Page 6 of Bewitched by the Wicked Witch (The Bewitching Hour #4)

Three

Sage

" W hat are you doing here, Paige?" I demanded as I kicked the snow off my boots and onto my rickety porch. Paige stood with her arms wrapped around her body, her breath forming puffy clouds every time she spoke, her usual brightness dimmed by obvious worry.

"You changed your wards," she grumbled as she worried her lip, dry from the winter weather moving in.

"Why aren't you in school?" I asked with a lift of my eyebrow as I waved my hand over the door of the hut and walked inside.

The inside wasn't much better than the outside. It looked dilapidated; a hedge witch's paradise. Only I wasn't a hedge witch. I moved across the room past the old wooden furniture placed in the natural-looking living area to what appeared to be a back door.

"Bev is missing," she said before I could even ask why she wasn't in school. "But it's not just her, Sage. Four girls total—Ashlynn, Chrysanthemum, Periwinkle, and now Bev. All of them mixed-blood witches. All of them just... gone."

My chest tightened. Again, I waved my hand, silently saying the enchantment with my back to Paige, who I could hear shivering behind me.

My gaze flicked to the fireplace on the left.

It gave the illusion of being used, but no one ever lit a fire there.

There wasn't any practical reason to heat this area.

I waited a brief few seconds as the enchantment recognized my magical signature, and the panel appeared.

It opened and I stepped close, allowing it to scan my eye.

As it did, the door unlocked, and inside, the elevator waited.

I stepped inside as Paige followed, and we descended a level into the earth, where I lived and worked.

"The authorities are calling them runaways?" I asked as the elevator descended.

"Of course they are. Because who cares about shifter-blood witches, right?" Her voice cracked. "But Bev wouldn't run away. None of them would. Someone's taking them, Sage."

I turned to Paige, eyeing her again, waiting for her answer.

A long breath escaped her as blonde hair fell from her ponytail, brushing her expressive blue eyes.

Though a cousin several times removed, her mother had been my mother's best friend.

Despite our differences in coloring and the age gap between us, she always felt more like a little sister.

Like me, she was an orphan, raised by our gran, Bertie.

"Gran's going to lose her shit if you are caught skipping again.

" I narrowed my eyes at her. Her hands twisted tightly in front of her, fingers knotted as if trying to hold onto something, anything.

She clasped them until the knuckles turned white, her brow wrinkled as she continued to worry her dry lips. "What's wrong?"

I thought of the symbol I'd seen outside Hexes and Brews, the way the coffee shop had gone silent in my presence, the fresh missing posters that seemed to appear overnight.

The elevator dinged open, and my shoulder brushed hers as we moved out together.

"This is different," she muttered, her face going ashen as she fidgeted with a string unraveling from her blue knit sweater. Her voice lowered to a whisper. "These girls would never run away. Not all four of them."

I didn't know much about the other girls, but I knew they were all friends of Paige's.

During Paige's birthday parties or celebrations, most of her friends gave me a wide berth, keeping their distance.

Despite Paige's insistence that I wasn't a bad person, I'd told her many times not to spread that untruth.

They still refused to come near me, which was exactly what I wanted.

My gran, Bertie, and Paige were all I needed in this stupid magical town.

A hiss made me turn to see my over-fattened black Maine Coon, Cosmo, glaring in a way only cats could, as if to remind me of his existence.

He could feel my thoughts. I rolled my eyes at him, thinking as loudly as I could, as if I could forget you.

"It took you long enough," he complained, his long-haired tail twitching in the air as he tilted his nose up. His starlit gaze traveled over my body before narrowing in disapproval. "You forgot my danish. "

"Cindee wasn't working today. They had a new employee, Cate," I informed him. "Best not to eat anything from her. You might turn into a dog or frog."

"I suppose it's good that you didn't bring me back one," he sighed, his cat shoulders visibly slumping in sadness as he fell dramatically. "But now I will waste away to nothing. A shadow of my former magnificent self."

"Oh, shut up. You are the fattest, most spoiled familiar I've ever met!" I retorted, my hands going to my hips.

