Witch Is The New Black (Paris, Texas Romance #3)

Huh? Wasn’t that what they called Calla?

Fuck, she didn’t want to insult Calla, but there was only so much magic and mythology one person could handle.

It was enough that she could make things disappear and cast spells, quite another if she was going to need to shave every eight hours and crave small bunnies for lunch.

“You mean like Calla shifts into a werewolf?”

“No, I mean like a witch who shifts into anything—a person, an inanimate object, whatever. When a shifter first comes into his or her own, it usually happens under highly charged emotional circumstances, and that explains how you ended up in that bank that day, Bernie.”

Her mouth fell open. “I can’t process this. It’s too much…”

Calla squeezed her shoulders when Winnie said, “Then let me process it for you. I’m betting you and Eddie had an argument of some kind just before he went into the bank, am I right?”

“Who’d argue with somebody as pretty as Green Eyes?” Gus asked, clamping his hand on Bernie’s arm with affection.

But Bernie nodded with slow recognition. “Yes! Eddie and I argued about—Never mind, we just had a huge argument in the parking lot of the bank. I was so angry and hurt I almost couldn’t see straight.”

“I bet! And then he went into the bank, waved a gun around, got the bank manager to open the vault, and in you walk, but no one sees that because the cameras are disabled and he’d knocked everyone unconscious. Now, if you were in a fugue state, which is what I’m guessing happens when you shift because you don’t appear to remember it, you would have followed him into the bank and run right into him in the vault, looking exactly like him. This is the part where I’d bet dollars to donuts you freaked Eddie out completely. In a panic, he knocks the bank manager out, or maybe she just passes out, and you end up in the vault with all the money!”

“Holy…” Ridge muttered as all eyes landed on him. “That’s why you were passed out in the pantry, Bernie! You’d shifted into Violet earlier in the evening. It explains why Violet behaved the way she did.”

Bernie’s eyes flew to Ridge’s face. “Violet behaved the way she did…?”

He held up a hand. “It’s a long story, and I’ll explain later. Suffice to say, you shifted into Violet but behaved much more like Bernie. You didn’t once question why I was calling you Violet. But you sure had all your rules in place for, as you call it, an appropriate ex-con boss relationship.”

Bernie’s mouth fell open as Calla’s eyes widened. “So she’s shifting into people but retaining her morals and personality traits and doesn’t remember any of it?”

Winnie bounced in her seat. “I think so! So if that’s true, you fell asleep in the bank, woke up as Bernie, and somehow, in the melee of the police arriving, that son of a bitch got out of the bank unnoticed.”

Ridge tapped his finger on the picnic table, his eyes intense. “Something’s been bugging me since you told me all of this, Bernie. I was going to ask you about it tonight while we studied. Do you think you could draw the tattoo on Eddie’s arm from memory?”

She’d only seen it a hundred times. “I think I can.”

Flora dug in her purse for a piece of paper and a pen, handing it to Bernie, who drew the symbol, making the group go silent—deathly so.

The seniors’ silence scared Bernie far more than anything else. They were never silent. “What? Is it bad?”

“That’s an ankh, Bernie,” Ridge said with a tone so grave, her heart sped back up.

“And that means?”

Winnie squeezed her hand again. “Some witches use the ankh to symbolize eternal life.”

Bernie gasped, taking in a mouthful of hot air. “Wait, that means that Eddie’s…”

Ridge’s mouth tightened into a thin line. “It means that Eddie’s likely a warlock.”

That motherfluffin’ son of a bitch.





Chapter 11



“Well, Bernie girl, I think we’re coming into the home stretch.” Fee sat on her bed atop one of the yellow and blue pillows. “Now that we have some answers, we can move forward.”

Fluffing her hair, she set the brush down and applied some clear lip gloss she’d picked up at the pharmacy in town, preparing for her third study date with Ridge this week since she’d found out she was a shifter.

“We don’t have all the answers yet, Fee.” But they’d been looking for them for almost a week, since she’d shifted into Ridge.

“We have more than we had coming into this.”

“That’s true. Now we need to find out how I’m a witch shifter, or whatever, and if my parents were witches, why they were just pretending to be humans.”

“Yeah. That’s still a big puzzle, but we have more pieces to this crazy jigsaw of your life than we ever did before.”