“Put a mouse in it,” Wanda answered.

  “You loathsome termagant! I should be happily licking my paws in front of the fireplace instead I’m trudging through the snow, getting my fur wet, you malodorous trout!”

  “Did he just call you a trout?” I asked, facing her. I couldn’t help my smile.

  She shrugged. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “Woe to your mother for having the misfortune of bearing such a loathsome toad!” the rude, little creature continued. “It isn’t any wonder your womb is cavernous and dusty!”

  “Have you tried catnip?” I asked as I opened the slider and a fierce wind whipped around my ankles, traveling up my body and enveloping me in a chill embrace.

  “Hmm,” Wanda said and scratched her chin. “I’m not sure it would be strong enough.”

  Everything she said was characterized with a deadpan sort of disinterest. Her default setting seemed to be flippancy, a sort of automatic shield against genuine personal connection. Henner said witch covens were like high school mean girl cliques on steroids. Show weakness, and the coven would devour you whole.

  I nodded. “Maybe I can whip up something a little more powerful.”

  She faced me, and there was true curiosity and gratitude in her eyes. “If you could invent the equivalent of demon Xanax, I’d be forever appreciative.”

  Then she flashed me a genuine grin—something kind and almost innocent. It was a heart-stopping, pageant-winning, full-of-pearly-whites smile. It made lines fan out around her eyes and transformed an already striking face into something beautiful. I hadn’t realized she had smile lines until now. I supposed I hadn’t seen her really happy before. I’d seen her playing the part of coy, seen her haughty, uncertain, and I’d even seen her distraught. But I’d never seen her happy.

  She gave me a slight nod as the wind attacked her, and she shivered against the chill. “Get your coat on and grab your ingredients, Poppy. I can’t stand around looking fabulous all night.”

  ***

  It took me five minutes to gather everything I needed for the ritual, and then I joined Wanda and Hellcat on the back patio. By that time, the wind had picked up anew, tossing fresh snow at our faces and bodies. I couldn’t blame Hellcat for dancing a jig on Wanda’s shoulder. She kept trying to put him down on the ground, but he just dug his claws into her back and refused to budge.

  “Ouch, that hurts, you little heathen!”

  “Fie! Fie, Fie! Fie!”

  “What’s he going on about?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “He’s fond of medieval slang. Just ignore him.” She hugged the jacket closer to her body and then, taking a deep breath, leaned down on her haunches with a grimace, opening her bag. “Let’s get this over with.”

  I followed suit and yelped as the snow melted on contact with my knees, soaking my flannel pajama pants. Wanda cleared a patch of snow, laid out a lap desk, a cheap map, and a bowl.

  “The bowl is for the Divining Oil,” she explained, as she looked at the implements in front of her and frowned. “The potion isn’t for anointing the skin, is it?”

  “No, it isn’t. Usually, you’d anoint a candle with it.” I looked up at the sky, just as the wind reached out and slapped me across the face. “But there’s no way a candle will remain lit out here.”

  Wanda nodded. “Then we’ll have to make do with the bowl.”

  I reached into my own bag, unstoppering the vial of Divining Oil. An anointed candle would usually provide us with a quicker result, but in light of the potentially incendiary consequences, I was willing to endure the slower and more psychedelic scrying experience to get answers.

  “The spell must be performed before dawn, so we’d best get on with it,” Hellcat announced, but now he was speaking through Wanda—both of them saying the words together. It was eerie, to say the least.

  “How… are you doing that?” I asked.

  “When we practice magic, we unite our energies to become more powerful,” Wanda-Hellcat replied in unison.

  It was off-putting enough that I decided not to ask them anymore questions.

  “Give me your left hand, and pour with your right,” they continued and Wanda reached out, seizing my hand as the cat fought to maintain its place on her shoulder.

  “Pour while I cast, and keep your eyes on the sigils at the bottom of the bowl,” they continued.

