Chapter 3

“Ah,Misty Fields, just the kitchen witch I wanted to see,” Cohen greeted as the little bell by the door announce our entry. The moment we stepped inside, Flora sitting on my shoulder and holding on to my scarf for balance, we both shivered with pleasure.

The Magic Brewery was deliciously warm, full of the rich aromas of coffee and flavored syrups, a faint nuttiness coming from the store-bought almond biscotti in the big glass jar left of the register. I felt the sting of the cold leaving my ears and the tip of my nose as feeling returned.

When the barista reached for the spinach, already preparing Flora’s preferred smoothie, the garden gnome flung up her hand. “You think I wanted an iced spinach-pineapple smoothie in this weather? You sadist, Cohen Lancaster. Gimme a pumpkin spice Irish coffee.”

The barista gave her a salute with a handheld milk frother and lifted his eyebrows at me, silently asking if I, too, wanted to divert from my usual.

“I’ll have one of those hot chocolates, please,” I answered.

Cohen grinned. “Besides the kids who come in here, you’re one of only two adults who actually orders that.”

“Oh yeah? Who’s the other one?”

“Arthur Greenwood.”

I stilled at the name. I’d done everything in my power not to think about him since that day in the Cedar Haven parking lot when he’d tugged that Celtic knot pendant over his head. There had been a significance to that gesture, one I didn’t know, but I did know a door had closed between us. Emotionally, for while that invisible tether still remained, it was muted. And it ached, far more than I was willing to admit.

The Crafting Circle, who had witnessed the fight from the safety of Daphne’s turquoise Thunderbird, had wisely never brought him up on our Thursday night get-togethers, not even after a few pineapple-Midori cocktails.

“O-oh?” I asked in a strangled voice, not sure what else to say.

“So what did you want to talk to her about?” Flora said loudly, diverting the subject.

Cohen had been too busy preparing Flora’s Irish coffee to catch my reaction and continued easily, “Seems the folks around here are saying how good your pastries would be with a cup of my coffee. I was wondering if you’d like to supply the Brewery with something exclusive—whatever you’d like to make—a few times a week? On commission, of course.”

Bake for the Magic Brewery? That’d mean I’d have to make more trips into town for baking supplies, more chances of running into a lumberjack shifter who wanted nothing to do with me. It also meant another tie, another responsibility to this town. Not to mention a distraction from working on the grimoire, but what gains had I truly made in that department anyway?

“I’ll think about it?” I said, accepting my hot chocolate. He hadn’t skimped on the whipped cream.

“Sure. Lemme know soon, though, yeah? With the winter holidays coming, we could make a killing!”

“She’s heard your proposal, now here’s one of mine,” Flora said. “I want your used coffee grounds.”

Cohen snorted in amusement. “That sounds more like a demand.”

We shifted to the side so a new group of customers could place their orders, and the barista returned when he’d given them their receipts.

“So?” Flora quipped. She licked the spiced cream off her upper lip, waiting.

“You can take as much as you want if you haul it out of here,” the barista replied, rolling his eyes. “You’ll be doing me a favor on trash fees!”

“Fantastic. We’ll help ourselves after we enjoy these.”

Diverting to a table by the windows overlooking the square, we sipped on our hot drinks and made our plans. I knew of a secluded clearing in the forest that had a bunch of elderberry bushes that would provide an excellent screen to hide the moonflowers, the only problem was, there was no water source in my forest. The foliage there had roots that dug down deep to access water, and the moonflower vine’s roots were simply too shallow.

“Don’t you worry, cider witch, I know how to make a vernal pool or two,” Flora assured me, slinging back the rest of her boozy coffee.

“Witch?” an unfamiliar voice asked. “Did you say ‘witch?’”

