Madelyn Alt - No Rest for the Wiccan

Table of Contents

Hex Marks the Spot

Quirky, enchanting, mystical, and addictive... Not to be missed.Annette Blair

Madelyn Alt writes an entertaining mystery.

Maggie ONeill is back, better than ever... A winner from page one. Ms. Alt transports her readers to the lovely town of Stony Mill and entertains with characters both charming and sinister. The mystical elements of the story weave seamlessly throughout as the reader learns, along with Maggie, as she becomes more comfortable with and knowledgeable about her gifts and how to work with them for the greater good. This is enchanting entertainment at its finest. Fresh Fiction

A Charmed Death

A magical, spellbinding mystery that enchants readers with its adorable heroine. The Best Reviews

Entertaining... A fun mystery to read!MyShelf.com

The Trouble with Magic

A fascinating ride... A hint of romance with much intrigue, mystery, and magic in a small Midwestern town setting.

A fun, witty whodunit... The characters are likable, the story flows easily, and the mystery and mystical elements are believable. Fresh Fiction

This new series is going to be a winner.

The plotting is tight and the murderer came as a shock. The situations are funny and the characters charming.

THE TROUBLE WITH MAGIC
A CHARMED DEATH
HEX MARKS THE SPOT
NO REST FOR THE WICCAN

Through the corridors of sleep
Past the shadows dark and deep
My mind dances and leaps in confusion.
I dont know what is real,
I cant touch what I feel
And I hide behind the shield of my illusion.

SIMON & GARFUNKEL, FLOWERS NEVER BEND

Chapter 1

My name is Margaret Mary-Catherine ONeillMaggie, please, only my mother goes the long way round the bendand I am a lifelong resident of Stony Mill, a mostly uninteresting small town in Indiana.

Mostly.

I used to think that living in a small town meant boredom, monotony, and slim pickins in the way of potential male companionship. On the other hand, I also used to think a belief in magic, ghosts, and witches was a symptom of an overactive imagination, wishful thinking, and possibly even outright insanity.

Kind of funny, when you think about all that has happened here in the last eight months.

And all in this sleepy little town.

Except you wont find me laughing. Would you, if you discovered within yourself a previously unacknowledged ability to discern, and even feel, the hidden, secret, most private emotions of others? The ones they dont want anyone to know about? Its a little unnerving. Unfortunately there are no twelve-step programs for empaths. No magic pill to make it all go away. Just like all the other intuitive souls out there in the world, we empaths are on our own, for better or for worse.

And actually, come to think of it, there was also nothing boring or monotonous about the strange disturbances that had been popping up all over Stony Mill either. Turbulence of a sort in the fabric of energy and matter that makes up the reality the rest of us see and feel and experience. Ripples that seemed to have opened a door and put out a great, big welcome mat for all sorts of weird phenomena. In the beginning, only sensitives noticed the change in the tides, and only those sensitives with a deeper familiarity with matters esoteric understood the significance of what they were feeling.

That chaos energy was on the move.

Dark energy.

Thats where the N.I.G.H.T.S. come into the picture. The Northeast Indiana Ghost Hunting and Tracking Society, that is. Headed up by my witchy boss, Felicity Dow (at Enchantments, of courseIndianas finest mystical antique shop), my band of ghost-hunting buddies have been a big help to me in learning to understand more about myself, and to gain some much-needed confidence while together the lot of us plumbed the depths of the mysteries of Stony Millmysteries both dark and light combined.

For as any good metaphysician will tell you, one cannot exist without the other. I took comfort in that knowledge. That dark could never overpower light. That light would always exist, no matter what. As long as that was true, there was always hope.

A girl needed to have hope. Especially when all the signs pointed to the weirdness in town getting worse.

Scoff if you will. I know how strange this all must sound. A year ago I would have scoffed, myself, but all that Ive experienced has since opened my mind. Im still not convinced thats necessarily a good thing, but I am learning to deal with it. My way.

As for the charge of slim pickins, it seems I might have been too hasty. A girl with two very different men vying for her attention can hardly complain. What to do with the two of them, well, thats another problem entirely.

My name is Maggie ONeill, and this is my story.

In researching my newly recognized talent, Id read that many empaths tend to be unusually susceptible to the weather, reacting to it on more than just a physical level. Perhaps there was something to that theory, because there was something about a hot, sultry night that never failed to set my nerves on edge, and this summer had had no shortage of them. Summer... thats the thing. Summer, it wasnt. Not yet. Not quite. The formality of the summer solstice was still a little over a week away, but already wed seen enough searing heat to brown the grass and drive people indoors to the cool relief of overworked air conditioners. Between the hot sun and a shortage of rain, the green lushness typical of mid-June in Indiana had thus far failed to manifest. Fields of soybeans and corn that should be beginning to flourish struggled valiantly to deepen their root systems in the crumbling soil, while aboveground their growth had faltered, their yellowing leaves coated with the gray dust that was raised from gravel roads with every vehicle that traveled them. Local farmers eyed the sky beneath glowering brows, searching for a hint, any hint, of the much-needed moisture.

How it could be as steamy as it was without rain, I had no idea, but it was enough to try the patience of a saint. And Saint Margaret, I was not. Not even close. I was actually beginning to be glad I lived in the basement apartment in the old Victorian on Willow Street rather than on the upper levels. Home to the occasional shadow creature my dark little apartment might be, but at least the surroundings were always a temperate (if damp) seventy degrees, and without the monstrous electric bills my best friend, Stephanie Evans, better known as Steff, endured in her apartment two floors above me.

Still, a girl started to go stir-crazy if she stayed home too often. Which was one reason why I had allowed TomFielding, that is, my on-again, off-again, not-quite-boyfriendthat steamy Saturday evening, to sweet-talk me into a moonlit drive down to the sunken gardens in the old limestone quarry. The other reason being that I was still trying to make up to him, at least in my mind, for my unplanned lapse in ethical judgment six weeks earlier, when Id allowed Marcus Quinn to kiss me. Marcus Quinn, the delectable male witch I had once mistakenly written off as being attached to my boss. Marcus Quinn, whod let me know in no uncertain terms that he was most definitely interested in me. Marcus Quinn, who with his shoulder-length dark hair, blue eyes, and laughing demeanor had teased his way into the illustrious position of Temptation No. 1 in my life.