Risky Magic: A Trash Witch Novel Read online

  Risky Magic

  A Trash Witch Novel

  Tori Centanni

  Copyright © 2018 by Tori Centanni

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover Art by Lou Harper

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Risky Magic

  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

  About the Author

  Also by Tori Centanni

  Risky Magic

  I’m Avery Burke. They call me the Trash Witch because I play fast and loose with spell ingredients. Personally I think of myself as an innovator, pushing the boundaries of what magic can do.

  Imagine my surprise when the handsome young Council member Jaden Blackmore asks me for help finding a missing witch behind the Council’s back. No matter how dangerous and reckless it is to defy the Council, I just can't say no to Jaden's beautiful green eyes.

  But then parallels to my own mother's disappearance come to light and enemies crawl out of the woodwork. With the help of Jaden and my uptight, rule-abiding roommate, we must test the bounds of my magic and find the missing witch before whatever happened to him happens to me, too. And it turns out my magic may not be what it seems…

  Chapter 1

  My magic potions weren’t selling.

  That wasn’t anything new: I had a reputation for playing fast and loose with spell ingredients, which was why my own coven referred to me as the “trash witch” behind my back. And sometimes to my face. Still, it was a bummer on a slow night when I needed the rent money.

  I checked my phone but reception was awful in the Underground and the internet wouldn’t load. All I could do was stare at the clock. At four in the morning, the Underground Market was dead, figuratively speaking. Even Valerie’s side of our shared table was devoid of customers. Seth, my black cat, was curled up on top of my blue cooler that sat beside me, full of potions that no one was here to buy.

  My magical potions never sold well, but occasionally I’d get a customer who was willing to try their luck with my brand of magic. If you asked me, my potions and charms were just as good as Valerie’s, but rumors had done a good job of painting my wares as “unreliable” and “occasionally explosive.” Like all magic won’t explode if mishandled or left in a hot car. I mean, really.

  Sadly, even mundane humans were warned to buy only from Valerie Lopez, the dark haired young witch, not Avery Burke with her wild copper hair and risky magic.

  A man came toward our table. Valerie scowled at his approach. The guy, whose name I didn’t know, was a warlock who sometimes moonlighted at the market taking up magical-for-hire jobs. He nodded amicably at us. Val continued scowling. I just studied my phone rather than make eye contact.

  I had nothing against warlocks personally, but everyone knew they were shady as heck and not the sort of people you wanted to be seen doing business with if you valued your reputation. And mine couldn’t take another hit.

  Once he was gone, Valerie scooted her folding chair back, stood and stretched. She wore a black blouse and short black skirt, with black leggings. All she needed was a black witch hat and she’d be ready for Halloween. Her dark brown hair was pulled into a tight, neat bun and she wore no makeup, not that she needed it with her clear skin and glowing complexion. She was my polar opposite: I was pale with a few freckles, coppery untamed red hair, and I wore blue jeans and a t-shirt beneath my red leather jacket.

  “Hey, Avery, I’m going to take a walk before I fall asleep,” she said.

  I glanced again at the clock on my phone. Only two minutes had passed. That couldn’t be right, could it?

  “Why don’t we just pack up and call it a night?” I suggested. It had been slow all evening but by two am, the drip of customers had dried up entirely. The Underground Market stood mostly empty, except other vendors and sellers who, bored, were walking around to take a look at their competition. Tonight was a total bust. Even Valerie had barely made a dent in the potions she’d brought to sell.

  “We have the table until five this morning,” she said.

  “So? No one’s here.”

  “I already paid for it.”

  Valerie and I were at the market pretty regularly since selling potions and charms was how we paid our bills. We rented space from the market organizer, a cold, mysterious guy named Takeshi, who I was pretty sure was some kind of dragon shifter. We paid rent for the table, though hours of use often changed, ranging from three in the afternoon to seven in the morning. The Market was technically twenty-four hours, but shoppers wouldn’t find much between, say, six am and mid-afternoon. Supernaturals were not, by and large, morning people.

  So our table hours were optional. We paid for the space but we weren’t obligated to sit there when no one was around.

  “So? It’s not like we’re raking in the bucks,” I said, with a gesture to the empty street in front of us. The table across the street was also empty, which emphasized my point. “Let’s cut our losses and get home. I could use some sleep.”

  “It’s not even an hour.”

  I checked the time. Another minute had gone by. It was going to be a long fifty-six minutes. “Exactly. Let’s just go.”

  Valerie rolled her eyes. “I’ll be back in ten. Watch my stuff. And if a customer comes, don’t try to slip them your potions instead. I don’t want anyone thinking my stuff doesn’t work.”

  With that, she headed down the long market street and left me sitting with nothing to do. I looked over at my cat Seth, who lifted his little head, blinked his eyes, and then curled back up and went to sleep. Traitor.

