Witches Gone Wicked

  Witches Gone Wicked

  WOMBY’S SCHOOL FOR WAYWARD WITCHES

  SARINA DORIE

  Copyright © 2018 Sarina Dorie

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1985888025

  ISBN-13: 978-1985888029

  OTHER BOOKS IN THE womby’s school for wayward witches SERIES listed in order

  Prequels to Womby’s School to Wayward Witches:

  Tardy Bells and Witches’ Spells

  Hex-Ed

  Womby’s School for Wayward Witches Series:

  Spell Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

  Hex Crimes

  Hexes and Exes

  Reading, Writing and Necromancy

  Budget Cuts for the Dark Arts and Crafts

  My Crazy Hex Girlfriend

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Excerpt from Hex-Ed

  in the Womby’s School for Wayward Witches Series

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am fortunate to have so many supportive friends and family encouraging my endeavors. From an early age I had a mother who was my number one fan. I appreciated the early years of encouragement and the later years of brutal honesty. I am thankful I have a husband who enables my creative addiction. I wouldn’t be able to write if Charlie didn’t go in his man cave and entertain himself with World of Warcraft during the long hours it takes to produce a novel.

  Thank you Night Writers, Alpha Readers, Visionary Ink, Wordos, and Eugene Writers Anonymous for helping me make this series the best it can be. Justin Tindel and Daryll Lynne Evans, you gave me hope and a writing community at a time when both were lacking in my life. James S. Aaron, your suggestion that I’m writing a cozy witch mystery was brilliant.

  Eric Witchey, your classes always inspire me to write better craft. If only I had been born with a witchy last name like you were. But one can’t have everything.

  CHAPTER ONE

  We’re Not in Kansas Anymore, Totoro

  The moment I learned I was a powerful witch and destined for a life of magic was the best day of my life. Finally, I had my chance to learn to control my powers at Womby’s School for Wayward Witches.

  Forget my dream of being a student at Hogwarts when I turned eleven. I was going to be an art teacher at a real magical high school. The administration didn’t even mind my lack of experience. I had thought that would be a problem since I hadn’t completed my student teaching and didn’t have an official teaching license.

  Best of all, I would be reunited with my high school sweetheart, Derrick, now that I knew he was here in the Unseen Realm. We would live happily ever after.

  Assuming I found him … and he didn’t hate me.

  Cheerful afternoon sunlight filtered through the unshuttered windows of my very own kingdom a.k.a. classroom. It was an immense room with a high ceiling over gray basalt brick walls and beautiful hardwood floors that would make a historian drool. Someone had written: Welcome, Clarissa Lawrence on my chalkboard in elegant cursive.

  My desk was made from scarred wood that looked as though it had been through battles of Witchkin past. I’d spent the morning scrubbing the walls and floor and wiping down tables and chairs with Lysol and bleach. At last I was ready to feng shui the furniture into a harmonizing environment for student learning and effective classroom management.

  My favorite composition of tables, which I’d seen in the Morty Realm, was shaped like a U with the teacher’s presentation area at the opening. It felt friendly and democratic. By the time I was finished dragging the tables, my muscles were fatigued and my lower back ached.

  Still, there was no rest for the wicked, and that was me.

  I tried to tape my posters to the walls, but they kept falling off the uneven stone surface. I didn’t expect the stapler to work, but I tried it anyway. Tacks weren’t any better. Among my office supplies, I unearthed a roll of duct tape. The custodians at my last school had chewed me out for using duct tape. I didn’t want to make the janitors mad, but I didn’t know what else to use.

  There was one thing I hadn’t tried. Magic.

  I’d accidentally used magic plenty of times, and without my fairy godmother’s potions suppressing my abilities in the Morty Realm where magic hadn’t been allowed, I just might be able to do magic. It was unlikely I would accidentally turn anyone into a toad. Students wouldn’t be arriving until next week and hardly any staff was on sight yet.

  The custodians would later thank me for not using duct tape, I told myself.

  I stood on the stool and held Picasso’s Guernica up on the wall. The poster was huge, five feet long, and the cubist-style scene was painted in shades of gray. I focused my will onto the corners where I wanted it to stick. I thought about kissing, since that had set my powers into motion in the past.

  It felt like I should say magic words, so I gave it my best. “Abracadabra. Stick to the wall.” I enunciated clearly and managed not to say any unintended words after the fiasco of saying “abra-cadaver” last summer.

  I let go of the poster. It remained against the wall for about two seconds before falling.

  Maybe I needed to rhyme. “Poster, I’m rubber. You’re glue. Stick to this wall, witchy-poo.” Not my best rhyme, but it was all I could come up with on the spot. For good measure, I added, “Presto chango!”

  It remained against the wall. Yes! I was a witch! I stepped down from the stool. Ten seconds later, the poster peeled off the wall and fell on my head. As I tried to grab the poster, it gave me a papercut on my finger. The cut was deep enough that I bled onto the paper.

