Wicked Wisteria (Witch Cozy Mystery and Paranormal Romance) (Wisteria Witches Book 2) Read online

  WICKED WISTERIA

  (WISTERIA WITCHES BOOK 2)

  Angela Pepper

  WWW.ANGELAPEPPER.COM

  Chapter 1

  Three generations of redheaded witches walked into an ice cream parlor.

  That's not the opening to a joke. It's how my latest installment of shenanigans got started. I swear on a stack of the Wisteria Public Library's various holy books that everything I'm about to tell you is entirely true.

  The minute I walked into the ice cream shop with my daughter and my aunt, my witch senses started tingling. At first I thought it was just excitement about ice cream flavor choices, but that was because I'd been a witch for barely a full month and was still getting the hang of things. We ordered our treats and took a seat by the window. While we ate our sundaes, my stomach flip-flopped, sending me concerned messages, and for good reason. Something strange was happening, indeed.

  None of us were talking.

  Ordinarily, if there are two Riddle women present, you have to fight to get a word in edgewise. And three Riddle women is a symphony of snark peppered with intergenerational arguments about fashion and culture, and pressing topics such as the calorie content of cherry-flavored lip gloss. But this afternoon, it was as though someone had erased our thoughts and left us speechless. We were so quiet, I could hear the woman seated behind me sighing as she flipped through the pages of a hardcover book. Yes, even without seeing her, I knew it was a hardcover. My witchy ears could also tell the book contained five hundred and twelve pages, printed on acid-free, eighty-five-pound paper stock.

  The woman's sighing only grew louder once I noticed it. She sounded like someone who'd never been so disappointed in her life, until she flipped another page and became even more disappointed, sighing even louder.

  Being a librarian, I feel personally responsible whenever someone is unhappy with a book. So, naturally, after the tenth sigh, I finally turned around, smiled sweetly, and asked, “Good book?”

  She jerked her head up and stared at me with big brown eyes. She was noticeably shorter than me, even with both of us seated. I'd guess her age as mid-twenties, and she was pretty, with her minimal makeup and dark eyelashes, tan skin, and long black hair falling in loose waves around a perfectly round face. She wore a black men's fedora hat and a tropical-print tunic which made her look artsy and fun. In fact, despite being a handful of years younger than me, she looked like someone I might want to be friends with. And that was a concern for me, since I didn't exactly have many friends outside of work in my new home.

  The dark-haired young woman asked, “Were you talking to me?”

  “Just wondering if that's a good book you're reading.”

  Her round face contorted as she visibly struggled to form a response to my question.

  I discreetly glanced down at the hardcover in her hands. It was the memoir of a well-known rock star. So far, so good, I thought. I could be friends with a woman who enjoyed memoirs, as long as that wasn't the only thing she liked. The book had been a popular one at the library where I work, and this book was evidently one of ours. I could tell by the neatly aligned stamp visible along the top edge of the pages. One of ours. Now I felt twice as responsible for her unhappiness with the title.

  “It's supposed to be good,” the woman said bitterly, tucking her chin-length espresso brown bangs behind one tiny round ear. “But there's so much missing.”

  I nodded in agreement. “They probably had to leave out some of the hardcore partying, out of respect for the man's family.”

  “But the book is literally incomplete,” she said, frowning and shaking her head.

  My right eye twitched. She probably meant figuratively, not literally. A book that was literally incomplete would be missing pages or something physical like that.

  She bowed her head forward and studied the book's contents. I was about to turn around and return to minding my own business when she said, “Maybe it's an artistic thing. Like it's so shocking, they had to do that thing where they blot out some parts, like the thick black lines on government documents. What's that word?”

  “Redacted?”

  “Yeah,” she said, nodding. “Redacted. They redacted some of the words, but that was stupid, don't you think?”

  I shrugged. “He does have daughters the same age as those groupies he used to... Um. Spoiler alert. Have you reached that part?”