  The Underground Market was exactly what it sounded like: a supernatural market that took up several blocks beneath Pioneer Square. After Seattle’s Great Fire of 1889, the mortal residents had rebuilt the new city on top of the old one. It was a common practice in larger cities in those days and a bonus for supernaturals, who used the tunnels and sunken streets to carve out spaces for themselves. There was a popular tour of the Underground for curious mundanes, but it never reached the market.

  Anyone who found the market could buy a variety of wares from a variety of vendors who operated tables and booths along the stretch of street and its alleys. Electric lamps were strung on black cords and dangled overhead. A mural of a blue sky, complete with clouds, had been painted on the ceiling, giving the whole space an open-air feel.

  When we’d first opened shop, Valerie had warned me not to buy, touch, or eat anything, even the free samples, because faeries and warlocks had ways of binding you into obligation just from taking a bite of a free cupcake. She’d gotten slightly less paranoid in the year we’d been set up and now, she was even willing to leave me alone for an entire ten minutes.

  Not that I was trying to get myself in trouble. Like Valerie, I only wanted to sell the potions and charms I put so much work into so I could pay bills.

  A few minutes after Valerie left, a man came walkin
g down the stone street alone, passing booths without even pausing to look. I expected him to stop at the succubus’s tent a few doors down. A lot of men who came charging into the market headed straight for her. But he passed her velvet ropes without a glance. And then he stopped at my table. I set down my phone. The man was middle aged, maybe early forties, with a little gray in his dark hair and a few lines on his face. He wore slacks and suit jacket. Sweat beaded his upper lip and his cheeks were flushed.

  “I hear you have the best money potion,” he said.

  “We do!” I said, even though technically it was Valerie’s money magnet potion that was renowned for its great results. The buyer would drink it and within seven days have some kind of monetary windfall. Sometimes it would only be a small windfall, like maybe finding ten bucks in a parking lot or something, but it always worked.

  My money potion wasn’t as well tested because fewer people wanted to take a chance on me.

  “Great,” the man said. “I’ll take one. How much?”

  The irony of spending money for a money potion was not lost on me, but a lot of people didn’t see the problem. In theory, it could pay off big time, but in reality it was more like a lottery ticket. You might win a million dollars but it was more likely you’d find a fiver you’d left in a coat pocket instead, and may not break even.

  “Twenty,” I said, standing so I could dig one of Valerie’s potions out of her cooler, since that was certainly the one he’d come for.

  The man winced. “How about ten?”

  I froze. I couldn’t sell Valerie’s potion for ten bucks. She’d kill me. At twenty bucks a pop, with the cost of ingredients, she was making only a few dollars a bottle. But mine…I used different ingredients, cheaper ones. I substituted the rare dragon flower leaf with ordinary ivy leaf, for example. That helped keep the cost down.

  And that man hadn’t specifically said he wanted her version of the potion. He didn’t seem picky. Just twitchy and desperate.

  “Fine, ten,” I said. The man looked visibly relieved, his shoulders relaxing.

  I pulled Seth off my cooler. The cat wiggled out of my hands and jumped up on the seat I’d vacated. I opened the cooler and retrieved a small glass bottle full of green liquid. The green was, admittedly, from food coloring, but Valerie and I both did that. We’d learned early on that the grayish, ugly color most potions naturally became was too unappealing to sell. People wanted colors that coordinated with what they were getting and a little showmanship never hurt anyone. On the label, I’d written “Money Magnet.”

  The man handed me a ten and took the potion. He stuffed it into a pocket and quickly turned and walked away.

  Valerie returned just in time to see him retreat.

  “What’d he buy?” she asked.

  “Money potion,” I said, pocketing the money.

  Valerie frowned. “Yours? Does he know it’s a cheap knock-off?”

  “It works,” I insisted. I was like ninety percent sure that it did. Magic was all about intent. It was about using objects to tell your spells what your intention was and then infuse that energy into the brew. So it shouldn’t matter if you used the exact specified ingredient the spell called for or not as long as your intentions were clear and your magic was powerful.

  “If you say so,” Valerie said, dubious.

  “I used my mother’s own spell for that one,” I said, which was true. Even mom had substituted ivy for the rare plant that originally came from the lands of Faerie and was incredibly hard to grow in the mortal world.

  Valerie opened her mouth but stopped short of insulting my mother. Even she wouldn’t stoop that low. But her eyes burned with the need to point out that my mother had had a similar reputation for bucking the conventions of magic in order to make spells less expensive and more accessible. Of course, that was before she’d vanished without a trace.

  “Let’s just hope he doesn’t come back for a refund,” Valerie said.

  “He’s human. He won’t even if it fails.”

  Valerie glared.

  Humans, who were often loath to believe in magic in the first place, were quick to chalk up magical failures to the fact that all magic was a scam. It was worth a shot to them, but it was a long shot. And if it failed, they were usually too embarrassed to come back and complain.

  “It won’t fail. It works, okay? You’re not the only witch at this table.”

