PRE ORDER: Murder Along the Shore (Ebook)

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I shifted in my seat and tried to ignore the concerned gazes of my coven. Two days had passed since we discovered the strange effects that strange gray substance, almost like perlite, had on me. It sapped my energy and left me hollow and unemotional. For the last two days, it and the Sanctum sigil stamped on the lid of the jar containing the rocks, had been contained inside an iron box and hidden away in an attempt to contain and mitigate its power. No matter how many times I told them all I was fine, I still saw worry in their eyes. I couldn’t do much about it, though, not when they still remembered me asking if they wanted tea after discovering a secret society in town was hell-bent on hunting down every paranormal. It didn’t help that Kim’s daughter, Lindsey, had to wake me up to do farm chores that morning. Normally, I woke up at four in the morning with no problem, but I was still in bed when she arrived at seven. And she had told everyone. Whose bright idea was it to start a group chat? Oh right. Mine. Thanks, past Megan, for making my life more difficult.
I studied my coven members out of the corner of my eye. We were seated around our usual booth at the Bizzy Bean. Customers sat clustered around tables to my left. Cats scampered up and down the massive cat tower that took up most of the far wall. The sounds of the cafe were muted by the spell that protected our booth from eavesdroppers. I sat in my usual spot across from Dani, with Kim at my side. Heather perched on the edge of the bench to keep an eye on the line. She twirled the end of her long red braid between her fingers as her eyes swiveled between me and the counter. As the owner, she was almost always there working in some capacity. Seated between Dani and Kim on the inside curve of the booth was Grace. She was a spitting image of her mother, Dani. They had the same dark-brown hair, chopped to shoulder length. But while Dani had light-steel-blue eyes, Grace's were a brown so dark that they almost looked black. The thick eyeliner didn’t do anything to help lighten the color.
Grace sighed then threw a packet of sugar at my face. I flung my hands up, catching the packet less than an inch from my nose. I scowled at her as I tossed the sugar packet back. She caught it and turned it over in her hands.
“I’m fine,” I said.
Grace nodded and held up the packet. “She feels fine to me.” Grace was one of the strongest divination witches I had ever met. While Dani could find anything or anyone with her magic, Grace’s ability to read emotions on objects was surpassed by no one I had ever met. Only through her had we figured out that the gray soil was what was messing with me.
“See?” I raised my eyebrows and held my hands out at my sides. “I’m fine. You can all stop treating me with kid gloves.”
“It’s not—” Heather began.
I cocked my head toward her. “I know kid gloves when I see them. I’m not fragile. And whatever symptoms I’m still experiencing are mild at best. I’ve worked through worse. We can’t put our investigation into the Sanctum on hold indefinitely.”
I forced my hands to stay steady as I turned my head to hold the gaze of each of my coven mates in turn. “Mild” was a bit of an understatement. The emotional dampening effects were gone, but I was still exhausted. After Lindsey left that morning, I had taken one nap then a second before getting in my truck to come here. I hoped Heather didn’t overhear my request for a triple shot of caffeine at the counter. My coven needed me to step up and help with the Sanctum investigation, and I had powered through worse. Everything’s fine. It will be fine.
“She’s right,” Kim said, showing that I could always trust her to have my back. “Dani, have you tried to track the symbol yet?”
Dani’s eyes flicked between my hands and my eyes. Had I held them too still? She’s too good at reading people. I clenched my fists and shoved them into my lap, a tight smile on my lips half daring her to call me out while begging her with my eyes to drop it.
She leaned forward, staring directly into my eyes. “Have you messaged Victor yet?”
My fingernails dug into the palms of my hands. His confession that he wanted to officially court me had been ruined by the effects of the faux perlite. He had texted me right before I walked through the door of the Bizzy Bean. I pulled out my phone and reread his message.

Victor: Hope you’re feeling better. I made too much chicken soup for myself if you want me to drop some off.

My eyes flicked up to Dani as I pecked out my response.

Megan: I’m feeling a lot better after sleeping for almost two days straight.
Megan: Chicken soup sounds wonderful. I’m with the girls right now. Maybe I can swing by on my way home to pick some up?
Victor: Can’t wait.

