Magic and Mayhem: Witchin' Impossible (Kindle Worlds Novella) (Hazed & Confused Mysteries Book 1) (6 page)

“Why would Danny be scared when talking about the Arete then?”

“I have no idea.”

“Mizzzzz Kinsey, you are barking up the wrong tree on this Danny Mason business. The boy was into stuff that would have gotten anyone killed, Shifter, witch, or human. He was bad news.”

“Like what kind of stuff, Chief?”

“There is a group of methamphetamine producers out of northern Missouri, who have been trafficking drugs up into Iowa. If you check with your FBI, I’m sure the can corroborate what I’m saying. These folks have been flying under the radar, and it’s made it difficult to catch them in the act of moving product. I suspect there are several young people in our community who help and work for them,” Chief Nichols said. “I’ve been trying to stop them for over two years. I long suspected Daniel Mason was part of that group.” He looped his thumbs into his black belt. “It wouldn’t surprise me if Boyd was not a part of their organization as well. The young man was a known drug offender.”

Robert Townsend pounded his fist against the desk. “That enough, Dirk.” He strode to the chief. “I’ve known John and Joy Decker my entire life, they are my kin. I won’t have you talking about their son that way. Not without real proof.”

A hint of a smile tugged at Nichol’s lips. “No offense, Bob. It’s just a speculation.”

“So you think some human meth heads had the finesse, not to mention, ability to manipulate flesh and bone, to perpetrate these killings?”

Dirk Nichols smug smile soured. “That’s what I think.”

“You really are a crap police officer, Dick.”

“Just wait one damned minute,” he protested.

Adele Adams held her hand up and silenced him. “Is there anything else you want to know, Agent Kinsey? As you can see, we are dealing with external forces in our town that we haven’t quite figured out yet.”

“You have to know magic is involved. There’s no way in hell a bunch of human yahoos twisted Danny and Boyd into pretzels. It might not be witchcraft, but it it’s definitely supernatural. Why haven’t you insisted on a vigorous investigation?” I directed the question at a Nichols and Adele.

“My man took the investigation as far as he could.”

I snorted. Super unprofessional. “You and I have both read Mitchell’s reports. There are enough holes in his inquiries to sink the Titanic.”

“Are you questioning my integrity, Mizzzzzz Kinsey?”

“I think I’m being pretty obvious about it.”

The police chief turned red in the face, Adele Adams looked annoyed, but the rest of the group, including my dad and Bryant Baylor, seemed to be conveying quiet approval.

“I think we’ve given you enough of our time, Agent Kinsey.” Adele started walking to the door. “You be sure and tell Carol we cooperated.”

“I certainly will,” I mumbled. “I’ll make sure Baba Yaga gets an earful.”

Once I stood outside the building on the concrete sidewalk, the June wind whipping through my hair, I breathed a giant sigh of relief. I’d learned three things: My dad was out of magic jail. There was tension between the Shifters and the witches. And finally, the coalition was full of liar-liar-pants-on-fires.

Did Lily know my dad was back in town? If she did, why didn’t she tell me? Ford had to know, but we weren’t exactly friends, so he might not understand the significance. How could Lily let me walk in there unprepared?

I got in my car and took out my phone. There was a certain werecougar who had some ‘splaining to do.

“I’M SORRY I DIDN’T TELL YOU, HAZE,”
my best friend said, confirming she knew my father was back. “When you left Paradise Falls, you hated him and hated this town. Your mother had…you know, and your father was in jail. You never looked back. I wanted to tell you when I called, but I was afraid if you knew Kent was out of jail, you wouldn’t come home. I tried to tell you again when you got here, but then the whole Boyd tragedy happened.”

I fought the urge to hang up the phone. She was right, but it didn’t mean I had to like it. I guess my silence freaked Lily out because she started talking a mile a minute.

“You haven’t called me or written to me since the day you left Paradise Falls, Haze. Hell, we’re not even friends on social media.” Her voice quivered. “I am desperate to find out what happened to my brother. He was the
only
family I had left. I couldn’t take the chance that you’d change your mind. I’m sorry if that feels like a betrayal.”

“I can’t deal with this right now.” My father’s betrayal had been the pinnacle of angst for me when it came to this town. “I just need some time to process. We’ll talk about it later.”

“Will we?” I heard the trepidation in her voice.

“Yes, Lils.” I made my reply gentle. “We will.”

I hung up with Lily as I turned onto Harmony. Ford’s street. I parked on the curb in front of his pale green ranch-style house and put my head down on the steering wheel and closed my eyes. I’d never felt so exhausted. Seeing my dad, finding out he was out of jail, had taken an unforeseen emotional toll on me. In my youth, many had described me as a “daddy’s girl,” and when he was taken by the witch police, I believed I never wanted to see him again. I still felt that way. He and my mother had never been attentive parents. They’d been obsessed with each other to the exclusion of everyone including me.