  She slammed the book shut with the biggest sigh yet, and tossed it on the table in disgust. “No, and I won't, because I'm done with this pretentious dreck,” she said, only she used a word more colorful than dreck. In her anger, she didn't notice the book was dangerously close to a patch of spilled coffee on the table. But I noticed.

  I used my witch powers to surreptitiously grab a napkin from a nearby table, float it over below the sight of the woman, and drop it on top of the coffee spill. The napkin soaked up the coffee before it could stain the book. Crisis averted. My boss at the library would have been proud.

  Suddenly, my right shin smarted. Despite my sneakiness, my use of levitation in public hadn't escaped the notice of the other Riddle women. The swift kick to my shin had been more than a love tap.

  The dark-haired woman didn't notice me groan. Her phone had started ringing, and she scrambled to find it in her large bag. It was a pricey designer handbag, yet her phone had a crack on the screen. She answered the call with impatience. “Now what, Dad?”

  I glanced away quickly, shamed on her behalf over her rudeness.

  She said, “What do you mean, it needs more power? I thought you knew what you were doing.” She pushed her chair back and got to her feet with an exasperated sigh. “I don't care what you have to plug it into, just do whatever it takes. I need that money.” She paused and then said, in a syrupy sweet voice that made my pale, freckled skin crawl, “Please, Daddy? For me?”

  I didn't hear the rest of the call because she left the ice cream shop to emotionally blackmail her father in private.

  As soon as she was gone, my aunt and my daughter resumed their conversation about cherry-flavored lip gloss.

  I noticed the dark-haired emotional blackmailer had left the thick hardcover book behind on the table.

  If you thought my opinion of the woman couldn't drop any lower, you'd be wrong. In addition to using the word literally wrong and being rude to her father, she was one of those people who treats any public space as a library return slot. There are people in this world who are apathetic enough to trust in the goodwill of others who would see the book's stamp and eventually get it back to the library. Or not. Whatever, as that type said. I'd probably see the dark-haired woman again in a month, claiming the overdue fees attached to her account had to be a mistake.

  I reached for the book, planning to bring it with me to work the next day. Another pale, freckled hand beat me to it. My daughter snagged the book.

  Zoey chortled triumphantly as she opened the hardcover and riffled through the pages.

  After a minute, she asked, “Where does the dirty stuff start?”

  Aunt Zinnia said, “Page seventeen.”

  We both stared at my aunt, a woman who shares the spectacular Riddle family genes. She has the same red hair, green eyes, and freckled skin that's never sure if it likes the sun or not. Plus she's a witch, like me.

  “Auntie Z,” my daughter gasped. “You naughty girl. You read this trash?”

  My forty-eight-year-old aunt pursed her lips and shook her head. “Honestly, you two. I may be the same age as both of you put together, but I'm
not that old.”

  Zoey and I exchanged a look then continued to stare at Aunt Zinnia.

  Finally, she sighed and admitted, “Fine. I cast a bookmark spell when Zoey was riffling the pages. It's a novice-level basic skill, which you both would know all about if you'd been doing your homework.”

  Zoey flipped to page seventeen as instructed. She began reading with great interest, which wasn't an unusual sight. I'm one of the lucky mothers who has a sixteen-year-old kid who actually loves school, reading, and studying. I might have been exactly the same at her age, if I wasn't expecting a baby and taking every odd job I could find to make money for us.

  Oh, who am I kidding? That was never going to be me. If I'd actually enjoyed school and studying, I wouldn't have been doing the things that led to my being an unwed teen mother. My problem in school was that I was bright. Most subjects came easily to me, so I breezed through with minimal effort and never learned proper study techniques. That came back to bite me on my lily-white butt later in life, when I decided to become a librarian.

  What got me through the schooling I needed was bottomless coffee and sheer stubbornness. I thought I was done with studying, but now I'm a student once again, a novice witch, with my aunt as my mentor. We have our roles figured out. For example, she lords her age and experience over me, and I hurt my face resisting the urge to roll my eyes. She acts like I should already know spells she hasn't taught me yet, while I secretly get ahead of her in the books. She thinks I'm slacking, but I practice until my lips and fingers are numb, and then casually pretend to have beginner's luck with everything I try casting “for the first time.” This annoys her to no end. It keeps life interesting.

