Read Witches for Free Online

some traveling dog and pony show. It’d always been a huge bone of contention between them.
    Amanda never made money by trading on what she was. It was her religion. Her calling. She didn’t put price tags on it.
    She and Rebecca had never been close. That damned old sibling rivalry—made worse because they were both witches, and Amanda had always been by far the most gifted—had lurked between them, poisoning their relationship and killing any real sisterhood there might have been. On Rebecca’s part only. Amanda couldn’t have cared less who was the more potent witch.
    What did Rebecca want from her? To be friends now, because they were both husbandless? Amanda rubbed her eyes, sighing.
    At least Rebecca dealt only in white magic. Amanda should be thankful for that. So many ambitious witches went to the dark side.
    Amanda dropped the letters into one of her ceramic pots in the middle of the kitchen table. She’d answer them later.
    Right now, she had a basket of food to prepare and take to Mabel, and it was getting late.
    Thinking of Rebecca, and how she made her money, reminded Amanda she was broke herself.
    It didn’t take much money to live here, but she needed some.
    She grew her own food in the summer and canned or froze it for the winter months. There were the fruit trees Jake had planted years ago. She got by. Being a witch, she knew the ways of fertility, the secrets of the earth. Yet money was nice. She couldn’t grow or witch everything she wanted. If she did, she’d be a physical wreck.
    In a small wicker basket, she placed a jar of her special peach preserves, the muffins, some tangy cheese and crackers, a roll of Mabel’s favorite sausage, and the special herb tea that helped her arthritis. Tea laced with magic, so the old woman’s pain would go away for a while. With the cooler weather, Mabel would need it.
    When she was ready to go, she stood in the middle of her front room and wove a simple spell to protect her house from intruders. Hardly took any energy at all. Protection spells never did.
    Outside, she strode across the yard to where her workshop sat waiting patiently for her to return. In the beginning, it was just a large wooden shed Jake had built to store his potter’s wheel, supplies, and pots after he’d completed their house.
    It’d been Jake who’d suggested, since she was so good with her hands, that she try throwing pots. She’d be a natural. As always, he’d been right and something unexpected had happened. She’d proved not only to be good at it, she quickly learned everything he had to teach her and over the next few years had surpassed even him. She grew to love it, learning about every facet of pottery, its history, and the different styles and techniques. Soon, she not only created the pots, but designed her own intricately patterned ones decorated with ingenious slip designs and glazed in bright colors.
    Jake thought they were so lovely, so unique, that one day he took some into town and had them placed in a local store, Jane’s Gift Shop. They sold like hotcakes and an artist was born. Amanda had been selling them there ever since, and getting a good price, too, along with her homemade fudge and taffies from her grandmother’s old recipes, another idea of Jake’s. Now, everyone in the area knew her, not only for her pottery, but for her delicious candies.
    Since Jake had taught advanced pottery classes in town, he rarely had the time to create new pots, as he would have liked, so soon the workshop became her place.
    The door stuck like it often did and she yanked at it, going inside. It was musty. The spiders had been busy, she could tell by the gossamer-thin webs floating everywhere, but she couldn’t see their inhabitants anywhere. It was getting too cold, almost November.
    In one corner, the old potbellied wood stove hunkered, wood still piled up high next to it.
    Jake had believed in preparing early. He’d cut and stacked the wood months ago in the heat of