Papa popped his head into the kitchen and asked what he could do to help. I had him pull an enormous bag of flour from the storage closet. He was great for muscling things around. He set it out by my industrial mixer and got it opened and ready for me. I had him get the dining room ready, moving the chairs down from the tables and setting up the napkin holders and setting out the sugar caddies. We made a great team.
I set to work for a few hours, and the world shrank to flour and eggs and the rhythm of mixing, folding, rolling. Oscar read the orders aloud and double-checked every measurement. He even taste-tested the kolache filling, though I caught him sneaking some strawberry jam just for pleasure.
Papa headed out just after the open sign went on and the bell over the door started ringing.
The morning sped by, one perfect pastry at a time. And as had come my routine, I felt…prepared. Not just for the bakery, or the ceremony, but for whatever hell the world wanted to throw at me next.
Bring it on, I thought. I was ready.
The bakery always grew quiet after the first rush, the air thick with the ghosts of cinnamon and butter, the sun rising slow and lazy across the checkered tiles. I wiped the counters and let mymind drift, watching the dust motes spin in the pale beam slicing through the front window. Oscar, who had decided the best place for a familiar was directly in the patch of morning sunlight, perched on the prep table and looked every bit the dignified familiar, if you ignored the crumb of cheese danish clinging to his whiskers.
“Miss,” he said, after clearing his throat twice for effect. “If I may, now might be an ideal moment to take another look at the grimoire. There’s so much we haven’t gotten to. It’s usually quiet until eleven, and the protection wards are fully engaged.”
I dried my hands and eyed the battered, iron-clasped book sitting on the shelf behind the prep table. “You make it sound like we’re about to perform a heart transplant, Oscar.”
He cocked his head, whiskers quivering. “In a way, we are. The book is at the heart of your legacy. We must treat it as such.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I walked over, running my fingers over the tooled leather. It looked ancient, older than any book I’d seen, and the sigil on the cover still glowed faintly when I brushed it. “Alright. Let’s maybe figure out why the Wyrdmother wants it so bad.”
Oscar hopped closer, his beady eyes sharp and bright. “Perhaps it is not the book itself, but the knowledge locked within.”
I pulled up a stool and grabbed a safety pin from the counter. I gave my thumb a little poke and let the small bead of blood smear on the clasp and flipped it open, as carefully as I could. I wiped my thumb clean and started turning pages. There were notes in the margins, diagrams, stains of old herbs and maybe a scorch mark or two. My mother’s handwriting danced across half the pages, but what caught my attention were the blank sheets.
Except, they weren’t blank. Not really.
I ran my palm over one, and it felt warmer than paper should. Not hot, but faintly alive, like it was waiting for something. I frowned and turned to Oscar. “Why would there be blank pages between written pages in a spellbook? Wouldn’t you want to fill every bit of space with something useful?”
He considered. “Some witches leave room for future generations, Miss. But more often, it’s a sign of spells too dangerous to be written openly. Hidden in plain sight, as it were.”
The notion made my skin crawl, but I couldn’t help myself. I flipped another page, then another, each blank but not empty. My fingers tingled. I leaned in closer, nose almost to the page, and caught the faintest whiff—iron and roses and something sharp, like ozone before a thunderstorm.
“You ever see this before?” I asked.
Oscar shuffled to the edge of the book and sniffed. “There is something locked within,” he whispered, his voice more reverent than I’d ever heard. “It’s waiting for the correct key.”
The bell above the door chimed, making me jump. A customer—just a regular, here for kolaches and coffee—poked his head in, exchanged the usual pleasantries, and left with a box of pastries so quickly I hardly remembered the exchange.
When I returned to the grimoire, it was as if it had inched closer, eager for attention. The light in the bakery flickered as clouds passed, and the faint glow from the page seemed to pulse with every breath I took.
I flipped another leaf and felt a sting on my thumb—a paper cut, quick and clean. I cursed under my breath, bringing the finger to my lips, but a bead of blood had already welled up and fallen onto the page.
At that instant, the room shifted.
The blood drop sizzled, spreading thin as ink across the paper. Black words began to crawl up from the point of contact,letters twisting and unfurling, coalescing into a script that was at once familiar and deeply wrong. Wisps of dark smoke rose from the book, curling into the shape of words and sigils I’d never seen. The air smelled of burnt sugar and grave dirt, and my heart jackhammered in my chest.
“Bloody hell,” Oscar muttered, eyes wide.
The script that appeared was jagged, the lines trembling as if fighting to stay anchored in this world. I tried to read it, but my eyes slid off the letters, my brain refusing to latch on. It was like looking at a word in a dream—you could see it, but couldn’t hold it.
Beneath the crawling text, in a frantic scrawl that could only be my mother’s hand, a message appeared, written over and over in the margins:
DO NOT READ
DO NOT FEED IT
WIPE IT AWAY NOW
My breath caught. I sprinted to the bathroom, thumb throbbing, and grabbed the little bottle of alcohol and a handful of cotton swabs from the medicine cabinet. I returned to the table and poured the clear liquid onto a cotton swab, pressing it to my bleeding thumb and then, hand shaking, dabbed at the drops of blood on the page.
