The Baddest Witch

Chapter 1

Chapter

One

GOOGLE EARTH, I KNOW YOU LYING!

Bad things seem to follow me wherever I go. I kid you not. I came out of the womb wrapped in bad juju, probably with a side of cosmic irony for good measure.

Now, I won’t say I’m unlucky. That feels too convenient, like blaming the weather for forgetting an umbrella.

I prefer to think the universe just has a slightly warped sense of humor where I’m concerned.

The kind that finds amusement in watching me navigate life like I’m perpetually one banana peel away from complete disaster.

Still, I’ve spent the better part of thirty-five years wondering why life insists on throwing me into situations that feel one step shy of catastrophic, as if someone upstairs is taking notes for a particularly cruel sitcom.

On paper, I should have had a head start. Hell, I should have been born with cheat codes.

I was born into a family that believed in magic the way other families believe in mortgages and Sunday dinners, with absolute, unquestioning faith.

My mother told me bedtime stories about Witches who could bend moonlight, Shifters who danced between forms like liquid mercury, and beings who lived just beyond what ordinary people could see, existing in realms between time and space.

She spoke about it with the kind of bone-deep certainty that made it feel less like fantasy and more like historical fact.

According to her, magic was written into my DNA like brown eyes and stubbornness, as inevitable as the sunrise.

I’m a Witch. Well . . . sort of. More like Witch-adjacent. Witch-lite. A magical disappointment wrapped in human packaging.

No matter how many stars I wished on while wearing my vintage Rainbow Brite pajamas.

No matter how many candles I tried to light with sheer determination alone, squinting at wicks until my eyes watered, willing flame into existence, my magic never really showed up.

Not in any reliable, repeatable way. Not in any way that mattered when it counted.

Except when you count the one and only time it decided to make a guest appearance.

Back in New York, third grade, Big Tasha called me a fat bitch.

I was so mad. Sick and tired of being sick and tired of her constant bullying, of the way she’d corner me during recess and pick apart everything from my lunch to my clothes.

Something inside me finally snapped like an overstretched rubber band.

I stood up from where she had pushed me onto the wood chips, my hands shaking with a rage so pure it demanded an outlet. Finally, I was going to take a stand.

I stared her down as the wind picked up around us, sudden and unnatural.

The clouds went from innocent white puffs to the darkest gray I’d ever seen, rolling in so fast it was like watching time-lapse photography.

To my utter astonishment and growing terror, the change felt connected to me, like invisible strings ran from my chest to the sky above.

Before I knew it, Tasha was lifted clean off her feet by a gust of wind that had apparently woken up that morning and chosen violence.

She went flying across the playground like a ragdoll, arms flailing wildly.

She landed hard, peed her pants in front of everyone, and the entire class erupted in cruel laughter, pointing at her the way they’d pointed at me countless times before.

For one single, glorious second, I felt it. Power. Real, humming, electric power threading through my veins like molten gold, making every nerve ending sing with possibility. It was intoxicating and terrifying and absolutely, undeniably mine.

No one even considered it anything but a strange weather occurrence.

Apparently, I ‘escalated the situation’.

I was suspended for a week. My parents were mortified, spending hours on the phone with the principal trying to explain the unexplainable.

There was no rational explanation that made sense.

I hadn’t touched her but I also hadn’t not touched her, if that makes any sense at all.

The incident became a playground legend, whispered about in hushed tones that followed me through elementary school like a reputation I couldn’t shake.

No one called me names to my face after that.

That was the first and last time anything like that ever happened. After that, my magic packed up and left town, apparently deciding it had made its point and was no longer interested in participating in my life.

You’ve reached your destination.

The robotic voice cuts through my spiraling thoughts like a digital knife through emotional butter.

Pausing my mental catalog of everywhere my life went sideways, I stop to catch my breath.

My thick thighs burn with the particular ache that comes from prolonged exertion in impractical footwear.

My feet hurt something fierce. Yeah, I’m cursing myself for trying to be cute and wearing boots that were clearly meant to be admired while standing perfectly still in coffee shops, not for power walking miles down mysterious back roads that seem to exist outside normal geography.

Dense trees line both sides of the narrow road like verdant prison walls, their branches forming an almost-canopy overhead that filters the late afternoon light into dancing patterns.

There’s not a car coming or going in sight, no signs of civilization beyond the cracked asphalt beneath my increasingly uncomfortable feet.

Birds chirp somewhere in the distance, their calls echoing strangely in the heavy air, but other than that, it’s the kind of silence that makes you aware of your own heartbeat.

I sigh, long and frustrated. If I hadn’t been walking in what feels like a perfectly straight line, I’d swear I was walking in circles, trapped in some kind of woodland purgatory.

The only indication I have that I’m actually moving forward and not stuck in a stress-induced hallucination is my broken-down car that I left approximately a thousand years ago.

I tried turning back. It only got me more lost.

You’ve reached Ruby Springs, Google Maps announces for the fifth time during my seemingly endless trek down this godforsaken road, each repetition sounding more mockingly cheerful than the last.

Tossing my head back, I laugh, but there’s no humor left in it, just the hollow sound of someone who’s reached their absolute limit. I am beyond done, past frustrated, and rapidly approaching the kind of breakdown that gets turned into cautionary tales.

“Google, if I could throat punch an app, I would gladly do the time for that particular crime. Because I know you’re lying through your digital teeth. I have been walking for what feels like forever and there’s not so much as a mailbox in front of me, let alone a whole damn town.”

There’s no one around to call me crazy for having a full conversation with my phone, so why the hell not embrace the madness.

Recalibrating, the app replies with mechanical patience, and I would seriously question my sanity if the damn thing hadn’t been buffering and searching for this mystery town for hours like it’s trying to locate Atlantis. Somehow, I still have just enough service for Google to ruin my life.

“You do that,” I tell it with false sweetness, knowing without a shadow of doubt that I’m completely and utterly lost.

I have no idea where Ruby Springs actually is, how to find the place, or if it even exists outside of my grandmother’s increasingly confusing legal documents.

My mom said Ruby Springs was magically protected.

I guess that translates to ‘good luck finding it without losing your sanity first’.

My parents are back in New York, blissfully unaware of the fact that I may or may not be stranded in a magical dead zone.

I’d like to keep it that way for now. I’m a grown-ass woman.

I can figure this out. I’m tired in my bones, my car died a dramatic death miles back, it’s getting cold as the sun starts its descent, and I would literally kill for a cup of coffee, a bottle of water, or anything that might restore my faith in the basic functioning of the universe.

Better yet, I’m exactly one minor inconvenience away from a total emotional meltdown of epic proportions.

Famous last words, as it turns out.

Thunder cracks overhead like the sky is splitting in half, the sound echoes down the empty road and reverberates in my chest. It’s followed shortly after by a vicious streak of lightning that tears across what had been a relatively clear sky moments before.

Without so much as a drop of warning, because of course the universe couldn’t give me that small courtesy, rain falls in heavy, punishing sheets that seem personally offended by my existence.

“Oh, hell no!” I shout at the sky, as if volume alone might convince the weather to reconsider its life choices.

Quickly unzipping my oversized purse, I search frantically for anything that might protect my hair from this meteorological assault, because everything else in my life might go to hell in a handbasket, but my hair, my beautiful, carefully maintained, took-six-hours-to-braid hair, will not perish in this downpour.

I refuse to let Mother Nature add insult to injury by ruining the one thing I got right today.