Chapter 3

T rixie

My apartment greeted me like a warm, familiar hug as I stepped inside.

"Hello, Gertrude," I said, greeting the string of pearls plant hanging by the front door, its long strands of round green beads dangling from a macrame hanger. "How's it hanging?"

The apartment building was actually very old, and most of the spaces in it had been renovated over time. Most apartments now had things like air conditioning and new stoves and working refrigerators.

Mine had not been renovated as such. Mine had what I liked to call vintage charm. Big radiators chugged along all winter long to keep this place toasty, giving off that uniquely radiator-heat smell. In summer, I employed an army of fans flanked by a few ice packs to keep cool.

However, the place was spacious, open, and bright. On one wall was a custom bookshelf as old as the apartment itself. It had a sliding ladder across the front of it because the ceiling in the main room was so tall it was impossible to reach the highest shelves without it.

There were two bedrooms and two bathrooms in this place, which made it an absolute gem by New York standards. Most people would wonder how I afforded it.

Well, by sheer luck and good-witchy genetics, the apartment had been passed down from generation to generation between the women in my family since before my grandmother. It was my turn to hold onto this gloriously rent-controlled space, and the magical laws of The Hollow made it so that as long as it remained in the family, we couldn't be kicked out, and the price couldn't be jacked up. It was a wonderful law.

Even so, I still needed a roommate to afford the utilities and such for the place, but that was okay because Emmy was exceptional when it came to roommate standards. If one didn't count the fact that there were often jars of live frogs in our refrigerator and sometimes frozen squirrels (who had died only of natural causes, of course) in our freezer.

Or that sometimes, clouds of bruise-colored smoke would drift out of the dining room which Emmy had, over time, turned into her personal laboratory. Or that once, I'd found a chicken in the bathtub—alive and squawking. Emmy had her oddities, but so did I.

My thing was plants.

"You're looking alive, Medusa," I told my snake plant as I dropped my bag on the hook beside the door. I set my wine bottle on the counter. "But you, Bertha, could use a little spritz. I hope that's not a spider mite."

I ran my little cactus that I'd gotten from Le Jardín's gift shop under the faucet before replacing it on the windowsill above the sink. It'd been a lifelong goal of mine to visit the actual Le Jardín, but that was never going to happen. Le Jardín was a garden so exclusive, so private and secret that only the most powerful witches in the world were extended invitations to witness the beauty inside.

So I made do with the knock-off version of Le Jardín right here in my apartment building. Between me and Emmy, it was a wonder that someone hadn't reported us for some weird violation—like the smell of dirt coming from my balcony or the squawking of a chicken in the bathtub.

I supposed that was the benefit of living in a magical apartment complex. People didn't necessarily look twice at a woman carrying a live chicken into the apartment under one arm or at a woman hauling a cart full of carnivorous plants into the elevator wearing bite-repellant gloves.

"Do your plant babies ever talk back to you?" Emmy spoke into the fridge where she was bent over something bubbling. "Come on, activate, you bastard."

"Do your potions talk back to you ?" I raised my eyes at Emmy's rear end. She still hadn't looked up since I'd entered the room. She did that a lot, got so sucked into her magical research that I doubted she'd notice if I spent a week away from the apartment without telling her.

"Touché." Emmy pulled herself up, slammed the fridge door shut. "By the way, this came for you."

Emmy tapped the front of the fridge where she'd taped a letter using an entire roll of industrial-strength duct tape.

"You do know I can't take you seriously when you wear those," I said. "Sorry, but I just can't."

"Wear what?" Emmy scrunched her nose in confusion.

She was wearing plastic boots that went up to her knees as if she'd been wading in a swamp. On her face were a set of goggles so oversized they just about swallowed her head whole. Her cute, curly hair was blown back from her face as if she'd walked through a wind tunnel. She wore a strappy little tank top beneath a white lab coat, and on her shirt it said Magic Geek .

"Your letter?" Emmy tapped the fridge again. "It wouldn't leave me alone. Open it, will you?"

"It's just a summons," I said. "Open it yourself if you want. I'm not going."

"A summons?" Emmy's mouth flew open. "From The Circle?"

"Who else sends summons in the 21 st century by way of rabid manila envelope?"

"Oh my-lanta. Can I go in your place to the event?"

"Sure." I shrugged. "Be my guest."

"Do you literally get a guest?" Emmy ripped the duct tape off the envelope.

