Irene and the Witch

  Irene and the Witch

  by

  Terri Bruce

  ♦ Mictlan Press ♦

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  Irene and the Witch Description

  Copyright Notice

  Also by Terri Bruce

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  If You Liked This Story...

  About the Author

  Also by Terri Bruce

  The Afterlife Series by Terri Bruce

  Irene and the Witch Description

  Party girl Irene Dunphy thought being dead was bad and being stuck in purgatory even worse, but when her attempts to return to the land of the living as a guardian angel are derailed by a soul-stealing witch, she quickly learns there are things more terrible than death.

  “I have been loving this series ever since I read Hereafter. I knew it would be a different kind of ghost story and Terri Bruce’s imagination and creativity have taken me into a world both wondrous and frightening, and I am so happy I am only here as a visitor.” ~ Sherry Fundin, Fundinmental.com

  “The afterlife, magic, and supernatural are themes I generally avoid. The fact that Terri Bruce managed to keep me turning pages all the way to the end is thus quite impressive.” ~ D.B. Rose, Amazon Review

  Copyright Notice

  Irene and the Witch (Afterlife #3.5)

  Copyright © 2017 Terri Bruce

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Credits:

  E-Book Cover artwork by Anile

  Printed in the United States of America

  Second Edition

  Also by Terri Bruce

  The Afterlife Series

  Hereafter (Afterlife #1)

  Thereafter (Afterlife #2)

  Whereafter (Afterlife #3)

  Irene and the Witch (Afterlife #3.5)

  Whenafter (Afterlife #4) (May 2018)

  Neverafter (Afterlife #5) (forthcoming)

  Ever After (Afterlife #6) (forthcoming)

  Short Stories

  The Tower

  The Wishing Well

  Welcome to OASIS

  Death and the Horse

  My Lover Like Night

  The Lady and the Unicorn

  One

  Irene Dunphy found herself in a forest, which was funny, because Irene was a city girl. Or, at least, she had been when she was alive.

  She’d arrived—after a rather torturous, circuitous journey—at the pearly gates. Her guide to the afterlife—who happened to be a big, bald man in a yellow and purple striped toga—had asked her where she wanted to go, and she’d told him home—back to land of the living. Her first choice would have been to return there alive, but since that wasn’t an option, she’d expressed a desire to try her hand at being a guardian angel. She’d been ushered through a doorway and had landed here, in this forest, in a lower realm of the afterlife. A Nephilim had pointed to a path that disappeared into the forest and told her the doorway back to the land of the living lay at the end of it. Then the Nephilim had flown away, leaving her here alone.

  Well, not entirely alone. Andras, her traveling companion, was here, too—in a manner of speaking. Andras was a twelfth-century Spanish knight who had died in the year 1195. He’d lost his ghost body and was now fully incorporeal. He shared a psychic connection with Irene, and, with great concentration, he could manifest himself in a physical form for short periods.

  Irene often wondered what her life had become—traveling through the land of the dead, battling Nephilim and Hungry Ghosts and other monsters, all while talking to an invisible knight. This wasn’t really how she had pictured the afterlife. But then, her bar-hopping, casual-sex loving, thirty-six-year-old self had never really contemplated the afterlife all that much—death had seemed a long way off.

  She slowly turned in a circle, taking in her surroundings. Green. Lots and lots of emerald green.

  The forest was thick and lush. Arrow-straight redwood trees towered overhead, providing a thick, light-filtering canopy from which hung ropes of silvery moss. Underfoot, the ground was carpeted in a soft, thick pelt of pine green.

  She wasn’t a fan of wilderness, but even she had to admit it was awe-inspiring, especially after the bleak hell-scape she’d just traveled through. She let out a low exclamation of appreciation. “Wow. What is this place?”

  The air beside her shimmered, like summer heat rising from asphalt, and coalesced; Andras—broad, tall, and strong—appeared, golden, translucent, radiating light so pure and brilliant it hurt her eyes to look at it. His dark curly hair and stubble-studded jaw and dark penetrating eyes were all still visible, but they were now bathed in a warm, golden light that radiated from and around him.

  Andras looked around the landscape with interest, one eyebrow raised skeptically.

  Stay here, he said, the words resonating in her head through their psychic link. I will scout ahead and make sure the path is clear.

  Irene could have argued with him—wanted to, in fact—she wasn’t some helpless damsel in distress, but truthfully, she could use a moment to sit and catch her breath. Every afterlife realm they had passed through had been full of terrors and they’d had to battle their way clear, something she wasn’t trained or prepared for. When she was alive, she’d be an online marketing manager for a department store chain, for cryin’ out loud. This was the first peaceful moment she’d had in a while and she didn’t mind stopping to enjoy it.