Paige's smile returned, slow and easy, her gaze flicking between us as the tight line of worry around her eyes gradually eased. "Goddess, I will never get used to that," she said, moving across the open room and falling into a chair.

Cosmo rose to his massive paws and stretched out his rounded belly, resting it on the ground briefly before he strutted off.

Familiars were hard to find. Very few witches these days had one.

Why? Because familiars found their witches, and they would only bond with the most powerful of them.

I'd just been unlucky enough to get the biggest, laziest of them.

"I should've named you Garfield," I called after him. He ignored me. His tail went higher, twitching as he disappeared around the corner to the kitchen. Most likely to get into something in the cabinets. Such a powerful ancient being, and yet his desire for snacks still led him.

Cosmo called out from the kitchen as I heard the creak of a cabinet opening. "You know very well that this isn't even my true form. I'm a majestic creature of power and grace." He paused dramatically. "Also, I'm getting quite tired of living on those awful kibble pellets you insist on buying. "

I rolled my eyes. Show off.

"Yes, I'm well aware of your 'majestic' form, too. Still doesn't change the fact that you spend most of your time napping and eating," I retorted, as he hissed in mock outrage. He stalked back into the room, his head held high as he gave up the search for snacks to defend his honor instead.

"I'll have you know that I am a creature of refined tastes and sophisticated needs," he said, sashaying his overly large black bottom to the sofa next to Paige before he plopped down and began cleaning his fur.

"Perhaps if you found yourself a companion of equal refinement, you wouldn't spend so much time with your little mechanical friend in the bedroom drawer?—"

"That's enough!" I interrupted him, feeling heat creep up my neck.

"I'm simply suggesting that perhaps some social interaction with actual people might improve your disposition," he continued innocently. "The sounds coming from your room at night suggest you're quite lonely?—"

"Cosmo," I warned, anger shimmering beneath me as black shadows and stars of my magic began to form at my fingertips, only irritating me further as I groaned and fisted them tightly.

Paige's gaze flicked between the two of us before she began giggling, the tension finally leaving her shoulders.

"I am so glad you gave him a voice where he could speak to anyone.

This is the best!" Her lips stretched into a wide grin, and my irritation dissipated seeing her smile.

It was rare to see her truly smile these days.

I could almost forgive Cosmo. Almost .

"You're the only one," I muttered, but my lips twitched at the corners as I held back a grin of my own.

"Tell me everything," I said, settling at my desk. "And I mean everything. When they disappeared, where they were last seen, who they were with."

I turned to the front of my desk, where six monitors lit up across the sleek white glass. I tossed my satchel down and leaned back into my chair, letting it mold to my body. The coffee was lukewarm, but I drank it anyway. Not a curse to be found.

Paige's relief was palpable as she sank into the chair across from me. "You believe me?"

"I've seen the signs," I said grimly. "Someone's hunting us, Paige. And from the way people have been looking at me lately, I think they're planning to pin it all on the town's resident wicked witch."

I sighed and then chucked the empty cup into the waste bin.

I looked over at Paige, who folded in on herself.

All signs of her earlier brief happiness were gone.

Her hands rubbed her denim jeans before she looked around as if she'd never been here before.

It was then that the dark circles under her eyes became apparent.

"Paige, what's really going on?" I asked. "You're more worried than you're letting on."

She nodded slowly. "It's the way they disappeared. Each girl was last seen alone, late at night. Bev was walking home from her job at the bookstore. Ashlynn was coming back from the library. They weren't running away, Sage. Someone took them."

"Are all the other girls mixed species like Bev?" I asked, my eyes narrowing as the wheels in my head turned .

Paige nodded. "All of them."

That explained why Paige was friends with them.

She was also of shifter descent. Rumor had it that it muddled the witch's blood and abilities, though there was very little evidence to support that claim.

The shifters were a relatively new addition to our community, just about three generations back.

Since then, they had intermingled and married into the witch community, becoming an important part of Old Hollows.

Still, there were those who resented their addition to the town. I knew that other paranormal towns had many different types of paranormals—fairies, sirens, banshees, vampires, demons, and giants. Not Old Hollows. It had been strictly a witch-only community for more than 300 years.