Chapter 8
“Wait, hold up, what are you talking about?” Orion struggles to catch my attention as I stumble around the room, packing up my things. “Mikaela! What happened?” he asks.
“I need to talk to Gramps!” I shout as he grabs my arm. “I’m going to die!”
Orion’s eyes grow as big as saucers as he takes a step back. I stuff the cards into my leather flip-top backpack along with my phone and race from the room. Orion’s right at my heels.
“Take a breath, sis. You can’t leave now,” he says. “We don’t have anyone to cover for us.”
There’s no way in hell I can work the rest of my shift with the vision replaying on a loop in my head.
I can still feel the scrape of the blade as it grazed my ribs.
A knife straight to the heart isn’t a survivable wound.
I don’t need supernatural intuition to know that.
If I’m looking for a silver lining to my impending death, at least I can rest assured that no one will ever bother me about college again.
I won’t have to worry about becoming Witch Queen, either.
I no longer have a future to think about.
Orion grabs my arm and pins me in place. Two middle-aged women I hadn’t noticed shopping take one look at us and scuttle into the next aisle. “I’m not sure what you saw,” Orion whispers. “But stay calm. Let’s talk about it.”
I stab a finger at his chest. “If you had seen what I did, there’s no way you would be calm right now.
” I spot a flash of movement in my peripheral vision as another customer peers at our crystals.
We’re too exposed for this conversation right now, so I tap into Orion’s mind and speak through our bond.
Most witches prefer not to allow others into their heads, but as twins, Orion and I have been linked together our entire lives.
“That girl—the one who’s maybe going to be working here now—is going to kill me. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. I know we can’t close the shop, but I can’t stay here a minute longer.”
Without giving him an opportunity to respond, I rush from the store and onto the street. I’ll carry the expression on his face with me forever. It was one of sheer confusion and panic.
Orion and Gramps already lost Gran. Losing me too would completely shatter their broken spirits.
I don’t know what to do, but Gramps will.
The sidewalks are busier than they were earlier as the day picks up. Heat waves shimmer off the pavement as the sounds of music and chatter fill the streets. I shove through the crowds of slow-moving tourists and head for the streetcar stop.
Someone tries to flag me down, but I ignore them. I glance over my shoulder and spot a regular of mine who has a near religious obsession with her daily readings. I don’t have time to speak to her or the energy to worry about whether I’ll lose her business.
Instead, I quicken my pace. The muggy air leaves a sheen of sweat over my skin. I hike up my skirt to get some air movement on my ankles and walk as fast as I can.
The streetcar arrives at the stop only a second after I do. I scan the pass on my phone and slide into a seat near the back.
As it slowly rolls away, I lean my forehead against the glass and shut my eyes. I’ve taken this route so many times that it’s seared into my muscle memory, and so I let my mind go blank.
Fifteen minutes later, I get off the streetcar and race home, pain shooting up my leg.
The soles of my sandals are so thin, I can practically feel the sidewalk beneath my feet.
The Cadillac is parked in its usual spot in front of the house, thank goodness.
I throw open the front door and yell out for Gramps.
There’s no answer, but the ceiling creaks. I take the stairs two at a time, tossing my bag onto my bed before continuing up to the third floor.
Gramps’s voice grows louder the closer I get to the top. I pause at the cracked door and peer inside. He’s got his back to me, sitting at his desk. On the computer screen, boxes of faces stare back at him.
“We’ve got to be more aggressive in discrediting his statements,” Gramps says. “Dupree won’t take this challenge lying down—it’s not the way men like him operate. He’ll say or do anything to win this race.”
“I don’t believe that’s our path forward, Ezekiel,” one of the virtual faces says. “You should present yourself as a foil to his aggression. The people want to see a friendly face, someone they can believe in.”
“But—”
“Do you really want to come across as an angry Black man?” someone else asks.
Ouch.
I tiptoe back down to the second floor and take a seat on the bottom step.
The last thing I want to do is interfere with his campaign.
Besides trying to take over all the businesses on our street, Mike Dupree was a guest on a podcast recently and spouted off terrible things about women and immigrants. My blood boiled hearing him speak.
Gramps has to win this race.
I can keep myself from combusting for a few more minutes while he has his meeting.
