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Back Waking the Witch
Chapters (46)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. Dedication
  4. Acknowledgements
  5. one
  6. two
  7. three
  8. four
  9. five
  10. six
  11. seven
  12. eight
  13. nine
  14. ten
  15. eleven
  16. twelve
  17. thirteen
  18. fourteen
  19. fifteen
  20. sixteen
  21. seventeen
  22. eighteen
  23. nineteen
  24. twenty
  25. twenty-one
  26. twenty-two
  27. twenty-three
  28. twenty-four
  29. twenty-five
  30. twenty-six
  31. twenty-seven
  32. twenty-eight
  33. twenty-nine
  34. thirty
  35. thirty-one
  36. thirty-two
  37. thirty-three
  38. thirty-four
  39. thirty-five
  40. thirty-six
  41. thirty-seven
  42. thirty-eight
  43. thirty-nine
  44. forty
  45. forty-one
  46. forty-two

I went through a repertoire of simple tricks—lights, sparks, fog, all the ones kids love. I’d learned all the ways to keep Elena and Clay’s twins amused when I baby-sat. Now that they’re school age, they want to learn the tricks ... and get royally pissed off when they can’t.

So I entertained the baby as Mom and the local cult dude moved to full-on screwing. When they started banging against the walls, the baby got concerned again. I did, too. The house was old and they were really going at it.

I picked up an ugly stuffed toy from the buggy and made it dance. The baby grabbed it and threw it. I knew this game. I picked it up and gave it back. She threw it, then chortled when the stupid grown-up fell for it again.

The toy looked homemade. Tiffany didn’t seem the type to lovingly sew toys for her baby. It was definitely an amateur job, with weird stitching along the seams. An older sibling? Whatever they’d stuffed it with, it wasn’t exactly soft and cuddly. It felt like ... dried herbs.

I caught a whiff of something that made my eyes fly open. I lifted the toy to my nose.

It was stuffed with blessed thistle. Most witches don’t use herbs outside of rituals, but blessed thistle used to be stuffed into sachets for protection and health. I think Wiccans still used it. I glanced toward the front hall. Was Tiffany Wiccan?

I looked closer at the toy and noticed the stitching wasn’t actually messy. It was symbolic. Special stitching for protection. Not Wiccan. Witch.

Now I knew why the baby had been calling me Mama when she saw the spells. Cody Radu wasn’t the spellcaster in the family. Tiffany was.

sixteen

sixteen

Tiffany wasn’t the cuddles and cooing type. She got what she wanted and left with a box of cookies to excuse her visit. I suspected the Radu household ate a lot of cookies.

Was Tiffany punishing her husband for screwing around with girls like Ginny? Maybe. But whatever Cody’s hang-ups, I bet there was a touch of the Madonna/whore complex going on. Ginny and her ilk were for wall-shaking sex and Tiffany was for making babies and adorning his arm at company dinners. Only it turned out that Tiffany liked her share of wall-shaking, too. Alastair was a safe outlet—an outsider who was unlikely to ask for any commitment while he had a houseful of young women offering the same goodies.

It was all a little too soap-opera confusing for my brain right now, so I zeroed in on the part that really piqued my interest—finding out that I wasn’t the only witch in town.