10 Ways to Spellblock a Warlock

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2018 by Virginia Nelson

  Edited by Sara Lunsford

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is coincidental.

  This book contains content that may not be suitable for young readers 17 and under.

  The Author of this Book has been granted permission by Robyn Peterman to use the copyrighted characters and/or worlds created by Robyn Peterman in this book. All copyright protection to the original characters and/or worlds of the Magic and Mayhem series is retained by Robyn Peterman.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Foreward

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Foreward

  Blast Off with us into the Magic and Mayhem Universe!

  I’m Robyn Peterman, the creator of the Magic and Mayhem Series and I’d like to invite you to my Magic and Mayhem Universe.

  What is the Magic and Mayhem Universe, you may ask?

  Well, let me explain...

  It’s basically authorized fan fiction written by some amazing authors that I stalked and blackmailed! KIDDING! I was lucky and blessed to have some brilliant authors say yes! They have written brand new stories using my world and some of my characters. And let me tell you...the results are hilarious!

  So here it is! Blast off with us into the hilarious Magic and Mayhem Universe. Side splitting books by fantabulous authors! Check out each and every one. You will laugh your way to a magical HEA!

  For all the stories, go to

  https://magicandmayhemuniverse.com

  Grab your copy today!

  Dedication

  For DJ

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to the Work family for feeding me and tolerating my babbling about imaginary people while I wrote this one.

  Thanks to Sara for editing. Love you more than cake.

  Thanks to David for talking me through the plot points when I thought I’d written myself into a corner.

  As always, thanks to my wonderful kids for being awesome

  But most importantly, thanks so very much to Robyn Peterman. I had so much fun writing this and can’t begin to thank you enough for your friendship. You’re amazing!!!

  So you’ve heard of cockblocking, right?

  GANNON WILSON IS CURSED. Although he’s not sure how or why, everyone believes his curse killed his beloved wife, Gilmore, just after she gave birth to their beautiful little girl, Emmie. Even Gannon believes he might have caused her exceptionally untimely demise, if inadvertently. So, although he’s a single father—functioning on lack of sleep, exhaustion, and otherwise pretty frazzled most of the time—he’s not looking for a witch girlfriend to ease his troubles. Anything but, in fact. Gannon only dates humans... because he’s scared of what the curse might do if he dared love another witch.

  Henrietta Fannyfartle is on a mission. She learned of the tragic tale of Gilmore and Gannon through the witchy grapevine, but she doesn’t think the Taradiddle curse is what ended Gilmore’s life. Since she’s working on her thesis—magical university is such a drag, amirite?—she needs evidence to support her suppositions, and there’s only one way to get it.

  Henri needs to get close to Gannon and his daughter to verify her theory is correct, so she can write her paper, and then go on to be one of the leading witch professors among her contemporaries. One problem? Gannon is wary of witches, which is wise. What’s a witch to do but pretend to be a human in the middle of nowhere West Virginia so she can get the story of a lifetime.

  Wait... one more problem. The one thing the clever little witch didn’t count on was love.

  Chapter One

  Rule #1 – Get your beauty rest.

  A tired witch is unaware and likely to stumble into a hot mess without seeing it coming. When facing down a warlock, a girl has got to be on her game. Take time for naps, self-care, all that gobbeldy gook, because without it, you run the risk of letting other magic users get the upper hand.

  Gannon

  HE WOKE UP TO THE SMELL of smoke and hoped against hope that the living room wasn’t on fire.

  Again.

  Leaping to his feet, he tripped over a toy train and a headless doll before catching himself on the doorframe with one arm to avoid faceplanting in the hallway. Why was it so dark? Although he could smell smoke, he wasn’t choking on it, so...

  Nighttime, his tired brain supplied with hitching slowness. It was dark because it was the middle of the night. He needed to get to Emmie, to get her out of the house if it was on fire. The last time...

  He preferred not to think about the last time, or about the melted remains of his console gaming system. Sprinting the few feet down the hall, he shoved his daughter’s bedroom door open after a small struggle with the sleeping bag she’d apparently left on the floor. Flipping on the lights, he quickly surmised she was neither in or under her bed—she sometimes liked to crawl under it to sleep in hopes of taming her own pet monster—nor was she in the closet or in her toybox.

  The smoke smell was dissipating instead of getting stronger, so his panic over the fire quickly gave way to panic about the location of his missing child. “Emmie?” he called softly, not wanting to scare her if she’d fallen asleep somewhere else in the house.

  No response. He jogged to the living room—not on fire—before sliding into the kitchen breathlessly. There, sitting in the middle of the dining room table, as if it were a perfectly normal thing to do at three o’clock in the morning, he found his daughter. Emmie’s forehead was streaked with flour, chocolate syrup dripped onto the floor in slimy rivulets, and the singed smell that woke Gannon appeared to have begun in the somewhat melted blue Tupperware bowl she stared into morosely.

  “Whatcha doin,’ my Emmie girl?” Gannon asked with practiced patience. He’d learned quite some time ago not to yelp or seem distressed when his magical daughter got into shenanigans, no matter how much he might be tempted.

