Magical Influence Book One

All characters in this publication
are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,
is purely coincidental.

Magical Influence

Book One

Copyright © 2013 Odette C.
Bell

Please note, for a short time, this
series was published under the pen name Jilly McQueen

Cover art
stock photos: Blue Smoke © Juan Morelis.
Licensed from Dreamstime. Halloween day © choreograph, and Business
and fashion © olly18. Licensed from Depositphotos.

www.odettecbell.com

Magical Influence

BOOK ONE

Chapter 1

I walked up the front steps, reaching
a hand out to my door. For a moment I glanced up, letting my gaze
dart up the side of my house. It wasn't a mansion, even though it
was indisputably huge. It had 10 rooms, three bathrooms, a vast
kitchen, a massive dining room, and a complete warren of a
basement, not to forget the particularly massive attic. It wasn't a
mansion because it was entirely run down. And I do mean entirely.
Roofing tiles fell off the roof every other day, hardly any of the
windows closed properly, and there were some gaps so large in the
floorboards that rats could fall through.

Still, it was my house, and I was
acutely aware that it was perfectly appropriate for a witch. It had
those old, castle-like turret-type things. It also had a bevy of
old oaks growing by the outer walls, the gnarled branches ready to
scratch the windows in every storm or slight breeze. Neither I nor
my grandmother ever bothered to do anything in the yard, and it was
a collection of junk, branches, and clogged weeds. Needless to say
every single sane child on the block would run a mile before going
anywhere near our gate.

“Aren't you going to welcome me home?” I
asked lightly under my breath as I finally reached the door handle
and tugged it open.

I didn't get a response, or at least
not a verbal one, but that exact moment saw the house creak
ominously and a roofing tile slide off and jettison itself into the
yard. It wasn't close enough that I had to duck or anything, and it
brought a slight smile to my lips.

Now that was a welcome. An entirely
appropriate one considering the day I'd had.

Mumbling under my breath, I
walked into my house. While the outside was entirely run down, at
least my grandmother and I did spend a little bit of time on
housework. No, that wasn't correct;
I
spent a lot of time on housework. My grandmother
spent most of her days and nights tearing around the place making a
fantastic mess.

Sighing as I flicked my gaze
through the atrium, I saw a pot plant had been turned over, shards
of pottery scattered over the floor and a poor fern lying in a sea
of dirt. Tutting, I walked over to it and picked it
up
. “Mary?
Mary?” I called out to my grandmother, expecting her to fly down
the large spiral staircase in the center of the house, her wild,
purple-rinsed grey locks flaring around her head as her blue eyes
locked onto me.

It's how she always said hello.
I would get back from work, she would appear from the belly of the
basement and tell me whatever
marvelously ridiculous things she’d got up to that
day, then the both of us would sit down for a cup of tea and a chat
about all things magical.

Today there was no response. Raising
an eyebrow slightly, I patted down my black skirt and walked off
into the kitchen. I instantly noticed the mess all over the table.
I'd made a point of cleaning it last night, because the darned
thing had been littered with dirty dishes for almost half a week
now. Somehow the dirty dishes were back. The exact same dirty
dishes I had popped into the dishwasher almost 18 hours
ago.

I crinkled my brow. If I weren't a
witch, I’d probably assume I was going mad.

“Mary? What are you getting up to? Mary?”
Slamming my hands on my hips as I turned around in the kitchen, I
searched out any sign of my dear old completely batty
grandmother.

Then I saw her. Or rather I saw a
shadow, outside in the yard.

Now I raised my other eyebrow, tutted
very loudly, and quickly jogged to the large French doors that led
out onto the patio.

I hadn’t always known that I
was a witch, though even as a baby I imagine I would have
realized something
wasn't quite right with my family. It wasn't Addams Family-esque,
but it was close. All of my aunts and uncles and grandparents
weren't quite right. For birthdays and Christmas they wouldn't buy
me socks and underpants; they would get me old, tattered books that
looked like they were 300 years old and that were filled with
ghastly, horrifying pictures a child should never look upon. And if
it wasn't books, it would be peculiar potions. Jars that looked
like nothing more than old jam pots filled with bizarre colored
liquids with strange objects in the bottom. Lizards, butterflies,
buttons, dirt, you name it, just a collection of strange junk. Yet
whenever they would hand me such presents, they would do so with a
degree of awe that would suggest they certainly weren’t joking. It
were as if they were passing on a crown or a fortune instead of an
old jam jar filled with rubbish.

Yes, my family had never been quite
right, and soon enough my mother had sat me down and informed me of
my lineage, witches and all.

