Mountains, Mystery, and Magic Read online

  Mountains Magic And Murder

  Smoky Mountain Witches Book 1

  Samantha Eden

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  1

  As I lugged my bags through an airport terminal toward a home and life I’d left behind years ago, I couldn’t help but let the butterflies in my stomach get the better of me. It had been five years since I’d seen Spell Creek Mountain, my family, or the home I grew up in. There was a good reason for that, but at the sight of my cousin waving at me as I approached her in the airport filled my line of vision, I couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was.

  “You’re a sight for sore eyes. That’s for sure,” Charlotte said to me, holding up a sign that read my name as I lugged my suitcases behind me through the airport. Why she had a sign with my name on it was a mystery to me. I’d grown up with Charlotte, her being my cousin and all, and the five years I’d been gone from Spell Creek Mountain, Tennessee, weren’t nearly enough for me to forget what she looked like. Still, Charlotte had always been the eccentric type so this didn’t surprise me nearly as much as it should.

  “Your eyes been sore, Charlotte?” I asked, settling in front of her and dropping my bags at my feet. The walk from the tarmac to where my cousin was standing couldn’t have been more than a couple of hundred feet, but it felt like at least a mile with all these bags in my hands.

  “The sorest, Izzy,” she said, wrapping her arms around me and giving me a patented ‘Lockheart family hug’. I know what you’re thinking. All families hug, especially after going so long without seeing each other. Our hugs were special though. They were long, deep, and we could practically read each other’s mind when we embraced.

  That sort of thing tends to happen when you’re a witch.

  Taking my favorite cousin into my arms, I felt light, happy, and more than a little loopy. In other words, signature Charlotte.

  She must have felt something similar because as she pulled away, she looked at me with big eyes. “Somebody’s been on a lot of dates since her almost wedding.”

  A large, mischievous smile spread across her face, the kind that begged for details. Too bad for Charlotte that Lockheart family hugs weren’t that informative and I wasn’t coming off anything juicy just yet. Not that there was too much juice to be squeezed from my big city experience. The string of dates I’d been on since Jared, my sad sack of a former fiancé who’d jilted me at the altar for my former best friend and current worst enemy, Wynonna Clarke, had been little more than a string of bad OK Cupid setups and disastrous meetings followed by dull dinner dates and conversations that went nowhere. Of course, there was no reason for Charlotte to know any of that right now.

  “Don’t be hatin’, girl. I’m a single woman,” I said, nudging my cousin with my elbow.

  “And don’t think I’m not excited about it, Cuz,” Charlotte said, beaming over at me. She splayed her fingers out in front of her face, rainbow-colored fingernails dancing in the airport light. “We’re both single for the first time in, like, ever.”

  “Five years is definitely not forever,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Maybe not, but it sure as H-E-Double hockey sticks feels like it is while you’re out living it up in the bright lights of Chicago and I’m stuck on ol’ Spell Creek Mountain, taking care of Grandma Winnie and the B&B.”

  I smiled a little at the mentions of my grandmother and the quaint bed and breakfast we’d run as a family for years now, and at the sight of my cousin’s smirk. God, I had missed her.

  “First of all, Chicago isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I promise, there were more than a few nights I wished I was snuggled up in front of a fire in our family living room,” I said. “Secondly, what’s up with the whole ‘spelling’ thing?”

  She shrugged. “I’m trying to curse less. Grandma Winnie put a swear jar near the front desk at the B&B, and I’ve about gone broke.” She shook her head. “But enough about me. Let’s talk about my hair.”

  “Your hair? Well, I mean, talking about your hair kind of is talking about you, but sure, whatever,” I said, looking at the towering mass of red sitting atop my cousin’s smallish round head. It was massive. So much so that I imagined it was more magic than maintenance keeping it standing. Still, it had always looked like that, ever since we were kids. So, I wasn’t quite sure what she was talking about.

  “The highlights?” she said, arching her eyebrows up so far that they disappeared under her expertly coiffed bangs. “Don’t tell me you didn’t notice them.” Her hands went up to her hair, straightening up the piled mass.

  “Of course, I did,” I answered. I didn’t. “It looks amazing. In fact, I thought that was why you had the sign up for me, in case I didn’t recognize you with those . . . those things.”

  Charlotte shook her head. “That is a pile of bull, but I sure appreciate your shoveling it in my direction.”

  I nodded at her. “Anytime, Cuz. Now, you mind helping me with my bags?”

  “Sure thing,” Charlotte said. She twinkled her rainbow-colored nails, and as she did, my bags lifted from the floor.

  “Not like that!” I said, grabbing the handles and shoving them back against the floor. I blinked hard, my heart racing a little as I looked at the people walking around us. “Are you crazy?”

  “Probably,” Charlotte admitted. “But I’m not the one who got all hard-nosed. I hope the mortal world didn’t turn my favorite cousin into a stick in the mud.”

