Hocus Purrcus, page 1
Hocus Purrcus
A PAWSITIVELY PURRFECT MATCH
PEPPER MCGRAW
Contents
Description
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Excerpt
Thank you for reading
Other Books by Pepper
Anthologies & Collections
About the Author
Hocus Purrcus Copyright © 2023 Pepper McGraw
Digital Edition
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
PUBLISHING HISTORY:
Sigils & Spells | Naughty Nights Press | May 2023
Cover and Title Page Images from Dreamstime:
Witch Legs and Black Cat © Adrenalinapura
Paw Prints and Heart © Zsuskaa
Gray Cat with Witch’s Hat © Zsuskaa
Pawprints © Fourleaflover
Black Cat © Adrenalinapura
Edited by J.L. Troughton
PMG Publishing
Description
Witches & Shifters, Vampire & Chameleons.
The matchmaking cats of the goddesses have their work cut out for them in Zero, Kansas.
Pippa has no intention of ever mating. She loves being a single witch and relishes the freedom that comes with it.
Jared is the alpha wolf of the Wildfire Pack. They’ve just relocated to Zero, Kansas, when he meets his mate. Too bad she wants nothing to do with the mate bond.
Only the matchmaking cats of the goddesses can save this match now.
One
BYGUL BLAMED KITTY Claus for this latest assignment.
Ever since K.C. mentioned how challenging witches were to work with, it was all the other matchmaking cats could talk about.
Even though they already had full case loads, the cats were determined to move witches to the top of their list.
Then K.C. returned to tell them of a newly formed coven in need of both familiars and mates.
That was when Bygul knew all his protests would come to naught.
As far as the other cats were concerned, this coven represented a pawsitively purrfect opportunity to match a lot of homeless cats with their purrfect human companions and to do some matematching as well.
At least that’s what Soraya kept saying, and unfortunately, Tivali and Muezza agreed with her.
Which meant Bygul was along for the ride, because there was absolutely no way he could trust those three to matematch a bunch of witches without his assistance.
The moment they arrived in the tiny town of Zero, though, and Bygul saw exactly who the members of the coven were, and even worse, who its leader was, he knew K.C. had set them up.
The lazy, pompous cat was probably laughing his fool head off right now.
Because there was no way even the best matchmaker at Pawsitively Purrfect Matches—Bygul himself, thank you very much—could help these insane witches achieve their happily ever afters.
Pippa was bored.
Not a good circumstance, to be sure, but it couldn’t be helped.
In the beginning, she’d been thrilled to find other witches in similar circumstances as her own—that is to say, lone witches without a coven to anchor their magic—and had leapt at the opportunity to form a coven with these slightly unstable—okay, mostly unstable—witches.
In the beginning, it had been wonderful.
They’d settled in this small town called Zero, which in Pippa’s opinion had been on a downward slide toward a population count that matched its name, when they had arrived.
A somewhat charming, sleepy town in the middle of nowhere, Kansas, where any magic Pippa’s newly formed coven happened to unleash would be mostly unseen by the rest of the world.
In fact, it was the perfect spot for the brand of chaos that Pippa’s magic tended to cause.
It was wonderful in the beginning.
Not having to worry about her coven members judging her for her lack of control over her magic.
It wasn’t her fault that the well from which her magic sprang was more like an ocean with hurricane-force winds, now was it?
Yet, her original coven—a righteous, judgmental group in Massachusetts, that claimed, like so many others, to have its roots in Salem—had believed exactly that.
Pippa was a danger to society, they’d claimed, and it was just too bad it was the twenty-first century, for if she’d been born back at the formation of Salem, she’d have been burned at the stake for certain, and the world spared her out-of-control magic.
While that might have been true, Pippa couldn’t believe they’d found it necessary to point it out. Rude!
Then they’d given her a choice—be stripped of her magic or banished.
Well, no one was stealing Pippa’s power, even if it did make her life chaotic and miserable upon occasion.
So Pippa had chosen the lone witch lifestyle, which wasn’t much different than the rest of her life, given her parents had died when she was a child and the rest of the coven had washed their hands of her long before her banishment.
It was the glitter incident that had been the final straw.
It wasn’t as if she’d done it on purpose. She’d been trying to multiply the pastries for the meeting that afternoon and well, she’d ended up casting the vacuum cleaner instead, not that she’d realized it at the time.
It was a truly unfortunate turn of events that the vacuum happened to be full of glitter her coven leader had just vacuumed up after her granddaughter’s visit.
It was a weird bit of magic, actually.
Pippa was quite fascinated at how her casting had turned out.
She’d wanted pastries and instead had gotten glitter.
Mounds and mounds of glitter.
The really weird thing was that the glitter didn’t multiply until the vacuum was turned on.