  Valerie made a soft noise, like a harrumph, and gave me a look that said she thought that was entirely questionable. Then she sat back down in her chair. My seat was currently occupied by Seth, who had gone back to sleep, so I stood for the rest of the tedious hour.

  Back home, we unloaded our coolers into the refrigerator we kept in the small one-car garage since neither of us owned a car. Magical potions could be kept at room temperature for about twelve hours before their effectiveness started to fade. If we kept them refrigerated, they’d last about a week, long enough for Valerie to sell her stock and me to sell more than I would otherwise. I usually had to throw a good chunk of mine out but I’d learned to make smaller batches so I didn’t have as much waste.

  Our house was a small one-story craftsman with a tiny rectangle of backyard fenced in behind it. Our rent was outrageous for the size but in Seattle there wasn’t much you could do about that. And as witches, we needed the garden, small as it was. The kitchen was a decent size, newly remodeled before we’d moved in, with a large center island where we did most of our spell prep and spell work. The living room was “cozy” with a used blue sofa and ugly brown chair that had been mine since I was a kid.

  Down the hall were two bedrooms, both about the same size, and a single bathroom at the very end of the hall that we shared. Like everything about us, our bedrooms were polar opposites. Valerie’s walls were lined with bookshelves. She had a twin bed with a dark burgundy duvet and a small walnut nightstand with a lamp where she often stacked more books. Her bed was made and her room was clean, if you didn’t count stacks of books next to the overfilled shelves.

  My room was messy with random socks on the floor (I needed to do laundry) and papers piled on top of my dresser. I’d painted the walls of my bedroom a bright pinkish orange and my bedspread was electric blue.

  Exhausted, I fed Seth his dinner and then stumbled into the bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth. When I was done, I came out to find that Valerie was already shut in her room. I grabbed my cat and went to bed, determined to find a way to make more money this upcoming week.

  Chapter 2

  The next day, I found Valerie seated at the kitchen island with her laptop open as she ate a piece of toast. She looked up briefly and muttered “Good morning.”

  “What are you working on?” I asked, stifling a yawn. It was a little after noon and I’d just dragged my butt out of bed, mostly because Seth kept standing on my chest and meowing in my face to let me know he was ready for breakfast.

  “Filling out sales numbers on my spreadsheet.” Her open ledger book sat next to her toast. She was meticulous about noting every sale. I kept count in my head, which worked okay, especially since my numbers weren’t stellar.

  “Fun stuff,” I said, opening the cabinet where I kept the cat food. Seth wound around my legs. I grabbed a clean plate and plopped his fancy, grain-free salmon meal onto it. It looked like the kind of salmon canned for human consumption and it wasn’t cheap.

  Valerie, who hated the smell even though the smell was just normally fishy, not funky cat food stink, wrinkled her nose. “That cat is so spoiled.”

  “He’s my familiar,” I said, putting the plate down and petting his head as he bent down to eat.

  “He is not,” she said firmly, ever annoyed that I called him that.

  “Sure he is.” I watched him woof down the food. “He’s my little kitty soul mate.”

  “Not the same thing,” she insisted, like I didn’t know. “In order for him to be your familiar, you have to do the ritual.”

  I shivered. The ritual to crea
te a familiar involved summoning a demon, something I’d never done, and binding the cat’s soul to yours. It was way too dark and freaky for me, plus it would change Seth, who was a sweet, cuddly cat and didn’t deserve to have his soul tied up by demonic forces and threaded into mine. No thank you.

  “Cat adoption is enough ritual for me,” I said, and poured myself a bowl of cereal.

  “Then don’t call him a familiar,” she said. “People will get the wrong idea.”

  I paused, cereal box midair, and considered arguing that the only people around were the two of us, and also, who cared what anyone thought? But the truth was, Valerie cared. She cared a lot.

  I finished fixing my breakfast and ate while Valerie tapped away at her spreadsheet. Then it was time to get to work. Out in the garden, I watered the plants and pulled a few weeds before picking some of the ripe peppers and tomatoes and trimming the oregano.

  Back inside, I found Valerie had a spell set out on the counter. She wore goggles and looked like she was doing chemistry instead of spell work. In some ways, it was almost the same thing. Both required meticulous measuring and concentration. She got upset if I distracted her and god forbid I accidentally broke her circle if she had one open (some spells required them, while others did not), so I went into my room and pulled out my own spell book.

  It was good size, like a hardback novel, but not overly large like those spellbooks seen in movies. It was bound in leather and the paper had been enchanted never to wear or fade. It had been my grandmother’s and the spells and recipes were all scrawled in her neat cursive, with blank pages at the back. In some places, my mother’s notes were scrawled in the margins, where she’d substituted something to great effect or come up with an easier way to do the spell. I kept my own notes in the book minimal, since I was even more fast and loose with substitutions than my mom had been. She was willing to change an ingredient here or there. I was willing to swap out half the spell if it meant getting it done.