Witch to Choose (Heart of a Witch #1)

Paris stayed over and she spent the night again and laid on the other side of me all night. I had to be honest, I liked her being here. It felt like I was safe again, the way I used to feel when my parents were alive.

  The rest of the week went by in a hurry, and I never got back to Robert about our date. I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t or why I was procrastinating talking to him. A strong part of me wanted to see him this weekend. I just hadn’t called him. I was having too much fun with Paris. To Robert’s benefit, he wasn’t blowing up my phone or my emails trying to get an answer. He was just waiting for me to give him answer. I liked his patient heart.

  Paris spent Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday night at my house. On Wednesday and Thursday, she introduced me to a new spell. We did a luck spell, and a protection spell. Paris didn’t know it, but she was already part of my protection spell. It had been a long time since I felt anyone had my back like this woman had shown me in such a short time.

  I got up and went to work on Friday.

  When my workweek ended, I decided to do my little special treat I gave myself if I didn’t miss a day at work for the week. I knew that seemed ridiculous but I’d had a problem with not going to work in the past. All work was for me was going to an office building and I got paid for doing so.

  I pulled into the bakery parking lot. I parked in a spot right next to the handicap spot in front of the bakery. The name of the bakery was Hot Treats, and that was exactly what they were. They made all these delicious desserts and they heated them up and when they served them, they were hot and delicious. My favorite was the chocolate éclair with vanilla ice cream as the center. This was so delicious that I literally only allow myself to have this treat three times a year because it was so insane tasting. I could eat two every day, at least until they made me sick.

  I stepped out of my car and on the ground were three hundred-dollar bills. I looked around and there were no cars or people in sight. I picked up the money and sure enough, it was real money. I didn’t know what I should do. I wanted to keep it and there was no real way to report this as found so they could find the person who lost it. The reality was, if a person lost three hundred dollars, they wouldn’t report it, unless it was attached to their wallet or purse.

  So, finders keepers. I put the money in my purse. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time standing in a parking lot with the money exposed even if I was practically the only person in this shopping center.

  I went inside the bakery and ordered my éclair. I got it to go and I could heat it up in my microwave if it got too cold. What I was worried about was the vanilla ice cream. They had different kinds of chocolate éclairs to choose from. So I picked one that had nice vanilla custard in the middle. Within a couple of minutes, my éclair was ready and I walked outside. As I walked around my car, I could hardly believe what I saw.

  Three more one hundred-dollar bills.

  Now, this was getting serious. Did I park over a gold mine? I quickly put the bills in my purse. I dropped to my knees and looked underneath the car. There were no more. Sure, I felt a little disappointment, but six hundred dollars was officially the largest amount of money I had ever found. I’ve found a five dollar bill floating inside a toilet once...yeah, I grabbed it.

  I got in my car and headed home with a smile on my face, knowing I had some fast money that I could spend on useless stuff I’d otherwise feel guilty spending my own money on.

  I got home and knew Paris was still at my home. She was going to teach me one last spell before going home and supposedly visiting that dude, who for some bizarre reason would never say his name. It bothered me at how secretive she was about him, especially after I had confided in Paris everything about me.

  After a bit of small talk, and more attempts at trying to get her dude’s name, Paris had me stand up and taught me a health spell that was simple enough. You say it when you are injured or feeling sick.

  After the lesson, Paris, fell silent.

  “What is it, Paris?” I asked.

  In a soft voice, she said, “This entire week, I’ve seen an evil surround you. At first, I thought because you’re a newbie and sometimes that happens. But normally, that lasts for about a day.”

  “Evil?” I said. “What evil?”

  “Sahara, it’s been three days and I still sense and feel it around you. You have a lot of darkness that surrounds your aura and I’m not sure where it’s coming from. I’m going to recommend you do the aura-cleansing spell multiple times a day until this evil moves away from you. I want to teach you one more spell and unfortunately, you won’t know if it works until Black Magic is used against you, but because I sense and feel this darkness around you, I think I need to teach one more spell today.”

  Paris taught me six short lines. I said them out loud because there was no Black Magic being used against me. I wanted to see if I could feel the power of the spell.

  I said out loud, “I take back my power. At this very moment...this very hour.”

  Then a power was released from me and it swirled around the room in a breeze. I felt a comfort in knowing I had this spell and I could use it whenever I needed to.

  Paris felt the breeze too and seemed pleased.

  “That’ll do it for the day. Remember, only use the spell when someone is using Black Magic against you.”

  I looked at Paris and I was a tad curious about what kind of power Black Magic had. I had seen what happened when regular magic was at play. I just wondered how menacing and powerful Black Magic was.

  I had a strange feeling that I would soon find out.

