Witch Slapped (Witchless In Seattle Mysteries Book 1) (2 page)

“Belfryyy!” I yelled when a strong wind picked up, lashing at my face and making my eyes tear. “This is moving toward ridiculous. Just tell whoever it is that I can’t come to the phone right now due to poverty!”

He shrugged me off with an impatient flap of his wings. “Wait! Just one more sec—what’s that?
Zoltar?
What in all the bloomin’ afterlife is a Zoltar?” Belfry paused and, I’d bet, held his breath while he waited for an answer—and then he let out a long, exasperated squeal of frustration before his tiny body went limp.

Which panicked me. Belfry was prone to drama-ish tendencies at the best of times, but the effort he was putting into being my conduit of sorts had been taking a toll. He was all I had, my last connection to anything supernatural. I couldn’t bear losing him.

So I yanked him to my chest and tucked him into my soaking-wet sweater as I made a break for the hotel we were a week from being evicted right out of.

“Belfry!” I clung to his tiny body, rubbing my thumbs over the backs of his wings.

Belfry is a cotton ball bat. He’s two inches from wing to wing of pure white bigmouth and minute yellow ears and snout, with origins stemming from Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, where it’s warm and humid.

Since we’d moved here to Seattle from the blazing-hot sun of Paris, Texas, he’d struggled with the cooler weather.

I was always finding ways to keep him warm, and now that he’d taxed himself by staying too long in the crappy weather we were having, plus using all his familiar energy to figure out who was trying to contact me, his wee self had gone into overload.

I reached for the credit card key to our hotel room in my skirt pocket and swiped it, my hands shaking. Slamming the door shut with the heel of my foot, I ran to the bathroom, flipped on the lights and set Belfry on a fresh white towel. His tiny body curled inward, leaving his wings tucked under him as pinhead-sized drops of water dripped on the towel.

Grabbing the blow dryer on the wall, I turned the setting to low and began swishing it over him from a safe distance so as not to knock him off the vanity top. “Belfry! Don’t you poop on me now, buddy. I need you!” Using my index and my thumb, I rubbed along his rounded back, willing warmth into him.

“To the right,” he ordered.

My fingers stiffened as my eyes narrowed, but I kept rubbing just in case.

He groaned. “Ahh, yeah. Riiight there.”

“Belfry?”

“Yes, Wicked One?”

“Not the time to test my devotion.”

“Are you fragile?”

“I wouldn’t use the word fragile. But I would use mildly agitated and maybe even raw. If you’re just joking around, knock it off. I’ve had all I can take in the way of shocks and upset this month.”

He used his wings to push upward to stare at me with his melty chocolate eyes. “I wasn’t testing your devotion. I was just depleted. Whoever this guy is, trying to get you on the line, he’s determined. How did you manage to keep your fresh, dewy appearance with all that squawking in your ears all the time?”

I shrugged my shoulders and avoided my reflection in the mirror over the vanity. I didn’t look so fresh and dewy anymore, and I knew it. I looked tired and devoid of interest in most everything around me. The bags under my eyes announced it to the world.

“We need to find a job, Belfry. We have exactly a week before my savings account is on E.”

“So no lavish spending. Does that mean I’m stuck with the very average Granny Smith for dinner versus, say, a yummy pomegranate?”

I chuckled because I couldn’t help it. I knew my laughter egged him on, but he was the reason I still got up every morning. Not that I’d ever tell him as much.

I reached for another towel and dried my hair, hoping it wouldn’t frizz. “You get whatever is on the discount rack, buddy. Which should be incentive enough for you to help me find a job, lest you forgot how ripe those discounted bananas from the whole foods store really were.”

“Bleh. Okay. Job. Onward ho. Got any leads?”

“The pharmacy in the center of town is looking for a cashier. It won’t get us a cute house at the end of a cul-de-sac, but it’ll pay for a decent enough studio. Do you want to come with or stay here and rest your weary wings?”

“Where you go, I go. I’m the tuna to your mayo.”

“You have to stay in my purse, Belfry,” I warned, scooping him up with two fingers to bring him to the closet with me to help me choose an outfit. “You can’t wander out like you did at the farmers’ market. I thought that jelly vendor was going to faint. This isn’t Paris anymore. No one knows I’m a witch—” I sighed. “
Was
a witch, and no one especially knows you’re a talking bat. Seattle is eclectic and all about the freedom to be you, but they haven’t graduated to letting ex-witches leash their chatty bats outside of restaurants just yet.”

