Betwixt: Paranormal Women's Fiction (Betwixt & Between Book 1)

  Praise for Betwixt

  “Magically delicious! Darynda Jones knocks it out of the park with Betwixt. If you love Charley, you’re going to be be obsessed with Defiance. Hilarious, heartwarming and oh so addictive.”

  -Robyn Peterman ~ NYT and USA Today Bestselling Author

  "Darynda Jones brings her original style to paranormal women's fiction, and I for one couldn't be happier. Also, maybe be wary of inheriting from strangers...or not. Go get this book!"

  —Michelle M. Pillow, New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Author of the Warlocks MacGregor series

  "Betwixt takes readers on a heartwarming, spellbinding journey packed full of intrigue. Ms. Jones has outdone herself with this gem."

  -Mandy M. Roth, NY Times & USA TODAY Bestselling Author

  Betwixt

  Betwixt & Between Book One

  Darynda Jones

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  BETWIXT: A PARANORMAL WOMEN’S FICTION NOVEL

  (BETWIXT & BETWEEN BOOK 1)

  © 2020 by Darynda Jones

  Excerpt from A Bad Day for Sunshine copyright © 2020 by Darynda Jones

  Cover design © 2020 by TheCoverCollection

  ISBN 10: 1-7343852-1-9

  ISBN 13: 978-1-7343852-1-2

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce or transmit this book, or a portion thereof, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author. This book may not be resold or uploaded for distribution to others. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  www.DaryndaJones.com

  Available in ebook, print, and audio editions

  Created with Vellum

  For those of you who, like me, still believe in magic

  even though we’re of a certain age.

  Stay fierce.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  THANK YOU!!!

  Also by Darynda Jones

  PWF PAL PIMPING

  More Paranormal Women’s Fiction

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  One

  There are two kinds of people in the world:

  those who believe in magic

  and those who are wrong.

  I pulled to a stop in front of a sprawling mansion, checked the address the lawyer gave me, then glanced at the mansion again, even more confused than I’d been when I first got the call. No way was this legit. I looked at the numbers on the massive white columns and compared them to the numbers I’d scribbled on a hot pink sticky note. Perfect match. It was one thing for a complete stranger to bequeath me a house. It was quite another for that house to look like a red brick version of Tara from Gone with the Wind.

  I turned my head to look at the street sign one more time, making sure it said Chestnut, then I checked the address for a third time. Still a perfect match. Maybe I heard it wrong. Or wrote it down wrong. Or I’d entered the Twilight Zone. As I sat steeping in a light marinade of seasonal herbs and bewilderment, weighing my options—medication, electroshock therapy, exorcism—an urgent knock sounded on the window of my vintage mint green Volkswagen Beetle, a.k.a., the bug. I jumped in response, the movement quite possibly dislocating a rib.

  A feminine voice shrieked at me as though the barrier between us was a concrete wall instead of a piece of glass. “Ms. Dayne?”

  I put an arm around my ribcage to protect it from any further damage and turned to the panic-stricken woman enveloped from head to toe in neon purple.

  “Hi!” she shouted.

  Seriously, every article of clothing she wore—beret, scarf, wool coat, knitted mittens—were all a shade of purple so bright my pupils had to adjust.

  “Are you Ms. Dayne?”

  And I liked purple. Really, I did. Just not a shade so bright it watered my eyes. Not unlike pepper spray. Or napalm.

  I cracked the window and gave a cautious, “Mrs. Richter?”

  The woman shoved her mitted hand into the narrow opening I’d created. “So nice to meet you. What do you think?”

  I took her hand a microsecond before she snatched it back and stepped to the side to allow me to exit.

  Mrs. Richter, a woman only a couple of years older than my own forty-four years of hard labor with little reward, hurried to the hood of the bug and pulled a stack of papers from a manila envelope. A stack of papers that probably needed my signature.

  A needlelike cramp tightened the muscles in my stomach. This was all happening too fast. Much like my life of late.

  After the first wave of pain subsided—the same pain I’d been having for months now—I pushed a wind-blown lock of black hair over my ear and followed her.

  “Mrs. Richter, I don’t understand any of this. Why would someone I don’t know leave me a house? Especially one that looks straight out of Architectural Digest.”

  “What?” She glanced up from her task of wrangling the paperwork in the icy wind and let her gaze bounce from the house to me then back to the house. “Oh, heavens. I’m so sorry. Mrs. Goode didn’t leave you this house. I just wanted to meet here because her house is, well—” She cleared her throat and tried to tame a strand of blond hair that whipped across her forehead. “It’s persnickety.”

  Relief flooded every cell in my body. Either that or the Adderall I’d had in lieu of breakfast was finally kicking in. Still, how in the Sam Spade could a house be persnickety?

