I puffed an icy breath from my lips, creating a spray from the rain splashing into my mouth. “I don’t hate Baba,” I replied easily.
Almost too easily.
The answer had become second nature. I responded the same way every time anyone asked when referring to the witch community’s fearless, ageless leader, Baba Yaga, who’d shunned me right out of my former life in Paris, Texas, and back to my roots in a suburb of Seattle.
I won’t lie. That had been the single most painful moment of my life. I didn’t think anything could top being left at the altar by Warren the Wayward Warlock. Forget losing a fiancé. I had the witch literally slapped right out of me. I lost my entire being. Everything I’ve ever known.
Belfry made his wings flap harder and tipped his head to the right, pushing his tiny skull into the wind. “But you no likey. Baba booted you out of Paris, Stevie. Shunned you like you’d never even existed.”
Paris was the place to be for a witch if living out loud was your thing. There was no hiding your magic, no fear of a human uprising or being burned at the stake out of paranoia. Everyone in the small town of Paris was paranormal, though primarily it was made up of my own kind.
Some witches are just as happy living where humans are the majority of the population. They don’t mind keeping their powers a secret, but I came to love carrying around my wand in my back pocket just as naturally as I’d carry my lipstick in my purse.
I really loved the freedom to practice white magic anywhere I wanted within the confines of Paris and its rules, even if I didn’t love feeling like I lived two feet from the fiery jaws of Satan.
But Belfry had taken my ousting from the witch community much harder than me—or maybe I should say he’s more vocal about it than me.
So I had to ask. “Do you keep bringing up my universal shunning to poke at me, because you get a kick out of seeing my eyes at their puffiest after a good, hard cry? Or do you ask to test the waters because there’s some witch event Baba’s hosting that you want to go to with all your little familiar friends and you know the subject is a sore one for me this early in the ‘Stevie isn’t a witch anymore’ game?”
Belfry’s small body trembled. “You hurt my soul, Cruel One. I would never tease about something so delicate. It’s neither. As your familiar, it’s my job to know where your emotions rank. I can’t read you like I used to because—”
“Because I’m not on the same wavelength as you. Our connection is weak and my witchy aura is fading. Yadda, yadda, yadda. I get it. Listen, Bel, I don’t hate BY. She’s a good leader. On the other hand, I’m not inviting her over for girls’ night and braiding her hair either. She did what she had to in accordance with the white witch way. I also get that. She’s the head witch in charge and it’s her duty to protect the community.”
“Protect-schmotect. She was over you like a champion hurdler. In a half second flat.”
Belfry was bitter-schmitter.
“Things have been dicey in Paris as of late, with a lot of change going on. You know that as well as I do. I just happened to be unlucky enough to be the proverbial straw to break Baba’s camel back. She made me the example to show everyone how she protects us…er, them. So could we not talk about her or my defunct powers or my old life anymore? Because if we don’t look to the future and get me employed, we’re going to have to make curtains out of your tiny wings to cover the window of our box under the bridge.”
“Wait! There he is! Hold steady, Stevie!” he yelled into the wind.
We were out on this cliff in the town I’d grown up in because Belfry claimed someone from the afterlife—someone British—was trying to contact me, and as he followed the voice, it was clearest here. In the freezing rain…
Also in my former life, from time to time, I’d helped those who’d passed on solve a mystery. Now that I was unavailable for comment, they tried reaching me via Belfry.
The connection was always hazy and muddled, it came and went, broken and spotty, but Belfry wasn’t ready to let go of our former life. So more often than not, over the last month since I’d been booted from the community, as the afterlife grew anxious about my vacancy, the dearly departed sought any means to connect with me.
Belfry was the most recent “any means.”
“Madam Who?” Belfry squeaked in his munchkin voice, startling me. “Listen up, matey, when you contact a medium, you gotta turn up the volume!”
“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!”