Spotlight: Big Little Spells by Hazel Beck

Publication Date: August 29, 2023

Publisher: Graydon House

A smart, modern Rom-Com about a witch banished from her coven who seeks help from the only person who can prove she’s not a threat to witchkind—her annoyingly immortal childhood crush.

Rebekah Wilde was eighteen when she left St. Cyprian, officially stripped of her magic and banished from her home. Ten years later she’s forced to return to face the Joywood Coven, who preside over not just her hometown, but the whole magical world.

The Joywood are determined to prove Rebekah is a danger to witchkind, and she faces a death sentence if she can’t prove otherwise. Rebekah must seek help from the only one who knows how to stop the Joywood—the ruthless immortal Nicholas Frost. Years ago, he was her secret tutor in magic, and her secret, impossible crush. But the icy and frustratingly handsome immortal is as remote and arrogant as ever, and if he feels anything for Rebekah—or witchkind—it’s impossible to tell.

Now, she’s no longer a child…and this time what sparks between Nicholas and Rebekah is more than just magic…

Excerpt

Chapter One

You don’t have to be an exiled witch under threat of the death penalty should you cast the faintest little spell to feel the magic in Sedona, Arizona.

But it doesn’t hurt.

The full moon is shining, high and bright, making the red rocks glow outside my little bungalow. The air is soft and dry instead of swollen with Missouri’s trademark humidity, which I’m not sorry to leave behind.

If it was up to me, I would never have gone back to Mis­souri at all.

Because one thing exile has taught me is that magic is as much a habit as anything else. Unnecessary at best. Danger­ous at worst. An addiction, in other words.

These days I am all about recovery.

Except for tonight. Tonight, admittedly, has been a bit of a relapse.

I breathe out and try to blow away the past while I do.

I’m standing out in my little yard, my head tipped toward the Arizona sky and my shoes kicked off so I can feel the earth and as many vortexes as possible. Because I’m a hippie, I tell myself. Just a run-of-the-mill Sedona hippie. Hair down, feet bare, crystals hanging all around like every other New Ager around here.

Not magic, just vibes.

But before I manage to fully ground myself here, I feel something grab me, like a huge, magical hook around the center of me—but inside out. It’s dark. Hard. Kind of slimy, really—and it makes my stomach heave.

This particular magical tug is a summons, yanking me out of the life I fought so hard to build, all on my own. Not for the first time.

Not even for the first time tonight.

Though this summons is harsher than the one before. Meaner.

I know instantly it’s not him.

Because he yanked me back to St. Cyprian too, but it didn’t hurt when he did it. It’s not supposed to hurt at all, and he made it feel almost good—

But I stop thinking about the maddeningly beautiful, im­possible immortal witch who ruined my life once already, and start worrying about me.

There’s only one reason for me to be dragged back home against my will. And it’s been a long night already. My sister, Emerson, who I haven’t seen in person in a decade, formed her very own coven made up of our closest friends and one ob­noxious immortal. Then, together, we all fought off a major, magic-induced flood that would have submerged the town of St. Cyprian and most of Missouri.

The final jerk makes Sedona disappear into a blur of red, then there’s a whooshing sensation while whispered words fill the air around me.

Rebekah Wilde, come before us, the voices command me.

And I’m back.

Right where I don’t want to be.

I’m standing outside a farmhouse across the river from my hometown. And instead of the terrifying wave of water and my sister ready to dive into the middle of it all like the first time I showed up here tonight, the river has settled down. The fight is over.

Or…maybe it’s only just begun.

Because a quick glance around shows me that Emerson is standing outside in the cool April night, looking like the fierce Warrior she is, her eyes blazing gold with all her newly redis­covered power. Jacob North, our old friend and a Healer—and, I think, my sister’s new love—stands with her and doesn’t look any worse for the intense healing he did when we came much too close to losing Emerson earlier.