Gramps gave us access to the shop’s email account once we were old enough to be trusted.
I log in and my heart sinks when I see that Joelle’s application has already been opened.
Damn. There’s no way I can delete it now that Gramps has already seen it.
I click open the PDF scan instead and study her looping, delicate handwriting.
My finger brushes over her full name: Joelle Murphy. The girl destined to kill me.
She was seriously so gorgeous, too. The universe can’t let me have one good thing, I swear.
When I open the sent messages, I can see that Gramps already emailed to set up a phone interview. It’s not too late to stop this. Once I tell him about the vision, there’s no way he’ll let her work in the shop.
I need to stay far away from that girl. The last thing I want to do is give her any opportunity to get close enough to stab me.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t stalk her on social media.
I open Instagram and type in her name. Only a couple Joelle Murphys appear, but none of them is the girl who sat across from me in my reading room.
Time for a different approach. I switch to Google and plug variations of Joelle Murphy plus the names of small towns in the vicinity of Salem, Massachusetts, into the search bar until I find a newspaper article about a talented junior tennis player.
An image of a slightly younger, darker-haired Joelle swinging her racket stares back at me from the top of the page.
Bingo!
As I scroll through the article, I tamp down rising feelings of admiration. It makes Joelle out to be the darling of the town. If you can believe the writer, she was single-handedly responsible for getting her high school’s team to the regional semifinals.
I scroll through more Google results, but I can’t find anything else about her aside from a shorter article with a more recent image. This time, Joelle’s curls are dyed in vibrant shades of purple and blue. The photo captures her mid-handshake with her opponent.
Who is this girl? And why does she want to kill me?
The door at the top of the stairs swings open, startling me from my research. I click my phone off and face Gramps, who leans in the doorway, staring down at me. “Shouldn’t you be at the shop?” he asks.
I trudge up the stairs, pausing one step below. “I saw something in the cards today.”
“I would hope so,” he chuckles. “That’s your job.”
“Gramps.” My tone stops him mid-laugh. “This is serious. We need to talk.”
He backs up, allowing me to step into the office.
The curtains are thrown open, casting the room in near-blinding sunlight. A stack of photo albums sits on Gran’s desk next to an open box. More boxes are scattered across her side of the room. Inside one, her glass trinkets are bundled up in Bubble Wrap.
If my emotions weren’t already so thrown off by watching my own death, then seeing the pieces of Gran’s life packed away would send me to tears. It’s taken Gramps a whole year to clear out her space, but honestly, it still feels too soon.
I steady my shaky hands against my thighs and take a seat in her creaky desk chair.
Gramps studies me. “What happened? Tell me everything.”
I tell him about Joelle and the reading I gave her. When I get to the part when she plunges the knife into my chest, his eyes darken.
“I don’t even know who she is or why she would want to kill me,” I conclude. “And I don’t know what to do at this point. I could have read the cards wrong—”
“The cards are never wrong,” Gramps interjects. “You know that well enough. Give me the details. Where were you? What time of year was it?”
“Um.” It’s easy enough to pull the memory back to the forefront of my mind. “We were in a forest, I think. There were trees all around us, and a full moon above.”
“What did the moon look like?”
I shake my head, slightly aggravated by his intense questioning. “I don’t know.” I shrug. “It was the moon.”
Gramps crosses the room and grips my shoulders. “Think, Mikaela. Be very specific. You shouldn’t leave a stone unturned in a vision this important. Every little detail is essential.”
“Fine, fine.” I close my eyes and let it replay. “I can’t see the blade. No matter how hard I try. It’s almost like it’s cast in a thick fog.”
“Skip it, then,” Gramps says. “What else do you remember?”
“The moon had a slightly reddish hue.” My eyes pop open. “And it seemed bigger than usual. Unreal almost.”
Gramps scratches his chin and inhales quickly as something clicks. He strides over to his bookshelf and snatches a thick book off the shelf. I catch a glimpse of the cover as he flips it open. The Farmers’ Almanac. He’s so old-school.
He harrumphs when he finds what he’s looking for. “I’ll be damned. Look at this right here.” He plunks the book onto the desk, and we both peer down at the open page.
It’s a list of the moon phases for the year. I follow Gramps’s finger to June 29.
