3. Not-so-welcome back
NOT-SO-WELCOME BACK
if they had let gus watch over the witch,
this never would’ve happened.
tsk.
— gus
So… Honey asked me to do magic.
It wasn’t anything too difficult. Just a simple locator spell to find Riordan and hopefully convince him to return home.
Any witch should be able to do that—the locating part, at least—and if they had the same amount of raw power inside of them as I do, ‘persuading’ him to come back to Moonburrow for a chat would be no problem at all.
Any witch except for Penelope Willows, that is.
Reminding Honey that my spells don’t really work when I attempt basic witchcraft did no good. She was determined, and I… well, I’m a people-pleaser.
It’s a flaw. I know it is. My mother used to tell me that being kind and being incapable of telling someone ‘no’ are two entirely different things, and that I needed to stick up for myself since I couldn’t rely on my magic to do it for me.
Shame that my need to help outweighs any of my discomfort.
That’s why, when Honey sat on the counter downstairs in Dough You Believe in Magic, beaming at me with her big purple eyes, and asked if I could please try to find Riordan, I folded like one of her soufflés when someone slams the kitchen door too hard.
Not that she’s worried he’s dead. Max talks to his brother regularly. Riordan has his phone, he answers when the sheriff calls, and, according to Honey, he sounds fine. Stubborn and determined to stay gone, but fine.
No. Her worry stems from the fact that there’s a troublesome witch who I’m sure still wants Morrigaine’s mirror—and good luck with that one!
—and a mate who is in need of bringing his brother home.
That’s not all, either. Honey mentioned that there have been a few issues with the border spell that keeps mortals and vampires and no-good-nicks outside of Moonburrow.
The coven has been insisting on strengthening the wards to the point that no one can get in or out without the Alpha’s or the coven leader’s express permissions, and Max—trying to be diplomatic and thinking about the safety of both the pack and this town—is leaning toward allowing it.
Honey thinks it would be for the best if Riordan came back before the witches and the pack locked Moonburrow down. And that’s why she asked me to find him.
Because she did, I promised I would try.
The spell is simple enough. Locator magic usually requires an object belonging to the person you’re searching for, but a picture will work in a pinch.
Honey produced one of Max and Riordan from a few years ago.
She promised she could get another print made and cut the picture in half to give me a photo of Riordan by himself, smiling in a way that I only saw once or twice while he was still in town.
I set everything up on the small, cozy kitchen table in my apartment over the bakery. Once ready, I lit the candles, drew the circle, and cast the spell like I was taught when I was a witchling.
When I was done, the only thing that happened was that the flames on the pair of candles winked out. That was all. No explosion. No conflagration that led to the curtains going up in smoke. The fire died, and I had an uneasy feeling in my gut that said I failed.
Again.
To be fair, that was pretty much what I expected…
Hey. I’m a cursebreaker. Give me dark magic wrapped around a supernatural creature and I can pull it apart eventually.
I’m a seer. Give me a ghost and I can talk to it if it wants to chat.
But give me an ordinary spell that a twelve-year-old witch could perform after one lesson at her mother’s knee and you might want to stand back.
Honey was disappointed when I went downstairs and told her, though she tried not to show it. I murmured that I was sorry. She hugged me and told me that I had nothing to apologize for which, naturally, made me feel worse because, again, people-pleaser.
Now I’m upstairs in my apartment once more, staring at the photo of Riordan smiling up at me.
Wherever he is, I know that he’s somewhere outside of Moonburrow. I just have no clue where.
What makes matters worse is that, no matter how much I pretend that I only agreed to cast the locator spell for Honey, there was a moment when I closed my eyes, whispered the incantation, and hoped that it would work more than I have hoped any other ordinary spell would work in a long, long time.
There. That’s the truth. I wanted to cast the spell and have it be a success because I wanted to find him.
Maybe that was part of the problem...
Magic is supposed to be simple. At least, that’s what every witch who has ever tried to teach me says. You decide what you want, reach for your power, and let yourself have it.
I call bullshit.
Because if magic really was as simple as wanting something and letting yourself have it?
Riordan Lobo would be back in Moonburrow by morning—and he isn’t.
A week later, nothing much has changed.
No surprise, but my attempt at a locator spell did not work at all. Not only didn’t it bring Riordan back to Moonburrow, but Honey confesses that while Riordan does take his brother’s calls, he flat-out told the sheriff that he won’t return to Moonburrow while Olivia Frost is on the loose.
