She wanted to run away from her past, not catch up with it.
Rosie just wants to live a quiet, happy life and raise her daughter as far away from her toxic ex-husband as she can get. But when they move into a decrepit cottage in Mosswood, Georgia, a gang of meddling do-gooders want to run her out of town. The vicious laundromat machines keep eating her spare change. Her sexy Irish neighbor insists that he’s a Witch King and that it’s her royal destiny to be his Queen.
And to top it all off, strange things keep happening around Rosie when she least expects it…
She could deal with it all, but her ex won’t rest until he tracks her down. When her ability to protect her daughter is threatened, Rosie shows them all that nobody messes with the new witch on the block.
Wanna meet Rosie? Read Chapter 1 of New Witch on the Block now 👇🏼
Please note: This series is not cozy and contains adult language, and some sexual situations.
Chapter 1
Rosemary listened to the sound of birds twittering outside of the bedroom window. She instinctively strained to hear the hum of traffic from a nearby expressway. A gentle breeze in the trees played harmony to the birdsong, and she could hear the faint sounds of someone chopping firewood not too far away. But that droning of cars and trucks that she had become accustomed to was gone.
She opened her eyes to an unfamiliar room. Her small suitcase stood, still packed, by the open bedroom door. Her daughter, Maggie, dozed on the bare mattress beside her, curled toward her mother for warmth and comfort. And as she reached out to stroke Maggie’s soft dark curls, everything came rushing back to her.
The panicked snatch of what little personal belongings she would be able to carry. The hasty departure. Bundling a half-asleep Maggie into a cab. Urging the driver to go and slipping him cash she couldn’t afford so that he would spirit them away into the night. Arriving in a strange town right on closing time for the local real estate office. Managing to secure a small, furnished cottage on the outskirts of town, no questions asked.
So many coincidences had to come together to make their escape from Randy a success—and Rosie was thankful for every one of them.
For all her adult life, she had been Randy’s woman. In biker language, that meant she was his property. She moved when he said she could move, ate when he said she could eat. She did as she was told when she was told to do it, and above all, she kept her mouth shut.
At seventeen, running away with a man on a motorcycle had been exciting. The freedom, the thrill of the road, the roar of the bikes between her legs. He’d promised to keep her safe, which was something she’d rarely felt in the foster homes she had passed through. It was just a damn shame she had been too naive to realize at the time that ‘safe’ also meant ‘imprisoned.’
His promises and compliments soon gave way to yelling, broken things, and bruises. Then came the apologies, the promises to do better, and the reminders of how great their years on the road had been. The cycle left her so mentally exhausted that she didn’t have time to think about leaving, much less act.
And then at twenty-nine, Maggie happened. She remembered sobbing over the toilet with Raquel and Mimi when she read the pregnancy test. She could still hear Randy’s voice when she told him.
“Guess you won’t be runnin’ out on me anytime soon, then, will ya?”
Letting out a tense sigh, Rosie unzipped her hoodie and shrugged it off. She laid it over Maggie, who snuggled into the soft material. First order of business: coffee.
The small tote bag of essentials she had brought sat on the white tile counter in the cabin’s tiny kitchen. She didn’t have the energy to inspect the place the night before. She waved dust from her face as she looked through the cabinets for something to make coffee with. She opened a cupboard to the left of the sink and found an old-fashioned kettle, wine glasses, and a dusty bottle of red wine. Jackpot!
She read the label on the bottle, cracked and peeling up at the corners.
FOX COTTAGE 1881
MUSCADINE
Well, alcohol was alcohol, cheesy labels or not. She turned on the kitchen tap and watched with a wrinkled nose as red-brown water spurted into the sink. Gross, she thought to herself. How long had this place been vacant? The water did eventually run clear, and she hoped the kettle would brew out any other impurities.
She set the kettle to boiling and decided to check out the rest of the house. Starting at the front door, she meandered into the living room. It was a small but cozy rectangular room with a bay window overlooking the front yard and a little fireplace at the other end. The couches, rug, and curtains looked like they could use a good clean, and she could tell the mattress they had slept on needed an airing out. She started making a mental to-do list.
Fox Cottage had been vacant for some time, according to the realtor. It had been ‘a while’ since she’d done a showing of the property. The thick layer of dust on everything suggested her understatement was deliberate—Rosie would be shocked if anyone had been in here in decades. But the owner would be so glad to have any rent coming in that the price was low, and improvements were welcome. It was fully furnished, which was useful for a family starting over, and the place was ‘very private.’ There was only one neighbor, a man who lived in a camper trailer an acre or so away.