  Wanda began murmuring under her breath as I tipped the potion into the bowl. Clove, lotus, orange, and sandalwood teased my nose for an instant before the scent was whipped away by the wind. Divining Oil was an easy potion to make, and one of my favorites. The sigils etched at the bottom of the cheap plastic bowl glowed dully as the liquid settled and the spell began to take effect.

  As I focused on the sigils, they flared a brilliant, electric blue. Their edges blurred, like someone had brushed across the lines and smudged them. Wanda’s strange dual voice grew louder. Or maybe the wind grew softer.

  “Go forth in your mind and seek what ye shall find,” Wanda-Hellcat finished intoning. Then she added in her normal voice. “Hold onto your butt, gypsy. This is about to get weird.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Weird?” I slurred, and even to my own ears, I sounded drunk. What did she mean by...

  But in that second, I found out exactly what she meant.

  One moment, I was swaying like a drunk but with my hind end still firmly planted on the snow-covered patio, trying my darndest to get frostbite in the January air. The next moment, it felt like I was hoisted into the air by my panties, getting a wedgie from hell while some unseen force offered me an aerial view of my surroundings.

  I had no idea what spell Wanda had placed on my Divining Oil, but this was not usually how scrying went. In my experience, I was lucky if I even received a visual to answer whatever question I was asking. Most of the time I just got a gut feeling about what I wanted to know.

  But, this was… totally different. This was… I was floating. Flying through the air.

  My eyes bugged, and I lifted my knees to touch my chest before they could bang against the treetops. This was all just an illusion, of course, a powerful visualization created by Wanda’s intense focus on the map just underneath the potion. The map was meant to help us narrow the focus of the spell, and to give us an exact location of the missing children.

  And while it truly felt like I was floating, it was more an out-of-body experience. It wasn’t real. But it felt real. The air that raked at my face and wormed its way under my coat was bitterly cold. Snow danced around my head, landed in my hair and settled on my lashes, while light erupted beneath me, like a massive hole had opened in the ground, revealing a sun.

  At first, I wasn’t sure where to look. The light was so bright, so dazzling, and the pattern was almost indecipherable, like hundreds of rainbow contrails dragged to earth. They crisscrossed the map of Haven Hollow at odd intervals, but seemed to be the most concentrated on the roads in and out of town. Every hair on my body stood on end, and even a hundred feet up, I could sense the magic running through those multi-hued trails of light.

  Someone had bespelled the crap out of this town. I suddenly understood what Ophelia meant about keeping monster hunters away. I could feel the magic rattling my bones, sinking into me and thundering. It almost felt like the power was trying to shake my fillings loose, it was so intense, so strong. And I possessed magic. This power would bamboozle a regular human and someone who wasn’t meant to be here? It would outright zap them into nothingness!

  “Ask your question, Poppy!” Wanda’s voice made me jump. It sounded like she was speaking from a long ways off, when I knew she was sitting only a few feet away from me.

  “If those kids are in Haven Hollow, the spell will show you where.”

  “Right,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I said the word aloud. My head was spinning, and the light beneath me was so bright, it tugged tears from my eyes. “Show me where the missing children are.”

  I hunched my shoulders, and got a tighter grip on my knees, waiting for whatever had a hold of my undies to hoist me aloft again and ferry me to a new location. Instead, it dropped me and I didn’t even have time to draw in air to shriek before I slammed back into my corporeal body.

  I was still swaying, off balance, and I tipped forward. I would have landed face-first in the still sparking bowl of Divining Oil if Hellcat hadn’t leapt off Wanda’s shoulder and launched all ten pounds of black fur and bad attitude right into my face.

  My momentum successfully reversed, I hit the ground hard, the back of my head impacting with a sharp crack of sound and an even sharper twist of agony at the base of my skull. Stars burst behind my eyes.

  ***

  I must have passed out, because when I came to, I was on my couch, burritoed in a blanket, with Wanda hovering over me, and a self-satisfied Hellcat chowing down on treats she must have brought for him.

  Wanda looked pale and more serious than I’d ever seen her. Some of the stiffness in the set of her shoulders eased when I opened my eyes.

