Page 138 of The Blue Moon Café & 24-Hour Occult Emporium

Shock sent Talula into a whole new level of panic. Time was ticking away, and they had more questions than answers. “What does that mean?”

“We don’t have time for this,” Simon growled. “Kiki, now that you’re here, can’t we wish for Damien and his minions to be eaten by syphilitic walruses or something?”

“No,” Kiki snapped. “No wishes, no big enchantments. Never again.”

Simon barked. “Everyone’s in danger! Why can’t you just—”

“Because granting wishes is what got us in this mess in the first place!” The café walls shook with the jinn’s cry.

Kiki forced themself to look Talula in the eye. “I made it. The map. And the cuffs. He asked, and I had to…I had to. But I made sure there were loopholes he didn’t think of. The map never showed the same prime meridian twice. Borders between places were sometimes manmade, sometimes geologic, sometimes astronomic. But he figured it out. Every time, he figured it out, and I will never, ever forgive myself.”

A brutal silence spilled out over the café. Kiki turned away, covering their face with their hands. Simon just stared, stunned. Talula’s heart wrenched, but something tickled at her mind. She felt like she was looking at another riddle-ridden recipe. Something was there for her to understand, but she couldn’t quite see it.

Dahlia shoved an order pad and a pen in her face. “Write something in Jinn. Something you read in the cookbook.”

Puzzled, Talula wrote the word for salt on the order pad. Dahlia snatched it away and compared it to a page of the cookbook. “Look.”

The writing was identical, down to the swoop and slant of each letter.

Talula gasped. Then she wrote another word, “garlic.” She flipped the pages back to the first recipe. There it was again, as if she’d written it herself.

Which, Talula realized, somehow she had.

“Kiki didn’t write the cookbook,” Dahlia confirmed. “You did.”

Kiki and Simon both turned to Talula, jaws dropped.

“But the book is ancient; how could I have written it?” Talula felt even more lost.

“I don’t think you wrote it. I think you will write it,” Dahlia explained. “The eggs prove it.”

Confusion was giving Talula a headache. “What eggs?”

“The eggs you made this morning.” Dahlia hopped on her feet excitedly. “You used the ones in the fridge, right? They were old, like beyond old. They were in the fridge when I moved in. That’s why I wanted to throw them at Kristen.”

“That’s disgusting,” Kiki observed. “I’m glad to see you, but that is disgusting.”

“Am I going to get food poisoning before we’re murdered?” Talula groaned.

“No, just listen.” Dahlia pulled up a webpage on her phone. “I read the notes you left behind at my house, and I looked it up. Old eggs float. Fresh ones sink. You didn’t just restore these eggs. You turned back time for them.”

“That’s impossible—” Simon started to say, but he cut himself off. “Talula almost chucked someone into a volcano.”

Frustrated, Talula threw up her hands. “And I’m still sorry about it! But is this really the time to bring that up?”

“When you were working the Volta that night, you were looking for Pompeii. We saw a volcano.” Simon paced. “What if you were at the right place, but the wrong time?”

“Also, you sent me to Monaco in the nineteen twenties.” Kiki shrugged. Everyone turned to the jinn, wearing matching faces of shock. Kiki hooked their thumbs behind their old-school suspenders as if to say See?

Dahlia spoke, eyes glittering. “This book had all the information you needed for random things only you could have known after the fact. Like the health inspector’s quiche love and Damien’s mango allergy. It taught you through food and little phrases that only became meaningful at the right place and the right time. You wrote this book. Or, you will write this book. That has to mean something.”

“It means,” Kiki said simply, “that Talula is more powerful than any magical being here.”

Simon’s dark eyes met Talula’s. “Which means she’s the only one who can save us.”

“It also means that you have everything you need to make that happen.” Dahlia squeezed Talula’s hands.

Heart stuttering, Talula let that sink in. She reviewed what she’d learned. Elemental magic. Conjuring. Illusions. Time. But the book had given her more than just sorcery skills. Each recipe had a ripple effect, helping Talula protect her magical community and become more part of her human one.