The Enchanted Writes Book Two

By Odette C. Bell

Life’s busy for Henrietta. Ever since the fateful masquerade, the witches have only attacked harder.
To top it all off, she can’t get his name out of her head and his shadow out of her dreams. The Witch King, Theodore Hellier. He haunts her every move. So when Henrietta’s own sister becomes smitten with the man, Henrietta’s forced to put her life on the line to keep the two separate. Whilst wearing ridiculous stiletto boots, of course.
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The Enchanted Writes follows a ditzy hero and her dangerous nemesis fighting to save their city. If you love your urban fantasies with action, heart, and a splash of romance, grab The Enchanted Writes Book Two today and soar free with an Odette C. Bell series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Odette C. Bell
• Release date: Jun 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310225451

Book preview

Chapter 1

Henrietta was covered in mud. And as she reeled back on her stiletto boots, in a flash she was struck by a cascade of water so strong it sent her slamming against the open shaft of a vent. The whole thing shuddered and gave a thunderous clang.

To her side, something hissed.

The witches.

Three months ago after Henrietta had so foolishly attended a ball with the Witch King himself, it had ushered in a harrowing new chapter in her saga. Now every single night saw her running across the rooftops of the city in her ridiculous outfit, trying to keep the peace.

It was getting harder. With every passing night, the witches grew stronger.

Case in point: Henrietta lunged back as a clump of dirt as big as a car slammed her way. She barely managed to dodge it, and she smelled the overpowering, dank scent of the dirt as it brushed just a centimeter past her face, flattening her hair against her cheeks. Then it crashed into the vent shaft and bent the thing in two with an enormous screech of metal.

She was currently on a roof, currently being the operative term. Unless she could grasp hold of the situation, she would fall off the side of the wall and crash down to the street four floors below.

The witches were not playing fair. There were two of them, for starters. What was more, they were combining their powers. One was a water witch, the other an earth witch, and you didn’t need to be a genius to realize what happened when water met dirt.

Mud.

Loads of it, cascades of it, tornadoes of it. Henrietta had never seen so much mud in her life, and the torrent had not yet stopped.

She tried to stand again, but her boots couldn’t grip on the treacherous floor below. She landed on her butt with a resounding thwack.

Couldn’t she catch a break?

Not now. But there was one thing she could be happy about: no one had discovered her secret.

Somehow, some-precious-how, Henrietta had managed to keep her double life hidden.

But only just.

Technically no one knew that there were witches in the city, and thank god no one knew that she was a witch hunter. That being said, every single day the news reports would be filled with more stories on Stiletto Girl, and they were getting far more accurate with every second. At first it was simple tales of people sighting Stiletto Girl as she ran around the city dressed like a crazy stripper, but now people were coming forward recounting how they had glimpsed the most fantastic fights involving the most unlikely of powers.

Magic.

Nobody had said it directly, but Henrietta knew people were thinking it.

Fortunately, as of yet, nobody had the conclusive proof they required. Just stories, just rumors, and just the occasional photo of Stiletto Girl running around in her hilarious getup and frankly deplorable boots.

One of the witches gave a ferocious, spitting, pitching hiss. It sent such a tingle of nerves through Henrietta’s spine that she almost lost hold of her wand.

She pushed herself to her feet, and despite the fact the ground was covered in thick, sludgy mud, she snapped into a roll. It was not the cleanest of maneuvers, and she made terrible wet squelchy noises, but eventually she sprang to her feet.

She took the opportunity to whirl her wand around and write the word ice.

A bright halo of light appeared around her feet. Then an enormous magical light spread out from around her, instantly casting the mud, dirt, and water into ice.

Which meant one thing.

Just as Henrietta allowed herself a second to be impressed by the power of her spell, she took a step and she fell flat on her butt.

She even made a cracking sound as she impacted with the thick ice that now covered the roof.

The water witch gave a terrible, keening cry, and if Henrietta had not been fighting on the roof of an abandoned warehouse at night, she would have been worried at how far that terrible voice could carry.

Bloody hell, Henrietta managed as she tried to push herself up, but the second her treacherous heels pushed against the ice, was the second she slipped over and became a tangle of her own limbs lying with her back pressed into the cold, slippery ice.

She was really going to have to think her spells through before she cast them. But that was just the thing. No matter how hard she practiced during the day, and how many quizzes she answered from Brick, it was always different when it came to a fight. In a fight her battle brain took over, and her battle brain wasn’t up to scratch. Once or twice she had heard Brick bemoaning that a witch hunter of old would never have been so stupid, but at least Henrietta liked to think she was learning.

