“The crystal residue is here, certainly. Cassie’s energy signature.” She turned the phone over, studied it like a scientistexamining a particularly unusual specimen. “But this… this is something else entirely.”
“Something else like WHAT?”
“Like bloodline magic.” She looked up at me, and there was something in her expression—curiosity, yes, but also a flicker of recognition. “The crystal didn’t create this, dear. It woke something up. Something that was already there.”
“Nothing was ‘already there.’ I don’t have magic. I have a cat whose judgmental expressions I’ve started narrating in my head, a job at a winery and an apartment that I can barely afford. I’m completely ordinary.”
“Mmm.” Margaret didn’t look convinced. “Tell me about your grandmother.”
“Which one?”
“Either. Both.”
“Abuela Rosa was a saint who made incredible tamales and thought astrology was the devil’s work. Grammy Martinez was a Methodist from Minnesota who collected ceramic cats. Neither of them were WITCHES.”
“And great-aunts? Any of those?”
I opened my mouth to say no, and then stopped.
Great-Aunt Rosalinda. Abuela’s sister. The one nobody talked about except in whispers, usually followed by the sign of the cross. I’d met her once, at a family reunion when I was maybe six. She’d looked at me with dark, knowing eyes and said something in Spanish that made my mother hustle me away.
Para la hija que gira.For the daughter who spins.
I hadn’t thought about that in decades. Why was I thinking about it now?
“There was…” I swallowed. “Tía Rosalinda. But she died when I was a kid. And she wasn’t a witch, she was just… strange. People said she could see things.”
“What kind of things?”
“I don’t know. Love things. Who belonged with who. My mom said she predicted half the marriages in her village.” I laughed, but it came out wrong. “Family legend stuff. Not real.”
Margaret and Cassie exchanged a look.
“Matchmaking magic runs in families,” Margaret said carefully. “It’s rare, but when it manifests, it’s powerful. And it tends to skip generations.”
“I’m not a matchmaker. I can’t even match my own SOCKS.”
“The gift doesn’t care about socks, dear.”
Luna, who had been suspiciously quiet, chose this moment to hop onto the coffee table and fix me with her unsettling golden stare.
“The magic is responding to you,” she said. “To your energy. It’s generating options because that’s what you’re putting out—a signal, like a beacon. Every romantic possibility you’ve ever brushed against is answering the call.”
“How do I make it STOP answering?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it.” Margaret set down my phone, which immediately started vibrating toward the edge of the table like it was trying to escape. “I’ll need to do some research. In the meantime, try not to match with anyone else.”
“I’M NOT MATCHING WITH ANYONE. THE APP IS DOING IT BY ITSELF.”
“Then try not to think about romance.”
“There’s a TEENAGER doing JUMPING JACKS on my LAWN.”
We all looked out the window. Jimmy had moved on from calisthenics and was now examining my garden gnome with great suspicion.
“Your gnome looks different than I remember,” he called out. “Did you get a new one? This one seems… angrier.”
The gnome did look angry. I’d bought it at a garage sale last spring, mostly because it reminded me of my boss Valentina—tiny, aggressive, and perpetually unimpressed.
