*~*~*
Ten Fun Facts About Maggie Maddock by April Aasheim
I thought it would be a lot of fun to talk about the four
sisters that comprise The Daughters of
Dark Root: Maggie, Merry, Ruth Anne, and Eve.
Maggie is the storyteller in both The Witches of Dark Root and The
Magick of Dark Root so I thought I’d start with her. Here are Ten Fun Facts about Maggie Maddock
which should interest readers new to The
Daughters of Dark Root series as well as entertain readers who have read
the first two books and are awaiting the third.
- Maggie’s middle name is Mae. Her mother, Miss Sasha Shantay, was a huge Rod Stewart fan in the 1970s.
- Maggie’s hair is red, but it changes hue depending on her mood. When she’s sick or depressed it becomes a muted orange and when she’s angry it deepens to a crimson cherry. Her hair is curly and prone to frizz, and Maggie often resorts to wearing it in a ponytail to keep it under control. She has thought about cutting it off but she has been raised to believe that a witch’s power is in direct proportion to the length of her hair.
- Maggie was a below average student who squeaked through high school with a C- average. She never aspired to have better grades because she assumed she would just take over her mother’s magick shop once she finished with her education.
- Maggie had secret dreams of becoming an airline stewardess when she was a child so that she could leave Dark Root ‘far behind’. Her career aspirations changed, however, when she realized she would have to serve people and be nice to everyone.
- Maggie’s 7th grade Home Economics lab suddenly caught fire after three girls chanted “Maggie Maddock rides a broom” while making a quiche. After the fire one of the girls transferred schools and the other two never uttered those words again, at least when Maggie was around.
- Maggie was born in April and is an Aries.
- Maggie’s favorite movies include: Clueless, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the original Parent Trap. She tells everyone that her favorite movies are: Gone with the Wind and ‘that movie about all those birds that Alfred Hitchcock made’. She has never seen either of them.
- Maggie’s favorite things are: Oreos, Yankee Candles, Mr. Bubble, and her Aunt Dora’s home cooking.
- Maggie’s first kiss was in the 9th grade to a boy named Dwight. He kissed her on a dare to see if he would turn into a toad. He didn’t. But he did develop one of the worse cases of acne the Dark Root freshman class had ever seen. Some say it wasn’t a coincidence.
- Maggie has a crippling fear of the dark. It stems from her childhood when she was sure there was something in the nursery with her. This fear carried on well into her adulthood and she still spends most of her nights sleeping with a nightlight on.
*~*~*
The
Magick of Dark Root
Daughters
of Dark Root
Book
Two
April
Aasheim
Genre: Paranormal, Women’s
Fiction
Publisher: Dark Root Press
Date of Publication: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 1499611951
ASIN: B00KRQ2KAK
Number of pages: 330 pages
Word Count: 88,000
Cover Artist: AnneMarie Buhl and
Greg Jensen
Book Description:
“There are rules that must be
followed, Maggie.”
“Even in witchcraft?”
“Especially in witchcraft. What
someone puts into the world comes back to them.”
“You mean karma?”
“Like karma, yes. But for a witch
it comes back threefold. Never forget that.”
“That doesn’t seem fair.”
“Who said life was fair?”
In the second installment of The
Daughters of Dark Root series, Maggie Maddock and her sisters are back,
training under their coven-leading mother Miss Sasha Shantay to take over as
the new leaders of The Council. But life isn’t as smooth as Maggie had hoped it
would be. Harvest Home’s taxes have come due, and her mother’s illness has
returned, stronger than ever.
Desperate, Maggie and Eve devise
a scheme to make money through witchcraft.
And that’s when things go
terribly wrong.
Available at Amazon
Excerpt:
There are nights
when you question just about everything: who you are, where you've come from,
what your purpose is, how you got to your current place in life.
And then there
are nights when you just accept things.
Nights when you
stand beneath a silver moon, digging a shallow grave for a man you murdered. A
man who probably had a wife and children, a mother and a job. A man who
probably wouldn't have tried to molest your kid sister, if she hadn't been
wearing a perfume enchanted to entice men in the first place.
These are the
nights you try not to think.
Because if you
think––about the corpse sitting in the car a dozen feet away, about your
inability to determine wrong from right, about the fact that your mother was
right about you after all, that you walk the line, just like your father––you
just might go mad.
And I couldn't
go mad.
Anyway, it was
Thanksgiving, officially, and I wasn't going to let this little incident ruin
the holidays.
“No!” I said
aloud as I plunged my shovel into the earth and tossed out another spade full
of dirt. “I’m going to keep it together!”
“Maggie, you okay?”
Merry stopped digging and faced me, her eyes concerned. In this lighting, as
her gold hair framed her sweet face, she looked more angelic than ever. “You
can take a break, if you need to. We’ll be okay.”
“Me? I’m fine,
Merry. Thanks for asking.”
I caught my
sisters shooting each other knowing looks, looks that said I wasn’t all right,
that in fact I had lost my marbles.
“I’m fine,” I
repeated emphatically, tossing out an extra-large helping of dirt and wondering
how much deeper we would need to dig.
The spell said
to encase the subject in a box, then bury him under the light of a waning moon,
but it didn't specify how deep the grave needed to be. An unhelpful omission.
Since the “subject” would eventually dig his way out of that grave, clawing his
way through the box and layers of muck, I conjectured we shouldn't dig it too
deeply.
The experience
would be traumatic enough for the poor guy as it was.
Fortunately for
us, however, the timing of his death couldn't have been better, being a waning
moon and all. If I’ve learned anything from this ordeal, it’s that if you are
going to commit murder, and have any intention of bringing the deceased back to
life, always plan it around the correct moon cycle.
Lucky break for
Maggie!
