Divorce, Divination and Destiny

by Melinda Chase

  But for a second, I paid her no attention. I pulled out my phone and snapped a clear picture of the fae’s face, right before he went inside and disappeared from view.

  He was absolutely hideous, with slimy green skin and horns that grew out of his head at all sorts of random angles. There was a set of beady red eyes pushed back into his head, and his nose was all smashed up, giving him the appearance of a pug.

  I had no idea who he was. Hopefully, we could use this picture to figure it out and get our damn grimoire back.

  “He just appeared!” Annabelle was shrieking. “How did that happen? Elle, what is going on?”

  “Yeah, we can’t really explain that to you,” my mom seriously replied as she glanced up at me. “How much time do we have?”

  I knew exactly what she meant. I looked down at my watch and saw that there were only about five minutes until we hit the two-hour mark and, hopefully, Annabelle forgot everything she’d just seen.

  “A couple of minutes,” I replied, coming over to try and help her calm down the frantic kid.

  “What are you talking about?” Annabelle demanded. “What is going on? What was that? How did he—appear—just like that?”

  “He’s what we call a fae,” Mom told her.

  “Mom!” I gasped.

  “What?” She shrugged. “The kid deserves to know, at least.”

  I could see the slight pleading in her eyes, and knew she felt the same way I did. Even if Annabelle wouldn’t remember, she deserved some sort of an explanation for why her life had gone topsy turvy since she’d started working for us.

  “Know what?” Annabelle asked. “You know what, it doesn’t matter! I’m quitting. You people are crazy.”

  “Wait, Annabelle, don’t do anything rash,” I told her, blocking her path with my body. “Here’s the thing. Magic…is real.”

  “The store name.” She actually chuckled, which I supposed was a good sign.

  “Yeah,” I replied wryly. “And that thing was a fae. He’s got powerful magic, and he took something very precious to us. It’s called a grimoire, and it holds all of our family’s spells from the last millennia and a half.”

  That number may have been a little exaggerated, but I wanted at least to make all of this seem cool for Annabelle.

  It seemed my plan was working because she stopped trying to bolt out the door and crossed her arms to let me know she was listening.

  “Huh,” she replied, contemplating everything I was telling her. “I wonder how that works. Like teleportation, I suppose, though there’s no real scientific basis for that. At least not something we’ve discovered.” She was doing exactly what I did when I was overwhelmed. Talking it out. “I wonder if it’s at the atomic level,” she continued. “I suppose it must be, or else…” Suddenly, she trailed off, and her deep-brown eyes got this terribly vacant look in them.

  For a moment, my heart stopped, before I remembered the potion I had just given her. It must have kicked in.

  All of a sudden, her features went blank before they reset themselves into a calm, nearly happy expression, and she looked at the two of us with a soft smile.

  “We should get the store back open,” she pointed out.

  And just like that, she marched over to her computer, closed the security feed out, and walked to the front of the shop, where we heard her bustling around as she opened back up.

  “Well, at least we know our potion worked,” Mom pointed out.

  “And we’ve got a face,” I replied.

  I glanced back down at the picture I’d snapped on my phone.

  Suddenly, I felt a very familiar, but semi-long lost, pull on my mind.

  A vision was coming.

  11

  Before I could do a thing about it, I disappeared into my vision in the middle of the break room. The world around me evaporated and reformed again.

  I was now standing in the middle of a forest filled with tall trees. It looked like any other forest in or around Portland, and there were no defining characteristics to tell me just where I was.

  But, right there in front of me was the fae robber. He squatted next to a fire that he’d clearly built, cooking up some poor squirrel he’d skinned and hunted.

  “Sends me to do her dirty work,” he was grunting. “Won’t even bring me good food. What manner of creature is this? I can’t be expected to eat this way for much longer.”

  “And you won’t be.” A high, chilling voice announced behind me.

