A Barista’s Guide to Love & Larceny

Chapter 1

One

The crow woke Dani in the rudest way possible: with his cold beak in her ear canal. She shot up in her seat, taking a page from the book she was dozing on with her.

“Hecate’s bones, Gingerbread, you really are a harbinger of destruction.” The bird quorked softly, accepting the compliment. “I’m going to have to pay for this, you know.”

“Shit,” Dani said, blinking. “Shit, Gingerbread, what time is it?”

The crow flapped to the top of the nearest bookcase and gave an urgent caw.

Angry shhhs shot at them from students at the next table, but Dani was too busy gaping at the sundial floating high above Gingerbread to care.

Its blade was silhouetted against the kaleidoscopic skylight enchanted to shine regardless of the weather outside. The dial read seven thirty.

“Oh no,” Dani said. “Oh shit, no.”

Not only had she missed the deadline for her tarot paper, she should’ve been somewhere else half an hour ago. Somewhere important. “Gingerbread, how could you let this happen?”

How could she have let this happen?

Dani’s hands shook as they reached for her quartzpad—the device all Fox’s Leap University students used for notes, assignments, and messaging.

“Please don’t be dead, please don’t be dead,” she muttered.

She hit the on button, then breathed a sigh of relief when the crystal-powered screen lit up.

It had just enough juice for her to hit submit on her overdue, unfinished essay, cementing the dread in her rib cage.

The assignment had originally been due on Friday, but her professor had been kind enough to give her an extension over the weekend—and she hadn’t even been able to make that.

There was no way the teacher would be so lenient a second time.

Gingerbread swooped down to land on a stack of books Dani had gathered earlier, the single turquoise feather in his left wing bright against his black plumage. He let out a nails-on-a-chalkboard squawk.

“Are you serious right now?” hissed one of the students from the neighboring table. “Get your raven out of here.”

“I’m so sorry, I’m trying, he’s a crow, sorry.

” Dani scrambled to dump her things unceremoniously into her messenger bag.

Useless tears were building behind her eyes, but she fought them back, pissed at herself for getting emotional.

The last thing she needed was to have a meltdown in the middle of the library and show her classmates what she feared might be her true self: a perpetually exhausted, always behind schedule, eternally penniless misfit whose clothes never matched and whose admission to the university on partial scholarship may have been an accident.

Two months into her first semester, she was still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Dani blocked the other students’ view as she furtively tucked the torn page back into the book.

“Okay, hop on, we’ve got to get going.” She slung her bag across her chest and held out an arm to Gingerbread, who scuttled up to nestle under her braid.

She glanced at the sundial again. “Ugh, McKenna’s going to be so mad at me. ”

Gingerbread, McKenna’s familiar, replied with a low, affirmative croak.

Deflecting the dark looks hurled at her, Dani returned the damaged tome to its proper shelf and hurried toward the circulation desk, which was crowded with students checking out books, scrying mirrors, and charm kits. A group of girls was chatting inconveniently in front of the exit.

“Vogel had the nerve to give me a C on last week’s glyph,” one of them complained. “A C! Was the spirit I summoned not good enough for her? It was from the 1980s!”

Dani swerved around them, her detour taking her under the giant bulletin board by the door. A purple flyer with tear-off tabs read: Paid Sleep Study Needs Participants. She swiped one of the tabs before ducking through the sliding doors.

It was a relief to stumble out of the library and into the autumn chill of a haunted evening at Fox’s Leap, a wet wind finagling dead leaves from their branches and portending a storm.

Halloween was only days away, and Dani could feel it, like the air itself had goose bumps.

Truthfully, she had never much cared for the holiday; there was too much pressure around having a good time.

She much preferred November, the middle child of the holiday season.

Rain had made the sidewalk slick, and she slipped every third step in her heavy combat boots. Eventually she resigned herself to the fact of her lateness and let herself fall into a slightly accelerated version of her normal pace: wifting, McKenna liked to call it.

Naturally, she was headed for the opposite end of campus.

