Witch on Second: A Jinx Hamilton Mystery Book 5 (The Jinx Hamilton Novels) Read online

  Witch on Second

  A Jinx Hamilton Mystery Book 5

  Juliette Harper

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Juliette

  “Listen to them.

  Children of the night.

  What music they make.”

  Bella Lugosi - Dracula

  Prologue

  The night I said goodbye to my friend Myrtle, I wound up talking to a stick.

  Now, hold on before you judge me. In my world, you can’t take a statement like that and assign it a face value of “crazy” without hearing the explanation first.

  I’ll tell you more about Myrtle here in a bit. Right now, just concentrate on the fact that she was my friend and I had no way of knowing if I would ever see her again.

  The rest of my family — the people I’m related to by blood and by choice — walked me home. When I announced I was going straight to bed, my mother and my bestie, Tori, exchanged worried looks, but they didn’t try to stop me.

  Instead, they both hugged and held me, whispering in my ear that they loved me, and then they watched me start up the stairs alone.

  My new “ex” boyfriend, Chase, wanted to say something. The expression on my face shut that down fast. He closed his mouth and looked at the floor instead. We had been officially “over” for less than six hours. In good Dixie Chick fashion, I was not ready to make nice yet.

  Mom and Tori must have thought I was out of earshot when I disappeared into the darkness at the top of the stairs. I heard Tori say, “Are you sure we shouldn’t go after her?”

  “I’m sure,” Mom said. “When she’s hurting like this, Jinx has to get off on her own. She’ll need us more in a few days.”

  I hadn’t intended to engage in blatant eavesdropping, but then I heard Chase ask, “Is there anything you think I can do?”

  If you’ve never had the chance to hear your mama take up for you when she thought you weren’t listening, you’ve missed one of life’s great experiences.

  As I lingered quietly in the shadows above them, Mom answered him in a clipped tone. “I think you’ve done quite enough,” she said.

  “Kelly,” Chase pleaded, “please try to understand.”

  “Don’t you ‘please’ me, Chase McGregor,” Mom said, anger edging the words. “Breaking up with my girl would have been bad enough, but doing it today of all days is inexcusable. Frankly, I don’t want to be talking to you right now.”

  After that, all I heard was the sound of Chase’s boots walking away. Smiling through my tears, I went upstairs to be with my cats — all four of them — and broke down completely.

  At the end of that crying jag, they had wet fur, and my sinuses were so clogged up I could barely breathe. I knew if I didn’t get a handle on my emotions, I’d wake up to the worst post-cry hangover ever.

  I wandered toward my bedroom, only to stop at the doorway. Dim light filled the room. Had I left a lamp on?

  It took me several seconds to realize the glow came from the raw quartz embedded in the head of a walking staff called Dílestos. I crossed to the bed, sat down, and reached for the polished piece of oak whose name means “steadfast and loyal.”

  At my touch, the quartz brightened, and the pulsations thrummed with a slow rhythm I found comforting. As the vise grip holding my heart loosened a fraction, Dílestos began to hum softly.

  I closed my eyes and drank in the low, soothing melody. When I opened them again, I discovered the cats were now with me on the bed, staring at the crystal with hypnotized, golden eyes. The combined rumble of their purring struck a warm undertone to the staff’s gentle melody.

  My next door business neighbor and fellow witch, Amity Prescott, gave me the staff the first time I journeyed to a magical land called Shevington. She told me all the women in my line carried Dílestos. The Mother Tree that sits in the center of Shevington gave it to my Cherokee ancestor Knasgowa.

  It suddenly occurred to me that I’d never thought to ask why the Tree share a part of herself with, an idea that instantly ignited a second realization. Myrtle had just merged her spirit into the Mother Tree. Could she be trying to speak to me through Dílestos?

  “Is that you, Myrtle?” I asked hopefully.

  Through the maelstrom in my mind, a lyrical voice answered, “The aos si now resides with the Mother Oak. Just as I can never be truly separated from my source, she whom you know as Myrtle is ever with you.”

  That wasn’t the direct communication I wanted, but the words comforted me all the same. “Have I neglected you, Dílestos?” I asked.

  After that first trip to Shevington, I leaned the staff against the wall beside my bed. The idea of interacting with it again literally never came to my mind until the moment, almost three months later, when the quartz began to glow. Now I understand the delay wasn’t my being neglectful; there was a larger plan afoot.

  “Our time is as it should be,” Dílestos answered. “All comes in the appointed order.”

  “How do you know what happened today?” I asked.

  “I felt the spirit of the aos si flow into the blood of my mother,” Dílestos answered.

  “Does that have anything to do with why you decided to talk to me tonight?”

  Under my hand, the wood warmed. “Tonight you had need of my company,” Dílestos said. “You must rest. Your tears cannot undo what was done this day.”

  Basically, an enchanted stick just told me to go to bed. Ask my mother. I was never good about the bedtime thing.

