Witchy Woman Read Free

those perfectly medium-sized breasts, as if she wasn’t buying a word of it.
    “How do you know the vase isn’t a real antique?”
    She shrugged. “I saw one just like it in another shop, same crack and everything.”
    “Really? Which shop?” He was liking this crooked-antique-dealer story more and more.
    “I don’t remember,” she replied with a toss of her head, making her hair dance again. He liked her hair. It was a natural honey-and-sunshine color that couldn’t have come out of a bottle. That weird, black-haired kid he’d seen on TV all those years ago could never have grown up into this fair, delicate creature.
    “Well, if you do remember, or if you hear of any horror stories concerning antique dealers, I wish you’d give me a call.” He handed both women his card. Tess handled hers gingerly by the edges, dropping it into an outer pocket of her vinyl purse. He was hoping she might reciprocate with a card of her own, giving him legitimate means to call her, but she didn’t.
    Judy, however, did. “I love antiques, but I’m always paying too much for things,” she said. “I can’t tell you how many times Tess has saved me from a tragically ignorant impulse buy. I know all the shops—which ones overcharge the most, which ones offer bargains. If you’ll call me later, I’ll tell you what I know.”
    “Thanks. I’ll do that.”
    “Oh, Mr. Wagner?” It was Tess who spoke up, surprising him.
    “Please, call me Nate.”
    She fixed him with a stare, her eyes holding an otherworldly intensity. “Do be careful.”
    A chill snaked its way up his spine. “Excuse me?”
    And then she seemed perfectly normal again. “You should be more careful when you handle old things in antique shops. That cut on your finger—no telling what kind of germs you picked up. You should wash it out with alcohol as soon as possible.”
    “Yes, yes, I’ll do that.” Had he only imagined that fleeting strangeness about her? As he watched the two women walk away from him, he suddenly knew, beyond a doubt, that Tess DeWitt was in fact Moonbeam Majick.
    At five minutes until five, Tess sat at her desk with her head in her hands, utterly drained. If she had to take one more phone call or track down one more glitch in one more program, she would go mad. What she needed was a bath—a long, hot, blessedly isolating bath. The tub seemed to be the only place she could empty her mind and achieve total relaxation.
    The tension was worse than usual after her unnerving lunch hour.
    Despite the constant battle of dealing with her “gift,” she didn’t think much about the old days anymore. Fifteen years was a long time, and she’d forgottenmost of the events prior to her thirteenth birthday. The nightmares had stopped years before, and the image of her mother’s face was only a blur in her mind, so infrequently had they seen each other in recent years. But seeing that blasted red panther had brought it all crashing back.
    She’d only been a child when she’d last seen the statue. But there couldn’t be two pieces so alike. Besides, she had felt the evil emanating from that unholy cat. Without her even touching it, the vibrations had reached toward her like a blackened, skeletal hand reaching from the grave.
    She had no doubt in her mind that the Crimson Cat could kill. As a child, she had watched her uncle sicken and die less than a month after finding the statue in his attic among her grandmother’s effects. She remembered overhearing whispers about a curse and, little by little, piecing together the story.
    Apparently a Gypsy woman who practiced dark magic had placed the curse on the cat statue a couple of hundred years ago, then had vindictively given the cat to Tess’s great-great-grandmother, a white witch. The curse had proved so powerful that it had been passed from generation to generation, ending with Tess’s mother.
    Tess shivered as she recalled the transformation that had taken place, the stranger her mother had