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  She started to walk out into the setting sun, then she remembered the paintball gun lying forlornly in the dirt. Gripping it while pocketing the knife, she darted through the forest. She had no doubt they’d all left her behind. But the great thing about living in a small town was that nothing was too far from anything else.

  Besides, she knew these woods like the back of her hand.

  It took her an hour to hike from the forest to the one highway that ran into town and another twenty minutes to trot quickly across the bridge stretching through the gorge and reach the main part of town. But home was a further five miles across town. When she limped into the local bar looking for water, a chorus of “Katy-girl” met her at the door. She looked up to see Boris and Sam manning the bar at their usual stations. They toasted her with their half-consumed bottles of beer.

  With stiff legs she walked to the bar and leaned on the counter.

  “Trip,” she groaned aloud, “I’m dying.”

  The diminutive bartender, a gnome and excellent brew master, gave her a wry glance. “Up in the forests again.”

  “Yes, but not for what you think.”

  “Really now?” said Trip while pulling on a tap for sparkling water—her favorite.

  Gratefully she accepted his offering and swallowed the first gulp to say glumly, “Really, I wish I had been aura-gazing. Rose stranded me in the forest. Again.”

  Trip shook his head in distaste. “That girl really needs to learn that a queen first serves. She canna rule without it.”

  His thick Irish brogue was showing through.

  “It’s what I’ve been telling her for years,” said Katherine eagerly. Out of all the townspeople, Trip was one of the few that didn’t worship the ground her sister—and for that matter, her mother—walked on.

  He shook his towel at her. “Well, tell her harder. Now off with you. Young ladies don’t belong in bars.”

  “If I can stand on my own two feet I belong here,” she countered. She hated that. By witch standards she was old enough to order hensbane, a toxic plant so lethal it was a Level 5 coven-controlled substance. So standing in a liquor-serving bar was child's play.

  He sighed. “Aye, lass, but for tonight it is not your place. Now go home—your mum will be worried.”

  She nodded and turned to limp off. From behind her she heard Trip call out, “Ryan, take Katy-girl home!”

  She turned to protest that she didn’t need the police captain’s help, but he had already eagerly accepted.

  As she looked up into Ryan Moning’s face, she glared. He shrugged on his coat and held the door open for her. Katherine had known since she was five that the man had a crush on her mother. She knew because she had started reading auras like road maps when she’d encountered her first crush in grade school. That same crush had pushed her into a pond and laughed. But not for long. She smiled at the memory of his feet freezing in the shallow water. He had been stuck for hours. After that little push of power from her, he had left her alone, and she had considered them even. But she held the grudge against Moning still because it was just gross. Hell, her father had still been alive then!

  Sighing, she got into the passenger’s side of the town’s police car and irritably stared out the window at the passing buildings—the town hall, the main library, the fireman’s station, until finally nothing but trees met her gaze. Firmly she ignored his attempts at starting a conversation until they came to the gates of the queen’s house.

  Quickly she opened the door when the car stopped. “I can make my way from here, thanks for the ride!”

  As he was protesting, she slammed the door and hustled through the wrought-iron gates.

  She didn’t bother turning around as she limped forward in her dirty jeans, carrying the paintball gun. She knew he was still there. Once his headlights had fully receded into the dusk, she was able to relax.

  Night had fallen. The moon shone as it rose in the sky and she walked the mile-long driveway in perfect contentment. This was her domain. The outside. The clean air. The night sky.

  As she reached the door, which swung open without a touch, Katherine wondered what excuse Rose had given their mother this time.

  No servants met her at the door. They didn’t have any. Her mother insisted on doing everything themselves, or magically, if possible. Everyone was responsible for their own mess. Which was all fine and dandy, but Katherine didn’t have the domestic powers that most of her family did. The one time she'd tried to fold the laundry with a wave of her hand, she had ended up bursting the water pipes and setting the carpet on fire. Her magic was different. Darker. Which was why she did her best to never use it. So while Rose and the queen were away on town duties, it was Katherine that ended up washing her own clothes, folding laundry, scrubbing the toilet, and picking pet dander out of the carpet.

