A Letter to Three Witches

Book 1: Cupcake Coven Romance

by Elizabeth Bass

Genres: Paranormal Romance; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

In the sleepy college town of Zenobia, New York, the only supernatural trace on display is the name of Gwen Engel’s business—Abracadabra Odd Job Service. But Gwen’s family has some unusual abilities they’ve been keeping under wraps—until one little letter spells big trouble... Nearly a century ago, Gwen Engel’s great-great-grandfather cast a spell with catastrophic side-effects. As a result, the Grand Council of Witches forbade his descendants from practicing witchcraft. The Council even planted anonymous snitches called Watchers in the community to report any errant spellcasting... Yet magic may still be alive and not so well in Zenobia. Gwen and her cousins, Trudy and Milo, receive a letter from Gwen’s adopted sister, Tannith, informing them that she’s bewitched one of their partners and will run away with him at the end of the week. While Gwen frets about whether to trust her scientist boyfriend, currently out of town on a beetle-studying trip, she’s worried that local grad student Jeremy is secretly a Watcher doing his own research. Cousin Trudy is so stressed that she accidentally enchants her cupcakes, creating havoc among her bakery customers—and in her marriage. Perhaps it’s time the family took back control and figured out how to harness their powers. How else can Gwen decide whether her growing feelings for Jeremy are real—or the result of too many of Trudy’s cupcakes?

Release date: January 25, 2022

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

“What is she doing in there?”

Tannith’s magic lamp draws her so near the glass that her breath fogs its surface. In her perplexed impatience, she’s breathtakingly beautiful. Almond-shaped green eyes reflect like gemstones against the glass, and hair blacker than mine drapes over her shoulders, tantalizing me. Sometimes that hair swings when she moves and I can’t take my eyes off it. In bed at night I often reach a paw out to touch its silkiness, though only lightly, careful not to wake her. Nothing angers Tannith more than disturbing her sleep. Seriously. Objects get thrown. She has good aim.

She peers so closely that her nose is almost touching glass. “Why is she just sitting there?”

I gaze at the lamp and the woman visible inside it. She’s in the front seat of her vehicle, which pulled into her driveway a full minute ago. The image flits and flickers, unstable, but the woman is also in motion.

“She’s not just sitting,” I point out. Tannith’s powers of inference can be woefully lacking, but that’s one of her failings that I, a mere feline, am not supposed to acknowledge. As her familiar, I’m not supposed to acknowledge any of her failings. Holding my tongue isn’t always easy. “She’s moving.”

And not even subtly, but in jerky gyrations. From anyone else this might be considered odd behavior, but I know the woman inside that glass. There’s nothing graceful or normal about her. Just the sight of her makes my fur bristle.

Tannith’s gaze narrows, then she bleats out a joyful laugh. “You’re right! The idiot is sitting in the front seat of her car in her driveway, dancing to . . .” She angles her ear, and her smile widens as she recognizes a tune that means nothing to me. “Oh my God, that’s Barry Manilow! ‘Copacabana’!” She bends, laughing silently but gleefully. Then she leans forward, almost kissing the glass. “Gwen, you pathetic cheeseball.”

I don’t care for any of Tannith’s relations, but I had the misfortune to be stuck at Gwen’s apartment once. Every day was torture. Her smothering attention was unendurable, and the food she served me wasn’t worthy for the most pathetic alley cat, which I most definitely am not.

Tannith’s delight in Gwen’s dancing is short-lived. She drums her long, red-lacquered nails on the table. “Damn, this song goes on forever.”

“Why are you watching her at all? You said the others reacted just as you expected them to. What is there to see?”

“I just want to make sure Gwen gets her letter, too.” Tannith smirks at my skeptical glance. “Okay, I admit it. I’ll relish seeing her devastation more than anybody’s.”

I want to see it, too.

“Dear Gwen.” Tannith barely keeps an eye on the glass now as she engages in jubilant speculation. “First she’ll open the letter, then she’ll read it—twice, just to make sure her eyes aren’t deceiving her. She’ll have to sit down.” Tannith’s expression pantomimes every emotion her cousin would be going through. “And then she’ll have a little debate with herself. Should she call Daniel? No! That would show a lack of trust in their relationship.” Tannith shakes her head, hair shimmering. “Gwen is the type who thinks in dorky phrases like that. You know what she’ll do instead of calling Daniel?”

I look up at her, blink slowly. “No . . .”

