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“Where the heck did you get this magical bus from?” Priya asked.

“Here and there. Junkyards mostly. It’s taken a while to get it restored.” Tempest smiled.

“You built this?” Priya marveled. She screwed up her face, confused. “By yourself? Without magic?”

“Most of it,” Tempest corrected. “I had a mechanic check over my work on the engine. But I installed the flooring and the water tanks and put in the woodstove. And I built all the shelves and cabinets. I still need to get the exterior repainted.”

Priya was gaping at her. “Tempest, this is the most magical thing I’ve ever seen! Don’t you ever tell me you can’t make magic happen again.”

Tempest looked at the empty shelves waiting behind the open doors, and at the boxes stacked in the alley, and felt a shiver pass in the air between them.

“It needs books,” Tempest said.

“And it shall have them.” Priya wagged her eyebrows conspiratorially, and began to work the Veni Plica spell.

The compression charm was extraordinary to watch. First the boxes opened themselves. Then the books rose, flying to find their places on the shelves, with the sort of migratory instinct of things returning to where they belonged. Well past the time when the shelves should have been full, they continued to receive the books. Tempest watched as fat tomes appeared to fold themselves in half and grow thinner. They shimmied into every crevice. The bus dropped on its wheels as the weight of the books settled, and Tempest heaved a sigh as well.

“It looks like your inheritance has finally come home,” Priya said. “I think they were all waiting for this.”

Tempest glanced at her mother’s sign resting on the dashboard, and the atlas faintly glowing on the shelf beside the steering wheel. “I think so too,” she agreed. “I think they’ve been waiting for quite a while.”

And then she realized something was missing.

Priya realized it at the same time. “Where’s Fortune?” she asked.

Tempest looked up and saw the open third-story window.

“I think I know,” Tempest said. “She went back up to our apartment. I’ll go get her. I should probably pack a bag while I’m up there. Do you mind waiting here for a few more minutes?”

“Not at all! I could live here.” Priya smiled. She pulled out her book again and climbed into the passenger seat. “I guess now’s as good a time as any to tell you I put a little sleeping charm in the tequila. I don’t think anyone’s coming out to check on us, Tempest. Take your time.”

Tempest’s apartment above the shop was small but she’d never minded that about it, not with an entire store to call her home. She’d lived there ever since she was a child. Now she stood in the doorway and looked at everything with the knowledge that she probably wasn’t ever coming back.

Fortune was indeed sitting on the bed, surrounded by a neat pile of items she’d assembled: A few changes of clothes, a tin of clove-scented polish, a small stack of books Tempest had been meaning to read, her spare pair of cotton gloves, a bag of the dried mango strips that Fortune favored, a candle and a photograph of Tempest’s mother taken outside the shop sometime in what Tempest guessed was the early 1980s.

The parrot had her beak tucked into the zipper of the bag and was trying doggedly to work it open.

“Fortune?” Tempest spoke tentatively. “Were you just packing a bag for me?”

“Time to hit the high seas!” Fortune announced, without looking up from the zipper.

“It’s a bus. It doesn’t float on water.”

“All aboard! All aboard!” Fortune flapped once, triumphantly, and the zipper gave way.

Tempest picked up the bag. She took one more look around the room, then reached past Fortune and picked up the photograph from the top of the pile and tucked it into her jacket pocket. She swept everything else inside and closed the zipper.

Fortune hopped onto her shoulder.

Tempest went back downstairs, through the shop, past the banner and the empty shelves and the colleagues sleeping on tables and the floor still holding their glasses. The ABCs were sprawled out spreadeagled in the metaphysics section, snoring loud enough to wake the dead. She didn’t look back, except to lock the door and push her employee keycard through the letter box on her way out. Now there really was no turning back.

Priya was waiting for her in the bus.

They stood for a moment without speaking.

“I don’t know how I’ll ever thank you,” Tempest said.

“No need.” Priya shook her head. “Just stay in touch and let me know where you land. I’m going to hang out near Boston for a bit. Maybe get a seasonal job in Salem. I have an uncle who lives there. Promise you’ll look me up if you’re ever in the area?” She pulled a pen and a notepad from her bag and scribbled down a number on it.