I turned the screen around to show her. “Now, stop stalling.”
Dani slumped in her seat and picked up her napkin and ripped it up as she talked. It was a nervous habit she had, which frequently indicated she didn’t like the words that were about to come out of her mouth. “Yeah. I tried tracking the sigil. It didn’t work.”
Heather inched closer to Dani. “Did something go wrong? Do you need another look at the sigil?”
Dani shook her head. “It’s not that I copied it down wrong. I felt my tracking spell connect to something. It was almost like it slid off, like there was something protecting the symbol. I think I just need more power behind the spell.” She looked nervously up at me.
“I appreciate that you’re worried about me. I do. But I’m fine.” Oh God. She can tell I’m not fine, and now they don’t trust me anymore. How am I supposed to get us back to where we were? Would I trust me if I were in their shoes? I schooled my facial expression as I pushed down the bubbling panic. After so many years alone on my farm, I was still new to having friends. Quieting the voice in my head, which sounded suspiciously like my mother, saying that their friendship started and ended in my utility, was hard some days. I did my best to quiet the doubt and focused on the problem. My coven had seen me at my absolute weakest and needed concrete assurance that I was fully recovered.
I folded my hands in front of myself and lifted them in front of my face. I exhaled a small trickle of magic between my closed palms and muttered the words to an illusion spell I liked to use. Gertie, my cow familiar, was a particular fan of it. I opened my hands and released the illusory butterfly into the air. It flew from my hands, and I directed it across the table, where it landed on a piece of torn-up napkin. “See?” I smiled.
Dani reached across the table, covering my hand with her own. “Megan… I’m sorry. I can’t help it sometimes. I’ve spent so much of my life being responsible for other people that my mama-bear instincts kick in at the wrong times. You know your mind better than anyone.”
My eyes watered.
Kim cleared her throat. “We should try casting the spell together.”
Dani withdrew her hand and retrieved a sketch of the sigil from her pocket. Grace had drawn it for her from memory. The charcoal was a little smudged from repeated folding, but the image was still clear enough. Dani flattened it then grabbed a map of Point Pleasant from her purse. With both the drawing and the map laid out in front of herself, she held out her hands for Heather and Grace to take. We all linked hands together. I had to stretch across the table to reach Heather. While Heather was the only nonwitch at the table, she could still lend a little bit of power to the spell. It was peanuts in the grand scheme of things. Every living thing had some power inside them—witches just had more, at least more that could be used for magic. Her calming presence probably helped more than the tiny power boost she provided.
Once all our hands were linked, Dani chanted the words to a tracking spell. I exhaled, letting out a large billow of magic. All our magic looked different from each other’s. While mine looked like translucent red rose petals floating on the air, Dani’s always looked like golden motes of light. Grace’s purple sparkles danced around the space, mixing with the metallic blobs that came out of Kim. They always reminded me of liquid mercury, if mercury had a slightly reddish tinge. Watching our magic weave together was always a little surreal. I wished Heather could see it, but she couldn’t. Only witches could see magic being cast. To everyone else, it would just look like we were holding hands and whispering to each other.
We each poured more and more power into Dani as she wove the spell together. The stream of magic swirled between the drawing of the sigil and the map. But instead of landing and lighting anything up, the magic swirled around it before dissipating without leaving any clear sign of where the sigil was located. At the very least, the spell should have identified the sigil on the table. But it didn’t. Not a single spot lit up.
Dani sagged into her seat as the magic faded. She chewed on her bottom lip as she stared down at the map.
“What happened?” Heather asked.
“It didn’t work.” I leaned forward and stared at the map. I was wearing my enchanted eye shadow that helped me identify if someone was paranormal or not. It had the added benefit of letting me see, without any additional effort on my part, the slight residue that magic left behind when a spell had recently been cast. Nothing was on the map, as though we hadn’t cast anything at all.
Dani folded up the map. “For half a second, it felt like it found something, but then it just slid off. Something’s got to be protecting it somehow.”
“Another magical effect? Would the Sanctum use magic?” Kim asked.
Dani shrugged and looked at me.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Grace drummed her fingers on the table. “What do we know about the Sanctum?”