  “I shouldn’t have been so selfish,” I said, ignoring the admonition to rest. “I’ve been pretty lazy riding my bike to the portal instead of walking with you so you could see your mother.”

  To my surprise, Dílestos laughed. “All who journey seek to reduce their steps.”

  No arguing with that.

  Even though my eyes were starting to grow heavy, I stubbornly kept asking questions. “Why did your mother give you to Knasgowa?”

  “For the One, I create the way to the many,” Dílestos replied.

  “That makes absolutely no sense,” I yawned, dimly aware that the staff’s humming was responsible for my growing lethargy.

  “Your time of joining nears,” Dílestos said, “then you will know.”

  Still holding the staff, I stretched out on the bed. My cats instantly surrounded me, their purring sending me tumbling farther toward unconsciousness. “Can’t anyone just answer a simple question?” I mumbled.

  “What is plain to the ear of one seems but gibberish to the ear of another,” Dílestos said softly.

  “Did you just call me clueless?” I asked thickly.

  “You are not without a clue,” Dílestos answered, “onl
y lacking some. Tonight you are sad and tired. Sleep.”

  I think I said something about that being the story of my life. I really don’t remember — but I do remember what Dílestos said right before my exhaustion claimed me.

  “The story of your life is only now beginning to be told as long ago it was written.”

  1

  As I shifted to get more comfortable, my hand brushed the frigid granite beneath me. If Tori hadn’t thought to bring two stadium chairs to the cemetery, sitting on the stone bench would have chilled me to the bone.

  Normally at the end of October in Briar Hollow, North Carolina the low temperatures hover in the forties. That Thursday night, about a week before Halloween, it was almost freezing. By noon the next day we’d be back in the sixties, but at that moment, I would have given anything to be in front of a fireplace.

  Okay. I guess I might as well be honest with you. Most of the chill I felt that night came from inside my soul.

  I could just opt for the simple explanation, “My boyfriend broke up with me,” and leave it at that. Everybody gets why a woman would feel down over being dumped, right?

  Well, my breakup redefined the phrase “it's complicated.”

  For starters, Chase McGregor runs his cobbler shop right next door to my general store and espresso bar — and we both live in apartments above the retail spaces. Avoid running into him? Not an option.

  Then there are the metaphysical variables. He and his father, Festus, are werecats, which shouldn't matter since I'm a witch.

  Trust me. It matters.

  Our relationship ran straight into a massive wall of intolerance. Werecats are only supposed to get together with other werecats. Things go bad when they don’t.

  How bad, you ask? They crank out certifiably crazy kids who can't shift into feline form and who take out their frustration on the rest of us in murderous ways.

  We spent the last weeks of that summer dealing with a guy named Malcolm Ferguson whose whole family nurses a decades-old grudge with the McGregors. The feud started when a werecat, Jeremiah Pike, married a human. Then, competing real estate claims kicked in.

  You may not like your homeowner’s association, but I’m betting they don’t send hit men in when you plant a rose bush in the wrong place.

  Well, on second thought, maybe they do. From what I can tell, HOAs are in league with the devil. Werecats, however, are not, but they do get their backs up over territory.

  Malcolm is dead, but he’s not the last of the Pike descendants. That problem might be temporarily shoved to the back burner, but I have a sneaking suspicion it will boil over again.

  As if all of that weren’t enough, Chase and I faced an added wrinkle — the incompatibility of witch/werecat magic. We would never have been able to have kids at all, crazy or otherwise.

  Starting to feel sorry for me? Good, because I'm not done yet.

  On top of all of this, the McGregors are pledged to defend the Daughters of Knasgowa. That includes me, my mom, and by extension, my best friend, Tori, and her mom.

  Knasgowa was a Cherokee witch, and by one husband or another, we’re all her descendants. Don’t worry. I won’t go into a recitation of some ancestral litany. We’ve settled for the genealogical catch-all “cousin.” It saves a lot of time.

  Here’s what you do need to understand about my magical heritage. Both Tori and I are predestined to fulfill roles in the Valley of Shevington, a Fae community that exists in a stream of time parallel to our own.

  I am in training to assume the position of Lord High Mayor from the community’s founder, Barnaby Shevington. Tori will ultimately take over as the Valley’s alchemist.

  Every bit of what I just told you got dumped on my head over the course of the preceding summer. I went from being a waitress at Tom’s Cafe to owning a business complete with magical entourage and epic, metaphysical politics — in less than six months.

  How did I cope? I had a friend.

  No, I don’t mean Tori, although she’s never left my side. My friend and mentor was an ancient fae spirit, the aos si. We called her Myrtle.

  If I’d lost Myrtle to death, I might have been able to make peace with the transition. You know, the five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

  But Myrtle didn’t die. She merged her essence inside an ancient tree to recuperate from exposure to a toxic magical artifact.

  Is she coming back when she gets well?