Startled, we both jerked our attention to the man standing very, very close to our table. He was dressed for the weather in a pea coat and thick jeans, a scarf slung low on his neck. Strange markings on the backs of his hands poked out past his coat sleeves, inked in a bluish green. Thistle thorns, either we’d been completely absorbed talking about the forest or the man was a shifter to have approached so quietly.

“This is an open magic town, pal,” Flora said, no affection whatsoever in the word. “You’ll hear that word a lot.”

“Yes, we know,” he said.

We? I glanced behind him, remembering there’d been a group of people behind us in line, but they were nowhere to be found. Maybe they’d taken their drinks to go?

When I flicked my attention back to him, he was smiling. The man was handsome, his smile white and even, his blue eyes bright, and while the whole package was meant to disarm, I felt the hair on the back of my neck start to rise.

“You ever blink?” the garden gnome asked. Guess his smiled hadn’t worked on her either.

“Flora,” I admonished. Then I gave the man a fleeting and apologetic upturn of my lips—I wouldn’t necessarily call it a smile. There was something off about him, and I just wanted him to go away. The diversion of moonflowers was the only thing keeping me from despairing about my life right now. “Something we could help you with?”

“Oh, just curious is all,” he replied, gesturing with his drink. “There was a rumor of a flash of white light southeast of here. Wondering if a cache had been discovered or maybe a new coven had—”

“Was there?” Flora exclaimed brightly. “Didn’t hear about that, and this is the place for all the town gossip.” She leaned around him, shouting, “Hey, Millie, you know anything about a bright white light a few weeks ago? You live on the southeast part of town, don’t you?”

The woman Flora had called out scrunched up her face in a quizzical expression. “Yeah, but—”

“You did?” The man’s attention snapped to Millie, like a cat having spied an oblivious finch hopping around the ground looking for seeds. He turned, the collar of his pea coat shifting to reveal a strange tattoo reminiscent of a buck’s antlers spreading across his throat, and stalked quickly to the table across the coffeehouse.

“Quick, woman,” the garden gnome hissed at me, yanking my mug of half-drunk hot chocolate out of my hand and sending it clattering into its saucer. “Out the back!”

Instinct told me to avoid drawing the tattooed man’s attention, so I moved at an unhurried pace, but with purpose, Flora held to my chest. Cohen, too busy with filling drink orders, hadn’t noticed the strange exchange and just thought we were helping ourselves to the spent coffee grounds. Flora moved to my shoulder so I could grab a bucket in each hand to maintain the ruse, or fling with extreme prejudice, whatever was necessary.

The back of the Magic Brewery opened onto an alley used mostly by delivery trucks and kids on bikes hoping to avoid the denser traffic patterns. The trucks had already delivered and the kids were all in school, so no one was around to watch us sneak around. Setting down the buckets at the end of the building, we craned forward and peered around the brick wall to the storefront.

The antler-tattoo man had moved outside to a cluster of people I didn’t recognize. I did note they were all in the same pea coats and dark-wash jeans with boots, male and female alike, those strange blue-green markings on their skin. “…unusual green eyes, just like he said,” he was telling them.

Me. He’s talking about me. And who told him I had usual green eyes?

“…check around town…” a military-looking woman said.

“…split up…”

“Heard about an old man with a flea market…”

Emmett!

Flora had heard that too, and she yanked on my ear to keep me from moving.

“I think I see a glamour,” she whisper-hissed.

I immediately shifted my eyes to the side to look through my peripheral vision, but it was tough to discern anything since the cluster was already moving down the street. Frustrated, I yanked my head back and retrieved the buckets, checking around the corner to confirm the coast was relatively clear. There was a jingling of bells and a slamming of doors, but the November wind muted it all. They must’ve gone into some of the other shops to continue their search.

Keeping low, I hustled us to the sedan, wedged the buckets into backseat footwells, then made like the leaves of an autumn tree and left.

It was only after I confirmed we weren’t being following in the rearview mirror for the third time that I actually turned to Flora and said, “Do you think Emmett will be okay?”

