Table of Contents
Holly, Curses, and Hauntings
Forward
It was many and many a year ago,
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Kingdom Series
The Blue Moon Bay Series
Holly, Curses, and Hauntings
ANNABELLE LEE ISN'T lonely during the holidays, how can she be when she's already dead. And everyone knows ghosts definitely don't get lonely. Eerie Thistlebottom, Blue Moon Bay's adorable resident zombie, doesn't agree and decides that this year her bestie in death will not be spending the holidays alone. So she writes up an advertisement. One human roommate wanted. No money, no problem...must do well with spooks.
Dante Martin cannot believe that his beautiful, yet kind of flighty twin sister actually answered that ad. Being the dutiful brother that he is, he goes to help her move in only to discover that the mystery of the haunted shack high up on the hills of Blue Moon Bay does indeed come with a lovely ghost, a jealous ghost dog, and a secret that could threaten to rip apart their holiday magick forever...
Copyright 2017 Jovee Winters
Cover Art by LLewellen Designs
Formatted by D2D
My super seekrit hangout!
This is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, events, or places is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, Jovee Winters, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in the context of reviews.
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.
Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Jovee Winters.
Unauthorized or restricted use in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.
The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patent Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.
Published in 2017 by Jovee Winters, United States of America
Forward
A poem writ by Edgar Allen Poe: Annabel Lee
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love -
I and my Annabel Lee -
With a love that the wingéd seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her high-born kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
Went envying her and me -
Yes! - that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we -
Of many far wiser than we -
And neither the angels in Heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling - my darling - my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea -
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
Prologue
Annabelle Lee
I TIPPED MY HEAD TOWARD the diamond-dusted sky, sticking out my tongue as I waited for the first cool glide of winter’s kiss. The solitary snowflake was fat, gracefully swaying to and fro as it danced in the icy breeze.
Tomorrow was Christmas. I had so many preparations still to make. Glenda had been sweet enough to offer me her kitchen after all the guests at the Inn had been settled in for the night. Which was rather brave of her considering I couldn’t cook worth a lick. But I’d graced the stages of Broadway and had feigned quite convincingly that I could.
I wanted to please Julian, show him that an actress was also capable of becoming a fine wife. But I’d burned the pumpkin pies nearly black. My pudding was tacky and tasted more like prunes than plums. The dinner rolls I’d slaved over for hours hadn’t risen and were hard as tack.
Nothing I’d done tonight had turned out. My heart ached. This was a fine start to what I hoped might be a proposal from him tomorrow. He’d been hinting at some great surprise for me.
My tummy flipped.
I should be abed. But I sighed the moment the deliciously cold flake rested upon my tongue. He would drop by in the morning. He’d promised this evening that he’d come to chop some wood to last me through the winter.
Julian was a shifter. When I’d learned the truth, three months ago now, I’d been terrified. I too had read stories of humans who turned to beasts under the light of the full moon. Finding and taking virgin sacrifices to feed to their Underworld master. I shivered, still getting the willies whenever I thought of those sorts of monsters.
But Julian wasn’t that. He was a beta shifter. Shy. Sweet. Unbelievably tender. I’d worked on the stage and had seen more naked bodies than any peer of mine likely would in the entirety of their life. I was a modern twentieth century woman, and Vaudeville suited my passions just fine.
I’d kissed men aplenty in my day. Flirted with more than my fair share. I’d even gone further than that with one.
Billy Kline.
I shivered, wrapping my pink silk robe tighter around my slim shoulders. It was far too cold for me to be skulking about at midnight dressed this way, but I was restless and knew I’d not be able to sleep even if I tried. So I closed my eyes and instead remembered the raven-haired peacock as I’d first seen him. I’d been Juliet to his Romeo. Our passion was electric on the stage. I was sure no doubt it was that chemistry between us that had driven our show and made it a constant sellout off Broadway.
I’d fancied myself in love with Billy. Young and trim, fashionable too. His features were sharp and angular, his eyes a piercing bold blue, his fingers long and even slightly delicate for a man’s. With a pencil-thin mustache that had made him look dapper and polished. A man of the world, literally, he’d traveled everywhere. Toured five of the seven continents, seen most of the wonders of the ancient world even. He always wore the very smartest clothes and with his customary pocket watch snapping open and shut, he paced the empty theater aisles as he was wont to do every hour before curtain call. No one could
call Billy manly, but there had been an allure all the same. Something electrifyingly hypnotic.