Behind them is Zander Rivers, my cousin, looking un­characteristically grim for a guy who used to make the role he was born into—a Guardian—seem a lot more fun than the name suggests. Next to him is Georgie Pendell, Emerson’s best friend, whose entire family has been witch Historians—and actual historians who run the town’s local-interest museum—as long as anyone can remember. And last but never least, El­lowyn Good. My best friend. And also the Summoner who helped Emerson contact me once Emerson remembered she was a witch, despite the Joywood spell that took those magic memories away from her for ten whole years.

Across from them stand all the members of the Joywood, the ruling coven based here in my hometown of St. Cyprian, MO. The authoritarian, bullying, small-minded coven that cheated me out of the life I was supposed to have.

Seven dictatorial witches I had no intention of laying eyes on again.

I feel a rush of a very old, too-dark fury inside me—but stop myself. It’s practically a reflex at this point. I don’t do outsize emotion or high drama anymore. I don’t do dark. That would lead directly to my death, and I’ve always been pretty clear about wanting to stay alive.

If I hadn’t wanted to live—my life on my terms—I would have stayed here. I would have let these petty Joywood tyrants wipe my mind the way they wiped my sister’s, taking away any hint of ever knowing magic.

I tell myself that I’ve forgiven them. I chant it inside me, not like one of the spells forbidden to me, but like a mantra. They were only doing their jobs, following their laws, as stu­pid as those laws might be. I forgive them because forgive­ness is mine to give. I don’t need to carry the bitter taste of St. Cyprian and its ruling coven with me. I chose to leave all of this behind. I still choose it.

Something—not quite a shadow—moves in my peripheral vision, and I see him too. Nicholas Frost, the one and only immortal witch. Some people call him a traitor.

I call him all kinds of things and unlike most, have done it to his face. But now is not the time to air all my oldest grudges.

His gaze from halfway across a field makes everything in­side me…change. Not so much that dangerous black fury any longer. This is something else. A different kind of heat.

I don’t want to acknowledge it. Or him. Especially not with this audience.

Even if, for a moment, it feels as if the two of us are all alone here.

I have to remind myself that we’re not.

I forgive you, I think at him, in my smuggest internal voice. The best of a decade of recovery programs right there. And even though I can’t—won’t—use a witch’s usual telepathic version of conversation, I suspect he hears me anyway. Be­cause his dark blue eyes gleam.

From all the way across the tall grass.

“Rebekah Wilde,” booms a voice I recognize entirely too well, even though I haven’t heard it in a decade. Carol Simon, the Joywood coven’s Warrior and therefore the leader of…ev­erything involving witches the world over.

I force myself to look at her, hopefully without my feelings all over my face, and decide that teenage me was right. Her frizzy hair really is unforgivable.

“You have been summoned here, to the site of your infrac­tion, to answer for your offense,” she intones.

I finally take note of the fact that she and her cronies hauled me into this field, but not into the group of my friends and family who also infracted tonight. I’m standing halfway be­tween them and the Joywood. As tempting as it is to think that’s just carelessness, I know better.

They don’t do careless.

I slouch where I stand, because even being across the river from my hometown makes me want to behave like the sulky teenager I was when I lived here. That’s what Carol and her buddies likely see anyway, so why not live down to their worst expectations? I’ve always been excellent at that.

I lock eyes with Felicia Ipswitch, the Joywood’s Diviner and my personal nemesis, and smirk a little. And just like that, it might as well be tenth grade when Felicia was the high school principal and I was a problem. A problem she thought she could solve with draconian detentions and the kind of pun­ishments that would send human teachers to jail—but witch students heal up better.

Turns out I’m not over high school, which doesn’t really do a lot for the sullen peace and love vibe I’m trying to exude here.

I look away from that evil old hag to find Emerson look­ing at me like I’m an answer. That’s not unusual. My sister always thinks there is one. And better yet, that she can find it and implement it.

I know better, because I made my own way out in the world, relying on nothing and no one but me. I learned the hard way that life and the world often have no answers, no neat little bows. For anyone, witch or human.

I tell myself that it gives me great internal peace to accept this knowledge, and maybe it will, someday. I grit my teeth and think peace, please.

