Page 21 of The Spellreader and the Phoenix

Max might be the king of simple sandwiches, but if he was going to bother to eat out, it was going to be food he couldn’t easily make himself.

It wasn’t more than a few minutes before they were seated at a booth with plastic menus to peruse. The diner looked like it was lost in the 60s and smelled like coffee, fried foods, and an underlying sweetness. Syrup, probably. Max knew for a fact that they had excellent breakfast foods.

The server brought Max coffee. Thankfully, Alex declined before Max had to figure out if fifteen-year-olds should have caffeine. When had his parents let him start drinking it? He couldn’t quite remember.

They wanted orange juice, and that was perfectly safe, as far as Max was aware.

“Get whatever you want,” Max instructed. “It’s like an employee bonding experience or something.”

Alex squinted at him. “Have you ever had an employee before? How worried should I be?”

Max tilted his hand back and forth. “Eh. Sort of? When my parents ran the shop, my sister and I helped out all the time. They were killed in a car accident when I was twenty-four. I took over the shop, and my sister worked with me until she went away to university. She came back a couple summers to help out. She’s one of those weird people who loves people and actually wants to talk to them and stuff, so she was good at the customer service part.”

Alex smirked. “Whereas you’d like the customers to just leave you alone, right?”

Max groaned. “So much. Seriously. I don’t understand why they have to bother me so much.”

Looking like they were trying not to laugh outright, Alex asked, “Have you considered that you might be in the wrong line of work?”

“But the books are awesome!” Max protested, wishing that he could tell Alex all about the spellbooks and the research he did.

Unfortunately, there were strict rules about telling normal people about magic, and it basically came down to marriage, family, and long-term commitment. There were spells that could fully remove the memories of shifters and witches and specific events from a normal person, as opposed to the… soft adjustment of the World Spell. But messing with people’s minds could be dangerous, and there was no saying exactly what other details might be lost that had been connected to the memories that were removed. Those spells were therefore highly regulated, and you could get into a lot of trouble for using them.

Max wanting to make his own life easier was definitely not a reason to reveal anything to Alex—who seemed like a great kid, but would likely be heading off to university and their own actual life in a couple of years. The Council would throw the book at Max if he even thought about it.

Max shrugged and added, “I acknowledge that people are still necessary at the current time to make the shop successful enough that I can keep buying books and researching for my clients. I’m open to that changing, that’s all.”

Their server came back, and they paused to order. Max got a spinach and mushroom omelet with extra cheese and a short stack of pancakes. Alex got the full breakfast—eggs, bacon, sausage, breakfast potatoes—and waffles.

Max admired their desire to tackle all the breakfast foods.

And then they were left staring at one another. Apparently, it was awkward silence after all.

“Ugh,” Max groaned. “I’m terrible at this. I’m thirty-eight—I think I told your mom that already—and I’ve lived here my whole life. I’ve run the bookshop since my parents died. I don’t like people. I do like books. Nōwē, my cat, tolerates me, and we’ve already clarified that if she trips me and kills me, she’ll eat my eyeballs.”

Thankfully, Alex looked amused at this. “Got it. So if I show up after school one day and you’re not open, I should expect an eyeless corpse?”

Oh, thank god. They had a similar sense of humor.

“It’s extremely likely,” Max agreed. “And, I mean, if I’m dead, it’s not like I’d need my eyeballs. I wouldn’t want Nōwē to starve.”

“And your sister would come get Nōwē?” Alex asked.

Huh.

“You know,” Max mused, “we’ve never talked about it, but she’d better.”

Max pulled out his phone and shot off a quick text.

Max

You’d take care of Nōwē if anything happened to me, right?

Hypothetical question in case my new employee finds me dead at the bottom of the stairs because Nōwē has finally succeeded in tripping me.

He didn’t get an immediate response because it was barely six in California, and it was a Sunday, so Evie wasn’t working. Maybe he should have tried to make the surprise even better, but honestly, he just wanted her to stop whatever she had planned for when she came to visit him after Christmas. This way, he was employing someone he actually liked, and there was no way that Evie could try to matchmake, because his employee was a kid.

Wins all round.