Despite how silly she would be sometimes, she was still getting more powerful by the day. Not only would her spells come quicker, but she would be able to cast more in a fight, and they would also be far more powerful.

Yet they still were not strong enough.

Strong enough to fight the ordinary witches, yes, maybe strong enough to fight some of the more senior members of the clan, but there was one creature Henrietta still had no hope of defeating.

The Witch King.

Him.

That man from the ball, the man she kept dreaming about night after night. He haunted her mind.

But right now Henrietta had bigger problems on her hands.

It took a while, but eventually both the witches managed to gain their footing. The earth witch somehow conjured up a great pile of dirt that immediately scattered over the ice underneath her feet, and she brought a hand out to the water witch, clasping her sister to steady her. Then they turned their horrible, wet, red-rimmed eyes on Henrietta.

They clasped their hands together, and there was a whoosh.

Henrietta tried desperately to get to her feet, and somehow as she locked her knees she managed it. Even though she teetered there, her body swinging forward and back as she threatened to fall over again, she managed to keep her footing.

She wrote the first thing that came into her head.

Fire.

Once again a halo of light appeared at her feet, and it circled around for a moment until an absolute wall of fire shot towards the witches.

Henrietta was no longer a newbie, and she knew that a simple fire spell would not be enough to defeat both of these witches, let alone bring them to their knees for long enough so that Henrietta could banish them.

The earth witch whirled around, brought her hand swinging forward, her fingers spread wide. Great jets of dirt shot from them. So much dirt that you would be forgiven for thinking that the sky had suddenly become entrenched in an avalanche.

It shot towards Henrietta, but at that moment she fell to her knees and slid away, truly out of accident, and not because of any fantastic skill at dodging.

She yelped as she skidded, and that yelp steadily grew into a throaty scream as she felt the floor underneath her begin to rumble and shift.

It was too much weight. The dirt, the ice, everything.

It gave way.

The roof shuddered, it shook, and it fell. With Henrietta and the witches on it.

It crashed down to the floor below.

Just as it fell, Henrietta brought her magic wand in front of her and she wrote one single word.

Bubble.

It wasn’t something she’d ever written before.

It had popped into her head, and her hands had followed through by writing it in a dash.

Fortunately for Henrietta, just as the ground below her broke up and sent her tumbling to the floor below, a protective bubble shot around her in a blink of twinkling light.

From the outside it might look like Henrietta was trapped in a snow globe, but from the inside she was protected from the destruction. She wasn’t knocked on the head by a falling brick, or smashed in the side by one of the great long steel beams that had previously supported the roof. She wasn’t even covered in a hail of iced-caked mud and dirt.

She just floated there in the bubble, her arms tucked neatly around her knees as her eyes stared in wonderment at what was happening around her.

Then, just as the dust settled, so did the bubble.

It popped with the softest, lightest of sounds, and it brought her gently to her feet before it did.

That was where the soft, gentle side of things ended.

The witches were somehow already on their feet. Even though they were covered in the gray dust of rubble and were both getting themselves out of a chunk of mud-covered brick, their movements were still quick and filled with power.

Henrietta had to end this. She had barely saved herself with the bubble spell, but she knew instinctively that she would not be so lucky next time.

Not for the first time, she found herself bloody wishing that Brick was here. But he wasn’t. The little sod was off on a retreat.

Apparently, as a warrior monk, it was common for Brick to go off, hang out with his warrior monk brethren, get in touch with his roots, meditate, read books, hit things with sticks in the yard, or whatever. Brick had tried to explain the process to Henrietta, but she had been in no mood to listen to him.

Even though Brick was eccentric, crazy, and his jacket and dress sense were terrible, she needed him. She really did. Because he was the only one in the entire world she could confide in, the only person who knew what she was going through, and who could offer her a helping hand. And right now she could use a bloody helping hand.

Which gave her an idea.

Henrietta shifted back quickly, trying to make herself a small target, hoping that the clouds of dust that were still shifting through the room would give her enough cover so she could hide from the witches momentarily.

She brought up her wand.

Chains.

It was a spell she had written before, and it came in handy when she wanted to tie witches up momentarily before she could banish them. But it was something she could only ever try when they were disoriented. And Henrietta hoped that falling an entire level through the roof of an abandoned warehouse would be sufficiently disorienting.

As soon as she finished writing the word, there was a crackling, heavy noise from her feet, and she didn’t need to look down to see a swirl of chains suddenly appear from around her legs and race forward towards the witches.