  Across the table, my daughter sighed miserably. She was sounding a lot like the disappointed woman who'd abandoned the book. I studied her face, and the cute vertical wrinkle that formed between her eyebrows as she concentrated.

  My daughter looks so similar to me that it feels like vanity to compliment her features, but she really does have the cutest little upturned nose and the loveliest lips, which never need more than a dab of lip gloss because they're the perfect rose-petal shade. I would compare her cheeks to cherry blossoms and her eyes to sparkling emeralds, but that would embarrass both of us, so I'll stop.

  Zoey let out another sigh, this one exasperated.

  Aunt Zinnia said to her, “If page seventeen's not to your liking, try fifty-one.” She coughed delicately into one of her lace-edged handkerchiefs. “If you like that sort of thing.”

  Zoey said, “The story was just getting good, then it was suddenly redacted.” She lifted the book and leaned in to stare closely. “That's odd. I think there's something wrong with this book.”

  I held out my hand. “Let me see.”

  Zoey didn't want to hand the book over, so I gave her my Trust-me-I'm-a-librarian look. It's a lot easier for librarians to make that face if they have thick-lensed reading glasses to peer over the top of wisely, but I do what I can with my perfect vision.

  She reluctantly handed me the book. A mild static shock discharged as I took it into my hands, and the sound in the restaurant changed. The clatter of customers' spoons in glass bowls of ice cream sundaes receded. The whoosh of an employee steaming milk for a latte became a far-away hiss. The volume of the jazz music on the sound system dropped down to distant plinking. My breath caught in my throat. My aunt had taught me that handling charmed objects can have a variety of effects on a witch. Sometimes it feels as though you've jumped into freezing cold water, and your mouth and nose both close off by instinct.

  There was something magical happening with the book. I opened it to a random page and looked down just in time to witness the strangest thing I've ever seen inside a book.

  Now, having worked in libraries for a number of years, working my way up to librarian, I've seen a great number of strange things inside books. I've seen flip-art cartoons in the margins, hand-scrawled comments that are more entertaining than the book itself, and even a slice of bacon used as a bookmark. But I've never seen anything like this.

  Before my very eyes, letters on the page were disappearing. Not all of them at once, but a word from one sentence and then a short phrase from the next paragraph.

  Suddenly, the entire book was yanked out of my hands.

  It was the petite, dark-haired woman. She'd returned for the book. She was still talking on her phone, pausing in conversation just long enough to mutter to me, “Gotta return this dreck to the library,” and then she was gone with it.

  My curiosity had been piqued. I started to push my chair back, but found I couldn't move. Aunt Zinnia had taken me by the wrist and was now whispering an incantation.

  “Be still,” she hissed. “Eyes are always watching.”

  She wasn't wrong. The cafe had filled with a bustling Saturday afternoon crowd. While most people were focused on their ice cream shakes and sundaes, some curious eyes were pointed our way.

  Aunt Zinnia loosened her grip but didn't release me from her spell. Her high-level magic spun around me like invisible silk—so soft, yet strong. Her spell was a cocoon-like imprisonment, and I understood it was for my own good. If she hadn't stopped me, I might have chased the woman down, tackling her bodily and taking the hardcover from her hands.

  My body stilled and my breath calmed, but my curiosity remained piqued, as hyper as a Jack Russel puppy bouncing on a leash inside me. I would see that book again, once it was returned to the library. I would find out why it was erasing itself. As both a witch and a librarian, this mystery had my name all over it.

  Chapter 2

  Hours later that Saturday, I was back at home and still thinking about the strange, self-erasing book.

  I went to my kitchen, where I do my best thinking while puttering around.

