Not dropped—exploded. One second it was sitting on a back table, the next it was in about forty pieces on the hardwood floor, and the woman behind it was already on her feet with her hands fluttering and her face the color of a fire engine.
“Sorry! Sorry, I’m so sorry—“ The woman was already on her feet, hands fluttering, face crimson. She was tall, angular, dressed in a silk blouse and tailored slacks that belonged in a corporate boardroom, not a closed restaurant at eight-fifteen on a Tuesday night. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a bun so tight it looked painful. “It just—I didn’t mean to—she startled me when she opened the door and I?—“
“Jill.” A woman was already coming around the counter with a dustpan, moving with the easy calm of someone who swept up telekinetic accidents on a regular basis. “Breathe, baby. That’s the third glass this week and I’m running low on the good ones.”
“Gina,” Lori come over to me and pulled me into the room, “this is Jillian Porter. She breaks things.”
“I don’t—it’s not on purpose.” Jill pressed her palms flat on the table like she was trying to physically hold herself down. “It’s a stress response. My therapist says—well, my old therapist, I can’t exactly tell my new one that I’m—anyway.” She took a breath. “I’m Jill. I used to be a corporate lawyer and now I accidentally destroy glassware. It’s a whole thing.”
“Gina Ferraro.” I sat down across from her because Lori gave me a look that said sitting was not optional. “I see dead people, apparently. So.”
Jill’s eyes went wide. “Dead people? Like, plural?”
“Just the one so far. But she’s enough.”
“And this is Tammy,” Lori said, as the woman with the dustpan deposited the glass shards into a bin and set a margarita in front of me without being asked. Tammy was warm brown skin and gray locks and statement earrings the size of small chandeliers, and her smile had the wattage of someone who genuinely liked people, which I’d forgotten was possible.
“Welcome to the weird club.” Tammy squeezed my shoulder. “Amelia talked about you.”
“She did?”
“Mmhmm. Said you’d turn up eventually. Said you had the look.”
I didn’t know what “the look” was, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
Jill was watching me with the anxious focus of a woman who’d been waiting for someone else to be new so she wasn’t the newest anymore. “When did yours start?”
“Two days ago. Yours?”
“Six weeks.” Jill picked up her margarita, set it down, picked it up again. “I was in a partners’ meeting in Boston. Someone told me I’d been passed over for the third time and I got so angry the conference room window cracked. Top to bottom, right down the middle. Fourteen people watched it happen.” She took a long drink. “I resigned the next day. Told them it was stress-related. Which, technically.”
“What did you do?”
“Googled ‘spontaneous telekinesis menopause’ at two in the morning. Which, for the record, gives you some very strange results.” She almost smiled. “Then I found an article aboutStarfall Bay, and something about it just felt—right. So I drove up. Lori found me my second day here, crying in the parking lot of the hardware store because I’d accidentally set off every car alarm in the row.”
Lori settled into a chair and accepted a margarita from Tammy. “I have a radar.”
“She has a radar,” Tammy confirmed. “She found me when I was twenty-two and didn’t know why I could see colors around people’s heads. Thought I was having migraines.”
“Aura reading,” Lori said, for my benefit. “Tammy sees auras.”
“Among other things.” Tammy winked. “But auras are my bread and butter. I can tell when someone’s lying, when they’re sick, when they’re falling in love. Makes me hell at poker.”
I looked around the table at these three women—a retired nurse, a former lawyer, and a restaurant owner who could see your emotional state like it was a paint swatch. A week ago, I’d been eating cereal alone and feeling sorry for myself. Now I was drinking margaritas with a coven.
“So here’s how it works,” Lori said, once the margaritas had been topped off and Jill had only rattled her glass once. “We look out for each other. We train together. We help new arrivals get control of their abilities before they accidentally level a building.”
Jill winced. “That’s not—has that actually happened?”
“Nineteen-eighty-seven.” Tammy sipped her margarita. “Before my time, but the old-timers talk about it. A pyrokinetic went through menopause and the library caught fire. They rebuilt it with sprinklers.”
“The point,” Lori said, giving Tammy a look, “is that you’re not alone, and you don’t have to figure this out by yourself. Control takes practice. Early manifestations are messy. That’s normal.”
“We meet here every Tuesday,” Tammy added. “After I close up. Sometimes more often if someone’s having a rough patch. And Lori does one-on-one training sessions for the new folks.”
“Training sessions.” I turned the word over. “Like supernatural tutoring.”
“Like learning to drive,” Lori said. “You’ve got the keys, you just need someone to teach you how to steer before you run into a telephone pole.”
