Chapter 1. Caitlyn
My eyes flicked from my tattered notebook to the clock on the wall. Not a single customer had come into the shop in the past four hours, and it was unlikely that any would. The day of the Samhain summoning was always the quietest of the year. I would usually not have bothered opening... but hanging out in the shop beat hanging out at home.
Up until six months ago, I would have done anything to get out of covering a shift in the shop, which catered to the coven’s DIY needs. That was my mom’s passion.
But then one of the dormant houses decided that I was the witch it wanted to bond with...
... and then promptly regretted its decision.
But it was too late. The moment it opened its creaky old doors to me, it was my house, and I was its witch, and there was nothing either of us could do about it.
Which was why I now sat in the shop, feet perched on the counter, sucking my pen, staring at the ceiling and trying to come up with the missing ingredient for my Exploding Gum which was simmering away in the back room, instead of where it should be—if my house didn’t hate me—in my kitchen back home.
But I guessed it wasn’t all bad. Me covering so many shifts had given my parents the excuse to go on a long overdue vacation—the first they’d taken since the responsibility of the shop had landed on their laps almost a decade ago.
The shop had once belonged to my aunt and uncle, who were murdered while on vacation in Headless Hollow. It should have gone directly to my cousin Jen, but for some reason none of us could fathom, she’d confessed to killing her parents—which was impossible.
Jen simply couldn’t have done it.
But unfortunately for Jen, the mortal police had handled the initial investigation before any of the supernatural authorities could get to her, and she’d been swept up into the mortal legal system.
And when our head of coven, the formidable Ms. Lily Cole, led the charge to break Jen out of the mortal prison, we were met by an impenetrable, unidentifiable protective magic that none of us could breach, which meant poor Jen had to remain in the mortal prison and serve her time.
It didn’t help that she’d refused to see any of us and hadn’t responded to a single correspondence.
So, my family took over the shop, each of us counting down the days until Jen got out and we could hand back the keys.
During my aunt and uncle’s time, the shop had been a bookstore, catering to the coven’s smutty book fixes for almost two decades.
Unfortunately, the romantic gene had skipped my side of the family.
Despite Mom and me being part succubus, and my dad being a full-blooded incubus demon, our collective ability to recommend books capable of causing heart flutters or awakening new kinks was practically nonexistent. So, the shelves were cleared. My aunt and uncle’s stock was boxed up and put into the basement, and the shop was restocked with more pragmatic offerings, such as hammers, nails, power tools, and a rotating selection of useful odds and ends—provided, of course, that you could bribe your sentient house into allowing renovations.
I shuddered at the thought of suggesting moving some of the centuries-old dusty crap in my house, let alone asking to do some DIY, and promptly put the thought to the back of my mind.
Instead, my thoughts drifted to theothersentient house we were responsible for. Not only were we minding the shop until Jen got out of prison, but we were also caretakers of her family home, which still remained in Headless Hollow waiting for Jen to return.
And a few years ago, I’d had a genuinely excellent idea on how to set Jen up for the future.
It might have involved atinybit of exploitation.
Okay—maybe alotof exploitation.
Before the summer her parents died, all Jen ever talked about was summoning her mate. And unless she’d somehow managed to turn the tin toilet in her cell into a makeshift cauldron—and work around whatever suppressing magic was wrapped around that prison—I doubted she’d done much summoning during her sentence.
When she got out, she’d have to start from scratch. The bookshop would need reopening, the stock we’d saved in the basement was a decade out of date, and while her parents had left her some money, it wasn’t nearly enough to catch up in this economy and provide a life for her and her new mate.
So, I might have turned her family home into a novelty vacation stay.
Which the sentient house wasnotthrilled about.
BooDini—the house’s manifestation in the form of a cute, little bedsheet ghost—took quite a bit of convincing. But once I explained that the income would help Jen start over when she was releasedandthat BooDini wassupposedto scare the guests away, it agreed.
It turned out BooDini was exceptional at its job. I hadn’t had a single guest last twenty-four hours, let alone the week-long minimum stay. The rental quickly became a near-cult-level vacation spot and was fully booked up to the furthest date theapp allowed, with a growing backlog of eager applicants waiting for a cancellation.
Which reminded me—I’d had a notification earlier about my latest cancellation.
I pulled up the ScareBnB app and opened the message from the chimera shifter who’d booked the cabin for the next two weeks only to now announce that a“very important and completely unavoidable”issue had come up. And since I only offered refunds if a cancellation was made at least forty-eight hours before the start of the stay, that meant another healthy chunk of cash going straight into Jen’s got-out-of-jail pot.
