Free Hexed and Vexed by Rebecca Royce

 
     
     

Prologue
     
     
    Olive had pictured Campbell in a black tuxedo many times. His tall, strong physique looked magnificent dressed in formal wear. She’d imagined him standing at the end of the aisle, waiting for her as she walked slowly toward him.
    Only in her fantasies she’d been wearing white, getting ready to marry him. Instead, she found herself staring at the back of his head in the completely unheated church watching him wed her sister.
    Tears had long since ceased falling from her eyes. This is happening, this is actually happening .
    Campbell Bane had thrown her over for her sister, and now the two of them were going to go off and have a wonderful life together. Somehow she had to get over it; someway she had to make this okay.
    Her dress scratched her, and she longed to take it off. When she’d walked down the aisle wearing the atrocious creation, Campbell hadn’t even looked at her. One bit of eye contact and she would have known….something. What, she had no idea. But a piece of information would have been passed between them that could have at least explained to her how this had happened, instructed her on how she’d failed in their relationship.
    A man didn’t simply end a decade-long romance to marry the girl’s sister.
    Did he?
    Olive looked around the room at all the guests. Other than the Bane family and her parents’ assortment of upstanding, well-mannered friends, who were all talented and worked in jobs that allowed them to serve the community, the other people were employed in all facets of witchcraft, some of them the dark arts. Josa Rador took people on tours of the Amazon to look for special animal totems—some of her clients never came out. Dern Serge had been on a trial for murder. The only problem had been that they’d never found the body. Sara Tooks sold voodoo dolls. Olive never knew if they worked, but making and selling them had always seemed borderline creepy to her.
    Why had Campbell wanted these people at his wedding? He’d barely spoken to them when she’d been with him. Another thing that had apparently changed.
    Her mind itched, which made little sense to her since it wasn’t like she could wield any power, but typically, that was how witches described the feeling they got right before they did a big spell.
    She shook her head. If she could get a little time alone with him, she’d find a way to make him explain it to her. If she couldn’t have him, then a few small seconds to talk to him would make the difference for the rest of her life.
    Magic surged out of her. She gasped, unsure of what was happening. Nothing like this had ever occurred before—not to her, at least. Her hands shook and a white light suddenly bathed the sanctuary. A rainbow of colors swept out of her fingers and while everything else might have been visible to only her, everyone in the room could now see what happened.
    The guests screamed, all of them alerted by their own magic to the surge in hers. Her sister hollered, throwing her bouquet on the ground. One second Campbell stared, his mouth agape, and the next second he vanished.
    What the…?
    She never got to answer that question. Instead, she disappeared, too. The world went white around her. She’d done magic, real witch’s magic. Only she had no idea what she’d done.

 
     
     

Chapter One
     
     
    High tide smashed against the shoreline as the warm afternoon sun beat down on top of her skin. Olive sighed, loving the contentment of actually being warm. Her sensations might be somewhat askew. Realistically, she knew winter had only been really in full blow for about a month, but it felt like she’d been living in the cold for years.
    Forever .
    Particularly, because hours earlier, she had been even more freezing than usual, standing in a drafty church where the heating system had only partially worked. January in New York City required working radiators, if not central heating.
    Her pink, sleeveless, bridesmaid’s dress