In spite of everything, Dani was glad to have a chance to collect herself.

Tonight’s was the first assignment she’d ever turned in late for her tarot class.

She’d write to her professor later to beg her way out of a failing grade.

She really couldn’t afford a zero on her transcript.

“We can’t worry about that now,” Dani told Gingerbread, attempting to sound confident.

Tonight, all she needed to do was acquire enough money to make rent and buy groceries.

She lived with her best friend, McKenna, in a shitty apartment a few blocks from campus.

Their lease was month-to-month, and their landlord had stated in no uncertain terms that he’d be happy to kick them to the curb if their payment was even a day overdue.

Dani was still short on her portion, which made it all the more crucial that she play to the best of her ability tonight.

No pressure or anything.

Her destination finally reared up before her.

Like most of the buildings at the Leap, the oracular studies department was an architectural anomaly, resembling no other construction on the grounds.

It looked like someone’s idea of a modern Romanesque cathedral with a steampunk airship docked on its roof.

The airship bit was the observatory, which was where she was heading tonight.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the glass door before it slid open for her.

Her usually artful braid was a frightening mess, the bird’s-nest look completed by Gingerbread’s head poking out from under it.

He squawked when she reached up to tidy her hair, the one element of her appearance she took especial pride in.

It was dyed a spectacular ombre of purple, starting with deep indigo at her roots and paling to a delicate lavender by the time it reached the tips, like twilight in reverse.

There was no time to fix it. Dani crossed the lobby quickly so no one could witness her bad hair day.

The room was mumbling with activity, as it usually was in the evenings; OS majors were notorious for their night owlish tendencies, Dani among them.

Reading and scrying nooks were tucked about the lobby; she could smell frankincense and see the glinting of a pendulum swinging from a student’s hand in one corner.

Gods, she fucking loved it here.

She made a beeline for the stairs and climbed two steps at a time, passing department after department until she came to a breathless stop at a white, windowless door labeled ASTROLOGY in careful block letters.

She turned the handle and stepped into a small waiting room, where a yawny, hipster-lite student glanced up at her from behind the sign-in desk.

“Tonight’s open gaze was canceled,” he said, obviously peeved at the interruption. “You can check the student portal for updates.”

“I’m not here for the gaze,” Dani said, hands lighting restlessly on the edge of his desk.

He gave her chipped-paint raspberry nails the look he might give a hair in his cafeteria-issue salmon nicoise.

As if his spoon-handle rings and pewter snake necklace were that much cooler. “I’m here for the Wheel of Fortune.”

“I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

“La ruota. The card game? You know, the people you let in almost an hour ago?”

“Okay, I do know what you’re referring to.

” His words were accompanied by a burst of color in Dani’s mind: a cloud of greige that glimmered as it turned to silver and then dissipated.

“But they didn’t tell me anyone else was coming.

And you don’t really seem like the type of person they would have invited. Sorry.”

He looked surprised at his candor. Dani, on the other hand, was accustomed to this sort of thing.

It was a quality she’d possessed her entire life, one she couldn’t quite explain: People always shared more than they meant to when she was around.

It seemed to be a passive trait of hers, like having perfect pitch or always being able to guess the time.

To a third-party witness, it was imperceptible, but Dani could always tell when it was happening because a color would enter her brain like an uninvited guest. The exact hue depended on the emotional valence of the person and what they were talking about but, without fail, one or more colors would appear in her mind’s eye, and she would know a boundary had been crossed.

Synesthesia, she’d learned to call it—only she didn’t have it for anything but this.

“Listen, dude.” Dani leaned forward, the intensity in her voice borrowed from the few times she’d had to kick rowdy customers out of Quarter Cast, the café where she worked most nights.

“You have to understand. The stakes are higher tonight than they’ve ever been, and I’m the linchpin of the operation.

Kingpin. Hatpin. Whatever. I could walk out of here with more money than either of us could dream of, and who knows? Maybe you’ll get something out of it.”