  Andras winked out of sight—he didn’t need to be corporeal to scout ahead—and Irene settled herself on a moss-covered boulder to wait. She frowned ruefully as she thought of how Andras looked: strong, powerful, and lit with a fiery, golden light that seemed to emanate from within. In contrast, she was still a bloody, tattered mess from the last battle they’d fought. She frowned as she studied her cut and bruised legs and hands. In theory, ghosts projected what they looked like. If all that was true, then she could change anything she wanted about her appearance; she’d just never really tried before. She’d liked her appearance just fine when she was alive, and she’d never felt like anything other than a five-foot eight inch, long-legged, curvy, red-head. Even if she’d wanted to forget that was what she looked like, there wasn’t a man alive who had failed to remind her.

  Once she had died, however, she hadn’t looked in a mirror—she’d been afraid to. Afraid that she’d be invisible. Afraid that her appearance has changed—maybe she looked like a corpse or a flesh-eating zombie with peeling skin and bulging, insane eyes. No, better not to know. Occasionally, she did wonder, though, what she looked like to other ghosts. To Andras.

  She looked down at her dress. It was a sexy little candy-apple red number, with spaghetti straps and a thigh-length skirt. She hadn’t thought much about the dress before now. She had been forced to wear the thing she had died in, and since she liked the dress—she looked good in it and it made her feel pretty, sexy, and confident—and didn’t have any other clothes to choose from, it had just become part of her self-identity. Irene in the red dress. Maybe, just maybe, there had also been an element of self-flagellation to it as well. The dress reminded her of her last night on earth—out partying with her girlfriends until she’d attempted to drive home drunk and crashed her BMW. It was a constant reminder that her death had been her own fault.

  Andras had let go of his regrets. Maybe it was time for her to let go of some regrets, too.

  In for a penny, in for a pound, she thought w
ryly. If she was going to start manipulating her appearance, she might as well go all in. If Andras could project a body and armor and a sword, then the least she could do was conjure up some proper clothes—jeans and a t-shirt at the very least. The over large, olive-green men’s suit coat she wore, however, that she would keep. That had been a gift from someone special and it made her feel safe, loved, and protected—it was almost a kind of armor.

  She scrunched up her face in concentration, trying to will the dress into a pair of jeans.

  Nothing happened.

  Her frown deepened as she dug in, focusing harder.

  Still nothing happened. Something rustled in the bushes nearby, making it hard to concentrate. She pursed her lips and tried again, picturing in her mind’s eye her favorite pair of jeans—made of faded blue denim so broken in it was soft and malleable and well-worn at the knees and seat. She tried to image her legs covered in those jeans, tried “pushing” the image from her mind to her body, and even tried closing her eyes and reaching out with her ghost senses to “pull” the jeans to her. Nothing worked. The red dress remained stubbornly in place, just as tattered and blood-stained as when she’d started.

  With a whoosh of air, Andras shimmered into view, blinding her with a blaze of golden light. Irene blinked to clear the spots dancing before her eyes and then slid from her rock. “Back already? I kinda thought that would take longer.”

  The coast is clear. We are alone here.

  Excitement jittered through her, leaving a shiver in its wake. This was it—she was going home! She’d been working towards this since the moment she’d died, and now the end was in sight.

  The path was easy to see, since it was made by a little gully in the ground. All she had to do was follow it through the woods to the end.

  This turned out to be easier said than done. The forest was thick, the trees oftentimes so close together that low-hanging branches slapped at her face and tangled in her hair, slowing her down.

  Unlike all the afterlife planes she’d been in before, she noticed signs of life here. There were background noises—a chirping like crickets—and some kind of lightening bugs that glowed green. Well, she thought they were bugs—it was hard to tell what they were, because they looked only like glowing green lights in the distance. She saw them ahead of her and deeper in the woods as she passed, but none ever came close.

  High above her, the trees grew so close together and their leaves were so thick, that they formed a solid canopy overhead, leaving the forest interior dark and cool. She’d been in the woods before; they usually were hushed and somber. This forest, however, felt noisy—and alive.

  Irene was just ducking under a low hanging branch when out of the corner of her eye, she saw a spark of purple light flash briefly low down in the shrubby undergrowth and then disappear.

  She slowed down. “Did you see that?”

  See what?

  “There was a light. There’s something in the bushes over there.”

  Irene hesitated, not sure she wanted to take the time to check out whatever it was. However, there was another brief purple flash, like light glinting off a mirror.

  I see it. Stay here.

  Andras vanished. She assumed he was going to check it out, so she waited, anxiously tapping her foot while he did so.

  There was a WHOOSH as of a sudden in-rush of wind, a blinding light, and then Andras re-appeared a little distance away, in the vicinity of the flashing light she’d seen. I think you should look at this.

  Dutifully, she left the path and trudged through the thicket of underbrush that scratched at her legs to where he waited. He was standing beside a small puddle of water, about two feet across, nestled in a little dip in the ground. It seemed shallow, but Irene couldn’t be sure because the water was as black as obsidian, obscuring anything that might lie below the surface.

  Irene’s brows drew together in confusion. “It’s a mud puddle,” she said. Though the water was black, the surface was highly reflective, almost like a mirror, which must be the source of the glint she had seen. “What’s so exciting about a puddle?”

