A Cauldron of Hot Coffee: Enchanted Enclave Mysteries Books 1-3 Read online

  Except I didn’t know what had happened. All I knew was that as soon as I had grabbed the broom it had dragged me along for the worst ride of my life.

  “Come on, let’s get going,” the first security guard muttered. “What are you, slow or something?”

  I followed after the security guards, completely humiliated as shoppers gawked while I walked past, their eyes boring into me. My water-logged shoes squished with every step, and my clothes dripped onto the tiles. The only good thing about the water was that it masked my tears of complete and total humiliation. Thankfully, I hadn’t wet my pants. That would be the only thing that could make this embarrassment any more complete.

  I had considered running away, trying to make a mad dash for the door and hoping that no one would ever find out who I was, but of course, Oasis Physiotherapy had all of my personal information. Mall security would be able to find me easily, and if I fled now, even if I managed to get away, it was only a matter of time before I’d have the police knocking at my door.

  Going with the security guards and begging for forgiveness and mercy seemed like the best way to go.

  “Come on, keep up,” the first guard scolded as I trudged along after them. One of the bystanders caught my eye; I looked up to see a short woman who looked to be in her fifties. Her formerly brown hair was now liberally speckled with grey, and despite her short stature she had a way about her. She stood out in the room, and her brown eyes twinkled at me. The corners of her lips seemed to flicker up into a bit of a smile, but I couldn’t tell if she was mocking me or supporting me.

  I made my way past her and followed the two security guards into their office. It was small, with two chairs behind a double-length desk, and a third chair sitting against the wall. On the desk sat a box of a dozen donuts; eleven of them were left.

  “Great, do you have to spill water all over the floor? Steve, go get a mop, this is ridiculous.” I wanted to sit down, but I had a feeling the security guard wouldn’t like me getting the thin cloth layer on the chair against the wall wet. “So, what kind of stupid prank did you think this was?” he asked me, plunking himself down in one of the chairs behind the desk. The chair wheezed, obviously struggling under the man’s weight.

  “I swear,” I pleaded. “I have absolutely no idea what happened. I work at Oasis Physiotherapy. Today was my first day. I just grabbed the broom to clean up a mess and the next thing I knew I was flying through the mall. I don’t know what happened. Please, you have to believe me. I’m so sorry for all of this. I don’t know what happened, I really don’t.”

  The man sighed, then glanced up at me without moving his head. “Seriously, lady. I really don’t want to deal with this today. The cops are a phone call away. Just tell me what happened, for real, and maybe we can make a deal.”

  “A deal?” I asked. I so desperately did not want to get arrested for this. I was only twenty-three years old. I had my whole life in front of me. A deal sounded absolutely amazing.

  “Yes, I think we can organize something. How about you pay for the damage you’ve caused here today, and we can just let the whole thing slide under the table. How does that sound?”

  “Great,” I said, practically shouting from excitement.

  “Calm down, calm down. Geez. Look, I think we can all agree you cost this mall a lot of money. Why don’t we call it an even thousand? You give me that in cash, right now, and you can walk out of here.”

  The excitement I’d felt a moment ago drained from my body. A thousand dollars? I didn’t have that kind of money. All of the estate stuff with my dad hadn’t been settled yet – although immediately after he passed I had been given a few thousand dollars by his lawyer as an advance for living expenses - and since I’d only graduated a few months ago and hadn’t started working yet I was running pretty low on funds. I had a few hundred bucks to my name, but I certainly didn’t have a thousand.

  “A thousand? But all I did was ruin that one family’s lunch,” I argued.

  “Well, there was that, but you also caused emotional damage to many people,” the man replied. “Besides, I’m not here to argue with you. Either hand over the cash, or I can call the cops.”

  I had a sneaking suspicion the cash was going to go straight into the security guard’s pocket.

  “I don’t have that kind of money,” I said in a small voice. “I can’t pay you that much.”

