The Secret Keeper: The Witch of Frognot County

Can’t a witch just live peacefully in the woods anymore? Trouble is brewing in Frognot County.

During the summer in Frognot County, afternoon thunderstorms rolled off the San Juan mountains with factory precision, giving the small town an unearned sense of importance. But the locals knew better—storms here were just a reminder that nature had its own agenda, especially when it came to the Santa Sangre River. Cursed, or so they said, though no one would admit it out loud.

Carrie Moonshadow stood on the balcony of her Victorian home, watching the storm clouds gather. Her house sat precariously on the river’s edge, defying both nature and town gossip with each new flood. She knew what they whispered about her, that she was as cursed as the river, her house spared from the floods only by some strange magic. But she never let it bother her. Not anymore. Carrie had bigger things to worry about, like the rotting balcony joist she was trying to fix with a spell.

Carrie sighed as she examined the rotting joist. This would take more than a quick fix. But magic always had a price, and the energy had to come from somewhere—whether it was drawn from the earth, the moon, or from her own life force. Too much magic, and the debt to nature would come due in unexpected ways. She had learned that lesson the hard way, and now she was more careful.

As she began to trace runes along the wood, she felt the familiar tingle of power sparking through her fingertips. It was always a delicate balance, using just enough to get the job done but not so much that it would cost her more later.

She glanced at the river below, swollen and muddy from the week of rain, and raised her hand in a half-salute to the raft of tourists from Dallas that Jack Landry was guiding through the rapids. He ignored her, which was fine by her. The less attention, the better. Carrie did not mind being left alone—unless the town made it impossible.

She had just started muttering the incantation under her breath, fingernails scraping at the wet wood, when she heard the familiar rumble of Alethea Monroe’s Jeep pulling into her driveway. Frognot’s only hydrologist always showed up after a storm, as if she expected to find Carrie’s house washed away at last. No luck today, Alethea.

The afternoon thunderstorms were erupting with their usual timeliness. Heavy clouds from the high wild peaks were dropping their moisture off in the middle of town before making a beeline to the border with New Mexico. When it rained like this in Seattle, people zipped up their raincoats and powered through, but in Frognot an afternoon thunderstorm was a big wet pause button. At Marigold’s bookstore, antsy tourists dripped on the hardwood floors as they perused field guides to Colorado wildflowers. Blacktree Perk coffee shop did brisk business on lattes and muffins, and tourists got wet dashing from shop to shop looking for umbrellas that they would not need in an hour.

Carrie glanced at the raft fighting the rising water, the passengers bobbing along as Jack shouted orders. The Santa Sangre river was popular among whitewater rafters and kayakers in spite of—or possibly because of—the rumored curse. It had rained hard every day this week, and the river was flowing high enough that the whitewater rafting company had made the Texans sign an extra waiver. Landry was a hard-bodied old-timer. Heavy rains were not enough to slow down business.

She gently shook her head. She knew he was already planning which of his customers he would dump off the raft at which rapids. The twenty-something in the cowboy hat might enjoy a swim through the Washing Machine, which was plenty bouncy at these flow levels. People who fell out of their rafts tipped more, he would brag to any locals that would listen. He had actually tracked it on a spreadsheet one summer—and who was he to deny them their thrills?

“Best be careful,” muttered Carrie. “People struck by lightning on a whitewater rafting trip don’t tend to tip at all.”

The Santa Sangre River divided the town of Frognot into two neat halves, both of which had strong opinions about the other. According to the pamphlets printed by the Frognot tourism bureau, the fifteen-thousand-person town had sprung up during the gold rush of the late 1800s. Martha Sage, who ran Frognot’s three-room Ute Indian Cultural Center, was irked by the suggestion that the town had appeared spontaneously, as if the buildings had pushed up through the soil along the river one day, like cattails. Martha frequently handed out her own hand-annotated versions of the official tourism pamphlets. In truth, the town had been imposed on the valley in an orderly Victorian grid, by a railway company looking to build a depot that would service the Frognot mining district.

Men had come to dig gold out of the mountains, and shrewd shovel salesmen had come to dig gold out of the miners’ pockets. The luckiest left rich; the unluckiest never left at all. There were plenty of secrets buried in the boarded-up mineshafts dotting the surrounding mountains.