  Using my telekinetic powers, I pulled out a cutting board, several lemons, and a sharp knife. The old Zara Riddle—the one who didn't have witch powers—would have sliced the lemon in the Riddle family tradition, with both hands on the knife handle, safely away from the blade. Both my daughter and I suffer from a specific food prep phobia. We will run from the room if a character on a TV show starts slicing something on screen. But now that I didn't have to hold the knife at all, I had moved beyond chop-smashing helpless fruits and vegetables and could now do amazing things, such as create those thin little matchstick-sized carrot sticks that go into egg rolls.

  And, thanks to having been host to a friendly ghost who loved fancy food and entertaining, I even knew what the vegetable sticks were called. Strips of about two inches in length have different names, based on their width. From thickest to thinnest, they are called batonnet, allumette, julienne, and fine julienne. Cubes also have their own special names, but I won't go there right now because I think I've proved my point, which is this: being a witch is awesome.

  I don't retain all of a ghost's knowledge, but I do keep some factoids. My witch specialty is called Spirit Charmed. That's the witchy term for attracting free-floating ghosts, and it's as much a gift as a curse.

  My mind wandered back to the afternoon's encounter at the ice cream shop while I sliced lemons for iced tea with both of my hands safely in my pockets.

  Aunt Zinnia had told me not to bother worrying about the erasing book. She said plenty of strange things happened in Wisteria. “Always have and always will,” she'd said. “Until something jumps up and demands attention, it's best to ignore these minor incidents.”

  On the walk back to her neighborhood, where we dropped her off before coming home to Beacon Street, I told her she didn't know me very well if she thought that her command would work on me. She'd have been better off using reverse psychology. If she'd instead put me onto the Case of the Missing Words, I might have rebelled, dedicating myself to the tedious intricacies of the cantaloupe ripeness spell. But telling me not to think about the book with the disappearing words? It was like telling a kid not to stick their finger in a bowl of frosting.

  If I saw a bowl of frosting, I w
as going to stick my finger in, and definitely lick it.

  The doorbell rang just as I was mincing some fresh mint for the iced tea, harvested from the herb garden outside my kitchen window.

  Zoey, who was upstairs in her bedroom, yelled, “Doorbell!”

  I yelled back, “Doorbell!”

  “Doorbell!” she cried.

  I immediately replied, “Doorbell!”

  She thumped her way down the stairs as we continued to exchange cries of “doorbell!”

  I heard her open the door and politely greet our guest.

  A minute later, Chet Moore entered my kitchen, looking flummoxed. “If it's Zoey's job to answer the door, why do you both yell about it? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of having it be her responsibility?”

  I picked up the pitcher of iced tea with one hand and put my other hand on my hip. “Whatever happened to saying hello before launching into a critique of someone's parenting skills?”

  He didn't laugh.

  After a brief stare-off, he finally said, “Hello.”

  With a formal air, I said, “And a very cordial hello to you as well, fine sir.” I used my magic to pull two glasses from the cupboard. Other than my family, Chet was the only other person who knew about my abilities. I loved that I could be myself around him. “Would you care for some iced tea?”

  He stared at the floating pitcher dispensing cold, lemon-infused tea into one glass and then the other.

  While he did that, I stared at him, trying to note and memorize his features. Chet is a wolf shifter, and while he hasn't been very forthcoming about the exact details, I have a feeling his magical ability affects even his human appearance. When he looks right at me, something strange happens to my perception. All I can see are his green eyes. I know he's got a face, because everyone has a face, but it just... goes away when he looks at me. This has been happening since the moment we met, the day I moved in next door to the Moore family.

  If he's not looking at me, I can get a better sense of him. He's got a long face and prominent cheekbones, with hollowed-out cheeks that give him a fierce, hungry look, depending on the lighting. His hair looks black sometimes, but when he wears a black shirt, you can tell that it's dark mahogany brown. His eyebrows are thick and dark but tidy, and his long forehead contains two and a half wrinkles. I say two and a half because the lowest wrinkle line stops halfway across his forehead, as though it's afraid of his right eyebrow, which Chet arches a lot. He's older than me by a few years, but has zero gray hairs. I have a dozen that I keep plucking, even though I know I shouldn't.