  Concern rumbled their psychic connection like a Mack truck over rough ground. This does not look like normal water.

  “So?” Nothing in the afterlife ever looked normal; hell, in the afterlife, there was no normal.

  ‘So,’ you are the one that always wishes to investigate things out of the ordinary. You say nothing is as it appears. This may be more than a puddle.

  Irene tried to tamp down her exasperation. “There doesn’t seem like a lot to investigate here. It’s a puddle. I don’t know what to say beyond that.”

  Their connection buzzed with a new emotion—perhaps consternation, she wasn’t quite sure what it was. It felt like a nest of angry hornets buzzing inside her skull.

  “What?” she asked. “You’re the one who never wants to investigate anything and always urges me to just leave things along and stick to the path.”

  Andras didn’t seem to have a reply to that. He just folded his arms across his chest and raised an eyebrow at her, so she retraced her steps to the path and set off once more towards the doorway.

  She’d only gone about twenty paces when she encountered another puddle, this one in the middle of the path. It was similar in size to the last one; however, its water was clear, and when Irene looked in the puddle, she could see a room.

  Irene blinked in surprise and dropped to her knees beside the puddle. Looking into the water was like looking through a window—though there was a weird, fish-bowl effect as if she were peering through the peep hole in a door. She was looking at what appeared to be a library or maybe a bookstore—there were rows and rows of floor to ceiling bookcases filled to bursting with books; the books were too far away for her to read the titles, but they seemed to be fairly modern since they all had paper covers, rather than leather. The room was dim, though sunlight streamed in through a narrow ceiling-height transom window to her right. The one thing that was missing was people—there were none in sight.

  “What the hell...?”

  I thought it was just a mud puddle, nothing of note to see?

  Irene ignored the sarcasm dripping from his tone. “Well, this changes things, doesn’t it?”

  Irene studied the scene, not sure what she was seeing. Was it a painting? A memory? A window to another place in the afterlife—or perhaps back to the land of the living? She poked at it with her ghost senses. She couldn’t actually “see” an item’s true shape, but she could sort of “feel” it with her mind, like a blind person tracing contours with their fingertips. Doorways felt like you’d expect—like an opening in the center of a solid block and were usually pretty easy to identify.

  She mentally poked at the puddle, but got nothing in return. It didn’t feel like anything at all. Was it an illusion? She looked up quickly, scanning the immediate area, wondering if the puddle was some sort of trap to get people to stop long enough to be ambushed. She went still and silent, listening hard, but she didn’t see or hear anything that indicated anyone approaching. She relaxed slightly and frowned down at the puddle again. It wasn’t the doorway off this plane—that she could sense easily. That was a big, bright, silvery beacon calling to her and was still some distance off. These puddles, these were something else, something unexpected.

  She poked the puddle with a finger and the water’s surface rippled like normal water, distorting the image, but not erasing it.

  “Huh.” Well, it had to be something. She was loathe to stick her hand into it. The last body of water she’d come across—the mythological River Styx—and had been filled with man-eating Hippopotamuses; she wasn’t about to just go sticking her hand or her face anywhere near a seemingly innocent looking puddle without actually knowing what was in it.

  We should continue on.

  “Yeah, I guess...” A rustling in a nearby bush made her jump. Some kind of critter, little more than a small brown blur, streaked out from under the bush and disappeared into the
forest.

  “Uh, yeah, we better keep moving,” Irene said, uneasiness raising goosebumps on her arms.

  But they had only gone a dozen paces when they stopped again.

  Another puddle.

  This time, the water showed a living room—just an ordinary living room, complete with a flower-patterned couch in dark shades of red and yellow and a fifty-inch television. The television was on—a football game. The announcer said something about “Steelers.”

  “Okay, that is definitely the land of the living,” Irene said. “And I’m pretty sure that’s America.”

  “Hey, Ma!” a young girl—heard but not seen—shouted from inside the puddle-picture, “you’ve got a call!”

  Irene dropped to her knees beside the puddle and peered at the edges of the picture, craning her neck to try and see who was talking.

  “What?” called another voice—an older woman—from farther away, possibly in another room.

  “A call!”

  “Danesha, didn’t you cover it like I asked? You know I don’t take calls on the weekend!” A heavy-set woman came into view, wiping her hands on a dish towel. Though the image wasn’t terribly clear due to the fishbowl effect, Irene could see that the woman was in her forties, with short hair buzzed close to her scalp and deep laugh lines around her eyes and mouth. The woman bent down, her face growing large in the puddle and blotting out everything else in the room, and her dark eyes narrowed, as if she was peering at something. Irene drew back in surprise. She had a feeling the woman could see her.

  “Can I help you?” the woman asked.

  Irene blinked. Then she waved—tentative and self-conscious—at the puddle.

  I do not think this is a good idea...

  “Yeah, hello to you, too. I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m right in the middle of setting up for football so we got to make this quick.”