The Perils of Pernicious Potions: A Wags to Witches Cozy Mystery, #1

By Cordelia Rook

Welcome to Poplar Knot, North Carolina, cast resort of spell raisers and deep bark secrets. Looking for a potion? Autumn Trelayne and her trusty familiar Gravy can whip up the best in town.

Until someone dies after drinking one of those concoctions. Now Autumn is in a whole cauldron of trouble, while the real killer is out there brewing up their next murder. As if that weren't noxious enough, the Inquisitors throw themselves into the mix, including the one she never called back after their first and only date. Autumn is their prime suspect, and witch justice is never kind.

Caught between a murderer and what might be an even worse fate, Autumn had better conjure up some answers fast. Before somebody gets her—and her little dog, too.

Join Autumn for a bewitching blend of magic, mystery, and one opinionated min pin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cordelia Rook
• Release date: Aug 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223098324

Cordelia Rook

Writer, reader, tireless champion of the Oxford comma. I can quote 80's movies with startling accuracy, and name all the Plantagenet monarchs in order. I'm for dogs and donuts. I have no feelings either way about scones. I am terrified of Mrs. Danvers. I write clean, lighthearted dog cozies under the name Cordelia Rook, and clean traditional fantasy under the name J.R. Rasmussen. I live in Charlotte, North Carolina, where my household is run by a galumphing fool of a bulldog. Visit me online at cordeliarook.com.

Book preview

Chapter One

I was three years and ten months old when I cast my first spell. I think my father was so worried that I might not have the craft, he just couldn’t wait any longer to find out.

My parents had let me watch a movie they probably shouldn’t have, and I’d been having nightmares for days. Rather than brew me a potion himself, Dad taught me an incantation (a rhyming one, always easier for the little ones) while he simmered the ingredients on the stove. When it was ready, he set the pot in front of me on the laminated Duggo-the-Dog-Detective placemat my mother kept in my spot at the kitchen table. Duggo’s face was thereafter warped and droopy, on account of the pot being too hot yet.

I still remember sitting there, stubby legs swinging because my feet couldn’t reach the tile floor, concentrating on the finished brew with all the might in my tiny heart. My father’s familiar, a long-haired Dachshund named Shep, curled up in my lap, offering me his power as I spoke the words in my most solemn voice. Shep had the silkiest coat. Dad took great care of that dog. As was only right, for such a good boy.

Believing in magic is easy when you’re a kid, and willing a thing to happen is at least thirty-five percent believing it will. The potion was a success. I had sweet dreams that night.

There was another movie a few months later. My mother caught us making our potion that time, and left.

I guess my father hadn’t gotten around to telling her about the whole witch thing while they were courting. Or at their wedding. You would think he at least could’ve managed it before she bore his child, but maybe he just felt it would be too awkward by then. Anyway, she didn’t take it well. I never saw her again.

Dad died a year after she abandoned us, so it was Uncle Septon and Aunt Fiona who continued my magical education. But from that first time when I was not quite four, potions were always my preferred medium.

As I got older, I came to realize this wasn’t for purely sentimental reasons. It was the math of it all. Potions were recipes, and recipes were equations. And equations were guaranteed. If you did the left side right, the right side was immutable.

Immutable was good. Immutable was safe.

Or so I thought. But maybe the joke was on me, because had I not developed this special love of potions, maybe I wouldn’t have brewed the one that might, had things gone a little differently, have ultimately led to my death. And that did lead to someone else’s death. But that was hardly my fault.

Minutes before I first heard about Luke Green’s illustrious arrival in Poplar Knot, my twin cousins Holly and Ivy were arguing about whether dogs could do long division in their heads.

Gravy just barked at Autumn for missing a teaspoon of allspice. Ivy waved her spatula at her sister, dribbling a line of hot wax onto her worktable in the process. So he must have known that the ratio of allspice to oak bark was off.

Holly rolled her gray eyes. Nearly all Trelaynes had gray eyes, and most of us had hair in one shade of red or another. Not Holly, though; hers was lime green at the moment. Her always bright hair and makeup were an easy way to tell the twins apart, even at a distance. "He knew the potion was off. Or he sensed that it might be. He didn’t know why. Right, Autumn?"

She looked at me for confirmation, but I raised my hands in front of me, like this was a stickup, then went back to slowly stirring a cup of coffee into my hot pot. My miniature pinscher and familiar was right there on top of my worktable, curled up on his bed and watching me closely. I wasn’t about to be drawn into an argument that might end with me disparaging his math skills.

He had barked at me, but it might or might not have been about the allspice. A shower was passing through, and Gravy always blamed me for the weather. I was getting to that last teaspoon of allspice anyway, so it’s a moot point.

