My Crazy Hex Boyfriend Read online

  My Crazy

  Hex-Boyfriend

  WOMBY’S SCHOOL FOR WAYWARD WITCHES

  SARINA DORIE

  Copyright © 2018 Sarina Dorie

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1723969281

  ISBN-13: 978-1723969287

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

  Tardy Bells and Witches’ Spells

  Hex-Ed

  Witches Gone Wicked

  A Handful of Hexes

  Hexes and Exes

  Reading, Writing and Necromancy

  Budget Cuts for the Dark Arts and Crafts

  My Crazy Hex-Boyfriend

  Spell It Out for Me

  Other Titles To Be Announced

  Table of Contents

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  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

  Excerpt from

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  http://sarinadorie.com/writing/short-stories

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  If you are reading this far in the Womby’s School for Wayward Witches series, I’m guessing you have read the other books as well. Whether you have stuck with the series because you love the quirky characters, you want to know if Clarissa will turn into a wicked witch like her mother, or you are waiting to see what happens with the potential love interests, I appreciate your enthusiasm.

  If you haven’t already signed up for my newsletter, I want to encourage you to do so. This helps me as an author connect to my readers, lets you know when books are being released, and gives me a way to gift you with free books and short stories.

  You can find the newsletter sign-up on my website: sarinadorie.com or you can go to: https://mailchi.mp/sarinadorie/authornewsletter

  Happy reading!

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Dread Pirate Derrick

  I sat in my empty classroom during my fifth-period prep, tearing paper from a pristine watercolor pad for the following class. A young man wearing a school uniform ran in. Antlers grew from his forehead, the same hue as his mop of sable hair. I knew Martin from his infrequent visits to Art Club.

  The teenager panted, out of breath and leaning against the doorframe after having raced up the stairs. “Mrs. Lawrence, come quick! Mr. Thatch needs you to cover for his class.”

  Had Martin been one of my actual students, he would have known I was Miss Lawrence, not Mrs. Lawrence. I didn’t bother to correct him.

  “Where is Mr. Thatch?” I asked. “Why does he want me to cover for him?” Other than it was my prep period and Thatch probably thought I didn’t have anything better to do. Knowing I couldn’t get out of doing a favor for another teacher, I stacked up the pads of watercolors, my gradebook, and a pile of papers I still needed to grade.

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Tell him I’ll be right down.”

  It would have been nice if just once the patron saints of art teachers had looked my way and decided to cut me a lucky break so I could actually do some prep work with the new supplies a Fae prince had gifted me with, but not today.

  I grabbed my green-and-black striped sweater from the chair behind my desk and headed down the stairs. It was frigidly cold in the dungeon. As I reached the landing at the bottom of the tower, I paused a moment, setting my papers on the banister to wrangle myself into my sweater. A flicker of movement caught my eye. My biological mother’s portrait hung on the wall.

  Alouette Loraline stared out from the painting, wearing a pointed hat and a high-necked gown reminiscent of the Victorian era. She was tall and regal, her cheekbones high and her nose elegantly sloped. Her smile was mischievous, her eyes the pale green of an icy pond. Her fair features were startling against the midnight of her hair. People said I looked like her, and I might have even more if it hadn’t been for my freckles and hot-pink hair.

  When I didn’t look directly at the painting, the emerald snake draped across her shoulders like a feather boa looked as though it slithered. The head of the reptile reared up with the jaws open to bite a raven gliding into the frame. Another serpent spiraled around her arm, the contrast of green with her black sleeve creating an undulating pattern of stripes.

  She held herself with a confident serenity, despite the way the animals around her attacked each other. That was the kind of witch I wanted to be: the calm in a stormy sea of chaos. The slight lift to her chin hinted at a strong will and a defiance she wasn’t afraid to let others see. There were moments I wanted to be like her, a great and powerful witch. That is, until I remembered her murderous ways.

  I glanced down at the sweater I’d selected, black with green stripes resembling the emerald snakes coiling up the black sleeves of her blouse. Already it felt like a bad omen.

  I continued down the steps into the bowels of the school. Sconces lit the walls with blue flames that made the walls look even moldier. Water dripped somewhere in the distance. Had I been nearing another teacher’s class, I would have heard a jumble of voices and the typical chaos of teenagers. Yet even when Thatch wasn’t in his classroom, students spoke in hushed whispers.

  Maya Briggs waved at me when I entered the room. The students in Thatch’s class clustered in groups around cauldrons at the counters in the back and the sides of the room. Textbooks lay open at their desks, and students chopped herbs for whatever magical experiment they were learning in alchemy. Thatch was nowhere in sight. I wondered if a magical emergency had come up somewhere in the school or one of his alarms had gone off, signaling an unregistered Witchkin had used magic in the Morty Realm. As great as it was that he was willing to serve as the school’s magical talent agent, if he dropped another student into my seventh-period class today, I wasn’t going to have enough chairs.