“I got carried away. I heard ‘mango chutney’ and lost my teensy mind. I promise to stay in the dark hovel you call a purse—even if the British guy contacts me again.”

“Forget the British guy and help me decide. Red Anne Klein skirt and matching jacket, or the less formal Blue Fly jeans and Gucci silk shirt in teal.”

“You’re not interviewing with Karl Lagerfeld. You’re interviewing to sling sundries. Gum, potato chips,
People
magazine, maybe the occasional script for Viagra.”

“It’s an organic pharmacy right in that kitschy little knoll in town where all the food trucks and tattoo shops are. I’m not sure they make all-natural Viagra, but you sure sound disappointed we might have a roof over our heads.”

“I’m disappointed you probably won’t be wearing all those cute vintage clothes you’re always buying at the thrift store if you work in a pharmacy.”

“I haven’t gotten the job yet, and if I do, I guess I’ll just be the cutest cashier ever.”

I decided on the Ann Klein. It never hurt to bring a touch of understated class, especially when the class had only cost me a total of twelve dollars.

As I laid out my wet clothes to dry on the tub and went about the business of putting on my best interview facade, I tried not to think about Belfry’s broken communication with the British guy. There were times as a witch when I’d toiled over the souls who needed closure, sometimes to my detriment.

But I couldn’t waste energy fretting over what I couldn’t fix. And if British Guy was hoping I could help him now, he was sorely misinformed.

Maybe the next time Belfry had an otherworldly connection, I’d ask him to put everyone in the afterlife on notice that Stevie Louise Cartwright was out of order.

Grabbing my purse from the hook on the back of the bathroom door, I smoothed my hands over my skirt and squared my shoulders.

“You ready, Belfry?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

“Ready, set, job!”

As I grabbed my raincoat and tucked Belfry into my purse, I sent up a silent prayer to the universe that my unemployed days were numbered.

I
sagged against the brick façade of the pharmacy and blew out a breath of defeat as I watched the pouring rain splash into a puddle-filled pothole in the middle of the road. “Okay, so that didn’t go quite as I’d hoped.”

Belfry scoffed from the inside of my box-shaped purse. “It didn’t go at all.”

“Jeez Louise. She was like a drill sergeant.” I referred to the manager of the pharmacy, who, in all her yellow-smocked militancy, had shot my application and me down like a skeet shooter.

“Uh-huh. I can’t remember the last time I saw such a sourpuss. She’ll need to set up camp in the laxative aisle if she keeps that up.”

“I feel a little like the fates are conspiring against me, Belfry. This is the ninth job I’ve been turned down for. I didn’t think the humiliation could be topped after yesterday’s rejection. I mean, if you can’t get a job at Weezie’s Weenie Hut, what’s left?”

“That’s not the fates, Stevie. It’s your resume. You
have
no resume. Humans in the real world have resumes. It looks bad that you’re thirty-two and have no job history. We need to create a human you. A reinvention of sorts.”

Now that really burned my britches. I did so have a job history, and I said as much when I managed to offend the manager of the pharmacy with my outraged disbelief.

Jeez. This was miserable. “I
do
have a job history, Belfry. I have ten years as a 9-1-1 dispatcher. Shouldn’t that count for something?”

“Well, it might if, in the human world, people were looking for an emergency operator whose specialty was talking psychopathic warlocks off the ledge of a spell.”

Yeah. Good times. I managed a snicker. “I was really good at that.” Then I frowned, annoyed by the memory. My job was the very reason I was in this stinkpot of toxic waste.

“You know what I say to this, Stevie? I say bollocks!”

Somebody’d clearly been influenced by the UK this morning. “Does the British guy say that, too?”

“No. Or I don’t know. I mean, he didn’t when we had that hacked-up communication out there on the cliff. I just imagine that’s the word he’d use for this mess we’re in. If it weren’t for your old job, you’d still be a witch. So again, I say bollocks and bull teats!”

“Bulls don’t have teats. They’re male.”

“Whatever. Why won’t you just listen to me and help me figure out a way to get your powers back? To prove you did nothing wrong? Then you wouldn’t have to worry about getting a crummy minimum-wage job. We could do it. You and me. Just like Rizzoli and Isles. We’ll find a way.”