Rosie took five steps from the living room to the breakfast nook, where a round table sat cramped in the corner. They might brush elbows, but Maggie could do her homework and the two of them could eat dinner, which was all they needed. The back hall was more like a hub and only hosted two doors. The one at the end of the hall revealed a small bedroom with a single bed and a strange round window that Rosie knew Maggie was going to adore.
The other door opened into a washroom. She gasped with excitement to see a large claw-foot bathtub there, even though it was filthy. But her heart sank when she noticed the aluminum washtub and scrubbing board that substituted for a washing machine. Clearly, no one with children had lived here since the Civil War was a thing.
It would be a long while before Rosie would be able to afford a luxury like a washing machine. Right now, she wasn’t even sure how she was going to pay her rent. She’d taken every cent from the meager account Randy maintained with her for appearances and stolen the small roll of bills in his underwear drawer. But her funds acquisition had only netted her enough for a month’s rent upfront and the bare essentials. And, Rosie knew it would spend quicker than it had come to her.
Her head churned with thoughts on how she was going to make this work. She would need a job, but who would hire her without a high school degree or any professional experience? With no credit, would the electric company even approve her as a new customer? Or a cell phone company give her a new contract, or a bank give her an account? Randy had controlled everything since she was seventeen. She didn’t even know how to do most of these things, and she worried doing any of them might allow her husband to track her.
Her gaze eventually settled on the filthy bathtub. Well. She might as well get down to business. Living in a grungy cottage just would not do.
Rosie opened every single window in the house to harness the breeze in her efforts. She cleaned the old clawfoot tub with a ratty towel she found under the sink and some clumpy baking soda from the kitchen pantry. When she found a clothesline and bedsheets in the tiny linen closet in the washroom, she was so excited she didn’t stop to think what might be already be sleeping in them.
A palmetto bug. A palmetto bug was sleeping in them. The cockroach slash water bug, every bit as big as her thumb, was startled by her scavenging and flew—yes, flew—out of the linen closet in a panic. And like a yawn on a summer day, the panic was catching.
“Aaargh!!” Rosie made a sound somewhere between a scream and a strangled noise of indignation. She flung her hands to stop the roach from flying straight into her face and spun to swat at the sound of its huge wings flapping around her. It landed on the open windowsill, and it scrambled outside.
“Ugh!” She slammed the window behind it lest it get any more ideas, and then breathed heavily. Maggie joined her, bleary-eyed and with bed hair that would make a young Shirley Temple wild with envy.
“What are you doing?” she muttered, watching Rosie catching her breath. “It’s like dumb o’clock.”
It was about 9 am. Ten-year-olds could be so melodramatic. She knew she couldn’t mention the giant cockroach without Maggie sleeping in her bed for the next few days, so she skipped that story entirely.
“Getting a start on cleaning this place up!” she replied cheerily, hoping that some of it would rub off on Maggie. It didn’t. The child stood there, arms folded, looking for all the world as though she might turn tail and go back to bed.
“The sooner we have it all spic and span, the nicer it’ll be to live here, right?”
Maggie quirked a brow. “Seems like it’ll need a lot of spicking and spanning.”
Rosie turned off the faucet on the tub and ushered Maggie out of the bathroom. “Good thing we’re not afraid of hard work then, isn’t it?”
Maggie slumped as she let herself be propelled through the house. “Can I at least have breakfast first?”
***
The summer sun warmed their hearts as well as their skin as the pair set off for the small, sleepy-looking town that lay nestled in the valley below the cottage. Rosie squinted down the road that wound its way from Mosswood almost to her doorstep. It was a good thing that they both liked being outside; she only had to hear one instance of ‘How much further?’.
Rosie took in the layout of the town. Residences clustered on the southwest side of town, with the commercial district hugged by a lazy river to the east. They passed by a large brick building that hulked over the intersection of the main road and the highway. A faded sign announced that Hayes Sugar and Syrup had once been a prominent fixture of Mosswood, but now the building looked abandoned.
“It’s prolly haunted,” Maggie announced. She peered at the building like a true Scooby-Doo connoisseur.
“Ya think?” Rosie asked, raising a brow.
“Duh. See the cobwebs in that broken window?” Maggie nodded her head in the direction of the building. “Dead giveaway.”
Rosie hid a grin, resisting the urge to tease her child about how many spirits must be couch-surfing at Fox Cottage if cobwebs were a sign of ghostly presence.
The sweet smells of summer seemed more prevalent down here on the flats. Soft scents of magnolia blossoms mixed with the earthy aroma of long grass growing by the road. An old ranch-style house spruced up with white paint and green trim sat opposite the abandoned factory. A small, empty corral jutted out on one side of the building, with fields beyond it hosting two horses. A smart-looking sign nailed to the fence said it was the Mosswood Vet Clinic.
