Chapter 1

1

“ I ’m starting to think that maybe kitchen witchery isn’t my thing.”

I stood in the kitchen of Lightkeep Cottage, wearing an apron and looking like I’d just fought—and lost—against a sentient sack of flour. The counters were covered in dirty bowls, spilled ingredients, and sticky utensils. The window over the sink was open to coax out the remnants of smoke still wafting up in serpentine tendrils from the oven.

“Now, whatever would make you say that?” asked my aunt Rhi a bit breathlessly. She was sweating profusely and pulling oven mitts from her hands, like a pair of boxing gloves.

I pointed to the counter, where the results of my morning’s lesson were laid out on a cooling rack. “Just a hunch.”

We both walked over and looked at them. According to the recipe, they were meant to be strawberry thyme scones. According to the evidence in front of us, they were misshapen rocks of dubious origin.

“I’m not even sure they’re edible, let alone magical,” I grumbled.

“Oh, I’m sure they’re fine,” Rhi said, but I could hear the false note in her encouraging tone as she scooped up a dishtowel, and began flapping it to help clear the remainder of the smoke.

It was almost impossible to believe it had only been a couple of weeks since I’d first set foot in Sedgwick Cove, because I’d never had so much about my life change in such a short time. Two weeks ago, I was living in Portland, ME, finishing my sophomore year of high school, and looking forward to a summer hanging with my friends and scooping ice cream for minimum wage. Now, I was living in a cottage by the sea in a town populated almost entirely by witches, and was struggling my way through the first few days of my magical education.

Magical education. It still sounded completely unhinged when I said it out loud. In fact, everything that had happened to me in the two weeks since my grandmother had died sounded like fantasy fiction. But it wasn’t fiction. It was real. And it all came back to the woman I’d seen standing in the garden last night.

My grandmother Asteria Vesper had been a witch, a descendant of the First Daughters of Sedgwick Cove, who had created their magical community in mid-coastal Maine. A deep, ancient magic had drawn them there, but they were not the only ones. An entity known only as the Darkness had also settled here, feeding on the Cove’s inherent magic, and strengthening itself as it did so. Eventually, the Vespers had to come up with a way to bind the Darkness from accessing the deep magic of the Cove. So, they had created a powerful Binding spell, but the only way to seal it and ensure that it would continue to protect the Cove was a second spell called the Covenant. Every generation, three women of Vesper blood had to renew the Covenant, for only if all three of them remained in the Cove would the Binding hold. Asteria had kept that little tidbit of information from her three daughters, including my mother, who had fled Sedgwick Cove when I was just a baby. She’d thought she had time—time to bring her family back together, time to bring them around to their destiny so that they could step in freely and of their own volition. But then Asteria had died on my sixteenth birthday, and when we returned to Sedgwick Cove for the funeral, the truth came out.

My mother was a witch. Her sisters, Rhi and Persi, were witches too. And, despite my current culinary attempt to disprove it, so was I. We had to stay in Sedgwick Cove in order to preserve the Covenant. And honestly, that would have been enough change for anyone—moving to a new place, living with relatives I couldn’t remember ever having met, absorbing a new identity and family history—but Sedgwick Cove had more in store for me.

The thing about the Darkness was that it didn’t want to be Bound. It wanted to be free, and even more than that, it wanted me. My magic—a magic I wasn’t even convinced I possessed. It turned out that the Darkness had tried to claim me as a toddler, and that was why my mother had fled in the first place. Asteria had rescued me, but the damage had been done. It wasn’t until just a few days ago, when the Darkness tried to make a bargain with me—my mother’s life for mine—that I discovered exactly how much magic I truly possessed. Calling on the elements, I had banished the Darkness, though there was no telling for how long.

“I called on the elements,” I mumbled, staring at the scones again. “I commanded the freaking ocean. I made lightning appear from the sky! So why do I now seem incapable of commanding a simple baking recipe?”

“Because,” Rhi answered, coughing slightly, “they are two entirely different types of magic. Kitchen witchery is subtle. What you did was…” She paused, struggling for the right words.

“A fluke?” I suggested.

She scowled at me. “Of course not! No one could perform magic like that as a fluke! You just need to gain control over your magic.”

“You think I wasn’t in control that night on the beach?” I asked.

“In a way, yes. You were in a life-or-death situation. Your magic came to your rescue. But now you have to learn how to do the opposite of that. You need to learn to summon it yourself, and like any other skill, it takes a lot of practice.”

I sighed and picked up a scone. “I’m beginning to see that.”