A hundred miles upstream from Frognot, the headwaters of the Santa Sangre poured straight out of a stony gash in the side of Blacktree Peak. Near the river’s source, the iron-rich water ran blood red. Mary Cardoso, who at one hundred and two years old was the oldest resident of Frognot, adamantly told anyone who would listen that the river water was cursed. She attributed her long life to drinking only bottled mineral water imported from the Swiss Alps. This was ridiculous, of course. A spring in Switzerland could be cursed as easily as a river in Colorado, and it was harder to untangle yourself from magic that had originated so far away. Swiss covens were probably really well organized, too.

Carrie Moonshadow hadn’t decided if she believed the river was cursed. If it was, the curse didn’t have anything to do with her. Or maybe she was cursed as badly as the river, and so they got along. Carrie lived right on the banks of the Santa Sangre, but the spring floods always spared her. The denizens of Frognot whispered about it to one another, when sheds and decks were flushed away from houses just up- or downstream.

It was true that Carrie lived on a lucky piece of land. Well, more than lucky, in fact. Her old Victorian home was located smack dab in the middle of an oxbow in the river, on the Northern edge of town where the river slowed and meandered through flat green pastures. The house was an eclectic gingerbread confection of dormer windows, Greek pediments and Queen Anne shingles topped by a soaring circular tower with a peaked roof and a distant view of the barren summit of Blacktree Peak.

Every sane flood insurance underwriter had assured Carrie that her home would be washed away by the next light drizzle. It had managed to stay standing for a hundred years before she arrived, but somehow, the town still blamed her for her good fortune, trading cruel whispers every time she emerged unscathed from a flood or a forest fire. It was as if, by not sharing in their pain, she had taken something from them.

At the moment, the swollen river was the color of hot chocolate, lapping right against the bars of the wrought iron fence that surrounded her property. Carrie watched as an inflatable blue raft bobbed downstream over the waves. Jack Landry glanced at her window as he shouted a command to his eager crew, who dipped their paddles in the water with something significantly short of military precision. When she raised a hand in a wry salute, he frowned and looked away.

By now, the rain was down to a bare sprinkle, and Carrie went out onto her balcony to huff the smell of fresh-washed mountains and scrutinize a rotting joist. The joist’s condition had been worsened by the week of heavy rains, but Carrie was loath to replace it. Modern lumber couldn’t compete with the Victorians’ sturdy hardwood. Plus, she rebelled at the thought of bringing noisy contractors and prying workmen into her home.

She was going to try and fix it herself, and hope her luck held. She thought she’d be able to manage the repair by tweaking a spell for encouraging tree growth and was eyeballing how many angelica stems she would need to give the incantation power. As she prodded the wet wood with an acid green fingernail, a truck rumbled off the road onto her gravel driveway.

Alethea Monroe drove her big Jeep up to the oxbow after every big rain, ostensibly to check on Carrie’s well-being. “You’re crazy to live there,” she told Carrie whenever they ran into one another. These occasions usually involved Alethea blocking an exit.

Leaning over the balcony railing, Carrie waved at Alethea’s truck. When she straightened back up, her hand caught a splinter on the railing, and a droplet of ruby-red blood welled up from her skin. She would have to get back to the spell after Althea left. Wincing, she plastered on a smile. She would have to pick a few angelica stems for herself.

Carrie knew the townspeople found her uncanny, some more than others. Alethea, she suspected, was disappointed to find Carrie high and dry. If Carrie’s house had disappeared, Carrie might have gone with it.

Carrie, to her knowledge, had never done anything to deserve this grudge. She and Alethea had first crossed paths in the gardening section of the hardware store, where they’d both reached for the last bag of fertilizer. Carrie had let Alethea have it, but the token generosity hadn’t softened the old woman up.

Maybe she should make one more friendly overture. The jeep was still idling just outside Carrie’s iron gate, and on a whim, she grabbed a large bucket and went out the back door, making her way to an orange barrel of fresh, dry compost. She shoveled in about a foot of rich soil and headed for the Jeep. Her sudden approach startled Alethea, whose hand hovered on the gear shift. It was too late, though—Carrie had already waved her down.

“Quite a storm, huh?” Carrie said cheerfully.

Alethea’s lips pursed as she glanced disapprovingly at Carrie’s still-standing house.

