Every Witch Way

  About the Book

  Every Witch Way

  Kirsty Ferry

  Book 1 - Schubert

  Synopsis:

  Time for a Halloween road trip …

  Nessa hates her full name – Agnes – which she inherited from her great-great grandmother – but is that all she inherited? Because rumour had it that Great-Great Granny Agnes was a witch, and a few unusual things have been happening to Nessa recently …

  First, there’s the strange book she finds in her local coffee shop, and then the invite from her next-door neighbour Ewan Grainger to accompany him on a rather supernatural research trip. What ensues is a Halloween journey through Scotland in a yellow camper van (accompanied by a big black cat called Schubert), a mystical encounter in an ancient forest and maybe just a touch of magic!

  A glorious fun read from Kirsty Ferry. Sit back with a glass of fizz or a hot chocolate and enjoy this perfect little treat!

  Schubert series:

  Every Witch Way

  A Christmas Secret

  A Delicious Selection of Bite Size Reads!

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Thank You

  About the Author

  More Choc Lit from Kirsty Ferry

  Introducing Choc Lit

  Chapter One

  NESSA

  I have to tell you that my name is Nessa. O-ho! I hear you cry. That’s short for Vanessa, then.

  Well yes. Yes, it is. But I am not called Vanessa.

  I am called Agnes.

  Which I hate.

  But Agnes was my great-great-grandmother’s name, you see, and twenty-five years ago, I graced the family by being the first girl born into it in practically a century – so I got the name.

  Then I discovered Agnes was a witch’s name, so that made it all quite interesting.

  And yes, I am currently jumping around the sixteen square metres of my “garden” and talking to trees, but there’s really nothing sinister in it. I’m trying to make a wand, and you have to ask the tree’s permission to do that or they get upset. And it’s almost Halloween and it’s a full moon, so I can’t think of a better time to be doing it.

  But maybe I should give you a little background? It’s all to do with the women in the coffee shop. It’s their fault and if it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t be doing this.

  I suppose at least I’m not jumping around naked though. That’s just too much for suburbia to cope with.

  EWAN

  ‘Nessa?’ I’m rather intrigued as to what my neighbour is doing. She’s flouncing around, waving her arms in the air and there’s an ominous droning sound coming from her garden.

  The last time I heard that noise, I discovered she was actually singing. Maybe she’s singing again. If that’s the case, I have to stop her before my ears begin to bleed.

  ‘Nessa!’ I raise my voice and she stops mid-flounce and looks up at my window. We live in the same building. It’s a converted Georgian terrace house, which is now split into flats – she’s downstairs, so she gets most of the back garden. I’m upstairs, so I get the little bit in the shade that’s tagged onto it. ‘Do you need help? Are you in pain? Shall I call an ambulance?’

  ‘Shut up, Ewan Grainger,’ she yells back. ‘And stop spying on me.’

  ‘I’m not spying on you,’ I tell her. ‘I’m just concerned for your welfare. You may be having a breakdown of some sort and I want to help you.’

  ‘I am not,’ she says, ‘I’m just—’

  But I never find out what Nessa’s doing.

  ‘What’s she doing?’ asks Fern, my girlfriend. Her long blonde hair tickles my cheek as she squeezes next to the window beside me and stares down at Nessa.

  ‘I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to find out.’

  ‘Well, forget her.’ Fern pulls me away from the window and slams it shut. It’s an old house and an old window and I’m quite surprised the frame doesn’t break. ‘I’m here, and I’d prefer if you focused on me rather than your weird neighbour,’ she grumbles.

  Fern is quite pleasant to look at, with her long blonde hair and her navy-blue eyes. But I don’t know – she’s not really holding my attention too much tonight. I’m more curious about why Nessa is dancing around the garden during a full moon.

  Nessa’s a bit strange sometimes, but she’s very interesting.

  Chapter Two

  NESSA

  Ewan has just disappeared from sight, pulled back into the flat like he was sucked into a giant vacuum cleaner. That’ll be Fern’s doing.

  I’m no big fan of Fern. In fact, I think Fern is her own biggest fan. And if I was truly a witch, I’d think up a really good spell just to take her down a peg or two. I pause in my ceremony-thing to think about what I could do to Fern. I come to the conclusion that I’d love to do something about her hair. It’s far too sleek and shiny, nothing like my jet-black frizz. But I’m not that bad – horrendous as Fern is, I don’t think I would be horrid enough to make her go bald. Maybe she could just have a tragic hair dyeing accident so that the bleach (it’s not her natural hair colour, even I can tell that) goes temporarily green.

  I turn away from the house and look back at the tree. It’s apparently bad luck to cut the branch off the tree to make your wand, so I need to make sure one has fallen off naturally.

  And if one hasn’t, I am hoping that my leaping around might cause a minor earth tremor and a branch might drop off.

  Crack!

  Meeeeeeow!

  Or I could simply hope my massively fat cat decided to climb the tree.

  ‘Thank you, Schubert!’ I shout up at him. ‘Remind me to give you extra tuna tomorrow.’

