I stood on Gran’s porch and looked past the stranger in tweed. Beyond the lush clover, buzzing flowers, and plum trees heavy with dark sweet fruit, the ground dropped away and the honeysuckle air stretched out to a clear blue promise.
The letter, clenched in my right hand, was a promise, too. One I didn’t need to look at. The envelope’s coarse, soft paper had the kind of handmade roughness you paid for. My Uncle Max must have paid his attorneys well.
He wanted the house, of course. I should have known when we refused his offer that he wouldn’t take no for an answer. But the house had chosen my sister and me. Even as we stood on the porch looking out, I felt it behind us like a slumbering giant breathing softly as it dreamed.
Our first step would be to meet with our lawyer, Hector Morales, to see if there was any substance to Uncle Max’s threat. Our second step—
“Well? Do you deny it?” A woman’s crisp voice plucked me down from the wild blue yonder. It came from the stranger. The reporter. Dana Something-Or-Other. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her. “The explosion wasn’t caused by a gas leak, was it?”
She was a thirty something brunette with her hair tied back and a tweed blazer that had British aspirations. Serious. Smart. Professional. But there was something about her posture, maybe the way she stooped to hide her height, that gave away her humanity like a stray hair.
Memory flashed, and I knew where I’d seen her. A TV news segment about my bookstore. The kind of talking head blurb they film on scene at every car wreck, robbery, and murder. Those vultures had arrived just after the firefighters and swarmed like flies, while I sat on the curb and rocked myself and shivered under a crinkly foil blanket.
“Why are you here?” I asked. I knew the answer, of course. She was here for fresh meat for her viewers. For ratings and clicks and a pat on the back from a boss as nihilistic as she was.
“You are Holly Nightingale, aren’t you?” She eyed me for three heartbeats, then glanced at Hazel.
“You came all the way from Seattle to interview the woman whose bookstore exploded?”
“There were several discrepancies in the police report. For instance—”
“I don’t care.”
“But I have reason to believe that officials are lying about—”
“Does that look like my problem?”
“It’s all of our problem if we don’t—”
She started going on about journalism with a capital J, but the words flew past me. I had a queasy feeling in my stomach and an itch in my brain. Something about her didn’t make sense. It hit me. “Where’s your crew?”
She looked up from her speech. “My crew?”
“TV journalists always have a van following them around, don’t they? A guy with a camera?”
“Usually, yes—”
“How do you expect to show the viewers how devastated I am without a camera?”
“I was just hoping to get a statement from you about—”
“I’ll give you a statement. In the past week, my life has been turned upside down, spun around, and hung up to dry. I have a lawsuit to deal with and a house to save, and I don’t have the time or the patience to be your human interest story.”
My sister, beside me, glowed in her yellow sundress, but she looked worried. She bit her bottom lip and flashed me a weak smile. She’d been quiet since yesterday, when she’d nearly become the first witch in a few hundred years to be burned at the stake by the Inquisition. I couldn’t blame her. She needed and space to recover. She needed protection. Good thing I’d come through unscathed.
I put my hand on Hazel’s back and started toward the open door. “Let’s go inside.”
“Wait! You’re right!” Her desperate voice might have grabbed me. I turned.
“I don’t have my crew.” She looked at the ground. “I don’t have a crew anymore. And I’m not here officially. I tried to get my editor to assign me to the story. The city’s covering up something big. But he doesn’t care about anything but what the corporate office tells him. He sent me to shoot another accident just north of Issaquah. A lumber truck blind-sided a minivan full of retirees and sent them tumbling down a hill.”
“That sounds awful,” Hazel said. She was always so empathetic, even when she should have been thinking about herself.
“Have you ever seen land that’s been logged?” Dana asked. “The stumps stick up from the ground like spikes. They tore the van to bits. First the body panels, then the engine, and finally… Rob and I set up at the top of the hill just as a breeze pushed up from below. It smelled like gasoline and Vic’s Vap-O-Rub. I threw up twice and broke down crying five times before I called my editor and told him I couldn’t film the segment. He fired me.”
“That… does sound awful,” I said, damnit. “But if the TV station fired you, why do you want to interview me?”
“The city’s been working hard to cover up some aspects of the explosion. I want to know why.”
I snuffed out a laugh. “I’m not sure you’d believe us if we told you.”
“Try me.”
And besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell her. It was all so fresh. So raw. I felt like the van that rolled down the hill. I needed time to gather my pieces and weld them back together. I needed to deal with the lawsuit—wait. Something tickled the back of my mind.
Hazel and I were being sued by our uncle over the house. Gran left it to us, not him. An inheritance squabble. The most normal thing in the world.
But Uncle Max was one of the richest men in the country. He could spend millions on the best lawyers in the world. I wasn’t even sure we had money to pay Hector Morales. If we were going to save the house, we had to be smart about it. Most of all, we had to know why. Why did he want the house?
Who better to find out than a maverick reporter who wanted to hold powerful people accountable?
Talking to her would be a risk. She might not believe us. She might decide that I was crazy, or that I’d committed insurance fraud, or done something to Caleb. After all, the world still thought he was missing in the explosion. Only a handful of people knew him as the psycho he was, leading a double life as Grand Inquisitor or whatever.
I peered at Dana. Her soliloquy had sluffed off some of her broadcast perfection and in the big blooming garden she seemed painfully alone.
I turned to my sister. “What do you think, Hazel? Should we invite her in for tea?”
“That sounds”—she said, looking at Dana in a way I couldn’t decipher. “Lovely.”
