Any Witch Way But West: Magic and Mayhem

By Virginia Nelson

Everyone thinks camera-ready Sadie Snickersnee is just vain. She changes her hair color and makeup style like they're disposable. But what no one knows is she's being stalked by a wraith, one who drains her soul and magic, and the only way she knows to protect her family is to keep the thing's attention on her.
 

At least until she can find a way to get rid of it. Sadly, she's carried this thing around for years and never managed to break free. When her landlady suggests she mend an amulet her parents broke before she was born, Sadie's more than willing to try just about anything to escape—even swap places with her sister and head back to her hometown.
 

But sometimes you can't run from your problems, so when her longtime crush shows up in West Virginia, she needs to not only break the enchantment connecting her to the wraith, but also protect him. What's a magical twin to do but call her sister in for help! Luckily for the universe… Snickersnees come in twos.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Virginia Nelson
• Release date: Oct 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393771562

Virginia Nelson

Virginia Nelson likes knights in rusted and dinged up armor, heroes that snarl instead of croon, and heroines who can't remember to say the right thing even with an author writing their dialogue. Her books are full of snark, sex, and random acts of ineptitude--not always in that order.

Book preview

Prologue

Sadie Snickersnee never much cared what people thought of her. Born the eldest (by five precious minutes, which she never let ANYONE forget) of the Snickersnee twins, she learned at a young age that people only saw so much of reality.

The easiest example of which was, when anyone saw her or her sister, no one could tell them apart. Even their parents struggled to recognize which of them was which, stating for all who could hear that their birthmarks were the only distinguishing difference between their girls.

For a long time, this amused Sadie. She found ways to take advantage of people’s misconceptions about her—from swapping places with Savannah on tests because she was better at math and science than her animal and fiction loving sister, to taking her sister’s place in social situations where Savannah would’ve felt uncomfortable. They used to milk the fact people couldn’t tell them apart as much as possible and without any repercussions.

Life was simpler back then, she often thought. But, then again, didn’t everyone feel that way when looking back to their childhood?

By their teens, they had switching places down to a science. At least, it seemed they had things fully in their control until things changed toward the end of their senior year.

Right about then was when Sadie decided to become different. Everyone smiled and nodded at her sudden need to differentiate herself from her twin. Some said it was a sign of maturity, the development of self or some such nonsense. Others said Sadie wanted to stand out so that boys would notice her. There were many theories, but at the end of the day, not a single one of them guessed Sadie’s real reason.

Even her own sister used to make fun of Sadie—for her constant hair color changes, for her obsession with cosmetics, and because of her newfound ability to change her appearance almost entirely on a whim. Sadie let Savannah have her laughs.

At least one of them found the situation funny. Then again, that was partly Sadie’s fault, because she never confided her actual reasons to her sister. Maybe if she had, things would’ve been different. Whenever Sadie had these kind of thoughts, though, she quickly discarded them. What she did, she did to protect Savannah, and realistically there was no way she would want to change her choices.

So, while Sadie lived in constant terror, Savannah chuckled over Sadie’s selfies and her fixation on capturing things on film. Hahaha, Sadie is so vain!

Sadie wished her life was as simple and carefree as everyone seemed to think it was.

In reality, she had to change the way she looked frequently. Before long, she had her alterations down to a science. She documented the minute changes and the grand changes with pictures of her own face…but not because she liked looking at herself overmuch. Not even because she wanted social media or male attention, as some others suggested.

In reality, she kept track of which changes worked, which didn’t, and what she’d already tried so that she didn’t overlap too much when she made the next change.

Each change was carefully choreographed and planned out down to the smallest detail. Eye color, it turned out, didn’t matter. They could still find her easily if she just swapped her hazel-green eyes to blue.

Hair color and length sometimes lasted the longest, not that she’d ever quite determined the why behind that information. Clothing helped some, but the biggest changes she could make seemed to be cosmetic—the right application of contour could change the shape of her face, which seemed to, in collaboration with a hair change, make the longest and most secure difference.

At first, though, she didn’t know any of that. It took her years to figure out most of it, but to really understand Sadie’s situation, we have to go back to when it all started.

A teenaged Sadie hung out in her bedroom. Although the walls of her childhood room were painted a dusky rose color, none of that paint job was visible past the many posters she’d hung with a combination of tape and tacks. Some were movie posters she’d grabbed for a buck at the video rental place—back in the dark ages, people rented VHS tapes at stores dedicated to just that purpose! Some were cut out of glossy magazines. She loved the views of far off destinations, peeks into movie stars lives, and the fantastic elements in the movie posters.

She planned to live a life full of adventures, that much she knew even as a high school senior.

Graduation loomed, but it was still the lazy days before it all became real. Sadie had a group of close friends, her twin, and a loving family. Her life made sense, and she couldn’t imagine a world where it might not make so much sense. After graduation, she planned to go to college and eventually to teach math. Not to little kids, who kind of horrified her, but to adults and teens. She wanted to teach at the university level, but she needed to get a few degrees herself first.

As a witch, it probably seemed like a weird career choice, but there was a solidness to numbers. She liked the dependability of them, their stable and reliable ability to do exactly what she thought they would. Magic, something that came as naturally to her as breathing, wasn’t reliable, so maybe she was looking for balance in her life.

She’d never find out, as that dream turned out to be one she didn’t have the opportunity to pursue. Anyway, she was in her room, up late and listening to music in the dark so as not to bug her sister sleeping in the next room. The day had been long, one of those endless summer feeling days when the lightning bugs outside her windows danced through the forest like tiny fairies. Maybe it was tiny fairies—who knew in Assjacket? Cricket song almost drowned out the sound of her radio, and the night breeze smelled sweet and welcoming.

She’d finished her homework early, she didn’t feel like watching television, and the darkness was full of so many smells. Night smells, home smells, and she practically dozed in her little window seat with her favorite teddy bear, one from her childhood, snug in her arms.

Everything was right with her world, at least until she noticed the eyes.

Glowing white eyes, like an animal caught in headlights. She startled, staring hard into the backyard and blinking to try to clear her vision. Surely it was just some reflection on the glass, something behind her, perhaps, that was shining off the glass in the appearance of eyes?

You see, Sadie hadn’t been afraid of the dark, not even when they were little kids. Back then, she’d held her twin sister, Savannah’s, hand for nighttime bathroom runs.

The same things are out in the night as in the morning, she’d whispered, sure of this fact even as a small child. "Taking away the light doesn’t make things scary; it is you that makes the dark scary. Your imagination comes up with things that can’t possibly be there just because there’s nothing you can see. But, the thing is, there’s nothing there, or at least nothing that wasn’t there in the daytime."

No matter how many times she blinked, though, no matter how she turned her head, those glowing white eyes continued to stare at her from the darkness just past the yard. Finally, her heart racing and her palms sweaty with panic,