  “Making Mommy a birthday cake.” Her bottom lip came out in a pout as she scrubbed her chocolate covered fingers across her fuzzy nightgown. “It isn’t working very well.”

  Gannon scrubbed his own hand across his forehead before scooping her up. “We’ll try again tomorrow, if you want. It isn’t her birthday, though,” he reminded the child. It didn’t take long for him to strip her out of the dirty pajamas, pop her into the shower, scrub off the mess, get her dried dressed in a fresh, sweet smelling nightgown. The child’s jaw popped with huge yawns by the time he’d finished, yet she clung to his hair when he tried to put her in bed. “Daddy, tell me the story of Mommy again?” she begged.

  He needed to clean up the mess in the kitchen. He needed to try to snag a few hours of sleep himself, before getting up to repeat his daily duties—feeding and preparing Emmie for her day, dropping her off at preschool, heading to work where he’d blink blearily at the computer screen and pray for lunchtime, get off work then get Emmie again...

  But instead of worrying about tomorro
w—which would come too soon for his liking, anyway—Gannon curled up in the bed next to his daughter. “Your mother was the most beautiful woman in the entire world. The moment I saw her, I couldn’t help but love her...”

  RULE #2 – Silence is golden, duct tape is silver.

  Sometimes you have to use the silver to get to the gold. Why isn’t this on a bumper sticker yet?

  Henri

  HENRIETTA FANNYFARTLE could smell graduation, it loomed so close on the horizon. The only thing standing between her and the tassel was one stupid paper she’d been working on for what felt like two lifetimes.

  Well, fifteen years, give or take, but still... it had been a long time and a lot of words and research to get to this point in her educational experience, so the call to Doctor Eiselbergenheimer’s office was neither a surprise nor a bother.

  Probably the old witch wants to congratulate me on my upcoming degree. No biggie. Maybe it is something they do with all doctoral candidates. After all, I’ve never been this close to being Doctor Fannyfartle before.

  The title sure has a ring to it, she couldn’t help but think.

  But once seated in the doctor’s cluttered office, Henri’s palms began to sweat. Instead of immediately greeting her, the doctor riffled through a stack of papers and grunted every few seconds, as if the words on the page offended her in some way.

  Shit, Henri thought, her carefully manicured nails digging into her palms. What is that giant stack of papers, anyway? Balancing a bit on the balls of her feet, she managed to lift herself just enough to see over the stack of mummified frogs, books, and other magical miscellany. My dissertation?

  Dr. Eiselbergenheimer cleared her throat before tapping the heavy stack of creamy paper on the desk with one elegant knuckle. “Ms. Fannyfartle, as the chair of the committee overseeing your defense, I have to admit that I was both initially intrigued by your thesis premise and later impressed by the level of research you put forth in creating your final dissertation.”

  “Thank you?” Henri said when Dr. Eiselbergenheimer paused and seemed to await some response. She wouldn’t have phrased it as a question if a silent but didn’t seem to hang in the somewhat musty air of Dr. Eiselbergenheimer’s office.

  “You’re quite welcome. Initial intrigue aside, despite your somewhat tedious rendition of your extensive research, I’ve noticed that the entire premise of your paper is hinged on the study of one curse in particular,” the doctor explained, again tapping the stack of papers like a judge without a gavel.

  Henri swallowed hard, her cheeks burning with a combination of irritation—tedious rendition? Was she calling Henri’s writing boring?—and panic. The curse her entire paper hinged on was a more modern spell, one cast less than a full generation before Henri’s. The Taradiddle Curse was the stuff of urban legend, a story used to spook young witches into listening to their elders. Henri read every article and talked to every hag and spellcaster within driving distance to piece together the details of the curse, so what more research could she have done?

  “There are a lot of curses in my dissertation,” Henri finally responded, hating the slight squeak to her voice. When she got nervous, her voice cracked and she broke out in hives—unattractive, itchy hives—and her skin crawled as Dr. Eiselbergenheimer continued to pin her with a steely grey gaze.

  “The Taradiddle curse,” Dr. Eiselbergenheimer clarified, her ruby red lips curling down in a frown of obvious distaste.

  “I researched extensively the history and elements of the curse,” Henri defended. Wasn’t she supposed to defend her thesis in front of the committee and her advisors? No one said anything about a personal, one-on-one thesis defense. She wasn’t ready, hadn’t prepared for the gimlet gaze of Dr. Eiselbergenheimer nor her own insecurities about her paper.

  What if they changed their minds, after all her hard work, and she didn’t graduate with her doctorate? What was she to do then? Go back to her mother and five sisters with her head hung low in shame? She was the first of the Fannyfartle witches to attend university, the first to come so close to a doctorate degree—she couldn’t fail now.

  “Your research has no evidence to support your final determination in regard to the Taradiddle Curse, and without that primary element, I’m afraid your paper isn’t sufficiently developed to allow the committee in good conscience to give you a degree.”

  The doctor passed Henri’s dissertation across her desk and the papers fluttered when Henri accepted them with a shaking hand.

