Divorce, Divination and Destiny Read online

  Even then, customers absolutely flooded the place. We had a checkout line that wrapped all the way around the store, like one of those lines at Disneyland.

  “Okay, but you see, this was right next to the display of clearance items,” the lady I was ringing up was telling me. “So that means it must be half off. Check again.”

  She had a full head of dyed-blond hair, a kale smoothie in one hand, an entire outfit made up of designer pieces, and a rock on her finger big enough to sink the Titanic.

  And she was arguing with me about a whole…four dollars and fifteen cents.

  “Right,” I replied, pointing at the screen, where the price for her abundance potion was very clearly displayed. “But it wasn’t actually in the clearance section. So the potion’s still eight bucks.”

  “Eight dollars and thirty cents,” she snapped as if the fact that I didn’t explicitly state the additional thirty cents was a betrayal of the entire city of Portland. “And you’re sure there’s nothing you can do?”

  “I’m afraid not, lady,” Mom growled, busting in and taking over abruptly. It was possibly the most Mom thing she could do. “Now, do you want the potion or not? Guaranteed to bring you all sorts of luck and abundance. Eight bucks. And thirty cents.”

  I pretended not to notice the little half-smirk Mom shot my way. The two of us had a slightly different philosophy when it came to resolving customer disputes.

  The woman squinted, staring between Mom and me like she thought one of us might change her mind before she finally sighed and pulled out her card.

  “I really want to buy that new Tesla,” she shrugged like this was a very normal, everyday person issue.

  I remembered when I used to be like her. Thank God I’d finally learned that there were a million things more important than the newest Tesla model.

  The second Mom finished ringing her up, she grabbed the little wooden block from under the register that read “Closed,” and plopped it down right in the center.

  Instantly, a cacophony of groans rose from the customers waiting in line.

  “Sorry folks, we gotta close down early,” Mom announced nonchalantly. “Family emergency.”

  For a half a second, my heart stopped as I freaked out, wondering which member of our family was having an emergency.

  Until I remembered that Grams had just passed me five minutes ago, and Deedee had texted us an update ten minutes before. There was no family emergency.

  I narrowed my eyes at Mom, but she just shot me a sneaky grin and tapped her right pointer finger to her lips as a signal to be quiet.

  We watched as the disappointed customers filed out but knew they’d be back. Our shop was like a good drink: hard to put down and highly addictive.

  “Okay, what was that all about?” I asked as I put the closed sign on the door after the last customer left.

  “Break room.”

  Mom spun on her heel and strode back through the shop. I almost had to run to follow her.

  The break room had become more of a secret meeting room. It was where we gathered whenever we wanted to talk about private things. I’d recently learned that Grams had charmed the place so only a McCarthy could hear what was said inside of it, which was how I’d managed to eavesdrop on the conversation that would eventually lead to me finding out I was a witch.

  Grams hadn’t really thought it all the way through.

  “We need to hire help,” Grams gasped as soon as Mom and I walked in. “The tourists are going to make me suck down an entire vial of mamba venom and follow it up with some freshly picked hemlock.”

  I didn’t exactly hear the rest of Grams’ threat, though, since I was too excited that we were finally going to hire additional staff. I’d been begging her and Mom for a month to let me find someone, and up until now, they’d flat out refused.

  “Thank you!” I gasped. “Okay, I have a system already in mind. So, we’ll post—”

  “Shannon, baby, let’s not jump into planning mode yet,” Mom interjected. “We’ll ask around the coven and see if anyone knows a witch who wants to work for us. If not, then we’ll look into hiring a layperson.”

  Mom shuddered as if a layperson were the equivalent of a giant spider.

  “That’s not why we closed early, though,” Grams replied before she stepped to the side.

  I hadn’t even noticed she’d been blocking the rickety little table from my view until she moved, and then, she revealed a whole mess of vials, potions, and charms.

  “Shannon,” Mom murmured behind me, gripping my shoulders. “Welcome to your first magic lesson.”

  My mouth dropped open. This was all I’d wanted since…

  Well, I wish I could have said as long as I could remember, but it was more like “since I found out I was a witch.” So, only for the last two months.

  “You guys are going to teach me!” I gasped, grinning at the two of them like a high schooler who’d just been given a car for graduation.

  “You bet your ass we will,” Mom replied. “I wasn’t going to let my child learn all about magic off of Google.”

  “This is amazing!” I said, clapping my hands. The wheels in my brain were already spinning, and I could feel them go around and around and back again. There were so many things I wanted to know. How could I conjure up a muffin in the morning to go with my coffee? Or make my car restart when the battery was dead?

  Or stop having visions of unwanted things. Actually, that was probably number one on my list.

  “So, where do we start? A spell to control the weather? Or make a fire? I want to learn how to snap my fingers and make a flame just like Mom does.” I crept toward the table like a child on Christmas morning, admiring all of the things I’d been sticking on shelves for the last month. There were rose petals and sprigs of lavender next to bundles of sage, the kind of normal stuff you’d find in any spiritual store.

  But there were also black widow legs and cobra fangs, eye of newt and hemlock buds.

