Naturally, I ignored them. Between hot flashes, guilt, confusion, and feet that hurt, I didn’t know which end was up.
“Pack for cold,” Luna’s letter had warned, which felt mildly insulting in late August when Stonewick carried the lazy warmth of peaches and dust.
Still, I stuffed mittens into my satchel between talismans and tea sachets while the cottage did its happy-creaky settling and Keegan double-checked knives he never hoped to use.
“We’re really doing this tonight,” he said, buckling the last strap. “You sure?”
“No,” I said truthfully, and then, because we were us, “Yes.”
He smiled with that tired, stubborn fondness I kept wanting to bottle. “I’ll take both.”
Outside, the gargoyles shifted, stone-on-shingle, as if the roof cleared its throat. Karvey’s rumble drifted down like flint rolled in velvet. “North winds sooner than the calendar says.”
“Noted,” I called up. “We’re going to need you.”
“I am already there,” he said simply.
Keegan tipped his head toward the door. “Stella said to meet at the tea shop. Brace yourself.”
“For tea?” I asked.
“For Stella,” he said.
We’d left the cottage quietly, and I looked over at Keegan as we made our way down the path.
“Are you sure you’re up for this?”
“And leave you to all the shenanigans?” His smile widened, and my stomach fluttered. He always had this way of making me feel like the most beautiful and capable woman in the world. It was something I didn’t even realize I’d been missing when I’d been married to Alex for all those years.
“Hopefully, it will be pretty harmless.”
“Yeah, falling for traps usually is in our world.”
I grinned and squeezed his hand. “But if we know that we’re headed into one, does that really make it a trap?”
“If the tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it…”
I smiled, feeling temporarily light as we walked into Stonewick Village. The sight immediately calmed me. It was a few days from September and the shops had already embraced fall with pumpkins stacked neatly on haystacks and broomsticks dangled teasingly on stoops.
By the time we’d made it to Stella’s, I was thirsty and slightly less confident about this idea.
Stella had arrayed herself like a prologue. Her cloak gleamed sable to midnight, her lipstick could cut paper, and thelittle diamond points on her teeth winked like a secret. She stood in the doorway of the tea shop as if it were a theater and we were late to our cue.
“Darling,” she trilled, sweeping us in with one jeweled hand. “Refreshments before ruin.”
“Can we skip the ruin?” Twobble asked, head popping out from behind a tower of biscuit tins. He wore earmuffs. Bright blue. Fuzzy. In August.
“You look ridiculous,” Skonk told him, adjusting his own tiny scarf with terrible dignity.
“It’s called ‘preparation,’” Twobble sniffed. “Luna said to pack for cold.”
“What about that ruby dangling around tour neck?” Skonk questioned.
Twobble cupped it protectively. “I deserve pretty things in these trying times.”
Nova leaned her staff by the hearth, the green in her eyes calm as river moss. “The threshold will not wait for us to be ready,” she said. “Best that we move before midnight.”
“I was born ready,” Stella said, which in her case might actually be true. She turned, drew herself up taller, and pointed a commanding finger toward the back parlor. “Limora, darling! Curtain up.”