  “Ah! That wasn’t the right ingredient! My cauldron is boiling over!” Becca Harmon shouted. She looked human enough besides the long fingernails that resembled white claws.

  The students around the cauldron leapt back. Being the least magical teacher in the school, it shouldn’t have fallen on me to try to sub for one of the most dangerous classes. Fortunately, my common sense told me what to do in this circumstance. I used the sleeve of my sweater as a potholder and flung the lid off the cauldron so the heat wouldn’t be trapped inside.

  I waved to the orange flames licking the bottom of the pan. “Turn down the heat.”

  Becca waved her wand in the air, and the flames died away.

  Standing at the edge of the huddle, Balthasar Llewelyn laughed. Elf ears poked from his black hair.

  “You did that on purpose!” Becca pointed a claw-tipped finger at him.

  His lips drew back into a leering grin, exaggerating his goblin-like features. “You told me to throw in the chopped bat tongue, and I did.”

  “That wasn’t bat tongue. It was the shredded mushrooms.” Martin scanned the pages of a textbook. “Now we have to dump out the entire potion and start over.”

  “Look at my uniform.” Becca waved a hand over herself. For the number of holes in her black sweater, gray-and-silver skirt, and white blouse, she might have been attempting a swiss-cheese impression.

  I patted the girl on the back. “Go on up to Mr. Puck. He has some spare clothes.”

  She cast a dirty look at Balthasar. Between keeping an eye on the biggest troublemaker and perusing experiments to ensure no one was goofing off or doing anything dangerous, I didn’t get many papers torn from the watercolor pads, let alone get started on any grading. By the last ten minutes of the ninety-minute period, Thatch still wasn’t back. I sent a student to the administration wing to see if Mr. Puck, the school counselor, was available to take over so I could get back to my room before next period. Because it was a B day and I had even-numbered classes, I had Advanced Painting next.

  “We’re finished.” Martin tugged at my sleeve. “Can you grade our rugio juice?”

  “Um. . . .” I said.

  “You have to test it and see if it works,” he said.

  “What is this potion supposed to do?” I asked.

  “Mr. Thatch says if we get it right, we’ll be able to sprinkle it over the school food and it will make it taste better. If we get it wrong, we’ll probably poison ourselves and need to go see Nurse Hilda.”

  “Why don’t you stopper it up and put your name on it instead?” I suggested. “Mr. Thatch can decide if he wants you to poison yourselves later.”

  Puck came down to relieve me duri
ng the last minute of class. The man’s blond curls were in disarray, and the counselor looked even more frazzled than usual. “Where is Mr. Thatch now?”

  I apprised him of what I knew of the situation.

  “Damn it, he can’t bring more students. Our classes are maxed out as it is. I keep telling him to dismantle those alarms, but he refuses. I’ve got better things to do all day than watch his classes.” He pulled at his hair.

  I forced a smile. “As I understand it, if Mr. Thatch didn’t see who was using magic in the Morty Realm, Fae would swoop in to collect the children instead. Or am I misinformed? Is Mr. Thatch not saving these children from being drained or enslaved?”

  Puck’s lips pressed into a line. “Do you think our Mr. Thatch does this out of the kindness of his heart for us? No, he does it to sabotage our school.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “He keeps bringing students to the school, and Jeb feels bad and won’t turn them away. The more students we have, the more this burdens our budget. The worse off we are financially, the closer we come to closing. That’s what Thatch wants. It’s what the Fae want—all those children in the world to be theirs. He acts like he’s helping us, but he’s playing right into the Raven Queen’s hands.”

  Anger flared up in me. “Mr. Thatch is not in cahoots with the Raven Court.”

  And yet . . . even Khaba had thought he was. I missed my friend, the former dean of discipline. I wanted to trust Khaba’s judgment, but he might have been blinded by his personal bias against Thatch. On the other hand, Thatch had lied to me multiple times. He’d told me Derrick, my former boyfriend, was dead, and Khaba seemed to think he was alive. What if Thatch was still loyal to his former queen? I couldn’t believe it.

  Or perhaps I just didn’t want to.

  “Hey, Mr. Puck!” a girl shouted. “Do you want to try out my rugio juice? It’s supposed to make the school food taste good.”

  Puck ignored the student. I didn’t care if he tested one of their potions and ended up needing Nurse Hilda’s werewolf-poop elixir to get better.

  I gathered up my grade book and ungraded papers. “Thank you for coming down so I can return to my class.”

  Puck smirked. After I said it, I wondered if my courtesy meant I now owed him a favor. Thanking someone in the Unseen Realm could cost someone her immortal soul.

  I made it to my classroom and readied my attendance sheet. As soon as students started filtering in, I realized I’d left the stack of watercolor papers in Thatch’s room. I sent a student to retrieve the supplies we needed for class.

