The vagaries of what talent did what seemed to be an accident of genetics, but Cat loved that the twins were always trying to push what was possible.
“There’s cold soup!” Siobhan declared from the fridge, holding up a Tupperware with a vaguely red substance in the bottom of it. Cat looked from that to the cauldron. “Toast is good.”
Toast hadn’t been good for almost a month when Niamh was experimenting with doughs. Cat could never tell if she was getting a failed potion or regular bread, but now that Niamh was on soups, she could go back to bread for a while.
She made herself some toast on the sideboard, and Annie immediately stole one as she said, “I forgot!”
“What?” Cat asked as she put another piece of bread into the toaster. “Anyone else? Burned bread?”
Annie shuddered. “You don’t have to call it that. Words matter, you know?”
Cat snickered. Words didn’t matter to Cat nearly as much as they did to Annie.
“It’s accurate, though,” Cat said. “First, you bake the bread until it’s perfectly done, and then you re-bake the bread until it’s brown.”
“I forgot to tell you.” Annie leaned over and started digging through endless papers on the huge kitchen island in the middleof the room, big enough to seat everyone on rickety stools around it.
Annie pulled out a couple of booklets the size of a regular piece of paper in glossy colors.
“What is this?” Cat said as she tried to swipe one.
“I opened the envelope because the dude on the phone said that I should. He’s the rep from the book company.”
Cat finally got a look at one. Her job for theCauldron and Broomwas ordering inventory. With her divination talents, she often sourced new stock for the best prices. Books weren’t the biggest part of their inventory—that was the candles and incense—but they were probably a third of the business. They’d specialized in philosophy and all sorts of self-improvement literature. This was a new vendor she’d solicited information from.
“He called three times asking to talk to you. He really wants to talk to you,” Annie said.
Cat nodded and ate her toast as she flipped through the brochure. They seemed to be heavy on astrology of multiple kinds, as well as tarot cards and dream interpretation. If she didn’t know better, she thought a divination witch had written this.
There were a couple of titles she hadn’t heard of before, and the quality looked okay, though you could never really tell. The brochure was printed well.
She examined the card on the front. “Dennis Hitchens, sales rep. I’ll call him.”
“Like now? Because if he calls the store that many times when Dylan’s working, she’s going to smite him over the phone.”
“Telekinesis doesn’t work over the phone,” Siobhan declared from her greenhouse off the kitchen. It was really just the back, south-facing corner of the house where they installed a bunch of windows, and Siobhan had filled it with shelves of plants.
“Well, she would try,” Annie said, and Cat laughed.
Dylan was younger than her, another stray taken in during high school. She’d known about witches and telekinesis, but her coven had fallen apart, and rather than be taken over by another coven—the usual thing that happened if a family lost power—Dylan refused to toe the line and ended up 400 miles away from California in downtown Denver, shoplifting things out of an electronics store. A Denver police officer was still trying to figure out how she’d lifted some of them.
Fortunately, there was a sympathetic judge in the system the twins had met years ago who looked out for unusual cases. After a stint in juvenile detention, she came to Silver Spring. She was the angriest, prickliest, craziest witch of all of them.
“Is she there now?” Cat asked.
A couple of witches nodded.
“I will tell her to give him my number. No worries.”
She finished the toast and looked around at a loss for what to do. Normally, she would have orders to take in at the store, but no truck was getting to town until Friday after that kind of blizzard, which meant there was no new inventory.
Sometimes she helped with the online orders, the majority of their business, but no mail would leave Silver Spring either until tomorrow at the earliest. She could stop by the coffee shop, the bookshop, or the library, or she could catch one of the yoga classes a crazy hippie ran out of the back of her house, but nothing seemed to appeal.
She loved the simple life in a small town. She loved that she could call on anyone for help if she needed it, and when she didn’t love it and it got too much, she loved that there were literally miles of forest around them where she could disappear anytime she wanted.
For some reason, this morning she was itchy. The simple pleasures in town didn’t hold her interest, and she didn’t wantto go into the great outdoors. She’d fully topped up on her dose of both cross-country skiing and snowshoeing for the month at least.
She took a deep breath. “I’m going to take a shower.”
