Stuck with a Spell by D. D. Scott

CHAPTER ONE
     
    H oly hellfire!
    I scrambled out of the kitchen with the
rest of my guests to see what new calamity Aunt Liza had conjured
up.
    One would think the bestselling police
procedurals I write would provide enough excitement in my life. But
the fictional antics I dream up are nothing compared to living the
next farm over from my crazy Aunt Liza.
    No one would believe my award-winning
fiction, written under the nom de plume Nicky Blane, could be based
on the real-life shenanigans my Aunt Liza cooks up next
door.
    We found her standing next to a heap of
twisted metal in the center of a circle of charred ground. Quite
the contrast to the blanket of snow that covered everything else in
sight.
    “ What the hell do you think
you’re doing?!”
    Liza said nothing just blinked. Okay,
she tried to blink, which must have been difficult and rather
uncomfortable being as she had singed eyebrows and only a
smattering of eyelashes left. Her plaid hunter’s cap smoked and
sizzled right along with her apocalyptic mess.
    Despite my yelling, she still wasn’t
focusing on me or the question I’d barked at her. Apparently, she
was still dazed by her latest blow-up.
    It took a second for my mind to
register what the metal had once been. No. She didn’t, I thought,
certain she wasn’t that far over the total nutjob line.
    But then I caught what was left of the
manufacturer’s label on one piece of smoking metal. It was the
wreckage of the two rusting gasoline tanks that had been on our
land since long before I was born.
    Damn. She truly had lost all of her
marbles.
    Thankfully, Captain Allen, a
thirty-year veteran of our Sheriff’s Department and now my Editor’s
significant other, hadn’t yet felt the need to take out his
handcuffs or unholster his duty weapon, though his hand was resting
on its stock. I had a feeling that when it came to my Aunt Liza, he
would always be duty ready.
    “ Well?” I continued, not
about to let her weasel her way out of an explanation.
    “ I was just usin’ the
support structure of the tanks to hang up a couple of dolls. I
didn’t count on there being anything left in them rusty old
things.”
    “ Uh...Hello, Genius!
Gasoline is extremely explosive! Why would you even consider firing
that cannon of yours at a gas tank?! Wait a minute. Did you say
dolls?!”
    “ So what? Yes, they were
dolls. I’m trying out a new spell on a couple of folks.”
    She said this as though it were a
perfectly reasonable thing to do.
    “ Let me get this straight.
As far as you’re concerned, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with
hanging Voodoo dolls on a gas tank and then annihilating ‘em with a
10-gauge shotgun?”
    She cocked her head as if she were
thinking about it really hard.
    There wasn’t a single one of us
standing there who didn’t know all kinds of major trouble resulted
when her wheels were crankin’ that fast and furious.
    “ Yeah. I don’t see anything
wrong with that,” she said, taking off her cap, dropping it to the
ground, and snuffing out the last remnants of burning material with
her pink rubber boots.
    “ What y’all should be
concerned about, however, is that I think my spell may have gone a
wee bit awry.”

CHAPTER TWO
     
    W ell, hot damn! Now we were getting somewhere! A spell! I was
privy to a for-real spell coming from a for-real witch!
    Okay...for the record, I’m not sure
Nicky’s Aunt Liza is actually a witch. But she definitely tries and
takes her attempts at becoming one to rather extreme but fabulous
levels.
    Totally good with me!
    I’d been waiting on an opportunity like
this forever! And I was over the moon to finally have the chance to
see it! Oooo...speaking of the moon, I wonder if the fact that it’s
going to be a full moon tonight figured into her planning and
preparation?
    There’s just so much about all of this
witchcraft that I can’t wait to explore. It’s not every day that a
fiction editor like me experiences more interesting action in