Penn was sure she was imagining the long looks and the whispers as she walked down Main Street in Silver Spring. Main Street was a misnomer because it was also the only street, aside from three tiny residential side streets leading nowhere into the hills, a strip of civilization between towering cliffs.
The town was too far away from the skiing or national parks to attract much tourist traffic, but not far enough away to remain completely isolated, so it stayed a quirky mountain town peppered with small businesses catering to locals and transplants who wanted to get away.
It was just enough to allow theCauldron and Broomto thrive. The coven ran a shop full of stereotypical witchy memorabilia, plus other new age books, trinkets, and crystals. There were a lot ofweirdcommunities in these mountains, which was the most harmless word Penn could find for the people who retreated to try to live by one creed or another. Mostly, Penn admired them. Pennsylvania had its share of devout in the rural areas, but they lived by different creeds.
Personally, she’d never summoned that much faith in her life in anything except in her own bootstraps, and that was getting increasingly difficult.
One person had called.
She’d spent $50 on business cards for one call.
It’s a start?
How long would she have to stay starting?
She shook that off. It was only the day after the race. She was afraid the rumor about equine performance-enhancing drugs would never die down, truly, but there had to be a few donkey owners who would still want to talk to her if onlybecauseof the drugs. She’d never drugged an animal in her life. She would never need to with her magic, but it would open a conversation? Was that really the kind of pet owner she wanted to work for?
She almost laughed, but bit her tongue rather than look crazy in the middle of the street as she contemplated the fact that she would welcome working with horse race fixers if it meant business success, which was why she was not in some kind of intentional community tucked into the mountains chasing enlightenment…. She really would be content with enough customers to pay the bills.
She tipped her hat at a young woman she was fairly sure worked in the library, next to the bookstore, next to theCauldron and Broom.At least she wasn’t the only one with a faulty business sense.
She stopped under the sign with a big black cauldron sitting on a fire made of broomsticks and ducked inside to a cascade of wind chimes. She blinked because the chimes were clanging with magic as much as with sound, checking that she wasn’t a werewolf.
“Yoohoo,” Niamh said from behind the counter. The shop smelled like a clash of incense and herbs. Penn could never decide whether or not she liked it.
Niamh was one of the twins, the matriarchs of this ragtag little coven, a woman somewhere north of sixty and south of eighty with the ageless fine lines and fair hair that hid the decades. Her sister Siobhan stood up next to her, towering over her with black hair shot through with silver.
“Oh good, it’s you,” Siobhan said.
“Hey,” Penn said with a smile for the twins.
Penn didn’t even know if they were really sisters, let alone twins. They looked nothing like each other, but they’d run this shop and coven together for the last several decades. They dedicated their lives to homeless witches, and she was a little bit in love with both of them for that.
The matriarch of Penn’s coven, one of her aunts, had capitulated the same day the other coven walked over their wards like they were nothing—because at that point they were nothing—and declared all their hard-won centuries of territory forfeit.
She shook that off and started forward, walking between a shelf of rocks and crystals and another shelf of candles to reach the counter. The store was a grid of miscellaneous displays, while books covered the walls. She found it hilarious that a bunch of real witches were selling books on fake witchcraft, but they’d gotten quite a reputation the world over, and now did most of their business with the postman.
“Now, dear, I need a full report,” Niamh said from the counter.
Penn tensed. She had hoped the story of the drugged donkeys was not going to reach their ears. They promised again and again that anything short of murder would not get her banished, but she was just a little twitchy.
“Um…”
“Annie said you saw the Koenigs, perhaps even the alpha!”
Penn’s brain stuttered to a shop. “I beg your pardon?”
“Wolves,” Siobhan said through gritted teeth. “I know they raise asses.”
For a craven second, Penn thought they were talking about children, not donkeys but then nodded.
“Do you think you were followed?” Niamh asked.
“Is that why…” Penn nearly rolled her eyes. Annie had driven them back to Silver Spring on the most circuitous winding dirt roads. “If we were followed, they were invisible.”
The twins shared a look. “You never know what they’re capable of.”
“Invisibility? I thought they just turned into wolves. Like, that’s their whole deal. One trick pony, so to speak.”