Which is why I still didn’t understand why they’d tried a bond severing spell. When the tether between them had been cut, my mother perished into nothingness and my father was arrested. It had all happened so quickly. I’d moved in with Lily and Danny to finish out the last month of high school, and they rest, as they say, was history. Or at least I thought so, but it turned out I’d left more than a broken youth behind.

A sharp rap on the roof of my car startled me. I looked up to see Ford standing outside my door and staring at me. “You coming inside?”

“Yes,” I said, willing my racing pulse to slow down. “I’m coming.”

“I bet that’s not the first time he’s made a woman say that,” Tizzy said.

I screamed. She screamed.

Ford yanked the door open and pulled me out of the car as if rescuing me from a pit of snakes. He shoved his head in the car, his body relaxing when he saw it was only Tizzy.

“Why did you scream?” Tiz said. She clutched her chest dramatically. “I think you gave me a heart attack.”

“I didn’t know you were in the car! You scared the crap out of me.”

“I thought something smelled bad.” She waved her paw in front of her face, her tail swishing from side to side.

Ford chuckled.

I snapped my fingers at him and the squirrel. “Not funny.” I shifted my focus to my sneaky familiar. “How did you get in my car?”

“You left the window cracked about two inches. I’m pretty flexible, you know.”

I sighed. “No. I mean, when did you get in my car?”

“Oh,” She shrugged, her shoulders brushing her cheeks. “While you were in with the witch-were group. Lily told me about your dad. I thought you might need me, but then you were so mad at her on the phone, and I thought you might need someone to yell at, so I stayed out of sight.”

She wasn’t wrong about me needing someone to yell at. “Go back to Lily’s,” I ordered her.

“She really feels bad about not telling you right away, Haze.” Tiz’s sincere defense of my oldest friend moved me. Not enough to forgive her, yet, but it did take some of the sting off the hurt.

“Then she’ll need you, Tiz. Lily’s alone right now, and I can’t be there for her. I’ll get there, though, I promise.” I tipped her chin with my knuckle until her big brown eyes looked up at me. “So, go. Okay. I’ll check in later, I promise.”

I crossed my arms as I watched Tizzy climb up a nearby tree, jump onto the roof of a ranch house, take a flying leap off the far side, and disappear.

“She loves you,” Ford said. His blunt observation rattled me.

“Don’t you think I know that?” Some witches treated their familiars like tools, some as pets, but Tiz had always been more like family to me. A sister, of sorts. She kept me sane during an insane part of my life. I don’t know that I’d have made it out of Paradise Falls if it weren’t for her.

“Let’s get inside,” Ford said coldly. “I have the reports and witness statements laid out in the kitchen.”

Chapter Eleven

FORD’S HOUSE WAS UNEXPECTED.
It was a three bedroom ranch house, with one bedroom converted to an office, and two bathrooms. The large kitchen with a stainless steel convection oven, a gas range, a butcher block top center island, a double well stainless steel sink, a peg wall full of high-end pots and pans, and granite counters. His side-by-side refrigerator was bigger than my clothes’ closet in my bedroom back home, and he had a large pantry. This was a kitchen for someone who loved cooking.

“Are you any good?” I asked when we moved to the center island. Photos, newspaper clippings, official reports, and oddly two books that appeared well-read if the worn edges of their binding were any indication.

His brows raised. “Good at what?”

I warmed under his heated gaze.

“Cheffing.” I gestured to the room. “It’s quite the kitchen.” The dark brown curtains matched his hair color, and the pale blue walls complimented his eyes. Coincidence? “The choice of colors…”

“Tanya picked the colors.”

Heat crept up my neck. “She did, did she?” My words sounded tight in my ears. It was taking every ounce of my control not the tear down the curtains and slash the walls with the professional knives in the butcher block caddy near the stove top.

He noted my indignation and smiled. “Yep.” He nodded. “As a favor.”

“She sure likes to do you a lot of favors.”

“You forfeited your right to be angry when you left me.”

“Seriously? We never dated.” His insistence that I was his mate and somehow should have magically known tweaked my ire. “You act as if we were together. I’d never even so much as had a conversation with you if you don’t count the time in the lunch line when you asked me to hand you the catsup.”

He shook his head as if to deny my words. “My life was good, Hazel. I got good grades, I had the perfect girlfriend, and I knew what I wanted to be when I got out of high school. Then you come along one night, and on a drunken dare, you kiss me.” His next words were almost hushed and reverent. “You changed me, Haze. When you did that, you changed everything.”

I rolled my eyes. “I never knew just how transformative my lips were.” I threw my hands up in the air. “If I’d have known that I could turn popular dicks into my love slaves, I might have kissed all the boys.” Yeah. I was being an asshole.