  I glared at her, pursing my lips and pushing down the urge to ream her out but good. We both knew the rules. Grandma Winnie taught them to us from childhood, and we both knew how important it was to follow those rules. We could thank my mother for that. Or, we could have if she were still around. She had been gone for ages now, and the only piece of her I had left was a rusted old locket I couldn’t open, the only thing she left me.

  “I just don’t want anybody seeing us,” I said through a clenched jaw. “We’re an hour away from Spell Creek Mountain, and that’s plenty close enough for rumors to have followed us here.”

  Charlotte chuckled and waved me off. “You’re being way too sensitive, Cuz,” she said. “Things aren’t the way they were when you left. Everything has settled down a lot since . . . well, you know what happened. Anyway, if you want to do it the old-fashioned way, I guess we can.”

  She brushed my hand aside and grabbed one of my bags, lifting it and huffing just like any old mortal might. “What have you got, like a body in this thing?” she asked.

  “That’s for makeup and hair supplies,” I answered, looking at the bag she was hoisting with two hands.

  “Well, in that case, I guess it’s kinda light,” she muttered. “Still, I don’t know how you managed this as long as you did. Five whole years without magic. Sounds horrible.”

  “It wasn’t, really,” I answered, thinking about my life up in Chicago, the head chef job I’d left the only home I’d ever known for, and the reason I felt like I n
eeded to run. Still, all of that was a long time ago. So long, in fact, that I had started to forget why I’d felt like I needed to leave Spell Creek, my family, and the magic we’d always shared as witches behind in the first place.

  “But you had to carry your own bags every day,” Charlotte said. “You had to cook your own food, buy your own groceries, not to mention buy your own drinks.”

  “I have never, in the whole of my life, bought my own drinks, and bite your tongue for thinking I did.” I shook my hips just a little for emphasis. “Just because I wasn’t a practicing witch doesn’t mean I’m not still a woman. You don’t think this T and A are good enough for a tequila every now and then?”

  Charlotte looked me up and down. “Get it, girl.” She laughed. “I stand corrected. Still, things had to be a lot harder without being able to use your God-given gifts.”

  “Sometimes,” I admitted. “But there were other times, and they came more and more frequently as time went on, when I enjoyed doing things for myself. I vacuumed my own floor, and when it was clean, I felt accomplished. I did my own makeup, and when I looked like a million bucks later that night, I felt like a million bucks too.”

  “What about your hair?” Charlotte asked, glancing up at my dark-brown locks. “You do that yourself too?”

  “Of course not,” I muttered. “I wanted to be a mortal, not a Neanderthal.”

  I picked my other bag up and started walking. Charlotte threw an arm around me. “Sure is nice to have you back home again,” she said. “I swear, ever since you’ve been gone, the trees on our land have been still. There hasn’t been a lick of wind in the willows. But then, this morning, when I was coming to get you, the leaves started rustling again. It was like they were holding their breath, waiting for you to come home. And now they can exhale.”

  I looked at my cousin, wondering if trees weren’t the only things that had been holding their breath.

  “I’m glad to be home too,” I said, wrapping my arm around her waist and squeezing her tightly.

  “I’m so glad you decided to come for a visit,” she said. “But why now, Izzy? It’s been five whole years. Surely, you didn’t just wake up one morning and think to yourself, ‘I’ll go back to Spell Creek Mountain today.’ ”

  “Of course, I did,” I answered. “Sometimes, it’s just that simple. I just needed a break. I needed to come home.”

  I pulled my arm away from her quickly so that my cousin couldn’t sense what I was thinking. I didn’t like lying to people, especially people I loved, and what I’d just said might have been the biggest lie I’d ever told.

  2

  Charlotte’s old hatchback hadn’t changed in five years. It still shook as it sputtered down the road, moving from Knoxville, the closest airport to home, to the splendor of the Smoky Mountains. It had been years since I had physically seen the rolling hills and mountains where I grew up. They had crept their way into my dreams though. Many were the nights that I had been lying in my bed, high up in a Chicago apartment building, while my sleeping self was flying over these peaks and valleys, dipping and diving through the place where my life had been formed.

  As they came into view, so did all the emotions I had allowed to remain bottled up since I left here. Tears started in my eyes, and I was afraid they were going to fall down my cheeks and I was going to have to explain myself to Charlotte. I’d have to tell her how much coming home meant to me, how I’d wanted to do it for years now but couldn’t muster up the courage to see the place I’d charged away from after that horrible day when my mother died. Maybe, once those flood gates were open, I wouldn’t be able to close them again. Maybe I’d end up telling Charlotte the real reason I had to come home, and no good would come from that.

  Luckily, if you could count on my cousin Charlotte for anything, it was to say the wrong thing at the right time.

  “You know, I think I’m getting sexier as I get older,” she mused.

  “What?” I asked, turning to her, every bit of my melancholy evaporating with my tears.

  “Hear me out,” Charlotte said, nodding at me and bracing herself as though she was about to dive into this with all the labored concentration one might bring to a dissertation. “We all know that I was very, very sexy when I was younger.”