“Now, come on, don’t get discouraged. I’m sure they’re not that bad,” Rhi said, tossing aside her dishtowel and picking up a scone. She took a bite and chewed slowly. Her face twitched into a momentary grimace she couldn’t quite control. “See? Not bad at all.”

I picked up a scone and bit into it. “Rhi, stop torturing yourself. These are disgusting.”

Rhi swallowed hard and put the rest of the scone back on the cooling rack. “Kitchen witchery is all about intention. You’re focusing too much on getting it right and not enough on imbuing it with your intentions. What were you thinking as you mixed and chopped?”

“Mostly, ‘Oh shit, I’m going to screw this up. I can’t cook. These are going to be awful,’” I admitted.

Rhi allowed herself a tiny snort of laughter before wrestling her face into a neutral expression. “Well, there you go. Self-fulfilling prophecy.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Are you saying they taste terrible because I assumed they would?”

“No, they taste terrible because you overcooked them and screwed up the recipe somehow,” Rhi said, patting me on the shoulder. She nibbled the scone again, thoughtfully. “Hmm. Too much salt. And overmixed. But even if you’d gotten it right and they’d tasted delicious, they wouldn’t have had the effect that you’d intended.”

I sighed, flopping into a chair at the kitchen table. “This is hopeless.”

“Of course it’s not. We’re just trying to do too many things at once,” Rhi said, plunking a plate down in front of me with one of her own scones. “You need to learn how to have confidence in the basics of cooking first. I didn’t realize how little experience you had, or I would have started with something simpler.”

I shrugged. “Mom has never been much of a cook. I can boil pasta and scramble an egg and make pancakes from a box, but that’s about it.”

Rhi laughed. “Yes, we never could tempt Kerridwen into the kitchen very often. She was too busy running wild on the beach and in the garden.”

I tried to imagine my mother, an ER nurse, ever being the kind of hippie little wild child my aunt was describing, but my imagination wouldn’t stretch that far. She’d changed so much. Run from so much. Buried so much.

There was a reason Rhi was taking my magical education in hand rather than my own mother, and that reason was fear. The same fear that had sent her running from Sedgwick Cove when I was a toddler had never faded. And in fact, after my recent run-in with the Darkness, it had only increased. Although my mother had agreed to move back to Sedgwick Cove and renew the Covenant alongside her sisters, that didn’t mean she was ready to throw herself headfirst back into life as a Vesper witch. I’d barely seen her over the last few days since the Covenant was renewed; and while I knew she had a lot to do to finalize our move to Sedgwick Cove, I couldn’t help but feel like she was avoiding the cottage.

No, it was worse than that. I felt like she was avoiding me.

In a way, I understood. After all, I was scared, too. Now that I’d accessed my power, it was terrifying to think it had been there all along, and that I had no real idea how to control it. But I also knew that running from it wasn’t going to help. I needed to do what my mother hadn’t been able to do all those years ago. I had to look in the mirror, embrace who I was, and then start to understand what exactly that meant.

And so here I was. Burning scones. Figuring it out.

I took a bite of Rhi’s scone. It was soft and crumbly and ridiculously delicious, but that wasn’t the best part. As I swallowed that first bite, a warmth spread through me, rich and dripping like honey, coating my insides in a sense of calm and contentment. I looked at Rhi, wonder all over my face.

“Better?” she asked, smiling.

“Better. How do you do that?”

“Intention combined with the right ingredients. You’ll get there. And if you don’t, that’s okay, too. Every witch has to play to her natural strengths. Much like your mother, you won’t find Persi in the kitchen unless she’s hungry. Speaking of Persi, I promised I’d drop lunch down at Shadowkeep for her. Would you like to come along?”

I nodded eagerly. I hadn’t been to Shadowkeep yet, our family’s shop in downtown Sedgwick Cove. All I knew about it was that it sold “witchy” items geared toward tourists who flocked to Sedgwick Cove, the same way they flocked to Salem in Massachusetts. But under the facade of a kitschy tourist trap, Shadowkeep was also a trusted source to the local magical community for the kinds of things witches really needed: herbs, gemstones, books, dousing rods, and all manner of other things I had yet to learn about.

I went and got myself cleaned up, and waited on the front porch while Rhi packed a small basket with lunch for Persi. I stared out over the ocean, watching the waves crash on the sand, and inhaling the sharp, salty air. My heart seemed to swell in my chest, and I knew I would never tire of this view, never wish myself away from this place. From almost the first moment I’d set foot in Sedgwick Cove, a deep, untapped part of myself had woken up and claimed it as home. I didn’t really have a choice. We belonged to each other. I wondered for the first time if that feeling had something to do with the Covenant. Did my very blood know it was irrevocably tied to this place? Perhaps the magic of that spell included me, too, tying a string to my heart and tugging me back to the place where I was meant to be.

