Page 119 of Sigils & Spells

HOCUS PURRCUS

Pepper McGraw

CHAPTER1

Bygul blamedKitty Claus for this latest assignment.

Ever since K.C. mentioned howchallengingwitches were to work with, it was all the other matchmaking cats could talk about.

Even though they already had full case loads, the cats were determined to move witches to the top of their list.

Then K.C. returned to tell them of a newly formed coven in need of both familiars and mates.

That was when Bygul knew all his protests would come to naught.

As far as the other cats were concerned, this coven represented a pawsitively purrfect opportunity to match a lot of homeless cats with their purrfect human companionsandto do some matematching as well.

At least that’s what Soraya kept saying, and unfortunately, Tivali and Muezza agreed with her.

Which meant Bygul was along for the ride, because there was absolutely no way he could trust those three to matematch a bunch of witches without his assistance.

The moment they arrived in the tiny town of Zero, though, and Bygul saw exactly who the members of the coven were, and even worse, who its leader was, he knew K.C. had set them up.

The lazy, pompous cat was probably laughing his fool head off right now.

Because there was no way even the best matchmaker at Pawsitively Purrfect Matches—Bygul himself, thank you very much—could help these insane witches achieve their happily ever afters.

*.*.*.*.*

Pippa was bored.

Not a good circumstance, to be sure, but it couldn’t be helped.

In the beginning, she’d been thrilled to find other witches in similar circumstances as her own—that is to say, lone witches without a coven to anchor their magic—and had leapt at the opportunity to form a coven with these slightly unstable—okay, mostly unstable—witches.

In the beginning, it had been wonderful.

They’d settled in this small town called Zero, which in Pippa’s opinion had been on a downward slide toward a population count that matched its name, when they had arrived.

A somewhat charming, sleepy town in the middle of nowhere, Kansas, where any magic Pippa’s newly formed coven happened to unleash would be mostly unseen by the rest of the world.

In fact, it was the perfect spot for the brand of chaos that Pippa’s magic tended to cause.

It was wonderful in the beginning.

Not having to worry about her coven members judging her for her lack of control over her magic.

It wasn’t her fault that the well from which her magic sprang was more like an ocean with hurricane-force winds, now was it?

Yet, her original coven—The Witches of Salem, dating back to 1600, thank you very much (so very pompous and cliched, not to mention, wrong)—had believed exactly that.

Pippa was a danger to society, they claimed, and too bad it was the twenty-first century, for if she’d been born back at the formation of Salem, she’d have been burned at the stake for certain, and the world spared her out-of-control magic.

While that might have been true, Pippa couldn’t believe they’d found it necessary to point it out. Rude!

Then they’d given her a choice—be stripped of her magic or banished.

Well, no one was stealing Pippa’s power, even if it did make her life chaotic and miserable upon occasion.

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