“The river’s running high,” Alethea said.

Carrie held up her peace offering. “I have a gift for you.”

Alethea sniffed the bucket warily. “Oh?”

“Some of my compost. Fresh out of the barrel. It’ll do wonders for your roses.”

Everyone in town knew that Alethea grew prizewinning roses. Even Carrie knew it, and she tried to actively avoid Frognot gossip. Alethea told everyone who would listen about her upcoming competitions, and whenever she won a blue ribbon, she wore it around town for a full week. Carrie often ran into Alethea at the garden center, where the older woman frequently roped green-vested employees into lengthy debates on the merits of various irrigation systems. Their mutual love of gardening should have made them friendly, but Alethea still acted like she was eager to put some of her outstanding blooms on Carrie’s grave.

It was time to let bygones be bygones, dammit.

Carrie smiled cheerfully at an earthworm poking its head out of the compost. Alethea should have been grateful at this bounty, but instead, she looked afraid. “You’re trying to poison my roses, aren’t you!” she barked.

Carrie took an instinctive step back. Her foot slipped on the gravel and the bucket flew out of her hand as she tried to right herself.

“Why would I want to poison your roses?” she asked, genuinely mystified. Her tastes ran to wildflowers, but she had nothing against the more formal blooms.

“There’s something wrong with this place,” Alethea said. “There’s something wrong with you. The Santa Sangre should have reclaimed that land years ago.”

“And yet, it hasn’t.”

“By all rights, you ought to have drowned in the river.” Alethea was babbling now.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you.” Carrie’s eyes blazed. She was tempted to do something outlandish like cackle, or wave a broom around, or steal a small terrier from a girl with pigtails. But she didn’t want to give Alethea the satisfaction.

“Keep your poison,” Alethea said, punching a button to roll up her window. She threw the car in reverse and backed up rapidly, hitting the overturned bucket of compost. The orange plastic cracked beneath the Jeep’s wheels, and Alethea’s tires left a track in the rich, dark compost. Carrie hoped the earthworms had avoided the worst of it.

“Stay away from my house!” Carrie shouted after the retreating Jeep. She doubted Alethea heard her. When the hum of the Jeep’s engine disappeared into the distance, Carrie collected the broken fragments of the plastic bucket and hurled them into her trash bin. Then, she carefully scooped up the loose compost with a trowel and carried it into her garden to put it to good use.

Flowers, trees, and medicinal plants flourished on every square inch of the property. Carrie’s gardens were startlingly large. Larger, in fact, than the dimensions of the property should have strictly allowed. But under Carrie’s watch, there was somehow always room for another row of agrimony or columbine, or another trellis for sweet peas. Her upstairs and downstairs porches were packed from end-to-end with potted greenery, and against the southern wall she had built a small glass greenhouse.

As Carrie circled the house, she paused at the leaded glass door, fingers brushing the thick chain and padlock that held it shut. The metal was embossed with intricate interlocking runes. The work was as beautiful as it was powerful. Vines crawled up the sides of the door in orderly twists, with flax string tied to the stems at regular intervals. Carrie tapped the glass and turned back to the open gardens for now. The situation with the joist was not quite dire enough to require opening up the greenhouse.

The vines of a trellis brushed against Carrie’s skin, the still-wet leaves moistening her dark hair as she walked down to her herb garden. She had been meaning to cut back her overgrown fleawort patch for several days and was glad to have a use for the culled plants. Dropping to her knees, she thinned the fuzzy stalks by hand, depositing her harvest in a hand-woven basket she’d gotten from the annual Frognot craft fair last Christmas.

As she collected plants, a strange protrusion rose up from under one of the paving stones that wound down the garden towards the ten-foot circular meditative labyrinth located at the high point of the property. The paving stone shivered several times, dislodging the dirt surrounding it, then fell flat. Carrie locked eyes with a small ceramic garden gnome guarding the path. The lawn ornament had a conical red hat and a mischievous expression. As Carrie watched, the gnome shivered, and then leapt an inch in the air. She blinked as the ground below the path roiled, throwing off the smell of wet soil and raining errant earthworms onto the paving stones. With a sodden grunt, a figure emerged from the churned-up soil below the ceramic garden gnome. The statue tumbled from the figure’s head onto a paving-stone and cracked in two. Carrie took a step back as the soil-encrusted figure shook itself off like a dog. Finally, two wide, gray eyes opened under the crust of dirt.

