One
STEVIE
There’s no problem a proper cup of tea can’t fix.
It says so right on my work apron, just beneath the Kettle Black logo Mom designed decades ago, back when the café only existed in her dreams and sketchbooks. It says so on our menus and the shirts we sell to tourists. And it says so on the Mother’s Day mug I painted when I was six—a black-and-gold one that sat next to the cash register, holding all the pens.
There used to be a plaque on the wall, too, but that came down years earlier, buried in a box with the ashes of Connor and Melissa Milan, resting beneath a granite headstone in Los Pinones Cemetery.
Devoted parents and friends
May their eternal light shine as a beacon for all who loved them…
If you squint at that part of the wall now, I bet you can still make out the square of plum-colored wallpaper, slightly darker where the plaque used to hang.
Anyway, as far as truisms go, the tea thing always felt like a good one. For the first eighteen years of my life, the simple brew had healed all manner of wounds, from scraped knees to bruised egos, from mean-girl dramas to the fathomless ache of unrequited love.
And later, when I lost my beloved parents, when even the shrinks and social workers had given up on me, when my days turned so dark I feared Death himself would come and snatch me right out of my bed, two things brought me back from the abyss:
My best friend Jessa Velasquez and some good, hot, life-affirming tea.
There’s no problem a proper cup of tea can’t fix,my mother’s voice echoes again now.
It’s funny how badly I still want to believe it.
But there’s another truism—bigger, all-encompassing—one my parents forgot to mention before the river swept them down the lost canyons of Arizona, dashing their skulls against the rocks before the water could even finish drowning them:
There’s nothing the universe loves more than a chance to show us how truly breakable we really are.
Two
STEVIE
I’ve never seen a sky as wicked as the one that just blew in over Tres Búhos.
It’s a mean one alright, full of ire and vengeance. And while I love a bone-rattling Arizona storm as much as the next witch, I’d rather not be sitting on top of the tallest rock in the desert when Mother Nature goes balls-out ballistic.
She’s kind of an asshole sometimes.
I’d also rather not be dressed like a human lightning rod, but considering I can’t make the two-hundred-foot descent without some serious hardware, looks like that dream’s dead on the vine too.
I glare up at the sky. All morning it was clear and calm, the perfect day for a climb. But the second I get settled on top, light the palo santo, and whisper a few words of my mother’s magick…
“Message received,” I grumble, keeping theassholebit to myself.
In response, the oil-black clouds flicker with a preview of what’s to come, and a burst of hot, gritty wind rifles through the old grimoire on my lap. The faint smolder of palo santo dies, its sweet fragrance replaced with the scent of ozone.
That sky is ready to burst.
I close the spellbook, resigned. My attempt at magick—if you can even call it that—was destined to flame out anyway. Sure, I can sense people’s energies, and my body has an uncanny ability to heal itself quicker than most, but as far as active powers? Other than casting witchfire, my magick is basically nonexistent, just like my parents wanted it to be.
Just like I promised to keep it.
Guilt surges anew, making my skin itch.
“Forget magick, Stevie. It’s a curse…”
They weren’t Mom’sliterallast words—those would come in the hours that followed, high and panicked and mostly incoherent—but they’re the ones that stand out now. The ones that twist a hot blade in my gut every time I open the forbidden grimoire, searching for a clue about her past.Ourpast. This unknowable thing inside me, crackling with a wild, potential energy that simultaneously terrifies and fascinates me.