  “You’re awake! Son of a witch, you scared the hell out of me!”

  “Oh my God,” I grumbled as the headache from hell hit me. “My head… What happened?”

  Wanda’s lips twisted as she reached down and cradled the back of my head in the palm of her hand. She whispered something as she stared at me and the pain began to fade away.

  “The spell failed,” she said as she pulled back and faced me with a frown.

  “Failed?” I repeated.

  She nodded and breathed out deeply. “It wasn’t because we messed up.”

  “Then?”

  “Our magic was thwarted because it met a power stronger than ours.”

  It was my turn to frown. “Stronger?”

  She nodded again. “Just after you passed out, this popped out of thin air.”

  Wanda held something up to the light. At first, I thought it was a piece of confetti. The paper was thin, almost translucent, and glittered like snow. Words were written on it in small, fine script, but I couldn’t make them out, owing to the fact that I couldn’t focus for more than a few seconds at a time.

  “What does it say?”

  “Give us Olwen, and we will return what we’ve taken,” Wanda read aloud and then shrugged. She inhaled and exhaled for a count of three each. Then she turned to me and raised a brow. “Know any Olwens?”

  “No. Do you?”

  She shook her head and a stray lock of pitch black hair bisected her forehead. She pushed it back and secured it behind her ear. “Afraid not.”

  We both were quiet for a few seconds. “You know what this means, then?” I asked.

  Wanda looked over at me. “What?”

  “It means the children didn’t wander off. They were taken and by something powerful enough to hide them from a witch and a gypsy tapping into the power of a freaking Hollow to find them.”

  Wanda nodded. “Then we’re looking at a hostage situation.”

  “Right.”

  And I had no idea how to get the kidnappers what they wanted.

  ***

  I dragged myself out of bed at seven the next morning and my headache was back. Throwing on something clean, I made coffee and then drove Finn to school. We sat in silence for the majority of the ride, staring at the lightening horizon, the headlights of the Wrangler slicing through the gloom of the early morning.

  We arrived a few minutes later, and I joined a line of cars waiting to drop their kids off by the front doors. Pulling up behind a BMW, I immediately recognized it as Janara’s.

  “It looks like Janara managed to enroll Wren in school,” I said.

  Finn looked at the BMW and smiled broadly as Wren stepped out from the back seat, wearing a brand new backpack. She was still dressed in the style of a pageant competitor, and I hoped she wouldn’t be ridiculed for it.

  “Be a good friend to Wren, Finn, because I think she could really use a friend like you.”

  He looked over at me and smiled as the line moved forward. When it was our turn, Finn hastily opened the passenger door and jumped down to the cement sidewalk below. Wren was still standing in front of the school, as if afraid of what to do next.

  “Bye, Mom!” Finn called over his shoulder. He faced forward again and jogged up to join her. “Hey, Wren!”

  She looked at him and immediately appeared relieved. And at that moment, I was beyond proud of my little boy. He was such a loving and kind soul, and as I pulled away from his school, I could feel tears burning my eyes.

  ***

  The scrying with Wanda had left me with more questions than answers, and that was a position I hated being in. Wanda had promised to take the mysterious note to Ophelia to ask if the name ‘Olwen’ meant anything to her. I would have gone with Wanda, but I was busy dropping in to give Libby, the zombie Wanda had raised recently, her bi-weekly checkup. As much as Wanda complained about it, Libby was currently acting as her roommate because she had to be in close proximity to Wanda because Wanda was her maker. I found the whole situation somewhat comical, although I did feel sad for Libby, who was struggling in this new life.

  And I’m sure it didn’t help that Wanda wasn’t exactly the sentimental sort.

  During Libby’s checkups, I’d tip a few potions down her throat to keep her looking bright-eyed, and mostly human. As of yesterday, Libby had gone a week without producing maggots, which was a sign she was no longer rotting from the inside. Pretty soon, she’d be able to go out in the sunlight.

