1. Distraction
DISTRACTION
gus’s wolf friend is gone,
but the magic lady has stayed.
that’s good… yes?
— gus
I’m beginning to think that Serena forgot about me.
The head of the Salem-based national coven hasn’t called me in weeks.
And maybe that’s not so unusual. When I’m on the job, she trusts me to do my best and to reach out to her if necessary.
Only when she has a new mission to assign me does she get in touch with me, and I keep expecting her to buzz me and tell me that there’s another cursed supe who needs my help.
So far she hasn’t. It’s been two months since I last spoke to her, filling her in on how my trip to Moonburrow went.
I told Serena that Ashton Morgan wasn’t cursed, but dealing with a case of magical contamination instead, and that it was easy to fix that.
However, before she could give the order that would send me back to Salem, all hell broke loose.
Officially, Serena gave me the okay to stay in Moonburrow as long as I felt it was necessary because of Morrigaine’s mirror.
A powerful witch artifact that takes on different forms throughout the centuries, its most recent incarnation is as a simple silver compact that Roxy Kane—a feisty raccoon shifter and Ash’s mate—found in a local dumpster.
As a thank you to me for helping bring the ‘dead’ opossum back to life, Roxy gifted me the compact.
Normally, I don’t accept payment for my services.
But that’s okay. Serena does. She charges whatever they can afford to pay—and if they can’t, that’s fine, too—and it supports the coven.
She also makes sure that I have everything I need, plus a bank account that is more than comfortable.
That’s why, after I told her I should stick around and see if I could figure out how the enchanted mirror ended up in a supernatural town decades after it was lost, I knew I could relocate to Moonburrow without worrying about what it would cost me.
Money-wise, that is. After everything that happened with Chief Deputy Lobo, my inability to walk away from Moonburrow has cost me way more than that…
Two months. It’s been two months since Olivia Frost—coven healer turned rogue witch—faked her own death, framing me, all so she could get her hands on Morrigaine’s mirror.
It didn’t matter to her that, as the last of Morrigaine’s descendants, the mirror technically belongs to me.
Or that, at the time, it was still in Roxy’s possession so it was technically hers.
The witch blamed me for her ‘murder’, tried to kill Roxy, and after she was thrown into a jail cell beneath the Moonburrow sheriff station, she escaped.
She wasn’t the only one who fled Moonburrow, either.
Riordan Lobo disappeared the same day he arrested me for Olivia’s ‘death’.
He tossed me in the same cell that eventually went to Olivia, and then he was gone.
Despite being the second most powerful wolf shifter in Moonburrow, he abandoned his job as chief deputy and his position as Beta of the Moonshadow Pack all because—
I shake my head. It doesn’t matter why he left. He took off, and then Olivia escaped, and now if you ask anyone in town, Riordan is searching outside of the reinforced borders, hoping to drag the murderous witch back to Moonburrow to pay for her crimes.
Me? I… I know better. I know why he really left, and it pains me every day that I wasn’t able to remove his curse before he did.
How could I when it was that very curse he used against me that kept me from using my ability as a cursebreaker to help him first?
As far as I’m concerned, I have unfinished business, so it’s not a bad thing that Serena is leaving me be.
Maybe I can blame it on how I spend more time than the common witch around spirits of the dead, but ever since I realized exactly what Riordan’s curse is capable of, I can’t bring myself to leave town until I’ve figured out how to break it.
If that means waiting him out until he returns?
That’s what I’m going to do, and it doesn’t hurt that Serena’s satisfied, knowing that there’s a loyal witch onsite to keep an eye on the Moonburrow coven.
Olivia was the face of the mutiny. She was eager to steal Morrigaine’s mirror for herself, but she promised many of her sister witches a share of the power that comes with the charmed compact.
It was up to Delilah—the head witch of the Moonburrow coven—to deal with any member who betrayed her leadership.
She says she did, that she doesn’t know how Olivia escaped, but by the time Serena approved my staying in town, I couldn’t bring myself to trust any of the local witches after they targeted me as an outsider to take the fall for Olivia’s ‘murder’.
