“Where do you want him?”
“Living room again. It was working.”
“Where?”
“Second door on the left.”
Ducky protested wildly, explaining why he needed to be in the kitchen.
Penn just raised a metaphorical eyebrow, and he scrambled away.
“Ducky!” Annie shouted.
“He’s going.”
She followed Annie and the dog straight down the main hallway that bifurcated the house. The dog peeled off at the correct door, stepping daintily over the gate meant to keep him in. He parked himself on a rug with a grumble.
“Oh, you’re fine,” Penn said as she glanced into a tiny library opposite the living room. So far as she could tell, no one ever hung out in either of them except the dog. The twins seem to spend their whole lives in the kitchen.
Annie pulled her toward that kitchen and a sunroom full of plants at the back of the house. Fortunately, the black and purple theme had not continued inside. Everything was still wood but stained a dark mahogany and covered in hand-stitched lace doilies. It was overwhelming yet oddly comforting.
“It was just Penny!” Annie called out.
Penn hated the nickname and had firmly quashed it in her old coven, but one of the twins had called her that the day she arrived, and it had unfortunately stuck. She’d been too insecure to correct her, and it was increasingly too late with every repetition. She contemplated the fact that meant she was going to be Penny until she died.
“Actually, it’s just Penn…” she began impulsively as they reached the kitchen, and the words died in the face of the utter chaos within.
The huge kitchen island was covered with flour and endless loops of dough. Someone had their head deep in a lemon-yellow fridge from the last century. A cast-iron pot half the size of a bathtub bubbled on the huge stove next to the fridge. The wall was covered with a lot more cast-iron in every size and shape. A counter along the wall had been cluttered with laptops and papers, but today, it was also covered in dough. Annie went back to kneading some of the dough on the island.
Niamh pulled her head out of the fridge and waved. She looked like a carbon copy of Annie with red hair and freckles, though they weren’t related.
“Actually, it’s…” Penn began again when something clattered in the greenhouse, and two witches pulled an even bigger cauldron in from there.
One of them was Siobhan, the other twin. She towered over everyone, with pale skin and shockingly black hair. She looked like the woman holding the other side of the cauldron with the same black hair and striking features; however, Penn knew they weren’t related either. They’d rescued Cat from some kind of terrible European orphanage, one of the many strays they’d pulled into their orbit. Penn didn’t have the exact story, but the woman was fiercely loyal to the twins. Cat loved that she could be mistaken for Siobhan’s daughter. It was even more true today, because the flower dusting her hair matched the salt and pepper of Siobhan’s.
“Penny!” Cat said with a smile. Her hair was long, flowing down her back, and she wore a peasant skirt in bright colors, accompanied by beaded necklaces and bracelets on both wrists. She looked like someone had picked a hippie out of the sixties, along with the fridge, and deposited them in the twenty-first century. She swiped her forehead, leaving more flour behind.
Penn gave up trying to correct her name. “What is going on?”
Niamh waved a ladle from the stove with a smile. “I’m trying to see how solid they can get.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Niamh scooped up a ladleful of unidentified liquid from the pot and then pointed to the dough. Penn realized there wasn’t just one kind of dough. There was every kind of dough from liquid pancake batter to near-solid pastry on the counter. Niamh was a potion witch, which normally meant magic cooked intoliquid.
“If I can get it stable without a stopper, wouldn’t that be cool?” she said enthusiastically.
“Yeah, it would,” Penn said, thinking of her aunt who would’ve given her left arm to make her potions last longer and not require a container. It also would’ve never occurred to the older woman to experiment and try to make it happen.
It was definitely something Penn was still getting used to. The kitchen had all the hallmarks of an insane seventh-grade science fair. She’d never met anyone pushing the boundaries of what was possible with magic like the two women in front of her. She loved them a little for it and hoped she wasn’t going to wreck everything.
“What the hell is going on here?”
Penn twisted to see a new witch in the doorway, Tori, another adoptee who ran her own business in town helping rich people get their second homes ready for habitation by importing caviar from the tropics and other absurdities. She was one of four force witches in the coven, caught lifting things without touching them as a child. She was a compact woman with shoulder-length brown hair and heavy muscles under an expensive leather jacket gifted by a client.
“Experiments!” Niamh said triumphantly.
“Well, I need a potion to get cat piss out of a million-dollar Persian rug.”