  Even though I knew that I didn’t interact with anyone in my visions and that they couldn’t see me the way I could see them, I still felt a massive chill crawl up my spine.

  I recognized that voice.

  I would never, ever forget that voice.

  I turned around, and my fears were confirmed when I saw the fae woman appear from the brush behind me. She had on those same dark robes, but the hood was down, revealing her long, shiny hair.

  The fae woman walked straight toward me, and I nearly lunged to the ground before I remembered that she couldn’t touch me. In a terrifying moment, she walked so close that I would have been able to feel her skin touch mine if we’d been in real life.

  But we weren’t, and she passed me by without another thought.

  “My lady,” the fae gasped, leaping to his feet and dropping into a deep bow as if he hadn’t been ready to curse her out mere moments before.

  The fae woman recognized it, too, but said nothing. Instead, she pursed her lips and appraised this minion of hers.

  She had been behind the theft. That much was clear.

  “Save it, Nemius,” she barked. “Have you stolen the book?”

  “Yes,” the fae, Nemius, replied, pointing to a dirty, old knapsack. I could just barely see the corner of my family’s grimoire poking out of the opening. “Would you like it, Lady Elrind?”

  “No,” she barked. “Keep it safe for me. Fail me, and I will have you die a most terrible death, understood?”

  “Yes, my lady,” Nemius choked.

  And just like that, it was over. The forest dissolved around me, and I was back in the break room. Mom was in front of me with wide eyes, waiting to hear what I had seen.

  “They’re working together,” I choked out. “The fae woman and our robber. He stole the grimoire for her. I don’t know what she wants with it.”

  “What the heck just happened to you?” Annabelle’s voice broke through the tense moment, making it rife with shock.

  Mom and I turned to see her staring at us with wide eyes, a customer’s receipt in her hand.

  “Uh, what do you mean?” Mom attempted to cover.

  Clearly, she was where I’d inherited my lying skills.

  “A grimoire? And a fae?” Annabelle demanded. “You people are either crazy or…” Suddenly, a light popped into her eyes, and she looked around the break room as if she were seeing it for the first time.

  “Magic for Real,” she murmured.

  “No,” I sprang toward her, meaning to grab her into my arms and attempt to shake the ferocity of my words into her. “Not real. Not real at all.”

  “Let me go,” Annabelle demanded. “You people are absolutely crazy.”

  The teen twisted out of my grasp and leaped through the doorway. A second later, we heard the front door slam close, and Mom and I both knew what that meant.

  We’d devised a lovely, perfect plan to keep Annabelle from remembering that videotape. And then I’d gone and blown it all up with my vision.

  “Hello?” the customer Annabelle had been helping called from the front of the store. “Is anyone going to help me with this return?”

  “We’ve really gone and done it this time,” Mom sighed, rubbing her forehead.

  The old me would have been quick to agree with her. But the new Shannon absolutely refused to do that. My powers were coming back. I could make another potion so Annabelle would forget any of this had ever happened.

  “I’m on this,” I told Mom.

  She had no ot
her choice but to trust me with the task unless she wanted to turn away the twenty unhappy customers waiting in line, and she knew it.

  “Okay,” she nodded. “Go fix this. And Shannon, remember: exposure of our kind to the human world has been nothing but disastrous in the past. Make sure she forgets.”

  “Of course,” I nodded quickly.

  I didn’t even want to ask what “disastrous” meant coming out of my mother’s mouth. Not even earthquakes were disasters to her.

  It was time for me to roll up my sleeves and make another potion. Just this time, it would be all by myself.

  Two hours later, I was starting to really regret my decision to make this potion all by myself. For the fourth time, I laid a dried devil’s kiss petal out flat and then stared down at it, squinting my eyes like a rugged cowboy in a classic Western.

  “All right,” I growled at the little purple petal, “you listen to me. This time, when I crush you, I want you to flake out just like you do for Mom, you hear?”