“Don’t you know anything about Shifters?”

“Uhm, yeah. Duh. My best friend is a freaking werecougar.”

“Is she?” He glowered. “Is she your best friend? Before you returned to Paradise Falls, when was the last time you even talked to her?”

His spicy scent became more pungently delicious with his anger. My lower bits clenched. My face flamed. I realized I was turned on. The stupid bearman was giving me a bunch of crap about being a crappy person and all I could think about was much I wanted to conquer his peak with my valley.

I blew out a ragged breath and tried to focus. “That’s not fair. I had to get away. I…” Left my friend behind. I sniffled. “My mom was dead. My dad responsible.”
I didn’t think I could ever have you.
I hadn’t realized until that moment just how much Ford had affected me. “Why are you being so mean to me?”

He surprised me by wrapping his arms around me and pulling me into the warmth of his wide chest. “Because,” he said, “I need you to understand that while witches may consider their mates temporary, it’s not the same for Shifters. When we mate, it’s for life.”

The word “life” echoed in my head. “This is all so confusing.”

“Two Shifters are bonded by an overwhelming need to be together. There is always a unique scenting involved. For me, with you, it was vanilla and rum.” He touched my hair and inhaled. “I can’t even go into a bar because it makes me think of you.”

“Is that why I smell cinnamon desserts every time I’m around you? I noticed it our senior year, but I just thought you’d changed colognes.”

“I smell like cinnamon desserts?” His hands stroked my back.

“Cinnamon buns right now.” Unwitch-like, I sniffed him. “It’s making me really hungry.” I hadn’t eaten all day, but I wasn’t just starved for food. I rose up on my tip-toes and kissed his neck.

Before we took this any further, there was something I had to know. “So you never had sex with Tanya Gellar.”

“Nope.” He started to say more, but when I leaped up and wrapped my legs around his waist, he shut his mouth.

“I don’t need to know anything more,” I said. I stroked his short beard, caressing the dark hair with my fingertips. I pressed my mouth against his, gentle and easy. I tugged his lower lip between my teeth and bit down—not hard enough to break the skin but hard enough to make him moan.

“Woman,” he said, very caveman-like. His fingers wound up my neck and twined into my hair. My lips parted for him, and I took his breath inside me as our mouths melded into a kiss that shot pleasure daggers to my groin.

I didn’t even notice he’d carried me to his bedroom until he threw me down on the bed. “This is all a little sudden,” I said, stripping my tank top over my head.

“I don’t know,” Ford said. “I think a couple of decades doesn’t make for sudden.”

He pulled his shirt off, his broad chest peppered with dark hair, and his cut-from-steel abs had grooves deep enough to scale.

“It should be illegal for you to wear a shirt.” I stared as his pecs danced when he crawled up the bed to me. I let out an unsteady breath. “Like go-to-jail do-not-pass-go kind of illegal.”

“You have too many clothes on.” He unbuttoned my pants and slid them down my thighs. “That’s better.”

He spread my legs, his thumbs tracing inner thigh. Electricity crackled along my skin.

“Is that going to be a problem?” he asked.

“Uhm…” Maybe. “Nope. I’ve got it under control.” I willed my magic to stop cock-blocking me. Ford’s hair raised on his arms and chest as more energy crackled. “I don’t want to electrocute you. We should probably stop.”

“Uh-uh.” He unbuttoned his jeans. “I’ll take my chances.”

“Thank the Goddess.” I did not want him to stop.

Ford’s body stilled. “Don’t, Haze.”

“Why?”

“How bad do you want to have sex right now?”

My whole body vibrated with lust and desire. “Pretty freaking bad.”

“Me too.”

“Then what’s the problem?” I rubbed myself against him. “I want you. You want me.”

“Because of the mating frenzy.”

I leaned back to gauge his expression. “What?”

He shook his head. “You really don’t know much about Shifters.”

“I think we’ve established that already.”

“The mating frenzy happens as a byproduct of the mating scent. If we take this further, I’m not sure I have the willpower not to take it all the way.”

“All the way…”

“To the mating bite, which will seal our fate forever.”

“You mean…” I got the gist, but I wanted him to spell it out.

“It means I’ll never let you go, Hazel. If you push me, and we mate, you’ll have to give up your life outside our world. Or I’ll have to leave my life to follow you.”

“Would that be so bad?”

“Yes.” He got up and put on his clothes. It made me want to shoot him. Unhappily, I followed his lead.

When we were back in the kitchen, I wrapped my arms as far around his waist as I could, and I held him tight. “I have never stopped thinking about you, Ford. I’ve turned down all the men who ever asked me out because they weren’t you. I threw myself into my work, believing that the job would be enough for me. I don’t remember our kiss, and I’m sorry it changed you into something you didn’t want to be, but for me, I hadn’t needed some biological imperative to tell me that you were the boy I wanted to love. I had feelings for you long before you started smelling like cinnamon toast.”

