Hawthorn Witches: Demons & Dracaena, Sorcerers & Sumac, Werewolves & Wisteria (Hawthorn Witches Omnibus Book 1) Read online

  Hawthorn Witches Omnibus #1

  Including:

  Demons & Dracaena, Hawthorn Witches Novella #1

  Sorcerers & Sumac, Hawthorn Witches Novella #2

  Werewolves & Wisteria, Hawthorn Witches Novella #3

  By A.L. Tyler

  More Books by A.L. Tyler

  http://addisynltyler.blogspot.com/

  The Waldgrave Series

  Arrival of the Traveler

  Deception of the Magician

  Secrets of the Guardian

  Redemption

  The Spider Catcher

  Rabbit Bones

  Serpent’s Bite

  Pale Hound

  Lion’s Shadow

  Shattered Minotaur

  Fox Blood

  Hawthorn Witches

  Demons & Dracaena

  Sorcerers & Sumac

  Werewolves & Wisteria

  Vampires & Vinca

  Necromancers & Nettles

  Zombies & Zinnia (coming soon!)

  If you want to get emails about new releases, follow this link (note: this is only for news and new releases from author A.L. Tyler, and you can unsubscribe at any time): http://eepurl.com/btupaT

  Table of Contents

  Demons & Dracaena, Hawthorn Witches Novella #1

  Sorcerers & Sumac, Hawthorn Witches Novella #2

  Werewolves & Witches, Hawthorn Witches Novella #3

  Preview

  *****

  Demons & Dracaena

  Hawthorn Witches Novella #1

  Copyright 2015 A.L. Tyler

  Story © A.L. Tyler 2015. Cover art by A.L. Tyler. All rights reserved. http://addisynltyler.blogspot.com/

  Copyright: domenicogelermo / 123RF Stock Photo

  Edited by Sarah Read.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination and used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  *****

  For Harvey. Thanks for everything, kind stranger.

  *****

  Chapter 1

  “So, Mr. Hendal gave up today,” Gates said, shoving her chemistry book into her packed locker. It hit against a scented candle hidden at the back, rocked off center, and slid back out. She awkwardly caught it with her free hand, but two more books shook loose from the compacted mess. “Son of a!”

  The books toppled out like an avalanche and landed with a thud and a flurry of old English papers and candy bar wrappers. We both dropped to the floor, scooping up the mess as the last of our lingering peers cleared the 700 hallway. It had only been five minutes since the final bell, but every day the school cleared like a party raided by the cops.

  I wouldn’t know about such things. Gates would, but only because her younger brother had been brought home by the cops a few times.

  She grabbed the pile of wrappers I had pulled to the side to discard, and shoved them back into her locker with everything else, slamming the door shut to hold it all in and clicking the lock.

  “What was I saying?”

  “Mr. Hendal,” I supplied, looking curiously after the wrappers before shaking my head.

  “Oh, right.”

  We walked down the long L-shaped hallway to the senior parking lot, shouldering our bags and enjoying the eerie silence of the empty school.

  “So today someone pointed out that he gave us the same homework assignment twice. He looked at the board and then said, ‘Screw it, turn in your old one for extra credit.’ We’re watching a movie for the rest of the week. The end of the year is awesome.”

  “Yeah,” I said. That was how it worked between me and Gates—she talked, and I listened.

  “Yeah, and holy crap, did you see Mr. Sondersen today?” She turned to me as we passed the 400 hallway. “I mean, does he dress in the dark? His socks didn’t even match. And I swear, you need to smell him on Tuesdays and Thursdays, because I’m pretty sure he doesn’t shower and he just covers himself in cologne.”

  We pushed through the doors to the parking lot, and with all the other cars gone, we both saw it at the same time.

  There was a line of five clear, empty cups lined up on the hood of my red ‘93 Trooper.

