This is real. You did this. Sold everything, quit your job, signed divorce papers, drove two thousand miles to buy a haunted Victorian inn sight-unseen because your great-aunt mentioned it needed saving.
When she put it that way, it sounded less like a fresh start and more like a magnificent midlife crisis.
Best midlife crisis ever.
“Too late now.” She shoved open the car door.
The salt air hit her full force, whipping dark hair into her face—hair that had started showing silver streaks she’d stopped bothering to hide. The wind carried the scent of the wild roses, sweet and heady, and beneath that, the green growing smell of things coming back to life after a long dormancy.
Her feet crunched on gravel as she approached the porch steps. They creaked under her weight but held. The front door was painted a deep teal, the brass knocker shaped to resemble a mermaid holding a shell. She touched it, and magic hummed beneath her fingertips—sleeping, waiting.
The door swung open before she could knock.
Of course, it did.
Avine stepped into a foyer that smelled of dust and decades of history. Faded wallpaper in a pattern of shells and waves. A chandelier hung from the ceiling, its crystals clouded but intact. A sweeping staircase curved up to the second floor, its banister dark with age. Furniture covered in white sheets stood sentinel in the parlor beyond, ghostly shapes in the dying light.
Hello, the house seemed to say. Or maybe, Finally.
“I’m losing it.” Avine rubbed her temples. The house didn’t argue.
She found the kitchen by instinct—or maybe the house guided her there, which was a thought she wasn’t going to examine too closely. The lawyer had said the deed would be waiting on the counter, and there it was: old parchment, heavy and official, smelling of sea and ancient intention. It made the fine hairs on her arms stand up.
Magic older than memory. Old when the Salem trials sent her ancestors fleeing west.
A pen sat beside the deed—an honest-to-god fountain pen, heavy and dark. Avine picked it up. Her fingers tightened around it.
Last chance to turn around. Drive to Seattle. Find an apartment. Get a normal job. Be a normal person.
She thought of her old life. The corner office. The expensive apartment. Fifteen years of marriage to a man who’d looked at her magic—the magic she’d dulled and dimmed and hidden to make him comfortable—and called it a hobby.
“Screw normal.” She signed her name.
Avine Bell. The ink glowed turquoise as it dried, bright as bioluminescence, pulsing once before fading back to black.
And then the world shifted.
The ink’s glow didn’t fade. It spread—racing across the parchment, down the counter, into the floorboards beneath her feet. Turquoise light pulsed through the wood, tracing patterns she half-recognized from her grandmother’s old books. Ley lines. Ward anchors. The magical infrastructure of a vast and sprawling network.
Avine stumbled back, catching herself on the kitchen island. The light raced up the walls, illuminating cracks in the plaster, making the old wallpaper glow from within. The chandelierin the foyer erupted into brilliance, every crystal catching and refracting the turquoise fire.
TWO
AVINE
The housebreathedaround her.
A presence stirred—enormous and patient, waking from a long slumber. Recognition passed between them, witch to building, and for a heart-stopping moment, Avine could have sworn the inn waslookingat her. Assessing. Deciding.
Then—acceptance. Complete, flooding through her like sunlight after a long winter.
The nervous tremor in her hands stilled. The anxiety that had been her constant companion for the entire drive—for months, if she was honest—released. In its place rose peace. Absolute and unwavering.
The wallpaper patterns shifted. The creaks of old wood turned from complaint to greeting. The musty smell lifted, replaced by roses and fresh ocean air.
Welcome home.
Her palm was pressed against the wall without her meaning to put it there. Heat spread from the contact—a handclasp, greeting after a long absence. The rightness of it sang through her bones.