“She’ll run to the other cousins. They’ll have an impromptu meeting of their little cupcake coven. Their uncoven. And it will be nothing but confusion, because they’re idiots.”

Pleasure purrs through me. Tannith’s clever, powerful, and devious, and—God help me—I love her. Sometimes I feel I don’t deserve her, and other times it seems she doesn’t appreciate me. But moments like this compensate for the bad things.

A flash inside the lamp draws our gazes.

“Oh, look! She’s finally getting out of her car. Dressed in lumberjack lite, as usual. And there she goes . . . up to the door . . . checking her box . . .”

The woman in the glass plucks a letter attached to her mailbox and turns it over to examine the address. Suddenly, the angle has changed and her face looms close. It startles me.

Tannith mimics a gasp, pretending to be Gwen. “‘Who could it be from? Why, Cousin Tannith!’”

My nemesis of the inedible dinners stares long and warily at the back of the envelope, her forehead crumpling into deep lines. “She probably wonders why you sent her a letter when you live right across town.”

Tannith clucks happily. “Pretty soon she’ll be wondering all sorts of other things. Poor Gwen! I’ve ruined her Manilow high.”

With one eye still on the envelope—she can’t seem to look away from it—Gwen stabs at the front door’s lock with her key, but misses. Tannith smirks as her cousin makes a second try. “Gwendle-bug’s already discombobulated.”

I yawn. “Are you going to watch that lamp all day?”

Tannith sneers at me. “You’re one to talk. I’ve seen you staring at it for hours.”

What’s so strange about that? The lamp’s bubbles go up and down constantly. Tannith calls it a lava lamp. Occasionally it mesmerizes me. I resent her poking fun at a weakness I can’t help.

“You wouldn’t want to watch her either if you had my memories. I still can’t believe you left me with her.”

Tannith clucks at me in disgust. “The least you could have done was a little useful spying.”

“How could I spy? I could barely think. I was humiliated and patronized, and I was starving.”

She laughs. Laughs.

Does she truly have so little empathy for me? Rage grips me and I twitch all over.

“No claws,” she warns.

“I had to eat dry food for an entire week. Pellets!”

“Give me a break. I’ve seen you eat bugs.” She swings her curtain of hair over one shoulder.

Oh, that hair. I think she does it on purpose. She knows how it affects me. But for once I try not to let her see it. I turn away, tail in the air. “I’ll get over it as soon as you apologize.”

She smiles, and for a split second I bask in her radiance. “Don’t hold your breath, hair ball.” One manicured hand swats me off the table with surprising force. I go sprawling to the floor, just managing to land on my feet and retain my dignity. Such as it is. I glare at her, but Tannith’s forgotten all about me. She’s back to peering into her lamp again, completely focused on Gwen.

I was still humming “Copacabana” to myself when I spotted the mint-green envelope clothespinned to the mailbox. The humming stopped when I turned it over and saw the T in elaborate foil script on the envelope’s flap. T for “Tannith.”

Give me strength. Not today. I didn’t have the energy to deal with Tannith.

It had been a garage-clearing day. Not that I should complain. Garages are the bread and butter of Abracadabra Odd Job Service. Without garages I’d go broke, and I and my two employees would be spending our free time at the unemployment office. And yet . . .

So. Many. Garages. And Mrs. Caputo’s had been stuffed to the rafters with boxes accumulated over decades. Boxes of clothes, quilts, and blankets, ancient kitchenware and dishes, household files going back decades. Boxes of abandoned crafts. Broken sports equipment. Most of all, there were Christmas decorations—cartons stacked halfway to the rafters with broken ornaments and tangled strings of long-dead lights. These sat alongside the towers of disintegrating newspapers and dusty stacks of National Geographic , which she said she couldn’t throw away because they were her husband’s. Her husband died in 1986.

And then there were the shelves of hoarded stuff—jars of rusty hardware, jars of marbles or seashells or pebbles, and sometimes just empty jars; old gardening pots; broken ceramics; yellowing books. For it all, filth was the common denominator. No matter how it was stored, everything was rusty, water stained, or ruined by bugs, mice and other rodents, or birds. A whole day of work, and we’d only managed to clear out enough space to move things to when we tackled Mrs. Caputo’s attic. Our next task.

After a day of garage cleaning, all I wanted was a soak in the tub and to relax. A letter from Tannith was not going to relax me.