Aunt March came through the workshop door just as I was finishing the sentence, rescuing me from further discussion. When her nieces spoke of her, people usually asked if Aunt March was named after the character in Little Women. She wasn’t; she’d just had the misfortune of being born in March, and then becoming an aunt. At sixty-one, things that had once pointed up were starting to point down, and her once red hair was mostly gray, but she was still easily the prettiest Trelayne of her generation.

Lavender Petras is here, she said to me. She’s asking for you.

I gave her a blank look. Why? Lavender Petras was the mayor of Poplar Knot, and was hosting one of the biggest parties of the year tomorrow. I couldn’t imagine what she’d be making the time to talk to me about.

March shrugged. You can ask her yourself.

My potion needed to simmer undisturbed for a minimum of seventeen minutes anyway, so I wiped my hands and took off my apron. Gravy jumped down and followed me out front.

Our workshop was at the back of Holly Tree Lane—that was our spell shop—in a refurbished barn just on the other side of the driveway from the rambling Victorian that currently housed six Trelaynes. The good part of our living arrangement was, we were only a few steps away from our job. The bad part was, we were only a few steps away from our job. Not that we had any real cause for complaint; Holly Tree Lane was only open on Tuesdays and Saturdays, otherwise by appointment. We might be at work sixty-seven percent of the time, but at least the hours were pretty flexible.

Unlike the workshop, where the competing scents of several projects could sometimes be eye-watering, the smell of the spell shop was maybe my favorite smell in the world. The fireplace was home to a multitude of standing candles made with comforting herbs, nutmeg and cloves and the like, and the bookshelves were chock full of the spellbooks we sold, most of them antiques I’d dug up. In my opinion, there are things that smell better than old books, but they’re all pastries.

These heavenly scents were meant to put our guests at ease, but they didn’t seem to have much effect on Lavender. She stood near the counter, fidgeting like a salt-and-pepper-haired, bespectacled squirrel. Her oversized earrings were trembling. As soon as she saw me, she pressed her hand against her chest. Autumn, I am so glad to see you. I have an emergency!

I doubted this. Lavender Petras was all about the drama, and it amounted to nothing more often than it didn’t. What’s going on?

Gravy ran around the counter and poked her with his nose. She bent down to greet him, and used that voice people do with dogs to say, evidently to him rather than to me, Luke Green is coming to my solstice party!

The second half of this enthusiastic declaration made sense. Tomorrow was the summer solstice, and owing as much to her house being on a triple lot as to her being the mayor, Lavender always had the biggest event in our itty-bitty town. (Actually, it didn’t even qualify as a town. At a population of 768, Poplar Knot’s official classification in the state of North Carolina was tiny village, having missed the plain old village mark by some 233 souls.) It would be an all-day affair, capped with a bonfire that evening, and was a source of excitement for many more people than just Lavender. Myself and my family included.

The Luke Green part, I was a little fuzzier on. I stepped to the counter and leaned on my forearms. Is that the new guy over on Willow Street?

Lavender looked like I’d just asked her something glaringly obvious, like whether she had a nose. Of course it is! He only moved in over the weekend, I haven’t even met him yet. But Iris Hayashi has the advantage, you know, being two doors down and all. She brought him scones yesterday. She looked over at Aunt March, who was following along intently from the nearest armchair. "She says he’s very handsome."

Oh! Aunt March gave me an amused look. And I gather he’s of a distinguished age?

Distinguished was Aunt March’s code word for over fifty-nine. I began to see some of the source of Lavender’s excitement. She, like Aunt March, was divorced. Most witches didn’t date strangers (our word for nonmagical folk), and it wasn’t like our dating pool of handsome, eligible witches was so big even when you were twenty-five.

"A distinguished healer. Retired, but still. And he’s widowed! Lavender grinned at Aunt March as if the death of Luke Green’s poor wife was the best news since witchcraft ceased to be a crime. And he happened to mention to Iris that the summer solstice is his favorite holiday, so of course she invited him to my party right away, she knew I wouldn’t mind. She looked back at me. So you can see why I need you to sell me a skywriting spell."

I saw nothing of the kind. Especially since I didn’t know what a skywriting spell was. A what now?

She raised her hands over her head and swished them apart with a flourish, like the world’s most flamboyant conductor. "Welcome to Poplar Knot. Written in fireworks. Not just hanging in the air like fairy lights, but exploding up above the bonfire, over and over again. For, I don’t know, a half hour or so."

I produced a scholarly frown, like I was giving the matter some internal study, mostly to keep myself from laughing. Go big or go home, I guessed, except the party was already at Lavender’s home, and going big was her favorite thing. I don’t know of any spell like that.

But you bought all those McFee spellbooks over in Tennessee last month, didn’t you?

Yeah, nine of them. Different branches of the family, all going back a few hundred years. They went digital with their whole library. I had no doubt there was a tinge of pride in my voice. It was one of the biggest acquisitions I’d ever made.

