by S. W. Clarke
Good Witches Don’t Lie
Academy of Shadowed Magic - Year One
S.W. Clarke
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Epilogue
Clementine’s story continues…
About the Author
Copyright © 2020 by S.W. Clarke
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover Design: Covers by Juan
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Chapter One
I’ve always lived by one rule: when someone starts trouble with me, I finish it. And sometimes that means laying into your boss in the back room of Corner Mart Grocery because his fingers traveled up your thigh.
Well, I traveled up his thigh, too. But not with my fingers.
When my boot connected with Maury’s gonads, he clutched himself, dropped to his knees. So it goes, seethed the angry voice inside me. One of life’s truisms: never trust a man on his knees. He either wants to spend his life with you, or he’s done something awful enough to deserve the jewels jangled.
I tipped Maury onto his back, and there in the back room of Corner Mart Grocery was where I straddled my own boss. But not in the way he’d always hoped.
His eyes narrowed up at me, one hand grasping the neck of my shirt. “I’m going to goddamn—”
But he didn’t get to finish that sentence; I made sure of it. For a timeless stretch I imprinted my knuckles into his cheeks. His jowls rippled like someone skipping stones on a lake.
“Woah,” floated in a voice from somewhere behind me, “Clementine’s gonna break his face.”
Clementine, that was me.
I was breaking someone’s face.
Not again. Not again.
All at once, rationality flowed back in. My left hand was clenched so hard my knuckles popped white under the skin. Well, except where they were red.
Beneath me, his arms folded over his face, lay the man who’d gotten my blood up. And his blood? Well, let’s just say someone needed to get on the PA for a cleanup.
A pair of hands grabbed my arms, hauled me up. Mikey, the new guy. I tried to pull away from him, found the two parts of myself contending for dominance.
There was Rational Clem...and there was the Spitfire.
Rational Clem was me 98% of the time. She got me into the shower most mornings, paid the bills, held down a job, and got to her classes (mostly) on time.
The Spitfire was the other 2%. She was dangerous.
She got her nickname back in the sixth grade, when Tommy Wilson tugged her hair and jerked her head so hard she screamed. And she kept screaming as she delivered the punch that would give him his first broken nose.
On the floor, my boss coughed—a wet, sickly sound—and I flared on Mikey and Annabelle, my two coworkers. Mikey put his hands up in a clear plea for peace as Rational Clem fought her way to the front of my mind.
They’re your friends. Chill out.
Meanwhile, the Spitfire couldn’t unfold her aching knuckles. Her left hand would bear the crescent-moon imprints of her nails for weeks to come. That was how unwillingly she left me—with blood and anger sloshing around like an overfull pot at a roiling boil. Eventually, every time, Rational Clem managed to turn down the heat and place a lid.
But every time, it got harder.
From the floor, my boss lifted his head. His nose was leaking bad. “Annabelle, Mikey—call the police.”
Annabelle wrung her hands, uncertainty written across her face. Mikey didn’t move.
We all knew how this would go.
I finally managed to unfold the fingers of my left hand. “Nobody’s calling the police, Maury. Unless you want to explain the footage of what you did to me in the back room.”
Above us, the little ceiling camera recorded away. To think, Maury’s own paranoia about robbery would end up incriminating him.
Together, Maury and I gazed into its fish-eye lens. Then our eyes met.
He rose to one elbow, fresh blood streaking down his cheek. “You’re fired.”
“I know.” I turned to Annabelle and Mikey. “I won’t blame you two for staying. But I wouldn’t recommend one-on-one time with Maury.”
Neither of them said anything. I pulled my badge from my shirt—Clementine Cole, printed in bold, official letters—and set it on a stack of pallets. I plucked my jacket off the hook, pulled it on, and passed into the store.
In the aisleway, a customer stood with wide-eyed curiosity and a peach in her hand. Apparently the commotion had carried all the way out here.
I didn’t say anything. I knew how I looked to her: wild-haired, black jacket, boots under my work slacks. It’s always the redheads who get the bad rap, like we chose this color.
But I didn’t choose this, lady, I wanted to say. Of course, impressions were hard to defy, and the blood on my knuckles and the heat still blotching my neck and cheeks didn’t help.
So I pulled on my fingerless gloves and passed out into the night, where at some point a winter dusting had left a blanket of white over the world. And in the cold bite of the outdoors, I couldn’t help but lift my face.