Standing barefoot—and he was always barefoot when he ventured underground—Finn was just under five feet tall. When he went out into town, he wore heeled cowboy boots. He insisted this was a style preference, but Carrie thought he liked the boost. His hair and beard weren’t visible under the muck, but they were snowy white. Before he went earth-diving, he braided both hair and beard into tight, sturdy braids. Which meant that out and about, he tended to look like his hair had been through a crimper. Carrie considered it a nostalgic nineties throwback.

“You owe me a gnome,” Carrie said peevishly.

“That’s not a gnome. It’s an atrocity,” Finn grumbled. His voice was always gravelly. When he was annoyed, it rumbled like an earthquake. He poked at the halves of the lawn ornament with one foot.

“Jealous?” Carrie asked. “Afraid there’s only room for one garden gnome in this town?”

“I’m not a garden gnome,” Finn growled. “I’m a gnome in a garden.”

Carrie’s eyes sparkled. “My apologies.” Finn was the only gnome Carrie knew, and accordingly much more of an expert.

Carrie cheerfully collected the ceramic gnome shards under her arm and deposited them in her basket.

“Hose me down?” Finn asked.

Shaking loose dirt off herself, Carrie walked with Finn back up to the house. He waited patiently on the brick patio as she screwed the high-pressure sprayer nozzle onto the hose.

“You buy these things just to grind my gears,” Finn said, holding up the two halves of the gnome. “They’re a terrible representation of my people.”

“You’re right.” She grinned as the layers of grime sloughed off onto the bricks. Muddy runnels  of water ran off into the garden. If they weren’t sucked up by the plants, they would soon join the Santa Sangre as it flowed into the San Juan and made its way towards Mexico. Muddy water filled the halves of the gnome. “It doesn’t look at all like you. Your hat is much uglier.”

Finn was now dripping wet but largely clean. He was wearing a tight-fitting silver bodysuit. He insisted that the suit’s construction was a gnome secret, but he’d hinted that it was woven from some kind of metallic thread. The texture reminded Carrie of steel wool. Even if humans could make it, she doubted it would be appearing on Paris runways anytime soon.

“I have fantastic taste in hats,” Finn growled. He dropped the pieces of the ceramic gnome, made a rude gesture, and stomped away towards his rooms at the back of the house. Carrie sighed and went to inspect the hole where he’d emerged from her garden. Admittedly, the ability to move through solid earth was quite useful. She suspected that he was able to do it by way of small skin vibrations, possibly with the help of the fine, wiry hairs that covered his body. He looked like an unusually hairy human, but sometimes people stared.

Finn refused to answer her questions on a wide range of topics: gnome magic, gnome culture, gnome anatomy, and most especially his own biography. Although she watched, and learned, and made hypotheses, he remained largely an enigma. For all she knew, there were a hundred more gnomes living in the soil right below her feet, and Finn was the black sheep of the family gone to seek his fortune above ground.

Carrie had met Finn in an abandoned mineshaft the year she’d moved to Frognot. Although “met” was incomplete. It was more accurate to say that she’d stumbled over his half-dead body. She was in the mineshaft chasing rumors that a cursed jackalope had built a warren underground in the area. Her mission had been totally harebrained—even if she’d been powerful enough to trap an ensorcelled beast, she could have easily died in a cave-in. Instead, she’d tripped over Finn, slamming into a rotting support and nearly bringing the roof down on both of them. But she’d gotten Finn out, and after realizing he wasn’t human, taken him home to nurse him back to health. He’d lived there ever since and made himself indispensable in the process.

Carrie returned to the garden and replaced the flagstone Finn had dislodged. She patted the earth back down around it and made sure all the upturned earthworms found nice loamy patches of soil to dig into. Then, she went back to picking fleawort.

A few minutes later, Finn emerged from the house. 

“Where’s your hat?” Carrie asked. Recently, he’d taken to wearing a wide-brimmed green straw hat tied with a crocheted blue ribbon. It was truly an assault on the senses.