  I don't know.

  My world runs short on easy and straight answers. That used to scare me. Now, I rely on focus and discipline to try and keep the confusion at bay.

  So, yes, in those first weeks of fall, sadness dogged my every step, but anger and determination walked side by side with the melancholy.

  None of the other people in my life left me. Tori was right downstairs in her micro apartment, greeting me every morning with a goofy grin and a perfect latte.

  My loveable Aunt Fiona, who gave me the store and my magic, invited me daily to come to her cottage in Shevington and learn herbology, her speciality.

  Darby, our resident brownie, in collusion with my southern mother, opted for the food solution, cooking sumptuous meals for us all around the clock.

  Rodney, the black-and-white domestic rat with the mind of a genius who lives in the storeroom, spent most of his time curled around my neck. Rodney wanted to come to the cemetery that night, but I insisted that he stay back at the store.

  In response, the little guy stomped his foot and let out with a string of chattering protests. I was having none of it. “There are things out there that would see you as an hors d’oeuvre. I can't lose one more person, Rodney.”

  Sympathetic tears filled his eyes. He patted the back of my hand with his tiny paw and nodded in reluctant acquiescence.

  Don't get me wrong, wonderful people love me. Some of them have four legs, and some of them are, technically, dead.

  Enter Colonel Beauregard T. Longworth, late of the Army of Northern Virginia, deceased since 1864, now more or less alive courtesy of the Amulet of the Phoenix. Beau was the reason I was sitting on a graveyard bench that night.

  Were we there to complete some arcane ritual? To chant an incantation to raise the dead?

  Nope. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

  We were there to play baseball.

  Well, he was there to play baseball. I was there to get cheered up.

  A few nights earlier, sitting by the ever-present fire in our basement lair, Beau taught me a new word — animus. There’s a simple definition; hating or disliking something. But the more metaphysical meaning is “basic attitude or governing spirit.”

  To help Beau get caught up with the last 150 years or so, Tori recently gave him an iPad. He absolutely loves the thing, spending hours online reading and watching YouTube videos.

  When Beau asked me if I knew what “animus” meant, he handed me the tablet so I could read the definition.

  I returned the device with a limp, potentially surly question. “So, what’s your point?”

  With infinite patience, Beau said, “Over these past few months Myrtle became your personal animus. Dear Jinx, you must now find true north for yourself.”

  The petulant child in me wanted to declare, “Can’t make me!” Thankfully, that didn’t happen. He was right.

  In addition to being my friend and mentor, Myrtle was literally the animating spirit of the fairy mound on which our store sits. In her absence, for me at least, our home became something more hollow and less magical.

  Everyone else found a way to pick up and go on just as Myrtle wanted us to do — really pretty much ordered us to do.

  Me? Not so much.

  Maybe if Chase hadn't broken up with me the very morning Myrtle announced she was leaving, I would have coped better — or maybe I wouldn't have.

  Either way, Beau nailed it. Myrtle was my true north. Without her, the needle of my internal compass seemed to spin aimlessly.

  Bu
t for his part, Beau was fulfilling his promise to Myrtle to take care of me — by studying magic, by sitting with me next to the fire, by taking long walks with me high in the mountains, and by organizing a baseball game.

  Beau knows when to talk and when to be quiet. And he knows when to go for the laugh. That night in the cemetery, there was no way I couldn't smile at the two teams warming up amid the tombstones. It was ludicrous, improbable, and kind of wonderful all at the same time.

  The major league season might be over, but we were definitely in the minors — the post-mortem minors — and about to witness the opening game of the newly formed Briar Hollow Spectral Sports League.

  As I watched, Tori lifted the Amulet of the Phoenix over Beau’s head, struggling to ease it past the bill of his cap. Beau, who typically goes about in white shirts, dapper vests, and tall black boots was decked out in full baseball uniform.

  He was also juggling an impressive armload of bats, gloves, and balls. In the absence of the amulet whatever Beau is wearing or holding goes back into the ectoplasmic state with him. That was the only way he could outfit the players on the Dead Sox, his team, and their opponents, the Deceased Dodgers.

  While Beau distributed the equipment, Tori walked over and handed me the amulet for safe keeping. As the official umpire, she dressed in thematic black, complete with a cap emblazoned with the words, “Whether I’m right or wrong, I’m right. — The Ump”

  As I took the amulet from her, I said, “I hope Beau isn’t expecting too much from this crew.”

  The motley assortment of players included two farm women in long gingham dresses wandering toward the infield and a departed hairdresser with a beehive positioned at first base.

  “You never know,” Tori said cheerfully, plopping down beside me. “Everyone has hidden talents, even Duke.”

  I followed her gaze toward home plate, a flat grave marker bearing the oddly cheerful inscription, “Here lies Jed, better off dead.” There, a pale, wispy coon hound sat in a state of agitated attention.

  “Duke is playing?” I asked.