  “We do?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at her.

  “Of course, we do,” she balked. “Let’s not act like this isn’t a known fact.”

  “Well, if it’s a fact . . .” I muttered.

  “But, the thing is, I’ve started to feel much more confident as I’ve gotten older.” She looked over at me, which was extremely dangerous because the roads in the Smoky Mountains are, as one might suspect, curvy, and my cousin was the sort of driver who could have an accident while in Park. I was reasonably concerned.

  “Eyes on the road, Charlotte!” I said, grabbing her face and turning it forward.

  “Ouch! Watch the foundation!” Charlotte squealed.

  “I’ll watch the foundation when you watch the road!” I answered. Then, looking at my hand, I found it caked with bronzer. “You wear too much makeup.”

  “Hater says what?” Charlotte asked.

  “I’m not falling for that,” I said.

  “Ugh,” she answered, pouting a little. “You’re not fun.”

  “I’m plenty of fun,” I muttered. “Ask anyone in Chicago.”

  “I don’t mean mortal fun, Izzy,” Charlotte said, sticking her tongue out disgustedly but keeping her eyes plastered on the road, which was an improvement. “Everyone knows mortals can’t have near the fun we do. It’s just a fact.” She cleared her throat. “Now, if you’ll let me get back to my point.” Her eyes cut over to me, but just for a second.

  “Fine,” I answered, waving a hand for her to proceed. “Get on with it.”

  “Like I was saying, I’m feeling a lot more confident as I get older, a lot more comfortable in my own skin,” she said.

  “Okay,” I prompted.

  “Well, you know how Grandma Winnie always told us that witches tend to get their most powerful as they reach thirty years old?” Charlotte continued. “She always said a witch tends to find her gift for the world between twenty-five and thirty.” She nodded at me. “I’m twenty-eight now, Izzy, and I think I’ve found my gift to the world.”

  I blinked, my mouth agape. “Which would be . . . your sexiness?”

  “Correct,” Charlotte said, nodding and smiling at me.

  “Are you screwing with me right now?” I asked, biting my lower lip.

  “What?” she asked, her painted eyes widening. “Why would you think I was screwing with you? Are you screwing with me by asking if I’m screwing with you?”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said, shaking my head. “I couldn’t follow that train of thought with a compass and a Boy Scout in the backseat.”

  “Then why would you ask if I was screwing with you?” Charlotte murmured, honestly—and amazingly—sincere.

  “Um, I don’t know. Because you just told me that you thought being sexy was your gift to the world?” I answered like it was the most obvious thing in the world because, you know, it was.

  Charlotte tightened both her jaw and her grip on the steering wheel. “Well, every witch has a gift to give to the world, and I’m very sexy. So, you do the math.”

  With that, her foot fell harder against the gas pedal.

  I did miss being home.

  By the time we made it up to Spell Creek Mountain, one of the highest points in all the Smokies, Charlotte had calmed down a little. She had begun to consider the idea that maybe her gift was twofold. In addition to being unmercifully sexy, she also noted that she was a good artist and a fairly good dancer once she got a few drinks in her. So, you know, maybe her gift to the world was one of those things as well. I had learned my lesson with the first outburst. All Charlotte got from me going forward was a constantly nodding head and blanket praise. It made for an easy car ride.

  Driving into Spell Creek Mountain,
my heart jumped. The quaint mountain town was like a hundred others scattered across these mountains, with one notable exception. A couple of hundred years ago, witches who had been run out of Salem had settled in this peak and made it their own. They multiplied, as is so often the case with witches, and here we were. Spell Creek Mountain was a magical town, filled with all sorts of supernatural creatures. Sure, witches were the bread and butter here—there were at least three coven families on the peak and in the surrounding hills and valleys—but there were also other creepy crawlies scattered about for flavor. Not that you met many of them. The werewolves liked to stay out in woods, and not that it’ll come as much of a surprise, the vampires weren’t exactly morning people. As such, most of the supes, as Grandma Winnie called us, people came across were witches and warlocks.

  You couldn’t tell it by looking at the town, though, and there was a good reason for that. While there were a lot of supernatural beings in and around Spell Creek Mountain, the vast majority of folks who lived here were red-blooded American mortals. They were just mountain people working hard, paying their bills, and raising their kids. They didn’t know a lot about the supernatural community brimming right under their noses, and both sides seemed to be the better for it. There were rumors, of course. Those rumors hit a fever pitch right after my mom died, right before I left town, but Charlotte assured me they had died down. As such, the supes of Spell Creek pretended they were just like everybody else, and everybody else believed them. Or, at least, they pretended to.

  “Not much has changed since I left,” I said dreamily, looking at the town sign that read Now Entering Spell Creek Mountain, Tennessee, where the people are as magical as the surroundings. I had grown up looking at that sign, at the drawing of Harold Lockheart, my great-great grandfather and the founder of this place. That sign was a part of me, and looking at it now, I realized just how much I’d missed by not seeing it every day.