Once Blessed, Thrice Cursed: A Sister Witches Urban Fantasy #1 Read online

  Once Blessed, Thrice Cursed

  A Sister Witches Urban Fantasy #1

  Coralie Moss

  Copyright © 2019 by Coralie Moss

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, objects, and incidents herein are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual living things, events, locales, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Published internationally by Pink Moon Books, British Columbia, Canada.

  ISBN 978-1-989446-05-8

  Editor: Michelle Meade

  Cover Design: Elizabeth Mackey

  Proofreading: Beth Attwood

  Created with Vellum

  About the Author

  Coralie Moss loves everyday heroines and complicated witches, layered magic and earthly moments, and will always believe in the power of love. She lives on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia with her family and two globe-trotting rescue cats.

  Join Coralie’s mailing list for book news, giveaways, and the occasional homage to sisterhood.

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost, all the gratitude to my editor, Michelle Meade. Thank you for hearing me, for guiding me, for wielding the red pen with dexterity, and for knowing when to put down the pen and pick up the pom poms.

  Thank you, Elizabeth Mackey, for creating a gorgeous cover.

  Massive thanks to the beta readers—Kim Kennard, Laurel Buchanan, and Leslie Mart. It’s always a delight to see what stray bits you’ve caught. Your suggestions were spot on!

  Last and by no means least, THANK YOU to the readers.

  Contents

  Author’s Note: The Sister Witches & other series

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Author’s Note: The Sister Witches & other series

  Once Blessed, Thrice Cursed is book #1 of the Sister Witches Urban Fantasy Series. Set in Northampton, Massachusetts, it introduces us to Clementine, Beryl, and Alderose Brodeur.

  Demon Lines (book 2) is the continuation of Clementine’s story.

  The Scarab Eater’s Daughter (book 3) gives us the sisters’ continuing adventures from Alderose’s point of view.

  Readers first meet the sisters’ aunt, Maritza Brodeur, in the Calliope Jones series:

  Magic Remembered (book 1)

  Magic Reclaimed (book 2)

  Magic Redeemed (book 3)

  Magic Restrained, a novelette (book 3.5)

  The Magic Series: Box Set #1 of the Calliope Jones novels

  Join Coralie’s mailing list for news of upcoming book releases.

  This book is dedicated to my sister, Karen, who has always had my back;

  and to my grandmother, Dorothy,

  who taught me to make magic with needles and threads.

  Once Blessed, Thrice Cursed

  Introduction

  When my sisters and I were handed the keys to our deceased mother's shop, we thought we’d spend a crisp and colorful October weekend together.

  We planned to divvy up the shop’s contents, keep what we wanted and sell off the rest, then close the doors to Needles & Sins for good.

  Our mother had other plans.

  1

  “Needles and Sins.”

  My oldest sister, Alderose, shielded her eyes from windborne grit and contemplated the sign’s faded lettering. “Why did Mom have to give her shop such an awkward name?”

  “Never bothered me,” I said, tracking the path of Alderose’s stormy gaze. I found the shop’s pitiful appearance far more unsettling. Seven years after our mother’s death—and a scant month after her successor’s passing—two grimy, unlit display windows whispered of hard times and a dearth of customers.

  I’d lost count of the hours and days I’d spent ensconced in the shop’s overstuffed armchairs, sneaking glimpses of swooning, half-naked humans on paperback book covers while my mother and her friends taught me how to knit and crochet.

  Or tried.

  “You were too young to care.” Alderose shrugged off my touch and shifted her weight. The wind whipped a hank of her wavy, dark brown hair across my cheek while sending clusters of bright yellow leaves scuttering across the sidewalk. “Mom opened the shop when I was in junior high, and that name haunted me from day one. The girls were brutal and the boys assumed I knew way more than I did.”

  Middle-sister Beryl stepped in between us. “I say Mom was ahead of her time. I think it’s cool she decided a store devoted to romance novels and the womanly art of needlework would thrive in a town already devoted to women’s empowerment.”

  “‘Womanly art’?” I asked. Northampton, Massachusetts, was home to a famous all-women’s college and, as an alumna, I chafed at my sister’s phrasing.

  “I was being ironic.”

  “Moira Brodeur. Pioneer for witches, stitches, and dukes in britches.” Alderose turned on her booted heel and offered us fist bumps. An updraft lifted the skirt of Beryl’s plaid dress, and more of Alderose’s hair. She grabbed the wild locks and returned to scowling at the sign and jangling the ring of keys the estate lawyer had pressed into her hand.

  During our hour-long meeting, the insipid warlock repeatedly voiced the assumption that at least one of us would pick up where the shop’s most recent caretaker—our mother’s longtime friend, Serena—had left off when she’d died. Her will passed the care and running of the shop to us. It was nobody’s business that the Brodeur sisters had met multiple times over HexenApp and agreed to sell what we could and divvy up the proceeds.

