Going through the Potions Read online

  Going Through the Potions

  Pacific North Witches Mystery #1

  Samantha Silver

  Contents

  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

  Also by Samantha Silver

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  I stared right into the dragon’s open mouth as it roared at me, and I gulped. His red and yellow scales glistened in the rays of sunlight that peeked through the canopy of the trees.

  “He’s just like a big old pussycat,” I muttered to myself. “Good kitty.”

  Well, apart from the fact that when you had to get a collar off a cat, it was generally pretty easy to distract them with a treat and then quickly undo the collar before they realized what was happening.

  Dragons, on the other hand, were a bit more of an issue. After all, this particular dragon’s teeth were about the size of the average housecat. And then there’s that whole fire-breathing thing, too.

  This particular dragon had a large blue collar around his neck. A collar that I was supposed to get off without becoming a midmorning snack in the process. I stepped to the right, keeping one eye on the collar and another on those giant teeth. The dragon was well aware that I was here and was absolutely not on board with what I was trying to do.

  “Rhea, mother of the gods, lull this dragon to sleep,” I ordered, pulling out my wand and pointing it directly at the dragon. In a flash of color, however, the dragon leaped up toward the sky, causing the spell to miss, and I let out a gasp of surprise.

  “Come on, don’t you want a nice nap?” I called up to him when I’d gotten ahold of myself once more. “It’s a nice, sunny day out. Perfect weather for a bit of a snooze!”

  The dragon replied by shooting a burst of fire toward me, which I managed to avoid by casting a quick shield spell, protecting me from the flames. “I guess that’s a no,” I muttered.

  The dragon spread his wings wide and began flying around the forest in a large circle. Great. I hated flying.

  A broom lay on the ground nearby and I grabbed it, jumping up onto it and soaring into the sky. I gripped the handle tight as I flew toward the dragon, but I was at an innate disadvantage: I was a witch from an earth coven. I was most comfortable with my feet on the ground and my hands in a pile of dirt. The dragon, on the other hand, was in his element here in the sky. Flying was as natural as breathing for him. I had to change the odds.

  “Rhea, mother of the gods, turn me invisible,” I ordered, pointing my wand at myself. Straightaway, my body and broom disappeared from view. It might have been a little bit disconcerting for me—I wasn’t a confident flyer when I knew where my body was, let alone when I couldn’t see it—but it would have been worse for the dragon.

  His long neck craned from side to side as he looked for me, vainly trying to figure out where I was while I flew toward him. Unable to determine my location, the dragon decided to take the nuclear option, which I wasn’t expecting. He opened his mouth and breathed out flame, sending fire everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Some of the trees below caught fire as the flames hit them, but more importantly, he was also shooting fire toward me.

  I spun sideways to avoid the flames, sending my broom shooting upward to get away from the fiery end the dragon had planned for me. I eventually found myself flying right above him, looking straight down at the blue collar that I had to remove.

  I figured I probably had one shot at this.

  I stuck my wand between my teeth so I could guide my broom with both hands as I shot straight down toward the dragon. When I was about a foot or two above him, I jumped off the broom, landing on the dragon’s back, and immediately lunged for the collar.

  Just as soon as I’d grabbed it with one hand, the dragon spun himself around, desperately trying to get me off his back.

  It took every ounce of willpower I had not to open my mouth and drop the wand as I found myself dangling in midair, one hand holding onto the collar while the rest of me hung powerlessly. I looked up and saw the clip. I reached for it, but the dragon took a sharp left, and the laws of physics meant my body moved to the side, so I couldn’t reach the clip anymore. Not to mention, the grip my other hand had on the collar was failing.

  There was no time to bother with the clip to release the collar. I wasn’t going to be able to get to it, not with the dragon doing his best impression of a cheetah on cocaine as he tried to get me to fall off him. I grabbed my wand from my mouth and pointed it at the collar.

  “Rhea, mother of the gods, slice through this collar.”

  Magic burst forth from my wand, and the next thing I knew, I was plummeting toward the ground. But hey, at least I had the collar in my hand. If I messed up this next spell I was probably going to die, but at least I would have succeeded.

  “Rhea, mother of the gods, make me float gently to the Earth.”

  My plummet quickly turned into more of a soft flow, like a feather slowly falling from the sky. I could see Keith Rockway, the wizard currently judging my work, staring up at me from the field where we had started. His arms were crossed, and I happily waved the collar in his direction. The burning trees had been put out; Keith must have done that to prevent as much damage to the forest as possible.

  A minute later my feet were on solid ground once more, and I raced over to the field where this test had started and threw the collar at Keith’s feet.

  “There it is.” I looked up at him, a self-assured smirk on his face, but his reply came in the form of a slowly raised eyebrow. His brown eyes betrayed absolutely no emotion. Keith was a friend of my mom’s and the head honcho of the magical fixers here at Mt. Rheanier. In his early fifties, he always said my antics as a child were most of the reason he had gone gray early.

