Moonlight Murder: An Inept Witches Mystery (2 page)

“Are you insane?” Ingrid was breathing so fast, she had to put her face between her knees. Dead people gook. She had dead people gook on her again. She needed to be power-washed. Immediately.

“I have learned how to move things,” Emily said, patting Ingrid on the back. She sounded too calm. Why wasn’t she freaking out? Was she in some sort of booze haze? “I’ll just move aside some of the earth, we’ll push him in, and no one has to know that your magic killed someone.”

“Your magic did!” Ingrid countered. “I wouldn’t have done magic without you. I’m going to throw up. Damn it. I am a murdering dove.”

Emily moved the earth and shoved random pieces of dismembered body in with her magic while comforting Ingrid. “It was an accident, so maybe it doesn’t count?”

Ingrid watched, horrified as the body disappeared.

“Um,” Ingrid said. Had they just buried a body? Was this even happening? She needed to be dreaming.

“Um,” Emily replied. She grabbed Ingrid’s hand and yanked her down the trail. “We must forget this ever happened.”

It was possible, Ingrid realized, that they’d just buried a body.

•••

“Goodnight Ingrid. We’ll figure out a plan tomorrow. I must have sleep.” Emily held back the opportunity to torment Ingrid, thinking murder is murder even if it was an accident. But it was an accident. And it helped not knowing who the dead body belonged to.

But was murder actually murder if it was an accident? They just needed no one to find out. They would have their memories wiped—by a witch who knew how to do that stuff. That way the guilt would go away. And they’d have the grave hidden. Also by a witch who could do things.

Ingrid rolled her eyes at Emily, needing to be slapped a little bit. The panic in her gaze had not faded.

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Maybe. I need to think this never happened. I need sleep. But maybe we don’t need a plan. What’s done is done, right? Oh goodness, what did we do?” Ingrid was bouncing on her feet, obviously fighting back horror at what had happened.

But, they couldn’t just pretend. Not yet, anyway.

“Did you forget,” Emily told her, “that you are dating the sheriff of this town and that we live on a very small island and someone will certainly find the bits of that poor dead body. It’s going to come out. We need to get ahead of it. We need better witches than us.”

“Every witch is better than us,” Ingrid said absently.

Emily was shutting the wrought-iron doors to the elevator to send Ingrid upstairs. She wanted to believe that the well of panic was not guilt. But it was a festering well of horrified guilt. Except, it was Ingrid’s magic that had hurt that guy. And Ingrid was going to lose it. Emily had to hold it together for Ingrid.

With the look on Ingrid’s face—exhaustion bordering on panic—Emily changed tactics. “Tomorrow. We’ll decide tomorrow if there is anything that needs doing. Everything is fine. Just sleep.”

She kissed her best friend on the cheek, something she reserved for times of real stress and concern. If this were a broken nail or wine emergency, Emily would have been horrible to Ingrid. But Emily knew that Ingrid’s pain was real. It had been her magic, after all, that killed the stranger in the woods. Emily watched as Ingrid half-heartedly pushed the elevator button that would take her to her private apartment on the top floor of the building. Ingrid’s face was flat and vacant.

The elevator doors closed, and Emily thoughtfully gnawed on her lip as she headed to her apartment door. “I’m going to have to put a stop to this. And soon,” she said even though no one was around.

They were both involved now. It might have been Ingrid’s magic that had gone out of control, but Emily had buried the body. A rush of…was it the need to protect Ingrid? Something anyway. It had flooded over Emily, and she’d just had to do something. Make it go away.

Her mind drifted to the scene in the woods. At first she’d thought Ingrid was screwing with her, but when Ingrid had grabbed Emily with bloody hands, she thought she would puke. Her instincts to protect Ingrid kicked in, and she’d used her one magical ability—levitation. Moving the earth with her magic was easy, and she knew she owed a debt to Aunt Hazel for insisting that she practice magic every day, even when they were on vacation at St. Maarten’s. It had paid off.

But now Ingrid needed to sleep and Emily needed to think. She’d been a wreck the last few weeks since her ex-husband’s body was found in the basement of their bookstore, Enchanted Tales, and Ingrid had kept it together. It was Emily’s turn. By morning she would have a plan. A good one.