  Deciding that was a question for another day, I released a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. “That’s actually a bit of a weight off my shoulders. There’s no way I could afford the taxes and insurance on this place, much less the upkeep.”

  “Oh, well, that shouldn’t be a problem. Somehow the taxes on Percival are stuck in the fifties. Cheapest on the block, but you didn’t hear that from me. Also, there’s the money that Mrs. Goode—”

  “Percival?”

  She leaned into the bone-chilling breeze, and whispered, “The house.”

  I whispered back, “The house is named Percival?”

  “Yes.” She stopped as though startled, then said, “My goodness, your eyes are beautiful.”

  “Thank you. Did you say the house is named—?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that shade of blue before.”

  “Oh. Um, thanks?”

  “You’re welcome. Can you sign here, please?” She recovered and pointed to a highlighted spot on the first of many, many pages, clearly in a hurry to get on with it.

  I eyed the paper with a suspicion born of far too many deceptive relationships. “How about we go inside and talk about this?”

  Her face, a face that had been rosy not thirty seconds earlier, paled at my suggestion. She backed away as though I’d just told her I was going to murder her and keep her heart in a jar on my desk.

  I would never do such a thing. I’d keep it in a jar in the cupboard. I wasn’t morbid.

  “Inside?” She clasped the papers to her chest and took another step back. “You mean, inside Percival?”


  I lifted a shoulder. “Sure. Is he, maybe, around here somewhere?”

  Her hazel irises glazed over despite the wind whipping her blond bob around her head, beret be damned, and her gaze traveled across the street to land on a structure there. Mine followed.

  Towering between two gorgeous houses that were almost as majestic as the one I’d parked in front of sat a huge, crumbling abode. It was gorgeous and grotesque and mesmerizing and I was certain I’d seen it in a horror movie. Or five.

  And I was lost.

  Percival was gorgeous. Hauntingly beautiful with ivy-covered moss green brick and black trim so dark it looked like wet ink. It sat three stories high. The main section was round with six black gables that formed a circle. Two bay windows graced the front on either side of a massive black door. Another section, square but just as stunning, was attached on the right of it. A tall iron fence surrounded the property with a veritable forest from what I could see of the back.

  I didn’t want to just live in Percival. I wanted to marry him and have his babies.

  Mrs. Richter jerked her gaze away from my future ex-house and back to The Bug where she started fighting the wind to straighten the papers again.

  Percival certainly left an impression. So had the lawyer who’d insisted over the phone that I drive all the way from Arizona—mostly because a last-minute plane ticket cost more than my car—to the infamous town of Salem, Massachusetts—a town I’d never visited—so that she could sign over a house that a woman—a woman I’d never met—left to me. And because I was recently divorced, utterly bankrupt, and just desperate enough to fall for even the most hairbrained scheme, I did it.

  Thank God that nice Prince from Algiers who kept promising to send me a million dollars for a small processing fee hadn’t called again. I would probably have fallen for that as well.

  Instead, I was standing in one of the most famous towns in history, in one of the most beautiful neighborhoods I’d ever seen, on one of the iciest days I’d ever felt, talking to one of the strangest women I’d ever met. And I’d met some strange ones. No shortage of those in the A-Z.

  “Was it on fire at some point?” I noticed a section of the brick was darker as though it had once been covered in smoke. When I didn’t get an answer, I finally took note of Mrs. Richter’s pallor which, even in the frigid wind, was bluer than it should have been. “Mrs. Richter, are you okay?”

  Keeping her back to Percival, she straightened her shoulders, and said, “It doesn’t like me looking at it.”

  I glanced back at the house. “Percival?”

  “Yes. Like I said, it’s very persnickety.”

  Before I could comment, a gust of wind blew several sheets of papers out of her hand.

  A high-pitch shriek I didn’t know was humanly possible erupted out of her small frame. She bolted forward and chased them down a street dampened with morning dew and fog, all the while screaming, “Oh, God no! Please, God no!”

  I did the same, minus the screams. Girl had spunk. Sure she was a mess of frazzled nerves, and it was apparently all Percival’s fault, but she could move when she had to.

  We zigzagged down the street, lunging after this page or that, and all I could think about was the fact that I hadn’t run this much since Brad Fitzpatrick chased me into the boy’s locker room in the seventh grade. Also, the fact that we had to look ridiculous.

  Mostly the fact that we had to look ridiculous.

  Just when I felt a page land between my fingers, it would slip away with the next gust. That was pretty much the process for a good three minutes until the wind started spinning around us. It created a tiny vortex, a whirlwind circling us, and the papers flew inside of it long enough for us to finally grab them. It continued until we had every last one.

  My hair would never be the same, but I couldn’t have Mrs. Richter stroking out mere minutes after we met. At our age, that was a real possibility.