  The man sighed. “Seriously? Look, I’m giving you an out here. Just pay me the thousand bucks and I don’t have to do the paperwork involved with handing you over to the cops.”

  I shrugged. “I can’t give you what I don’t have.”

  “Ask your family, or something. I’ll even drop it to seven-fifty. Look, this works out better for both of us. You get to keep a clean record, and I don’t have to spend my afternoon filling out forms I don’t want to fill out.”

  Family. My eyes welled with tears. There was no one else. Only Dad and me. And now Dad was gone, and I didn’t know what to do. This was my first attempt at living life on my own, living my life without him, and I had already screwed it up so insanely badly there was a good chance I was going to jail.

  Tears sprang to my eyes and started flowing.

  “Oh, great. Now you’re crying. Look, it doesn’t have to be this bad, ok? I’m trying to help you, even though you’re dripping all over the floor. Come on. I really don’t want to have to deal with this today.”

  I wiped at the tears forming in my eyes, when all of a sudden the donuts in the box in front of the security guard began floating in the air.

  “What on earth?” he said, his attention moving from me to the baked goods. “Are you doing this? What is wrong with you? How is this happening?”

  I could only shake my head, at a complete loss for words. I had no idea what was going on. Why were the donuts flying? Was this just the worst dream ever, and I was going to wake up in my bed drenched in sweat in a few minutes? It certainly felt real.

  Suddenly, the donuts began zooming around the room, like a bunch of trapped birds doing their best to escape. I ducked out of the way at the last second, narrowly avoiding being hit fair in the face by a Boston Crème which splattered against the wall behind me a second later, yellow cream squirting out of the donut like it had just been murdered.

  I dropped to the floor to minimize my odds of getting hit by any more baked projectiles while the security guard jumped around, trying to grab the donuts out of midair. An apple fritter was teasing him, darting around his head in circles, always avoiding the guard’s chubby hands as he grabbed at it repeatedly.

  The other guard, Steve, had straight-up passed out at the sight of the flying donuts and was now lying in a crumpled heap on the floor.

  A chocolate glazed suddenly veered off-course and landed straight in the first guard’s face, causing him to shout out and lose his balance. He fell backwards, hitting the ground with a loud thud, and as soon as he did the donuts all dive-bombed him, but before I had a chance to see what kind of state the security guard was in, the door opened behind me.

  This could not be good. The last thing I wanted to explain to anybody was why the guard was currently lying on the ground, surrounded by the remains of suicidal donuts.

  But the person standing in the doorway was the woman from earlier, with the greying hair. She held a stick in her hand, about a foot long, covered in blue glitter, and she didn’t seem the least bit perturbed about the scene she’d come across. In fact, when one final vanilla dipped donut appeared out of nowhere and started zooming around, a small whistling sound coming from the hole in the center of it, she simply waved the stick at the donut and it fell to the ground.

  I gaped at her. “Is… what…” I had so many questions, but at the same time, I didn’t even know what those questions were.

  “Did you just stop that donut with your stick? How come the donuts were flying? Did you do that? What are you doing here? What happened with the broom?”

  The witch gave me a kindly smile. “W
hy don’t we get out of here, and I’ll answer your questions. I’m sure you have a lot of them. But first, let me take care of this.” She pointed her wand right at me, and all of a sudden I went from soaking wet with fries in my hair to looking like the professional I had been just a couple of hours earlier.

  I gasped as I looked at my clothes. “How on earth?” I asked. “What are you doing? What are you?”

  “My name is Lucy Marcet, and I belong to the coven of Saturn. I’m a witch, and your aunt. It’s nice to see you again, Eliza.”

  Chapter 3

  Nope. None of this was happening. None of this was real. The woman had just told me she was my aunt, and a witch? That wasn’t possible. I didn’t have an aunt. My parents had both been only children. Oh, and there was that whole thing about witches not being real.

  Maybe I was on a really, really bad trip. I didn’t do drugs, but what if some had been added to the sandwich I had for lunch by accident? That was a thing that could happen, right?