  “Aarrrgh! Gosh darn it!” Under my breath I may have added a few choice swearwords. I jumped onto the stool, held the poster up again, and beat it with my fist. “Stupid! Stupid, poster!” Not exactly magical words, but I felt something shift inside me, like my organs were rearranging themselves. The room shimmered and smelled sharp.

  The poster held this time. I hopped off the table and admired my handiwork. Maybe I had to get angry to do magic. Or maybe it was the blood.

  I was just about to turn away when the cubist-style bull in the painting shook its head and brayed in anguish. The horse writhed as it trampled a man. A woman wailed, clutching her dead child to her breast. People flailed and screamed, the blocky angles of their bodies shifting and shuffling. The explosion in the background beyond the window in the scene shook the interior of the house. The walls crumbled into geom
etric shapes and rained down on the people and animals. Crimson dripped through the grays of the painting, splattering man and beast alike.

  The painting was about a Spanish town being bombed. I had admired the way Picasso had captured desperation and chaos in his angular and abstract style. Never before had I felt their terror this profoundly. This felt like war. Tears stung my eyes.

  The lightbulb in the painting flickered and went dark, but the light outside the window grew so intense it washed everything inside with white. Monochromatic flames lashed at the building and the people in the painting. Pigment leached into the grays, the flames turning yellow and orange. Smoke billowed out of the scene, stretching beyond the edges of the paper.

  I was in awe of the magic I had done. Then it sank in. I’d started a fire!

  Flames licked the stone wall. Ashes from the poster fell on me. Black smoke clouded up to the high ceiling. The fire turned indigo and devoured the dried moss growing on the wall. On the plus side, it also got rid of the black mold problem.

  I looked around the sparse room for something to put out the flames. At the back of the room in the nonfunctional sink was a bucket of water. I ran around my U of tables, snatched it up, and flung it at the wall. There was only enough water to douse a section of fire. It sputtered out only to return in full force a few seconds later. The fire kept spreading. Smoke filled the room.

  Holy batwings! I had really done it this time. I could see it now. Fired on day one of my new job.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Oopsie!

  I ran to the door of the classroom, shouting down the stairs. “Help!” I tried to say more, but I choked on a lungful of smoke.

  “Merlin’s balls. What is that foul stench?” said a man out on the landing. Each word was enunciated in such crisp British I couldn’t have mistaken the voice if I’d wanted to.

  My spine went rigid. Appearing like an unwelcome smell in a crowded elevator, Professor Felix Thatch pushed his way past me. His nose was aquiline and long, his dark hair shoulder-length and far nicer than mine—he probably used magic on it instead of hairspray—and he would have been handsome if he didn’t have a resting bitch face at all times. He watched me through heavily lidded eyes, lazily like a predator might watch prey.

  My colleague was the last person I wanted as a witness to my colossal mess-up.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked in his cool monotone.

  I coughed by way of answer. A bubble around him kept the swirling arms of smoke from touching his brown tweed suit. He cracked his knuckles and gestured with his hands. An invisible wind forced the smoke out of the room. My breath was stolen along with it, and I thought of all the science fiction movies I’d watched with people’s air supply in their ships being sucked into outer space. He raised his hands at the fire, waggled his fingers, and the blue flames extinguished. The moment he lowered his hands, I gasped in air again. Unfortunately, that was the moment the flames returned twice as high, heat radiating off them like the infernos of hell. More smoke billowed out.

  “Bollocks,” he muttered.

  Considering he was a trained Witchkin, his use of British profanities didn’t strike me as the best of signs. I retreated closer to the door, ready to call for help again.

  He removed a slender black wand made from twisted wood from his breast pocket and punched it in the air toward the wall. Orange and gold ribbons of water shot out and drowned the blue flames. Another gust of wind pushed the smoke out the windows, and again the air was momentarily sucked from my lungs.

  He pointed his wand accusingly at me. “Not only did you manage to set your classroom on fire, but you somehow summoned flames of seraphim, which cannot be put out by normal means. If I hadn’t sensed magic at work and investigated, you would have burned the school down.”

  Right. I guessed this was why I shouldn’t do magic. Lesson learned. Duct tape it was.

  “Sorry. It was an accident.” I wiped soot from my sweaty brow and pushed my hot-pink hair out of my eyes. “Thanks.”

  The wall was charred and black now. Interestingly, the corners of the poster remained. Even though it was gone, I couldn’t stop seeing the horror of Guernica in the place it had been.

  “I’m tired of hearing about your accidents. You’re a menace.” He slipped his wand into the pocket of his old-fashioned vest and straightened his dark cravat.

  I edged away.

  “You should never have been hired. Obviously, a mistake has been made.” He tugged at the bottom of his suit jacket, imperiously staring down his long nose at me. “You are coming to the principal’s office with me.”