  Paris looked at me long and hard and then gave me a warm smile. Was she reading my thoughts? Or just maybe she sensed my curiosity.

  We finished for the day and Paris told me she would be going to her guy’s house. She said they were going up to a weekend trip in Arrowhead.

  Okay, that was a little more information. Maybe it took Paris a while to open up about her own love life or whatever was going on between her and her guy.

  I had a feeling Paris liked this guy a lot more than she let on.

  After Paris left, I put my phone on my coffee table, and collapsed on my couch in the living room. Doing magic spells was tiring. I was expecting to get a phone call from Donovan and possibly Robert, but Donovan was so weird. He might think the ball was in my court and I needed to call him to finalize our date for tomorrow night.

  Maybe that is why I am holding off speaking to Robert?

  As I laid on my couch, I turned on my living room TV. It was a flat-screen. I think that was all they made these days. Or at least, that was all the big stores sold. I went through my recorded shows that I had on my DVR. I had some favorite shows and I was behind on a couple of them. My TV show watching was as eclectic as my current music interest. I watched every kind of show. I guess it came down to writing and believability.

  Believe it or not, believability was important to me in regard to reality shows. Some shows I knew were completely scripted. And then, there were other shows I just knew were real, like Survivor or The Real World.

  My favorite comedies ranged from dark humor to slapstick. I thought a sense of humor was one of the greatest traits we had as individuals. I thought the world was funny. Sometimes, dark humor made me laugh, and sometimes, silly slapstick humor gave me the giggles, depending on my mood.

  I loved crime dramas and game shows, late night TV, Fox News and MSNBC. That was what a person slowly became when they gave up dating and just committed to being single—a TV aficionado. I had developed weird navel gazing about myself and my love for TV was very much about learning to know myself and understand myself better through my choices and interpretations of shows. I did the same thing with novels and was a voracious reader.

  Tonight, I was watching a stand-up comedian on Comedy Central when my eyes felt very heavy. Extremely heavy. I hadn’t even opened my éclair bag yet. I had put it in the refrigerator. I was thinking, why didn’t I tell Paris about the luck spell working? I was meani
ng to, but I never did. That was my last thought I remembered before I was knocked-out, sound asleep.

  I slept on the couch all through the night. I didn’t go to the bathroom once. Just ten hard hours on that couch. I woke up, wide awake, at 4:00 in the morning and boy, did I have to use the restroom.

  I was surprised that my phone never went off. I looked at my phone and I had no calls, no messages. That was weird. I felt a little sad about that. Maybe I wasn’t as popular as I thought I was.

  I was the one who hadn’t officially gotten back to Robert and it was already Saturday. I still wasn’t sure why I didn’t confirm. Maybe a part of me felt bad about dating two guys in the same weekend.

  This was extraordinarily early to be up on a Saturday morning. I hadn’t done this since I used to get up at six in the morning to watch ThunderCats on Saturday morning cartoons. Did they even have those anymore? Saturday morning cartoons on ABC, CBS, and NBC? How could they compete with Cartoon Network? Still, that was an awesome part of my childhood.

  I decided to make myself some coffee and I decided to go outside in my back yard. I didn’t have a pool or Jacuzzi. But I had a cute red wooden bench under a canopy. I decided to grab a more advanced spell book and I took it outside to read through it.

  I sat down with my coffee and with the porch light on, I could read my book rather easily.

  I opened the book I picked up from inside and turned to the first page. The name of the book was Spells for Others. This was apparently a book about spells you can only do for other people and not yourself. This should be fascinating.

  I skimmed though the introduction of the book and I liked what I read in the preface. It talked about how the intent of spells were to balance the good against the bad and only the witch could choose which side she were on. I remembered Paris telling me most witches chose to be on the side of good, because people were inherently good.

  The book talked about how when you used magic for someone who was outside the craft, how their natural reaction was one of four things: the person was lying and was trying to con someone me, the person was nuts and I wanted nothing to do with them, or I believed them, but that was not for me, lastly, the reaction was...they believed and yes, this was exactly for me.

  That was my reaction. The last one. I believed this was me to my core. I had a little of all of them and maybe the con one was a close second, but mainly, I believed because I felt this was my salvation.

  Wow, I couldn’t believe how excited I was to get into a book.

  The book was broken up into personal stories, reasons for doing a spell for others, and the actual spells themselves. I couldn’t believe anyone could just buy this book off the shelf. Granted, the bookstore was hidden behind a number of buildings and seemed the only clientele were women and men interested in witchcraft. It was probably a ‘who you know’ kind of place.