Finn glared at her from below exuberantly bushy white eyebrows. “Sun’s down. Don’t need a hat,” he said, twirling a tube of superglue between his fingers. She smiled, and he went to find the pieces of the ceramic gnome he’d broken. By the time she had finished clearing the fleawort bed, the gnome was fixed and back in its spot on the freshly turned soil of the garden path.

Carrie wondered if all gnomes could pass so easily as humans, or if Finn was unique. Sure, Finn’s silvery manbun drew odd looks when he went into town. Additionally, Finn’s stony eyes were wider set than most people’s, and Carrie was pretty sure he had an extra transparent eyelid that protected his eyes when he was burrowing through the soil. Other than his height, the main thing that set him apart from other people was his appalling fashion sense. At the moment, he wore leggings printed with smiling yellow suns, his platform flip-flops dangling off the edge of a hammock that was strung between her house and the squat mountain alder that shaded her back patio.

“Have you got time to help me with a spell? I’m going to try something new with that rotting joist on the balcony.”

“This is what happens when you build with wood,” Finn said, shaking his head disapprovingly. “Show me an underground granite vault with rot problems.”

Carrie rolled her eyes. “If you’d like to buy me an underground granite vault I’d be happy to relocate.”

Finn scratched his beard. “Count me in. What time?”

“As soon as the moon rises,” Carrie said. Finn grunted in agreement and closed his eyes. By the time Carrie made it up the porch steps, he was snoring again.

The gnome wasn’t much of a conversationalist, but Carrie knew she could count on him. The moon was waning, so it would be nice to have a little extra oomph behind her spell. Finn might mock the human propensity for building with wood, but at the end of the day, he needed a roof over his head as much as she did.

Carrie ground down the fleawort with a pestle. She scraped most of it into a bowl to save it for later, then added aloe and marigold. She spread the fragrant herbaceous paste onto the cut on her hand, then sat down to read for an hour with a library copy of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. She read a lot of classic science fiction, and as she thumbed through the pages, she wondered how far Finn could tunnel underground before he got into trouble. Surely he wasn’t backstroking through lava pools? At least, she didn’t think so. It was one more mystery to ponder.

When the twilight had faded from gray to navy, Carrie collected her fleawort paste from the kitchen and headed up to the balcony. Finn joined her a minute later, keeping his distance from the railing. He wasn’t a fan of heights, which made sense for someone from a ground-dwelling species.

As Carrie sat down beside the rotting joist, Finn tossed her a small black marble. Carrie admired the smooth onyx.

“Polished it up myself,” he said. “Will it work?”

“It’ll work just fine,” Carrie said, carefully unrolling a leather carrier across the planks. About the size of a yoga mat, the leather was laden with pockets and tool loops, each carefully embroidered with intricate symbols. Carrie unhooked a leather loop to retrieve a long silver scoop—about the size of a Slurpee straw—and carefully assessed her options. After a moment, she selected a pouch marked with the rune for strength, and added some of the powder inside to the fleawort paste. Carefully resealing the pouch, she tapped the silver scoop against the boards.

“What do you think? Longevity? Or abundance?”

“You don’t need abundant joists,” Finn grumbled. “Just one good one.”

“Longevity it is,” Carrie said, flicking open the clasp. The paste inside was a ruddy mess—Carrie had purchased it from a trapper over in Silverton and hadn’t dared to ask about its origins. By itself, the reddish longevity paste was rank, but the herbs in the stone bowl brought out different notes, and the whole thing smelled vegetal and alive. Carrie took a deep breath. It was like she was smelling an entire forest. Not just the living trees and animals, but soil, rotting vegetation, crumbling bones and decomposition. An ecosystem in a bowl.

Finn had already chalked a signaling circle onto the balcony platform. Carrie looked over his marks.

“You’re becoming quite the witch,” she said. Finn ignored the comment, but when she handed him a protective amulet, he slung it swiftly around his neck. She did the same, and then dolloped fleawort paste into the center of the chalk circle. When she was done, she placed the black marble gently inside.

Taking the chalk from Finn, Carrie drew three runes on the rotting joist. One for growth. It was wood, after all. One for youth, and one for protection against disease. When she was satisfied with her work, she traced the chalk lines over with the fleawort paste. Energy crackled under her fingers as she worked, tiny pinpricks that jolted across her skin as the energy for the spell flowed out of the marble and into the runes. The sensation wasn’t painful, but it wasn’t pleasant, either, and she winced as she finished the lines. When she was done, she scooted back, letting as much moonlight as possible fall across the circle. Under the watery silver glow, threads of power flowed out of the onyx marble and into the runes on the joist, an opalescent milky way of promised magic. The runes on the joist grew brighter and brighter, and there was a creak of wood, almost sub-audible, as the rot began to heal itself.