  “Come on,” Lucy said to me, motioning for me to follow her. “This big oaf is going to wake up any minute now.”

  She had a point there, and I followed the crazy woman as we made our way back into the mall.

  “Where would you like to go to chat?” she asked me kindly.

  “Literally anywhere that’s not here,” I replied. I had to get out of this mall. I kept looking at my clothes. Maybe they hadn’t been wet in the first place. Maybe I was imagining the whole thing. That could have happened, right? Because the idea that Lucy had used magic to dry them was insane. Completely insane. That wasn’t possible.

  I followed her out of the mall, and into a nearby coffee shop. She went to the counter to order, and I took a closer look at her. Lucy was dressed in jeans and a light sweater; probably a little bit overdressed for the weather here in San Francisco in late February, but not so insane that it threw up a red flag. She was a shade under five feet tall, but carried herself with the confidence of someone who knew exactly who she was. Nothing about her screamed ‘insane’, so I figured it was probably safe to have coffee with her. At least we were in a public location. Besides, it was possible I was the crazy one in this situation. After all, I had no idea what had happened over the last hour or so. Had I gone insane? Was I hallucinating? Maybe I had pushed myself too hard to get back into the real world after Dad died.

  Lucy came back just then with a couple of lattes. She placed one in front of me and I tried to be subtle as I sniffed it carefully for traces of any foreign smells. I took a sip, but it tasted normal.

  “Now, I’m sure you have questions,” Lucy said softly. “Do you want me to tell you what’s happened?”

  I nodded. “Yes, please. Am I insane? Have I been drugged? What’s going on?”

  “You’re not insane and you haven’t been drugged. Frankly, I enjoyed the show – what I saw of it, anyway. You’re a witch, Eliza, and I’m your aunt. Your mother was my sister.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “My mom didn’t have any sisters.”

  “She did,” Lucy replied. “In fact, she had two sisters, and a brother.”

  “Magic isn’t real.”

  “Magic is real,” Lucy replied. “You were born into a family of witches. Why do you think the broom acted the way it did when you touched it?”

  “I don’t know,” I had to admit. “I have no idea what happened.”

  “Brooms are designed to move when witches touch them. If you had been raised as a witch, you would have learned how to control them and fly them by now.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense. Magic just is not real.”

  Lucy smiled at me and pulled out that stick again. “Watch this.”

  She looked around and pointed the wand at her coffee cup, which immediately turned into a bat, which flapped its wings and started streaking around the coffee shop.

  Lucy didn’t seem the least bit bothered about the chaos she’d just caused as the bat flapped around the shop. Half the customers cowered under the tables while an enterprising barista tried – and failed – to trap it in a small box to let it outside.

  “Where did that thing come from?” someone asked.

  “Someone get that thing out of here?”

  “What if it flies into my coffee?”

  “This is unhygienic!”

  “That coffee was decidedly sub-par anyway,” Lucy said with a shrug. “Only the undead would want to drink it.”

  I gaped at her. “How did you do that?”

  “I told you, magic. Your mother was a witch, and you are too.”

  “What do you know about my mother?” I asked, my eyes narrowing. I was absolutely not going to take this woman at face value, especially when I wasn’t sure what I could trust and what I couldn’t. This entire day was so insane I wasn’t going to trust anything I didn’t have to.

  “Your mother’s name was Patricia, maiden name Marcet. She met your father at Enchanted Enclave, an island where they both grew up. Your mother died in a car accident when you were six months old, and your father moved you to San Francisco immediately after that.”

  My throat was dry. Everything she had said matched what my father had told me. Although I had never heard of Enchanted Enclave. He told me we had lived in Seattle.

  “He never told me she had family,” I said, and Lucy nodded.

  “Your father never truly came to grips with the fact that your mother was a witch,” Lucy replied. “He hated it when she used it around him, and when she died, he moved to get you away from the family influence. He wanted you to grow up like the human he was, and never intended for you to find out about your powers.”

