How to Stone a Crow (Witch Like a Boss Book 2) by Willow Mason (great novels txt) 📕

told me enough. “Perhaps I should leave this one with you and focus on Pru’s dilemma. Since you can’t see Andrew.”

Patrick frowned and stopped fiddling with the old kettle, built long before anyone invented a system whereby they turned themselves off. “We’re partners. We should be working these cases together. I don’t like to think of you confronting whatever that thing was this morning, alone.”

“I won’t be alone,” I said, so quickly that Patrick’s frown grew deeper. “Jared can come along as muscle, though since Andrew can’t be physically restrained, we’ll each be as useless as the other.”

Patrick folded his arms and leant against the bench. “Is this your way of getting your boyfriend on the payroll?”

“He’s not my boyfriend, he’s my ex. And I never said anything about paying him.”

“So this person who doesn’t have a relationship with you any longer is happy to tag along while you’re working and doesn’t expect a cent in return?”

Well, okay. It sounded silly put like that. For a few seconds, I grappled with how to phrase the idea so it didn’t seem absurd, but gave up with a shrug of frustration. “We can’t both be in two places at once.”

“And we can’t grab random members of the community and deputise them into our business whenever we have more than one client on the go. That’s ridiculous. I used to juggle half a dozen customers at a time back home.”

My brain shut down the urge to correct his usage of the word customers. Freaks who thought every creak in their house was a monster and every person with a card deck was a fortune-teller didn’t count as clientele in my book.

Of course, as I’d discovered, Briarton had so many supernatural greeblies and gooblies—my official terms—that we’d never be short of genuine offers.

“Quick! It’s happening.”

The fear in Wes’s voice clicked us both into gear and we ran into the store. Nothing to see, no matter which way I turned, but the feeling…

Oh. Nope.

The skin on my lower back tingled, sending a wave of shivers dancing up the bones of my spine.

“Can you see anything?” Patrick whispered. “Is something there?”

He held out one of his contraptions, using the microphone to scan the air for any sound not perceptible to our ears.

I couldn’t see anything, but a good portion of that might be down to the fact I had my eyes squeezed shut. After forcing the lids open, the shop had the same number of occupants as before.

Good. I mean, not good because my skin was still trying to crawl off my body and find a place of safety, but better than having an angry poltergeist yelling in my face.

The dread grew more intense, coming in waves that dragged me deeper into a sea of despair. The inevitability of something horrendous happening caught me off guard. It took the vague thoughts of what could occur, always playing somewhere in my mind, and amplified the negative outcomes a thousand-fold until I couldn’t imagine the possibility of anything tinged with even the slightest hue of good.

My life was worthless. An orphan. Alone. I’d regained my powers too late to learn how to use them properly. They’d wither again and die, this time not from preplanning but ineptitude leading into neglect.

I might as well give up now. How pointless was it to try knowing that eventually, probably sooner rather than later, I’d fail?

Better to give my life away now than to suffer the years of declining expectation until it became a gift to end it and die.

“Woah. Make it stop.” I lifted a hand to my cheek and felt the tears cascading down.

Across from me, Patrick’s shoulders were curling inwards. Wes and Jac clung to each other, their faces turned away lest the other should see and agree with their self-disgust.

“Is it always this bad?”

Wes seemed grateful for the opportunity to talk and fill his mind with something other than the oppressing spirit stealing away everyone’s hopes and dreams. “It varies. This is a bad one but there was an occasion last week where I genuinely thought I’d rather kill myself on the spot than suffer the intake of another breath.”

He shuddered, reaching for Jac with his free hand, then letting it drop to his side as another wave of crippling self-doubt flooded the room. “We should burn it to the ground. Whatever is causing this can’t be allowed to continue.”

“What if that just sets it free?”

Jac’s words made me feel physically ill. Or was that because my mind threw up the image of my teenage self walking around high school half the day before realising her period had arrived and everyone around knew it before her?

“I can’t…” With a huge gasp, I threw myself toward the front door, half of me desperate to leave the store and the other half just desperate to leave the whole planet. Never come back. What was the use?

My hand closed on the doorknob just as the emotion swamping me altered. A rush of poignancy hit me. Then the sweet sorrow of loss.

Memories swept into my mind and out of it, so fast I couldn’t capture them fully. They left behind them a wave of nostalgia and regret that hauled at my chest until it ached too much to breathe.

Sadness. That’s what the pair had gabbled over the phone when they first requested our help. They’d said that everyone inside the store kept being sad for no reason.

This wasn’t sad. This went out through the pit of deepest despair and came out the other side with miles left on the clock. This was ravenous to peckish, burning fury to upset.

Then it stopped.

I staggered back, collapsing into a chair that cost more than my bi-annual grocery budget. Sweat popped out on my forehead and I wiped it away with my sleeve, using the rest of the fabric to dab at my tears. “Well, that was intense.”

“True.” Jac twisted his lips and cupped his elbows. “There’s authentic and then there’s authentic. Whatever is doing this