“We’ve got coffee here.”
“You have instant Folger’s. I’m going for coffee.” In truth, she needed to get out of the house—away from her mother’s magic, to a place where she could examine everything with a clear head.
“If you’re going into town, can you drop these off?” Liliana gestured toward a basket full of iced breads wrapped in beeswax paper and wound with twine. Their tags were labeled with familiar names, all of whom would be found behind counters on Elk Ridge’s main street. They oozed hearth magic, blessings of health to her friends and neighbors.
The top loaf was labeledZaide.
“Where’s Zaide working these days?” asked Rowan.
Her mother glanced up with a blink of surprise. “The magic shop. You didn’t know?”
The revelation stopped Rowan in her tracks. Zaide Hak, her childhood best friend, was working at the Magick Cabinet? She’d been managing a bar—at least, at last update, and that had been…how long ago?
Too long. More than a year. And that had been on Rowan. She had a tendency to lose track of things, to come up for air and find that hours, days, weeks, months, even years had gone by since she’d last touched grass. Folk stories of people wandering into faerie hills and losing years were much easier to accept when your own executive function didn’t assign much importance to time.
All of that was only an excuse, though, an excuse to avoid the lingering sadness after their calls. Zaide was a tie to Elk Ridge, and while she couldn’t quite cut it, she had let it fray.
“She started working for us when the Goose closed a couple of months ago. Took over as manager. It’s gotten hard to keep up withthe shop during festival season…Having Zaide on staff’s been night and day.” Liliana gazed out the window. “I wish I didn’t have to wonder how long we can afford her.”
Zaide was managing the Magick Cabinet? It was possible Liliana would have hired any responsible person to run the register and restock the shelves, but she’d only hire a manager who knew their stuff. Their magic stuff. Did that mean Zaide had taken up the craft?
Her best friend had seen enough over the years to believe that the Midwinters’ witchery was the real deal, but she’d never expressed an inclination toward practicing it herself. At least not to Rowan.
“Are you saying that Zaide joined the coven…?” said Rowan.
“She joined the coven about ten months ago. Now she stands for us in the south.”
6
Despite the lack of snow, taking the forest trail into town did Rowan’s heart and nervous system good. With every breath of tangy pine air, every treble of bird and crack of twig, her pulse lowered and her breathing evened. She relied on recordings of nature sounds to get her through her workdays, but they were nothing like the real thing.
Back in Southern California, she had to take multiple buses to get to any kind of hiking, and the trails were dense with people power walking simply to reach the top. Though the desert landscapes were striking, the rugged beauty of the Cascades soothed her in a way nothing else had managed.
She strolled past evergreens wearing shaggy coats of moss, which hung from their branches like hanks of hair. Trails of tiny bright green ferns tripped their way up mossy trunks, and nurse logs offered homes to hopeful saplings. The tip of her favorite Western hemlock drooped, as if caught in a perpetual bad day. A copse of dense, skinny trees, stripped clean of their branches and almost completely encased in moss, marked the end of the trail.
The tree line broke to reveal the familiar shape of downtown Elk Ridge, a collection of wood and brick buildings arrayed alongside a churning river and separated from the highway by a rusting New Deal–era bridge. The festival grounds were at the end of downtown, near to where Rowan’s trail deposited her onto the road.
Her heart fell as she made it to the main street.
The townsfolk had done their best with what they had. Plump wreaths dangled from lampposts, and garlands had been hung on every available surface. They’d even sprayed their windows with diffused white paint to give them the appearance of frosting over, but the parched sidewalks, the gutters uncrowned with dramatic lines of icicles, the naked roofs—it was all so shabby without the most important ingredient of a winter wonderland.
Rowan lingered at the boarded-up front of what had once been the Book Chalet, running her fingers over the chipping paint of the sign. The sight of it stirred up memories of hours spent rummaging through overflowing shelves. The shop cat, Dimmesdale, staring down in judgment from the peaks of the stacks if Rowan spent too long sampling the wares.
Would this be the last time those memories were called up from her mental archives? Without familiar anchors, the past had a way of becoming unmoored, drifting out beyond the horizon of recollection.
You don’t always need spells to forget.
The thought caused a tremor in her hand.
Next to the empty bookstore was Coffee Time, her first stop. A pale wood menorah with two standing candles and six stubs was in the window alongside a kinara with fresh candles waiting to be lit. Heading for the door, she nearly ran straight into none other than Gavin McCreery.
The cup of coffee he was balancing atop a box of pastries wobbled and nearly tumbled off the side, but Rowan reached uplightning quick to steady it. Her fingertips brushed against the side of his hand, and a sweeping tingle ran down her side.
Gavin arched an eyebrow. “Nice reflexes.”
“Thanks. Comes with being a klutz—you get a lot of practice.”
Rowan realized she still had her hand on his coffee cup and snatched it away before giving him a once-over. He wore navy slacks, a pale blue button-up, and a blazer, tailored to the exact lines of his V-shaped torso. Not the uniform of a man planning to vacation—even a McCreery.