The second the yellow envelope was free, it leapt out of her arms and shot at me like a dart. I ducked, and it narrowly missed knocking over the bottle of cabernet as it shot past me.

" Magneta ," Emmy said, and the envelope shot toward her, drawn by the words of her summoning spell. "Gotcha, you little twerp."

Emmy ripped the attacking envelope open while I grabbed two wine glasses from the counter.

"It's illegal to read my mail," I informed her.

"You gave me permission," she shot back.

I shrugged and poured both of us a very full glass of cab. Between a day filled with Little Hank, the run-in with a vampire in the alley, and now this pesky summons—definitely not the first one that The Circle had sent my way—I needed some liquid courage.

Emmy shrieked, doing a little dance. "You actually get a plus one! Can I come with you? "

"I'm not going."

Emmy's mouth fell open. I handed her a glass of wine. The summons seemed to have relaxed a tad in its anxious fluttering since it'd been opened. I'd been sent a stream of letters over the last couple of weeks, each one more aggressive than the last. I was still getting over the little scratch on my ass from one particularly nasty note. A note which had met a very fiery death on one of Emmy's Bunsen burners.

"You have to go," Emmy said. "They're not going to leave you alone unless you do."

I shrugged. "Just because my bloodline says I'm a witch doesn't mean I need to attend these stupid meetings."

Emmy's eyes widened further behind her goggles as she kept reading. "This isn't any meeting. They're announcing the new candidates for the wildcard election. You have to go! Not just anyone gets an invite to these things."

I took a gulp of wine. "I mean, I got an invite, so yeah—they do invite random people."

Emmy quieted, and I realized in my annoyed state I'd accidentally hurt her feelings.

"I'm sorry, Em," I said. "I didn't mean anything by it."

"No, no, it's okay." Emmy snapped off her googles with a vicious flair. "It's totally cool that you don't care at all about your witchy-bloodline which gets you access to the most exclusive events of the decade."

"I don't make the rules," I said softly. "Nobody's doubting that you deserve to be invited more than I do, hon. I'm sorry. I think the rules are stupid too. You're the hardest working witch in The Hollow by far. "

Emmy shook her head. "It's not your fault. It just sucks sometimes."

Emmy was a new witch, meaning that she'd been born to two human parents and had only discovered her affinity for magic as a teenager. Once she'd figured it out, she'd thrown herself fully into her magical education.

She studied day and night. Emmy had single-handedly put herself through paranormal undergrad, and now she was working on a bout of intense research that she hoped would help her get into one of the best magical graduate schools in the country.

Unfortunately, Emmy was absolutely right. It wasn't fair that I was invited to these sorts of things and she wasn't. Emmy loved magic, was thoroughly charmed by it. I detested magic and stayed as far away from it as I could. Yet I was the one with an envelope up my ass about attending the latest meeting called by The Circle—the magical council that ruled our paranormal sector in New York.

"There's an easy way to solve this," Emmy said. "Let's just go together. We can both tell them their rules are stupid."

I raised my eyebrows. "You're going to tell The Circle their centuries old rules are stupid?"

Emmy shrugged. "Someone's gotta do it."

I shook my head. "It's not me."

"But—"

Just then my phone rang. I answered with a sigh. "Hi, Grandma Betty."

"Answer your summons, sweetie. "

"But—"

"Do you want to die?" my grandmother asked easily. "Because if you keep repressing your magic and ignoring summonses, that's what's going to happen."

I sighed, took another sip of wine. I added "threats from grandma" to the list of things I was trying to forget about tonight.

"Gram, that's not what's going to happen."

"Have you released your magic yet?" she asked. "I can feel the summons from here. How many have they sent that it's triggering a magical reaction from your entire female bloodline?"

"Thirteen summons at last count."

"Thirteen?" she clucked. "RSVP before you die, Trixie."

"I'm not going to die, Gram."

"Your mother..."

"I don't want a lecture about Mom tonight."

Gram went silent. We'd had this argument too many times. The truth was that my relationship with my mother was intensely complicated, and my grandmother didn't know the half of it. I hadn't even known I'd had a grandmother until I turned eighteen and Grandma Betty found me herself. Hiding family from me was the least of my mother's offenses.

"Honey, please," Gram said, her voice softer. "I worry about you."

"I've no interest in dealing with The Circle. Or my magic."