  The poor thing was beginning to look a little haggard. Being a zombie meant she was a magical sponge, able to absorb whatever power she came across. She could act as a second familiar to Wanda, if need be. But, currently, she was having trouble accepting her new life. I had to imagine it was an impossibly difficult thing to be dead for decades and suddenly find yourself reanimated, in a world that was night and day different than you remembered it.

  Libby had been a dutiful fifties housewife and seemed to think this was all a dream. She knew and accepted she was dead, but she didn’t seem to understand she was back in the world—the same one she’d left. Instead, she thought she was in purgatory or hell. She couldn’t accept the reality that she was now a zombie, that she’d been raised from the dead by a Blood Witch, and that she had a vampire for a landlord.

  It was enough to make anyone dizzy, but I thought weeks of denial was a little much, especially when the reality of Libby’s new life was staring her dead in the face and had been.

  After tending to Libby and telling her everything was going to be okay (it was the same conversation we had every time I came to see her), I piled back into the Wrangler and headed in the direction of Haven Hollow’s downtown. I had a whole slew of potions to prepare for impatient customers.

  As I drove into town, the sky continued to grow lighter. It was muted, unable to punch through the solid mass of gray storm clouds overhead. More snow. Ugh. At this rate, we were going to be up to our ears in the fluffy white stuff.

  It wasn’t exactly a cheerful thought, but it was something. I clung to it until I hit Main Street, and could make out the bronze cast metal letters that spelled out the name of my shop. The letters shone dully in the muted morning light. I pulled into the spot out front, seized my purse, and trudged toward the front door.

  I realized a few seconds later there was someone already trying to walk in, flagrantly disregarding the ‘closed’ sign on my door.

  A hot burst of irritation pushed back the worst of the cobwebs in my mind as I stared my visitor down, silently willing him to turn toward me. When he didn’t, I planted my feet, crossed my arms over my chest, and said, “Fox Aspen. To what do I owe the displeasure?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Fox turned around slowly, that winning smile spreading across his face. “Ah, good morrow to you, Ms. Morton. Bit nippy this morning, isn’t it?”

  “Cut the Charles Dickens crap and tell me what you’re doing here,” I responded, almost shocked by my own temper. Maybe I’d spent too much time with Wanda…

  Fox’s grin never wavered, his tone so bright and conversational, I almost felt foolish for questioning him.

  “I came to inquire as to whether you’d reconsidered my proposal and, if not, I wanted to purchase some of your potions.”

  “Why?” I demanded as I unlocked the store and opened the door, allowing him to enter. I immediately turned on the lights and went to flip the ‘closed’ sign to the other side.

  He shrugged as he strode into the store and stopped in the middle, turning around as if taking stock of it for the first time. Then he faced me while I dropped my purse behind the counter and unwound the scarf from around my neck.

  “Todhchaí is proving more elusive than I’d anticipated. I hate to admit it, but I may need… help luring her out.”

  “Todhchaí?” I repeated, shaking my head. “It’s way too early in the morning for this. I haven’t even had my coffee yet.”

  Fox chuckled and approached the counter, leaning both arms against it as he gave me that look. Clearly, this guy was smooth and I was more than sure he was very aware of the effect he had on women. I took a few steps back and crossed my arms against my chest, and I glared at him.

  “Todhchaí is a tricky beast,” he said. “Given her abilities, there weren’t many people Jon could send after her, and even my impressive skill set is coming up a bit short.”

  “You still haven’t explained… anything.”

  Fox nodded. “I’m here, in Haven Hollow, to capture Todhchaí.”

  “And what is Todhchaí?”

  “A ghost.” He couldn’t have forced me to sit up straighter if he’d jabbed me in the rear end with a cattle prod. “She’s not a bad ghost by nature, but she’s scary and the last thing I need is her appearing to someone with a heart condition.”

  “Did you just say Todhchaí is a ghost?”

  Every ounce of weariness within my body was suddenly gone, replaced with an insistent urge to shake Fox until answers fell out of him.