Henrietta tried to see through the dust and dark, and fortunately as the chains shot forward they were surrounded by the unmistakable blue glow of magical energy so she could track their path.

They slammed down against something, and in another moment she could hear the intense, powerful, frantic hissing sound of a witch.

She didn’t have time to bring a fist up and pump it in the air, but Henrietta did run forward, her heels crushing the small bits of rubble all around her.

She erupted through a cloud of brick dust, intending to whip her wand around and write banish in the air so she could finally get this job over and done with.

Except there was a problem.

Whilst one of the witches was tied up in chains, the thick metal links wrapped all around her as they anchored themselves deep into the ground, the other one was not. In fact, the other one was now standing right in front of her sister, her arms held wide, her head pressed against one of her shoulders as a frantic sneer crossed her face.

This witch looked younger; she had the appearance of a teenager, and she was dressed in loose-fitting, completely dirt-covered clothes.

The earth witch.

In truth, Henrietta had rather fancied her chains would be powerful enough to tie both of them down, so she wasn’t prepared, not in the least.

The earth witch leaped forward.

Right at Henrietta.

As she did, a terrible rumbling sound accompanied the move, and from everywhere, every single direction, dirt flowed towards Henrietta. It didn’t tumble, and it wasn’t a fine dusting of earth; it was a cascade, an avalanche. The dirt seemed to shoot forward with the speed of bullets, and before Henrietta could react, it reached her.

It pushed into her with incredible speed and forced her to her knees, her body jostling forwards, backward, down, and to the side as each shot pummeled her. It pushed into her ribs, her legs, her arms, and her neck. She choked and spluttered, her body wracked by pain.

But she didn’t fall completely. And not for a second did she allow herself to lie there, still, as she waited for the witch to complete her devastating maneuver.

Instead Henrietta reached out. She stumbled forward. She forced herself back to her feet as she aimed a tackle at the witch.

It was unconventional. If Brick had been here, he would have shouted at her for being a badly trained witch hunter. But Henrietta was desperate, and this was the first thing she could think of.

Despite the fact she was no bodybuilder and certainly did not have fantastic strength, she wrapped her arms around the startled witch.

Henrietta forced the witch back, and both of them lost balance immediately, slamming against the brick-covered floor. As they impacted, the witch let out a sudden puff of air as the wind was roughly knocked out of her and her spell stopped in a snap.

The lines of snaking, shooting dirt stopped attacking Henrietta, and they fell to the ground and scattered everywhere.

Even though Henrietta’s ribs were probably bruised, and she didn’t have a lot of energy left, she didn’t let go. She kept her arms locked around the witch as she struggled in place. The witch screamed and hissed and yelped, sounding exactly like a wild animal and not like a human at all. Just for a second Henrietta allowed herself to be captivated by the witch’s red-rimmed, wide, wet eyes.

They took Henrietta to a place she did not want to be, a place of dark, dank, underground magic, a place where the Witch King roamed.

That was a thought that sent a shiver down her spine.

But it also pressed Henrietta into action.

Somehow she remained there with her arms tightly clutched around the witch as she managed to shift her wand around in her hand. Then Henrietta wrote a word.

Cage.

Just as she finished writing it, she let go, and she lunged back, falling to her butt immediately as a cloud of dust erupted around her.

Somehow she’d managed it.

A cage appeared, encircling the witch at once, and trapping her in place in barely a second.

It was large, it was strong, and the metal poles glowed with magic.

The witch threw herself against the bars of the cage, yelping even more, but no matter how much she tried to pry them open, it would not work.

She was trapped.

What was more, the cage was keeping the witch from using her magic, too. The little creature didn’t send walls of dirt hurtling towards Henrietta, and Henrietta didn’t need to brush any more chunks of earth off her skirt and jacket.

Because it was bloody over.

Henrietta pushed herself to her feet as she gave an enormous, rattling sigh that shifted all the way up her rib cage.

Then she brought her wand around and wrote a single word in the air.

Banish.

Before the spell took root and sucked the two witches back to where they belonged, Henrietta turned.

For some reason she hated seeing that part, the actual banishment, the final act in a witch’s chapter.

As they were sucked into the void, Henrietta always felt such a cold shiver pass over her.

Even now as she turned away, choosing to stare at one of the dislodged bricks from the roof, she couldn’t help but shiver.

Then she found herself standing there in the dark, on the fourth floor of an abandoned warehouse that was completely covered in rubble and metal from the roof above. She was alone, but she wouldn’t be for long.

In the distance she could hear the sirens.

Bloody hell, Henrietta cursed as she rolled her eyes.

She took the time to pat her skirt down and