  By the time we got back to the bug, each of us looking like we’d just come off a drunken bender, I felt so bad for the woman I did the unthinkable. I signed. Every. Single. Page. That is, after she proved there were no liens on the house, no back taxes. Basically, there was no catch.

  No catch.

  I didn’t get it. There had to be a catch. How could there not be?

  I held fast to the knowledge that I would have three days to call all of this off. Wasn’t there a law to that effect? I would have three days to back out of the deal, no questions asked?

  Then I could go back to my shambolic, bankrupt, nigh homeless life since I was currently being evicted from my apartment. I could feel confident in the fact that I did not owe a fortune on a money pit that was going to take me for every cent I didn’t have, no matter how alluring said money pit was.

  I couldn’t believe that at more than four decades on this earth I was an almost homeless has-been. My ex saw to that. Or, well, his mother saw to it. Erina Julson was the most heartless, conniving woman I’d ever met, and still I married her son.

  I thought he was different. I thought she no longer had any influence over him. I thought we were in love. I thought wrong. On all counts. They took me for everything I had and then some.

  And Annette, my BFF, wondered why I had trust issues.

  Yet here I was, possibly making the second biggest mistake of my life. I only had my honor left. My word. My reputation. If I failed again, I wouldn’t even have that. Yet I signed.

  Thankfully, the more I signed, the more the wind calmed around us. By the time I handed her back the stack of papers, the neighborhood was as serene as a glass lake.

  After replacing the documents in the envelope, she shoved her card toward me with a shaking hand. “Here’s my information if you need anything.”

  I studied it with a mixture of confusion and skepticism. “The number is blacked out.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Please don’t call.” She stuffed the envelope into her oversized purse, then added, “Ever.” She started backing toward her car.

  “What if I have questions? Do I just go by your office?”

  “No!” She cleared her throat and began again. “I mean, of course. Though I really have no further information on the house itself. I can’t imagine why you’d need to.”

  Damn it. There was a catch. There had to be. “Wait!” I called out to her as she sprinted to a parked purple crossover down the street.

  She waved a hand. “My assistant will bring by a copy of the paperwork this afternoon!” Then she dove inside her car and floored it, spinning the front tires in her effort to leave Percival—and me—in her rearview as quickly as possible.

  I didn’t even know they made purple crossovers.

  I glanced at the zippered bag she’d handed me somewhere between the tornado and her nickel-slick getaway, wondering once again if I’d just made the biggest mistake of my life.

  She’d had no answers for me over the phone and apparently that hadn’t changed.

  “I don’t understand,” I’d told her when she called three days ago. “Someone left me a house?”

  “Yes. Free and clear. It’s all yours. Mrs. Goode left explicit instructions in her will and I promised her—”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know a Ruthie Goode. There must be a mistake.”

  “She said you’d say that.”

  “Mrs. Richter, people don’t just leave strangers houses.”

  “She said you’d say that, too.”

  “Not to mention the fact that I live in Arizona. I’ve never even been to Massachusetts.”

  “And that. I don’t know what to tell you, sweetheart. Mrs. Goode left very detailed instructions. You must accept the house in person within the next seventy-two hours to take possession. Either way, it cannot be sold to anyone else for a year. If you don’t take it, it’ll just sit there, abandoned and vulnerable.”

  Abandoned and vulnerable. No words in the English language made me more uncomfortable.

  Three days.

  Well, maybe syphilis.
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  I had three days to decide.

  And moist.

  I turned to the abode known as Percival, took another good look at what a woman I’d never met named Ruthie Goode left me, then climbed back into the bug and pulled her into Percival’s driveway.

  My life had been punctuated by the strange and unexplained. I was flypaper for what others called the weird. Countless friends and coworkers had remarked on the fact that if there was an unstable sentient being within a ten-mile radius, it would find its way to me eventually. Dog. Cat. Woman. Man. Iguana.

  I once had to track down the parents of a toddler who thought I was her dead aunt Lucille. An aunt she’d never met, according to the aforementioned procreators.

  Everyone called these admirers, for lack of a better term, weird. I called them charming. Quirky. Eccentric.

  This, however, took the raspberry covered chocolate cheesecake. I’d only been bequeathed one other item from a departed member of society, and that was when Greg Sanchez handed me his half-eaten ice cream cone seconds before falling into a volcano.

  That field trip did not end well.

  I grabbed my overnight bag and paused again to get a better look at Percival.

  He was already growing on me, damn him. I had a thing for the broody ones. The dark ones with deep, invisible scars who looked like they’d fought a thousand battles. Percival definitely fit the bill.

  Filling my lungs with crisp New England air, air that held the smoky scent of wood burning from hearths nearby, I stepped to Percy’s front door, took the key out of the zippered bag Mrs. Richter had given me, and entered.