  “Not exactly,” Mom laughed. “We’re going to start you where every twenty-one-year-old McCarthy witch would start—with the basics.”

  “Think of today’s lesson like a vocabulary course,” Grams added, picking up a vial of diced rat tails and spinning it around in her hands. “You need to learn to spell before you can write the next great American novel, right?”

  I think I managed to force a smile on my face. But it was hard. I wanted to get up and do spells already, make some potions, and defeat all of the evil in the world. It was a grand way of thinking, I knew, but for some reason, I’d thought that was how everything would work out.

  Unfortunately for me, Grams wasn’t kidding when she likened it to a vocabulary lesson. For the next four hours, we sat there while I learned all of the different plants and other strange, mystical things that made up a witch’s toolbox.

  I learned an awful lot, too, and soon that itch to be perfect and powerful died away.

  3

  It turned out that the vocab lesson was going to last a few weeks. Actually, the way Grams put it, those lessons would last until I “knew every single use of every single thing by heart.”

  I had no idea there were so many different herbs, elements, minerals, and animals used in magic. And not just in potions, either. Different rocks and crystals could ward off or bring in different energies. For example, rose quartz really did attract love. And minerals like black salt from the Dead Sea were powerful tools when warding off evil spirits.

  I had a feeling my vocal lessons would be lasting for a long time, so I decided to distract myself from thinking about all of the things I wasn’t learning yet by trying to find a new hire for the store.

  My motivations may have been a little bit selfish. Mom, Grams, Deedee, and I were absolutely exhausted by the end of every day. If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought that Mom or Grams had put some sort of spell on Magic for Real to attract customers like moths to a flame.

  But I knew they’d never do something as immor
al as that, which meant that people just really liked our store.

  I had managed to drag myself home after a particularly grueling closing shift. Mom and Grams had left the store early to go “take care of dinner,” which really meant picking up sushi on the way home, and I’d been left to shut down by myself. It would have been a piece of cake if it weren’t for the two little boys who had decided that seven p.m. was the perfect time to start up a fresh game of tag. They’d managed to shatter an hourglass filled with sand that ran backward, as well as knock down a shelf full of books about the new age witch’s garden.

  Their poor mother had been mortified, so I insisted she just take the boys home and let me clean up the mess myself.

  I might not have done that had I realized that Saharan sand is incredibly tiny and insanely difficult to sweep up.

  It was close to nine by the time I’d gotten the last few reddish grains cleared from the floor, and everything in my body hurt. That’s something people don’t warn you about when you hit forty. It was like my being had suddenly decided that now was the perfect time to call up all those aches and pains from playing sports and acting crazy as a child. My knees had started to hurt, probably thanks to the fact that I used to love to play kickball on the playground after school, and my lower back now cried out in pain every time I bent over.

  I walked into the house and threw myself facedown onto the couch, even as the delicious smells of hot gyoza and freshly fried eels wafted toward me from the kitchen.

  “Shannon, are you hungry?” Mom called out.

  “Yes, but I can’t move,” I replied with my face buried in one of the hand-embroidered pillows Grams’ aunt had given her when she had moved.

  I heard Mom come into the living room, and just knew she was hiding a vicious laugh behind her fist. Mom had never gotten any sort of aches and pains, despite the fact that she was halfway through her sixties already. I had a feeling she was going to be one of those little old ladies who still marched around like a twenty-year-old, even when she was one hundred.

  “I know how to help you,” Mom said, plopping down onto the coffee table in front of me. She threw a surreptitious glance toward the kitchen to make sure Grams wasn’t watching. Grams hated when people sat on her furniture.

  “You have a spell to reverse the effects of aging?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Not in the slightest,” she chuckled. “But I am putting you in charge of finding our new hire. Congrats, kid, you are now the head of HR.”

  “Nobody in the coven had a suggestion?”

  “Oh, no, they did,” Grams sighed, coming into the living room with a plate of cucumber rolls in her hand. “Elvira suggested her granddaughter, and Tootsie offered up her niece. Unfortunately, neither one of those girls had anything but hot air in their heads. I can’t put them around potions and spells. What if they made the whole shop explode like a bomb?”

  “We have potions that explode?” I demanded, unsure if the fact that my heart had skipped about four beats meant that I was excited or terrified.

  “A few,” Mom shrugged. “So, listen, go put up a job posting in that coffee shop you like, or on those interwebs of yours, and let us know who ya find!”

  “I don’t think I can put something like this on the internet,” I pointed out. “‘Seeking helper for a job at a real magic shop’ probably wouldn’t go over so well.”

  “Touché,” Mom nodded. “Well, you’re the boss.”

  Finally, they were putting me in charge of something. It might have been a little ridiculous for a grown woman to get so excited over something like this, but alas, this was what my life had come to.

  And I wouldn’t trade it for a mansion in Beverly Hills. At least these interviews would give me something to focus on. Hopefully, I’d stop picturing Hunter’s face every time I closed my eyes. Or worse, picturing the fae woman’s face.

  The way she’d alluded to how interesting I was.

  The way she’d made it very clear she wanted to know more.

  She couldn’t be the only one.