Especially when Carol starts to speak again. Peace, love, light, I chant inside me. No spellwork here. No witchcraft. Just words of power that anyone could use while anointing themselves in essential oils and rearranging their houses for better feng shui.

“I know you must think you did something big here to­night,” Carol is saying, as if she’s never heard anything dumber in her life. Her voice is so persuasive that I have to pinch myself to remember that no, we weren’t giggling over a Ouija board, pretending we weren’t pushing it while we clearly were. We actually fused together the way all the books say true covens should, fought some gnarly dark magic, and won. Almost at the expense of my sister’s life.

“But I’m afraid all you really did, Emerson and Rebekah, is break the terms set down before you when you failed your pubertatum.” She glances around. “And the rest of you broke several laws aiding them.”

The word pubertatum has not gotten any less obnoxious in the ten years I haven’t heard it spoken aloud. It’s an ugly Latin word for a coming-of-age ceremony where witches in their eighteenth year are required to demonstrate their pow­ers so they might take their places in witch society. Pass the test and you answer a few questions to be herded into one of the seven witchkind designations. Warrior, Guardian, Sum­moner, Healer, Historian, Praeceptor, or Diviner.

Fail the test, like Emerson and I did, and you get to be a zombie or an outcast.

“I have power, Carol. You can’t deny that,” Emerson says, with her usual bouncy forthrightness, like she’s flabbergasted at the possibility that Carol would bother trying to deny such a thing. When it’s so obvious.

I really have missed my sister.

“You told me I had none.” Emerson points to me now. “You told us we have no power at all. You were wrong. And then, all this power inside me you said I didn’t have fought off your obliviscor.”

I expect rage. Carol has never been one for being told she’s wrong. Her mind wipe spell wasn’t supposed to have failed. But Carol surprises me.

She titters, and her cronies all laugh along with her. I re­mind myself that it’s supposed to make me feel wrong and stu­pid and vaguely humiliated. That’s what they do. Better to rule us by making us hate ourselves.

“And you’ve turned a simple testing error into some…ne­farious plot? I do worry, Emerson, that fighting off the obli­viscor addled your senses.”

“We just saved St. Cyprian and possibly all of witchkind, Carol,” my sister says, and not angrily. Just like she’s reciting facts, inviting Carol to come aboard. She even smiles. “You’re welcome.”

And I know hate is for the weak. Forgiveness is power. Blah, blah, blah.

But Carol Simon makes the case for blood feuds, forever. Especially when she rolls her eyes.

“We saved witchkind with no help from you,” Emerson continues, as if she doesn’t see any eye-rolling. Because she won’t give up. Emerson never, ever gives up.

Even when she should.

“As a concerned, dedicated St. Cyprian citizen who also happens to be chamber of commerce president, I have to won­der,” Emerson tells Carol. But she also casts an eye over the rest of them, these fixtures of St. Cyprian and my witchy past that I did not miss at all. Like Maeve Mather, the Joywood’s Summoner, who used to go out of her way to be mean to my grandmother. Just because she could. “Why, I’m asking my­self, did the ruling body of all witchkind not only turn a blind eye to the obvious imbalance in our power source that’s been making the rivers rise so dangerously, but also fail to help us fix it? Why did we have to stop it?”

“I assume because you wanted attention,” Felicia says. It is a familiar sentence, meant to be pure condemnation. She used to use it all the time as a precursor to her nasty little punish­ments. My gaze moves across the dark field to find Ellowyn’s, and I can tell from my best friend’s expression that she’s re­membering the same thing I am.

All of high school, basically. When Principal Ipswitch dedi­cated herself to what she called our reprehensible, attention-seeking behavior.

What amazes me is how little I’ve thought about high school since leaving Missouri. Deliberately. And tonight, it’s like I never left.

