“You’re kidding!” Malcolm’s delighted smile made her heart skip a beat. “Congratulations! What’s her name?”
Calli glanced down at the kitten. “Persephone.”
Hades barked, making the kitten jump up onto Calli’s shoulder.
“Persephone,” Malcolm repeated. “as in…” He set his teacup down but didn’t finish his thought.
Was he remembering what she’d told him last night? That familiars in her family didn’t show up until the witch or warlock fell in love? She began to feel hot as she remembered how their kiss had felt a few minutes ago. That wild, endless surge of…belonging. Yes, that’s what she’d felt. Like she belonged to Malcolm, and he belonged to her. As though her magic and his were linked.
But that wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be.
He was watching her, waiting for her to continue. She had to acknowledge the elephant in the room. The way her familiar had chosen a name that was forever entwined with his familiar’s.
So she shrugged and lied. “I have no idea why she chose that name..”
“Ah,” he said, and let the matter drop. But he looked between his dog and her cat, an unreadable expression passing over his face. “Okay, so… how about those magic lessons?”
She chuckled. “Not so fast. First, tell me everything you know about magic, everything your parents taught you.”
“Everything?”
“Yep. All of it. I’ll figure out where to go from there.”
He settled into the armchair. “I guess I’d have to start with the Wellesley witches who came from England…”
CHAPTER SIX
Malcolm’s family history was fascinating. Calli’s family had a long connection with magic as well, but it wasn’t recorded with the same amount of detail as his. He knew so much about his ancestors, about his past, and she was envious of that knowledge.
“My father and I used to pore over the family tomes,” Malcolm said, when she asked about where he’d learned all this. “Big, heavy, dusty things, each one with information on each witch or warlock and their histories. As a child it really captured my imagination, but when I lost my love of magic…” his lips quirked in a ghost of a smile, leaving the thought unfinished. “Strange, I haven’t thought of those books in years. Can you imagine that we brought them all the way from England and continued the tradition when we settled in Boston?”
Calli couldn’t. Her family certainly hadn’t done anything like that. Their history was more of an oral tradition, and that meant the farther back you went, the more the stories sounded more like, well, stories. She couldn’t help but feel a lot had been lost along the way.
“Neither the Wynters nor my mother who was from the Skycasters lineage kept records like that, at least not that I’m aware of.” She shrugged, but a part of her longed to have a sense of where she’d come from the way Malcolm did. “The closest we have are our family portraits. They chat with me sometimes about old family stories, but not often.”
She glanced away, feeling the embarrassment of being a hedge witch rise in her chest. She rarely felt ashamed of what she was, but whenever she met a blood witch or warlock, that old shame crept in.
“Hedge witches aren’t diligent at record-keeping,” she finally explained. “Most of my ancestors lived in the country and didn’t want their family histories put down on paper, especially when the witch hunts were popular. They had to be ready to pack up and leave at a moment’s notice. My grandmother said it was easier to hide in a city, but in the country, one’s magic was far more visible.”
“Yeah, but it hasn’t been that way for a long time,” said Malcolm. “Why don’t you record your histories now?”
“Tradition, I guess. The one time I’d brought it up with grandma, she said, ‘The stuff worth remembering gets remembered’ and left it at that.”
She stroked Persephone, who’d fallen asleep in her lap. Hades was snoozing beside Malcolm’s chair, head resting on his front paws.
Despite the somewhat dark nature of their conversation, she felt strangely at peace at that moment, as though there had never been a book tornado. Her books were back on the shelves, and no customers were disturbing them which was kind of unusual since lunchtime was usually busy. It was as though the town itself was giving them a moment to just…be. To get to know one another without something wild happening, or her accidentally hexing him.
“What was it like for you growing up?” she asked. “Did you attend any magical schools or have tutors at home?”
Malcolm leaned back in his chair, his expression a thoughtful one. “I suppose my childhood was pretty great. I didn’t attend any magical schools. My father taught me a lot at home while I attended non-magic schooling for the regular subjects like English, math, and science. My father had a true talent for spells and felt that made him the best possible teacher for me. I used to love to watch him work with magic.”
“That must have been inspiring, to learn from someone so talented.” She caught the frown that marred his handsome face at her words, and she switched subjects. “What about your mother? Was having a human mother difficult?”
His frown was replaced by a warm grin. “No, not in the way you think.”
Truly, she didn’t know what to think. Both of her parents had been hedge witches, and she’d never really spent much time outside of Moonstone. Non-magic humans tended to either love or fear magic, so obviously his mother would have been the former.
But she couldn’t picture Malcolm’s father as someone who would break the family rules to marry a human, not after how he’d described his father’s traditional warlock life and his expectations that his son would follow in his footsteps.
