Pruned (Cultivating Midlife Magic Book 2)(Paranormal Women's Midlife Fiction)

Copyright 2023 by Paula Lester and M.E. Harmon. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or authors, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. Cover art by April Anderton Proofreading by CateEdits Table of Contents Copyright Page CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 2 CHAPTER 3 CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER 5 CHAPTER 6 CHAPTER 7 CHAPTER 8 CHAPTER 9 CHAPTER 10 CHAPTER 11 CHAPTER 12 CHAPTER 13 CHAPTER 14 CHAPTER 15 CHAPTER 16 CHAPTER 17 CHAPTER 18 CHAPTER 19 CHAPTER 20 CHAPTER 21 Thank you for reading! About M.E. Harmon About Paula Lester CHAPTER 1 A scream ached inside my throat. Wailing out loud wasn’t really my MO. Oh, I cried now and then. Wept in a ladylike manner. I’d even been known to ugly cry over a sad movie. Or a big electric bill. But screaming? No, that wasn’t really my style. Still, I could feel it now, gathering like a bad chest cold right beneath my breastbone. It longed to cascade up like flowing lava and be born into the cab of my car. I jammed on the car’s brakes harder than necessary to jerk to a stop in my driveway. Staring at the house, I pulled in giant gulps of air in hopes of calming the scream. No dice. If anything, it grew in intensity, like a dragon uncoiling from a disturbed slumber. There was little choice other than to let it loose. So, finally, I did. All the frustration burst from between my lips. A week and a half ago, a visit to Johnson’s Orchard had shattered life as I had known it. My two sisters and I had been told an inconvenient truth. A secret. One that now required us to patrol dark places and kill monsters. We were being forced to become reeves. About that—I wasn’t super happy with how I’d handled it. When that Axe dude, the governor of our region or whatever, branded me into service, it hurt. I had cried in front of my family and the widow Johnson. Violet and Ruby, my staunch, strong sisters, didn’t sob. They gritted their teeth and got angry. But, see, there was a big difference between me and them. I was a mom. Everything I did, all that happened to me in my life, I saw through the lens of raising my sweet girl, Tillie. I couldn’t be a reeve because it was dangerous—no, lethal work. There was no way I was going to sacrifice my daughter’s well-being. I wanted her to have the perfect childhood. That included having a mother who was still breathing. But over the past week and a half, nothing had happened. It had been ten days, and I didn’t feel a damn bit different than I had the moment I walked into that farmhouse. No emerging superpowers to fight off bad guys or anything like that. I did feel on the verge of a nervous breakdown, though. Waiting for big, ugly, drooling things to leap out of the shadows... well, it was doing nothing for my peace of mind. The widow, Clementine Johnson, a reeve herself, had stopped by a couple days ago to check on me. All these years, she’d been more tangled up with my father than I’d realized. Her brow had gotten some tiny wrinkles in it when I’d told her I had nothing to report. Yeah, I understood those wrinkles. Again, it wasn’t like I wanted to be some kind of magical enforcer, standing in the gap between humans and the supernatural world called the Divide. Dividers were all of the imaginable monsters and minions from fairy tales and legends. Yeah, I wanted nothing to do with that madness. I prayed my sister Ruby could figure out a way to get us out of this ridiculous contract we’d been forced into. If she didn’t, my sisters and I would be consigned to going mad. Like our adoptive mother had. It had been our mother’s heritage that had roped us into this. This job was passed down in families, blood-related or not. Mom had tried to protect her children from this curse, but again, no dice. So, yeah, I wasn’t upset about not having anything life-threatening happen in my vicinity over the past week and a half. I was a wife and mother. Allergic to danger. It was the waiting that was doing me in. I jumped at every noise, wondering if it was a materializing demon I had no clue how to fight off. Usually, the sound turned out to be the dishwasher’s soap dish releasing partway through the cycle. That damn noise made me jump every time. Then there was the steward thing. Some person was supposed to show up and be like my advisor or something. Like Gandalf the wizard in those hobbit movies. He, she, they, or it hadn’t shown up as of yet. Dad had said I’d definitely get one of those—a Divider who could help guide and teach me. To our amazement, he’d revealed that he’d been a steward himself for years. Turned out he was the widow Johnson’s advisor, but the depths of that relationship, one that had been ongoing before my mother’s premature death, I didn’t want to explore at present. The main thing giving me the jitters was the thought this stuff may happen in view of my family. The thought made me cringe with concern. Yeah, I was getting good and tired of waiting. At this point, I wanted it to happen, already, so I could do something about it. Handle it. Compartmentalize it. Protect my family from it. A knock came on my window. I jumped so high my head hit the car’s ceiling. I brought my hands up, ready to fight off some ghoul or goblin spawned from the dark. I twisted around to peer out of the window. I’d been right. It was a ghoul. But not from the Divide. This was a plain