  “What the hell?” Gates asked.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know…”

  As we walked closer, my heart sank. It was hot, with a high over ninety, and I had left the two rear windows cracked open an inch to keep the temperature inside the car from skyrocketing and further degrading the stack of old mix tapes I kept in the center console. I already knew who had done it.

  There was only one person who carried a cinnamon chai latte everywhere she went, somehow being so cool about it that even the strict teachers didn’t hassle her as she sipped away mid-lecture. And the smell of cinnamon and heat-curdled milk was on the air.

  Jennifer Wilmot.

  “Holy. Crap. What is that?”

  I stared down at the mess in the back seat, hardly able to control my disgust as Gates peered around my shoulder. The car smelled like rotten milk, and the sweet undertones of cinnamon syrup only made it all the more sickening. The mess covered everything, and my horrified frown deepened as my eyes scanned the disaster.

  Gates had cracked open the door to the back seat, sorting through the mess with wide eyes as she pulled out my soaked gym bag, several splattered note books, damaged text books—and as she gasped, my senior project.

  “Oh, that sucks…” Gates said, swinging her long, dark ponytail behind her head. “Annie, are you okay?”

  I stared at the painting, once lovely and nearly finished, and now covered in splatter from the cinnamon chai latte that had been poured through the one-inch crack in the windows. The hot milk had seeped into the cushions and everything else, spoiling and stinking. It had probably been sitting since lunch, or longer.

  I heaved a sigh, trying to calm myself down.

  The gum in my hair had been one thing, and the rumor about prostituting myself for old console games had been…well, a little amusing, actually. Even if that hadn’t been the intent. I had ignored it.

  Then there was the ketchup in my locker, and the lemonade “accidentally” spilled on my pants at lunch two weeks ago. And the rumor afterward in French class that I had peed my pants. I hadn’t wanted to deal with it—there was only a month left in school, and then I would never have to see Jennifer Wilmot again.

  All I wanted was a clean start. I was too nerdy to be pretty, and too quiet to be popular. When people made fun of me, it rolled off my back and I left it behind me, but I had truly been looking forward to leaving this town. My college was only thirty minutes away, but that was all it took to start a new life with a new pool of peers.

  Everyone within a two-year age radius in Bellmoral, Colorado knew me. I had lived my whole life there, and while the town itself wasn’t too small, attending every grade from kindergarten up with same pool of children had a way of making it feel a lot smaller.

  Jennifer had never been a problem before. I even had her over for a sleepover party when we were in the third grade, but we had never been friends. She had left her brown stuffed rabbit at my house, and I had dutifully returned it the next day. That had been a big deal, because her family was leaving for a two-week vacation that night.

  I don’t know why s
he chose me, or what I did to make her hate me. Whatever it was, I hadn’t done it on purpose.

  Gates was still sorting through the ruins of my back seat, trying to wipe things down with my already dirty gym clothes. I reached over wordlessly to still her hands and shake my head. There was nothing left to do about it in the school parking lot. Everything that was going to be ruined was already too far on its way.

  I climbed in and slammed the door shut behind me as Gates got into the passenger side. I loved this car, big and boxy though it was. My mother had picked me up from grade school in this car, and now it was going to stink forever.