She took a quick shower, tossed her clothes, and brewed a steaming cup of Earl Gray. With almond milk and vanilla syrup, this was her thinking drink. Coffee was her doing drink, and wine was her ‘refusing to deal’ drink, but tonight she needed to think. Tomorrow would bring all the coffee she could stand.

She considered her options. First, she needed to know who they killed. And she would say they from now on. She wouldn’t put that on Ingrid, even playfully. Not yet anyway. There would come a time when she could mock her endlessly, call her a murderer, maybe even suggest one of those tattoos that symbolized how many people someone’s murdered. But it was too soon.

She opened her phone and started searching Google. She typed “Tattoos symbolizing murder count” in the search bar and pressed enter, then set her phone down to let it think. Her cell service sucked in this corner of her apartment, she’d have to work that out later. But in the meantime, while the page loaded, she sipped her tea.

So, a trip to the freaking forest at first light was on her list. She hated mornings. Every morning. But getting up early to hunt for a dead body. Yeah, not on her list of things to do. Ever. She sighed.

Her phone buzzed and she answered immediately, only realizing after she accepted the call that it wasn’t Ingrid. It was Sam. The hot fireman. Hmmm. That gave her some ideas. Maybe he could help her unbury the body. No. That would be a disaster of epic proportions. Ingrid didn’t like Fireman Sam to begin with. If Emily brought him into their magical murder mystery tour, Ingrid would completely lose control. Sam would gain some new experiences with fire.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Emily. I’m just getting off my shift. Want to grab some dinner?”

She wasn’t exactly hungry, but she could eat. She could always eat. Especially if she didn’t have to cook it. Plus it’d be nice to think about something else. Let her subconscious mind worry about how to keep Ingrid’s behind out of jail.

“Um, yeah. I’m gonna need at least dinner. I hope you are prepared for more. I’ve had a craptastic day.”

“Okay, I’ll pick you up in 10 minutes. We can go to that 24-hour diner.”

“Mmm. I could totally use a chocolate malt right now. Extra malt. And fried chicken. And mashed potatoes and gravy.”

Sam laughed. “Okay, I’ll stop by the bank for a loan before I pick you up.”

“Uh, yeah, no. 24-hour loan officers are not an actual thing. I’ve got my own money, well, it’s Ingrid’s money, but whatever. And I’ll meet you there. I want to walk anyway.”

He started to protest, but she hung up before he could get a sentence out.

She didn’t like being taken care of, not by a guy, and that wasn’t going to change, no matter how insanely hot the fireman was. Besides, and this was the important part, she needed a minute to think about the body in the woods. Because there was a Holy Mary Mother of Pearl body in the woods.

•••

Ingrid didn’t start thinking again until she was in the shower, scrubbing blood off of her body. She scrubbed her hands until the water ran clear. Then she washed her hair four times. Once her hair was piled on top of her head, she took today’s clothes, shoes included, and lit them on fire with magic in the shower. The shower was big enough that she could stand outside of the streams of water with her clothes burning fueled entirely by her magic.

“Oh my…” Her hands were shaking when she finally wrapped herself in a robe and put a towel around her hair, so she made her way to the mini-wine cellar she’d had built in her apartment. She stared at the wine until her eyes focused on the bottles of the St. Maarten’s wine from the vacation.

“What the hell was that?” she asked herself. She pulled aside several bottles of wine to find the truth serum she’d bought from Saffron, a witch who’d joined the Sage Island coven from some creepy coven. When Ingrid had been finding a way to get Emily off murder charges for her dead husband, it had been Saffron’s former North Island coven that had been recommended to Ingrid. She brought the serum out, made herself a cup of coffee, and poured it into the beautiful brew.

She played with the empty vial, rolling it in between her palms and staring vacantly around her apartment. It was the top floor of a four-story building on Sage Island. Emily’s apartment was a floor down, followed by another floor of apartments they rented out and then shops on the ground floor. Their hobby bookshop, Enchanted Tales, was down there with several other shops, but they hadn’t walked through the doors of the bookstore since they’d returned from St. Maarten’s.