  Now, he was going to judge whether I passed the test to be allowed to study to become a magical fixer. After all, when I had completed my witches’ exam—the examination every witch and wizard took upon coming of age to determine their magical skill levels and what occupation would be within their skillsets—I wasn’t exactly the best student. I definitely didn’t score highly enough to be given automatic entry into the magical fixer program, which was one of the most prestigious in the entire paranormal world. Magical fixers were basically general problem solvers. If you had an issue that involved magic to fix, you called the fixers. Their magical skills had to be top-of-the-line, since they dealt with anything and everything on a daily basis.

  So, now that I was twenty-seven years old and more mature—in theory, anyway—I was taking a supplemental exam that would give me entry to the magical fixer program. The test had required me to get the collar off an angry dragon who would do his best to stop me.

  “Here it is,” I said, motioning to the collar as the dragon flew down next to me. It was suddenly surrounded by a white-hot flash of light, and when the light disappeared a second later, the dragon had shifted back into a six-foot-two blond man with messed-up hair and a carefree smile.

  “You certainly gave me a run for my money there, Ali,” he said with a grin. “I zigged and zagged so hard I almost made mysel
f dizzy.”

  “Yeah, I was about ninety percent sure my arm was just going to detach from my shoulder completely,” I replied. “But I got the collar in the end. So, do I pass?”

  Keith looked at me. “No, absolutely not.”

  “What?” I complained. “Why not? I got the collar back.”

  “For one thing, you have the collar sliced in half. You should have unclipped it normally and brought it back in one piece, rather than destroying it to finish the task. Completing a task incorrectly is just as bad as not completing it at all.”

  “The rules didn’t say I had to bring it back in one piece,” I argued.

  “And part of being a magical fixer means reading between the lines,” Keith replied. “Besides, on top of that, there is the issue that your actions caused Blaze to set the forest on fire.”

  “So a few trees got burned.”

  “And what if that happened to property that belonged to the person you were supposed to be helping?”

  “Well, if I were a magical fixer, I’d just fix it after,” I replied, crossing my arms, and Keith sighed. I could practically feel him regretting ever being friends with my mom.

  “Sorry, Althea,” he said. Keith had always insisted on using my full name instead of calling me Ali like almost everyone else. “I’m afraid I can’t accept you into the magical fixer education program.”

  Chapter 2

  “This is bull,” I said, kicking at a loose stone as Blaze and I walked back to town together. I had tried arguing with Keith some more, telling him that I totally deserved to be accepted into the program for my creative thinking and doing whatever was necessary to get the collar off the dragon, but he wasn’t deterred. Apparently I didn’t have the right “temperament” to be a magical fixer just yet, whatever that meant. It wasn’t like I was a horse or something.

  Unfortunately, Keith’s word was law. And now I had to wait six more months before I could try again.

  “For what it’s worth, I thought your way of getting the collar was creative,” Blaze said. “I’ve done this same test about ten times for Keith, and nine of them failed. You’re actually the first one I’ve seen in the two years I’ve been doing this to actually succeed.”

  “See? All the more reason to let me into the program.”

  “Why do you want to be a magical fixer anyway? That doesn’t seem to me to be very much your thing.”

  “I’m in it entirely for the money,” I said. Being a magical fixer paid well, and my current job, being a plant collector for a major corporation here in the paranormal world, didn’t.

  “So much for doing it for a love of the work,” Blaze grinned at me.

  “Oh please, like you can talk. Your family is loaded.”

  “True.”

  While Blaze came from money, I most definitely didn’t. My family wasn’t exactly poor, but they weren’t rich, either. And thanks to my less-than-stellar working habits as a young witch, I had never amounted to all that much, and now every morning I received an email telling me what plants the corporation needed and in what amounts. I had to take them to headquarters every afternoon, and for that I was paid just enough to pay my mom a pittance to stay in my childhood bedroom, pay for a bit of food, and not much else.

  The sad reality of my current situation didn’t stop me from having big dreams, though. I wanted to pay for a house for my mom. She had raised my sister and me all by herself after dad died when I was a child, and while it could be argued that I wasn’t exactly a perennial winner of the world’s best daughter award, I was grateful for her all the same. Besides, my sister was a regular nominee for the award, so maybe it was just me who was a bit messed up.

  Despite working two jobs for most of her life just to make sure there was always enough for my sister and me, there was never much left over, and while she never complained, I wanted to make sure that my mom’s later years were spent in relative comfort. A million abras would buy a gorgeous house by the lake here in Mt. Rheanier, and that was my goal.

  The problem was, I was only making a hundred abras a day as a plant collector, and keeping even less of it. That was the inspiration for becoming a magical fixer. My salary would immediately jump to five hundred abras a day—abracadollars were the currency used in the magical world—and that would make it much, much easier for me to save up the kind of money I needed.