  Suddenly, Dad’s dislike of brooms made sense. A lot of things clicked, actually. Like when I started reading Harry Potter books when I was in fourth grade. Dad had told me it was fine, but I had noticed the way his lips pressed together when he saw me with those books, and how he would occasionally mutter curses at the TV when he saw Sabrina the Teenage Witch reruns show up on the guide.

  “So mom had family?” I asked quietly.

  “That’s right,” Lucy said. “There’s me, and your other aunt Debbie. She’s not nearly as much fun as I am, though. Then there’s your Uncle Robert. He can be a real stick in the mud, too. None of them would find the situation with the bat hilarious at all.”

  The coffee-cup-turned-bat had at some point been released outside, and normalcy was returning to the coffee shop about as quickly as it seemed to be escaping from my life.

  Could this possibly be real, or was I about to wake up from the world’s weirdest dream?

  “You also have two cousins,” Lucy continued. “Kaillie and Leanne. Kaillie spends all her time worrying about the stupid curse, and Leanne has no magical powers at all since Robert is her father, but they’re alright all the same.”

  “Wait, a curse?” I asked, but Lucy waved a hand.

  “You don’t need to worry about that right now. Anyway, once you finish your coffee, I’ll help you pack, and we can head back to Enchanted Enclave Island together.”

  “What?” I asked quietly. “No, I can’t go with you.”

  Lucy tilted her head toward me. “Why not? You’ve just discovered you’re a witch, and we’re the only people in the world who can teach you how to use your powers. Why wouldn’t you want to come with me?”

  “What if I don’t want to learn to use these powers?” I asked, my voice barely more than a whisper. “What if Dad had a good reason to stop me from knowing about them?” I couldn’t help but feel that if I accepted this magic I was betraying his memory. He had done his absolute best to raise me all by himself, and he had obviously had a reason for stopping me from knowing these people. Would I be doing his memory a disservice by going with Lucy?

  “Well, that’s just ridiculous,” she replied. “We’re your family. Who do you have here?”

  She had a point there. But my entire life had always been Dad and me. Us against the world, making it despite everything going against u
s. I could do things by myself. I could make it. Right?

  I couldn’t help but think about the niggling voice in the back of my head telling me it was easier with family. Dad had always been there for me, and now that he was gone, I was struggling. I couldn’t deny that. I had managed to fail at my first day on the job. There was no point in going back to the mall. Best case scenario I was fired, worst case scenario the cops were sitting there waiting for me. What else did I have going for me in life? I had an English literature degree, a couple of followers on Instagram but no one I would really call a friend, and my dad’s ashes in an urn on the fireplace. Even I had to admit that wasn’t much of a life.

  So why not give this ‘family’ thing a shot? What was the worst that could happen?

  Chapter 4

  “Alright,” I finally said to Lucy. “I’ll go with you. But I do have one more question: how did you find me?”

  “I had a sneaking suspicion your father was going to sneak you away from Enchanted Enclave when your mother died,” Lucy replied. “I set up a magical tracker on you, but it would only activate when you used magic. I honestly thought you would have accidentally triggered it earlier than now.”

  “Dad didn’t let us have a broom around the house,” I said with a shrug.

  “He probably suspected,” Lucy said. “Your father never trusted me. He always thought I would be a bad influence on his daughter.”

  “Are you?” I asked.

  “Absolutely,” Lucy replied. “As soon as the tracker activated I used magic to get over here. I saw the last of your little adventure in the mall.”

  I shook my head, trying to get the memory of what had happened out of it. “That was so embarrassing.”

  “Oh I don’t know, from where I was standing it was quite hilarious. You are lucky you didn’t hurt yourself falling off that broom, though. It was a good thing the fountain was there to help break your fall.”

  “Yeah, a good thing,” I muttered, rolling my wrist around. Most of the pain I had initially felt had disappeared, luckily.