Witch Is The New Black (Paris, Texas Romance #3)

“I set a barn on fire, Fee. On. Fire. With just the flap of my hand. A barn that holds importance for someone. It’s not like I have any warning it’s going to happen, either. It’s not like there’s some feeling that accompanies this when I wave my hands of mass destruction. It just happens. I’m going to hurt someone. What if one of those seniors from the center had been in the barn? I’d never be able to live with myself if one of them ended up hurt because of me.”


Somehow, she’d managed to escape doing any serious harm up to this point in her life, but for how long could what little luck she had hold out?

Fee’s tone softened. “You didn’t do it on purpose. It was an accident, Bernie. Just an accident.”

“Yep. So was the Titanic. But people still died.”

Fee snorted. “They sure did. Leo’s death was downright outrageous. How hard would it have been for Kate Winslet to make room on that damn raft for his fine ass?”

“Fee! The point is I’m dangerous. I shouldn’t be around people or livestock or anything with a pulse. Maybe Baba Yaga can give me a different job. In a closet. With padded walls and no lights.”

“Jesus and a sleigh ride. When are you going to catch up to the rest of us, Bernice? That’s why you’re here. To learn. There are people here who can teach you how to do this and do it right. For Christ’s sake, Winnie Foster’s one of the most powerful witches on this plane and she runs the rehabilitation house you’re staying in. Who better to mentor you than her? All ya gotta do is open up.”

Winnie-Schminnie. She’d heard a lot about Winnie and how she’d come to Paris on parole and turned her life around. She was the example Baba used ad nauseam when it came to lemons and lemonade. There was even a Winnie life chart with circles and arrows and all sorts of depictions of a woman saved from the wreckage of excess.

When Chi-Chi had first mentioned her, Bernie hadn’t paid much mind, but she’d learned quickly that Winnie was like some sort of bad witch gone good—a shining example of how you could turn your life around if you just applied yourself.

She’d be happy to do that if just one person believed her story.

“Baba thinks I’m lying about not knowing I was a witch.” There. She’d spent ten months in denial but if she kept that up, someone could end up injured. She needed help.

“BY likes White Snake, too. Which proves she’s not always right on the money.”

“You don’t like White Snake? How can you deny the appeal of Tawny Kitaen and all that hair on the hood of a hot car?”

“Hair-schmair. Who needs hair when there’s more than enough Streisand to go around?”

Glancing down at Fee, she cocked her head. She’d never asked him if he questioned her story because she almost didn’t want to know, but if she was going to be stuck here, shoveling horse dung and playing milkmaid, she needed someone to talk to, an ally.

“Do you believe me, Fee?”

Fee sat back on his haunches, lifting his small muzzle, the pink bow on his tail swishing in time with his tail. “Keepin’ it one hundred?”

Brushing her forearm over her the side of her face, she nodded. “Absolutely. Total honesty.”

“At first I thought you were crazier than when Brit-Brit shaved her head. But the more I watched you go all wonky-eyed whenever one inmate would zap another inmate with a spell behind the screws’ backs, the more I believed you. I thought you were gonna lose your shit all over the cafeteria after that greasy—not to mention volatile—beast Veronica conjured up all those spiders in Petunia’s split-pea soup.”

She shuddered at the memory, but then relief settled in her bones, almost melting them. At least someone believed her. But then the reality of her situation, the one where she had to confront this if she planned to learn how to get along in this life, slapped her in the face.

“But here’s what I want to know, and you’re not going to like it, but we have to discuss it sometime—sometime soon. For the love of a coven, how the hell could you not know you’re a witch, Bernie? You do have parents, they had to be witches—at least one of them did. Care to embellish? Because it makes no GD sense, and I’ve got all sorts of theories and plots running through my head about how you didn’t know. So feel free to set me straight. Like anytime soon.”

Rather than address Fee’s questions, ones that mirrored her own, she said, “I don’t think I want to be a witch, Fee.”

But she’d sure like to know how she’d become one. This damn parole was putting off her search to discover how this had all happened. The plan had been to figure it out the second those cell doors clanked open. Now she’d have to wait another two months before she could tackle the biggest dilemma of her life.

However, the moment she had a chance, she was going to that storage unit where her parents’ boxes had sat unopened for almost two years, and she was going to dig until she found an answer.