“It’s a strawberry moon,” Gramps says, sounding almost pleased with himself.
“The name’s got nothing to do with the color.
It’s meant to mark the peak harvesting time for strawberries.
But from what I gathered after forty-five years of being married to Adelaide, visions aren’t always what they appear.
The moon won’t actually look the way it did in your vision. It’s symbolic.”
My heart lifts. “Does that mean Joelle stabbing me is also symbolic?”
“Oh no. It’s just the smaller details that can contain symbolism. You being stabbed, that’s a major event. That’s as real as can be, baby girl.”
My shoulders slump. So, I’m going to die after all. This entire situation makes zero sense. I have no idea why a complete stranger would want me dead, but like Gramps said, the cards don’t lie.
I don’t know the first step to prevent this from happening or if I even can.
The most important lesson Gran taught me when I learned to read the cards is that the future we see in our visions isn’t mutable.
It’s not going to suddenly change. The circumstances leading up to it may, but the vision itself is set.
But there has to be another way. Maybe Gran left something out of her teachings, or maybe she was wrong.
Wait a minute. I scramble to my feet to peer back at the almanac. Holy shit. The full moon is exactly a week after my eighteenth birthday. No, that can’t be.
There has to be a way to change the future. If not for my sake, then for my family’s. We’ve had to deal with too much tragedy already.
Gramps grabs my shoulder and shakes me. “Snap out of it. I can see you spiraling.”
“Can you blame me?” I cry. “I don’t want to die, Gramps.”
In answer, he crushes me to his chest in a tight hug. “This is serious, but it ain’t nothing we can’t get through. We’ll get to the bottom of this.” He kisses the top of my head.
I notice keenly what he doesn’t say: You’re not going to die. Of course he can’t promise that. Even he must know I’ve got one foot in the Afterlife.
“What should I do?” I pull back to stare up into his eyes. “I should avoid her, right? She put in a job application! You have to turn her down!”
“Hush a minute and let me think.” He releases me and sits down in front of his computer, opening up the shop’s email account. I stare once more at Joelle’s handwriting, losing myself in a haze of panic and confusion.
“Hmm.” Gramps strokes his chin. “This might be a good thing.”
“What?! Gramps—”
“Forget the phone interview. I’ll email her right now and tell her she can start tomorrow.”
“Why would you want to hire the girl who’s going to kill me?” I gasp.
“Keep your enemies close and all that,” he says. His fingers fly across the keyboard as he drafts an email to Joelle. “You didn’t receive that vision for no reason, baby girl. This is a blessing in disguise. Now you’ll have an opportunity to discover more information about her.”
“I don’t want to get to know her.” Though, if I’m honest with myself, I am so intrigued by this girl. Ancestors, help me!
“If she won’t reveal her motive willingly, then you’ll have to read her mind, Mikaela.”
My heart drops. “But—”
“No buts. Keep me informed on everything,” Gramps says, ignoring my protests. “We’ll sort this out.”
Breaking into a mortal’s mind is easy, since their defenses are nonexistent.
To the right witch, a mortal’s brain can be an open book.
Morally, I don’t believe it’s right to take advantage of people who don’t even know about the existence of magic.
You can listen to their deepest, darkest secrets and they would never even suspect a thing.
The situation would have to be dire for me to try, but there has to be another way.
He sucks in a deep breath. “This may be the first trial you’re facing, but it won’t be the last. You’re the next Witch Queen, my girl. You carry the strength of your ancestors within you, and you’ve got the backing of the coven.”
“But what happens if I can’t stop the vision from happening?”
He presses his lips into a thin line. “I believe in you. A mortal is no match for a witch of your bloodline.”
The slight tremble in his voice doesn’t instill me with much confidence. First, the mysterious sickness with Marian, and now this. I’ve always trusted him to fix things, but two unprecedented events in one week is really stretching the limits of Gramps’s skill.
“For now, I’ll delay your training and keep wind of this from the Council.”
The last thing we need is for the rest of the coven to hear that their future Witch Queen is marked for death. That would throw us into the succession crisis of the century.
I can’t believe my eighteenth birthday may be my last. The thought shatters the dam inside, sending tears streaming down my face.