From where I stood in Eastern Market, the city seemed so small. I seemed so small. The clouds hung low and fat, obscuring what would be a full moon. But they went on forever, left and right, until they disappeared behind the twinkling buildings of the city.
I lost another job, Mom.
She never answered. She hadn’t answered since I was twelve. But for some reason, I’d never stopped talking to her when I looked into the sky. It felt like a secret journal, and this one contained endless entries.
My hair whipped into my face, a gust of wind urging me down the sidewalk. So I took my cue and started toward my apartment and my small life. My cat needed feeding. My plants needed watering. Homework needed finishing.
Meanwhile, I wondered for the thousandth time if there was anything larger out there for me.
“Clem?” came a voice from behind me, followed by boots padding fast through the thin layer of snow. I’d only made it to the end of the block when I turned and found Annabelle coming after me.
“Hey, AB.”
She smiled; the nickname had always seemed to please her, like she’d never been given one before.
“Hey. You forgot this.” In her hand, glimmering in the lamplight, sat my silver-chained necklace with the opal pendant.
Mom had instructed me never to take it off when she’d given it to me over a decade ago. And I hadn’t...until tonight. Maury must have ripped it off when he’d grabbed at my shirt, and I hadn’t noticed in the midst of my fury.
“Thanks, Annabelle.” I lifted the chain, set the pendant around my neck. I hadn’t noticed the strange sense of loss I’d felt without it until its familiar, comforting weight was back. “Can’t believe that bastard.”
“Yeah.” She came up alongside me, and we walked together. We both lived in the same neighborhood, after all. “What Maury did to you… I couldn’t…”
I glanced at her. “So you quit, too.”
She lowered her chin.
I nodded. “You always were too decent for that place.” As we came to a crosswalk, I began, “We can find a new place to—”
But I didn’t finish. I went silent, my mouth closing.
A dark figure stood on the other side of the crosswalk. In a city of 600,000 people, that was to be expected. But you also expected a person standing under a streetlamp to be illuminated by that lamp.
This person wasn’t. It was like he—definitely a he—repelled light.
“Clem?” Annabelle said.
We got the signal to walk, and Annabelle started across the road. But I remained immobile.
For a moment, I had forgotten where I was. I’d retreated inside my head, remembering the night when, as a child in bed, I’d stared into a lit doorway where a figure obscured most of the light.
It had been a dark figure—exactly like the one standing before me now.
And this guy wasn’t moving, either.
My chest tightened. “Let’s go this way, AB. I want to show you something.”
Annabelle paused in the center of the street, turned back toward me. “Show me what?”
Anything, Annabelle, I thought with gritted teeth. “It’s a surprise.”
When she returned to me, I set my hand on her forearm and we jaywalked onto 4th St., leaving the dark figure behind.
When we reached the other sidewalk, I ventured a glance. He still hadn’t moved.
Annabelle allowed me to lead her along. “What surprise, Clem?”
I leaned close as we walked. “Did you see that guy?”
“Guy?”
“Behind us, on the other side of the crosswalk.”
And in true Annabelle form, she stopped, turned, and gawked. I had to resist dragging her along. When her eyes met mine again, a tinge of worry shadowed her face. “I don’t see anyone.”
“That guy right there.” I was about to point, but when I looked back, Annabelle was right: the corner was empty, and the streetlamp cast its light on no one and nothing except the sidewalk.
I swiveled my eyes, but there weren’t even footprints. The only prints in the snow were ours.
Had I imagined him?
As a kid, I’d been terrified of the dark. So many foster homes, so many new families. I still didn’t know if the dark figure I’d seen in my doorway that night had actually been there or not.
It could have been one of my step-siblings in the doorway. It could have been my foster father. It could have been anyone who belonged in the house I was living in.
But it hadn’t been; I felt sure of that.
And for my convictions, I’d become the girl with the keen imagination. AKA, the liar. Heap that on top of all my other problem behaviors and you got a happy, shiny childhood.
I linked my arm with Annabelle’s. “Let’s go, AB.”
She eyed me. “Clem, are you okay? I mean, that was crazy what happened back at the store. Maury’s nose looked broken.”
Crazy—what a relative term. In a laced-up city like this one, crazy was filibustering politicians and pink suede shoes. It was a nineteen-year-old like me beating the crud out of her skeeze of a boss.
“I’m fine.” I slipped a Twizzler out of my jacket. “Hey, here’s the surprise.”
She snatched it from me as we walked. “You’re dangerous with those.”
If only I was dangerous with anything besides candy and my temper. “So says a Twizzler addict.”
