“What do you mean?”
He leans back slightly, amused. “Don’t you know?”
I truly do not. “Please be explicit, or I might misunderstand.”
“I’d love to be explicit, but for now I’ll be polite. I’m saying that you’re beautiful, and I want to spend time with you. A lot of time. Alone.”
The pen slips from my hand. It rolls off the edge of the desk, gliding across a famous tapestry—“The Unicorn in Captivity”—re-created on my rug.
“Um.”
He arches an eyebrow. “Now you’re the one who will have to be more explicit.”
I swallow a shaky lungful of air. Bats and rats and frogs, Iam at terribly loose ends. “I…ah…it isn’t that I don’twantto. You are very”—I gesture to him—“but, ah, this is moving fast, don’t you think? Until this week, you didn’t talk to me much unless you were asking me to go on your podcast to discuss writing fictional magic systems.” An offer I’ve refused, since I abhor talking about myself but even more abhor talking about writing. The inevitable querySo what’s next? What are you working on now?would make me physically ill. If I throw up on Morgan Angelopoulos, he’ll definitely start drawing his curtains closed every night.
“Until this week, that’s all you noticed,” he replies. “But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been noticingyoufor quite a while now. For me, this isn’t sudden at all. It’s overdue. But I don’t want to move faster than you’re comfortable with, so I’ll leave you with something to think about, and my phone number in your call history.”
I press my lips together, not trusting myself to speak.
He lets a weighty pause drop. The corner of his mouth twitches with a velvety “Good night, Zelda.”
The call disconnects.
Crack!
It’s the third of July, and above, an aptly named Thunder supermoon glows vividly when it shouldn’t be visible during a storm at all. The huge white rock is melodrama in the night, rain lashing sideways. Below, glow-in-the-dark footprints trace a path along the road from a murder mystery dinner theater’s door all the way to the Moonville tunnel. They were painted to give the illusion of ghosts having a stroll, trapping moonlight. Right now, they twinkle to suggest an invisible traveler isdancing in the rain. My gaze traipses from the footprints and up the front of the green Victorian, latticed with roses, to the second floor. An irresistible pull.
Our eyes meet again as lightning breaks, thunder follows, and somethingalivehappens to the globe string lights that hang high over the road, connecting the roofs of Wafting Crescent and The Magick Happens. Like a flurry of miniature wings, dime-bright, undulating from one bulb to the next.
I shoot to my feet with a start, but before I can get a closer look, all the power drains from my lamps, the Smithsonian channel on TV—as always, muted with captions on—my row of haunted house luminaries. I’m left in darkness with only the spatter of rain.
I crank the windowpane until it pushes outward, then lean out as far as I dare. Raindrops tap the sill. Already, there’s a calm spreading across the sky, rain slowing.
The string lights have burned out, but other than that, they look perfectly ordinary. Nobody is out and about. The storm must have caused an electrical burst, or my eyes are playing tricks on me. I shake my head, forbidding myself from opening my laptop tomorrow. I need a break.
You don’t have time for a break, an inner voice murmurs.You haven’t even started.
Sighing, I grope through the darkness for my silver skull lighter and a candle. I’ve got dozens of them—normal, nonmagical tapers—that I use for my pair of candelabras with ravens carved into their bases. But instead of regular tapers, my hand finds a different candle instead. The only one in the room that claims to be enchanted.
Gilda Halifax, a cherished nemesis of my grandmother’s, gave this candle to me last week for my thirty-second birthday. It’s a cumbersome, lumpy, graying thing—nothing at all like the candles Luna creates with her lively colors and pretty molds. Gilda said that Grandma made it many years ago and would want me to have it. I’m still not sure what that means. The candle’s name, according to an attached tag, is a little cryptic.
“Here goes nothing,” I mumble, clicking the lighter.
I glance askance at the window asLet the Strange Inrips into a high, thin, orange-red flame the precise color of my hair; the silhouette of Morgan flashes again in the lightning’s blaze, violin under his chin, then abruptly disappears with it in the space of a heartbeat.
Long after, my goose bumps haven’t eased, the back of my neck still prickling with the invasive tingle of being watched. It feels as if it’s coming from somewhere farther away than the house across from mine on Vallis Boulevard. The sudden, strange idea sweeps through my head that whatever is looking through my window now is something that flickers all the way up in the sky, with the lightning—and that is how I know that sixty-five days in Moonville is exactly how long it takes to start seeing things that aren’t there, once again.
Two
The waters of Twinstar Fork swell with love magic at the full moon. Pour three tablespoons of midnight into a birch bowl with a smooth stone at the bottom. Drink half, then offer the rest to a garter snake. For the following minute, enunciate your words carefully and your One True Love will hear whatever it is you say, from wherever it is that they are.
Love Magic Misc.,
Tempest Family Grimoire
“Damn. I gotmy hopes up for nothing.” Luna pulls back from the box in resignation, forehead pinched.
“Another one for the wall.” I pluck the key from her and add it to its mismatched fellows hanging from hooks on the shop’s storeroom door. “We’re building a nice collection here.”
