Destiny Cartwright sought peace in her ritual circle but found self-censure instead. Drat the Goddess of mischievous matchmaking pranks. How could a psychic witch lust after a paranormal debunker?
What were the odds?
Talk about a loser lousy chooser. Not that she wanted to marry the hunky debunker—six feet of baditude in tight, torn jeans, chest-bearing unbuttoned shirts, shaggy, burnished bronze hair, wide shoulders, and a five o’clock shadow. She wanted Morgan Jarvis, architect, for sex, for a while, as a boy toy, no commitment, no after burn, aftertaste, or regrets.
She'd faced facts. The odds of identical triplets all finding their soul mates were nil to “No way, Jose!” Since Harmony and Storm had found theirs, that made her the single girl out.
Lightening did not strike thrice.
Yes, Morgan would probably try to debunk her every goal: psychic, magickal, emotional, and spiritual, if either of them ever discovered what they were.
Self discovery. That's why she’d come here, to find those goals and the path she should take to reach them.
Now, in the dark parlor of the Paxton Island Lighthouse, she sat surrounded by votive candles representing Earth, Air, Fire and Water, situated North, South, East and West, one in the center for Spirit. The crystals between each cinnamon candle refracted their flames like stars, the ageless echo of breaking waves at high tide adding an earth rhythm to her magick.
Though her particular brand of clairvoyance allowed her to see the future of others, never her own, she had envisioned this lighthouse—as lost in a fog, and as much in need of comfort as she—as the place to find her future, her psychic path, her reason for being. And if she was smart, she’d maybe spell her perverse attraction to Morgan Jarvis into the sea.
Alone, like this, she might be able to accomplish it, but if she allowed herself to be caught in his magnetic field, she might get sucked in.
She suspected that Morgan hid a soft, chewy center which he covered with a snarky rock-candy shell. She thought he might be hiding Morgan the Mystic, but after Harmony's wedding, Morgan the Mistake made more sense.
Destiny shivered as mortification threatened to singe her brows, until the moon slipped from the clouds, its beams piercing the windows, caressing her shoulders like a shawl, warm, protective and forgiving, offering solace and welcome with the affirming embrace.
Here, she could put her worries behind her.
Shadows danced in her circle leaving the room’s edges in darkness, including the stairs whose spindles she faced but could no longer see. Her flashlight had picked them out on arrival a short while ago, and her possessions now sat at the bottom, in large, wheeled carts awaiting transport to a bedroom upstairs.
Relief improved Destiny’s spirits. She was here, not in Scotland with her well-meaning family auto-pairing her with Morgan Jarvis, so much a friend, he felt like family . . . to everyone except her.
Peace, Destiny sensed, just out of reach.
Serenity. If only she could grasp it.
Her hyperactive cat’s purring contentment attested to the tranquility surrounding them. She petted the caramel-and-marshmallow-swirl tabby. “You like the lighthouse, don’t you, Caramello? I like it, too. I think it wants us here.”
Destiny centered herself, a first step on a journey fired by self-discovery, a profusion of confusion over her illusive psychic goals, and a riot of romantic fantasies over one maddening man.
Breathe in. Release. Breathe. Release.
Perhaps she should have saved her ritual for morning, except that—
“Now feels right.
In the dead of night
I dare to invite . . .
A tentative calm settled over her, obscurity filling the dark edges of her consciousness the way it claimed the periphery of the room. She closed her eyes and searched the recesses of her mind before letting her words pour forth:
“Earth, water, fire, air
Angel guardians hear my prayer.
Help define my psychic brand.
For those who seek a helping hand.
Moon, stars, high bright sun,
Light my way to souls undone.
My psychic goal with speed, reveal.
Harm it naught, I seek to heal.”
Destiny opened her eyes . . . and lost her breath.
In her circle stood a man dressed as if for a centennial sail. Beside him, an apple-cheeked young girl sat in a grotto of bright white angel wings. Standing tall behind her: an angel.