"Everything's interconnected," Gram said. "If you ignore it, you'll suffer, darling, and I can't lose you too. You're all I have left. "

"I'll think about it," I hedged. "I love you, Gram. Why are you awake?"

"I could feel your summons tingling my toes in bed. That, plus I had a hankering for an ice cream sandwich. Sometimes they just call to me."

I said goodbye then disconnected, and when I looked up, I realized the apartment was quiet. Too quiet considering the zooming and bubbling and chatter that'd been going on seconds before.

"Emmy?" I glanced at my roommate. She looked a shade beyond guilty. I studied the room. "Where's the summons?"

"I didn't want you to die," Emmy blurted. "So I sent it back."

"You did what?"

"I RSVP'd you as a yes , and then I added me as a plus one," she said. "It's only fair after you devastated me with your unfair comments earlier. You owed me one."

"I didn't devastate you," I said. "You're just trying to guilt me into not getting mad at you for replying to my mail."

Emmy winced. "Is it working?"

"Well...crap."

"So that's a yes?"

I took another sip of wine.

"Great!" Emmy clapped her hands. "Now, I need your help for a minute. Then I swear we can watch Gilmore Girls and drink our wine uninterrupted."

"What do you need help with?"

"Can you stir while I add the nose hairs from a pig to my potion?"

I gagged. "You're joking. "

"Sure?" Emmy shrugged. "If that will make you feel better. You can pretend you don't know what's in my vials."

"Your research is disgusting."

Still, I followed Emmy into the dining room. The table was littered with glass vials and beakers. Some were lofted into the air while others hovered over different colored flames. No less than three colors of smoke puffed into the air.

A slight odor of bacon—I did not want to think too hard about that ingredient—wafted over us. I wasn't actually sure what Emmy was researching. She kept her cards close to her chest, not wanting to let anybody in on her secrets until she was closer to a solution. At least, that's what she told me.

While I stirred, I glanced over my shoulder at the apartment, thoughts of my mother filtering into my head. This place had been ours; it'd been the one place where it'd felt like I'd had a real family. The one safe haven in my life, a beacon of stability in a sea of stormy childhood years.

This apartment, its ties to the only good memories I had of my mother, was the single reason I'd never moved out of The Hollow despite my aversion to magic. Maybe, if things had been different, I could've disappeared to palm trees in San Diego or the mountains of Denver and left all traces of witchiness behind. It sounded so simple, so pleasant, to fully relinquish the bloodline.

But I couldn't do that. Not to me, not to Gram. She'd lost a daughter when I'd lost a mother, and this apartment felt like it rooted me to her. I couldn't bear the thought of giving it up. At least not yet.

Even some of the plants in the windowsills had once belonged to my mother. The miniature rosebush I kept in my bedroom. The hibiscus that bloomed every time I missed her. The tough-as-nails cactus that was nearly three feet tall and very fat in the corner of the library.

When I looked at the bookshelves, I could see her, the long, golden hair swishing down her back as she'd reach for one of the fairytales she loved on the rare occasion that she was home with me...and happy. We'd escape to different worlds together, tucked under a soft old quilt. We'd sip hot cocoa by candlelight, not because it was romantic, but because we needed to save every penny we could on the electric bill.

Like me, my mother hadn't had a lot of extra money laying around. I'd inherited that little problem from her too.

"Hey, are you okay?" Emmy asked, as I stared off toward the bookshelves, stirring the potion mindlessly. "You can be done with the nose hairs now."

I dropped the spoon like it was on fire.

"By the way, this also came for you." Emmy handed over a thick envelope. "It was less persistent than the summons, so I forgot it on the counter until now. I'll fire up Netflix while you pour yourself another glass of wine, you lush."

I was too focused on the envelope on the counter to chuckle at Emmy's joke. It was true, my wine had mostly disappeared as I'd been reminiscing about my mother. But the sight of the envelope on the counter pulled me out of the happy fog that'd wrapped itself around me.

A cold shiver went down my spine as I slit the envelope open. As I read the words on the page, it felt like someone was squeezing an icy hand around my very heart .

I dropped my wine glass, heard Emmy's shout of, " Hovera " that caused my glass to freeze in mid-air, just seconds away from shattering. Then I felt Emmy's presence as she came to my side and read the words on the page.

"Oh, honey," Emmy said, wrapping her arm around my shoulder.

And then her spell broke, and the wine glass shattered into a million pieces.