The mystery never failed to awe her. Visible only under moonlight, the magic was mesmerizing. That could be dangerous. If you used too much power, you could rack up a bill you couldn’t pay. Carrie pulled a delicate three-minute hourglass from her leather kit and upturned it. There was nothing particularly magical about it—the timer on her cell phone would work just as well—but she liked collecting antique hourglasses. This one was a Victorian egg timer she had found at an antique store in the middle of Kansas, and she’d bought it for herself as a reward for completing a particularly difficult piece of work.

As the last grains of sand flowed through the neck, Carrie retrieved a set of long silver tongs from her kit.

“Have you got the jar?” she asked Finn.

He made an affirming noise and placed a small metal cup on the balcony beside her. Working carefully, Carrie grasped the marble with the tongs and pulled.

The marble didn’t move. Cursing, she tightened her grip on the silver and pulled. A threatening hiss echoed through the air, and then the marble came loose. It was incredibly heavy and very unstable, oozing with errant loops of magic now that it was unbound from its circle. She had to grab the silver tongs with both hands to lift it into the iron cup. When it clinked into the bottom, Finn slammed an iron lid on top, screwing it on tight.

Carrie sighed in relief as the twinkle of magic faded from the air. This was the most dangerous part of any spell. She took a few minutes to collect herself, then grabbed the iron jar and scrambled to her feet.

“You could leave it until the morning,” Finn said. “You know my jars are good for it.”

“They’re the best. But I don’t like to wait,” Carrie said, fingers pressed into the grooves around the lid.

All magic had a price. The energy to heal a wound or dowse for water or strengthen your own muscles had to come from somewhere. Even a witch couldn’t escape the second law of thermodynamics. A good witch could, however, hide from it for a few days. That was the essence of magic. The black marble was now a cosmic IOU. The jar would prevent the universe from collecting its due, but not forever. Carrie, who understood the cost of an overdue cosmic bill all too well, liked to pay her debts as quickly as possible.

“You’re probably right. Remember the last time you tried to delay a debt like this?” Finn asked, his tone light but his eyes sharp.

Carrie looked away, memories rushing back. “I remember.”

Finn chuckled darkly. “That storm didn’t just wash away half your garden. It took a whole week of crops with it. Nature doesn’t forget when you steal from it.”

Carrie rubbed the back of her neck, feeling the phantom ache of that past mistake. She had tried to avoid payment for a water spell, but when the rains came, they had come with a vengeance. Floods that had torn through her carefully planted beds, leaving destruction in their wake. She had been lucky not to lose the house.

As they stepped outside, the smell of burning leaves hit her. A rose bush withered at the edge of her garden, one of the sacrifices she’d been planning to make. The moment her foot touched the ground it shed an arc of loose magic. The bush shriveled, its deep red petals turning to ash in an instant. The marble pulsed again, lighter now, its demand partially satisfied. But the air still buzzed with static. It wasn’t over yet.

“Let’s get this over with,” she said. “I’ll buy you a slice of pie afterwards.”

Carrie’s blue truck was fifteen years old, and it would last another fifteen if she had anything to say about it. Admittedly, Finn’s uncanny ability to duplicate just about any metal object she gave him made it significantly easier to get parts.

“Where are you thinking? Somewhere up on the peak?” Finn asked.

Carrie grinned. “I had a more…urban destination in mind,” she said.

“You have a soft spot for trouble,” Finn grumbled.

Carrie didn’t argue with him. Instead, she grabbed her cloak and checked the time on her phone. Magic had a way of twisting reality, and it was well past midnight now. Most of the houses on the hillsides were dark. She slowed the truck as she reached the north side of town, which had once been an entirely different city from Frognot, before the railroad had sucked up the whole valley. Parking the truck at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, she scrambled out.

“Stay here,” Carrie instructed. Finn shrugged and leaned his seat back, closing his eyes.