As this question rolled around in my mind, my eyes strayed to the lighthouse, and I felt my heart rate quicken. I hadn’t been down on the beach since that night—in fact, no one had. The section of the beach near the lighthouse had been roped off, and official-looking signs had been posted warning people away. “Falling rocks” was the public-facing excuse, and it was a good one. The cliffs that dropped down toward the sand were very tall and craggy, and it was easy to believe that they could be dangerous if you were a tourist who didn’t know any better. For the locals, though, the real meaning of the warning was even more frightening.

Down on that sand was an anomaly of magic and nature, created the night I battled the Darkness, and no one knew yet how dangerous it might be. It was a strange structure made of molten sand created by a lightning strike—that would have been strange enough all on its own. But what we were really concerned about was what may or may not be contained inside it.

The Darkness, trapped and immobilized, its power frozen in grains of sand.

I hadn’t seen the Gray Man, sleeping or waking, since that night; but I knew he wasn’t gone—whatever power I had, it surely wasn’t that impressive. I’d acted out of instinct to protect myself, but I wasn’t foolish enough to think it all over, and neither was the Conclave. They were the ones, my mother informed me, who had demanded the beach be cordoned off so that they could examine it safely; and though it had been several days, we’d heard nothing about what they’d been able to discover. Rhi had become increasingly cheerful about it, insisting that “no news was good news.” I wasn’t quite so optimistic, and from the dark glances I’d seen them throw toward the beach, neither were Persi or my mother.

“Ready, Wren?”

I jumped. I’d been too caught up in my own jumbled thoughts to notice that Rhi had appeared on the porch beside me. I nodded my head, and we set off on a brisk walk toward town.

Main Street in Sedgwick Cove was like something out of a tourist brochure for coastal Maine, but with a decidedly witchy twist. The local microbrewery was called “The Witch’s Brew.” The little antique store was called “Secondhand Magic.” The bed-and-breakfast had a rustic twig broom hanging over the porch rockers with the sign “Come Sit a Spell” dangling beneath it. On the corner was a small black shed with a roof shaped like a witch’s hat advertising walking tours. But of all the places that could draw the eye, Shadowkeep was by far the most intriguing.

Shadowkeep comprised a tall, slender, three-story Victorian house painted a vivid shade of lavender, with black shutters and a black slate roof. An intentionally crooked turret thrust its little pointed roof into the sky, topped with a copper weathervane of a witch on her broomstick. A sign in the shape of a bubbling cauldron was adorned with shining gold lettering: Vespers’ Shadowkeep. The porch was crowded with plants: plants in macrame hangers, plants erupting from vases and pots, plants wrapping their tendrils around the posts and railings. A pair of white porcelain cats stood sentinel on either side of the stairs leading to the front door. I felt a grin spread slowly over my face.

“What are you grinning about?” Rhi asked, when she spotted the look on my face.

“Nothing, it’s just… I’ve never seen a place quite so… Asteria.” I watched in horror as Rhi gasped softly and her eyes filled with tears. “Oh God, I’m sorry, Rhi, I didn’t mean to?—”

“No! Please don’t apologize!” Rhi said, brushing impatiently at the tears escaping down her cheeks. “Ignore this, please—I cry at everything these days. It’s just that… you’re absolutely right, and it makes me so glad to know that you can see it.”

“I may not have been able to spend a lot of time with Asteria, but she left a powerful impression,” I said. Rhi reached over and squeezed my hand, and then we walked up the steps into Shadowkeep.

A cluster of little bells jangled discordantly as Rhi pushed the door open and stepped inside. The air was redolent with the warm scent of incense and the earthy tang of dried bunches of herbs strung from the rafters between the twinkling string lights. Even though it was a bright June day outside, the interior had a cool, dark feel, as though we’d suddenly gone underground, or else slipped through a little hole in time that led to twilight. Part of the reason for this was all the plants that had crept up outside the window were blocking the sunlight, and the other was the complete lack of overhead lighting. Rather, the whole interior was lit with flickering battery-operated candles in mismatched brass lanterns, and clustered on shelves and tables. The walls were lined with shelves containing books on witchcraft ( Finding Your Inner Witch and So You Want to Be a Witch: Now What? prominent among them); and an array of trinkets and home decor. A pair of women in sun visors were examining a candle in the shape of a skull. A teenage boy was digging through a display of different packages of tarot cards, while his girlfriend gushed over a spinning rack of amethyst pendants carved into animal shapes. A sign on top of the rack said, “Choose Your Familiar!”