It was probably the delay Pippa had embedded in her casting. She’d wanted the pastries to multiply only when the platter had just one pastry left. It would ensure enough pastries to last the entire meeting, but wouldn’t take up too much space in the kitchen.
It was a brilliant casting, if Pippa did say so herself.
It was simply unfortunate that she somehow missed the platter and got the vacuum cleaner instead, something that didn’t make a lot of sense considering the vacuum had been in a closet at the time while the platter had been right in front of Pippa.
Then again, for all she knew, the pastry spell had worked as well.
She’d been banished long before the platter of pastries had reached just one, so for all she knew, she’d left the coven with an ever-generating pastry platter, which would be entirely unfair, considering they’d banished her.
She should have taken the platter with her.
They certainly didn’t deserve it!
After all, it wasn’t Pippa’s fault one of the witches knocked a plateful of crumbs on the floor and then insisted on vacuuming them up.
And it wasn’t Pippa’s fault that once the vacuum exploded, spewing glitter everywhere, no one thought to turn off the vacuum cleaner for several minutes, which resulted in ever increasing amounts of glitter exploding all over her coven leader’s living room.
It wasn’t like Pippa had intended that result. Besides, no one had been hurt in the rather large, repeated glitter explosions.
You’d think she’d set the place on fire the way they’d responded though. And to be clear, fire was kind of Pippa’s specialty, especially when her magic was going haywire, so that had definitely been a possibility.
Somehow though, it seemed glitter was worse than fire.
All those fires she’d accidentally started over the years and not once had any of them resulted in banishment.
Explode a tiny bit of glitter, though, and suddenly, she was public enemy number one.
Okay, so most of the highest-ranking witches in the Coven happened to be at the leader’s house at the time and had all been covered in glitter—they probably still sparkled to this day, something which gave Pippa great joy in imagining—but banishment seemed a rather harsh punishment for such an innocent crime!
Pippa had been quite upset at the time, but as it turned out, banishment had been a blessing in disguise for she was now part of a much more accepting coven.
No more witches looking down their noses at Pippa, thank you very much.
Of course, it had been difficult in the beginning, living the life of a lone witch without a coven to back her up, but then she’d met Natalie and Morana, then later, Tempest and Amaryllis.
Then they’d discovered the town of Zero and had just decided to settle there when Rowan and Jo walked into town.
In a matter of months, Pippa had somehow gone from a lone witch to one of seven and that was just fine indeed.
Except now, Pippa was bored.
Nothing ever happened in this town of seventy-three inhabitants, seven of whom were witches, and Pippa was tired of all that nothing.
The only male in the entire town who was within two decades of Pippa’s own age of thirty-three was Rowan and he was a fellow witch and coven member.
Pippa had a very firm policy about witches. She didn’t do them. Ever. And most definitely not witches from her own coven.
Never kiss where you plan to sleep and all that.
<
Sexual frustration played havoc with a witch’s control, and for witches like Pippa, whose control was shaky at best, that was never a good thing.
And since she was in a coven with six other witches who were in the same boat as her, they were now a coven of extremely cranky witches with dwindling control of their magics.
Even Rowan, who had taken to driving three towns over for a little action, was starting to get grumpy.
After all, who wanted to drive two hours to have some fun, then have to drive two hours back?
“We need men.” Amaryllis broke the silence at breakfast to say what they were all thinking.
Well, perhaps not Rowan or Jo.
“Uh, excuse me,” Jo said. “I’d like to put in an order for eligible women please.”
“Hear, hear,” Rowan said.
Predictable.
Boring and predictable.
It was sad really. Seven of them and not one of them bi.
Pippa let out a huge sigh.
She really wished she was bi.
Then maybe she could reconsider her stance on no witches. After all, women were so much more reasonable than men.
“I say we cast a spell,” Natalie said.
Natalie was their unacknowledged leader. She refused to accept the title of High Witch and just glared when anyone suggested she was in charge of—well, anything—but whether she acknowledged it or not, she was in fact, their leader de facto.
After all, it was Natalie who discovered Zero, a town perfect for their needs.
It was also Natalie who had paid for their rather large complex to be built. Pippa had never asked where the money came from as she figured she was better off not knowing.
Ignorance is bliss and all that, not to mention plausible deniability if the cops ever asked.
Finally, it was Natalie who’d come up with the name of their Coven, a name that never failed to make Pippa giggle.
So, yes, despite all of Natalie’s objections, she was most definitely the High Witch of the Zero Cum Laude coven.
Of course, this wasn’t exactly a good thing, since Natalie’s magic was of the sort that kept her on the brink of madness, which made her at best unpredictable, and at worst, utterly dangerous.