  I’d hit the point of exhaustion where I was starting to lose it completely, but I was also way too tired even to care. With each passing minute, Annabelle was out there, wondering what she’d seen.

  Thankfully, I understood how her mind worked. She wasn’t completely sure what had happened to me, or what I had been talking about. So right now, she was attempting to rationalize the entire situation and figure out a much more plausible explanation. Like maybe, for instance, that she’d misheard me completely. I just needed to get this potion to work in time before she started to realize that she’d heard correctly, and then headed down the path that started at “what if,” and ended with “Shannon’s a witch.”

  Yes, it was true the McCarthy’s owned a magic shop, but we didn’t want anyone to know what we really were. They thought we were a bunch of cooks with cool stuff, and we wanted to keep it that way.

  I took the rolling pin and smashed it down over the flower, praying that it broke down into the perfect little diamond-shaped pieces. Which it didn’t. Instead, it shattered into dust and then evaporated right into thin air. See, the thing that movies and books almost always miss is that when a potion doesn’t go perfectly right, it doesn’t go at all.

  “Come on!” I snapped at no one in particular. I turned back to the shelf behind me and surveyed all of the bottled-up herbs and plants Mom and Grams kept in the garden shed. “Think, Shannon.”

  So the recipe I was using was a complete dud. But, from what I could tell, potions were a lot like cooking. If the recipe didn’t work, I could make my own instead.

  Quickly, I scanned the herbs and tinctures until I put the perfect combination together in my mind.

  “Okay, angel’s herb, chamomile, bat liver essence, and…new moon water for new beginnings,” I murmured, grabbing each item from the shelf.

  Separately, they didn’t do all that much. But together, I should have a potion that would both protect Annabelle and make her forget what she’d seen altogether. Just for good measure, I also added in a lock of my hair to make absolutely sure she forgot anything magical that had to do with me.

  When I was all finished, I had something that looked…not pretty. Or appetizing. But it was glowing, and in the magical world, a glow was almost always a good sign.

  In fact, what I ended up with was a tiny pile of black dust. It reminded me of sand from one of those beaches in Iceland. I had no idea how I was going to get Annabelle to ingest it, but that was a problem for later.

  Quickly, I gathered the potion remnants into a little vial and rushed through the backyard and to Mom’s Mustang. When I got to Annabelle’s house, I found her mom on the porch swing out front.

  “Hi, Shannon,” Jenna smiled at me, tossing a piece of black, curly hair over her shoulder. “How’s everything?”

  “Oh, good,” I replied. “Great. Is Annabelle home?”

  “Yep, let me grab her for you,” Jenna replied. “Trouble with the store?”

  “We just wanted to ask her a few more questions about the robbery,” I lied. God, I hated lying.

  “Of course,” Jenna nodded. “You know, I think that really messed with her.”

  “Oh, no,” I sighed, a pang of sadness shooting through my heart. “What makes you say that?”

  “She’s got this crazy idea in her head that you three are actual witches,” Jenna laughed. “And not the Pagan kind, either.”

  “Funny,” I giggled, although, to my ears, the sound came out more like a donkey’s whine.

  With that, Jenna disappeared back into her big, wide house. I stood on the porch, kicking the floorboards and myself, for a moment. I couldn’t believe I’d been stupid enough to hire a non-magical human to work at the store. This whole thing would have been an awful lot better if I’d just hired one of the girls the coven had suggested.

  Of course, Grams would have grumbled about that for years.

  Finally, Annabelle came out of the front door, looking at me suspiciously. “Are you here to tell me the truth, or to lie?” she demanded.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re witches, aren’t you?” The look in her eyes was deadly serious. She’d figured us out, and there was no convincing her otherwise.

  At least, not without the help of a little magic.

  “Say something,” Annabelle prompted when I remained silent for too long.

  “Uhhh,” I stalled, trying to figure out just how I could get this potion dust into her.

  That was when it hit me. It was dust.