Tannith, with whom I’d been raised, was all right under controlled conditions and in small doses. But that envelope looked like it contained an invitation, and just the thought of an entire future evening devoured by the self-styled Siren of Zenobia filled me with dread. Not to mention, getting Daniel to go would take wheedling, and I hated to wheedle him. I hated to ask anything of him at all.

Daniel, the man I’d been living with for three months, had stated his dislike of Tannith early on: “She’s the kind of woman who can’t stand not to be the center of attention.”

And to think, I’d been worried about introducing them. Physically Daniel was just the sort of man Tannith cycled through regularly—tall, muscular, brainy, but not necessarily worldly-wise. And sure enough, when she’d met him, Tannith had arched a brow at me as if to say, You’re punching above your class with this one.

Which made me do a mental fist pump when Daniel had seemed oblivious to Tannith’s charms, even though she never failed to turn them on full blast when he was around. I loved him for this . . . yet I didn’t quite trust him. How could he not fall at Tannith’s feet like every other man I’d ever encountered?

I let myself into the house and wandered to the kitchen, dropping the envelope on the breakfast table to fix myself a cup of coffee from one of the pods Daniel deplored. He kept pushing them and the machine they belonged to toward the back of the cupboard.

“People made coffee for centuries without creating piles of plastic waste,” he’d lectured me more than once.

He was right. But my pod machine was so handy. Especially after spending an afternoon in a garage full of dust and mouse poop, when I just needed a quick caffeine pick-me-up to handle whatever my witchy nemesis had in store for me. Good to the last drop of guilt.

Anyway, Daniel was not here to scold. Cupping my steaming mug, I dropped into a chair at the chrome dinette to contemplate the green envelope again. It had to be dealt with. If there was a party, Tannith would expect an RSVP yesterday.

I opened the envelope, unfolded the letter, and scanned the message, printed in a fancy font imitating calligraphy. When I reached the end, I frowned, leaned forward, and read it again.

She’d chosen deep purple ink for her signature. Her handwriting was even larger and more extravagantly loopy than usual. It momentarily distracted me from what came directly after it.

This was not an invitation. More like a sucker punch.

The “cousins” she’d addressed the letter to were a group of us who all lived in Zenobia. Trudy was the oldest. She was a teacher, a mom, a fabulous baker, and the wife of a history professor at Zenobia College, who was currently on sabbatical. She and Laird had recently become empty nesters when their twin daughters, Molly and Drew, had left for college in California in September. Another cousin in town, Milo, was a year younger than me. He owned his own landscaping design business and lived with his boyfriend, Brett, who was currently running for mayor.

Tannith was a distant relation my parents had adopted, and not a favorite of any of us, but since we’d grown up together, she was included in what we jokingly referred to as our cousin coven—or sometimes the cocktail coven, or the cupcake coven, depending on what we were ingesting. I’d always expected Tannith to leave Zenobia, especially after we finished college and she came into an inheritance from her deceased parents. Instead, she’d stayed, bought a little house in town, shopped, took up various hobbies, and continued to hang out as if she were still a college student.

Now she’d finally decided to leave, but she was going in typical Tannith fashion. Causing discord. It had been like this from the beginning. When “my new sister” had appeared in our house, already beautiful and intimidating at eight years old, I tried to make her welcome. My class at school had recently discussed the goodness of sharing, so I’d decided to walk the walk and had handed over half my doll collection to Tannith. For weeks after I would find my poor dolls decapitated in the bathroom sink, buried up to their necks in the yard, or hanging by their tiny ankles from tree branches.

Each time, my parents had reminded me that giving something away meant no longer being in control over what happened to it. Which was easy for them to say. They didn’t have to worry about scooping up their favorite Ben & Jerry’s Brownie Batter ice cream and finding Barbie’s head in the middle of a pint.

Our relationship hadn’t improved much by the time we finished high school. On graduation night, someone sneaked into my room and put Krazy glue on the inside of my mortarboard. I’d spent my last summer before college with my hair buzzed off like a marine recruit.

Things had seemed smoother between us of late, but obviously that was wishful thinking on my part. A strange sound echoed around the room. Was that the wind, or a faint laugh? Hair rose on the back of my neck, a spider sense of being watched. Don’t be paranoid. Causing paranoia was another of Tannith’s talents.

