Bitch Witch

Can good triumph over evil…when evil runs in your veins?

The problem is Sarah Elizabeth Archer doesn’t have to put up with anybody’s crap.

Coming from a long line of witches who lost their souls to dark energy, Sarah is determined to change her fate. Turning her back on her birthright, she smothers her natural instincts with a boring job and quiet life.

But when Sarah gets pissed off, all bets are off. And anything can happen when you piss off a witch.

BITCH WITCH

Copyright © 2016 S.R. Karfelt

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published by

Votadini Publishing/Horace Tupper Books

Library of Congress Control Number:

2016900325

Print edition ISBN numbers:

ISBN-13: 9780989534758

ISBN-10: 0-9895347-5-8

The Covenant Keeper Novels

Kahtar—Warrior of the Ages

Heartless—A Shieldmaiden’s Voice

Forever—The Constantines’ Secret

Multi-Author Collections

A Winter’s Romance

In Creeps the Night

Through the Portal

Call of the Warrior

For Brian

A fellow night owl.

P
lastic bags of crispy crust pizza and monthly supplies twisted around Sarah Archer’s wrists, cutting off her circulation. She fumbled with her frozen Coke, catching it between a bag and her sweatshirt. The icy concoction oozed out the top of the cup, spilling over her fingers. Resisting the urge to cast them clean and feeling a bit saintly about her amazing willpower, Sarah paused outside Target’s automatic front doors to lick the mess off her hand.

A blaring horn made her jump and the drink hit the ground in an explosion of frozen ice, splashing her from bare toes to chin.

Dammit! I wanted that stupid thing!
Mourning the icy Coke melting between her toes, Sarah ignored the driver and considered going back into the store for another drink.
But there’s no way I can stand in that slow line again without casting to speed things up.

The horn blared again.

Just breathe.
Don’t get mad. You dropped it.

And you are standing in the middle of the damn road.

Sarah almost moved. She shifted one sticky wet flip-flop toward the brightly lit storefront when a mom with a cart and little kids shoved around her, heading for the darkening parking lot. The driver laid on the horn and swore at them through an open window.

Sarah changed her mind about moving.

She looked through the windshield, directly into the eyes of the driver. The pretty blonde glared back and lifted her middle finger off the steering wheel. Despite the size of the pickup, Sarah stood her ground. Somewhere in the back of her mind she tried to reason with herself.

Don’t, don’t, don’t.

But Sarah wasn’t listening.

It’s when she got pissed off that the problems started.

Sometimes she got pissed off easier than others. Like now.

The blonde stared at Sarah across the hood of the shiny white truck and screeched, “Fuck you, fat bitch!”

Customers in the vicinity protested, and someone swore back at the driver.

The vehicle swerved around Sarah, moving half onto the sidewalk in front of the store and almost clipping one of the giant red concrete balls put there to keep cars away. People scattered. An old man holding a cup of Starbucks’ coffee dropped it in his scramble to retreat back into the store, while younger people hurried out the doors to watch. The pickup squeezed between a bench and a trash can before bouncing off the curb and fully regaining the roadway.

The encounter would have pissed off even a powerless fat bitch. Sarah Elizabeth Archer wasn’t powerless. The retreating truck accelerated so quickly the back end fishtailed as it made its getaway. Too late. The damage was done. There was no way to escape witchy karma.

A ball of heat sparked to life in Sarah’s chest, hot against her ribcage, like whiskey torching the esophagus. Tums couldn’t help this, but she knew what could. She eyeballed the tricked out pickup speeding away.

“Fat bitch this,” she whispered, setting the hot anger free. It felt good not to tap it down, a hot rush of release better than any sex she’d ever had. The spell tracked the pickup like a heat-seeking missile as it shot down the strip mall, catching up with the platinum tantrum trash next to Moe’s Grill.

Sarah heard it hit, like a meteorite dropping through the engine and tearing the driveshaft out. An aftershock with a noise similar to a sonic boom blew out the front windows of the nearby wireless store and ricocheted across the parking lot, setting off car alarms in its wake.

“Oh, shit!” Sarah half-walked, half-ran toward her Jeep as people gaped in the direction of the explosion.

What goes up must come down, and for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. The aftershock headed her way so fast and hard Sarah thought she heard the high pitched whine of its approach. She forced herself to turn and face it. This is what separated the men from the boys, the good witches from the bad. At least she hoped it counted for something. One thing she’d learned long ago was to pay the cost of her own mistakes. She certainly wasn’t going to ever be one of those witches that lured cats, or heaven forbid neighbors, to the house so they could pay the piper. Not that she wanted to be a witch at all. She’d renounced it, for Pete’s sake! But it was hard to stick to her resolve when she got upset; harder than trying to give up sugar or caffeine.

It’s kind of ironic that the road to hell and the road to fat pants are both paved with good intentions.

The aftershock slammed into Sarah, lifting her off her feet and shoving her into the back of her Jeep, against the spare tire. The bulk of the spell’s reverberation rolled off her and against the car, pushing it into the car parked nose to nose with hers. Sarah heard the crunch of the vehicles as she hit the ground like a celebratory football slammed from the hands of a scoring quarterback. The impact jarred every bone in her body. It felt like her ribs had collapsed and her spine now rested between her breasts. Lying flat on her back and staring up into the darkening sky she noticed not the panic around her, but the full moon. A blue moon.