Well, that’s exactly why I asked to see you in particular. I heard Daniel McFee was into fireworks.

I shrugged. Could be, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t Gandalf.

Lavender’s face left no room for doubting her disappointment in me. You can look though, can’t you? I’m the mayor, I’ve got to welcome the man somehow. And it’s a holiday. We should make it special. I don’t see any reason a spell like that wouldn’t be possible.

I didn’t see any reason it wouldn’t be possible, either. But it was also very specific. And nine spellbooks was a lot to go through. I’d have been a lot more amenable to this request if only Iris had brought Luke his scones a day earlier, thereby getting us all aboard the So Handsome He Requires Fireworks train sooner. Even if the McFees had a spell like that, I doubt I’d be able to find it in time. I haven’t catalogued the spells in those books yet. And I’ve still got to finish my radiance potion, and⁠—

Oh, right! Lavender pointed at me. I wanted to ask you about that, too. I don’t suppose you could bring me an extra vial?

Oh, honestly. Now she wanted radiance potion for His Radiancy, too? Radiance spells were popular among Poplar Knotters as a way to dress up for the summer solstice, light being a major theme of the holiday. I made a batch of radiance potion every year, and always brought Lavender a vial as a hostess gift. (She’d once confessed to me, in her most dramatic whisper, that she was a bit of a dunce at potions.) We would drink the concoction at sundown and, well, glow.

Legend held that my great-grandmother Holly, after whom Holly Tree Lane was named, was the first to show up at a summer solstice event surrounded by a halo of light. It was her recipe I’d based my own on. It wasn’t super challenging to make—just an illusion, nothing like a full glamour—but it was complicated, and it took a long time.

That was what I’d been brewing in the workshop when I was interrupted—and it was almost done now. Adding more raw ingredients at this late stage would ruin it, and making another batch before tomorrow was out of the question.

Suppressing a sigh, I tapped my fingers against my thumb, back and forth, one by one. (A nervous habit I’d developed somewhere in my childhood and never shaken, particularly when I was calculating something.) My little hot pot already had to be split among my household, which meant me, the twins, Uncle Septon, Aunt Fiona, and Aunt March. Six. Then there were my cousins Gus and Winter, Aunt March’s sons. Gus had already asked for some for his wife and son. So now we were up to ten. My best friend Trevor, who wasn’t a witch and therefore couldn’t be expected to brew his own, made eleven, and then Lavender made twelve.

Thirteen was not only stretching it thin, it was an unlucky number besides. With some regret, but maybe not as much as would’ve been polite, I gave Lavender a firm no.

All right, that’s fine, she said with a wave. The main thing is the fireworks. You will look for that spell, right? When she saw me hesitate, she actually—and I am not making this up—batted her eyelashes at me. "I know you’re busy, but imagine how much I’ve got to do. I can’t buy nine books from you and look through all of them myself. But if you find a suitable spell, I’ll buy the book it’s in. At fifty percent above your asking price, for your trouble."

Seventy percent, I said, and I’ll try.

I’ll help you, Aunt March offered.

Perfect! Lavender gave us each a jubilant hug, then crouched to scratch Gravy’s ears. (Which were uncropped, and so cute they begged to be scratched. You’d never catch me cropping an ear or docking a tail.) You guys are heroes. Let me know what you find.

She left a few minutes later, and I wasted no time in snapping my fingers for Gravy. We were on a tight schedule now. Maybe even impossibly tight. We needed to make sure we got that radiance potion done, before I got lost in old spellbooks and forgot about it. Come on, Grave, let’s go make some magic.

He yapped, and took three steps backward rather than forward.

What? Are you worried about the allspice again? It’s right, I promise. Or are you just feeling lazy?

Another yap.

Aunt March laughed. Maybe he was hoping to stay in the shop and get a few more admirers coming in.

Yeah well, I’d like some admirers too, but we don’t have time for that. I scooped Gravy up and kissed his head. Come on. We don’t have to like it, we just have to do it.

Thus overruled, he allowed me to carry him back into the workshop, and helped me finish my potion. Which, in hindsight, was a pity.

Listen to your dogs, people. They’re almost always right.

Chapter Two

I gave Trevor a subtle elbow to the ribs. Check out Sergeant Suave and Miss Matched over there.

Trevor cocked his head as he studied Tal Shelby. The latter was halfway across the lawn, deep in conversation with (and in the personal space of) Iris Hayashi (who clearly didn’t mind one bit). How can any woman take him seriously when he’s got a parrot on his shoulder?

I raised my brows. Are you suggesting there is something peculiar to women that prevents them from taking parrots seriously?

I’m suggesting he looks like a pirate.

Chicks dig pirates, don’t they?

Maybe stranger chicks, but a witch and a pirate together feels a little too trick-or-treat, don’t you think?

I shrugged. "Doesn’t seem to be worrying