He tried to pull away, but I buried my face in his chest.

“We don’t have to hash this out right now, but I need you to stop being mad at me. Especially, since I didn’t know that you had this…reaction to me.”

He stroked my hair, melting me. “You make mating sound like an allergy.”

I chuckled. “I couldn’t stand watching you with Greta. Don’t you see?” I tilted my head back again to look at him. “I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to cast a spell to make all her hair fall out.” I didn’t mention that the only reason I didn’t cast the spell on Greta was because I sucked. The first and only time I’d practiced the spell, I’d aimed at my pee-my-pants dolly, but the magic went sideways, and poor Tizzy ended up bald for a month. Bald is not a good look for flying squirrel. “I never meant to hurt you, Ford.”

Which meant, I really didn’t know much about Shifters. Had I been so self-absorbed, that I made my relationship with Lily all about me? I’d never even asked her about mating. Is that why she was still single? My heart ached for her.

“I’m not mad at you, Haze.”

His blue eyes blinked down at me. “Vanilla and rum, huh?”

“You’ve really never even dated anyone?”

“You’re the only person I’ve ever wanted to date.”

“What about sex?”

I shook my head. “Not with someone else,” I smirked. I might have been a virgin, but I wasn’t asexual. “Masturbation can take off the edge.”

He laughed. “You’re not kidding.”

“You?”

“Not with someone else,” he said. “Not since that night.”

“Wow, that’s some serious crap.”

“Masturbation can take the edge off.”

Even though he was being cute by throwing my words back at me, a vision of him naked and holding himself flashed into my brain. My lady bits clenched. My stomach was pressed against his groin, and I felt the log in his jeans grow exponentially.

“Now you smell like vanilla, rum, and sex.” He disengaged from me and my throbby lady-morsels screamed,
Nooooooo
! “Which means, holding you is not a good plan. Let’s focus on the case. When it’s over, we can revisit this conversation.”

Goddess, why did he have to be so practical? “You’re right.” I turned myself toward the center island because my nipples were as hard as his Johnson and looking at him only made it worse. “The case. What do you have?”

He opened a manila folder with newspaper clippings dating back for ten years. “Over the past two decades, there has been some strange things going on in Paradise.”

When I raised my brow, he added, “Stranger than usual.”

“These articles are mostly about natural disasters. Tornadoes, severe lightning storms, hail…”

“The size of softballs.” My interest peaked. “That is unusual.” I spread the clipping out, organizing the stories by year. The disasters seemed to happen in a pattern. Initially, the storms were not so bad, but it appeared as if they had been getting progressively more devastating over the past ten years. “It looks like there is a break between September and December, then there are freak weather patterns every three months. January. March. June.” I remembered how rough the town looked when I drove in. “Was there a recent storm?”

“A high wind situation blew through town. It knocked a bunch of shingles off roofs, ruined a lot of store signs, and turned over a few trailers.”

In one of the clippings, there was a picture of a collapsed house. The headline read, “Local Family Killed By Storm.” I used my phone to magnify the image for a better look and noticed someone had scratched an
H
on the door. “There,” I said, pointing to the letter.

“I see it.” Ford scratched his beard.

I moaned.

He smiled.

“Stop that.” I shook off the growing lusty fog. “I saw that same letter at Boyd’s house scratched into his dresser, and again, I saw it scratched into the dash on Danny’s car.”

“What do you think it means?”

“At first, I thought it might be an initial or the start of a word that Danny and Boyd had managed to leave as a clue to their killer, but now I’m not sure. It seems less likely the victims drew the letter and more possible it was left by the murderer. Do you think it’s a calling card?”

“Like a serial killer?”

“In almost every single one of these weather events, someone was injured or died. What if it wasn’t an act of Goddess and more an act of a maniac?”

“Who has figured out how to control the weather?” His expression was incredulous.

“More likely, the killer or killers are crafting a magic powerful enough to disrupt the weather.”

“I don’t know, Haze. Doesn’t the leader of the witches frown on that kind of sorcery? I can’t believe your Babaloo wouldn’t intervene. I know how swiftly she came down on your dad.”

“Baba Yaga.” I winced. “She’s the witch in charge not the bear from the Jungle Book.”

He smiled. “I love that story.”

“Figures.” I smiled back. “You’re right, though. Baba Yaga wouldn’t let this kind of bad magic go without intervening. I just have a gut feeling.” And my gut rarely failed me.

“Maybe they are shielding somehow.”

“I don’t know how, but honestly, I didn’t do well in witch school, and I haven’t really studied any witchcraft since I left town.”