Page 1 of Strike It Witch

Chapter

One

Darkness had descended hours ago, and a chilly desert breeze rustled palm fronds, kicked up dust, and stirred the stale air. All in all, it was a pleasant evening in the southwestern desert of California.

Perfect night to take on a demon.

“You sure you’re up for this, Betty? You haven’t handled a banishment since before your mom passed away.”

“It’s a banishment, not a summoning. I’ll be fine.”

“I know, but maybe you should think about calling the?—”

“Ida Summer, if the next word out of your mouth iscoven, I’m out of here.”

“Nope, notmynext word.” Ida put her hand over her heart and shook her head. “I was going to ask if you should think about calling the gal who sells the good tamales—the ones with the green olives. We need to put in an order in time for Christmas.”

“It’s February,” I said drily.

“Leticia gets busier every year.”

I gave my friend a long, suspicious look. Ida was my height—five-four—and slim, with a cap of silvery white hair and a smile that made her blue eyes sparkle. I’d always thought she looked like Helen Mirren. There was an intellectual deviousness in bothwomen’s smiles that matched up. There were forty-five years between my thirty-five and her eighty, and it often felt like I was the elder in our friendship, not her.

“As long as you don’t talk to the creature, everything will work out fine,” I said. "Stick to the plan.”

I had zero faith in this part of my strategy. My friend was a lot of things—funny, courageous, loyal—but she wasn’t the type of person to keep her mouth shut. It just wasn’t in her.

Since she’d talked me into taking this job, I’d warned her repeatedly about the dangers of speaking to hitchhiker—aka highway—demons, about how once you engaged them in conversation, they slipped into your head like a slithery little worm and took over your body. Yet here we were, having the talk again.

“Right,” she said. “The plan.”

“You remember it, don’t you?”

“Pshaw. Of course I do. I know it so well I could recite it backwards.” She tucked a strand of her short white hair behind her ear, shoved the key in the ignition, and fired up the engine of the ’72 Ford LTD. “But if you wanted to go over it again, I’d be okay with it.”

Midnight was bearing down on us, so I slid into the passenger seat, leaving space for my partner Fennel to sit beside me. Ida backed out of her driveway and pulled onto the road as I went over the game plan one last time.

“You’re going to pull over and pick up the demon. He’ll sit in the passenger seat. You’ll drive into the ring of mesquite trees on the edge of the alfalfa field and lead the demon creature to the containment circle there. You’ll be able to see it. He won’t. The portal will show up either before or after the car pulls in. Doesn’t matter which for our plan.” I narrowed my eyes and leaned closer to her. “It will all go smoothly as long as you don’t engagethe demon in conversation. Don’t make eye contact, don’t even nod when he asks you a question. Try to look scared.”

“Of a hitchhiker demon?” She laughed.

“Ida, you need to take this seriously.”

“I am, I swear. Don’t engage. Got it.” She took both hands off the wheel, made finger guns at me, and winked.

“Careful.” I grabbed the wheel before we ran off the road.

“Oops.” She took it back, sat up straight, and peered over the LTD’s high dashboard.

I glanced down. Fennel tilted his black furry head in his version of a shrug.

My partner—not familiar, as everyone assumed—was an integral part of another stratagem I was bringing into play tonight. One I’d shared with Ida in a peripheral sort of way, not wanting to distract her.

“You good?” I whispered to the golden-eyed cat.

Meow, he said, via the mental-link spell we’d cast before we left. He was good.

Fennel had shown up a month after my mom died, at a time when I’d been so low even Ida couldn’t help me up. He’d moved into my garden room and napped with me on a chaise lounge I’d dragged in because it was the only place I could sleep. Sometimes, when the sadness in me was so strong I couldn’t breathe, he’d cuddle close and make biscuits on my chest until I calmed. Many a night, he purred me to sleep.

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