So Riordan is still gone.
Olivia is still missing.
And then, at three o’clock in the morning on an ordinary Tuesday, I’m sound asleep in my apartment when an all-too-familiar voice says, “Honestly, Penelope. It’s the witching hour. Why are you still sleeping?”
I was sleeping. As I come to with a jolt and discover I’m not alone in my bedroom, I’m definitely not anymore.
My eyes fly open as I jerk upright in bed, grabbing blindly for the lamp on my nightstand. I nearly knock it onto the floor before I manage to turn it on, bathing my bedroom in a warm yellow glow that immediately reveals the woman standing beside my bed.
Olivia Frost.
For one confused, sleep-fogged second, all I can think is that she’s back.
After two months of hiding outside of Moonburrow, Olivia has somehow slipped through the wards, found out where I’ve been living, and broken into my apartment in the middle of the night.
My pulse goes wild as I scramble backward, dragging the covers with me until my spine hits the headboard.
I’m already reaching instinctively for my magic—though only Hecate knows how badly that will backfire on me—when Olivia rolls her eyes.
“Oh, calm down. You’re going to wake everyone in town.”
“You!”
“Yes, yes. Let’s get that part out of the way. It’s me. Obviously.”
“What are you doing here?”
She stares down at me with a look of pure disbelief mingled with a sneer that says she can’t believe I’d ask that. “Wake up, sleepyhead. Use your eyes. Use your brain. Notice anything different about me?”
My first instinct is to refuse. She looks exactly the same as she did the last time I saw her: the long, dark-haired braid, her dark eyes, and the hint of wrinkles surrounding them.
Like me, she has a tendency toward wearing loose, flowing clothes, though she’s got on a sleeveless tank and a skirt that touches the back of her upper legs.
But then, as I blink myself into true consciousness, I realize exactly what she means: Olivia is only at about fifty percent opacity. Oh, and she’s also hovering about six inches off the floor. Her coloring is much more wan than it had been which makes sense because—
“You’re dead!”
“Yup.”
“You’re a ghost!”
She sighs. “And you’re supposed to be a seer. The only one currently in Moonburrow, as far as I know. Trust me. If there was any other witch I could talk to about my murder, I would be waking them up. Unfortunately for us, you’re it, and that means you’re the lucky witch who gets to help me.”
Maybe it’s unfair of me to be suspicious.
Not two months ago, Olivia Frost fooled her coven of witches and the Moonburrow Sheriff Department into believing she was dead.
She drank a potion that stopped her heart, slowed every bodily function until even a wolf shifter couldn’t tell she was still alive, then arranged the evidence so that it looked like I murdered her.
It worked, too, until the potion wore off and she went after Morrigaine’s mirror before getting caught, then escaping.
However, I know better. It would be so much easier to believe that Olivia came back to Moonburrow to fuck with me.
However, she’s right. I am a seer, and despite the obvious facts that she’s hovering and she’s only halfway here, there’s also a particular energy to a ghost that I’ve never been able to explain to witches who can’t see them like I can.
It’s not quite magic, though there’s magic involved.
It’s more like an echo left behind after someone dies, only strong enough to think and speak and annoy the ever-loving hell out of the unfortunate seer they decide to haunt until they resolve their unfinished business.
I can only imagine what Olivia’s will be…
It doesn’t help that I can feel her spectral energy while I’m sitting in bed. Throwing the comforter away from me, I move so that my bare feet are on the floor.
“You’re dead.”
She wrinkles her nose. “So kind of you to notice.”
“No. I mean…” I push my tangled red hair away from my face. “You’re actually dead.”
“Yes, Penelope. I am aware of that. And that’s why I’m here. You need to tell me who murdered me.”
“You don’t know?”
Olivia scowls at me. “Not quite. I know how I died. It was just after midnight. I was walking in the woods when one of them attacked me.”
“Attacked? What? One of who?”
“It was a wolf. I know that much.” A wry smile from the former witch healer. “I… I tripped. It was an accident. But I felt the claws rip me open before I could do more than get a glimpse of the big, black wolf that attacked me.”
My heart skips a beat.
A wolf. In the woods.
Attacking a witch.
“And you don’t know who it was? A… a shifter?” A feral? “Or, like, an ordinary wild wolf?”