Rune - Chapter 1 in a New Witch Cozy Mystery
- Kirsten Weiss
- Sep 20
- 6 min read
--By Kirsten Weiss, Witch Cozy Mystery Writer
I was twenty-five when I learned you can’t pretend away who you are. Pretending only makes it worse when reality finally catches up with you.
Reality always catches up. And I say that today as a shamanic witch—someone who regularly engages in magical thinking.
I wasn’t a witch back then though—socially awkward and fighting my magic every step of the way. But even today, I can’t entirely blame my youthful self’s resistance to my calling.
Whoever coined the phrase “unquiet dead” knew what they were talking about. The dead are far from silent. Ghosts ramble and rove, digress and drift, babble and blather.
Their thoughts are scattered, splintered, shattered. If ghosts were logical, they probably wouldn’t be stuck in middle world, our world.
It was one of the many reasons why my twenty-five-year-old self avoided them. But I was in avoidance mode for other reasons that June day.
I strode stiffly down the serpentine trail. Morning sunlight drifted through cinnamon-barked Ponderosa pines. A warm breeze soughed in the branches.
I glanced up the hillside on my right. Snow still dotted its clefts and crannies as well as the shade beneath the trees. Last winter had been ferocious. Its remnants still lingered.
The murmur of Doyle creek grew louder in the valley beneath. Leaving the trail, I picked my way down the hill, my canvas-colored trail runners slipping on loose earth.
I wound around pale granite boulders toward the water. Finally, I emerged on a strip of sandy shore, no more than ten feet long and three feet wide.
Sierra snow melt ripped past the modest swimming hole sheltered by granite stones. But I wasn’t here to swim. The water would be freezing. I was here to escape.
Setting down my canvas pack, I dug out a pen, a notebook, and my tattered copy of The Two Towers. I waited to see what urge would take me—to read or to write.
No, not to write. Feeling sorry for myself was never the best state of mind for writing. It led to self-indulgent sappiness.
Returning pen and notebook to my pack, I readjusted the elastic band around my blond hair and reapplied my sunscreen—a necessity when you’re fair skinned. I opened my paperback.
For once, I did not get lost in Tolkien’s world of hobbits and elves. Our Aunt Ellen had been right, and I wasn’t happy about it.
A corner of my mouth angled upward. I was never happy when I was wrong. Given all the practice I’d had at being wrong, I should have been used to it by now. My gaze flicked skyward. A hawk screamed a laugh in the blue sky.
Aunt Ellen had raised my sisters and me after the death of our parents. For reasons known only to Ellen (since most sensible people believed magic wasn’t real), our guardian had trained us in the basics of magic—but only the basics. Magic didn’t come naturally to Ellen as it did to Jayce and me.
Our sister Karin struggled with it too. Maybe that was why Karin was the closest of us triplets to our aunt. Ellen had worked for her magic. She’d studied, and she’d struggled. Karin was still struggling.
I bent to reread the page I’d skimmed without seeing. My neck corded. I didn’t have to work to see dead people. The dead were simply… there.
And that was a problem. I shifted, cold sand crunching beneath my lightweight khaki hiking slacks.
It wasn’t that I didn’t sympathize with the ghosts. I wanted to ease their pain and send them to the light like the mediums on TV. But it was never as easy as it looked on TV.
Which had led to our latest argument. Ellen was becoming a broken record on the subject.
Avoidance never works, Lenore. Finish your mediumship training. Finish something—that bookcase for starters. And get a real job in the real world with real people, while you’re at it.
I closed the paperback. I had a real job, thank you very much, editing books written by financial advisors. It let me work from home. The pay wasn’t great, but it was work.
And I didn’t want to be a medium. Ellen seemed to think I was just trying to get out of walking my path, whatever that was.
I thought I should get a say in what path I took. Ellen had chosen hers. Why couldn’t I?
I really should finish building that bookcase though. Leaning back, I braced my elbows in the sand, still damp from last night’s rain. I stretched out my legs, crossing them at the ankles.
Something shifted in a fresh puddle beneath a cream-colored granite boulder. I leaned forward for a better look. A dragonfly struggled in the puddle, its mercury wings waterlogged.
Crouching, I studied the insect, its body striped silvery blue. I scooped up water and dragonfly together. Careful not to damage its delicate wings, I let the water drain from my palms.
The dragonfly collapsed in my hand, its wings drooping. My breath caught. Had I been too late? Too ungentle?
Its iridescent wings flapped slowly, and I exhaled. I stayed there, crouched and unmoving, until my knees ached. Then the dragonfly lifted from my hands and zoomed off, low over the swimming hole, and crossed the burbling creek.
Straightening, I watched the fast-running water splash past the sheltered swimming hole. I grabbed my canvas pack and jammed it behind my head for a pillow.
Neither reading nor writing was happening today. My brain was too busy spinning in circles. I relaxed my body, weaving the sound of the creek into daydreams of fantasy lands.
Something white flashed past in the stream, and I sat up, frowning. Another flash of white rippled past, and then another.
I rose and walked to the water’s edge. Three more white things the size and shape of business cards floated past.
One spiraled into the swimming hole. Dampened by water, the paper was too shiny and stiff for a business card. A black symbol decorated one side, and I puckered my forehead. A rune?
My aunt had a set, but runes weren’t my specialty. I knew they came from the Norse, and each was believed to hold a symbolic meaning, making them useful for divination. That was where my knowledge ended.
The white paper shot from the swimming hole and into the creek. More floated past.
Curious now, I scrambled onto a boulder overlooking the rushing water. A trio of the white things floated toward me. I stretched out one hand. They drifted past, just out of reach.
I lay on my belly, catching the toe of my hiking boot in a divot in the warm stone, anchoring me, my chest above the water. Another piece of stiff paper floated toward me, too far away to grasp.
Releasing my anchor, I scootched further out on the boulder, my midsection over the creek. I wobbled, stretching, and snatched the card from the freezing water. My body lurched downward.
I slapped my free hand on the stone beneath me, halting my fall. The creek rushed inches beneath my nose. Slowly, I exhaled. I looked up, bracing my muscles to lever myself up and backwards.
But I did none of those things.
Instead, I looked into the face of a dead man.
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In the shadowed Sierra town of Doyle, Lenore hides from a world she distrusts, seeking solace in books to escape the visions she denies. But when she finds a man’s body in Doyle Creek and her beloved aunt becomes a target of suspicion, Lenore is drawn into a web of small-town secrets and old grudges.
Pursuing a killer, she risks unraveling Doyle’s enchanted core. Can Lenore, long wary of her shamanic gifts, embrace her magic to save herself?
Step into Rune, a captivating Doyle Witch cozy mystery prequel novella. Get cozy with this witch mystery now, and uncover the mysteries of Lenore’s mystical past.
Poem spell in the back of the book!
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