I grimaced. “Not much. I got as much information as I could out of Victor, but he didn’t know much. He recognized the symbol. He saw it when he was a younger vampire. His creator told him to stay away from it. From what he told me, which is all secondhand knowledge, they are the boogeymen of the paranormal world. It’s not clear how many people’s deaths or disappearances are actually related to them, but there are enough confirmed cases that when things are left unresolved, people always wonder if the Sanctum had something to do with it.”
“I hate to say it, but maybe we should ask Miranda,” Grace said.
Dani and Kim blanched. My mouth went dry, and my chest tightened at the prospect. Miranda was the local Warden, responsible for enforcing the laws of the paranormal community. I worked as the liaison between her office and the local government. Working with her for the past few months had not made me any more comfortable around her. While the Sanctum might have been the boogeymen, the Wardens weren’t much better. They’d operated as secret police for so long that I doubted they could do anything to fix their reputation.
Kim turned her head and caught my eye. “Can we trust her on this?”
“I…” I opened and closed my mouth as I tried to think of the next words. Miranda was too many things at once. She was someone who had stood beside us in a fight. She was also someone who had indiscriminately arrested werewolves when one of them had been accused of a crime. I couldn’t figure out where she fit on the spectrum of good versus evil. All I knew was that she was definitely lawful. In my mind, the question wasn’t whether I wanted Miranda to know the Sanctum was here—it was whether I wanted all the Wardens to know. And with that thought, the answer came to me immediately. “No.”
The table went quiet as we sat ruminating on the best way forward. How could we make any plans when so many things were unknown? My fists tightened in my lap, my fingernails digging into my skin. A frightened part of me questioned why this was our responsibility, but I dismissed those thoughts before they took root. We didn’t exist in a vacuum. We relied on the community, and in this, the community was unknowingly relying on us. It’s the right thing to do.
I flinched as my phone rang. I scrambled to pull it out of my pocket. My eyes widened at the name on the screen.
“Who is it?” Grace asked.
I held it up. “Miranda.”
Heather snorted. “Speak of the devil.”
I answered the call. “This is—”
“You have a new case. Meet me at the hospital.”
The line went dead in my hand before I could say anything else. “Well okay then.”
“What’s wrong?” Dani asked.
I shoved my phone back in my pocket. “Don’t know yet, but I’ve got to go to work.” I paused halfway out of the booth and looked at Dani. “Do you think you could modify your spell to push past the protections on the symbol?”
“Now that I know what it feels like a bit more? Probably.” She looked up at the ceiling as she did mental math. “I’m about eighty percent sure I can do it.”
“That’s enough for me. Why don’t you work on the modifications, and if it doesn’t work, we can re-evaluate what to do next. I don’t think we can trust Miranda with this now. But… if we can’t find anything on our own, we might not have a choice.”
The others nodded their agreement.
Heather stood as I slid out of my seat, and she tapped the table. “If you’ve got more magic to practice, you’re going to need more fuel. I’ve been experimenting with a new iced hot chocolate recipe. Who wants to give it a try?”
“Iced hot chocolate?” I raised my eyebrow. “Isn’t that basically just chocolate milk?”
Heather gasped and put a hand over her heart in mock outrage. “Just chocolate milk? How very dare! You’re going to have to wait five minutes for me to get a cup to go.”
I glanced at the clock over the counter. If I had been at my farm when Miranda called, the increased drive time would have been longer than five minutes. And if I have to cast more magic, the extra energy would be useful. I could feel the need for another nap coming on. I nodded.
Heather scampered away and ducked under the counter to begin fixing our drinks. I hovered over the desk, listening as Dani, Grace, and Kim brainstormed ideas on how to modify Dani’s tracking spell. My heart swelled as I watched them work. While right now wasn’t the best time for me to be getting a new case, looking into the Sanctum wasn’t being put completely on hold because of it. My coven was stepping up when I needed them.
After a few minutes, Heather returned with a tray of drinks. She handed me a to-go cup and watched expectantly for me to take my first sip. She was right. It wasn’t just chocolate milk. The texture was completely different. It had the same thick consistency of hot chocolate, with a richer flavor than most chocolate milks.
I let out an appreciative sound and raised the mug. “Thank you.”
The table erupted into praise for the newest item on the drink menu as I turned and made my way to the door. As much as I wanted to stay, Miranda was waiting for me at the hospital with a new case. Most of the cases I had worked on so far had involved a dead body. Maybe this one would be different.

• Murder Among the Hives
• Murder Between the Stacks
• Murder Under the Moon
• Murder Along the Shore