“I saw the darkness at the heart of the confluence myself,” Emerson says with a great calm I certainly don’t feel. Espe­cially since I saw it too. That terrible, encroaching dark, eat­ing the world whole. It had hunkered there where the three rivers meet, waiting malevolently. And then, tonight, it ex­ploded. Emerson, with our help, destroyed it. My heart starts kicking at me again, a riot of panic, like it’s still happening.

“Are you accusing us of something?” Carol asks, and she’s scarily good at this. She sounds on the verge of laughter, yet somehow almost hurt. As if she cares deeply what Emerson thinks of her. Of them.

I worry this will work on my sister. Because the truth is, Emerson has no power here. She’s too honest, and this is pol­itics. Power. It’s ego and control. Emerson is a lot of things I roll my eyes at all the time, but she’s never been ruled by ego or greed.

Not like these witches.

“I’m pointing out facts,” Emerson says, sounding patient now. My sister has never met a windmill she didn’t try to charge head-on. “And the facts are, we saved St. Cyprian. You could have helped us, Carol. But you didn’t.”

“Oh, Emerson.” Carol sounds sad. Legitimately sad, which would require emotions on her part. And I’m pretty sure ve­lociraptors don’t have emotions. “Why would we deliberately choose not to help save the place where we live? How does that make sense?”

Emerson blinks. “You tell me.”

I want to give a short TED talk on gaslighting and master manipulators, but this is not the time. It’s still not clear whether this is an execution or not. Carol did mention infractions of the pubertatum rules, and last I heard, me using magic the way I did tonight is a capital offense. Emerson wasn’t supposed to be able to do it. I claimed I could do it, but was exiled be­cause they said I had no real power—only the shameful, un­safe urge to use borrowed force. Either way, using witchcraft as an exile is about as forbidden as you can get.

I can always be counted on to rebel when it will do me the most harm.

There’s a part of me that wants to turn to Nicholas Frost, the only other being here who isn’t standing with a group. He’s the one who came up with the goddamned pubertatum back when the earth was young, or so they taught us in school. He is considered the first Praeceptor—the teacher of all teachers, but not in a safe little classroom way. Praeceptors in his day taught armies of witches, then wielded them.

But I know better than to look to him for help.

Looking at him at all is fraught enough when you were once a teenage girl with a teenage girl’s unwieldy crush. Those things are hard to vanquish.

“We saved St. Cyprian,” Emerson says again, as if saying it enough will get through to Carol when as far as I know, nothing has ever gotten through to Carol.

“Maybe you did save the town,” Felicia says, with her little sniff of disdain that I remember all too well. “But if you did, it was for your own gain and nothing more.”

I want to say that at least that’s better than doing it for at­tention, but I don’t, because I’m evolved as fuck.

My sister’s eyes narrow. And here’s the thing that most people don’t know about Emerson Wilde. She expends a lot of energy trying to convince the people around her to see the error of their ways. She embodies the notion that if you lead a horse to water in the right way, it really will drink.

But when she’s done, she’s done.

As her little sister, I know this better than anyone. So, I step in to stop the impending storm. “This seems straightforward to me,” I say, doing my best to sound as if all this carrying on is a waste of energy, and I low-key resent it. And as if I’m some kind of authority here. “Emerson has some magic. Let her take the test again.”

Excerpted from Big Little Spells by Hazel Beck. Copyright © 2023 by Megan Crane and Nicole Helm. Published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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About the Author

HAZEL BECK is the magical partnership of a river witch and an earth witch. Together, they have collected two husbands, three familiars, two children, five degrees, and written around 200 books. As one, their books will delight with breathtaking magic, emotional romance, and stories of witches you won’t soon forget. Find them at www.Hazel-Beck.com.

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Spotlight: Small Town, Big Magic by Hazel Beck

Publication Date: August 23, 2022

Publisher: Graydon House

For fans of THE EX HEX and PAYBACK'S A WITCH, a fun, witchy rom-com in which a bookstore owner who is fighting to revitalize a small midwestern town clashes with her rival, the mayor, and uncovers not only a clandestine group that wields a dark magic to control the idyllic river hamlet, but hidden powers she never knew she possessed.

There’s no such thing as witches…right?

