“This body didn’t come with an instruction manual. Gonna take some getting used to. But I always wanted to fly—”
“One of your wings is clipped, so don’t get too excited.”
She looks up at me, her eyes dilating in annoyance. “I thought you young people believed in personal freedoms.”
“You do not currently have the personal freedom to fly into a school bus. I actually don’t approve of wing clipping, but until recently, my boss, Mr. Horace Buckley, was your legal owner, and you did attempt to attack a couple of his clients—” I drag my hands down my face. “Oh my God, I’m trying to reason with a cockatoo.”
I scoop Doris up and walk over to a long, low bookshelf filled with paperbacks by Danielle Steel and Nora Roberts, plus several photographs, a crystal ball, and a big vase of dried flowers. The bird struggles in my grasp, so I help her perch on my wrist. The image that’s caught my attention is a beautiful young woman with long auburn hair wearing a slip dress and swinging a chubby baby around near the very waterfall I’m currently soaked in. The woman looks like me—and she looks like Mama.
“I sure was pretty, wasn’t I?” the voice asks, sounding wistful. “Then again, I guess it’s easy to be pretty when you’re young.”
I look from the bird to the photograph. I don’t want to ask the question I need to ask, because I know it’s absurd, but…I have to ask.
“Am I talking to my grandmother, and are you, um,possessingmy pet cockatoo?”
Doris—is it Doris, still?—clucks a laugh.
“That’s one way to put it. I had everything planned out withDiana. I was supposed to come back as my cat and become her second familiar.”
“A familiar? Like, the pet of a witch? And if you’re in there, where did Doris go?”
The cockatoo nearly falls off my wrist, so I gently place her on the floor. She fluffs her feathers and hesitantly walks around, her head bobbing. “Every witch needs a familiar. And if Doris is what you called your bird, then yes, I’m talking about her. As for where she went, I don’t know. I don’t think cockatoos have souls.”
“But they have feelings,” I argue, annoyed by this assumption. “She had a personality. She liked musicals.”
“Feelings and a love of musical theater are not a soul, honey. I’m sorry if you’re going to miss her, but hopefully you’ll be comforted by the fact that your grandmother performed a very complicated spell that—Well, it went totally wrong. But now that you’re here and you fumbled your way into the waterfall, at least I’m still around to teach you how to be a witch.”
The whole world goes silent in that moment.
I can hear a clock ticking, somewhere deeper in the apartment.
“I need a minute,” I say.
Leaving the cockatoo—the cockatoo that is apparently my estranged dead grandmother—to peck at her own rug, I run out the door and down the stairs to the alley, grumbling to myself.
“This can’t be happening. Weird-ass will, and no cavern behind the waterfall, and I’m wet and covered in dead grandma, and my pet bird is talking, but she’s actually speaking in sentences instead of Rodgers and Hammerstein lyrics. Maybe I have a brain-eating amoeba from the water and I’m hearing a disembodied voice—”
I have tunnel vision and am extremely preoccupied, whichmeans I run smack into someone, but they’re sturdy enough that we don’t go tumbling to the concrete. Instead, firm hands grasp my shoulders, and I flick my damp hair out of my eyes as I prepare to give somebody the what-for.
Oh.
It’s him. The guy who gave me the purse hanger. Hunter.
And he looks amused.
“Well, I’m not disembodied, if it makes you feel any better. Can’t be disembodied if you have a body,” he reasons.
And he does. Have a body. I have definitely noticed it. I was just momentarily pressed up against it. I’m very close to it right now. I’d like to—
Nope. Not now. I have bigger problems.
Leaving home for the first time, driving from Alabama to Georgia, being soaked to the bone, suddenly having a talking bird, inheriting a store that has no business existing, paying a salary to an absentee centenarian employee with money I don’t possess. What else could go wrong?
“Sorry. I’m having…a day.”
He looks me up and down with concern in his stormy gray eyes and apparently decides I’m not going to fall over, as he releases my shoulders. I immediately miss the way he made me feel all tingly and grounded. In that moment I realize that I’m farther away from everyone I love than I’ve ever been, and since I turned down Billy Wayne’s crappy proposal weeks ago, no one has touched me, beyond Colonel’s meaty handshake and Tina’s awkward hug this morning. I feel both disconnected and yet also right where I’m supposed to be, and these two sensations are playing tug-of-war with my heart.
The good-looking man standing before me knows none of this.