Delilah has made it clear that I’m welcome to join the coven whenever I’m ready.
I’m not ready. At this rate, I might never be.
Luckily for me, I made a handful of friends in town.
It took me a moment to warm up to Max Lobo, Riordan’s younger brother and the Alpha of the Moonshadow Pack.
Another wolf, he is the sheriff who interrogated me after I was initially arrested on a murder charge, and the male who believed me when I explained that Olivia just wanted to steal the compact from the antique shop that Roxy owns.
I did adore Max’s mate from the moment I met her, though.
Honey Lobo is a sweet, friendly opossum shifter—and Ash’s cousin—who owns the local bakery in town, Dough You Believe in Magic.
She’s also the one who was so grateful that I helped her cousin while she was out of town on her honeymoon that she offered me the use of the apartment over her bakery so that I didn’t have to stay at the coven house any longer.
Roxy, too. She is mouthy, but incredibly loyal.
She has a bone to pick with Olivia, and she insisted I take the compact even after it came out just how priceless it is.
She’s also taken me under her wing. She took it personally that one of the local witches broke into her shop, shot at her with silver bullets, and tried to steal from her.
I wouldn’t have been surprised if she hated all witches after that, and while she’s no fan of Olivia, she decided that my helping Ash meant that I was one of hers from now on.
Ash is devoted to Roxy, plus grateful I managed to discern that he had been stabbed in the heel with a silver needle. We get along well, especially since he loves books as much as I do. In fact, shortly after he moved to Moonburrow, he went to work at the local library.
And then there’s Gus.
Oh, Gus…
Gus is a wild opossum that Honey lovingly refers to as her sidekick. He imprinted on the opossum shifter while he was a young joey. He’s been her companion ever since, though I met him while Roxy was on babysitting duty because Honey and Max had left Moonburrow to celebrate their recent mating.
He’s also the opossum I accidentally made talk when I was trying to use a simple spell to converse with the shade of Ashton Morgan.
The spell backfired like it usually does, and I got to find out that Gus thinks of me as the ‘magic lady’ before it wore off and he went back to his chitters and squeaks.
Of course, that’s just one more reason I should know better than to use simple magic. After three decades, you’d think I would give up on trying when I know that my spells backfire nearly one hundred percent of the time.
I’m excellent at cursebreaking. It’s an innate gift, passed down through the witches in my family, and it comes as naturally to me as breathing. I can see a curse, trace the way the green wisps of the dark magic are wrapped around its victim, and—more often than not—figure out how to unravel it.
Speaking to the dead is another gift I was born with. Ghosts don’t scare me. Curses don’t intimidate me. Wolves… that’s an entirely different situation that I thought I might be able to deal with until what happened after Riordan—whether he meant to or not—turned his curse on me.
But ask me to perform a basic spell any witch child should be able to manage? Yeah. It just doesn’t work, and yet I keep on trying anyway.
And that’s how I put Moonburrow Library out of business for the time being.
It’s early afternoon when I push open the door to the library.
I’ve gotten into the habit of stopping in at least a couple of times a week.
There’s only so much research I can do on Morrigaine’s mirror, witch history, and other missing artifacts before every book starts repeating the same legends and I’m searching for something else to distract me.
Since Serena has decided that this is where I need to be and Riordan still hasn’t returned so I can take a crack at his curse, I have a lot more free time than I’m used to and reading helps.
Most days, I hang out with Honey and Gus in the bakery.
At first, I kept to the apartment over Dough You Believe in Magic because I didn’t want to run into any of the coven witches in town.
Honey is part-witch. Her Grandma Jean used to own the bakery before she passed it on to Honey, and though she’s gotten into a little trouble herself with a magic recipe book and charmed treats, most of the witches are too snooty to patronize a part-witch.
And Delilah doesn’t understand why I don’t want to join the Moonburrow coven even for the time I’m in town?
No, thanks. I’d much rather do my research on my own, keep the compact somewhere safe since I at least know better than to use its amplification powers on my own unpredictable magic, and pretend like I don’t have an ulterior motive when it comes to waiting for my chance to confront Riordan Lobo about what happened…