  “It’s going to be dark soon. Let’s get this over with.” Alderose—shortest, fiercest, and our de facto leader—broke away, read the tags on the keys, and separated two. She unlocked the shop and tugged on the heavy, crosscut oak and beveled glass door. Hinges groaned and the strip of rubber at the bottom flaked off in pieces.

  Beryl elbowed the door and followed Alderose inside. I paused on the threshold. A web of protective threads, frayed by time and invisible to the non-Magical eye, spread across the frame above head height. The threads had shimmered iridescent pink when my sisters passed underneath. I removed my knit gloves and reached to touch the construct with my bare fingers. Only the faintest sensation of my mother’s magic lingered in this place.

  There would be time for remembrances later. Wondering if there was some way I could capture the threads once we were done and take them with me, I closed and bolted the door and swiped the wall for the light switch. Florescent bulbs on the pendant lamps hanging over the two cutting tables flickered and spat before fully committing to providing us with a meager bluish glow. A checkout counter hunkered in the shadows to the left of the entranceway. Even with the overhead lights, late-afternoon shadows lingered in the corners of the shop.

  “At least the electricity’s working,” I said. “Either of y
ou remember where the thermostat is?”

  “Back here.” Beryl veered around the cutting tables and headed for the wall at the rear of the store. If my memory was correct, one of the two closed doors led to a bathroom-slash-utility closet and the other to an office.

  I leaned against a cutting table, cupping my fingers around the wooden measuring stick nailed to the table’s edge as I looked around the chilly room. How many times had I measured out yards of muslin for Needles and Sins’ customers, glowing with the praise they heaped on my curly-haired head?

  Alderose joined me as I rode the memory. “I think you spent the most time in here helping Mom,” she said. “Beryl always had an excuse to stay away. And Dad thought at least one of us should follow his trade.”

  I bumped shoulders with her. “He taught you to cut hair?”

  “He tried. The man put blades in my hands as soon as I was strong enough not to drop them.”

  “He used scissors, Rosey.” I mimed cutting the air with two fingers.

  “Yeah, well,” she said, crossing her arms and tucking her hands in her armpits. “Those weren’t the only sharp things he wielded.”

  Before I could dig deeper into Alderose’s relationship with our father, Beryl emerged from the bathroom, wiping her hands on a sheet of paper towel and interrupting the rare sisterly moment. “I’m hungry. Let’s order takeout. What do you two want?”

  “Mac and cheese,” Alderose and I blurted out together, laughing. Macaroni and cheese from a box was Mom’s fail-safe dinner option. My sisters and I had developed a mutual aversion to the stuff, though the last time I choked down a bowl of mac and cheese was with my mother, here at the store, because…because that’s what she made and that’s what we ate.

  “Oh my Goddess, do you think Serena did anything with Mom’s never-ending stash?” Beryl’s eyes widened. “I mean, look at this place. It’s creepy how little has changed since she took over.”

  The lawyer had led us to believe that Serena had been operating the store since our mother’s death. Alderose exaggerated a shiver and tucked the keys into the stud-covered leather pouch slung around her hips. “Very creepy. I vote we order pizza.”

  “Fresh mozzarella, tomatoes, and basil for me, please,” I said. “And get a bottle of champagne. For Mom.”

  Alderose and Beryl nodded, and Beryl added, “Better make it two bottles. And get some Pellegrino. And see if they have any tiramisu.”

  “Call in the order. Make mine onions, extra cheese.” Alderose adjusted her earbuds and scanned the street as she exited the shop. I locked the door, my gaze lingering on the last patch of clear sky visible between neighboring brick and granite buildings. Clouds with dark linings had been threatening to drop rain on us all afternoon, and now their fuzzy edges had almost fused.

  Behind me, Beryl called our favorite pizza place. Puffing out a breath against the glass, I drew a tiny heart in the condensation. I’d be departing my hometown soon enough, arriving at my new life in British Columbia armed with a bounty of cash and whatever sentimental odds and ends I wanted from the shop.

  Once in Vancouver, I would approach my mother’s siblings about my magical education. With Dad gone incommunicado—again—and Mom not around to answer my mounting list of questions, Aunt Maritza and Uncle Malvyn were next in line.

  My magic had always been a wild card, and now it was doing things I didn’t understand and couldn’t ignore. Not any longer. Not with the varied and creative ways the past was infiltrating my daily life, especially since moving to such a rainy region of the world. Whatever had triggered my latest round of visions was exhausting. Some people had chronic headaches. I had chronic visions. I was beginning to feel sleep deprived.

  “Sissy, come here.” Beryl waved at me from behind the checkout counter. “Call me crazy, but the more I see, the more I think Serena didn’t change anything after Mom died.”