Without daring to look at it, Ingrid lifted her mug and gulped the doctored coffee, not even noticing the burn.

Then she pulled out her phone and tried to text Emily, We didn’t murder that guy.

But she couldn’t. Her hands wouldn’t do it. Instead they typed,

We murdered that guy with magic. What the HELL?

When she wasn’t able to lie—even with her fingers—her hands started shaking. Holy Holy! They’d buried some poor random dove in the woods. I mean, she thought, he was lurking in the woods with two lost girls around. That was creepy. Maybe he was up to no good before she’d blown him up.

It didn’t make her feel better. She wanted it to make her feel better, but it didn’t. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man.

They were going to have to hire the evil coven to get them out of trouble, bunnies would be murdered, and more importantly, she was going to feel bad forever.

Like—was this karma? What had she done to deserve this?

“Hey,” Gabe said from the doorway to the bedroom. Oh, this was not good. He was supposed to stay sleeping when she truth-serumed herself. He wore only boxer shorts and everything about him was something that begged her to leap into his arms and plead for help.

Ingrid tried not to vomit at him. Don’t say anything, she told herself.

“Hey,” she replied carefully, biting the word out to keep any thing else, like confessions, from spewing forth.

“Are you all right?”

“Um,” she said. She shrugged.

He crossed the room and felt her forehead.

“You’re kind of warm.”

“Um,” she said. She rubbed her eyes and told herself to say nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.

“Come to bed,” he said. He pulled her to her feet and across the room. “You’ll feel better after you sleep.”

Why had she truth-serumed herself? Why had she done it when Gabe could wake up any minute? Where was her phone? What had she been thinking? Oh gods, she was in so much trouble. He could not look at her phone. The irritating and naughty texts that her ex-boyfriend had been sending her were the least of the reasons that the Sheriff of Sage Island could definitely not see her phone. Now she had to hide her murdering ways from him too.

“You’re too nice,” she told him. He was. He was too nice and too good for her. He was tall, handsome in the rugged, perfect way she loved. He did not have a white beard and no ivory tower arrogance. And he did not semi-despise her like her dead husband Harrison had. Oh gods, she thought, why in all that was holy had she truth-serumed herself during a mental melt down? She did not want to think about her dead husband.

He kissed her softly on the lips and said, “I’m only after you for your money.”

She laughed. And her eyes teared. It wasn’t true. She’d found the one guy who wasn’t after her for the money her first husband had left her. And she’d ruined it by killing someone and burying his body. She was going to have to break up with Gabe before he was forced to arrest her and put her and Emily in jail to rot, like the evil witches they were.

Accidentally evil.

If it was an accident and wasn’t intended, it wasn’t evil right? It was just…stupid.

She realized she didn’t want to break up with him before he broke up with her. Or before he arrested her. And that thought made her thoroughly sick to her stomach.

He was just supposed to be her pretty play thing. She wasn’t supposed to feel this agonizing shot of pain at the idea of them breaking up.

“Oh gods,” she said aloud as he pulled her close to his body, wrapped her up in his warmth, and whispered, “It’ll be all right, Ingrid. You’ll feel better soon.”

Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, she repeated silently until he settled into sleep. It was the only thing that kept her from shouting, I’ll never feel better again. Oh gods, I feel things for you and there’s a body in the woods, and you were just supposed to be my pretty lickable play dove.

As soon as he fell asleep, she snuck out of his arms to find and hide her phone. In the kitchen alone, she said, “Oh gods, Ingrid. Oh gods. What have you done?”

She shut her phone off and hid it at the bottom of her tampon box just in case. Not that Gabe would look at it, but what if he did?

Chapter Two

Out of the Frying Pan

Thursday Morning

If Emily was going to be honest with herself, she would have to admit that the sunrise, though beautiful, made her want to find a random stranger and claw his face. She
’
d had no sleep since she and Ingrid had become killers, her fried chicken at the diner was raw on the inside, and her make-out session with Fireman Sam was interrupted by her damn conscious who insisted that she shouldn
’
t be macking on a hot fireman only hours after killing and then burying someone. Instead, she
’
d said goodbye to Sam and sent him on his way.

“
But why can
’
t I just stay with you, Em? I don't have to work for another 24.
”