Page 120 of The Blue Moon Café & 24-Hour Occult Emporium

With a mug of Earl Grey steaming beside her, she took a look at her notes. Because the Cake as You Like It recipe had no instructions, she’d scoured the Internet looking at various cake recipes. Her plan was to try one, see if it sparked any magic, and if not, go on to the next. As she mixed up a batter, she focused on the only clue that Kiki’s book had given her:

Make it what you want, how you want it.

While her first cake was in the oven, Talula examined the next magical recipe. Thanks to weeks of Jinn vocabulary practice, she finished the translation in less than an hour. It helped that there were only five ingredients:

There’s Always Time for Fresh Scrambled Eggs

Butter

Five eggs

Salt

Pepper

Cheese optional, but optional cheese is for fools

The recipe’s first step was inexplicably detailed…and puzzling.

Begin by ensuring freshness. Pour water into a glass. Drop one whole egg (shell and all) into the glass. Focus on what makes an egg fresh. When the egg sinks to the bottom of the glass, remove it and repeat for every egg. Then proceed to the next step.

There was no marginalia here. No coy Kiki clue. Talula frowned as the oven timer went off. She set the cookbook aside to decipher later and pulled the cake out of the oven.

Talula thought back to the first of Simon’s illusion lessons: Powerful illusions can convince the systems of the body to react to illusions as though they’re real.

Talula drew up her magic, envisioning her cake as a four-tiered confection covered in rainbow sprinkles. But nothing happened. Again and again, Talula imagined a new version of the cake (as she liked it), but the same cake just continued to cool on the counter. Frustrated, she grabbed a fork and took a bite. Talula coughed. It was bad. The flavor was essentially sweetened cardboard, the texture akin to a grocery-store muffin that had just…given up.

Maybe the cake’s the problem, she thought. She put on a pump-up playlist, took a moment to marvel at the café’s new speakers, then started working with the next set of instructions and measurements.

Which is how Talula wound up baking three tragically mediocre cakes in one morning. She lined them up on one of the prep tables, glaring at them like they’d purposefully thwarted her magical baking efforts.

“You’re a disappointment to your entire species,” she informed the cakes. She pretended they looked ashamed of themselves.

Then the café’s golden bell rang out.

Talula froze. Dahlia?

She rushed out of the Employees Only door.

But it wasn’t Dahlia, tragically unkissed, standing in the Blue Moon Café & 24-Hour Occult Emporium that Thursday morning before Halloween. It was, in fact, the last person Talula had ever expected to enter the occult café’s premises.

“Wow.” Mrs. Bochart looked around with genuine admiration. “This place sure looks better than the last time I was here.”

Talula blinked hard. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. After that, she did as much of the stroke test as she could remember.

“One cocoa, please,” Pine Hollow’s best baker said without a trace of animosity.

Talula felt like she was in one of those dreams that didn’t make any sense, but the dreamer had no choice but to play along anyway. So Talula, following dream logic, gave a dazed kind of nod and reached for her hot cocoa materials.

“Do you know why this place is called the Blue Moon?” Mrs. Bochart asked, leisurely perusing the occult displays.

“I don’t think so?” Talula replied. What is happening?

“It had some hippie-dippie name before, like The Wheel Turns Café or something. But then one night, not long after I had my third kid in three years, your mother asked me what it was like to be so…lordy, how’d she put it? ‘Epically life-giving.’ ”

Talula gaped, captivated by the completely impossible words coming out of Mrs. Bochart’s mouth.

“I told her, ‘If Bocharts know one thing, it’s baking. If it’s another thing, it’s baby-making.’ ” Mrs. Bochart chuckled. “That made your mother laugh. She told me that in all her millennia of existence, she’s never been able to conceive. She said it was one magic that she’d never get to experience. I said, maybe it’ll happen. Maybe you need a special mystical something or other to be able to put one in the oven. Maybe it’s just got to be a very special blue moon.” Finally, Mrs. Bochart turned to Talula, her face kind and open. “Then, a few years later, she started to look a little moon-shaped herself. With you. And this place got a new name.”