We filed into the foyer, where the morning light made the white lace curtains glow. We took a left toward the kitchen. I slid Max’s letter in my back pocket, found the kettle, filled it with water and set it on the cream enamel stove of the old design that was lit by magical fire.
A steeper shaped like a crescent moon sat in the cabinet by a collection of six glass jars filled with dark, curled tea leaves and labeled with a spidery hand: jasmine, oolong, peppermint… I grabbed the oolong and filled the steeper. When the kettle screamed, I took it hot and sizzling from the stove and poured steaming water into a chipped blue teapot. I carried it and three mugs over to the small breakfast table where Hazel and Dana leaned toward each other conspiratorially.
Holly clapped her hands and shot back in her chair. "… and then I said, ‘I guess we both took the scenic route!’”
They burst out laughing. I smiled too, because Hazel was becoming herself again. I saw the old effortless ease flooding back in like a tide. Was I wrong to judge Dana so harshly?
Hazel took a mug from me. “I was just telling Dana about a hike I took in Borneo. Turns out she’s been there too. From the sound of it we both had the same shady tour-guide.”
I sat and poured tea for myself and lifted the mug to my mouth. It was too hot to drink, but it smelled amazing, like flowers and fruit and earth.
“So let’s get down to business,” Dana said.
I savored the feeling of steam on my face, then lowered my cup to the table. “What if I could help you hold one of the richest men in the world accountable?”
“Not where I expected this to go. But, who?”
“Our uncle… Maxwell Amp.”
She almost spit out her tea. “Your uncle is Maxwell Amp? The Maxwell Amp?”
I nodded. “He has a dark secret in his past that caused him to leave Charm Haven. I don’t know what it is, but Gran—his mother—alluded to it in her will. When she left us this house, he tried to buy it. When we said no he sued us. There’s something here he wants. Or maybe something he wants to cover up.”
Dana looked around the cozy kitchen, as if seeing it with new eyes. “But you don’t know for certain.”
“No.”
“He might want the house for sentimental reasons.”
“Perhaps.”
“But if there was some meat on that bone, It could get me back in the game.” She swallowed and I’d never seen someone so hungry. “It’s an interesting offer.”
“Will you help us?”
“Will you finally answer my question?”
“Sure. Why not?” I sipped my tea and felt its warmth spread through my body. “You were right. The explosion at my bookstore wasn’t caused by a gas leak.”
She leaned in. “So what was it? Chemical spill? A drug lab? Neighbors told me the wildest stories. A few claimed they had seen an elderly woman fleeing the scene on a broom. Of course that suggests psychotropic chemicals being released—”
“She was a witch.”
Dana shook her head and squinted. “Excuse me?”
“I know it’s hard to believe, but the elderly woman. Her name was Maleia, our great-aunt. She was a witch.”
Dana glanced at Hazel, who shrugged.
“Maleia set the bomb in my bookstore. She was working with my evil ex fiancé, who had been ordered to seduce me by the Inquisition.”
“Like… the Spanish Inquisition?”
“They wanted to bait me back here to fulfill a prophecy and bring magic back to Charm Haven. But they wanted to steal it and destroy it because they hate magic but the bird reached me in time and we flew on a broom and fixed it!”
Dana cocked her head to the side and frowned. “And do you know how to reach this Maleia for comment?”
“Not unless you can raise the dead.”
Dana let out an enormous sigh, closed her eyes and shook her head. “Ten years in the business and you’d think I’d know how to sniff out a liar.” She stood and the chair squealed back behind her. “Do you seriously expect me to believe that you evil stepmother blew up your store and flew away on a broom?”
“Great-aunt, but, yeah.”
“It’s the truth,” Hazel said.
“Have you even been to Borneo? Or was that your idea of a joke too? I can understand not wanting to talk to the press, but you don’t have to be such… such… jerks about it!”
My heart leaped into my throat. If Dana left now, who would help us dig up dirt on Uncle Max? “I can prove it.”
She laughed. “Are you going to take me on a broom ride?”
I couldn’t. The broom had been confiscated by the police as evidence. But I didn’t need it. What had Gran’s ghost told me? I’m the thirteenth daughter. I don’t need to _learn _ magic. I _am magic. _
_Last night I had almost drowned in white hot power. _I had rescued my sister from the bonfire, pulled her to the ground with only a thought and a twitch of my fingers. I’d summoned the broom and woven a magical barrier that both saved the people of Charm Haven and returned the magic their families gave up long ago.
Surely, surely I had enough magic left for sparks, to dim the lights, to convince a skeptical journalist.
I closed my eyes and reached for the place above my heart where the magic had entered me. But what had been full before was empty. I searched but I was a cupboard full of cobwebs.
I clenched my teeth and willed the magic to appear, but I might have been wishing on a shooting star for all the good it did me.
Why? Why couldn’t things work just for once? How was I going to—I opened my eyes and saw Dana’s slack-jawed face illuminated like a paper lantern. She stared at Hazel’s outstretched hand, which held an ethereal orchid softly glowing white. It flickered out and Dana brought her gaze up to Hazel’s face and they locked eyes.
“How did you do that?” Dana reached out and took Hazel’s hand, examined the empty palm, then flipped me over.
“Magic,” Hazel said, nervous, blushing. That wasn’t like her at all.
Dana’s mouth opened but she didn’t speak. I could almost see her entire worldview rearranging itself on the spot.
I coughed and they turned to me. “Now, will you help us?”
It was a man’s voice, behind me, who replied. “Help you with what, exactly?”