Scanning the kitchen, I pinpointed the sound I’d probably heard: a Kit-Kat Klock in shiny chrome and black. It had been a housewarming present from Tannith when I’d moved in with Daniel. He was picky about what stuff from my old apartment I put around—but for some reason he’d taken a liking to that clock. The tail made a swishing sound as it swept out the seconds.

I focused my attention back on the letter. Whom could Tannith be planning to run away with? Daniel? It didn’t seem possible. We’d only been living together for a few months. We were still in our period of adjustment—although most of the adjusting was on my part, since this was Daniel’s house. He’d lived here all through grad school and for the four years since he got his doctorate and had been teaching and researching at Zenobia College.

But I couldn’t imagine Tannith with Trudy’s husband, Laird. Trudy and Laird had just celebrated their twentieth anniversary. Milo and Brett had been together less than a year, but they seemed happy. . . .

I was so absorbed by the puzzle created by Tannith’s malignant message that my phone’s chirping ringtone caused me to shoot about three feet in my chair. I dove for my purse, extracted my phone, and flipped the cover open. Daniel.

My stomach somersaulted. Was this the end, then? I braced myself to be dumped over long distance.

“Where are you?” I asked without thinking. My brain had almost settled Daniel in the Big Apple with Tannith. Which was ridiculous. Daniel didn’t even like New York City. Or Tannith.

But wasn’t mutual dislike the spark of half of all the romances since Shakespeare?

And hadn’t half of all my own romances ended when my boyfriend got to know Tannith a little better? My first kiss, a wet peck from Josh in eighth grade, had taken place behind the cafeteria at lunch. By three o’clock that afternoon, Josh was walking Tannith home instead of me. In high school, I’d dated Chris Wilson for six weeks before I came back from after-school debate club to discover Chris and Tannith cuddling together on the backyard trampoline. Once a blind date had shown up at the door, seen Tannith standing behind me, and suggested she accompany us. Tannith had, of course, agreed. And then there was the Great Prom Disaster, which was still soul withering to think about. Tannith had stolen my prom date from me during the prom itself, in just the time it took for the DJ to play “Dancing on My Own.”

After a moment of distraction on my part and confused hesitation on his, Daniel’s dry laugh rumbled in my ear. “Hello to you, too.”

He wouldn’t be laughing if he’d run away with Tannith, would he?

Unless he was deliriously happy.

“Right. Hi.” Angst made my voice airy and doubtful. Through the phone, a car horn blared in the background, along with a lot of chatter noise . . . and maybe some kind of music? “No kidding, where are you?”

“Vermont.”

Are you alone? It was on the tip of my tongue to ask. I needed to play it cool, as cool as Tannith would be under the same circumstances. Daniel, an entomologist, was on a trip to—supposedly—investigate spruce beetles. The specific borer that he was interested in, the red-ringed spruce beetle, was native west of the Rockies, but recently one had inexplicably been sighted in Vermont. In the world of entomologists, that bug had set off a firestorm.

“I needed to stop for coffee,” he said. “There’s a good place here in Brattleboro.”

I glanced down at my cup. They wouldn’t use plastic pods in Brattleboro . . . if he really was in Brattleboro. How would I know? He could be anywhere. Just because he said he was in Vermont didn’t necessarily mean that he wasn’t somewhere else. New York City, for example.

“Gwen? Are you okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I don’t know. You sound strange.”

“I, um, have a headache. We cleaned out a garage this afternoon.”

He clucked. “You didn’t wear a mask, did you.”

He was always after me to wear a mask when I cleaned out garages, attics, and abandoned buildings: You never know what’s floating around in the air in those places. Mold alone can make you sick.

His nagging usually annoyed me, but today I found it reassuring. And not just because it demonstrated an ongoing concern for my well-being, but because it was a good reminder of why Tannith would not have run off with Daniel. Tannith might have flirted with him—mostly to piss me off—and might have been physically attracted to him, but if there was one thing Tannith couldn’t stand, it was someone telling her what to do.

More to the point, Tannith wasn’t Daniel’s type. He’d told me as much.

“She’s so obvious,” he’d said after the first time the three of us had met for lunch. “She can’t stand it if men don’t think she’s the hottest thing in the room.”

Honesty had forced me to point out the depressing truth: “She usually is the hottest thing in the room.”

“If you like that type.”

“What type?”

“Artificial.”

“What type do you think I am?”

He made the universal helpless gesture of a guy worried he’d strayed out of his depth. “You know, natural.”