Emerson Wilde has built the life of her dreams. Youngest Chamber of Commerce president in St. Cyprian history, successful indie bookstore owner, and lucky enough to have her best friends as found family? Done.

But when Emerson is attacked by creatures that shouldn’t be real, and kills them with what can only be called magic, Emerson finds that the past decade of her life has been…a lie. St. Cyprian isn't your average Midwestern river town—it’s a haven for witches. When Emerson failed a power test years ago, she was stripped of her magical memories. Turns out, Emerson’s friends are all witches.

And so is she.

That's not all, though: evil is lurking in the charming streets of St. Cyprian. Emerson will need to learn to control what’s inside of her, remember her magic, and deal with old, complicated feelings for her childhood friend--cranky-yet-gorgeous local farmer Jacob North—to defeat an enemy that hides in the rivers and shadows of everything she loves.

Even before she had magic, Emerson would have done anything for St. Cyprian, but now she’ll have to risk not just her livelihood…but her life.

Excerpt

1

If you google my name—something I only do every other Tuesday because ego surfing is an indulgence and I keep my indulgences on a strict schedule—the first twenty hits are about the hanging of Sarah Emerson Wilde in 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts.

Guess why.

Only after all those witch hits—three pages in—will you get to me, Emerson Wilde. Not a tragically executed woman accused of witchcraft by overwrought zealots, but a bookstore owner and chamber of commerce president. The youngest chamber of commerce president in the history of St. Cyprian, Missouri, not that I like to brag.

Men are applauded for embellishing the truth while women are seen as very confident for telling the truth—and very confident is never a compliment.

If you slog past all the Crucible references and sad YouTube videos from disaffected teens with too much eye makeup, you might read about how my committed rejuvenation efforts have brought ten new businesses to St. Cyprian in the past five years. You might read about our Christmas around the World Festival which, thanks to my hard work and total commitment, brings people from—you guessed it—all around the world. You could read any number of articles about what I’ve done to help St. Cyprian, because it’s not a good day unless I’ve done something to support the town I love best.

And I pride myself on making every day a good day.

Even if most people read about Sarah and the witch trials and stop there, I know the truth about her. I learned all about my notorious ancestor while researching a presentation for my fourth-grade class.

My peers might have preferred Skip Simon’s bold and unlikely claims that he was a direct descendent of the outlaw Jesse James, but learning about Sarah changed my life. The reality of Sarah Emerson Wilde is that she was a fierce feminist who wanted to play by her own rules. A nonconformist who wasn’t interested in playing the perfect Puritan, and therefore a direct threat to the Powers That Be. Following her own rules, ignoring theirs, and trumpeting her independence got her killed.

Sarah wasn’t only a tragic figure. She was also a fierce martyr who would have hated being called either.

In retrospect, it was maybe too much for Miss Timpkin’s fourth-grade class.

But ever since then I’ve considered Sarah my guiding light. I’m proud to have such an exceptional, indomitable woman in my family tree. My great-grandmother times nine, to be precise. I’ve always felt that I owe it to myself, the Wilde name, and Sarah to be a strong, independent woman who doesn’t let the patriarchy or anything else get her down for long.

“And I don’t,” I announce brightly to the quiet of the early-morning kitchen of my family’s historic house.

It’s a Tuesday in March and I have plans. I always have plans. It’s what I do, but these are particularly epic, even for me. I might have been born too late to speak feminist truth to Puritan patriarchal power, but I have my own calling.

I am here to make St. Cyprian a better place.

Don’t laugh.

You can’t fix the world until you sort out your own backyard. I intend to do both.

Since my first St. Cyprian community project with my second-grade class, I have put everything I am into this shining jewel of a river town, the people lucky enough to live here, and the shops that carve out their spots on the cobbled streets—like my own intensely independent bookstore.

For all the women who came before me who weren’t allowed. Or those who carved out their way and were shunned for it.

Fist pumps optional.

