Prologue
The witch stood in the forest, staring at the earthen rift. People would die; such a thing was inevitable now. The furrows in the earth were deep enough that a noxious goop not unlike congealing blood began to burble to the surface.
Several hobs popped into the small clearing nearest the furrow.
“What have you done?”
“That’s wretched.” One of the hobs gagged loudly.
“It had to be done,” the witch said mildly.
One hob, a tiny woman no more than a half meter tall, put her hands on her hips and glared at the witch. “Witches willdiefrom this.”
The goop oozed across the loamy soil, leaving plants withering with rot and disease. Despite the severity of the crime, the hobs were limited in what they could and could not do. Hobs, of course, were made by magic. They were the physical embodiment of the very thing that caused witches to come to Crenshaw. In essence, if magic were made sentient, it would be a hob—diminutive, omnipresent, and occasionally terrifying.
Not that most witches realized that! They had once, the first witches here in Crenshaw. The hobs painstakingly explained magic, built a castleto teach them lessons, showed them the rules, explained the whys and what-fors and if-thens, but witches started out as regular folk. Humans. And humans were remarkably obstinate. Over time, they’d decided they knew better, taken over the castle, and generally gone about mucking things up.
And this witch, this beastly selfish witch, had ripped a hole in the ground so poison spilled out into the haven that magic—thathobs—had made for their progeny. For really, that was what witches were, difficult foolish children of magic. No matter that magic healed their bodies and made their lives last for centuries. No matter that they had everything they had needed in this small safe hamlet.
The witch walked away, singing cheerily, as if poisoning the very earth that sustained witches was something jovial.
“Do we fix it?” one of the hobs mused.
The general muttering that rose up continued for some time, until one hob—Clancy by name—said, “No. We do not. They need to face consequences for their dimwitted actions.”
“It wasonewitch!” a sweeter hob pointed out.
“Was it, though?” Clancy looked around at his fellow hobs. “Quite a lot of them talking about going back to whence they came.”
Hobs exchanged looks. Going back, of course, would be dangerous. That was why Crenshaw existed in the first place, to prevent magical folk from going about in the unmagical world.
And that, as they say, was that. The fate of Crenshaw was in the hands of the witches now. They’d figure it out or die.
1Ellie
“Ellie!” Aunt Hestia’s voice cracked through the old farmhouse like a whip.
Elleanor Brandeau exhaled in relief. Every day, that insistent voice was like a pressure valve opening, easing the panic that Hestia would vanish.Again. As a younger woman, Hestia had disappeared without a trace for several years. The grumbling archaeologist upstairs rarely mentioned it, but Ellie thought about it every day.
Was this the day she’d be gone? Was this the day that everything fell apart?
There was a reason Hestia had gone, and until Ellie understood it, she would wrestle with anxiety. Despite her aunt’s insistence that she knew nothing about that missing time—and plenty of therapists telling Ellie that it was impossible to know—Ellie had doubts. More than that, perhaps, she had an irksome sense that there was an answer just at the edge of knowing.
As with every morning, Elleanor Brandeau was downstairs in the kitchen enjoying a bit of silence with a pot of overpriced coffee. As a teen, she would open Hestia’s door, just to make sure she was still there. Now, she was an adult, so she’d watch the automatic pot brew coffee in silence.
And wait.
Every day, the coffee clicked on at 6:00A.M.Hestia would wake by 6:15A.M.
Those fifteen minutes dragged out with a pressure Ellie hated. She’d wait patiently for both the summons and the caffeine.
Fine, maybe notexactlypatiently. Ellie watched the pot like a fox watched the hens that used to live in the coop out back. Unlike the fox that still crept around their empty backyard henhouse every so often, Ellie didn’t paw at the coffee pot. She’d wait for the coffee and her aunt, busy herself baking—today was fresh lemon scones—andwait.
“Is the coffee ready, El?” Hestia called from her upstairs lair.
“On the way!” Ellie smiled wider. Life was normal, steady.
Hestia had some sort of internal timer. By 6:15, she was usually awake and calling to Ellie. Until recently, she’d call out to have Ellie pour her a cup and then come to the kitchen so it was the “perfect temperature” when she walked into the oversized room. Lately, she’d had to wait to have it brought to her.