  No, no, no, no, no, was all Henri’s mind could muster. This couldn’t be happening. She was so close to graduating—so close to becoming Dr. Henrietta Fannyfartle. There was no way she could’ve done so much work only to fail at this point.

  “But—”

  Dr. Eiselbergenheimer cut Henri off with the snap of one pale wrist waved through the air. The tip of her wand glowed as she spelled Henri’s lips closed faster than a knife fight in a phone booth. “Although we cannot accept the dissertation, nor the thesis, in its present condition, there is a chance you can revise the paper and still defend at the next meeting of the council and graduation committee in three months’ time. It isn’t much time to do the level of research needed to make your paper worthy of the highest degree from Tadcaster-Ipswich Thaumaturgic University; however, it is the decision of the committee that a student with your level of dedication and diligence should find the challenge negligible.”

  It was a good thing Henri couldn’t talk because of the professor’s spell. Otherwise, she might have snapped something particularly rude at the “committee” determining her both ineligible for graduation while in the same breath calling her dedicated and diligent.

  “Do you have any questions for me before you set out to find evidence to support your thesis statement, or are you chomping at the bit to get to work?” Dr. Eiselbergenheimer asked. Her head had bowed, and she seemed to have already dismissed Henri from her thoughts as she cracked open a heavy tome with a sneeze as the weight of the thing disrupted a small tornado of dust.

  Yes, Henri had lots of questions, but the damn witch had spelled her lips locked, so the best she could do was wave the stack of now useless dissertation rather feebly in the air.

  “Good, good,” Dr. Eiselbergenheimer said, dismissing Henri with a wave of her hand. “I’ve work of my own to get to, so I won’t hold you up a moment longer. Ermengarde! Show Ms. Fannyfartle out, would you?”

  Ermengarde, the harried personal assistant to Dr. Eiselbergenheimer, caught Henri’s elbow and practically dragged her from the doctor’s cluttered office. “Best of luck on your research,” Ermengarde said with a chuckle. “Oh, and here.” With a quick wave of her wrist, Ermengarde unspelled Henri’s lips, allowing her to speak again. “She does that a lot.”

  “But I have questions,” Henri insisted, turning to head back into Eiselbergenheimer’s office, regardless of the irritation she knew the professor would have at the additional interruption.

  “Everyone has questions,” Ermengarde replied, spelling the office door closed and locked before Henri could storm back inside. “If she wanted to answer your questions, she wouldn’t have silenced you. You could say she likes to leave it to her students to figure things out on their own, as it increases their own capacity for learning. I often think she’s just a bitch and can’t be bothered to answer questions she doesn’t want to. Either way, good luck, toots. You’re gonna need it.”

  With that, Ermengarde vanished in a puff of purple smoke and silver glitter, leaving Henri frustrated and angry in the hallway of the office wing of Tadcaster-Ipswich Thaumaturgic University.

  There were a few options for Henri at this point.

  She could throw in the towel, accept defeat, and head home to lick her wounds. Although her family would be disappointed in her, it wasn’t like they’d ever kick her to the curb or, worse, curse her with a spell as nasty as those listed in Henri’s four-hundred-page dissertation.

  She could try to go over Dr. Eiselbergenheimer’
s head and make a complaint to the board about the last-minute refusal to accept a paper that had previously been approved at every level leading up to graduation, only to be rejected at the last possible second. There was a chance they’d take her side and reconsider...

  Or she could do exactly what Eiselbergenheimer requested—more research, finding data to support her supposition that The Taradiddle curse had been broken five years ago, in perhaps the most non-traditional way imagined in the history of witchcraft and wizardry.

  With a gusty sigh, Henri zapped herself home and began packing her bags. Off to Assjacket, West Virginia, then...to research firsthand the Taradiddle Curse and, in particular, Gannon Wilson and his young, magical daughter Emmie.

  Chapter Two

  Rule #3 – Don’t be afraid to ask for help.

  Familiars. Other witches. Get you a coven, if you must. But above all else, keep the goal in mind and your planning clear. If you do ask for help, but you’re not organized about what you’ve asked for, you never know what you’re gonna get!

  Gannon

  “I CAN’T JUST HIRE A nanny,” he explained, shoving clothes into the dryer by the fistful. “You know what she’s like. It would be easier for me if you’d just watch Emmie—”

  His sister’s laughter rang over the phone line like the chiming of a fire alarm. The sound grated on his nerves, probably more than usual because he was so damned tired. “Yeah, although I like spending time with my niece and getting to watch her grow up, I have a job and a life, too, Gan. There’s no way I can watch her while you work every single day. Have you asked Mom?”

  “Yes, Jackie,” he replied, turning the dial to turn the dryer on. The clothes began to spin and thud against the metal walls and Gannon began to load the washing machine. He tried to remember to be patient—more flies with honey and all that—but his baby sister always knew how to get on his last nerve. “Of course I asked Mom. She also doesn’t have the time to do it every day, as she has some romantic getaway planned with Dad or something, which is why I’m calling you.”