“And here I thought this was a family history lesson,” I said, closing my notebook and reaching for a cookie. Rhi slapped my hand away with a flick of her towel.
“Give them a minute to cool, for Hecate’s sake, or you’ll burn your fingers off.”
I groaned. The cookies smelled divine. In fact, everything Rhi cooked smelled divine, and tasted even better. It was, by far, the best perk of living with a kitchen witch.
The scent of the cookies wafted through Lightkeep Cottage—fromRhi’s little kitchen kingdom through the snug library crammed full of spellbooks and magical histories, through the French doors to the vast gardens, where the scent of vanilla and raspberry mingled with the heavy perfumes of a thousand different blooms my mother tended. It drifted up the stairs into the fabric-draped depths of my Aunt Persephone’s room, as she leaned back from her sewing machine, swearing and sucking on her finger where an errant pin had pierced it. At last it found the curious nose of my own cat, Freya, who leapt down from my bed to investigate whether she might be able to partake in Rhi’s most recent creation. A moment later, she appeared mewling plaintively at my ankles.
“See? Freya appreciates a good tale of feline heroism,” Rhi said, gesturing to Freya, who was preparing to leap up onto the counter.
I caught her mid-leap and set her on the floor again. “I think what she appreciates is the smell of those cookies,” I corrected her. I lifted Freya back down, and she glared at me. Then, as though she had silently called for backup, the other resident cat, Diana, appeared in the kitchen and sat imperiously beside Freya. They looked like a pair of queens awaiting their crowning.
“Ah yes, and the hero herself wants her reward, too, I see,” Rhi crooned, and began to break one of the cookies into little pieces so it would cool faster.
“So Diana is descended from the familiar in the story?” I asked. “That’s pretty cool.”
“Oh, it’s even cooler than you think,” Rhi said, smirking. “Dianaisthe familiar from the story.”
My mouth fell open. “Are you… you’re not actually… be serious.”
“I am utterly serious,” Rhi said absently. She made a kissing sound and Diana rose sinuously to her feet and leapt lightly onto the counter.
“You mean to tell me that cat is four hundred years old?!” I gasped.
“Oh, I think she’s much older than that,” Rhi said, holding the cookie crumbs out to Diana, who deigned to eat them. She then glared at me as she chewed, as though in silent disdain at my incredulity. “But don’t call her old, Wren. That’s rude.”
Rhi winked at me, and I laughed again. Every day, it seemed Idiscovered that some new impossibility was truth. At some point I was going to have to accept that it was just a part of my new normal.
Sedgwick Cove didn’t have a typical definition of “normal.” The tiny coastal town had been, from its very founding, a haven for the abnormal. The outcasts. The fairy tale villains turned friends and neighbors. Sedgwick Cove was the home of witches from all over the world, and my family, the Vespers, had been the very first. Drawn by the deep magic of this coastal place, our coven settled here only to discover that something else had settled here too—something ancient and evil that wanted the deep magic for its own. We called it simply The Darkness, and we kept it at bay by sealing a covenant with Vesper blood. As long as there were three Vesper witches in Sedgwick Cove, the Darkness could not take hold again.
And that worked… until recently.
Last spring when I turned sixteen, my grandmother Asteria had died, and my mom took me to Sedgwick Cove for the first time since I was a toddler. It was only then that I learned what my mother had run from—what she had kept from me my entire life: not only was I a witch, but I was powerful enough that the Darkness itself had been after me for years.
As far as I knew, I was just an awkward theater nerd with glasses and crippling stage fright, so this tidbit of information was a shock, to say the least.
But as it turned out, I was already acquainted with the Darkness. I knew him as the Gray Man, a mysterious figure from my childhood nightmares. When I returned to Sedgwick Cove, the Gray Man used my mother as bait to try to steal my power—power I still wasn’t convinced at the time that I even had. Then I sort of accidentally-on-purpose called the elements to save myself, my mother, and my friends; and to drive the Gray Man back into the shadows. It seemed my power was there all along.
Since then, I’d been trying to learn all I could—about myself, my coven, my town, and most importantly, my own abilities. As Rhi constantly reminded me, all of us Vespers were in uncharted territory here, magically speaking. Both my mother and my grandmother had triedto protect me in different ways. But it had become increasingly clear that I would have to learn how to protect myself.
Over the summer, I had learned that there were others who sought the deep magic of Sedgwick Cove, and would do anything to harness it. The Kildare coven had been banished centuries ago for wicked magic but, unbeknownst to the rest of the town, they had returned more than sixty years ago claiming to be another coven entirely. I’d come face to face with their descendant, Veronica Meyers, on the summer solstice. She had tricked me, lured me to the source of the deep magic, convinced that I would understand it and be able to control it.
But I didn’t understand it. I couldn’t control it. And if it wasn’t for my mother, my aunts, and my friend Eva’s kid sister Bea, I probably wouldn’t have lived to try. Veronica vanished, but none of us were foolish enough to think she was gone for good. And now we had another mystery on our hands—the source of the deep magic itself, and what to do now that we had unearthed it.
In the meantime, I was also learning what it meant to be a pentamaleficus—a witch of the five, who could command not just one element, but all five: earth, water, wind, fire, and spirit.
“It would probably be easier to guide you if there was a single living pentamaleficus here in Sedgwick Cove,” Rhi had said over an open spellbook one day, “but as far as we know, you’re the first since Sarah Claire herself.”
Sarah Claire. Those were footsteps I definitely did not want to follow in. And so, I’d done everything I could all summer and fall to make sure I did the exact opposite. I didn’t know where Veronica Meyers was, or what she and the Kildare coven were planning next—because, as Persi said, “They were sure as shit planning something,”—but I was determined to be as ready as I could be.
“I knew I smelled cookies!”
My mom had appeared in the doorway from the garden. Her face was streaked with smudges of earth, and she was sweating through her t-shirt, but her eyes were shining. She looked happy—really, soul-deep happy—for the first time that I could remember. It tookme by surprise, until I remembered that she was using her own magic for the first time after a decade of shoving it down into the dark places of herself.
“What are you smirking at?” she asked me, as she took the stool beside me and helped herself to a cookie.
“Oh, nothing,” I said, and crammed a cookie in my own mouth before she could interrogate me further. She didn’t need me to tell her why she was happy. It was plain to see in every lush, vibrant petal and vine out in the garden.
“How is it going in here?” my mom asked, looking between me and Rhi.