  This was the final straw.

  ~~~~~~~~~

  “Annie, there’s a new shipment of cactus in the back…Cacti? Cactuses? Whatever. Go and repot them, please!” Lyssa threw her green apron over her head and turned back to the sales counter just in time to paste a smile on her face and greet the customer coming through the door. “Hi! Welcome to Hawthorn Plant Nursery and Greenhouse, can I help you find anything today?”

  I rolled my eyes as I pushed through the door to the back. Asking someone else to repot a cactus for you, or several, should be illegal. I stared down at the shipment crate, loaded with little hedgehog cacti in pots too small to display well. I sighed, shaking my head. Between these and the agave, I had nearly turned my hands and arms into living pincushions over the last five weeks.

  I gathered a supply of the good display pots, some cactus soil, tools, and an old newspaper, and set to work. Lyssa preferred that I use gloves when handling the spiny monsters, but the leather made my fingers feel too bulky to angle right, and since I had ripped a plant off of its root base, I had decided to go with using strips of newspaper as a barrier instead.

  I tore apart a few sheets to get manageable pieces, and then began moving the cacti from the plastic shipping pots into the styled terracotta bowls with little desert scenes painted on the sides. Lyssa bought them from a local artist, and while I didn’t think they were anything special, they did seem to sell well.

  Almost ten years my senior, Lyssa was my older sister, but sometimes, she was more like a third parent. Or a second parent, since our mom had died. Or an only parent, since our dad had checked out mentally after our mom’s death.

  At least she thought so, anyway.

  She poked her head through the door, pushing strands of her curly, strawberry blonde hair back behind her ear.

  “Phone’s ringing in the office, Annie.” She spied my naked hands. “And put on some gloves while you do that. Nothing’s going to grow if you bleed in the dirt.”

  Gates tried not to jostle Lyssa to much as she shoved past, shouldering both of our backpacks, and gave her a look.

  “Crazy, superstitious boss-sister…” she mumbled, dropping the bags on the floor as she took a stool from the workbench and set up her desk area.

  Lyssa had inherited the greenhouse business from our aunt Kendra, who had been in the car with our mom when it had gone off the road and into the ravine. I hadn’t been close with Kendra, but she had left a note that she wanted me to have her old collection of CDs.

  The CDs were awesome, and I never really felt cheated. She and Lyssa were close, and she and I weren’t.

  Lyssa had married one of Kendra’s former employees, and even though the greenhouse barely kept in the black, they kept it going because it was a business they loved. Lyssa had studied horticulture in college, and while most of her assertions were grounded in good science, the fact that we kept cacti around “to ward off the evil eye” told me that she was at least a little crunchy, and likely partly quackers.

  I went to the office and grabbed the phone, repeating the standard welcome. “Hi, you’ve reached Hawthorn Plant Nursery and Greenhouse, how can I help you today?”

  “Oh, hello! I was wondering if you carry ice plant?”

  I pulled out the inventory catalog as I answered, just in case the woman on the line had any questions about flower color. “Yes, ma’am, we do. Was there any particular kind you were after?”

  “Oh, no, I’m just looking for something that will do well in a bathroom of my house where the air conditioning is too strong.”

  I furrowed my brow. “Well, ice plant is a succulent, so it would do better in full sun and dry conditions.”

  A pause on the line. I readjusted the phone as I pulled a manual from the book shelf in case I needed to read a verbatim description, but the words that came over the line next told me this potential customer didn’t need anything that technical.

  “Well, then why do you call it ice plant?”

  I snapped the manual shut, trying to keep my sigh from being audible over the line.

  “I prefer the Latin name delosperma,” I said evenly. It was a popular choice among xeroscapers as a ground cover because of the flowers, so I’d read the tag enough. “I have no clue why they call it ice plant. It does survive the winter outside, so maybe… never mind. For a dark, cold room, you could try a moss terrarium?”

  “Moss isn’t a plant, is it?”

  The conversation went downhill from there, finally ending in the woman deciding that she would try her luck—and likely fail—with ice plant. I shook my head as I hung up the phone, and went back to the back room.

  Gates had her math notebook out on the workbench, pouring over a complex equation as the textbook rested on her knees.

  I sighed as my gaze dropped to the floor. I had almost forgotten the cacti.