They continued down the highway, passing a squat little motel-slash-mechanical repairs shop call the Beep ’n’ Sleep. It looked like a grease pit and had the smell to match. Granny’s Diner on their right made Rosie’s mouth water at the tempting scent of fresh fried chicken. A large but outdated sign out front said ‘HAVE A GOOD SUMMER COYOTES’ in big black removable letters. Old-school jukebox tunes drifted out of the drive-thru window. With a ‘maybe’ from Rosie that they could stop for milkshakes on the way back home, they stopped at the gates of Mosswood Elementary.
“So that’s the new torture chamber,” Maggie mused with a tone of long-suffering resignation. Rosie chuckled.
“I doubt it’ll be all that bad, Pumpkin,” she said.
Maggie wrinkled her nose, scuffing the toe of her sneaker across the blades of grass that poked up through the cracks in the old cement sidewalk. “Is this school gonna be full of rednecks?”
“That’s not polite,” Rosie schooled her. “Of course not.”
“My last school had over six hundred kids. That school looks like it could barely fit twenty!”
Rosie rolled her eyes. Kids! “There are a hundred and thirteen students at Mosswood Elementary,” she told Maggie with confidence. “I Googled it. Now c’mon, we got ourselves some explorin’ to do!”
Main Street was a thin two-way road that was little more than a place for necessities to park themselves for consumption. A handful of people wandered along either side of the avenue in the shade from curbside trees. They took time out of their errand-running to rubberneck at the newcomers. Rosie put her arm around Maggie and ignored them.
The road seemed in good repair if a little weather-worn, with parking on either side. A single police cruiser sat outside a poky looking building that must have been the Sheriff’s Department.
“Healthy critters!” a kid who looked like he lived in a swamp called out to them hopefully, gesturing at a battered bucket by his bare feet. He couldn’t have been much younger than Maggie and didn’t look half as well off as they were, which sure was saying something. “Itty bitty baby turtles! Ain’t no pet like ‘em,” he said to Maggie as they continued down the sidewalk towards him. “Just fi’ dollars’ll get ya a turtle!”
Maggie immediately rounded on Rosie, eyes full, and hands clasped in front of her chest. “Can I get one, Mama?” she all but begged. “Look how cute they are!”
Rosie cringed. She couldn’t think of anything worse than a slime-covered snake-with-a-shell stinking up their soon to be de-stinked cottage. She stepped forward reluctantly and peered into the bucket.
“I dunno that it’s a good idea having them in a metal bucket on such a hot day,” she told the kid, who seemed unperturbed by the welfare of his meal tickets.
“Naw,” he shrugged before he sniffed and spat on the sidewalk. “They’re reptiles – they like the warm. ‘sides,” he grinned, showing off that one of his front teeth were missing. “They’ll sell like Granny’s hotdogs on game day right sure enough. Fi’—”
“dollars. Yeah, I know,” Rosie finished for him before turning to Maggie. “Sorry, Pumpkin, but we got ourselves some settlin’ in do to first.” She nodded at the kid and put her arm around Maggie’s shoulder to guide her further down the street. “Maybe he’ll have some for sale later on when we’re ready to keep company.”
Maggie didn’t sulk for too long. Not ten steps further down the street, they found exactly what Rosie had been looking for.
A convenience store. Hallelujah!
They wandered into the aptly named Go-Go Mart through modern sliding doors. Like everywhere else in town, the place was immaculate, but it smacked of the city convenience stores that Rosie knew so well. It was a little slice of cosmopolitan living, right in the heart of the backwoods.
Maggie had already dashed for a display of teenage girl magazines she knew her mother would never buy. Rosie noticed an array of her favorite cosmetics that made her heart leap. Oh, thank goodness! She picked up two different face creams and held the tubes gratefully to her cheek, the way one would a puppy or a kitten, or a container of collagen filler after two days without one.
“Can I help you, ma’am?”
She froze and then looked over her shoulder. Yep, a man was talking to her, the crazy lady hugging face cream. She shoved them back onto the shelf and straightened her shirt as she turned to face him.
She glanced in Maggie’s direction, hoping for back up. She could see two hands and the top of her daughter’s humidified frizz around the cover of Girlfriend. Traitor.
“Oh,” she said a touch too brightly in a last-ditch attempt to cover her faux pas. “Well, um… yes. I suppose you could! You see, we’re new in town, and—”
The man was younger than she was, had light brown hair, a handful of freckles across his nose, and kind green eyes. “You must be the folks that have rented Fox Cottage.” He gave her the once over, and she suddenly wished she’d had something nicer to wear, or somewhere nicer to live. Carol-Ann hadn’t mentioned that a reputation came hand in hand with her cheap rent.