Ah my Belfry, always my little champion. “Because who knows how long that could take, and in the meantime we have nowhere to live. Besides, what’s there to figure out? A council member stole my powers. Does it get any more definitive than that?”

Why was I allowing myself to be sucked into this conversation? No one wanted to relive the horror of that night less than me.

Belfry growled from inside my purse, rustling the napkin I’d tucked him into to keep him warm. “If I ever get my hands on that dirty bird council mothereffer, I’m gonna rip a hole in him!”

“With your big scary teeth?”

“Oh, shush. I can be scary.”

“No doubt. So scary the word ‘terrifying’ should be a hyphen on your name.”

“You’re avoiding.”

I nodded. You bet your bippy I was avoiding. “Yep.”

“So now that you’ve been usurped by a pimply sixteen-year-old who probably still plays with his X-Men dolls—for a job even someone like
me
, with no opposable thumbs, could perform—what are you gonna do?”

“Steal his X-Men dolls and burn them in effigy?”

Belfry did his impression of maniacal laughter. “Ooo, I like this plan, Dr. Evil. Tell me more.”

I was still in job-history shock. When a teenaged high school student has more work history than you do at thirty-two, a reevaluation’s in order. It wasn’t like I could tell the manager of the pharmacy I had more people skills than the cruise director on the
Love Boat
as a 9-1-1 operator for the paranormal.

I’d stopped my fair share of spells gone awry, earthquakes, one tsunami, two almost-shifts in the equator, countless wand lashings, a broom landing on the moon, not to mention hundreds of witch vs. warlock domestic disputes—just to name a few. Believe me, when a wand and a binding spell are involved, it’s a hundred times worse than your average human 9-1-1 call.

But none of that counts anymore and if I let the pot with all my emotions about my current situation sit on the burner too long, it was sure to boil over. So I’d taken to compartmentalizing my anger and only letting it out when I couldn’t feed off the energy of Belfry’s rage.

He only encourages me to ball my fist and raise it to the sky in anguish. For now, that isn’t helping us. Once I manage to figure out this new half of my life, I fully intend to let ’er rip.

Until then…

Pushing off the side of the building, I huffed a determined breath. “I say we go grab some lunch off the dollar menu at that food cart with the guy who makes tacos out of recycled something or other and rethink our plan of attack.”

I began to walk along the cracked sidewalk, staying dry by ducking under the awnings of the various locally owned businesses that had cropped up since I’d been gone.

I wouldn’t admit it to Belfry, but I’d missed the scent of the Puget Sound, the tang of water in the air, the colorful sails of the boats in the harbor, and the mountains peeking at me when the skies were clear. I loved Seattle. I never would have left to begin with if not for the job offer in Paris.

The squawk of seagulls darting through the parking lot across the street was like music to my ears. A parking lot for a fresh-fish market that hadn’t been there when I’d left Seattle. Still, Ebenezer Falls was as charming and quaint as ever.

Multicolored awnings decked out each storefront, and though it was February now, the spring would bring with it spots of dappled sun and tulips by the dozen, anchoring each store’s door in bright clay pots the size of barrels.

Bicyclers would stream through town in an array of festive Lycra, the streetlamp posts would sport hanging pots brimming with purple petunias and daisies, and the curbs would be lined with wrought iron tables for diners who were willing to brave the chance of rain with their alfredo.

Despite my circumstances, it was good to inhale cool, tangy air again.

As I made my way down Main Street, blinking lights from a flashing pink and green neon sign caught the corner of my eye, making me slow my roll and look upward at the twinkling bulbs, racing around the perimeter of the sign.

I stopped dead in my tracks, my galoshes splashing into a small puddle as I looked again.

Shut the front door.

Belfry rustled around in my purse, pulling himself up until his little yellow ears poked out of the rim. “What’s the holdup, Boss? I’m starving,” Bel asked, until he, too, read the sign on the store.

Our reflections in the big picture window mirrored one another’s for a moment and then he went silent along with me.

Before he exploded. “I told you the British guy was on the up and up! Told you, told you, tolllld you!”

I reread the flashing sign. Madam Zoltar’s Psychic Readings. Medium To The Heavens. Séances—Palm Readings—Tarot Cards.