I shook my head at the memory. Poor, oblivious dope. Did he really think perfect highlighted streaks appeared in nature? Did he not have an inkling of the amount of moisturizing, plucking, and concealing that went on in the bathroom every morning? Did he think I kept cosmetics around just because I liked to collect little bottles and tubes?

Maybe he did, and I never corrected his misperception that I was some kind of au naturel, cosmetic-shunning purist. Why disillusion him? I’d thought at the time.

Now I worried I’d been living a lie. Daniel might accuse Tannith of being fake, but she never hid her artifice. She was a genuine fake person.

“Gwen?”

His voice startled me. “Here!” It sounded like I was answering roll call.

“For a second I thought we were cut off. Seriously, are you okay?”

“Mm.”

“You sound odd.”

“How?”

“Listless? Monosyllabic? Maybe you should see a doctor. No telling what you inhaled in that garage. You know, bubonic plague is—”

Not plague warnings again. “Have you heard from Tannith?” There. I’d spoken the dreaded name. Now I awaited his reaction. It was too long in coming for my liking.

“Uh, no, not since . . .” After a pause, he reversed course. “Why?”

“I just got a weird letter from her.”

“What other type of letter would you get from Tan?”

Tan? He was calling her Tan now? “She’s moving. To New York.”

Silence ensued.

“Daniel?”

He cleared his throat. “I knew that, actually.”

“Since when?” Maybe since he started calling her Tan.

“I think she mentioned it at one of those endless evenings at your cousin Trudy’s.”

Daniel rarely even went to parties with the cousins. Although, now that I thought about it, he’d been there one evening not too long ago when we all played Clue. Of course Tannith had cheated—she’d been cheating since our Candy Land days—and then Milo had attempted to cheat in retaliation, to the effect that the cards for both Colonel Mustard and Mrs. Peacock ended up in the solution envelope, which caused Trudy’s husband, Laird, to have a snit fit, chuck the tiny lead pipe at us all, and stomp off. We’d all laughed and ended up in two chat klatches—Milo, Brett, Trudy, and me . . . and Tannith and Daniel.

Tan and Dan.

That had been back in September.

“She told you about New York?” Over a month ago?

“Yeah. We talked about it.”

“You mean you were over there having a heart-to-heart with Tannith?” And I didn’t notice?

“Must have been the appletinis.”

Trudy had perfected drink mixing from two decades of faculty dos. Cocktail coven provided her a chance to experiment or revisit favorites. Appletinis were always a hit. Apparently they’d been a good tongue loosener that evening, too. At least for Daniel and Tan.

“So you sat there listening to Tannith’s life-changing plans?”

“At the time it seemed preferable to hearing Milo talk about the mayoral campaign.”

Milo was helping manage Brett’s campaign against Karen Morrow for mayor of Zenobia, so the campaign was a natural topic of conversation.

“Did Tannith mention anything else about leaving town? Any pertinent information involving other people, for instance?” When he didn’t answer right away, I felt sure he knew something about which of the cousins’ partners intended to join Tannith in her New York love nest. Either that or he himself was guiltily planning to do so. I took a deep breath. “You can tell me, Daniel.”

“I think she said she was going to put off selling the house for a few months even after she moved. Something about waiting until the market got hotter.” His voice sounded befuddled and maybe a little bored, but that didn’t surprise me. His enthusiasm and intensity were reserved for insects.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

“About the housing market?”

“About Tannith leaving.”

“I didn’t think you’d care.”

“Of course I care.” Especially if she’s running off to New York with you.

“Or maybe I assumed you already knew,” he added.

“If I had, I would have told you.”

“Right, but I might not have been paying attention, so . . .”

I sucked in a breath. Okay, so now he was saying—implying, at least—that I gabbed at him so much he didn’t listen to half of what I said. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Daniel always thought it was strange that my cousins and I had such an endless capacity to chatter. If nothing new was happening, we would just retread past events. He laughed at us for finishing one another’s sentences and talking in unison.

Tannith was the least gabby of the four cousins. Maybe that would appeal to strong, silent Daniel. I also recalled a clue she’d dropped in that letter: the word charmed. . . . Until I charmed him away from you, she’d written. That indicated that she’d used witchcraft to lure him—whoever it was—away.

Even if she could do that, did she actually think she’d get away with it? Back in 1930 the Grand Council of Witches had issued an edict forbidding any of my great-great-grandfather’s descendants from practicing witchcraft. This had been a harsh, almost unprecedented r. . .