Destiny’s heartbeat trebled. Fear stole her breath, prickling her from the roots of her hair to the tips of her toes. She shivered and clutched her cat so tight that Cara meowed and jumped from her grasp to circle, examine, and “talk” to the little girl.
Destiny had never seen her cat try so hard to communicate.
The child held her hand flat, well above Caramello, and the cat purred loudly, and arched as if into an actual caress.
The girl smiled and the angel said, “Be not afraid.”
Destiny about choked. Wait a minute. She tried to regain her composure. “The last time an angel spoke those words, didn't some virgin get pregnant?”
The angel remained passive, its lucent amber eyes deeply probing, while Centennial man’s eyes widened. “I don’t think that could be the issue, here,” he quipped.
“I resent that!” Destiny fought a warm shot of embarrassment at her knee-jerk reaction.
Despite the entities’ lack of apparent threat, Destiny stood and pointed a large green fluorite crystal their way like a negative-energy scrub gun, because she knew—she knew—they were ghosts.
“Negative entities away.
Protection come to stay.
White light, elliptical in flight,
Surround me in a sphere so bright
As to sever threat and sight,
Of visions in the night.”
Adrenaline pumped through her as she stepped back but her visitors remained.
Normally, she’d feel safe in her ritual circle, except that they shared the circle with her.
Destiny gasped, knelt, and with a sweep of her arms, pulled candles and crystals close around her, to form a smaller, safer circle.
The ghost child’s lips quirked upward on one side, bringing Morgan’s rare smile to mind.
Centennial Man shook his head, as if in warning. “We’re not negative,” he whispered and pointed behind his hand. “That really is an angel.”
Destiny rose and straightened, preferring to tower over them, though no human could stand taller than the angel, and she chanted her spell, again, this time, loud enough to wake the dead.
A light appeared at the top of the stairs.
Another icy rush of fear. An involuntary catch in her breath. “Don’t tell me there are more of you!”
Footsteps, she heard, running on the floor above. A crash. A curse.
Another male ghost? Destiny stamped her foot. “Enough already!”
A hair-raising stair creak. Two. Three.
Heavy footsteps, slowly descending a blacked-out staircase.
Words of inquiry caught in Destiny’s paralyzed throat as she stood frozen in her protective circle. Beast or ghost, he could not harm her, here.
She aimed the fluorite crystal high, and at the next creak—thank the goddess for teen softball—she served it in a deadly pitch.
A man-grunt. A tumble down the stairs.
A horrendous crash against wheeled carts, her caterwauling cat leaping into the fray, and her personal belongings flying into view, turned her mind from ghosts to a flesh and blood man, about the size of Big Foot, wrecking everything she’d— “My things!”
Her heart beat a wild tattoo yet shame for the selfish thought claimed her. A ghost would not have disturbed her carts or landed with a thud and a shivering head-crack. Unable to reach a light switch without stepping near the Yeti at the bottom of the stairs, Destiny set her ritual knife on the floor to open the sacred circle and allow for her escape.
For insurance, she grabbed a large potted geranium off a nearby table. “Anyone hurt?” she called.
Silence, but for the sea sweeping the shore out back.
As she tiptoed forward, her intruder groaned, sat up, and breached the light. A Yeti, indeed, given the size of his chest and the bright of his eyes in shadow.
Destiny lowered the clay pot and crowned him before he could strike.
Like a tree trunk in a hurricane, he fell, taking at least one of her carts down with him. His torso lay in darkness, but she could see his hairy legs and ginormous feet in candlelight.
A behemoth in the flesh, moaning like he’d been shot.
She skirted the interloper and flipped on the light.
Curled in the fetal position, amid her clothes, both hands on his balls, he wore a purple bra like a bracelet.
Cat-scratch blood curled down his arm and dripped on his red boxers.
“Balls . . . busted,” he gasped.
Destiny’s fear morphed to horror. “Morgan?”
Morgan’s agony and rising nausea radiated through him deepening his suffering. As he rode out the pain, he identified his assailant with a dizzying peek, then he closed his eyes to recover with shallow breaths and a soothing mantra: Dead witch. Dead witch. Dead witch.