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I know what it’s like to spend year after year in a shape that isn’t yours. At least those three witches from Spellbrook cursed me into a living, breathing, mobile form. Not Thaddeus, and that’s been bothering me since Bonnie first mentioned him.

It’s been two centuries. If there’s anyone still existing from that time who knows the trigger behind breaking Thaddeus’s curse, they haven’t shared it with the rest of the class. He’s trapped, and once Bonnie admitted that to me after she realized there was no getting rid of me—and that I actually did make Kate happy—I knew I had to make it my mission to free him from his stone prison.

Unfortunately, none of my research or my magic or my potions have been able to help. I’ve only been able to confirm that Bonnie wasn’t fucking with me when she told me about poor Thaddeus. Six months later, he’s still a gargoyle, and Bonnie finally mentioned that—during my time as a cat—a powerful cursebreaking witch was born who works for the national witch coven in Salem. If a witch like Bonnie petitions the coven for help with a curse, she might drive down to Shadowvale to help Thaddeus.

Bonnie assures me that ol’ Thad being a warlock won’t hurt his chances of being seen by the cursebreaker. So long as a witch asks for help, her sister witch will offer it—and I had to smile through gritted teeth when Bonnie mentioned all of that after I spent six months experimenting, trying to help my brother warlock.

But, hey. That’s witches for you.

Forty years after I was cursed to learn patience, another witch tacked on a six month charge which, in the grand scheme of things, is nothing. Last week, she finally said that the head of the national coven—a witch named Serena, which was a relief to me because it wasn’t Susan—said she put Thaddeus’s name on a list. It might take some time before the busy cursebreaker can visit Shadowvale, but after waiting two hundred years as a stone gargoyle, I’m sure he’s mastered patience. Another year or two won’t hurt, and somehow I found my first witch friend in my long life.

Okay. Maybe not ‘friend’, but an ‘acquaintance’ who is easily bought off by a few complimentary pies courtesy of my super talented mate works just as well.

Somehow, Bonnie and I have reached an uneasy truce over the past year. Kate thinks that’s progress. I think it means Bonnie and I have mutually agreed not to curse each other because my mate would be annoyed with both of us. And since neither one of us wants to upset Kate—and now that we’ve had an extravagant summer wedding at my insistence that would’ve put the royal wedding of 1981 to shame… and I still want to hiss when I think about what happened to poor Princess Di… Bonnie realizes she can’t get rid of me—we’re friendly-ish.

Kate just beams and tells Bonnie that she really is a witch because she once looked at her palm and said that she would have a long life, and ain’t that the truth?

Ah, but I love my human mate. I fucking adore her. In between creating another tasty pie, and accepting that there are quite a few of her neighbors that aren’t as human as she is, Kate’s been helping me on my crusade to free Thaddeus while also continuing to prove that she’s my one true love and the reason I had to wait so long for her to be born, to mature, and for me to find her.

I wouldn’t trade a minute of being Mr. Whiskers if it meant that I never made her Mrs. Vincent Morrow—or that, in private, I call myself Mr. Kate Bellamy.

The past year with my new wife has been the absolute best one of my life and, considering, I’ve had seventy-one of them to compare it to, that’s saying something.

Physically, I’m thirty-two now, and I promise you that I will fight anyone who says otherwise (except for Kate who lovingly teases me, even if I convinced her that ‘Grandpa’ was off the table, but if she wanted to call me ‘Daddy’, she could). I only age when I’m in a human form which means that those thirty-nine Halloweens added a little over a month to the thirty-one years I already had before Susan and her coven cursed me. The fact that I was born in 1956 is irrelevant—unless I’ve made some sort of comment that reminds Kate that I was a 50s baby and I get teased again.

She doesn’t call me ‘Daddy’, though. I’m working on it, but as long as she calls me hers, I’m okay with that.

