“Hex yeah!” Kitty threw a fist in the air.
“Let me see.” Mom snatched the phone from her so quickly that I almost believed she’d brewed a swift spell instead of a love potion. Apparently, she had no trouble with technology in the basement as long as it provided a juicy piece of gossip.
I sighed. So much for my insider scoop. Now that Mom knew, half of Austen Heights was bound to know as soon as the bakery doors opened at dawn. While Mom’s scones and baked goods were delicious, at least half of our customers came solely for her gossip.
“This is our chance, girls. We can snag you husbands!” Mom threw her arms around Lydia and Kitty, and the three spun in a circle.
“Did you see that he was voted sexiest man alive last year?” Lydia sang.
“And he hangs with the fae prince, so he’s sure to be loaded,” Kitty added.
“Hello, sugar daddy.” Lydia giggled.
I opened my mouth to remind them that no highborn fae would ever want us, then closed it with a sigh. They’d heard my lecture as many times as we’d heard Mom’s. But their ignoring it didn’t change the fact that even though we were firmly middle-class in Austen Heights, we were also witches. And not even regular witches. Thanks to Mom being a witch and Dad being a fae, we were half of both races, which meant we never truly belonged to either. We were just a step above vampires or werewolves,who were illegal in society and could be arrested on sight if they were discovered. Many of the highborn fae in town never let us forget the difference in our social statuses. Mom wanted nothing more than to see us accepted by the rest of the town, and I was pretty sure that in her eyes, marrying a highborn fae would guarantee it.
“Sorry,” Jane whispered to me while watching our sisters and Mom with wide eyes.
“It’s not your fault.” I rubbed my forehead, not sure where the others got all their energy. “I should’ve been more careful.”
Jane gave me a small smile. “At least your potion is done.”
The liquid had thickened into a viscous violet paste that smelled faintly of lavender.
Perfect.
I pulled a package of ballpoint pens from my purse and dropped them into the mixture, where they sank with a soft plop. After soaking all night, they’d be ready to go tomorrow. While a veritas potion could be drunk, I found it much more useful to soak my pens in. If someone agreed to answer a question and picked up one of mymagical pens, the potion forced them to write the answers to my next five questions truthfully.
The small flame under my cauldron hissed and sputtered as I smothered it, and I shivered in the sudden chill. Now that it was fall, the basement was getting colder at night.
Jane yawned and put her pictures in her bag. “Ready to go home? I’m beat.”
“Me too.” I covered the cauldron with a lid to make sure nothing got into it, then reclaimed my phone. After bidding the rest of the family goodnight, I followed Jane up the creaky wooden stairs. We navigated around the worn armchairs and threadbare couch in the dark.
We checked on Dad, who was resting in a room on the main floor. It was too hard for him to go up and down the stairs these days. His quiet snoring reached us as soon as we cracked open the door. I stared at his gaunt, pale form in the moonlight cutting through the window for a long moment.
Like the other victims, Dad always needed rest. No one knew what started the Moonrot, but some called it a curse since it never affected the humans, or those unmarkedby magic. Only the Marked ever contracted it, and there was no known cure. It was impossible to mistake since all the victims had a silver mark the color of moonlight over their hearts. The larger it grew, the more lethargic the victims became. They had trouble eating and slept more and more while their magic and body withered away. Once the swirl grew large enough to cover their entire chest, they died.
“Let him sleep,” Jane whispered and shut the door.
Before leaving, I headed toward the bakery to make sure everything was prepped for tomorrow—old habits died hard, and after years of working here, Cupid’s Confections was a part of me. To get to the bakery from inside the house, I twisted the knob above the door so the dial turned blue. If it showed red, that would bring me to our family kitchen instead. It was a fairly complicated spell, but one that had held for the last seventy years since Grandma started the bakery.
Moonlight trickled in from the glass display cases along the front, casting silvery shadows over the mismatched chairs and wooden tables, and the scent of cinnamon and vanilla lingered in the air like the ghost of the day’slabor. The faint tick from the grandfather clock, usually covered by the hum of conversations and the clatter of trays, counted down the moments. It was nice to be here when it was closed. It reminded me of the newsroom after printing, when the rush of meeting a deadline had faded.
A box of baked goods labeled Second-Day Delights sat on the back counter, the leftovers from today that were ready to be sold at half price tomorrow. I snuck a croissant from the box, a classic but still one of my favorites, and split it with Jane before devouring the flaky goodness in three bites.
“Let’s go home,” Jane said.
We grabbed our jackets from the hook by the back door before stepping onto the porch. Jane locked the door behind us, and we pulled on our jackets to ward off the cold fog that had rolled in from the ocean and clung to us like a damp hug.
The small apartment Jane and I shared with Charlotte Lucas was close enough that we could walk there in minutes. While the fog obscured the familiar streets and muted our steps, we never had anything to fear in atown as small as Austen Heights. Although tonight the fog seemed especially thick, almost ominous.
“It would be nice if someone married rich,” Jane said when we were almost home.
“Not you too!” I gaped at Jane.
“I’m just saying it would be nice because Mom would stop worrying about money so much. You know it’s always weighing on her now that Dad’s sick.”
I pressed my lips together instead of bursting her bubble. She knew as well as I did that the odds of any highborn fae wanting anything to do with half-witch, half-fae like us were practically nonexistent. Technically, we were half-fae, half-human since witches were just humans with magic, but no one in the magical community considered witches the same as humans.