Now it was simply a fact of life. But
another fact I could appreciate was one my grandmother herself had
been at pains to remind me of whenever she could. Witches must keep
their magic secret. As must all other magical creatures. I lived in
the real world, after all, the same one you live in. Do you see
wizards zipping around with great long beards, chucking fireballs
at each other as they drive down the highway? Do you see witches
heading off to the shops on their brooms, talking cats keeping them
company on the train? Of course you don't. We’re here, but we just
don't let ourselves be known.

Like all of the most powerful forces
in the universe, we keep ourselves secret. When humanity is ready,
they will embrace magic, but for now they are quite content with
football, cups of tea, and world wars.

Despite the importance of our
secret, something was happening to my grandmother as she aged, and
that was general dementia. Okay, not the
general
kind, the magical kind. It seemed I
had to watch her every day to ensure she didn't do anything
outrageous that would finally confirm to all of our already
suspicious neighbors that we were witches.

Flinging open the French doors,
I marched out into the backyard. Fortunately our overgrown garden
was so immense that it blocked off the view over our back fence,
still, I never liked the idea of Granny
practicing magic out in the
yard.

“What are you doing?” I marched over to
her, crossing my arms as I did, making sure the move was obvious
and would put across just how peeved I was.

She looked up from the mud pile she
had created. There was a spade leaning next to an overturned table,
the exact same patio table that I often liked to have my breakfast
at, and it was clogged with dirt.

I made a point of raising an eyebrow
and looking up and down my grandmother. She had dug a hole, a
fairly hefty, deep one considering how old she was. She had filled
it with water and mud, and she was now dancing around in it like a
woman trying to crush grapes. Except there were no grapes, just
dirt, and it had covered her pants and top completely. She even had
it splashed across her face, and a couple of clumps dangling from
her purple-rinse curls.

She grinned at me. A very
cheeky, somewhat disassociated grin
. “Good morning,” she chimed.

It was very much the afternoon. I
ground my teeth. Sometimes I didn't know if she put it on. If she
only said highly unsettling things and dug holes in the yard so she
could irritate me.

“It's the afternoon,” I conceded as I
cleared my throat, “a fact you are well aware of. And something
else you are well aware of is that you can't bloody well do magic
in the yard,” I dropped my voice low, very low at that point, and I
had no doubt that Mary could still hear me; everything else might
be going, but her hearing was fine. Exceptional even. If I ever
tried to have a secret conversation with someone on the phone and
she was at the other end of the house, I swear she could always
pick up on what I had been saying.

“Magic?” My grandmother's lips wobbled
open as if she were surprised at the mere mention of the
word.

“I'm not a trainee witch any more,
Grandma, I know a weather spell when I see one. Now do you want to
cover it up, come inside, wash, and help me prepare some
dinner?”

For a moment my grandmother narrowed
her eyes, and it was a move that reminded me so much of how she had
been when I was a child. Strong, impossibly powerful. My role
model. A figure that had taken up so much authority in my life. She
had been the one I would always turn to if I had a problem with
magic, and she would be the one to track me down if I ever did
something wrong. Well now our roles had changed. She was the kid
outside playing in the mud, and I was the one trying to tell her it
just wasn't done.

“A weather spell, ay? Are you
sure?”

I was about to turn away, head
back inside to grab a towel and mop in preparation for my muddy
grandmother to track her way to the bathroom, but I paused. I
glanced back carefully
. “Yes, that's right, a weather spell.” Was she
challenging me?

“Let me see.” She brought a hand up and
started counting off on her fingers. “All you have seen is a spade,
a hole, mud, and a miraculously well-preserved grandmother dancing
around in it. And you have concluded from this scant evidence that
I am engaged in a weather spell?”

She really was challenging me.
Though it happened less and less these days, occasionally the old
bat would grow lucid enough to remember her
training
.
“Yes,” I kept my arms crossed. I knew what to do when I was
questioned. Hold your ground, snarl if you had too, but look as
deadly as you can. And my years of growing up with my grandmother
had taught me just how one can narrow their eyes in the right way,
stiffen their jaw, and pull their lips to the side to give off a
definite feeling of concentrated rage and anger.

“Well you are wrong, young girl,” my
grandmother finally pulled herself up and out of the hole, showing
a grace that she simply should not have considering her age.
Bringing up a completely mud-covered hand, she patted at her curls,
raising an eyebrow at me as I still stood there with my arms
crossed firmly in front of my chest. “This is a garden spell,” she
trilled.

Even though I tried to control
myself, I couldn't help but falter. My eyebrows descended in a
twitch
. “No
it isn't,” I tried petulantly.

This only caused her to laugh,
and it wasn't entirely pleasant; it reminded me acutely of just how
much of an authority my grandmother had once
been
. “I beg
to differ. And if you feel like challenging me, take that spade, go
over to my lovely little mud pit, dig down, and see what I was
dancing over.”