Moira coughed to cover up her laugh. Shaking my head, I returned to my table and finished putting together Hattie’s flowers.
Customers filtered in and out, most not buying anything. Those were usually the tourists who came in out of curiosity rather than intending to buy. When I first opened the shop, the tourists made me itchy, but after a while, they became one more quirky thing about this place.
Joy Springs is a cute little town tucked between Fredericksburg and Luckenbach, Texas, smack in the middle of wine country and wide-open nothingness. It isn’t a large place, but it has more than enough charm to make up for its lack of size. Coming from Seattle, adjusting to this slower pace of life took some doing, but now I found myself more relaxed and able to go with the flow.
It helped that the residents were just as weird as Seattleites, so even with my strange new bloodline and eating habits, I fit right in.
My shop hummed with life—human, magical, and flora—and that was my dirty little secret. Or clean little secret, depending on how you looked at it. The dirt under my nails, the surrounding blooms, and greenery soothed my senses more than anything else could. I might be a freak of magic, but my Floromancy still hummed brightly in my veins, each flower vibrating energy, all links in the extraordinary chain of life.
I was powerful in this place, the home I made when circumstances had forced me from the other one. Every flower had a story, every plant an opportunity to learn about the world. I reached out to stroke the glossy leaf of one of my many pothoses, and the vine stretched for my fingers, entwining itself around my wrist. I gave the leaf a stroke and gently extricated myself to return my attention to Hattie’s bouquet.
It was almost closing time, the sun beginning to dip behind a canopy of rolling hills. Early May was the time when the days grew warm but not too hot, and the evening temps dipped into the fifties. Still cool enough for a sweater. Moira slid some more baby’s breath over, along with several sprigs of eucalyptus for decor and scent. The plants reacted to my proximity, moving closer and trying to curl around my fingers as I picked them up, one by one.
Once I added the final touches to Hattie’s weekly flowers, I straightened, stretching a tweak out of my spine from hours of being hunched over, and glanced at the time.
“Tess, mind locking up for me?”
The banshee didn’t respond but got up from her seat and did a double check of the store to ensure all our customers were gone. I never performed magic in the front unless we were locked down, but I didn’t want to move this bouquet too much before we got it to Hattie’s house. It was absolutely perfect. The less jostling, the better.
Once I heard the front door lock click several times, and the weight of the shop’s warding spell settled over my shoulders, I let out a slow breath and smiled. The spell was a hum of comfort against my skin, silently whispering I was safe behind these walls.
Ever since the attack, my magic acted out in odd and varying ways, but the build-up was the most annoying part. I had tosiphon power out during the day constantly. If I didn’t, I was a walking storm of magic and grumpiness.
The positive side effect of this was how much healthier all the plants and flowers in the shop looked now. Granted, they always looked amazing, and our online reviews proved it, but now, there wasn’t a shop in the entire United States that could compete with the quality of our product.
Every few minutes, I had to reach out and touch a plant or a bloom or go outside and refresh the blooming flowers in the urns, and sometimes it got so bad, I walked down the stretch of shops and perked their blooms up, too—though I tried to take more care with this as a few people had mentioned something about it in passing, marveling at how well their plants were doing when it wasn’t quite the right season for it. While this grounded me and stabilized my magic, I realized it was fast becoming somewhat of a compulsion, this urge to purge and boost growth anywhere around me. But it was also a need. When the power built up inside me and I was without an outlet, I wasn’t quite myself.
This was one of the main reasons my house had a powerful glamour over it, and I trusted only a few people inside. My place looked like one of the world’s wonders, no matter if we were in the dead of winter. Life was my magic, and the world responded to my power like a cat arching against questing fingers.
Moira and Tess gathered around, and a shuffling from the back revealed Ash, yawning and stretching as he walked over. He was a dryad who lived in the shop and one of my best friends. Ash was tall and lean, with golden brown skin and tawny hair streaked in gold and light brown. His eyes were a strange moss color and changed to a stunning emerald when he performed magic. If anyone were closer to the earth than me, it was Ash. Every few months, he had to return to his tree to refresh his magic, but for the most part, he was here helping out during thebusier parts of the year. It always felt odd when he wanted to watch me perform magic, but when I asked him, he’d given me an odd look and merely said, “You are the heartbeat of the earth, Evie. No greater life magic exists. I am merely the power of a single Heart Tree. You are the world.”
I had no idea what he meant by that, but it made me feel weird, so I didn’t ask him to explain.
Moira, Tess, and Ash gathered chairs and put them around me in a semicircle. Shaking my head, I closed my eyes and steadied my breath.
Every week, I added some kind of blessing to Hattie’s flowers. She had no idea, nor was I sure she’d welcome it if she did. But it kept her coming back to us, and it was something positive I could do when the rest of my magic was so dangerous. I liked building her bouquets because it was something small I had control over while the rest of my life spiraled.
“What shall we do this week?” I asked.
“Last time she was in, she mentioned her hips were hurting,” Moira said.
A healing blessing. Always a good one and easy to perform, but my magic strained and pushed against me, so I wanted to do a little more.
“She mentioned she gets pretty lonely in that house,” Ash said. “Maybe something to bring more visitors or opportunities to get out of the house?”
I nodded. “Both of those are good. Tess?”
The banshee’s reaction made me smile. Even if she didn’t mean to, the breeze from Tess’s sigh rattled the wind chimes and made the plants sway.
“I suppose if I have to come up with something…” Tess paused as she thought. “She mentioned her favorite restaurant no longer delivered to her house.”
There wasn’t much I could do about that. “Anything else?”
Tess frowned. “She said she likes it when the peonies are in season, and she wishes she could grow them here.”
A slow grin curved my lips. “Ah. Perfect. We can definitely help her with that.”
A soft green light trickled from my fingertips, and I wrapped my hands around Hattie’s vase, keeping my intentions firmly locked in my thoughts. A swirl of pink flowed over the green—a small spell for pain relief and ease of movement, followed by another swirl of orange, the color of warmth and nature, to open Hattie up to the possibility of more social gatherings. When the inevitable crimson sparks followed at the end of the spell, I pretended not to notice and filed the knowledge away in the deep recesses of my mind that liked living in the delusion that I was not a freak of nature.