She laughed, a soft, tinkling sound. As we walked the four blocks deeper into Eastern Market, I kept glancing back. Car headlights poured through the night, a dog barked, a three-hundred-and-sixty-five-days-a-year jogger bounced by.
But I didn’t see the dark figure again.
Nobody repelled the light.
We parted ways at 10th St., promising to text each other when one of us found a new gig. Though I wondered, as I passed down the steps to my English basement, whether I would ever see AB again.
I had a bad habit of never reaching out; the foster care system had seen to that. All I needed was a place to live and my darling little curmudgeon of a cat.
I opened the door into the darkness of the apartment. My roommate was clearly out; he was a good steward of the Earth, always turning off the lights when he left. And a goody two-shoes in every other way, not like—
“Loki!” I called out.
Out of the blackness, two reflective eyes appeared. A chirp followed, and the eyes stared at me from a distance as I found the light switch. The moment before the apartment came into view, my heart expanded and gave an overlarge beat.
I hated darkness. I hated not knowing what lay around me. Who knew what might lurk in the shadows?
The lights turned on, and before me sat only my black cat, perched atop the sofa’s back. And around him, only the tiny living room, the packed bookcase, the ticking clock on the wall.
I didn’t know what else I had expected.
“Sup.” I tossed my keys into the clamshell bowl by the door and slid off my coat.
Loki stared back, and with a tiny compression of his chest, forced out a muted approximation of a meow.
That was the kind of relationship we had. And that was the only relationship I could handle, anyway. I’d once been told that dogs are for people who want to be revered like gods. Cats are for people who want to earn their pet’s affections.
Me? Well, I was on the farthest end of that spectrum. All hail my feline overlord.
“Meow to you, too.” I slipped off my boots, crossed into the kitchen. He trotted in after me, tail upright. The moment I’d upended his dry food into his bowl, Loki’s face was in it.
I smirked. “Chew before you swallow.”
When I opened the fridge, I made a face. For a person who—until tonight—worked at a corner mart, you’d think I’d have more food.
Nope. Just about all of it was my roommate’s. I opened the freezer, which didn’t have a single fecking frozen item except for the one I’d been salivating over all week—his half-eaten box of mint choco chip.
“Forgive me, roomie,” I said as I grabbed the ice cream, “for I have sinned.”
He had to forgive me; I had an extenuating circumstance, which involved my boss’s fingers on my thigh. A memory which I could almost forget as I gingerly pressed the back of my raw hand against the box of ice cream, sighing with relief.
And then? Then I fixed myself a bowl of it. I smuggled it into the bedroom, whereupon Loki came and sat in the doorway in obvious judgment.
Laid across the bed, I removed the spoon from my mouth and patted the coverlet. “Don’t be a stranger. I’ll share.”
Actually, I wouldn’t—chocolate’s toxic to cats. But I wasn’t above using it as a lure to get his warm, furry body heating a spot at my side.
He didn’t move. He gave one blink, opened his mouth, and let out a terrific, angry meow.
My eyebrows went up. “Sounds like indigestion. Did you eat too fast again?”
Another ornery meow followed, and then a third in quick succession.
Yep—those were our conversations.
Loki usually got tired of complaining at me after half a minute. A minute, tops. Tonight, though? His green
eyes had gone as wide as pennies as he meowed and meowed like he really was saying something to me.
“Guy,” I finally said, standing from the bed, “you’ve got food, you’ve got water. If you don’t want to come in, then I’m gonna have to close the door before you give me tinnitus.”
As I slowly shut the door, Loki kept staring. He kept meowing.
I could hear him on the other side, even after I’d finished eating. Even as I got ready for bed. Even as I turned on the white noise app on my phone and switched off my lamp and lay in bed.
And because I often had paranoid thoughts at night, the thought I had just before I slipped into sleep, still listening to his noises, was this:
He’s trying to tell me something. He’s trying to speak.
It must have been after three in the morning—the dead hour of the night. The witching hour, I’d heard it called on Halloween once.
The hour when magic happened.
If Loki was going to talk, it would be this time of night.
A massive thud sounded at the front door of the apartment, and my eyes flicked open. That was too big to be a cat.
I shot up in bed as footsteps sounded through the living room. But as I listened in the darkness, everything went still. Everything, that is, aside from my heart.
Before I could grab my pepper spray, the doorknob turned, and my bedroom door creaked open.
A figure filled the doorway. That was when I let out the scream that had been building in me from the moment I’d first seen him on the street corner.