Rhi watched me take it all in with an amused expression on her face. “What do you think?” she asked.

“It’s… not quite what I expected, actually.”

“Oh no?”

I lowered my voice. “Isn’t this the kind of gimmicky stuff real witches despise? Like…” I subtly nodded my head at the girl with the pendants who was now squealing, “Look, babe, a love potion perfume! Babe. Babe!” The boy, who didn’t seem interested in answering to “Babe,” continued to ignore her.

I widened my eyes. “See?” I mouthed.

Rhi laughed heartily and leaned close to whisper in my ear. “This floor is for the tourists. We keep the good stuff upstairs.”

At that moment, Persi undulated through the room, tossing her long dark hair over her shoulder. Everyone turned to stare at her—it was impossible not to stare at Persi. She was positively mesmerizing, oozing sensuality and confidence. She leaned in toward the girl now ogling the perfume and whispered in her ear, “If you want to capture his attention, I highly recommend it. I’m wearing it, and I’m still exhausted from last night.” She winked at the startled girl and then swept past the tarot display on her way to the cash register. “Babe” lifted his head and started scenting the air like a bloodhound. The girl pressed her lips into a line, snatched a bottle from the shelf, and plunked it down on the counter with a determined expression.

“An excellent choice,” Persi murmured. She rang the girl up as her boyfriend stood there, watching Persi with his mouth hanging open. The girl snatched up the bottle, grabbed her boyfriend by the hand, and marched him out of the store without a backward glance.

“Persi, that’s not even what you’re wearing,” Rhi said dryly.

“Yes, well, she doesn’t know that, does she?” Persi drawled, and then her eyes fell on me. “Oh, hello, Wren. Coming to do an inspection, in case you want to sell the place out from under us?”

“I—”

“Wren does not own Shadowkeep, as you very well know, Persi,” Rhi snapped. “Now stop tormenting the girl and eat your lunch.”

Persi smirked at me as she took the basket from Rhi’s hands. I tried to look like the joke didn’t bother me, but my stomach was roiling with guilt. Asteria had left Lightkeep Cottage to me in her will. It was the house my mother and her sisters had grown up in, and where Rhi and Persi had still been living when we arrived. Of course, it wasn’t my fault that Asteria had left the house to me. She’d really done it to tie my mother to Sedgwick Cove—a tactical maneuver to ensure the continuation of the Covenant. But that didn’t stop Persi from making snide remarks about it constantly.

I still wasn’t really sure where I stood with Persi. One minute, she was giving me a head-to-toe makeover; and the next, she was ignoring me completely. It made my head spin, but I also tried to remind myself that she was trying to process all of this just like I was. We would both need time to figure it out, and in the meantime, I would just grin and bear it.

Rhi had also brought along her own batch of strawberry thyme scones, and was arranging them on a glass pedestal on the countertop near the cash register.

“Is that all you’ve brought?” Persi asked between bites of chicken salad on a homemade croissant. “I thought you were making a double batch?”

“I was going to, but… well, I wanted to start teaching Wren and we, well…”

“I inherited my mom’s cooking ability,” I piped up, “so the second batch went straight into the trash.”

Persi snorted with laughter and had to cover her mouth to avoid spraying the counter with chicken salad. “Say no more,” she said, once she had safely swallowed. “Why are you starting with kitchen witchery, anyway?”

Rhi shrugged, wiping crumbs from her fingers, and placing a glass dome over the top of the scones. “Have to start somewhere,” she said.

“Kitchen witchery is so… strict,” Persi said, making a face. “You should let her start with something more intuitive.”

“Kitchen witchery is intuitive for me,” Rhi said, sounding almost defensive.

“Of course it is,” Persi replied, smiling like a cat with feathers on her lips, “because you like to follow the rules, and I like to break them.”

“You say that like it’s something to be proud of,” Rhi shot back. “Besides, since when have you wanted to weigh in on this topic? I don’t see you offering to help with Wren’s magical education. If you think I’m doing it wrong, by all means, feel free to take the reins; but I won’t hold my breath.”

Persi simply shrugged, still smiling, and took another bite of her lunch.

“Come on, Wren, I’ll show you where the real magic happens, so to speak,” Rhi said, gesturing toward the door behind the counter. There was a sign on it which read, “Staff Only.”

I followed Rhi to the door. Just before it swung shut behind me, Persi whispered, “Come find me if you want to learn some real magic.”

She winked at me. I just stood there, staring like an idiot, until the door closed behind me.