  It might even allow me to get my own place. Because as much as I loved my mom, I also loved privacy, and not hearing about how I needed to find myself a good wizard and settle down on a regular basis. And, of course, there was also my grandmother. But the less said about her, the better.

  “Are you going to try again in six months?” Blaze asked.

  “Yeah. Does he use the same test the second time around?”

  “I don’t know,” Blaze said thoughtfully. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen the same witch or wizard come back twice.”

  I grinned. “What on earth do you do to them?”

  “Well, one witch accidentally got caught in one of my flamethrowers. I stopped it immediately as soon as I realized, but she still spent two weeks in the hospital, with Healers putting salves all over her body.”

  “Yikes.”

  “A wizard who thought he was clever turned himself into a bird to try and catch me, and let’s just say it was a bit of a Jonah and the whale situation.”

  I grinned. “At least you didn’t swallow, I assume.”

  “Nope, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone as pale as him after he turned back into a wizard. Besides, I wouldn’t have eaten the wizard, even as a crow. I’m a vegan.”

  I snickered at the idea of this big dragon shifter next to me being vegan, but hey, we were in the Pacific Northwest. Those sorts of things weren’t exactly rare.

  “So what are you doing for the rest of the day?” Blaze asked, and I shrugged.

  “I guess I’m just going to go home and wallow in self-pity for a bit. You?”

  “Meeting a friend for dinner. I’ll see you around.”

  “Sure thing.”

  We reached the end of the path and Blaze took a left down the street and headed toward town. I stopped and stared after him for a minute, trying to decide exactly what I wanted to do. It was early October, and the temperature was still warm enough in the late afternoon that with a sweater on I could enjoy a nice walk by the lake.

  It was certainly preferable to going home. I didn’t want to tell my mom what had happened. I didn’t even tell her I was trying out to become a magical fixer; I didn’t want her to get her hopes up that her daughter might actually do something right with her life for a change. It turned out that was the right call.

  Sighing, I turned away from the road and followed the single-track path that led toward Lake Cybele. About two minutes later, I was on the beach. There were a few people around, but not that many, and I made my way to a patch of grass away from the sand and sat down, looking at the calm lake water and gazing up at Mount Rheanier. Our little town—named for the mountain—sat at the base of the inactive volcano. Whenever I felt stressed, I always came to the beach. It was such a gorgeous sight, seeing the crystal blue waters of the lake, with the deep green trees of the forest in the background, the cute buildings of the town, and the mountain rising high above everything.

  I couldn’t believe I’d failed. I had thought that getting the collar at all costs had been the most important thing. I hadn’t factored in that I had to do it while preventing any damage to the forest or to the collar itself. Maybe Keith was right. Maybe I didn’t have the right attitude to be a magical fixer. I wasn’t the sort of person who colored in the lines. I never had been. My sister, on the other hand, absolutely was.

  Why couldn’t I be perfect, like Leda?

  I just wasn’t wired that way. As the sun began to set, I walked along the pedestrian path back toward town. I didn’t have a broom, so it took about thirty-five minutes, since I had to walk all the way along the perimeter of the lake before getting to the other si
de, where the town was built.

  Mt. Rheanier was a small town with cute Germanic-style buildings built right up against the shore of the lake. The streets were cobbled and wide, with plenty of green spaces and parks everywhere. My mom lived in a small cottage that she rented on the outskirts of town, away from the lake. It was old—built about two hundred years ago when Mt. Rheanier was first settled by paranormals—and somewhat falling apart. I’d grown up in this two-bedroom cottage, and I now lived in a small converted shed at the back of the property. I was fairly certain if I still lived in the house I would have stabbed somebody by now.

  Luckily, by the time I walked back, the sun had well and truly dipped over the horizon, and it was dark enough that I managed to make it to my shed without my mom spotting me through the window. I didn’t really want to face her right now. I didn’t want to have to hide my failure from her yet again. On the bright side, hiding from my mom after doing something wrong was something I was very used to.

  I cooked myself a bowl of ramen for dinner—I liked to pretend adding fresh corn from the market made it healthy—and settled down on my bed in the corner of the room to sleep.

  Chapter 3

  I woke up early the next morning, enjoying the split second of ignorant bliss before the events of the previous day came flooding back to me. Maybe I wasn’t meant to be a magical fixer after all. Maybe I should become a Healer instead. After all, that was what my mom had always hoped for. Althea was a goddess of healing.

  Still, I didn’t think there was any Healer program in the entire paranormal world that would accept me. And to be honest, I probably wouldn’t make a good Healer, just like I probably wouldn’t last as a magical fixer, either. Not yet, anyway. I was determined to change my ways. I was going to learn to color inside the lines, and I had six months to do it.