All the girls wanted him. But he only had eyes for me.
We’d flirted for a year before we finally gave in to our passion late one night after the office manager had left the theater and shut off all the lights. John Forsyth hadn’t known I’d been in the dressing room tangled up and trying my darnedest to get out of my malfunctioning corset, and Billy was there to help me.
When the lights suddenly turned off, plunging our room into total darkness save for a soft swath of moonlight spilling through the curtains of my dressing room, well... It’d seemed like the right timing.
Just us.
No other living soul around.
Billy reached for me the very same moment I reached for him. I remembered that night vividly.
The caresses. The murmurings and promises of fidelity and hunger. I’d never been in love before, I’d never even made love before. But I went all-in with the wild and exuberant enthusiasm of one who knew they were doing exactly as they ought to be doing.
I didn’t know about prophylactics, or even think to take any of my own precautions. Naïve, yes. Foolish of me even. But I was in love for the first time in my young life, and I didn’t think much beyond the hunger of the moment.
Well, I was given a swift lesson in consequences. A month later I knew I was with child. His child. But when I told him, he denied it. Called me terrible names in front of all of our cast mates.
Of course, I had been shunned and forced to leave the stage lights behind. I was a fallen woman in a world nowhere near as liberal minded as I myself was. I had very little money and no hope whatsoever.
There had only been one choice for me. I didn’t want to do it. But I couldn’t support myself, let alone a baby. What other option did I have?
I scraped together the two dollars it would take to pay the healer. When I walked into that termite-infested slum and stepped through the brackish puddles of waste and filth along the cobbled roads, I almost turned back.
Until I imagined my life as a single mother.
It was only 1923. There was no life for me, or for the child. I would never be able to support him or her. No one in their right mind would hire not only a former actress, but also and far worse, a fallen woman.
With trembling fingers I paid, laid back on that blood stained couch, propped my legs up and screamed the moment she inserted that rusty old scrap of metal inside my womb.
But the healer was so assuring, shoving my sweaty hair off the sides of my temple and whispering that I would be fine, just fine. Right as rain. That it would only hurt for a little bit, but that soon I’d be up again and no one would ever know.
She sent me on my way not even an hour later, blood coursing down my legs, and I felt dizzy and lightheaded.
I wasn’t sure when I passed out, but the next thing I knew I was waking up inside the Sisters of Grace mission, lying on a lumpy feather down mattress, shivering from the cold and skin clammy to the touch.
Sister Mary with her wrinkled face and kind, rheumy blue eyes wiped my brow, gave me the sweetest smile I think I’d ever seen, and told me that the sepsis hadn’t killed me and that I’d finally turned the corner, but it’d been close. Far too close.
When I asked her how long I’d been there, she told me two weeks. Two weeks of fevers, vomiting, chills, and that once they were sure even my heart had stopped beating. She said the nuns had surrounded my cold body and prayed over me, and I’d miraculously taken a long, shuddering breath.
That was the moment I became slowly better. Day by day they tended to me, helped me walk, helped me grow stronger and more able. Sister Mary, who’d always been my favorite, asked me one day what I planned to do once I was finally well enough to leave.
In a panic, I stared at the walls of the mission and the gardens so lovingly cared for by the Mother Superior herself, and I wailed. I had no money. I had no prospects. My schooling hadn’t taken me far, and as an orphan I had no family to return to.
Mary patted my hand and told me providence would always provide. So long as I had faith.
I begged her to turn me into a nun, to let me stay there with them where it was warm and safe and everyone was so kind. She only laughed and told me that wasn’t how it would go. Then she told me the life of sacrifice I’d be forced to lead and well, miserable as I was, I wasn’t sure I could make that kind of vow. Yes, Billy had hurt me brutally, but I still held out the ridiculous hope that someday I too could find a true love.
Soiled goods or no, I did have faith, just as Mary had asked me to.
Realizing, no doubt, my inner chaos, Mary reached into her pocket and pulled out a tiny brown sack.
“It’s isn’t much, Annabelle dear. But I’ve been saving it for a time such as this. Here, I want you to have this. And believe that wherever it takes you, it’s where you ought to be.”
She shoved the money purse into my hands, and at first I tried to give it back. Several times I tried to give it back to her, but she refused it, telling me that she’d sensed for many years that someday someone would have great need of it.