Rosie hadn’t wanted to announce their arrival in town, but she could see that the horse had already bolted. “We must be,” she said, lifting a hand to brush her dark bangs out of her eyes.
“Rosie,” she said then, because it was the least awkward and most logical thing to allow out of her mouth. She nodded in the direction of the magazine rack, her ponytail bobbing. “And that’s my daughter, Maggie, short for Magnolia.”
Ben glanced over. “Oh yeah?” he asked, feigning surprise. “Looks like Taylor Swift to me.” Maggie peered over the top of the magazine before disappearing again. He held out a hand.
“I’m Ben Major,” he smiled. He exuded an easy manner that she liked tremendously.
“Pleasure to meet you, Ben,” Rosie said, resting her hands on her hips and taking a proper look around. She could see a display of vegetables in a market stall to the right, followed by fridges for meat. The rest of the store consisted of four narrow aisles that carried small household goods. She saw nothing that looked like fresh linen, much to her chagrin. The thought of sharing her bed with any other freeloading bugs was enough to turn her into an insomniac.
“I need some home staples. Food, of course,” she smiled, “some decent coffee. I notice y’all don’t seem to sell much in the way of homewares. Is there anywhere in town I can find stuff like that? And appliances,” she added hastily. She was already dreaming of replacing the bathtub and scrubbing board with an actual washing machine of her very own.
Ben let out a low whistle. “Nothin’ like that in Mosswood,” he said apologetically. “’Cept for coffee makers.” He stepped back to pat the top of a display of two 12-cup coffee brewers, which he seemed quite proud of. Rosie thought he had every right to be. Filtered coffee sounded divine after two days drinking it out of a kettle, grounds and all.
“Best advice I can give is to make a list and trek on out to Huntsville,” he continued. “It’s a ways north, but if you wait ‘til you have a few things to get, it can make the trip worthwhile. They got Walmart, electrical stores, you name it. Only make sure you’re back on the road home by four in the afternoon.” He lifted his brows at her, indicating that this last pearl of wisdom was the most important of all. “Else you’ll catch the rush hour.”
Rosie felt her heart sink to the bottom of her chest. She wouldn’t have minded being stuck in Huntsville’s version of ‘rush hour’ if it meant that she could pick up a few things. But no car meant that she would need to rely on someone to give her a ride, and she intended to keep a low profile.
A cheap car that would make it possible to get around, or a washing machine? Sigh.
“I’ll be sure and keep that in mind,” she said, trying to hide her disappointment. “Thanks, Ben. Appreciate it.”
“No problem,” he said, seeming pleased to have been of service. “Now food and household staples, on the other hand—I can definitely help you out with those.”
Maggie and Rosie left the Go-Go Mart almost twenty minutes later, each carrying two reusable shopping bags full of ‘household staples.’ They took a different route back to the highway to maximize their opportunity to explore. As they rounded the corner where Wallace Realty sat opposite the Town Hall, Rosie snuck a glance at the houses advertised in the windows.
There were some prettier places than Fox Cottage on Carol-Ann’s listings, that was for sure. But Rosie had already started to feel an affinity for the rickety old pile that she couldn’t explain. Beneath the dust and the ghost-heralding cobwebs, the place was a sanctuary by necessity. It was a haven for her and her daughter when they needed one most, and she had decided to do all that she could to repay it for giving them a fresh start.
Once they passed the realtor, they came across the Kwik Kleen. The laundromat that was little more than a bricked-in hallway with a door, but they pressed their noses to the windows like it was Disney World. Somewhere to do laundry that wouldn’t leave her hands raw! And somewhere to lug laundry, on foot, every few days. She sighed.
Okay, she told herself. The first thing I’m saving for is definitely a car.
“Mom,” Maggie said, interrupting her mental life-strategy planning session. “Look!”
Rosie turned her head in the direction Maggie was looking in. Tucked into a small back alley was a storefront painted with splotches of camouflage paint. Out front, there was some kind of rack that Rosie could only assume was for skinning dead animals, because there was a deer skeleton hanging from it limply, its bones bleached white by the sun. Her gaze jumped from the poor deer up to an imposing sign above the door.
OH SHOOT.
You got that damn right.
***
Dinner was a magnificent affair of jarred-sauce spaghetti with a bowl of iceberg lettuce that served as a green salad. Maggie was flipping a pale green piece of leaf over and back before she caught her mother’s eye across the table.