Frognot was located at an altitude of about 7,000 feet, and even in the summer it was cold at night. Even colder after the recent rains. Carrie’s hooded velvet cloak was an affectation, but it was warm and comfortable, and it added to her mystique. She had dyed the velvet herself, using midnight blue pigments from plants in the garden. It was the color of a starless sky, and in the dark, it made her almost invisible. She clutched the cloak’s worn blue edges close to her chest as she strode silently among the neighborhood’s old Victorian homes.

Carrie stared down the block of houses, trying to remember the house number. Just as she was about to risk looking at her phone, she spotted Alethea Murrow’s cherry red Jeep behind a tall iron gate. Bingo.

Carrie hurried up the driveway, grateful that the iron gate was unlocked. She was awfully tired from climbing fences. The gate squeaked as it opened, and Carrie had to duck behind the Jeep as a light flicked on in the house. Breathing hard, Carrie imagined Alethea staring out the window with her beady, busybody eyes. The hair stood up on the back of her neck. When the light turned off, Carrie continued around the side of the house.

Where Carrie’s garden was a riot of haphazard herb beds, Alethea’s was scrupulously orderly. Military, even. A smooth concrete path ran straight down the center of the lawn towards a small marble fountain surrounded by rose trellises.

Carrie moved silently to the nearest trellis. In the low light, the white wood looked like peeling skin. The roses, outlined against the dark concrete, filled the night air with a heady, romantic fragrance. They smelled so lovely that Carrie almost felt guilty as she retrieved a trowel from her pocket and dug a six-inch hole in the soil below the trellis, slicing through thread-like roots. A thorn snagged her, leaving a long red scratch along her wrist. Fair play to the rose. When she was done, she unscrewed the lid from Finn’s sturdy iron jar and tipped the black marble into the hole, covering it quickly with moist soil.

Magic always extracted a price. Today, it would extract that price from Alethea Murrow’s award-winning roses. She stood back, and a beam of moonlight fell on the nearest flower. The petals were bloody red for a moment, and then began to fade. Leaves rustled faintly as the color drained out of the roses, turning the petals a gummy flesh color before they cracked into dead rot. The thorny green stems lost color and withered, the points of the thorns crumbling away. A circle of grass surrounding the hole where Carrie had deposited the marble died off as she watched, leaving patchy earth behind. Alethea could flush that soil and fertilize it with fresh-fallen manure, but nothing would grow there for years. The spirit realm was collecting its debt with interest. Within a few minutes, the pace of the decay slowed, and then stopped entirely. The black marble had sucked up the life it was owed. On a whim, Carrie speared her trowel back into the dirt. After inspecting the black marble for any errant traces of magic, she slipped it into her pocket. A memento, for the next time her refusal to drown disappointed Alethea Murrow. Congratulations on your latest prize. You’ve got the deadest roses in Frognot.

A light turned on at the back of the house, and a cat in the distance yowled. Carrie melted back into the shadows and left quickly. As she walked back to the truck, a faint note of guilt twanged. But they were just roses, and Alethea had plenty more.

She wasn’t normally so petty. Usually, after she finished a spell, she took the debt-stone out to the middle of the forest, to a tree riddled with mountain pine beetles or half-dead from invasive dwarf mistletoe. There were more direct ways of transferring power, of course. Those ways were bloodier than using debt-stones, although less dangerous to the witch. But Carrie didn’t need to have some local farmer up in her business about why she needed so many goats all the time. A rose bush, she thought, was a reasonable price to pay.

Not just any rose bush. An award-winning rosebush. She allowed herself a wicked smile as she climbed back into her blue truck.

“Ready for pie?” she asked Finn.

“Always,” he said.

Carrie would have gone hungry without the Wildcat Diner. Unlike everything else in Frognot, the tiny vintage burger joint was open all night, except on Christmas and Valentine’s Day. It was busier than usual at the moment, rowdy with a long table of Texan tourists who had clearly just left the bar down the block. Their server was the diner’s owner, Binita, a wizened scrap of a woman who was either an ancient forty or a cherubic sixty. Binita glared at Carrie and Finn, standing well back from the table as she took their order of pies and coffees.

“Who put mine tailings in her coffee?” Carrie muttered to Finn as the server cast a long, suspicious look over her shoulder on her way to the glass dessert case up front.