  As she walked into a sparkling home, she knew her mother had spent the afternoon cleaning. Which meant she’d waved her finger and wiped all the dust away, twitched her hand and dispelled the odor as well as the grime, and waved her arm to straighten all of the furniture.

  It was good to be queen.

  As she dropped her bag and her gun at the foot of the staircase, she yelled for her mom. “Mother!”

  “In the kitchen!”

  Taking off the paintball vest, as well, she dropped it with the other stuff.

  “Mother, Rose—” Katherine complained, but stopped short.

  Because when she entered the kitchen two things met her senses: the smell of cinnamon buns fresh from the oven, and the smirk of her sister leaning against the counter in a fresh new outfit with ribbons in her hair and not a smidgen of blood on her.

  Katherine glared and said shortly, “Rose trapped me in the forest and took off with Derrick and his friend.”

  Rose quickly snapped her head over to her mother who was busy bending over the stove. “What Katy didn’t tell you was that she deliberately sabotaged me. We were supposed to be a team!”

  “Team,” Katherine gasped. “You were too busy with your tongue stuck down that idiot’s throat to realize the meaning of the word ‘team.’”

  “Girls!” snapped their mother as she turned around and tossed her apron in the closet. “Inside and sisterly voices, please.”

  Eyeing Katherine, she continued, “Katy, go upstairs and get cleaned up. Dinner’s almost ready.”

  Katherine stared at her mother with her mouth hanging open. “What about her?”

  “She’s already clean.”

  “I mean what are you going to do to her?” she whined. She couldn’t help it. She wanted justice.

  “Your sister and I will talk.”

  Katherine couldn’t stand another minute. She rushed back to the stairs.

  From the kitchen, her mother called, “Dinner in five minutes.”

  “I’m not hungry,” shouted a disgruntled Katherine from halfway up the stairs.

  “Good,” said Rose from where she had followed Katherine out to lean against the base. “We’ve got company coming over and you eat like a cow.”

  Fists clenched, with one last parting shot Katherine yelled, “Well, at least I’m not a stupid whore.”

  Rose flipped her luscious curls over her shoulder as an evil smile crossed her glossy, ruby-red lips and she sauntered up the stairs. As she passed Katherine, she whispered in her ear, “At least I’m not a prude.”

  Katherine stared after Rose while a noxious mixture of envy, resentment, and anger filled her heart. That night she thought of all the things she would say to Rose the next day, all the comebacks, all the retorts she wanted to speak to her hateful older sister.

  She never got the chance.

  Rose was dead the next morning.

  Chapter 3

  Getting up in the morning was always a struggle for Katherine. She hated mornings with a passion reserved for venereal diseases and warm soda. So when she emerged out of the cocoon of her blankets, it was with the wariness of a cat expecting to get wet. She poked an arm o
ut of her nest to check the temperature of the air in her bedroom first. When the chill of a too-cool room hit her flesh, she quickly snatched it back with an irritable grumble.

  Curling in on herself with the cold flesh safely tucked back inside the warm blankets, she murmured, “I forgot to set the heater on last night, didn’t I?”

  It was a regular occurrence with her, which meant that her room was now a freaking ice-box. She didn’t bother poking her head out of the comforter to check the time displayed in red, glaring letters on her nightstand. She could sense the phases of the moon fine from where she was under the covers. Dawn hadn’t broken the sky yet. And she knew from experience that the hardwood of her old floors would be cold; she had already felt the chill of the air and she knew a mad dash to the bathroom to turn the heater on was inevitable. But perhaps not for a few minutes more. With a satisfied smile she closed her eyes for more pleasant dreams. Dreams of her sister dropping into a whirlpool of mud, for instance. One that kept turning and turning and turning.

  The next thing she knew, a knock rang loudly on her thick wooden door.