“Is Daddy coming to meet us here?” she asked. Though the question was commonplace, Rosie knew her daughter. She heard an undertone of fear in her daughter’s voice and in the way she wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Is this where we’re living now?”
Rosie’s food stuck in her throat. She’d kept them both busy on purpose that day. She expected Randy to start calling somewhere around mid-morning when he roused himself from his hangover in whoever’s bed he’d fallen into. She had kept her cell phone turned off, so he wouldn’t reach her. She continued to chew to buy herself some time before answering and then forced herself to swallow.
“This is where we are living now,” Rosie said, measuring her words. “But he’s not coming to live with us, Pumpkin. It’s gonna be just you and me. Just us girls.”
Maggie was quiet for a moment. “Is that because he’s mean to us?”
Rosie’s heart felt like it weighed a million pounds. “Yes,” she said. “No more bad things are gonna happen from now on, okay?”
Maggie nodded, her dark hair bobbing up and down in her ponytail as she continued to eat her spaghetti. She had a halo of sauce around her lips, and Rosie wondered how on earth she could ask such wise questions and still manage to stain all her clothes with her dinner.
They cleared the plastic dishes they had bought at the Go-Go Mart, Maggie washing them clean while Rosie dried and put them away. Between snippets of conversation, she looked out of the kitchen window towards the twinkling lights of Mosswood.
“I’ll miss my old room and my friends.”
“I know, Pumpkin,” Rosie agreed. “But you’ll be able to make some new friends, and it will start to feel like home before you know it.”
“Except the air is nicer than home. It smells like Christmas here.”
Rosie laughed, a rich, deep laugh that crinkled the corners of her eyes as she hugged Maggie to her. “That’s because this is a pine forest!” she said, happiness bubbling inside her at the look of excitement on Maggie’s face. “Maybe at Christmas time we can go and pick out our tree from a tree farm. Would you like that?”
“Heck yes!” Rosie’s brow furrowed, and Maggie corrected herself. “I mean, yes, please – that sounds fun!”
Rosie’s face fell into a ‘that’s-what-I-thought-you-said’ expression. She took in a long breath and looked out of the window.
“Okay, then – we’ll see.” She let her eyes travel over the landscape in front of them while Maggie left for her bath.
It was strange, she thought, as she pulled the plug out of the kitchen sink. She’d spent less than 24 hours in this place, and she felt more at home now than she ever had in her whole life. Despite the house needing more attention than she‘d bargained for, Rosie felt like she could make a life for them here. If she hadn’t left the few friends she still had back home in Atlanta, the whole thing would have been perfect.
And then her phone lit up on the counter beside her. Before she could even question how it turned itself on, she saw Randy’s name above a text message. With shaking hands, she picked up her cell.
‘Guess u thought u could run out on me huh?’
Her breath was coming in short, ragged bursts. What if he knew where they were? What if he sent someone to come collect them—or, worse still, what if he came himself?
Rosie’s heart thudded like a jackhammer. She didn’t have time to register a second thought when her phone buzzed in her hand. She yelped and dropped it onto the counter. It fell face up, taunting her with a second message.
‘U know u can’t hide for long babe.’
Panic rose in her throat, cutting off her breath. She glared at her phone. All she wanted was to keep Maggie safe. She felt hot, her skin prickled, and nausea threatened to overtake her.
The phone vibrated on the counter again, but this time there was no text message. It shook, rattling against the worn tile surface. And then, right before her eyes, the phone screen split. Spiderweb cracks burst outwards in repeated pops that made the phone jump across the tiles. As it continued to skitter around like a cockroach trying to outlive a blast of bug spray, she noticed battery fluid bubbling out on the sides.
“Shoot!” she hissed, lunging for a pair of kitchen tongs that she’d just finished drying after dinner. She used them to pluck the phone from the counter and toss it into the trash can, leaving a trail of iridescent ooze dripping behind it.
What the actual fuck?
Rosie swiped at the ooze with a kitchen cloth and then threw that in the trash too. She felt exhausted, her long dark hair falling over her shoulder as she leaned on the counter to steady herself. She breathed in through her nose and then let the air out through her mouth, feeling her presence of mind starting to creep back to her.
The sound of Maggie pulling out the bath plug dragged her back into the moment.
“Mom!” Maggie called from the bathroom. “Can you please comb through my hair?”
“Sure, Pumpkin,” Rosie answered a touch too quickly. She took another deep breath, and then another, letting the action flow through her, slow her heart rate, and calm her mind.
She knew that there were posts all over the internet about phones exploding, but there was no way to explain what she had just seen her phone do.
