by MJ Caan
The Girl With The Good Magic
The Shifter Wars Book One
MJ Caan
Copyright © 2018 by MJ Caan
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.
Something new for B.
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
From The Author
About the Author
Also by MJ Caan
1
The Girl With the Good Magic:
Book One of the Shifter Wars
2
Of the myriad of magical gifts my mother was purported to possess and could have passed on to me, precognition was not one of them. Yet moments before a dead, rotting thing attacked us, I had been working at my family’s coffee shop, listening to my best friend drone on, thinking to myself: Once, just once, I’d love for something exciting to happen in this town.
“Earth to Allie…you there?”
The snapping of fingers in my face brought me back to reality.
“Sorry,” I said. “I was daydreaming.”
“In the middle of my read? Wait, were you daydreaming about my future?” Hope said excitedly. She’s my best friend, and the look in her almond-shaped eyes was way too expectant for this early on a Saturday morning.
“What? No. I’m sorry, where were we?”
Hope motioned to the sludge at the bottom of her coffee cup. “You were about to tell me that someone tall, dark, and handsome is about to waltz into my life, sweep me up into their arms, and take me away from this little hole-in-the-wall town. Preferably in a white Lamborghini.”
I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. “Like I’d let you be part of some Harlequin Romance cliche.”
“Well,” she said, “what do you see? I mean, what’s the point in having a psychic for a best friend if you can’t tell me the good stuff before it happens ?”
“I’m not a psychic, Hope. I’ve told you that.”
“Psychic. Witch. Whatever,” she said flippantly.
“Hope! What have I told you about saying things like that when we are in a public place?” I glanced up from behind the counter around the coffee shop to see if anyone noticed. Luckily, nobody had looked up from their laptop, and most of the patrons were wearing earbuds. I breathed easier.
Hope pursed her lips and eyed me dramatically. “No one pays attention to anything that happens in here. Besides, the tourists come in here for readings, so what’s the big deal?”
Trinity Cove was a tourist destination. Every summer, what seemed like a million people came traipsing into our idyllic little town nestled in the mountains of North Carolina. They came for the natural beauty of the region: lakes, hiking, quaint bed-and-breakfasts, and access to some of the best furniture galleries in the country. But mostly they came to see the Singing Falls. An hour-plus hike—depending on the path you took—up some of the toughest trails in the region would finish at a secluded lagoon, fed by a hundred-foot waterfall. The water poured down into the natural pool over jagged, protruding rock outcroppings that sheltered multiple caverns carved into a mountainside. Because the stone ledges were thin and their openings hollow, the sound of the water flowing down was haunting; the echoes created were of varying pitches, and constantly changing due to shifts in the climate and topography.
It also made for treacherous footing along the sides of the fall. Every summer at least one person fell down the steep pitch, breaking an arm, a leg, and on a couple of occasions, a neck.
Still, the undeniable scenic beauty called to people from all walks of life, and they descended on the town in droves every year. Their money went a long way towards keeping the town’s coffers filled, and all of the sleepy businesses in Trinity Cover catered to them during the tourist season. Restaurants advertised the freshest homemade delicacies, even though they were the same meals that could be purchased year-round—for much less. Signs popped up in numerous yards advertising antiques for sale; items that most of the sellers found at second hand stores and “antiqued” with the help of a chain and paint chipper. Every home with an extra bedroom was suddenly a bed-and-breakfast. Every semi-athletic college dropout that still lived at home with his parents was suddenly a canoe guide, promising to take you to a secret spot upriver about which only the locals knew.
Yeah. That kind of small town.
And I have to admit, I was just as much to blame as everyone else. My aunts owned the 3 Coves Café and Bakery in a prime spot in the center of the town square. I was one of those college dropouts that had decided to live at home while I “found myself.” I ran the café, and one of my side gigs for summer was to act as the town fortune teller. Instead of tea leaves, I read coffee sludge.
Hope had just arrived home from her first year of college and had been regaling me with tales of drunken frat parties and all-night jam sessions, followed by ditching the class you just stayed up all night studying for. Oh, and the men. She was convinced that the state college she was attending was where she was going to meet Mr. Right and head off into the sunset with him.
Her badgering look snapped me out of my reverie, and I gazed into the bottom of her ceramic cup.
“Nope,” I said. “There’s nobody in there. But hey, after one whole year away from home, what are you expecting?”
Hope bristled at the bite in my tone. It had come out a lot more terse than I intended.
“Well, at least I’m away from home and trying.”
Ouch. Touché and all that.