“You want us to deliberately cast a spell?” Tempest exclaimed.
“Well, we are witches, aren’t we?” Natalie demanded. “What are we good for if not casting spells?”
“I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Morana fretted. “What if all the eligible men I call are dead?”
As far as Pippa was concerned, this was a valid fear given Morana’s status as one of the strongest necromancers in modern history.
Too bad she also had zero control when using her powers.
She’d been known to raise entire graveyards, causing chaos and outrageous hours of overtime for the Witches Council and their enforcers.
It was actually quite a miracle they hadn’t stripped Morana of her powers yet, particularly after her last disastrous summoning.
Pippa’s theory was they were afraid of Morana’s reaction should they try. No one wanted to face off against an army of zombies commanded by a witch necromancer.
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” Natalie said. “Dead people simply do not qualify as eligible.”
“Depends on your definition,” Morana muttered.
Pippa grimaced. She had to agree with Natalie on this one. Dead was the very definition of ineligible as far as she was concerned.
“Look, it can’t be that difficult,” Natalie said. “All we’ll do is cast a spell asking the universe to send eligible men and women to settle in Zero.”
“We chose this town for a reason,” Rowan protested. “The minute you cast a spell like that, our sleepy town of seventy-three residents will suddenly become an overpopulated metropolis and we’ll have to move again. There’s no way we can keep our powers from revealing themselves in the middle of a city.”
“So, we’ll cast a spell for eligible paranormals,” Natalie said. “Problem solved. Then we won’t have to worry if someone notices our magic going astray.”
Astray was one word for it.
Berserk was another.
Maniacally destructive yet a couple more.
“If we cast for paranormals, we run the risk of pulling other covens to us,” Jo protested.
Natalie sighed. “Then we’ll cast for non-witch paranormals. Can we get on with it now?”
“Hold on a minute,” Tempest said. “Are we just pulling them in for a visit or are we looking for people to actually move and make a life here? Because that makes a big difference, don’t you think? I mean, what if they don’t want to live here, but our spell makes them stay and being a prisoner makes them so angry, they go on a murdering rampage and the next thing we know, we’re all victims of a psychopathic serial killer?”
Dead silence fell as everyone stared at Tempest, who finally shrugged and muttered, “It could happen.”
“Okay,” Natalie said, drawing out the word, “so we’ll cast for eligible paranormals who are seeking a new start.”
“In a quiet town,” Amaryllis spoke up for the first time since she’d put forth the need for men. Her head was down, her eyes trained on the patterns her fingers were making on the table’s wooden surface. “A quiet town,” she repeated, her voice dropping to a whisper.
Amaryllis was pathologically shy. She rarely spoke, even with them, and when she did, she never made eye contact.
“Of course, Amari,” Natalie said gently. “We all want this town to remain quiet and peaceful, so we’ll weave that into the spell as well.”
“So,” Pippa drawled out the word. “A spell for non-witch, non-serial-killing, eligible paranormals who are seeking a new start in a quiet, peaceful town.”
“Exactly!” Natalie said cheerfully. “I don’t know why we didn’t think of this earlier.” She stood and clapped her hands. “Come on, everyone. We’re going to transform this town and solve all our problems at the same time.”
Pippa shook her head and climbed to her feet, trying not to think of all the things that could go wrong, a list that was practically endless when considering they’d never cast a spell as a coven before.
Given how complicated this particular spell had become after one small conversation, it really wasn’t the spell to start with either.
“Cheer up, Pippa,” Morana said, bumping shoulders with her. “At the very least, our days of celibacy are soon to be over. What could possibly be wrong with that?”
Great. If things weren’t already destined to fall apart, that challenge sent out to the fates ensured they now were.
“We’re doomed,” Pippa muttered as she followed her coven outside to their circle of power.
“I thought K.C. said Zero was practically a ghost town,” Bygul growled, glaring at the stores K.C. had described as boarded up and empty, that instead had gleaming windows and were a hive of activity, with people bustling in and out, carting boxes back and forth. “Are we in the right place?”
“Well, that shop there says Zero Books, so I’m guessing yes,” Tivali said.
“That doesn’t even make sense,” Bygul grumbled. “It’s a book store. Why would you call it Zero Books if the store’s full of books?”
“It’s the name of the town,” Muezza said. “All the stores seem to have Zero in their names.”
“That makes even less sense,” Bygul said. “Who wants to live in a town called Zero?”
“Didn’t K.C. also say the town was mostly full of non-paranormals?” Soraya asked.
“Yes, and I’m pretty certain he said the only exceptions were the witches,” Muezza said.
“That can’t be right,” Tivali said, “because those are most definitely wolf shifters.” She nodded toward a group of adolescents chasing each other around the town square.