I pump a few on my own in the kitchen, because there are few things in this life that psyche a girl up more than a fist pump. One of those things is coffee. Another is sugar. Combine all three and I’m ready to face the day.

But first I need to face my roommate.

My roomie and best friend, Georgie Pendell, grew up in the rickety old house next door, but moved in with me when she could no longer bear another moment of agony in her parents’ house—her dramatic words, not mine. She’s been here five years, sprawled out over the third floor and using the extra bedroom I’d assumed she’d make into an office as a library instead.

Mind you, what Georgie calls a library gives me hives. It’s an overflowing catastrophe of books piled into tottery towers that she refuses to let me organize for her. The last time I tried to go inside, the door only opened about two inches before hitting one of her stacks.

She insists it’s exactly the way she wants it.

And that’s fine, because Wilde House is big enough for the both of us. In fact, bigger than we need. With my parents gone living the high life in Europe and my sister’s defection to who knows where after our high school graduation, the house had seemed too big. I had been thrown for a loop when both my sister and parents left St. Cyprian within a year of each other—though I’d rallied the way I always do. My sister, Rebekah, had always been a free spirit. My parents had always been socially ambitious—so why not take that as far as it could go on the Continent? I had the town. I had my friends. I got to live in this piece of history with my grandmother. Yet when my grandmother died a few years later and left me here alone, the old house felt like an ominous, rattling thing that might swallow me whole. Winter had seemed to seep in, cruel and unforgiving. The halls had seemed too long, the lights too dim.

Possibly I was grieving. The loss of Grandma. The loss of my family, who I knew had their reasons for staying away, in Rebekah’s case because she always had reasons no matter how little she communicated those reasons. Or returning only for the funeral, in my parents’ case, and then rushing back to their European adventure.

It felt a little stormy there for a while.

My silly, happy, eccentric best friend moving in has been like letting in the sunshine.

Organizational challenges aside, having her here makes these early mornings with the whole of Wilde House creaking around me, like it’s singing its own song while I wake, feel less…lonely.

Not that I allow loneliness in my life. I swat it down like an obnoxious fly anytime it pops up. Because loneliness is a betrayal of all the women who came before me and I am not going to be the Wilde who lets them down. I’m the current caretaker of this landmark of a house that’s been in my family some three hundred years, since the first Wilde wisely made the long trek away from the Massachusetts Colony and settled down in this part of Missouri where two great rivers meet, the Mississippi and the Missouri. I like the idea of roots that deep and rivers that tangle together. I like this house that towers above me with its uneven floors and oddly shaped rooms. I like where it sits in town, on one end of Main Street like a punctuation mark.

And I really like that my best friend is always right here, within reach.

Because before I head off to my beloved Confluence Books today, I need to get Georgie on board for an Official Friend Meeting tonight. Being a young, ambitious, independent woman in charge of the chamber of commerce in the most charming river town in Missouri—and therefore America—comes with its challenges. A strong leader knows when to lean in to her community, and I do. My friends are always the first people I turn to when I need some help.

I tell myself that I would do that even if my family was still here. That my friends are my family. My parents and sister are the black sheep—not me. Their leaving, their lack of contact entirely or bright, shallow, early-morning messages from abroad is their choice.

And their loss.

My friends stayed. They love St. Cyprian and loved my grandmother too. They are mine, and I am theirs. Just like this town I love so much.

Still, sometimes I like to make a gathering official because that makes it more likely we’ll get to the constructive advice more quickly.

I head for the curving narrow stairs that will take me up into the house’s turret. It’s never been my favorite part of the house—it makes me think of princesses and fairy tales and other embarrassingly romantic things that have no place in a practical, independent life—but it suits Georgie to the bone. Like it was made for her.

I eye the newel post as I start up the stairs because it’s shaped like a grinning dragon and I’ve never understood it. The Wildes are the least fanciful people alive. Pragmatism and quiet determination would be our coat of arms if we had such a thing, but we’re Midwesterners, thank you. Coats of arms are far too showy.

The dragon grins at me like it knows things I don’t.