“I’m sorry.” I had visibly flinched at that one and her tone instantly softened. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.” She reached across the counter and placed her hand on top of mine to give it a reassuring squeeze.
“No problem.” I smiled. “I kind of deserved that one.” I turned and placed her cup in the bin on the back table so it could be taken into the kitchen and cleaned. Turning back, I smiled again. “But really, why are you in such a hurry to get hitched? You have your whole life ahead of you.” I flinched a little when I realized that I already knew the answer to that question.
“It’s hard,” she said, eyes downcast. “My mom wants to see me in the wedding gown she made for me so badly. I want her to see that as well.” Hope’s eyes clouded up and I could see her clenching her jaw to stave off tears.
“Hey.” Now it was my turn to grab her hand. “The doctors don’t know everything. She beat breast cancer once before, and she can beat it this time around as well.”
“Thanks for that,” Hope said. “I feel like an ass even saying that, considering your mom is…”
“No worries. My mom bailed on Gar
and me years ago. He doesn’t really remember her; he was too young when she left.”
It was true. My brother Garland, or Gar as he preferred to be called, had long forgotten what our mother looked like. He could remember the stories she told us when he was small, but time had long since erased her image from his mind’s eye.
Unfortunately, my mental imagery was as strong as ever. If I closed my eyes, I could still picture our mother’s face. Not just the green eyes and fire-red hair that I had inherited, but also the tiny curves around her full lips and the lines that danced around her eyes when she laughed. Our mother had been so happy when we knew her. But that was before the madness set in; before she began to whisper about demons and monsters that hid in the woods outside of the house we shared with Aunt Vivian and Aunt Lena.
At least, I had always hoped it was madness.
I came from a long line of witches. Not just any witches, but rockstar witches, if you believed what my mother had told us as children. According to her, she and my aunts had stopped Armageddon from arriving at the steps of our sleepy little town in the form of werewolves.
While Gar could only remember the stories as bedtime tales, I remembered them as something more: cautionary tales of monsters that had once nearly wiped out all of Trinity Cove. Tales of things that could possibly happen again. To Gar, the stories were heroic and funny. But I was older; to me they were horrific, and the cause of night terrors that would still occasionally wake me from fitful nights of sleep.
Our aunts had assured us that the stories our mother told us were just that: stories. That they were meant to entertain and frighten children who stayed up long past their bedtime. But I knew better.
While we may have been called witches at one time, my aunts assured us that moniker was one that was misunderstood and certainly should not have been applied to us. We might have small gifts, the occasional extra-sensory ability, or a way with certain potions and herbs that did little more than induce euphoria in townsfolk or allow them to sleep better…but that was it. We didn’t fly around on broomsticks. We didn’t cast spells.
And we certainly weren’t responsible for the destruction of an entire breed of supernatural creatures referred to as werewolves.
The fact is, here in town my family had a certain reputation. We weren’t shunned, but we weren’t exactly asked over for Sunday dinners either. People here had a grudging respect for my aunts. They were polite to them, some were even friendly, but most just stopped short of crossing the street when they saw one of my aunts heading toward them on the sidewalk.
My aunts were a little suspicious when I told them I wanted to add fortune telling to the seasonal offerings at the coffee shop, but after they saw the bump in business, they allowed me my indulgences. I wasn’t a clairvoyant in the true sense of the word; my medium abilities were mostly the product of my ability to read a person’s emotional state and combine it with the latest horoscope readings I had found online. Add to that a few vague, generic missives from Google, and voila…your very own fortune told.
Hope wasn’t a tourist, however, and she wouldn’t fall for the mumbo-jumbo that I spewed to most of the giggling schoolgirls who passed through in the summer. No, she had been my best friend since grade school. She knew what I had gone through, she knew what the townies whispered about my family, and she knew when to call bullshit on me.
“C’mon, Allie,” she pleaded. “I know when you’re lying. You saw something. Spill it!”
The truth was, I hadn’t seen anything, and that was why my gaze had lingered in the cup. Usually there was something: a small spark, or a flash of something brief and tiny that revealed itself to me. I may not opt to tell the person, but there was almost always something there—especially with the people I was close to. But this time, when I looked into the coffee grinds all I saw was…coffee. I felt numb and cut off from the tiny spark of my vision.
No. Not cut off. Blocked. I opened my mouth to tell Hope that I really didn’t see anything, but my words were swallowed by the sudden wail of an ambulance, followed by the revving of a car engine as a police cruiser tore down main street, lights and siren blaring. It was quickly followed by the similar sounds of an ambulance as it chased after the cruiser.