  For warm-ups, I asked students to read the first paragraph of the article I had provided on Georgia O’Keeffe. They used the literacy strategies we’d been practicing to jot down the topic sentence and any vocabulary words they didn’t understand.

  “Why do we have to do this?” Ben O’Sullivan complained. “This is art, not English class.”

  “That’s right. You don’t have an English class,” I said. “But if you did, it might help you with your History of Magic, Fae Studies, Alchemy, and Protective Wards classes. If you practice literacy strategies with me, it will help you in all of those classes.”

  A whistling shriek like the cry of a fabled banshee rushed in through the cracks in the walls and between the boarded-up shutters. Candles flickered in the Gothic chandelier above. I paused in my explanation, wondering if the sound came from weather or magic.

  The wind outside blustered so hard it threw open the shutters, making the papers in the room spiral in miniature tornadoes. My pink hair danced into my eyes. With the maelstrom came the perfume of freshly cut grass and faraway spices. The warm air smelled like flowers and blossoming fruit and summer. The out-of-season smells confused my senses. The air was so thick with magic, it was difficult to breathe.

  The hairs on my arm prickled in warning. This was wind magic. Derrick, my crazy ex-boyfriend, was an Elementia, a wind affinity. Could this really be his magic after his heart had been stolen by the Raven Queen and I’d feared he was dead?

  The last time Derrick had used wind magic to burst the shutters of my classroom open, he had delivered a message fluttering on the pages of a breeze.

  This time, he was here.

  For me.

  I doubted he cared whom he hurt in the process of snatching me for the Raven Queen.

  A student ran past me to grab a handout twisting in the air above his head. I pointed to the door, shouting to be heard above the roar of wind, trying to warn them of the impending danger, but the students were all too busy chasing after their papers. Teenagers ran to the windows to close shutters that had burst open, while others held down the supplies.

  Why in the H-E-double-hockey-sticks did Thatch have to pick today of all days to be gone? I had to make sure my students didn’t get snatched.

  “Away from the windows!” I shouted and pointed to the door. I grabbed a student and shoved her toward the exit, but before I could say more, the air was sucked out of my lungs.

  The wooden ceiling creaked and groaned above. The frenzy of students stilled as they clutched at their throats and chests, desperate to breathe. The banshee scream of the wind died down. I gasped in a breath, as did the students around me.

  “Look,” said Trevor, my youngest student, who stood at the window pointing. “How does it float like that?”

  I didn’t want to know what it was. “Get away from the window.” I grabbed him by the collar and yanked him back. “Everyone, get away from the—”

  A terrible roar muffled the voices of the students. The ceiling splintered into a thousand shards, sucked away by the storm. Ancient stone crumbled on one side of the room. A giant blow struck the side of the tower. Something smashed its way in. Students tumbled into each other and fell to the floor, screaming. Black feathers swirled past.

  It had to be Derrick with the Raven Queen. We were screwed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  And I’ll Get Your Little Art Class Too!

  My heart thundered with fear. A brick hit my shoulder, tumbling me off kilter, and I stumbled to my knees. Students screamed, their voices lost in the screech of wind.

  I reached inside me for the electric magic of the Red affinity, but there was nothing to grasp. I was empty inside. I hadn’t taken Periwinkle up on her offer to recharge my magical batteries through touch magic, and now I was suffering the consequences.

  Professor Felix Thatch was one of the most powerful Witchkin at the school. After Derrick had drained me and killed me, it was Thatch who had resurrected me with the forbidden art of necromancy. He might be able to stop the Raven Queen’s attack, but he was away recruiting students. Khaba, our dean of discipline, also might be able to stop this, but he was gone because I had accidentally released him from the spell binding him to the school and he’d gone postal on us in an evil-genie sort of way.

  There were other Witchkin teachers who might be able to help, but they would be busy saving their own students from Fae. Once again, it was up to me, the least magical teacher, to get students out of harm’s way.

  “Duck and cover!” In the maelstrom of wind and rain, I shouted directions at the students, pointing to the exit. “Get downstairs.”

  Students ran to the door. Some crawled. I found Trevor clinging to the legs of a table, the wind blowing so fiercely he would have been carried away if he hadn’t latched on to something. I held on to the little guy. He was much smaller than the rest since he was only twelve and shouldn’t even have been in high school.

  In the chaos that had broken loose, I had failed to notice what had torn away the ceiling. A giant shadow loomed over us, blocking out the light of day. I half expected to see a murder of crows. Instead, I saw the bottom of a giant ship hovering above me, the stern having crashed through my classroom. I didn’t have time to wonder how it could float there.

  I hauled Trevor toward the door to the stairs, but the doorway was clogged worse than the arteries of a super-size-me McDonald’s patron. Students shoved each other and trampled over supplies to get out.

  The wind died enough that men descended rope ladders without swaying too greatly. A man pointed to me and yelled something up to the ship. Another man with a pistol in his belt and a knife held between his teeth lowered himself from a rope.