  “I cleaned up as much as I could,” she said, marking something in her notebook with a pencil. “Your notebooks are still legible, but I didn’t want to touch your canvas or the books, so you’ll have to look at those. I hosed out the back and left the doors open.”

  I raised my eyebrows at her.

  Gates gave an animated shrug. “It’s not like it was going to make it any worse! And seriously, you need to decide what you’re going to do about this. If she pees your pants again—”

  “It was lemonade.”

  “—that’s going to stick. And you can still pick up those games if you want. You know. For last night.”

  I rolled my eyes at her, but she was right. Something had to give.

  “I just wish this would go away!” I blustered. “I mean, smooth sailing—virtually smooth sailing—with my peers for the seventeen years I’ve lived in this town, and now—now—something like this has to happen? I lie under the radar. I don’t even talk to people when I can avoid it, and now this. I mean, it can’t get any worse, right?”

  Gates frowned, looking down and clearing a stack of dirt-crusted terracotta planters and a small bucket of hand spades to set aside her notebook. I knew the look.

  “What?” It came out as a croak.

  Her brown eyes wandered the greenhouse for a moment. “Anise, I didn’t want to tell you… I know you’re trying to ignore it anyway.”

  Anise. She used my real name instead of calling me Annie, and she knew that I hated my real name. My sister Lyssa, legally Alyssum Spring Hawthorn-Chubbly, loved hers. Even the Chubbly. Anise wasn’t a common name, and not many people knew about the spice, either. I had spent countless weeks since grade school correcting teachers and anyone else with a sheet of paper reading “Anise Star Hawthorn”, to call me Annie.

  At least Lyssa had given her two-year-old something a little more normal. She had wanted to name the baby Lentil, whether it was boy or a girl, but thank god for her husband, Josh, who had talked her down to Rosemary and Mace. (Thank god again, the baby had been a girl.)

  Gates and I had bonded over it. We met in eighth grade when a teacher asked her if her name was “some sort of Mexican thing” and she had responded that her parents were Puerto Rican, and “it wasn’t a Puerto Rican thing, either.” Then she had come up with what was still, to this day, the most original and dirty ethnic slang that I had ever heard a white person called, and had been instantly suspended from school for the rest of the day.

  “Tell me,” I said quietly.

  One corner of
Gates’ mouth pulled back in a cringe before she started. “She’s been asking out Vince for you in gym class. Like, saying that you asked her to ask him for you… repeatedly. People are starting to think it’s pretty pathetic.”

  I felt the blood rush into my cheeks, leaving me light-headed and nauseas as I stared down at the remaining cacti.

  “I told her to cut it out, but she keeps—”

  “It’s fine,” I muttered. It wasn’t. Why was she doing this to me?

  Gates came over to stand by me, hugging me nearly around my waist because I was a head taller, and then gently pushing me away.

  “Go see about your car,” she said. “I’ll deal with these pricks for you.”

  I forgot myself and laughed at her joke, shaking my head with a thankful look as I walked away.

  Vincent Carthage and I had been the only two kids in the advanced learning group together since elementary school. There had been others, but they came and went as they switched schools. But the two of us had held steady, always attending the once-monthly lunches, but never really talking beyond what the school coordinator asked us to do in her planned syllabus.

  I had harbored… not a crush, exactly, but more of a respect, since the tenth grade. One day I had looked into his cool, gray eyes and realized he had finally grown taller than me. That same summer he had finally beat me at chess, and somehow that had done it. I was pretty sure he didn’t even know that I was female, because I didn’t look or dress like most of the girly girls in our school.

  But I guess he knew now, courtesy of Jennifer Wilmot. And as the fates would have it, he was going to the same college as I was, and there would be no escaping this connotation.

  I wanted to cry and fall down and sleep forever, but I didn’t have time.

  Gates had moved my notebooks and senior class project behind the back seat in the open trunk area, so I swung open the door and examined them first. The covers were too warped to salvage, but I couldn’t bear to part with the contents. I liked to draw and write little stories in the margins, and I wanted to keep them, even if they were ruined. The canvas on my painting could be cleaned or retouched, but somehow, seeing something I had spent so many hours creating destroyed so carelessly was just depressing. I left it in the back, and threw an emergency blanket over it.