  Having said that, I think maybe an excess of tuna has contributed to Schubert’s branch-snapping skills. Hmmm. It’s a definite possibility.

  Anyway, who am I to challenge the laws of the universe? As far as I’m concerned, this branch is going to make a marvellous wand. I just need to consecrate it over my altar first.

  I did tell you earlier that I probably needed to give you some background detail, and I realise I should probably do this now before you think I’m just crazy.

  Like I said, it’s all to do with the coffee shop.

  I go there every morning before work. I’m the PA for a private detective, which sounds as if it should be quite interesting and glamorous, but we don’t get any massively exciting cases through our doors.

  Having said that, we did get a little bit of excitement last month when a batty old lady came in and started insisting her neighbour was trying to steal her shih-poo.

  I have to admit I did mishear her at first and didn’t quite know how to introduce her to my boss, Mr Hogarth, but it turned out she was talking about her puppy. The puppy was a cross between a shih tzu and a poodle and about the size of a jar of coffee. The shih-poo was very adept at wriggling through the fence. The neighbour was completely innocent and not encouraging it at all, but the lady went to the papers about our “incompetency” and “reluctance” in dealing with the situation anyway; Mr Hogarth’s initial response was to simply tell her to wait a few weeks until the dog had grown too big to wriggle through the gap.

  We had
a day of being the “Shi*-Poor Agency” (our local newspaper has no imagination) but then it’s chip paper anyway. Of course, Ewan saw the headline and had to ask me about it, especially as some dozy reporter must have been camped outside the office all afternoon in order to take that picture of me.

  Seriously, I hate having my photo taken on a good day, let alone a day when I’m craving chocolate and have taken the opportunity to stuff a family-size bar of the stuff in my mouth as I’m walking out of the office.

  So naturally, the picture that goes in the paper is of me, wearing a hunted expression and generally looking like a pig. And yes, I’ll admit, I was looking furtive. So the picture matched the sleazy, couldn’t-care-less-about-old-people-and-puppies image the rag was after.

  ‘That was a classy photo, Nessa,’ said Ewan as I bumped into him in the stairwell that evening. He had the paper rolled up like a tube, with my face glaring out of it.

  ‘Get lost, Ewan.’ I tried to push past him.

  ‘Now, now. I might have to run my own story about how I live above you and how rude you are.’ He was smirking at this point.

  ‘Go away,’ I growled and managed to get past him.

  His laughter annoyed the hell out of me as I stomped off towards my front door, but I ignored him and slammed my door shut as he stood in the stairwell.

  Sometimes I hate my neighbour.

  But most of the time I simply fancy the pants off him.

  I found that picture blown up and stuck to my front door a few days later, but annoying as Ewan can be, I know he wouldn’t have done that to me. I ripped the thing off, noticing with some disgust that it had been graffiti-ed over with some nasty phrases likening me to a pig, and a snout and trotters had been added in thick, black marker pen. I have an idea of who put it there, but I don’t like to say. Not yet.

  But I still haven’t told you about the coffee shop, have I?

  Well it’s like this.

  Every morning when I go into the coffee shop, there are a group of four women who are always there at the same time as me. The problem I have is that they like the same seats I do.

  By taking my window seat, they have, indeed, marked their cards.

  I christened them the Coven as they are like a bunch of cackling old witches, and what made this even more appropriate was the book that I found in the coffee shop around that time. This particular day, another lady was sitting in the opposite corner reading. She fussed around so much as she was preparing to leave that she ended up leaving her book behind.

  Now this is sacrilege of the worst kind, as you never leave a book behind.

  So I jumped out of my seat and scurried over to grab it and return it to her, but by the time I’d picked it up and dashed out of the coffee shop, down the stairs and then out of the front doors, the lady was gone. I stood on the shallow steps staring around me but she must have melted into the crowd by then. She had long, wavy hair, which was the deep, reddish colour of shiny cherry-wood so she should have stuck out a mile, but I couldn’t see her at all.

  I looked down at the book and saw it was a book on Wicca and witchcraft.

  I won’t pretend that my heart didn’t beat a little faster, and the word “serendipity” sprang into my mind – which is just a literary way of saying “oh my, what a wonderful coincidence” – and I found myself turning the book over in my hands and thinking.

  And then I thought that I might as well keep it and read it myself.

  And then it got me thinking about witches and witchiness in general, and yes, that old great-great-grandmother of mine.

  I wondered if she had been a witch, because there were a few strange stories about her, handed down the generations: The rumour was that she used love potions like “other people use toilet water”. But I suspect that particular rumour might have been started by some jealous ladies who didn’t like all the male attention she was getting.

  Aggie was supposed to be drop-dead gorgeous; the original wild-child and some sort of courtesan to King Edward VII. But having said that, most beautiful women were courtesans of that fine King, so you can’t be too sure.

  My father has a photograph of her, which shows her in full court regalia – not that we believe she had any right to court regalia – and she has the same sort of hair as me, which is dark and curly and pretty untameable. It’s one of those pictures that’s been hand coloured, and whoever did it gave her bright green eyes, so she looks a bit like a cat. She also looks like she’s going to burst out laughing.

