“Is it so hard to imagine that your products are so helpful to people that they would sell this much?” he added. “Maybe you are actually really good at what you do and people enjoy your products.”
Maggie smiled dreamily. “That would be nice,” she said almost inaudibly, yet still the Green Demon name echoed in her mind, unresolved and mysterious. As she thought about it, Sheriff Carl Walden called on her. His large, strong physique looked better than the last time she saw him and his face was not flushed with discomfort.
“Hey, Maggie,” he greeted.
“Hi, sheriff,” she smiled awkwardly.
His arrival was quite unexpected. Usually Carl Walden only showed up when she was in some kind of trouble.
“Again?” Bramble asked. “Didn’t he come by yesterday as well?”
Maggie hushed her cat without the sheriff seeing. She put on her most innocent façade for Carl, hoping that his visit was not official. In the heat, she had abandoned her usual sweats, and today she wore jeans and a tank top that showed off her petit contours. Carl noticed, but in his coy manner, he avoided looking altogether. Maggie held in a chuckle at his uneasy demeanor.
“What can I do for you?” she asked. “Some iced tea? A beer is out of the question, I suppose.”
“Oh God, don’t tease me like that,” he moaned. It almost made him sound human, almost like a close friend who admitted his weakness. “I would kill for a beer right now.”
“Aw I’m sorry,” Maggie smiled. “So, what brings you by?”
Carl looked extremely out of place. His fingers dug into his sides at the belt and his eyes desperately avoided her painfully visible breast mounds.
“Um, well, I just came by to see how you’re doing, you know, and if that ex of yours is bothering you,” he stuttered a little, clearing his throat.
“Nah, he hasn’t come round yet, but he is still in town,” she informed him.
Carl looked relieved.
“Okay then. Well, if he gives you any trouble, you just call me,” he told her, trying to sound reassuring. “I’ll be off now. See you, Maggie.”
“That’s all?” she asked.
He swung around, looking confused. “How do you mean?”
Maggie shrugged. “Oh, nothing wrong with that. I was just surprised by your random visit, although it was nice of you to check on me. Thank you so much, sheriff.”
He tipped his hat and exited without another word.
“Funny, isn’t it?” Bramble mentioned.
“Oh boy. What?” Maggie dared ask.
“How a grown, hardened man turns into a fumbling teenager in the presence of a woman he likes,” her familiar scoffed in amusement. “Looks like Sheriff Teddy Bear’s got a soft spot for you … or a hard spot, rather.”
“Bramble!” Maggie yelled, throwing a packet of lavender at the sniggering cat.
“Oh come on, Maggie! The man shows up almost every day, for seemingly no reason. Don’t play dumb. I know you are sharper than that,” Bramble persisted. His mean streak struck while the iron was hot. “Hey, if you sleep with the sheriff, you won’t have to worry about ending up in jail again.”
“You are incorrigible,” Maggie howled. “I am taking away your catnip.”
Bramble gasped. “You wouldn’t! Punishment for speaking the truth? Why, are we back in Salem of 1893?”
“Oh, stop being so dramatic!” Maggie laughed, but little did she know that Bramble was far from done on the subject.
Even that night, while he instructed her on herbal and candle magic, he could not resist running her patience thin about Carl Walden. Just before midnight, Maggie and Bramble were working on a potion of rose leaves and rosemary.
“You know that you are one chant away from some cop love, right?” Bramble teased.
“Oh my God, Bramble! Enough already,” she protested from behind her Scottish tartan kilt apron. “Besides, if he has such a crush on me already, we don’t need spells, do we now?”
“This is true,” her familiar agreed. “Let me show you how to mix some Hot Foot powder, just in case Carl gets too chummy.”
“No, I am done for tonight,” she objected. Maggie frowned. Just like Green Demon, the name Hot Foot intrigued her. “What is Hot Foot powder?”
“No, never you mind, Maggie. You don’t want to chase away your badge teddy—yet,” Bramble played hardball. “Just leave that for some other time, like the next four visits tomorrow.”