  No mistake had been made, but the truth was more awful than I had imagined.

  I sat in the principal’s office, my jaw dropping as Jebediah Ebenezer Bumblebub told me the news. Unlit candles rested in a row at the front of his desk, stacks of books, a crystal ball, and assorted vials littered the remaining space. Sunlight filtered in through the Art Deco-style stained glass of the double windows to the right, painting the room in the shifting hues of a rainbow.

  “What do you mean, I’m not ready to do magic? I need this.” The words spilled from my mouth before I had time to censor myself and sound grateful for my new position as the arts and crafts teacher. “I thought that was the reason I was accepted as a teacher at this school—not just to teach art—so I can learn to control my powers.” Besides the fact that it would be nice to actually have sex someday without electrocuting someone, magic was cool.

  I wanted to be one of the cool kids. Or teachers, anyway.

  The principal sat behind his mahogany desk. He leaned back in a century-old chair that creaked under his weight. “Yep, that’s it exactly. You got a lot of learnin’ to do.” Jeb resembled the stereotypical wizard with his long gray robes, the only difference the bandana peeking out from under his snowy beard and the hat on his head looking more like a Stetson with a cone attached than a witch’s hat. “The problem is, we ain’t ready yet. I never seen the likes of your kind of magic.” His accent reminded me of a cowboy from a Western. “Think how dangerous it would be for you to be castin’ with wild magic when our students are about. They’re an unpredictable mess as it is.”

  All the excitement and joy of being at the school withered away, leaving me aching and hollow inside. Once again, I was the freaky teacher who didn’t fit in. I’d already signed the contract, arrived back at the school days before in-service, and had started getting my classroom ready.

  Jeb continued on as I studied the messy expanse around us. His office resembled one-part wizard study, and one-part Old West parlor with Victorian settees and a full bar of liquors most high school students would give anything to pillage. To the left of the desk, a fireplace sat between columns of bookshelves. Various other items were stashed on the shelves haphazardly: kerosene lamps, candles, and other fire hazards among them. If there was such a thing as a fire marshal in the Unseen Realm, I was pretty sure he had missed this room.

  What I’d first taken to be a cow skull—but I now suspected might be otherwise—decorated the wall between paintings of men wrangling cattle-sized dragons. From the amount of clutter piled into every corner, the room looked like it doubled as the storage closet for extra supplies.

  “So that’s it? I get to be here, but not do anything?” I asked.

  “You were hired on as a teacher, not a student,” Felix Thatch said from where he stood by the mantle. Had he been anyone else, I might have found his British accent and good looks sexy. The sour-grapes face he gave me, though, ruined any chance of that.

  I wiped soot from my cheek, suddenly feeling self-conscious from the way he eyed me.

  The principal chewed on one end of his curly mustache. “That’s right, partner. You’re here for the teachin’. Everything else is second to that.”

  Thatch trailed a finger along the ledge of one of the locked glass cases that contained books. “What did you think would happen, we would just hand
you magic on a silver platter and allow you to use it?”

  Jeb held up a hand. “Whoa, boy. Rein yourself in, eh?”

  I was high on Thatch’s shit list, possibly because my biological mother, former Headmistress Alouette Loraline, had been his enemy. And possibly because I hadn’t made the best of first impressions. Or second impressions.

  Jeb looked to me. “Miss Lawrence, allow me to explain.”

  I fidgeted in the wooden chair across from him.

  “I need you to understand, I’d be mighty neglectful of my duties as principal if I didn’t ensure the protection of the students at our school. You hain’t exactly got a record for harmless, predictable magic.”

  Thatch tossed his midnight hair back in contempt. “The Morties are fortunate I happened to witness your blunders or else no one would have been present to undo them.” He paused with the drama of a thespian. “You’re welcome.”

  “Mortals,” Jeb said to me. “Morties is our term for the mundane mortals living in your world.”

  I nodded. My mom—adoptive mother—had told me that much when she’d explained we weren’t biologically related. I’d never suspected we weren’t since I had green eyes like Mrs. Abigail Lawrence and red hair—only, I dyed mine pink these days. Now I knew she was my fairy godmother, half-Fae and half-mortal—a Witchkin selected because she looked so much like me.

  “It’s a mighty rare thing indeed to find a woman twenty-two years of age with more powers than all get-out in the Morty Realm, but sure ’nuff, there you were. Usually by this point, an excess of electronics, cold iron, and synthetic doodads would have weakened and deteriorated a Witchkin’s ability to produce magic,” Jeb said. “That’s if the Fae don’t claim a Witchkin first.”

  Perhaps the drain of electronics was why my adoptive mom had budgeted to buy me a new iPhone for Christmas every year. She hadn’t exactly wanted me to embrace my powers. Abigail Lawrence wanted to hide magic from me, fearful I was going to get hurt or draw the attention of Fae who would snatch me up. I’d come to realize neither fear was that farfetched.