Spell Booked Excerpt

Excerpt from Spell Booked

“Can you see her?” Olivia fussed with her lipstick. “There’s no use in having spelled binoculars if you can’t see anything.”

“I can see just fine,” Elsie snapped back, refusing to allow her friend to take the binoculars from her. “She’s not out there yet. If she was, I’d tell you. Why don’t you get me another cup of tea?”

Olivia gave me the look, frown between her eyes and nose wrinkled like she’d smelled something awful.

Her smooth blond hair looked perfect, as always. Her gray eyes were impatient—as always. “Do something, Molly. Do we want to check out this new girl, or what?”

I smiled at her, amused as anyone would be with the comfort of long years of friendship. “I’m sure Elsie can see her as well as you could. She’s facing in the right direction.”

“Thank you, Molly.” Elsie inclined her head, and her large pink hat slid down into her face. “Oh dear. There must be something wrong with the spell. Everything has gone pink.”

I laughed, and Olivia grabbed the binoculars from Elsie.

“Let me see those.” She put them up to her eyes and adjusted the lenses. “Oh yes. There she is now. Pretty Dorothy Lane, librarian. She dropped her bag again. That girl needs some fashion sense. Why is she carrying a purple bag with those blue tennis shoes?”

“That’s not why we’re watching her,” I reminded Olivia. “Do you see anything around her?”

“Not yet. She’s still picking up the books and her cell phone.”

She put down the binoculars that had been spelled to see through the buildings that were between our shop and the downtown branch of the New Hanover Public Library.
“Why don’t we just go talk to her?”

“Oh no. No. No. No.” Elsie clicked her tongue as she said it and then righted her hat. “You know we can’t do that. We can summon her a little, and keep feeding magic her way. When she gets the glow about her, we’ll know she’s ready.”

Olivia gave back the binoculars with an impatient sigh. “Ladies, we are never going to get to Boca this way. We’ll be hundreds of years old before Dorothy Lane even realizes we’re looking for her. Is this the best we can do?”

Elsie rolled her expressive green eyes before putting the binoculars back up to her face.

It was a discussion we’d had many times before. The three of us needed Dorothy Lane, who was an orphan and a librarian recently graduated from East Carolina.
She was also an earth witch, with no knowledge of her abilities. She was powerful for a witch with no training, but she had no idea.

Unlike Elsie, Olivia and I had grown up in the practice of magic, with our mothers and grandmothers—along with a few aunts and uncles—showing us the way.
Dorothy had no one. It made a big difference.

Normally a small coven like ours wouldn’t have been interested in an unschooled witch, but we were desperate.

There comes a time in every witch’s life when she realizes that it’s time to retire. For me, it was when I meant to zap a ding out of my new car before my husband saw it and asked what happened.

Instead, I changed the color of the blue car to bright purple. Even worse, I couldn’t change it back. How humiliating!

Like everything else, even magic fades with time. Those little things you could do once with a snap of your fingers are now big things that can’t be done at all. I have been reduced to putting dishes in the dishwasher. Manually.

It’s shocking. Shameful!
But it happens to the best of us.

“You know it’s all we can do," I reminded her. “If we approach her in any way, it could be very bad for us. She needs to come to us on her own. Those are the rules.”

Olivia got up and paced around the counter in our shop, Smuggler’s Arcane.
She filled the kettle and then whispered a few words beside it. It only took an instant before it started whistling in her hand without touching the hotplate.
“See there? Things aren’t as bad as we make them out to be.”

Our three signature cups—my goldfish, Elsie’s flamingo, and Olivia’s star—were already on the table where we sat. Olivia put some tea into each cup and poured the hot water in.

Elsie picked up her cup to have a sip. She put down the binoculars. “Whatever did you do to this tea?”

Olivia picked up the binoculars again to have another look at Dorothy. “What do you mean?”

“Why is the tea coming out of the cup?”
We all stared at Elsie’s cup. It looked as though the tea leaves had grown tendrils and were reaching out over the edge.

“Oh my heavens!” Olivia knocked the cup out of Elsie’s hand. “What is that?”

I caught the cup, Elsie’s favorite for the past fifty years, and kept it from smashing on the floor.

“It’s nothing.” Elsie chuckled. “I think Olivia got her growth spell mixed up with her warming spell.”

“You see what I mean?” Olivia’s voice was high pitched in her moment of stress.
“How can we live this way? Yesterday, I almost shaved all the fur off Harper’s body.”

Harper was Olivia’s twenty-two pound, gray and white cat. His spirit was that of a British sailor from the 1500s with fascinating tales to tell of his sea voyages.

Elsie glanced at me, her lips quivering. I did the unforgivable and laughed back.

Olivia took all three of our cups to the little sink behind the counter. We’d only recently begun using it to wash our cups and other utensils. Too many were being mangled by our cleaning spells.

“I didn’t even have a chance to take a look at my tea leaves!” Elsie complained.

“I can tell you what you would’ve seen in those tea leaves,” Olivia said. “It’s not going to get better by itself, you know. We need to find those three witches to take our places and hand off our spell book. That’s the only way our lives are going to get any better.”