I spent the first thirty-one years of my life waiting for Kate without knowing who I was waiting for, then the next thirty-nine searching for her in a body that made the whole thing a lot more difficult. I thought finding my mate would be the most important part of finding happiness at first, then later breaking the curse on me. I believed that the moment I finally recognized her as my one true love would be the culmination of everything Fate—and, you know, the cruel Susan—had been making me wait for, all while forcing me to learn how to be patient.

I was very, very wrong.

Finding Kate was only the beginning. But living with her, loving her? That’s what I waited for—and it’s been so much better than a horny, lonely, desperate Vincent back in 1987 ever imagined.

I love waking up beside her every morning and knowing that I don’t have to count the hours until midnight. I love working upstairs while she bakes downstairs, then finding reasons to wander into The Pie Chart even though she knows damn well that I don’t need anything except a quick kiss. I love that she leaves the bathroom door open for me now, though she claims that’s because otherwise I’ll stand outside and complain until she lets me in.

Which, yes, that’s true, but how can I stand to stay away from my mate when I love her so much?

I love everything about Kate. Having dinner with her. Watching movies with her. Walking through Shadowvale with her hand tucked into mine, pointing out how much it changed over the last twenty-five years—and all the things that caught my attention when I was a stray cat skulking around the back streets rather than the man proud to show his mate off to anyone who passes us by. I even love the nights when she’s exhausted after spending twelve hours baking and falls asleep with flour in her hair before I can convince her that there are far more interesting things we could be doing in bed.

Mostly because I find plenty of enjoyment, grabbing a brush and grooming my mate—though wanting to lick the flour out with my tongue was another cat habit I had to work hard to break—while knowing that I convince her to let me lick some other, tastier parts in the morning…

I’ve also spent the year relearning what it’s like to be a modern warlock.

I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed being able to do magic so instinctively until it was a pleasure to spend two days on breaking down a spell, followed by the rush of power that filled me when I pulled it off. I couldn’t do that when all I was offered was a single Halloween, and that was mostly spent searching for Kate.

But now I have her, and as dazzled as I am by the hundreds of different pies she can bake, she’s tickled by the sort of magic I can perform for her.

For the first few months after my curse broke, I practiced magic simply because I could. Nothing important. It definitely wasn’t anything particularly impressive. I lit candles from across the room to set the mood while I had Kate in bed with me. Conjured things I could’ve reached without getting off the couch because she was snuggled against my side and I didn’t want to let go of her. Started the coffee while Kate was still asleep so that I could stroke her shiny hair and watch her snore. I made potions I didn’t need because there was something deeply satisfying about measuring ingredients with human hands again, about feeling my magic respond without having to fight through the body of a cat to do so first.

That’s not all, either.

Being a warlock in Shadowvale is different from how I lived while I was in Weston. I spent years hiding what I was there. During the day, I was Vincent Morrow, pharmacist at Weston Apothecary. At night, behind a locked door, I could be myself.

There’s no reason to hide in Shadowvale.

Magic is part of this place. I felt it beneath the pads of my paws when I wandered into this town twenty-five years ago, but it’s stronger now that I have access to all of my own power again. It hums beneath the streets and clings to some of the oldest buildings. I live on the same street as Bonnie, and while there’s no coven nearby—she belongs to an online coven instead which, I’ve discovered, is a thing now as I’m researching which computer order I want to join next—she admitted there are at least three other witches who live here. A handful of vampires; it’s not enough to make this a Fang City, but they’re here. And, of course, I’ve heard the story of Johnny Gray, the ghost who has haunted Shadowvale for seventy years—and who Bonnie mentions to have seen plenty of times since the former greaser can materialize on Halloween the same way that I was able to return to my human form during the same holiday.

It’s the veil, I decide. Magic is stronger, but the veil between realms is thinner on All Hallow’s Eve. Expect the unexpected when the thirty-first of October comes—and, if you’re the mate of Kate Morrow, piemaker extraordinaire, Halloween means something else, too.