“I think,” I
said, continuing to dig. “That this might be a lucrative business. Bringing
people back from the dead. If it works out, we might start charging for it.
Gotta bring in more money than that stupid magick store does.”
“Maggie, stop,”
Eve said, wiping her forehead with cashmere gloves she would never wear again.
“I’m just
saying…why not? We can call it Bodies R Us. They’re not dead unless we say
they’re dead.” I grinned at Ruth Anne, sure she’d appreciate my joke.
She shook her
head and continued digging.
“What?” I asked,
throwing my shovel onto the ground. “Are we too good for death jokes now?”
Merry pressed
her lips together. “Honey, you’ve had a terrible shock and now it’s finally
setting in. Go sit on the porch steps and we’ll finish this. We’ll call you
when it’s done.”
“No!” I
screamed, surprising myself with the shrillness of my voice. I tore at the air
with both hands, as if being assaulted by an invisible man, tears stinging my
eyes. “I won’t sit by while my sisters bury the man I…”
I choked, unable
to finish the sentence. I lifted my trembling chin. “Neither hell nor jail is
good enough for me.”
Someone’s arms
wrap around me. I recognized the vanilla and lavender scent as Merry’s. I
hyperventilated in her arms as she held me, cooing me to quiet.
“It’s okay,
honey. It will be okay.”
How could I
explain to her that it wouldn't be okay? Nothing might ever be okay again. Even
if we did manage to raise him, I had the deathtouch, just like my father. And
there was no coming back from that.
“What if we
can’t do it, Merry?” I sniffed, wiping my nose on her shoulder as I stared at
the Christmas tree in the front yard, the box that would soon be a coffin.
“We will,” she
said, brushing the hair from my face. “You’ll see.”
“I think this is
deep enough,” Ruth Anne announced, tossing her shovel onto the ground. “We’d
better hurry.”
I let out one
final sob of self-pity and nodded.
Merry grabbed my
hand and we converged on the car.
“I’m sorry,” I
said to the man in the passenger seat.
He sat buckled
in, staring straight ahead. I removed his seat belt, noticing the stiffness of
his body we hefted him from the car. You hear that the dead are cold, but you
can never imagine how cold. It’s not a freezer type of cold or a snow type of
cold. It’s an empty chill, like floating in deep space. A coldness without
hope.
“We don’t have
much time,” I said as we lowered him into the box.
He didn’t quite
fit and we pushed on arms and legs, stuffing him inside like an unwilling
Jack-in-the box.
Merry wiped the
salve she had concocted across his face and neck. It smelled horrible, like
ashes and mold. Next, she reached into her pocket and produced Mother’s wand.
“Once he’s
completely buried, we use this,” she said.
“Paul says that
in the old days, people were often buried alive,” Eve said, fighting back a
shiver. “He said gravediggers found coffins with scratch marks on the inside.”
“Maybe they
weren't buried alive,” I suggested. “Maybe they were guinea pigs in spells like
this one.”
“Maggie, you’re
not funny.”
“I know.”
At last, it was
done. The man who’d been buying us drinks and pawing at my sister only a few
hours ago was now four feet underground in my front yard. I wanted to stick a
cross in the earth, or a stone, something to mark this place.
But I couldn't
think like that. I had to believe he was just sleeping and would wake up
shortly, and we’d all go back to our normal lives.
Merry lifted the
wand. The emerald-colored gem shone so dim, it faded into the night. The wand
was dying, too.
“We could use
this on Mama,” Merry said, her voice almost a whisper.
There was a cold
silence that passed between us. If the wand had one charge left, did we waste
it on a stranger? Or did we try and save the woman we loved, who hovered very
near death herself in the bedroom upstairs? It could buy her time.
Our heads turned
in unison towards her window.
“No,” I said,
resolutely. “There’s still hope for Mother, but there’s no hope for this guy.
We have to use it on him.”
Merry nodded and
we gathered around the grave. She lifted her wrist, ready to cast the wand, but
I stopped her.
“Give it to me,
Merry. I have to be the one.”
“But Maggie,”
Merry protested. I knew what she was thinking. She had the gift of healing,
while I had the curse of…
She handed it
over.
My hand shook as
I took it. Merry might have the right kind of magick, but my powers were
greater, and I had Mother’s Circle.
My sisters held
hands, chanting words from Mother’s scroll, indecipherable gibberish that
produced an ethereal sound when spoken together, like angels falling from
heaven.
I raised the
wand, catching site of a raven that roosted between the spokes of the old
garden gate, intently watching me.
It was now or
never.
The price of the
deathtouch had to be paid.
About
the Author:
April Aasheim considers herself
an ‘expert’ in the paranormal. Her mother dabbled in the occult and her father
was a martial artist who believed that true power came from an unseen energy
that you could tap into.
As a child, April claims to have
lived in a haunted house and to have been visited by relatives who had passed
on. To combat her frightening experiences, April spent her youth studying world
religion including Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. Later, April branched out
in her studies with a focus on psychology, anthropology, sociology, and the
paranormal.
April is married with children
and currently resides in Portland, Oregon where she spends her days writing,
watching movies, and attending Zumba classes at her local gym.
The Magick of Dark Root is the
second in The Daughters of Dark Root series, and her third novel.
Twitter: @aprilaasheim
Tour
giveaway:
1 Signed copy of The Magick of Dark Root paperback
1Ten Dollar Amazon Gift Card (sent to FB page or
mailed to home address)
1 5 Dollar Starbucks Gift Card (sent to FB page or
mailed to home address)
1 Ebook copy of The Witches of Dark Root AND The
Magick of Dark Root (both are for kindle and sent to one winner)
2 Ebooks of The Magick of Dark Root (kindle)
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