I scowl. “I hadn’t thought about it…maybe we should go over to the hotel and put some protection spells there?”
But then what about Erica, or anyone else in the town? Would this creeper go that far?
I blow out my cheeks. “The worst thing is just not knowing where he is, or what’s going to happen next, while still trying to get this business going. It was the last of my money, my one shot to start a new life, and if I flop, I’ll have to move back in with my parents—”
She interrupts me with a raspberry. “Yeah, that’s not happening. If things go to shit, you can work for me at the hotel for a while until you figure it out. But thingsaren’tgoing to go to shit.”
I purse my lips and stare down at the sign. My eyes burn, and it’s hard to hide the emotion welling up inside me. The fear of failure. The fear of the unknown.
“Hey, dude,” Renee says, grabbing my hand. “I know there’s a lot of uncertainty, but guess what?”
I swallow back the lump trying to grow in my throat. “What?”
“Uncertainty is the only place miracles can happen,” she says with a bright smile.
I chuckle. “How so?”
“If you plan your life so there’s no uncertainty anywhere, are you really leaving space for the biggest, most wonderful, unimaginablethings to happen? And what if they come wrapped in a different package? Like, what if this warlock business is a blessing in disguise?”
I set the paintbrush down. “Like he blows himself up outside the shop and gets me national attention as the only bookstore to have someone self-immolate outside it?”
She blinks a few times. “That’s super dark, but yeah, something like that.”
I grumble and grab my phone to check the cycle tracking app. Ah, great…here we go again.
“What is it?” Renee asks.
I flip over my phone and put on a pleasant face. “Nothing.”
She cocks an eyebrow. “Really? ’Cause it looks like you just found shit in your bed.”
I turn the device back over and push it toward her. There’s a big half-crying, half-angry face over today’s date and a red line that runs through the calendar for about a week. She squishes her green-painted lips to one side as she wrinkles her nose.
“I’m inthat time,” I say. “It’s hard to notice sometimes until I get called out.”
“Sorry,” she mumbles as she pushes back the phone. “Anything I can do?”
I shake my head. “It’s just this way. Sometimes better, sometimes worse.”
“Well, I’m here for you no matter what kind of day you’re having,” she says.
There goes the waterworks again…
I smile through the shimmering haze in my eyes and thank her before getting back to painting. After finishing our signs, we wrap up the materials for the day, and she tries to invite me out for karaoke night at her bar.
“I’m not really a public singing person on a good day,” I say.
“Yeah, no one else here is, either.”
We share a laugh, but she doesn’t insist, and I’m really glad I didn’t have to shut her down any harder. I walk her to the back door and sigh in relief when I can drop the mask and just let myself be as I am.
Suddenly, I hear the water turn on upstairs, followed by music. But not just any music.
It’s Bastian.
He’s singing.
twenty-nine