  “Katy, Katy, wake up!” her mother commanded through the door.

  Katherine heard her. She turned over and snuggled some more. She wasn’t ready yet.

  That wasn’t good enough, apparently. With a jiggle of the doorknob, the Queen of Sandersville entered her daughter’s room. Katherine heard her walk over to the bed in high heels through the blankets.

  “Katherine Laine Thompson,” her mother commanded. “Get up right now. It’s only two hours until dawn, and you know how he gets if he doesn’t eat all day.”

  “Just a few more minutes, Mom,” said the bundle of covers.

  “No, now. You have school in three hours and you need to take Gestap out for his breakfast.”

  “Why can’t Rose do it?” said Katherine in faux-frustration. She knew the answer. Her mother came in her room every morning. The question-and-answer routine was always the same. It was almost comforting. Katherine knew what she was going to say before her mother even said it.

  An irritable sigh echoed. “Because, as you know, Rose has the witches’ council meeting every day before school—”

  “As preparation for her rise to power,” said Katy’s irritated voice from beneath the blankets as she finished her mother’s sentence.

  “Yes,” said her mother. “Now I’m off to take care of the shipping manifest for the shop. Do you need anything for your spells later this evening?”

  “No,” grumbled Katherine. “I’ve got everything but the lilac blossoms, and I’ll get those when I take Gestap out.”

  “Good,” said the queen as she turned and walked away, the echo of her high heels reverberating on the floor.

  “Do you need me to pick up Rose from the council before I head to school?”

  “No,” said her mother. “She has her first out of town coven event later this morning. The guardian will be taking her and they’ll be gone all day. I’ll pack an explanatory note in your lunch for the human principal alongside the work she’s already made up for you to give to her history and French teachers.”

  Katherine waited for the door to close. She didn’t bother commenting.

  “All right, Katherine?” said her mother in a leading tone.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the blankets.

  As the door closed, she said, “And Katherine?”

  “Yes, Mother?”

  “You know I appreciate your taking care of Gestap. Not everyone has the nature to handle him as you do, including your sister.”

  The door shut.

  “You mean she’s scared of him,” grumbled Katherine as she hurriedly threw off the blankets and dashed for the bathroom.

  Ten minutes later she stepped out of a piping hot shower and threw on her sweater, jacket, and jeans. Stopping in the kitchen, Katherine grabbed an apple to munch on happily and made her way through the butler’s pantry, the formal dining room, and out to the mud room off the back entrance. There she grabbed her mud-covered boots from the stack that she, her sister, and their mother kept for treks to the forest and when they went out riding. Although, to be honest, it was mostly her that did the trekking. They tended to rely on her to get the freshest ingredients for spells or ordered them online from the twenty-four-hour coven delivery service.

  With a wry smile, Katherine grabbed her scarf off the door hook and remembered the first time her mother had told her about Broomstick Deliveries. She’d been so excited to see a real witch ride in on a broomstick like the storybook legends. Only to be quite disappointed to find out it was just clever marketing. The ingredients were acquired and stored by magic, but the delivery was anything but supernatural. In fact, it still surprised Katherine every single time she got an order of Himalayan mountain snow delivered by a woman with more metal in her face than on her Harley Davidson.

  Broomstick Deliveries did an admirable job getting high-quality ingredients from hard-to-find locations, but to Katherine there was still something special about walking through the moonlit forest to look for nocturnal salamanders or search ledge-by-ledge on the mountainside for glowing unicorn hairs trapped on branches. But the queen and her heir couldn’t stand getting their outfits dirty, their hair snarled, or their manicures chipped. So she almost always went alone. Which was why Katherine had been surprised, to say the least, to be harangued into Rose’s double-date only to find out it was outdoors. But leave it to the queen bee of Bethlehem High to venture into the middle of the woods and come out without a single hair in her French braid out of place.

  Clearing her mind with a wry shake of her head, Katherine stuffed on the boots and walked out through the back gate to head toward the shed they kept in the backyard. As she approached it, her feet crunched down into the thin layer of snow that had accumulated overnight. It was barely a light frost and would disappear with the dawn of the sun in less than two hours.