  Without even thinking, I uncapped the vial, poured the contents into my hand, and then blew it straight into Annabelle’s face. It was like the generations of witches in my blood had just taken over, knowing exactly what to do.

  Heck, they’d probably dealt with this a time or two themselves.

  “What are you—” Annabelle started to say, but she quickly stopped speaking when the dust settled around her face. It landed on her skin, sticking to it like pieces of wet glue before it just dissolved right into her being.

  A blank look crossed her face, just like the one she’d had in the break room. After a second, Annabelle came back into the present moment and looked over at me with a soft smile.

  My heart was pounding in my chest, from both the anticipation of knowing whether or not the potion worked and the fact that I’d actually made a potion, all by myself.

  “Hey,” Annabelle said.

  “Hey,” I replied hesitantly. I said nothing more, waiting for her to make the next move so I could gauge how much she remembered.

  “Can I help you with something?” she asked instead.

  “I just wanted to check on you,” I told her. Inwardly, I punched the air with my fist. I had officially made a potion all by myself, and it had worked!

  That excitement quickly faded, though, when Annabelle’s eyebrows knitted together. “Check on me? Do I know you?”

  Oh no.

  Oh. No.

  “I’m your boss,” I replied, half terrified.

  “I don’t think so,” Annabelle laughed. “Between school, clubs, and college applications, I don’t have time for a job. I think you must have the wrong person. Have a good day.”

  And with that, she spun around and marched right back inside of her house, as if it were perfectly normal for a stranger to appear on her porch, claiming to be her boss.

  I, on the other hand, wanted to take that inner fist I’d just punched in the air and put it through a wall. I hadn’t just made Annabelle forget about today. I’d made her forget she even knew me or worked at Magic for Real.

  Grams was going to kill me.

  12

  “How’s Annabelle?” Mom called out as soon as I walked in the door.

  “She’s good,” I told her honestly.

  “And she doesn’t remember anything she saw, correct?” Grams asked.

  “Nope, she doesn’t remember a thing,” I told her honestly.

  “Uh-uh, there’s more,” Mom stated as I came around the corner a
nd into the living room.

  “Annabelle doesn’t remember anything,” I told them, a little embarrassed. “At all. We’re probably going to need to hire a new front clerk.”

  “Oh, dear,” Grams sighed. “And she was so good at her job, too.”

  “I still haven’t quite got a handle on this whole witch thing,” I groaned, sitting down between them and covering my face with my hands. “How long is this supposed to take, exactly?”

  “Not long,” Mom assured me. “A couple more months, maybe. This would all be a lot easier if we had our grimoire back. Speaking of which, I told Grams about the vision you had.”

  “What do you think?” I demanded, turning toward Grams.

  She had a cup of tea in one hand, and the other was resting on Herman’s back as he slept on the arm of the couch. Grams pursed her lips and thought for a moment before she shook her head. “Honestly, my love, I don’t know,” she finally sighed. “This is, unfortunately, out of my area of expertise. It has been for some time. I simply fell in love with your grandfather. I know almost nothing of his world outside of the stories all witches are told.”

  “And I’m starting to think that a lot of that is untrue,” Mom pointed out. “Kind of like democrats and republicans. I think fae and witches just want to hate each other, at this point.”

  “That’s terrible,” I sighed. “But it doesn’t help right now. What do we do?”

  “I think I might have a friend who can help,” Grams announced. “I haven’t spoken to her in decades, but from what I remember, she mentioned a hybrid once to my aunt, in passing. I couldn’t have been more than five or six, but the word stuck with me. I’d thought it was simply a myth at the time, of course.”

  “Wait, you knew her as a kid,” I replied. “How do you know she’s not dead?”

  “She comes from a clan of witches with an extraordinarily long life span,” Grams replied. “Rumor has it that a small bit of fae blood runs in their veins, giving them lives that span hundreds of years. Marcella is somewhere around a hundred and fifty now, I believe.”