“He does not drop by more than once a day, you evil feline,” she laughed. “Oh, the hyperbole on you! You should be a political activist or something.”
“Jokes aside, I am glad he likes you. Besides the fact that the likes of you could do with friends in the law, he is a good man. Carl is one of the few real men that still exist. Tough, educated, smart man with morals,” Bramble praised the sheriff. “Now, after I am done pulling my head out of the man’s butt, I’m off to nap.”
Maggie wished him a good night, while she still had to clean up after her herbalism lesson. As she swept up the pink rose petals, she could not help but think of the kind, but sad sheriff and his beautiful dark eyes.
A few days after Maggie had last heard from Carl, she was beginning to think that Bramble was mistaken about the crush. He had to have been wrong, because Carl was absent from her shop and her house without as much as a wave hello when he passed. In fact, Maggie was a bit worried that the sheriff was hurt. He was never this quiet.
In fact, when her shop phone rang, she secretly hoped that it would be Carl, checking on her. She hated admitting it even to herself, but when he checked in on her, she felt special. The kind of special like when your grandmother sends you lunch when you are broke.
“Corey’s Herbs and Simples,” she answered the phone.
“Where is that? I have tried to find that shop, but it is just … just nowhere!” Gareth’s whiny bitching cut through her ears. “What are you trying to pull? Are you even in Hope’s Crossing? You’ve got to be, ’cause, like, I am calling the same area code as this B&B, but I cannot find your goddamn house!”
“Where are you calling from, Gareth?” Maggie shrieked unabashedly. “Are you this twisted or are you just stupid? I have blocked your numbers and you keep calling. My God! Don’t you get the message? I don’t want to see you!”
“Oh, but you do and you will,” he slurred back at her, but before his threat could escalate, she slammed her phone down.
“Damn him! I can’t block him on a landline, can I?”
“I have no idea, my dear. I am a million years old and as far as I am concerned, people like Gareth should just meet a mysterious and sticky end,” Bramble tossed in his opinion.
Grinding her teeth in pure frustration, Maggie barked, “You know, I am beginning to seriously consider something really bad for that asshole!”
“How bad?” she suddenly heard Carl say, but Maggie was too upset to respond with some wisecrack. Her eyes glistened with tears as she sank into her chair.
“Oh nothing, just my goddamn ex that won’t leave me alone,” she wailed, burying her face in her hands. “I am so tired, Carl. I am so tired of being treated as if I don’t matter. My opinion never matters. Hasn’t he done enough to screw up my bloody life yet? Now he is officially stalking me.”
Carl crouched next to Maggie’s chair and put his large hand on her shoulder, playing with the curly little hairs in her neck.
“I swear I will take care of it as soon as I can,” he said softly, but his chest was heaving and falling with hard swells of anger. “Things are just very hectic right now with short staffing and some of my officers being transferred, but I promise you, Maggie, I will take care of it … somehow. This loser does not get to make you feel like this. Not on my watch.”
With that, he tapped her shoulder gently and marched out. His heavy footsteps were proof of his resolute decision and his obvious frustration. He could not lodge an investigation into a stalking now, but the thought that he was inept at protecting Maggie infuriated him
.
Maggie blew her nose and sniffled. Bramble bounded into her embrace. He nuzzled her neck, much like the sheriff had done with his fingertips, and purred in her ear. When she was done crying, Maggie’s eyes went cold. Her brow fraught with shadow as her intentions turned to steel, she held Bramble up in front of her, locking eyes with him.
“Tell me about Hot Foot. Teach me,” she commanded. This was not a request, as usual, but a respectful order to obtain the knowledge only held by darker witches.
After Maggie had locked her shop, she went home and locked her front door. This was something she needed to learn quickly.
“Sometimes, magic is the only intervention, the only solution left,” she told her cat as she drew all the curtains to make the house look dark and vacant. “I need my full concentration. I am done being nice. Tonight, I even banish the cool night air until I have learned what you know about this.”
“Put on some music,” Bramble told her.
Thinking him eccentric, Maggie asked, “Sure. Any requests?”