  I began reading the first page it was a personal story of this witch’s name, Camella. I read her story and I couldn’t help but feel like I identified with a lot of who she was before she became a witch. She then talked about balance. How balance was so crucial to the world’s existence so therefore, magic couldn’t work outside that balance. When magic did work outside, it was usually Black Magic.

  I read three more stories that were similar. The last story was the most fascinating. It was about a man who chose a life of being a warlock, so he could help others. It seemed bananas, but once I read his story, I saw how magic affected each of us differently, and sometimes, the only answer out there was to do something extraordinary and become a warlock.

  I skimmed to the middle of the book.

  There was an entire section on reasons why it was necessary to do magic for others. It talked about how to use magic for others when they couldn’t do it themselves. And the book talked about how you guided them over this one hump that was preventing their happiness. Their whole world would open up to them.

  Wow, that seems pretty intense.

  I was thinking about the spell Paris did on my behalf and how much I noticed my world opening up to many possibilities.

  I skimmed to the back of the book where the spells were broken up into categories. There were main spells, known as the beginner spells, and then underneath each of those spells were more specific spells. The stronger you became as a witch, the closer you could get to having immediate magic at your fingertips. It was about the most exciting bit of information I had ever read.

  I read the spells in my head and purposely didn’t read them correctly. I was afraid one of them might work, even if I didn’t say them aloud. It was amazing that just one word out of order made it so a spell couldn’t be active.

  I started to think, What if I didn’t say them out of order? What if I allowed myself to do a little bit of magic on my own? After all, Paris says over and over again that this whole thing is a personal choice.

  I had an excitement building inside me. I was terrified as much as I was thrilled.

  However, I had a haunting feeling, something I couldn’t quite explain.

  I was reading a section about how to move objects with a spell. I decided to see if I could do this without Paris in the room. It was a Telekinetic Spell.

  I read the preface to the spell and the book of spells said, at first, to try the spell on really light items like a plastic fork or a pencil. Once you got the hang of moving smaller objects, you could gradually move bigger and bigger objects with the spell.

  This was a little scary. I didn’t have Paris here as a safety net. But I was craving doing my own spell as if it was a drug.

  I decided to grab a pencil from my coffee table inside.

  I decided I was going to try a Telekinetic Spell. I flipped in one of my advanced spell books and turned to one of the strongest Telekinetic spells that existed. It was called The Gravity Spell 101.

  The book said you needed to be a High Witch to perform the spell. That was one level under what Paris was. Paris was a Most High Witch. I was going to risk some weird stuff happening if I tried to do this spell and something happened that I wasn’t prepared for.

  I read the spell almost twenty times in my head. I was trying to memorize it and “own it,” like Paris had said. The second I owned it in my head, I decided I would say the spell out loud to try to move the pencil I had placed on my backyard table. The table was made out of wood. It was the color of Donovan’s shoes...that first time I met him, back at the gym.

  I took a deep breath and I got extremely afraid again and questioned if I should even do it. Power was such a temptress. I craved to see what I was made of more than I feared the unknown.

  I looked at the pencil and said the spell as I had memorized it.

  “The moon and the sun and the stars were placed once upon a time. I command the energy in you to move without rhyme.”

  The pencil was supposed to at least move a little bit. Nothing happened.

  I waited a good ten seconds to see if that pencil would move and there was nothing.

  Maybe I’m not cut out for this after all?

  I looked at the spell again and looked to see if I’d said it correctly. I think I added an extra ‘and the’ when saying the spell out loud.

  So, I looked at the pencil and once again, got very excited. I commanded the pencil again, this time, saying the spell correctly.

  “The moon, sun and the stars were placed once upon a time. I command the energy in you to move...without rhyme.”

  Suddenly, my entire wooden table flew across my back yard in a rage of fury and crashed into the cement wall that connected my house to my neighbor’s. The table shattered into many pieces. The force that it went into that wall was insane. It cracked the cement wall but it didn’t break down the wall. That was one tough wall.

  Holy crap! What did I just do?

  I wanted to be petrified by what just happened, but I wasn’t. I was actually very turned on. It gave me a thrill like no other to be able to do what I just did.

  Then something
happened to me. I began to crave power. Reading these spells made me hungry to receive as much power as I could. Next on my list was to master potions. Paris hasn’t mentioned anything about potions. I was so tired of being mediocre. Then a dark feeling came over me and I tried to fight it off, but I couldn’t. I began to crave learning at least one Black Magic Spell.

  None of my books had any Black Magic.

  Suddenly, I realized what I was thinking and I did get afraid. I was afraid that I wanted the dark powers. I decided to take a deep breath and to go back inside.

  I decided to stop and to go inside and digest what had just happened and debated on telling Paris about it.

  Chapter Nineteen