“What the…?” exclaimed Hope, bolting for the café front window.
Just as she reached it, the door burst open and Gar came running in, his dark hair wet with sweat.
“Hey, sis!” he exclaimed, his words tripping over themselves. “Guess what? They found a body out by the falls!”
Great. The season was just getting started, and we already had our first slip-and-fall. This wouldn’t be good for business.
“Ugh,” said Hope. “When will these tourists learn the rocks there are signposted ‘No Climbing’ for a reason?”
“Not this one!” said Gar, excited. “This one was an animal attack!”
Both Hope and I snapped to attention immediately.
“What?” I said.
“Yep,” Gar replied. “I heard that whoever it was had their throat ripped open and their chest torn apart.”
Swallowing the lump that made its way into my throat, I clutched at the pink stone jewel I wore around my neck, the one my mother had given me for luck on the night she disappeared. Overtaken by a sense of dread like I had never felt before, I sank back against the counter, hardly able to register that the patrons were suddenly running from the cafe, in the direction of the wailing sirens.
3
I locked the shop door with a sigh after the last customer had exited. I could feel the slight buzz between my eyes; I knew what was on the way. “Great,” I said to myself aloud. “Just what I don’t need.”
“What don’t you need?” Hope’s voice caused me to jump. I had forgotten she was still here and had just gone to the restroom.
“Migraine,” I answered.
“I’ll help you clean up. That way you can close sooner and get out of here.”
Before I could pretend to protest, she walked behind the counter, picked up a bus bin, and started clearing the tables of the few saucers and coffee cups that the patrons had left behind.
“Thanks, but that’s really not necessary. I’m sure you have someplace to be.”
“Nope. We haven’t seen each other in months. Yes, I should have called from college but the phone works both ways you know. We have so much to catch up on.” She stopped what she was doing and wheeled around to face me. “Unless... you’re telling me to go because you know there is someplace I need to be! Am I destined to meet Him tonight?!”
I knew she was just yanking my chain, but I also knew that part of her was dead serious. I changed the subject.
“So why didn’t you go up to the trails and see what was going on with the rest of the town?”
“Once you’ve seen one mangled body, you’ve seen them all,” she sniffed.
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Honestly, the rumor mill must have been working overtime with this one. God knows how Gar heard it before the official reports. I mean, c’mon…an animal attack?”
“Well,” Hope said, turning to me, “you know what that really means, right?”
“What?”
Hope rolled her eyes dramatically. “Please, I’ve watched enough Supernatural to know that animals never attack and kill people in real life. It’s always a cover-up for something really nefarious. Like vampires, werewolves or some other bloodthirsty creature.”
“Yeah, right,” I say. “This is Trinity Cove, not the Hellmouth.”
“Not if you believe the stories we were told as children. Don’t you ever wonder why none of the parents in town would let their kids play outside after the sun went down? And why we weren’t allowed to go outside at all during certain times of the month?”
“Probably because those were pre-internet days when pervs weren’t lurking online, but rather were cruising around in white vans, snatching kids.”
Just then, my phone rang, and I couldn’t stifle a little moan as I loo
ked at the caller ID. I picked up before it could go to voicemail.
“Hi, Aunt Viv,” I said, making sure my tone conveyed nothing but positivity. “Yes, I’m fine. I’m still at the café. Hope is here with me, helping me close. We’ll be heading out soon, and I’ll call you when I’m on my way home.” I paused, looking over at a smirking Hope. “Aunt Viv, it’s literally a five-minute walk home. I don’t need…yes, all right. I’ll see you soon.”
“Let me guess,” said Hope, “she’s freaked out by the animal attack.”
“‘Freaked’ is an understatement. She’s sending someone to pick us up and drive us home.”
“I’m sure she got all the good dirt on what happened,” said Hope. “For people that no one really talk to in this town, your aunts seem to know all the good gossip.”
It was true. My family kept to itself, but still managed to be on top of everyone’s business. While I didn’t want to alarm Hope, if there was anything supernatural going on in the area, chances were my aunts had already sniffed it out. Maybe that was why they were so intent on my being escorted home. Had they made the same call with Gar? If anyone needed protecting, it was him. He was powerless. Men weren’t born with the power of witches—at least that’s what my mother had always said. They could acquire it in other, less pleasant ways, but she had declined to explain what exactly those ways were. Aunt Vivian had always said it wasn’t true and not to listen to her. Men belonged to another pocket of the supernatural, she had said. They couldn’t cross over into the corners occupied by witches.