Without missing a beat, the black cat’s green eyes flashed yellow at Maggie and he hissed, “Robert Johnson. Play Robert Johnson, 1937.”
“O-kay,” Maggie agreed reluctantly.
She had heard of Robert Johnson, but she had never heard the man’s music before. Maggie found it on her laptop and started the playlist of the blues legend. Suddenly, the old Victorian style Gothic mansion in Hope’s Crossing seemed to become a plantation house, complete with the smell of oaky mud and rotten bayous.
To the tune of the scratchy record and the slide guitar of the blues master, Bramble became darker than his own black pelt. His eyes were like emeralds on fire, hiding in a dark shadow. Maggie’s skin grew taut with gooseflesh, even in the summer heat, as the root work of the American South possessed her body.
“Hot Foot powder is exactly what it sounds like,” Bramble started, sounding rather like a dark priest giving a nefarious sermon. “It is hoodoo; it is intent. Will. The will to banish, to send someone running whether they want to or not. African American, Native American, and even slightly holy, hoodoo is folk magic that can be used for healing or for hell.”
“Do I have all the ingredients?” she asked.
“We have everything we need in the Sanctum downstairs,” Bramble preached. “Cayenne, graveyard dirt, chili pepper, sulfur, and rock salt. Now we will conjure. Now we will work the roots.”
Maggie had never seen Bramble like this before. Gone was her silly, spiteful familiar. Before her, the black feline with his firm voice and glinting eyes became the daemon she never saw by day.
5
Midnight passed. The summer night was humid and hot, a breeding ground for an unholy thunderstorm that was brewing above already. The town lay beneath the sporadic warnings of lightning and rumbling, unaware in its sleep of the corruption eating at Hope’s Crossing. A few places were still alive, though. Usually, during summer, bored young people would gather at Cecil’s Gas Station, an all-night garage. Others opted for the graveyard or the only real bar in town, a seedy establishment called The Snakepit. It was once the haunt of Bella Mayweather’s alcoholic, wife-beating father as well, so it had been active for several decades.
Maggie was exhausted, but what she had to do took precedence. The weather was nice enough now to take a stroll at night, but she elected to take her car after all, windows down. She felt strange. After Bramble’s unorthodox lecture on hoodoo she felt a dark hand gripping her heart. What bothered Maggie more, though, was that she liked it. She liked the new darkness in her magic, even though she was afraid of it. Bramble had shown a side she had never seen before; something that frightened her, reminding her that he was not just some silly cat with a culinary fetish.
As the sky flashed, Maggie drove to the Snakepit. It was a rotten place with bad country music and slutty women in coquettish fishnets, but Maggie had business there. Bramble had suggested she take a drive over there to see if her mark would be as predictable as they reckoned—and he was. Gareth’s car was parked among the last patrons that still infested the bar. On seeing his car, Maggie parked her own car a block away, safely concealed under the shadow of some oak trees.
Her heart raced as it always did where Gareth was involved, and not in a good way. Maggie took a deep breath and her hand found the leather pouch that contained her latest conjuration. Her bright blue eyes scrutinized the sack as if it were alive.
“This had better work,” she said, pulling at the string that held the mouth of the purse together. “I am not walking the thorny dark roads for nothing.”
She looked at the cheap exterior of the barren building, the neon sign spelling “Snakepit” in red. The sight of the deserted parking area under the pale streetlight made her feel sick, but she had to pull through this. If anything, Bramble would have her hide if she did not do this. Someone emerged from the door and Maggie perked up.
“Don’t be Gareth! Don’t be Gareth,” she repeated nervously.
If he came out now, she would not be able to work the magic on his car.
So what are you waiting for? her inner voice challenged. It’s not going to get done unless you get it done.
“I know!” she moaned aloud in her car’s dead acoustics. It only reminded Maggie of just how alone she was. Her eyes followed the staggering man and his lush to a car parked two spaces away from Gareth’s vehicle. They kissed, fondled, and erupted in a shouting match that felt like it lasted forever.
“Oh jeez, just hurry up and leave already!” she complained.