  Nobody knew who my great-grandfather’s father was – for sure, Aggie never married and there is no name on the birth certificate, but as her lifestyle was rather grand and she had a huge house in the borders, a lovely town house in Edinburgh New Town and a pied á terre in London, I don’t think Aggie missed out on having a man in her life. Or, shall we say, one particular man. I believe she had quite a few men. One of them probably paid for the houses she lived in.

  My parents still live in the Edinburgh house – we were all brought up there, all five of us: Billy, Scott, Hugo, Alfie and me. It was a very noisy house and I spent much of my childhood covered in mud and spiders – but it never did me any harm.

  I suspect that my parents were slightly shocked when I made my appearance – nobody quite knew what to do with me, except curse me hideously with that dreadful name. I do know that Scott used to like to put ribbons in my hair and change my clothes quite regularly, as if I was a giant doll – he’s always had an eye for co-ordination which makes him an awesome designer nowadays. The rest of my brothers used to largely hit me. But that’s okay, because I’d hit them back and I’d still hit them back now if I had to; but I’d also turn on anyone who hurt them and I damn well know how to stand up for myself, so I have much to be grateful for. Apart from my name, of course, but I can’t help that.

  But I digress.

  A few years earlier, I think poor Agnes would have been burnt at the stake, simply for being pretty and popular and suspected of the Dark Arts, but in the early 1900s she was quite safe.

  That’s very good to know, because I think I’ll be quite safe when I look into it a bit further and—

  ‘Oh, very classy, young lady,’ I mutter.

  Fern has just stuck her own head out of Ewan’s window and given me a V-sign, before closing the curtains again. I give a V-sign back to the window. Fern is definitely going to be my test subject. I’ve decided.

  And then I look around the garden, and I suddenly wonder where my cat is.

  Chapter Three

  EWAN

  ‘What was the point of that?’ I ask Fern. I just saw what she did to Nessa, but she mustn’t have known I was watching – I’d left the room to get a bottle of wine and some glasses out of the kitchen. Fern blushes.

  ‘She deserved it. She keeps staring up here.’

  ‘Probably because she’s worried someone’s spying on her.’

  Fern flicks that hair back over her shoulder and sniffs tetchily. ‘I just don’t like her, okay? The sooner you move out of here and in with me, the better.’

  ‘I’m not moving anywhere, any time soon,’ I say to Fern.

  I’m a bit sick of this discussion, to be honest. She brings it up far too frequently for my liking. She won’t let things happen naturally. As it is, she’s always round here, and it gets a bit too much at times.

  ‘I’m always round here, anyway,’ she says.

  See what I mean?

  ‘But you can go home and we can both enjoy our own space at the minute,’ I tell her, pouring the wine.

  ‘There’s not much wine in that bottle is there?’ Fern says, pulling a face. I knew the wine would distract her. She likes her wine, does Fern.

  ‘No,’ I reply. ‘It’s what I had left from yesterday.’ I don’t bother telling her I have two more full bottles hidden away.

  I can’t really tell her that a fuller bottle will encourage her to stay longer and I’ve suddenly gone off the idea of spending a lot of time with her tonight.

>   I met Fern at a club in London about a year ago, when I was DJ-ing – there we were, both a bit worse for wear, miles away from our native Edinburgh, and we clicked in a melee of sweaty bodies and alcohol. It was a lot of fun and she was really interested in what I was doing – she said she’d heard of me, which made me feel brilliant. I wrote a massively successful novel about organised crime in the club scene, you see, and there was talk from my agent about selling the film rights. That finally happened about six months ago, and Fern’s excited to think that she’ll meet Vinnie Jones and Jude Law when they film it down in Chelsea next year.

  It can still be fun with Fern, but sometimes part of me wonders if it’s me she wants, or the status of being with Ewan Grainger the Famous Author. Or perhaps she prefers the abandoned joy of dancing and gyrating up on the podium with Ewan G, the slightly wild and now notable, in-demand DJ?

  I know it’s a bizarre mixture – nobody ever said I was an easy person to pigeonhole – but to be honest I’m trying to put the club-land stuff behind me now, despite it paying very well. I want to concentrate more on the writing.

  At the minute, the celebrity magazines can’t get enough of my weirdly diverse passions – but to me, it’s just creativity coming out in a different way, be it via music or words. Honestly, the media are making such a fuss over that film, but Fern’s been great about fielding the questions and working the PR. She’s in marketing anyway, so knows a thing or two about how to handle it, and she’s enjoyed the attention a lot more than I have.

  I’m basically just trying to get to grips with writing the screenplay and working out the soundtrack – and I’m going to cameo as a DJ, apparently, and it’s such a lot of hard work. Maybe I’m just not paying her enough attention, and the guilt I feel over that is making me want to get shot of her tonight.

  But despite all that, I don’t like the way she’s always so mean to Nessa. It’s not funny. Nessa is the only person she seems to have a problem with, which I find quite peculiar. I like Nessa. I like Nessa very much and she doesn’t deserve the barbed comments at all.