  So, to distract myself from all of those thoughts, I printed up a flyer for the job and headed down to my favorite coffee shop, Rockstar Coffee, to post it.

  Within a day, I’d gotten more than a dozen resumes emailed to me. I guess the hipster coffee drinkers loved the idea of working in a “kitschy little occult store with years of history behind it,” as one rather bold girl had described it.

  I liked her style. The email she’d sent was clear and straightforward, and she listed out all of the reasons why she thought she was the best fit for the job, starting with the fact that she needed the money.

  I wouldn’t fault her for that. There’d been a time where I’d needed the money, too, and I admired how honest she was. Her name was Annabelle Leigh, just like in the Edgar Allan Poe poem.

  I called in a total of three people for interviews, including Annabelle.

  I had them come into Magic for Real before closing the next Monday morning. The first kid was named Zach, and in addition to the fact that he looked like he was only fifteen, I got the feeling he was there on a dare.

  It turned out to be more than a feeling when I picked up his application—the one I’d created on my computer and had all the applicants fill out—and got a flash of a vision.

  There was Zach, standing in the coffee shop with a group of his friends as they all pushed him around and laughed, pointing at the flyer I’d put up.

  And then, of course, there was the fact that he’d completed his sheet in bright-pink crayon. Needless to say, I ended that interview early and called up the next applicant.

  In walked a woman who, honestly, looked like an absolute supermodel. She was probably twenty-three or twenty-four, with long, silky-smooth brown hair and clear skin. There wasn’t an ounce of makeup on her face, yet her eyelashes were long and dark, and her eyebrows looked like they could cut straight through a mountain.

  I always had been slightly intimidated by overly beautiful people, and it was only recently I’d realized why. They reminded me of fae, even if I hadn’t known it before. Beautiful, but too perfect.

  “I’m Cassida,” the woman said, extending a hand as she sank into the chair across from me, immediately tucking her ankles underneath her like a properly trained princess.

  “Shannon,” I replied, vaguely aware that I was staring obviously.

  I couldn’t help it. I was desperately trying to figure out if she was fae, and just about begging the powers within me to come forward and give me some sort of vision. I didn’t want to have a fae in Portland, and I sure as heck wasn’t about to hire one on to work at my family’s store.

  “Are you all right?” Cassida asked, tilting her head and giving me a light, perfectly practiced smile.

  “Fine,” I replied throatily, with a heavy nod. “So, uh, Cassida, what aspects of your personality do you think make you a good fit for this job?”

  Slowly, I reached my hand out to grasp the application she’d laid down on the table between us and silently prayed that I’d get some sort of vision.

  But of course, none came.

  “Damn,” I cursed under my breath.

  It was only when Cassida’s brow furrowed that I realized she’d been in the middle of answering my question, and I’d heard exactly none of it.

  “Sorry?” she asked.

  “Uh, I mean, damn those are some good qualifications,” I covered.

  I could see in her light-brown eyes that she thought my behavior was strange, so I quickly changed the subject. Even if she was fae, the last thing I wanted was for her to know that I knew. It was better to just get her out of there as quickly as possible.

  “Thank you,” she beamed. “And, you know, I just have to say how much I admire that this is a family-run business. So many places in Portland have been taken over by corporations that just don’t understand our people and our way of life, so I think it’s so great that a place like Magic for Real still exists. That’s why I’d love
to get the chance to work for you.”

  I glanced down at my notepad, which still had about three thousand questions listed out. I’d come up with them the night before and just kept adding every time I thought of another thing I’d need to ask my potential employees.

  Like, for instance, if they were squeamish. Sometimes it could get a little messy when we were preparing rat tails or lamb’s heart.

  “That’s what we strive for here,” I told Cassida. “I’d like to thank you for your time, and we’ll be in touch as soon as we’ve conducted all of our interviews.”

  “That’s it? You don’t want to ask me anything else?”

  Actually, I really wanted to ask if she was a fae. But that probably wasn’t a good idea.

  “Nope, that’s all,” I told her, standing up to usher her out the door.

  As I did, I plucked a little piece of hair off the back of her perfectly tailored blouse. I was pretty sure Grams knew a spell that could tell if she really was a fae and if we had a problem or not.

  Cassida walked right past Annabelle, who immediately sprang up from her seat and rushed toward me with a massive smile on her face.

  “Hi! It’s so nice to meet you.”

  “You, too,” I replied, accepting her proffered hand for a shake.

  I knew right away that she was the one I wanted to hire. She had curly, black hair that she’d styled and let loose around her face, hazel eyes flecked with gold, and skin that looked like the purest shade of brown I’d ever seen. Her cheeks were rosy with a natural excitement, and she wore plain jeans and a checkered top that fell off her shoulders.

  And the best part? There wasn’t a single witchy thing about her. She even admitted, in the interview, that she wasn’t really into all the “spiritual woo woo,” and instead wanted the job so she could have retail experience on her college applications.

  It was perfect. Annabelle was a hard worker with a 4.0 GPA. She wanted to save up to pay for her engineering degree at the University of Portland, which she planned to finish in two years. Of course, she was only a junior in high school, but she’d already started taking college classes in order to prepare for early graduation.