  The shelves below the counter held the same orderly collection of notebooks, cardboard shoeboxes, and jars of pens and pencils I remembered from my years at the cash register. I flicked on my phone’s flashlight, swept the bright beam over the two shelves, and swiped my fingertips across a round tin of pastilles. A roll of greasy dust coated my skin. “Looks like Serena didn’t clean anything either.”

  “Ew, that is so gross.”

  I agreed. Mom might have been a pack rat in some areas of her life—she couldn’t say no to a set of vintage buttons or yet another pair of scissors—but she never let clutter get out of hand. The checkout counter especially was always spotless but for the register and a collection box for a local women’s shelter. “I’m going to wash up. Let’s not touch or move anything else until Alderose gets back.” I stifled the urge to wipe my hands on my jeans. “Keep an eye on the door. I locked it after she left.”

  I was almost to the bathroom when Beryl yelled that she was putting a cloaking spell on the windows. I had just located a desiccated bar of soap when she shrieked. My sister, still in her cropped, puffy jacket, was silhouetted in front of the glass, one arm raised and clutching her wand. On the other side of the door, six feet plus of leather-clad, auburn-haired, horned male glowered at her, then at me.

  “Demon Boy,” I said. “What the hell is he doing here?”

  “I don’t know,” Beryl hissed, “but would you get your butt up here and help me out?”

  I managed to ding my thigh on the table closest the door because I couldn’t take my gaze off Demon Boy’s face. He and I had history. He had history with Alderose, and with Beryl too.

  Separately.

  “I’m texting Alderose,” I whispered to the back of my sister’s head.

  Kostya, aka Demon Boy, Troublemaker, and half a dozen other monikers, pressed his massive palms against his side of the glass and grinned. “Let me in,” he said. His low voice set the door to vibrating. He glanced to where I’d traced the heart on the glass, breathed a foggy patch above it, and drew a smiley face with horns.

  Beryl shook her head as Demon Boy ran his tongue across his lower lip and went to his knees on the stoop. “Should we let him in, Clemmie? He’ll only try to distract—” She shook her head and snorted. “Now he’s doing that thing with his tongue.”

  Demons of every gender had forked tongues, and this particular demon knew how to use his to the extreme. My brain hollered to batten down the hatches as I rested a hand on Beryl’s arm and peered over her shoulder. “Do we have any reason to not let Kostya inside?”

  “History? Who knows what wild mission he’s on.”

  Last I heard, the demon in question was in training to become an investigator for the Board of Magical Governance. “Was he ever less than gentlemanly with you?” I asked. Kostya was the horniest male of any species I had ever come across, but his use of consent was stellar, and his ratio of orgasms provided to orgasms obtained positioned him in the top three of my list of lovers. Not that I was keeping a list. Or that we were lovers any longer. “Beryl. Answer me.”

  “Sorry, I was just remembering how good he is with that tongue,” she said. “I’m fine with letting him in. He never broke my heart. Or yours, right?”

  “Only thing he broke was my bed.” I reached under her arm to undo the lock.

  Kostya grinned at the squeak of metal on metal and straightened his legs the second the door began to swing toward him. “Beryl. Clementine. May I join you?”

  “We were just debating that question, Kostya. Can you behave yourself?”

  “Always and in whatever manner you request.” Peering past our shoulders and into the shop, he asked, “Is Alderose here too?

  “Yep,” I said, pointing behind him. “And you better not give her any reason to drop our dinner.”

  Kostya glanced over his shoulder as he crossed the threshold to the shop. A lone thread grazed the top of his head and glowed green for a moment.

  Safe. Mom had built a simple, familiar code into her protective spells, one that mirrored the non-Magical world and had been easy for a kid like me to remember. Gree
n for go, yellow for caution, and red for stop.

  Beryl resumed tracing the wood framing each window and chanting. By the time she finished, Alderose had crossed the street. The top half of her head was visible over a bag and two pizza boxes balanced atop a cardboard box from the liquor store.

  “Kostya.”

  The demon bowed. “Alderose.”

  “Can you guys move? This is heavy.” My sister shoved the boxes toward Kostya, wiped her boots on the worn welcome mat, and locked the door. “Put that on the table, then tell us what you’re doing here.”

  I darted to the counter and hefted the adjustable oak stool; the same one I had toppled off of countless times as a kid. Kostya retrieved two more stools, and a chair from one of the alcoves facing the street.

  An early-October weather front had arrived, darkening the sky, dropping temperatures, and bringing a smattering of rain. Beryl jogged to the back of the store, hit a light switch, and emerged from Mom’s office with a plate of beeswax candles and four teacups. She leaned over the table, shrugged the cup handles off her fingers, and centered the plate. “Kostya, would you light these?”

  The demon flicked a fingernail against his prominent, pointed thumbnail. A flame flared at its tip. He lit the candles one by one, then wrapped his fingers around his thumb, extinguishing the flame. “Thank you for letting me in,” he said. “I heard you three were in town and I wanted to offer my condolences about Serena’s passing, amongst other things.”