“That is unlikely,” I tell it, then close my eyes, despairing of myself.

There is no room in my life for the kind of whimsy that results in discussions with inanimate objects. Especially a dragon. A sometimes creepy dragon who hunches at the foot of the banister like he’s guarding the house.

“Stop it,” I mutter at myself—and possibly at him—as I head upstairs.

Once on the third floor, I eye Georgie’s library door as I pass it, itching to get in there and establish some order, but sometimes friendship comes before logic. Or intelligible shelving systems. At the end of the hall, her bedroom door is ajar, and I can see Georgie herself sitting on the wood-planked floor facing the two huge turret windows that take up most of the outside wall. They are flung wide open to the cool spring air and she has her face lifted to the sunrise.

Her curly red hair swirls around her, and she’s wearing enough bracelets on her wrist to perform a symphony of tinkling metal sounds. Like the half hippie, half free spirit she claims to be.

Georgie’s family also has roots in Puritan Massachusetts witch trials but unlike me, she loves getting lost in all that witchcraft nonsense. She pretends she has various supernatural powers to annoy me, but mostly she likes the trappings. What she solemnly calls crystal lore and sage burning. She likes to talk to her cat as if he can understand her and claims his meows are detailed replies that she, naturally, can comprehend perfectly. And she steadfastly claims to believe that Ellowyn, one of our other closest friends, can brew teas that cure colds, repair broken hearts, and curse weak-willed men.

There’s something comforting about how Georgie wholeheartedly embraces the silliness, like this daily ritual of hers. The morning light streams in, making the colorful crystals she’s arranged around her in a circle glow.

As I stand in the doorway, she gets to her feet and begins to collect her debris. Her crystals are the only item she owns that I have ever seen her keep in some kind of order. I used to try to help her pick up the various rocks, but she would tell me things like I put the malachite with the quartz and everyone knows that’s wrong, or that reds and blues shouldn’t touch on Wednesdays, obviously. I finally gave up.

I’ll admit that sometimes I have to shove my hands in my pockets to keep from helping again anyway.

“What brings you to my lair this early in the morning?” she asks without looking at me. I know this is to give the impression that she divined my presence when it’s more likely she heard the creaky board out in the hallway.

She does something dramatic with her fingers in the air, and at the same time a breeze shifts through the wind chimes she has hanging in her windows. A funny little coincidence.

I ignore it. “You’re free tonight, right?”

“Sadly no. In a shocking twist that will surprise everyone who’s ever met me or seen me attempt to dance, I’m running away to Spain, where I will dedicate myself to the study of flamenco. And possibly also tapas and wine.”

In other words, yes, she’s free.

“I need to call a meeting.”

Georgie sighs and looks over her shoulder at me. “Not every get-together needs to be a meeting with a cause.”

I smile winsomely at her. “But some do.”

“Is this about those flyers I helped you put up yesterday?”

I smile even more broadly. If there was an award for best flyer, that one would win it. But then, I’m excellent at flyers. “That flyer was about the new and improved Redbud Festival, Georgie.”

“Yes, I know. I also know that anytime you try to new and improve something in this town, the plague that is Skip Simon descends on you like the locust he is.”

“He hasn’t. Yet.”

“But he will.”

He will. He always does.

I sigh. “Yes, he will. He can’t resist. But I don’t want to fight him.” This time is implied. “I want to find a way to get through to him. Preferably without embarrassing him in front of the whole town.”

Because the only thing I’ve ever been able to do when it came to Skip Simon, from another old and well-to-do local family here in St. Cyprian like mine, was embarrass him.

Publicly.

His unearned victory against me in fourth grade notwithstanding.

There was the kickball game. You’d think a grown man wouldn’t still be mad that a girl had accidentally smashed his face with a kickball in gym class, both breaking his nose and making him the laughingstock of the fifth grade, but Skip had brought it up at least twice in the past six months alone.