When they finally got in the car and left, it was half past midnight already. Under her palm, she could have sworn that the Hot Foot powder stirred excitedly, eager to do its thing. Once the bar door was shut and nothing happened for a few minutes, Maggie gathered her courage and stalked along the sidewalk under the trees.
“Why can’t I do an invisibility spell?” she whispered in apprehension, clutching the pouch in her right hand. “Then he couldn’t see me even if he came out.”
Hey, note to self—ask Bramble if I can do that, Maggie reminded herself as she neared the car. The soft groan of the clouds cloaked her footsteps as she reached the vehicle, sinking to her haunches. Her hair stirred under the sweep of the light breeze, sure to pick up once the storm came closer, prompting her to get a move on.
Maggie could hear the pounding bass of the deafening music that played inside. Her senses appeared to have been piqued by the task and she carefully sprinkled the Hot Foot powder on the tires of Gareth’s car.
Softly, she muttered, “Gone you be. Gone you be. Never to return to me. Back to Boston by the power of three times three. Back to Boston, I command thee.”
Nervously Maggie rambled the words in order to get the sprinkling of all four tires done sooner than later. Eventually, she was in such a hurry, that she babbled more than cast. When she was done emptying the entire bag, she quickly stole back to her car as the thunder turned louder.
“How apt, this evil weather. Like a bloody horror film,” she mumbled as she fastened her seat belt. “And here I am, using folk magic in a not-so-positive way.”
She started her car and drove home. From seemingly nowhere, a figure appeared from the darkness of the sheltered sidewalk just past the exit drive of the gas station. Maggie shrieked as she slammed on the brakes, almost hitting the teenager.
“Oh my God!” she cried, examining the young man’s condition in her headlights to make sure she had not hit him. However, what she saw was odd. He was laughing hysterically, as if it was a big joke, before bounding and skipping off to the left like a little girl before vanishing into the dark. Maggie clutched her chest. “My God, I am heading for a heart attack tonight, I can feel it.”
Although she was grateful that the schoolboy was not hurt, she could not expel that image from her mind as she arrived home. She had to return to the gas station the kid had run out of. It was almost surreal, the manner in which he’d ignored her presence, let alone the accident he had almo
st caused. It was peculiar behavior, even for teenagers.
“Did you get it done?” she heard Bramble’s voice from under the sofa.
Maggie tried to remember that he was just her furry familiar, but when she could not see him, he scared her a little. Especially after the last session, Bramble gave Maggie the chills when he spoke, and not seeing him made it so much worse—as if he were amorphic or simply disembodied.
“I did it,” she revealed, tossing the empty pouch on the table. “I hope it works.”
“Did you will it to work when you sprinkled the dust?” he asked, still unseen.
“Yep. Willed the hell out of it,” she replied as she sat down. “Something else happened though, that was very weird.”
“Regarding the Hot Foot?” Bramble asked, finally coming out from under the sofa in the soothing cat form Maggie preferred.
“No, there was this kid that came out of nowhere. I almost hit him, but he looked totally unfazed by it. In fact, the little creep looked happy. You should have seen it. It was creepy,” she explained. “I can’t let it go. I have to find out why.”
Bramble was grooming his paw casually. He did not look surprised.
“Well?” she pressed.
“Well what, my dear? Go find out,” he answered. “I have learned not to argue with you once that bloodhound in you kicks in. If you don’t go and check it out, I will be kept up all night with your tossing and turning with all that unresolved clutter in your mind.”
Maggie scoffed, looking somewhere between insulted and amused. It was almost no fun if Bramble did not put up a fight, but she knew he was right. She had to investigate, even just to sate her curiosity.
No rain came, although the humid night prevailed as the pretty witch started down the main street. Most tourists and locals were sleeping soundly and for once, Hope’s Crossing belonged only to Maggie and the night. Apart from the heavy clouds, the wind was calm and it was quite pleasant outside. It was a good way to blow off steam after her rather stressful evening. She walked back to where she almost hit the young man, but she remained on the other side of the street until she came to the gas station.
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