  As far as Katherine was concerned, that was a good thing. Rose romanticized the snow with all the merry feelings that it brought with it: the promise of hot cocoa in the parlor on All Saint’s Eve and a bright fire burning over wooden logs in the fireplace. Katherine snorted just thinking about it. In the South, snow meant melting water in freezing cold temperatures, which usually meant black ice. A hazard on any road or trail, particularly when Katherine took her midnight steed, Black Fire, out on the forest trails for a gallop. It was ridiculous to think of snow as anything but a hazard at best, an inconvenience at worst.

  As she approached the small shed, she took it in with a fond look. To an outsider it looked like a dilapidated and rickety shack made of tinfoil that sat forgotten and unattended in the backyard of the estate. Close to an enclosed swamp and open to the elements with weeds springing up on either side. In reality, it was a dilapidated shed that was falling apart at the seams where its pre-fabricated metal walls leaned in to the interior with telltale signs of rusty red on their edges. And that was just the way Gestap liked it.

  “Gestap, I’m coming in!” shouted Katherine as the moonlight shone down on the rusty old shed and the deceptively small swamp behind it.

  With a grunt she grabbed a hold of the metal door and pulled it back with a sharp yank of her elbow. It didn’t make it easy—a loud protest of creaky metal emitted as the door swung back reluctantly and the edge caught in the dirt. Sighing, she stepped forward and into the darkness of the shed beyond. Grabbing a flashlight off of a nearby shelf from memory, she clicked it on. Or at least she tried to.

  “Damn it, Gestap!” Katherine said in frustration. “Did the batteries die?”

  No answer came forth from the darkness except the slight sound of water sloshing close by.

  Katherine banged the long flashlight against her thigh. Hoping a jostle would get it going. It hurt her more than it did the flashlight, so she transferred the banging to the ground. Crouching down, she hit it in the soft packed dirt of the shed floor. She wasn’t stupid enough to bang it against the shed wall. Gestap definite
ly would not like that.

  With a flicker, the flashlight turned on. The beam of artificial light lit up the small interior of the shed and for the first time that morning she saw the creature she got up before the crack of dawn every morning to tend to. Gestap sat in a pool of brown mud in the center of the shed, glaring at her. She knew he was glaring because the dark red orbs that served as his eyes were staring straight at her and he wasn’t moving.

  Katherine sighed, “I’m here, aren’t I? Seriously, Gestap, what’s your problem?”

  He didn’t move.

  She glared at him. He glared back.

  “Do you want breakfast or not?”

  Slowly he rose from his seated position. As he rose, the mud sloughed off his head and down his slimy sides. Gestap looked like a giant toad with mottled green skin and purple dots everywhere. But no one would mistake his appearance for anything but deadly. He was the size of a Volkswagen Beetle and, more than that, he was a kobold. Every witch worth her salt knew what a kobold was. Every human that didn’t want to be bled dry knew to stay away from him.

  Ribbitt? he croaked from where he sat.

  She stared at him in astonishment with her left hand fisted on her hip and the flashlight held tightly in the other.

  “So you want to play games?” she said slowly.

  Rib-b-itt?

  Katherine groaned in disgust and turned away. “I’m going back to bed.”

  A masculine voice with the educated intonations of a British peer emerged from behind her retreating back. “Seriously, Katherine? I thought that was pretty funny.”

  She sniffed and turned to look over her shoulder. “You think everything is funny.”

  “Yep,” said the toad-like kobold as he moved his front arms back and forth in the mud, letting noxious vapors drift up from where they’d settled under the still top layer.

  “Eww, stop it,” she snapped. “You know that stuff stinks to high heaven!”

  “Stuff? This stuff is Indonesian hot spring mud imported directly from the islands mixed with pureed red snail intestines and black forest truffles.” he said in a purr. “It’s perfect.”