There was the olive branch incident. Except it wasn’t an olive branch. It was an extra helping of the fish sticks from the cafeteria that everyone knew he loved. I’d thought he’d find those fish sticks within the hour and maybe we could bury the hatchet. Instead, he’d come back from a week’s vacation—that he claimed was the flu, but he had a tan from lying on the beach in Mexico—to find everyone calling him Stinky Simon. And hadn’t believed I’d been out that same week because I really did come down with the flu before I could take the fish sticks offering back out of his locker.

There was the unfortunate field trip to Mark Twain’s Boyhood Home in Hannibal. The riverboat incident a year later. The ninth-grade intercom thing that even my own friends didn’t entirely believe was an accident, but how was I supposed to know that it could be so easily turned on? Or that Skip and his freshman year girlfriend would choose to use that room to make out in?

Classmates made unfortunate slurping sounds at him for years.

Then there’d been prom. Our parents had urged us to go together despite the many years of discord. They thought our two old St. Cyprian families should be friendlier, and obviously my rebellious sister wasn’t the one to approach for cordiality of any kind. And when they’d had a few drinks, our parents tended to wax rhapsodic about how they’d always had hopes for Skip and me.

Neither Skip nor I shared these hopes.

But we’d agreed all the same, because St. Cyprian is a small town. And because it made sense to make an effort. Okay, that was me, but he was briefly less jerky about things. We even called our awkward plans peace talks.

Then I stood him up.

It was an accident, but no one believed that.

My position, then and now, is that when your always-problematic sister “loses” your favorite science teacher’s chinchilla, you can hardly be concerned about a dance. You initiate search and rescue, in a prom dress, because it’s the poor, lost chinchilla that matters. And given that I was the one who found Mr. Churchilla, you’d think Skip would have forgiven me.

But he didn’t. Especially when the rumor went around that I’d always plotted to stand him up. As if I would descend to playing teen rom-com movie games with Skip. Plus, there was another rumor that Skip himself had actually been planning to embarrass me with something far more cringeworthy than his choice of white tuxedo.

I wish I could say we’d left such silly adolescent issues behind, but on the day of Skip’s coronation—I mean, election, if you could call it that when his grand and formidable mother basically forced everyone she knows into voting for her precious spoiled baby—as mayor of St. Cyprian, I led a town cleanup service project. I had no idea the cleaning substance we’d used in the community center would make the floor abnormally slippery. I was wearing shoes with decent treads.

But Skip was not. He tripped, fell flat on his face and, yes, broke his nose again.

Yes, he blamed me.

The harder I tried to be nice to Skip, the worse I seemed to embarrass him. Over time, he moved on from any actual incidents to simply blaming me by rote. If there is any bad word breathed about him on the cobbled streets of St. Cyprian, he assumes it’s my fault.

But he’s the mayor. What mayor is universally adored? Welcome to politics.

An argument he does not find compelling, sadly. I’ve tried.

Skip might not believe this, but while he can certainly schmooze with the best of them, he isn’t liked by all and sundry. He is mayor here because his family is powerful and because he vowed to keep the town as it is. The sad truth is, no matter how many progressive folks live here, a great many people in the greater St. Cyprian area are afraid of change.

That doesn’t mean they like Skip personally. Yet somehow the blame for any negativity aimed at him or his office or his campaign gets put on my shoulders. When he decides I’m wrong, which is pretty much anytime I get out there and try to change things for the better, he really goes after me.

This is why I need my friends to help me brainstorm ways to deal with Skip’s eventual, inevitable response to my new ideas for the Redbud Festival. Because I’m certainly not going to stop trying to improve St. Cyprian and its tourist-attracting, revenue-producing festivals to appease Mayor Stinky Simon. 

Excerpted from Small Town, Big Magic by Hazel Beck. Copyright © 2022 by Megan Crane and Nicole Helm. Published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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About the Authors

HAZEL BECK is the magical partnership of a river witch and an earth witch. Together, they have collected two husbands, three familiars, two children, five degrees, and written around 200 books. As one, their books will delight with breathtaking magic, emotional romance, and stories of witches you won't soon forget. You can find them at www.Hazel-Beck.com.