Humbled, tears shining in my eyes, I finally hugged the little satchel to my breast and said between silent sobs, “Thank you, Mary. Thank you.”
She was right, there wasn’t much money in there. 11 dollars and 89 cents, to be exact. The very next day, and with a heavy heart, I said goodbye to the sisters, giving Mary a tender kiss on her cheek—knowing deep in my heart of hearts I’d never see my friend again—and I made for the bus depot.
I bought a ticket for as far as eight dollars would take me. I rode day and night, sleeping with my face pressed against the cold glass. I wrapped great big shawls around my shoulders whenever any man would sit beside me, wanting nothing more than for them not to notice me, not to judge me.
Only knowing that I felt a calling deep in my bones to go. And go. And keep going. Until the morning of the third day came and suddenly I knew it was time to get off.
I had nothing but a small suitcase with a broken latch on it to call my own in all the world.
But as I stepped foot off the bus into the Blue Moon Bay depot, I felt an immediate sense of home. I stood there, looking lost and confused I was sure.
And that’s how Julian found me. He was Billy’s opposite in every way.
Tall, muscular, and not well traveled at all. He was just a country boy, provincial, small town minded. But honest. And caring.
From the moment I locked eyes with his light brown ones, I felt an immediate wellspring of hope and a dizzying and breathless rush of warmth. I did not much care for the unwanted attentions of men, but Julian was so different with me.
Gentle. Patient. And unbelievably tender. Why, he still wouldn’t even kiss me unless we were out in public so that no one would think anything untoward about our relationship.
As time wore on, I grew to care for him very deeply and he for me. Then one night he opened up and told me he would be no kind of man if he didn’t tell me the absolute truth.
That’s when I learned about Blue Moon’s curse and that Julian was one of only two single men in the entire town. He confessed that he was well over two hundred years old, and that it was his pack in particular that had lost Old Man Tinker’s son.
Of course I laughed. Until I realized that he was dead serious. Then he shifted for me, and well, I didn’t handle the revelation with quite the aplomb I might have hoped for.
I almost left him then.
Until I had a startling revelation. If what Julian said was true, that the magick of Blue Moon Bay had called me here for a reason, then where else was there for me to go?
I was given a job almost immediately at The Golden Goose diner run by a wonderfully odd hearth witch called Zinnia Rose. She never even cared that I had nothing to recommend me as a waitress. She simply took me under her wing and told me I was home now.
And the Chambers who ran the Haunted Boot gave me a beautiful room at t
he inn to call my own so long as I cleaned the other guest’s rooms every morning. I was building a life here, a good one. A great one, even.
And I had Julian. No, he wasn’t the love of my life. I cared for him a great deal, infinitely more than I could for just about any other man in the world. Save one.
One who’d destroyed my belief in love altogether but who I, shamefully, still loved with every ounce of my soul. Needing to escape the tight confines of the galley kitchen I crept down the hall and out the front door, not wishing to disturb anyone. I just needed to breathe. I briefly considered running to my room for a coat, but dismissed the idea just as quickly. I wouldn’t stay out long and if I didn’t get out now I was liable to start screaming. The second I walked out the front door and took in the scent of frost and saw the holly and berry wreaths decorating the front door and the porch railing I could breathe again.
Shuddering from the immediate smack of cold to my face I shivered but didn’t turn back in. Out here I felt alive still. Like I could think. Like all the doubts and panics and fears weren’t smothering the life right out of me. Shaking my head I didn’t stop walking until I was leaning against the railing. I dug my fingers into the banister and stared out into the quiet night.
Winter was well underway. And though I felt the chill of night, I was warmed all the way through in a way that had nothing to do with body heat. Snow fell in earnest now, as though a large hand had come and shaken giant conifers back and forth in the gusty wind. The howling night was a blanket of white. But it was peaceful out here. It gave me time to think. To hope. To dream.
I’d never had a home. I’d been a vagabond since age ten when I’d opted to run away from the girl’s shelter and decide my own fate, come what may. I’d been a petty pickpocket at times, but only ever stealing just enough to get by. And returning whatever it was that I’d stolen if I could in one way or another.
Through the years I’d become accustomed to my nomadic lifestyle and had never wanted more than what I earned for myself. But that all changed after my near death.