Witcher Upper - Amy Boyles Page 0,44

everyone in town was fighting one another.”

“Wait a minute.” I lifted my palm, gesturing for her to stop. “You buried the spells?”

These had to be the same ones that Rufus and I had searched through.

She glanced at her glass, seeming ashamed. “There were a lot more of our kind here at the time. But lots of folks were doing bad things to one another—making it so that their enemies couldn’t find their eyeglasses when they woke up, or causing their neighbor’s spells to backfire. There wasn’t unity, and I was tired of dealing with it. It was just like a whole bunch of wizards and witches had nothing better to do, so they would prank each other all day long. It was exhausting not knowing when a spell would blow up in my face or when I’d step outside and my grass would suddenly become a bed of biting weeds.”

I stared at her, mouth slack. “That is unsettling.”

She nodded. “So I hid all the spells. Every single one of them. It was hard and it took all the strength I had, but I gathered each and every one and scattered them to the outskirts of town.”

The spells that Rufus had found. Those were the ones Hannah had sent there. “And everyone got angry about it?”

“Because they couldn’t see them. I magicked the spells so that they wouldn’t be found.”

“But what if someone could see them?”

She hiked a shoulder to her ear. “Impossible. I hampered everyone’s magic so that all they could work were simple spells, nothing complicated.”

“Ah, no wonder they were mad.”

I remembered Norma Ray saying that Sadie was as bad as her mother. Malene and Urleen hadn’t agreed, but they hadn’t disagreed either.

“So mad I had to leave, which was fine by me.” She sighed heavily. “And that’s why I never returned until now. But anyway,” she said, scooting out of the booth, “I suppose we should be going. I don’t want to take up any more of your time.”

We headed toward the door and I understood why folks were now angry at Hannah.

And I also realized that this meant that Malene and her quilting bee were witches.

Chapter 17

I dropped Hannah off at the bed and breakfast and couldn’t stop thinking about what Willard and she had told me. The spells that Rufus had somehow summoned or dug up or whatever could be seen by the two of us but not by anyone else.

What did that mean?

I shook my head. It didn’t mean anything. It was probably simply that Hannah’s spell was wearing off, that’s all. Whatever she had done to make sure the magic was dead and buried to the residents, it was just changing and breaking.

But still, it seemed so strange that as soon as Rufus appeared, we were able to see them.

Maybe it wasn’t me with the talent, but Rufus. Perhaps because of what had happened between us, what he had done to me, I could see the magic because of him, because of some sort of tether that joined us.

I shivered. It needed to go away, these thoughts of him. But still, there was a mystery there, one that, like it or not, I was involved in.

And what about Sadie?

I nearly jumped in my seat. Her keys were still in my purse. If there was money hiding in her house or anything else that would help me pay off the debt to the wizard mafia, it would be there.

Decision made, I headed over to Sadie’s, which luckily wasn’t too far away from my own house.

When I stepped through her front door, an overwhelming sense of loss struck me. Her jacket hung by the door, her favorite bunny slippers sat by the couch, and the glossy home decor magazines she loved to read perched on the coffee table.

I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t think. All I could do was feel, and I felt abandoned, y’all. The realization that I had lost my best friend crushed me.

Moving like a zombie, I made my way over to the couch, sat down and cried for a good twenty minutes before I was able to haul myself up and start searching.

The most likely place to hide money was the bedroom closet. Clothes lay neatly piled on the bed that was made. I texted Liam, asking if the funeral home needed clothes for her, and while I waited for his reply, I set about searching.

Would you believe that every shoebox only held shoes? Sadie was the only person I knew who