She had been clinging to the headrest of the passenger seat like a monkey so she could watch the road behind us and now slid into the actual seat, mindful not to squish my foraging bag and the moonflower pods inside.

“He’ll be just fine. They’ll just poke around and ask a few questions, just like they did at the Magic Brewery.”

“You can explain what happened at the coffeehouse anytime now.”

“You heard him mention a cache, right?” she asked.

“Yeah.” I’d heard her mention the word too; it’s what she thought that revitalized elm in the Cedar Haven forest was feeding off of.

“He’s a magic hunter, no doubt. Not a lot of them out there since it’s dangerous work. They’re like the vampire hunters draining vampires for their blood, only it’s magic they’re after. Caches, usually, but any powerful source gets their attention.”

I’d never heard of magic hunters before, but I didn’t need to know any more about them to know I didn’t like what she was implying. It wasn’t hard to guess why a human would be hunting magic. “But magic folk are born, not made.”

“Doesn’t seem to stop them from trying, though.”

Ame’s words from weeks ago tolled ominously in my mind: Outside of the university, unbonded, he could be stolen, his magic extracted.

Had that elusive cat been warning me about magic hunters all this time? My hands tightened on the steering wheel. I’d bring the orchard to life and pull down every last magic hunter below the loamy surface to become fertilizer for my apple trees if they touched so much as one of Sawyer’s whiskers.

A glance in the rearview mirror confirmed we had nothing but an empty road behind us, but it did nothing to soothe my unease.

“Do you know what that white light is that he was talking about? He said it was on the southeast of town; that’s where you live.” When she didn’t answer right away, I took my eyes off the road and looked down at her. “Flora?”

She had clamped her teeth, the muscle in her jaw ticking away.

“Flora!”

The garden gnome threw up her hands. “It was you, alright?”

The tires squealed as I wrenched the car to the side of the road and threw it into park. “What?”

“The milk bath! When you were in the infusion, it got all sparkly—as it was supposed to do, that’s how I knew it was working—and then right before you surfaced for air, there was a big beam of white light that ejected into the sky like a solar flare.”

My thoughts swirled. Right before I’d taken a breath… That had been when Violet had slammed her hand against my chest, cracking the contamination surrounding my core. I’d helped the moonflower burn the infection out of me, harnessing the full power of my magic—

“Oh my Green Mother,” I moaned, curling over the steering wheel. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”

A big white solar flare? More like a beacon to tell any witch with a lick of sense right where I was!

“And you didn’t think to tell me this?” I shouted, my voice echoing like thunder in the enclosed cabin of the sedan.

“Well I didn’t know you were hiding out at that time, did I?” she shouted back. “And after that, we had a town to save from a demonic blight!”

“And now we’ve got magic hunters skulking around,” I growled, though not at her. At the universe in general.

In the few moments I’d removed the parasite ring, the world had taken notice. And if these humans had figured out something unusual was happening in sleepy ol’ Redbud, what did the supernatural community think? Thistle thorns!

“We’ve got to up our wards,” I declared, pulling the car back onto the road.

“You think?” Flora snorted, crossing her arms over her chest.

“What kind of threat are these hunters, anyway?”

She shrugged. “More of a nuisance than anything else, but a pack of them… They can be a little more trouble. It’s best we lay low for a bit.”

“We ward Daphne and Shari’s house first, then yours,” I said.

Instead of arguing with me, Flora gave me a sideways look. She was the only one of the Crafting Circle I’d let in on my secret—well, eighty percent of it, anyway—and while she didn’t know my family name, she understood how powerful they were, and how powerful the rival coven who’d cursed our spell book had to be. Those were enemies she didn’t want to have.

“What about you?” she asked quietly.

“My hearth will protect me.” Then I laughed a wry note. “As much as it would piss Sawyer off, maybe I should get a farm dog. Might not work on the fae, but it’ll make those human magic hunters certainly think twice.”