“She can probably sense you’re a floricidal maniac,” Finn said.

“Hey!” Carrie narrowed her eyes. “How do you know that?”

“We didn’t risk sneaking around suburbia so that you could kill some random tree,” Finn said. “Besides. The roots talk to me.” He waggled his bushy white eyebrows, pulling his purple knit beanie down over his head.

“Is that a joke?” Carrie asked.

He shrugged mysteriously, and before Carrie could question him about it further, Binita returned with two slices of warm strawberry rhubarb pie and two cups of coffee, one black and one with cream. The diner’s owner might not like Carrie, but she remembered how she took her coffee, which counted for something.

“Thanks, Binita,” Carrie said. The woman made a small sign against evil and skittered away. Carrie sighed. “I may not have the warm regard of my community, but at least I have hot pie.” Binita always heated the pie up in a toaster oven rather than a microwave, a detail Carrie appreciated.

When the bell on the door rang, she was too engrossed in the excellent strawberry rhubarb pie to look up. A moment later, however, quick footsteps approached the booth. Carrie looked up in surprise to see a thin young woman with mousy strawberry blonde hair looking down at her. Her arm shook as she raised one hand and pressed it into the dark tattoo on the back of Carrie’s right hand.

“It’s not polite to poke strangers,” Carrie said, drawing her hand back.

The young woman ignored her. “You’re the witch,” the young woman said. By the way her words mushed into one another, Carrie thought that she was a little drunk. Overhearing her, one of the Texan tourists looked their way and chuckled. Something about Carrie’s expression, however, made him look away.

“I’m Carrie. It’s nice to meet you.” Her words came out ironically sharp.

“I– I need your help. I’m sick,” the young woman stammered.

There was a thin film of sweat on the woman’s upper lip, and her hair lay lifelessly against her head. Carrie thought that the young woman was pretty—or at least, she had been. Was she on drugs? “It’s late. You should sit down and get something to eat. I can order you something before we go–”

Nodding to Finn, she slid halfway out of the booth. But the young woman grabbed her arm with a surprisingly strong grip. She traced the outlines of Carrie’s tattoos with a yellowed fingernail. “I don’t need food. I need help,” she said insistently.

“Well, I can’t help you right now,” Carrie barked. She regretted speaking so sharply, but it was true. The icy languor that came over her after she worked magic was surging up inside her. The price, perhaps, of her stunt with the rose bush.

“Your hand is freezing,” the young woman said, fingers digging into Carrie’s bones.

Carrie rubbed her eyes and reassessed the young woman. She looked more distraught than dangerous, wearing a dingy white fleece jacket over a long denim dress.

“What’s your name?” Carrie asked.

“Emily. I saw your truck out front. That’s why I came in.”

Binita approached now with a sour look on her face. “If you’re going to cause trouble, you can cause it somewhere else,” she said, looking straight at Carrie as she spoke.

Carrie put her hand on top of the young woman’s. It was warm in comparison with her own, but very frail, the bones sharp under stretched skin. “Will you sit down?” Carrie asked.

Emily tugged her hand away, eyes darting to Binita for an instant before drifting back to her own worn leather boots.

“I’m sorry. This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have come.” She turned to go, but Carrie reached out and caught at her sleeve. It was damp with sweat.

“Wait,” Carrie said. After all, she had to make a living somehow. “You know where I live? Out on the oxbow?”

Damp strings of hair obscured Emily’s face, but she nodded.

“Come by tomorrow,” Carrie said, then added “Not too early.”

The bell over the door clanged away; the frightened young woman was already halfway across the parking lot.

“Think she’ll come?” Finn asked.

Carrie shrugged. “Or she’ll sober up and realize she needs a different kind of help.”

“Think she can pay?”

“Everyone can pay. One way or another.” Carrie shivered. The cup of coffee between her hands was already cold. She put a few bills and a generous tip on the table. “Can you drive? I’m about to faceplant into my pie crumbs.”

Annoying neighbors and suspicious looks are a small price to pay for a quiet life in the woods. However, trouble seems to be right around the corner when this mystery woman shows up and causes a scene in the middle of town. Find out what is next for Carrie and Finn on December 5th when The Secret Keeper: The Witch of Frognot County Book 1 is released. Until then head over to Amazon and pre-order it today.