Page 6 of The Accidental Witch

Nina rolled her beautiful eyes. “Get the fuck off me, Wanda.”

Wanda leaned over and dropped a kiss on Nina’s forehead. “I’ll take that as a yes.” She swung her graceful, long leg over her friend’s body and took the offer of Marty’s hand to help her rise.

Brushing off her slim skirt, Wanda looked in Robbie’s direction with warm eyes. “Let’s begin again, shall we? I’m Wanda Jefferson, and it looks like you have a problem on your hands, Roberta Tisdale. No pun intended.” She winked,sweeping her hand toward the plastic-covered opening, and said, “Why don’t you come in and sit a spell while you tell us all about it, yes? I’ll have Arch bring us some tea.”

Robbie was so caughtup in taking in the basement dungeon in Nina’s castle, she almost couldn’t finish her story about how this had happened.

There were tapestries on the walls in deep, rich colors depicting battles with…vampires? She squinted. Were those vampires fighting wolves? How odd.

Swords hung in crisscross fashion, shiny and heavy-looking. There were several long halls with lights made to look like old torches lining the walls. The wall opposite her had been demolished and an alcove was in the making.

There were suits of armor and even an old Victrola on a stray table, covered in dust. Three desks were stacked on top of one another in the corner, a tarp haphazardly covering them.

It looked like someone was a collector of some very old pieces.

After the women took their places—two of them on an ornate settee and Nina in a wingback chair—they’d all listened to how she’d gotten here.

“So, Twister? ThegameTwister?” Nina barked from the deep crimson chair, interrupting her thoughts.

Robbie nodded. As terrified as she’d been by the display of their tussle earlier, she’d willingly followed them into the part of the dungeon undergoing construction.

She didn’t really have a choice.

“Robbie?” Marty coaxed.

Blowing out a breath, she nodded again. “Yes. Let me explain. I’m living in a…new place, and I decided to invite some of my building mates for wine and weenies in a blanket?—”

Tottington gagged (he hated weenies in a blanket), but quickly covered his mouth in shame, looking down at his feet.

Shrugging, she tucked her hand against her chest. “Anyway, I was just trying to be neighborly. It was sort of a case of if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, right?”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Nina asked, cracking her knuckles.

Robbie looked down at her sneakered feet, the incredible guilt of setting her hair on fire still raw. She shrugged. “It means, I come from…from adifferentplace than they do, and I wanted to get to know these people, even if we didn’t grow up the same way. I like them. It doesn’t matter to me where they come from, or where anyone comes from, I guess. Anyway, some people in my building recognized me, and I wanted them to see I wasn’t like my…”

Man, she hated telling people where she came from.Whoshe came from.

“What Roberta is saying is, she was raised in a very wealthy family and some people in the building took exception to that. Naturally, the assumption is she’s spoiled and pretentious and rude, of which Roberta is none of those things. The purpose of the party was to engage her neighbors and show them she isn’t all that different than them. Something about reaching across the divide.”

Robbie smiled gratefully at Tottington for yet again being her mouthpiece…until Nina said, “So poor little rich girl, rootin’ around in the mud with the fucking peasants?”

Wanda clucked her tongue and pointed a manicured fingernail at her. “Stop being so dang rude, Mistress of the Night.You’rerich. You have no room to make judgements.”Then she turned to Robbie, her eyes warmer still. “Please continue, honey.”

Feeling like an absolute jerk, she decided it was better she didn’t go any deeper into her “we all bleed the same color” speech. It felt vapid and cliché. No one believed she truly felt that way, anyway. She’d once had more money than she knew what to do with, but it had never stopped her from trying to prove she was different from her elitist family.

Resigned to the stigma of poor little rich girl, she sat up straight, crossing her feet at her ankles, smoothing her jeans over her thighs. “A couple of my neighbors brought some board games, and I remembered I’d found an old Twister game in the back of the closet of my apartment when I moved in. So I grabbed it. It seemed like fun at the time, but we didn’t have the usual spinny thing that comes with it. You know, the card with all the colors and the arrow? But there was this…” She looked to Tottington, who knew the name of it.

“Planchette,” Tottington provided. “According to Google, it was a planchette, typically used for a Ouija board.”

“Ooo,” Marty whispered.

Robbie winced. “Yes. It was in the box with the game. So we drew a circle on a piece of paper, labeling all the colors, and used the planchette to spin.”

Marty cocked her head, taking a delicate sip from a cup of tea as her bracelets clacked together. “And then…?”

“I’d had a little bit of wine, but things were going fine. I mean, okay. Mrs. Campisi was a little drunk, and Blonda and Mick the Tic had a small fight, but nothing like they normally do. We were still having fun and amazed at her propensity for acrobatics—in a housecoat, no less. I mean, who knew an eighty-year-old could bend like that?”

“Mrs. Campisi,” Tottington filled in. “She’s quite elderly and makes the most horrific fish, but she certainly can, as Roberta said,bend.”

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