Chapter 20
Sylvie
Two Weeks Later
“You good?” Aiden asks, only the very top of his head visible from behind the heavy-duty shelves stacked with books.
He’s been over here almost every day, helping me stock books, take pictures of books, finish setting up my online store, and basically get all my ducks in a row.
Essentially, he’s the chief duck herder at this point.
Quack, quack.
“I mean, other than feeling like I want to throw up, yes?” It’s somewhere between an answer and a question, which pretty much sums up how I’ve been feeling the last two weeks.
“You’ve got this, sweetheart,” he says, and from the way he says it, I know he’s thinking about how he told me exactly that in bed last night.
Yeah, he has been helping me with more than just the store. Heh.
“I feel good about opening,” I tell him, because that’s what today is—the soft open for To Be Read.
“Oh, let me guess, it’s the spellwork you’re planning that’s got you feeling sick?”
“Ugh,” I say, throwing my head back.
He laughs, and the sound makes me smile, just like it always does. “You know, I never in a million years thought I’d be saying something like that as anything but a joke.”
With that, I drop the checklist I’ve been pouring over and run over to pull him into a huge hug. “You’re the best,” I tell him, the words slightly muffled in his chest.
The planner slams into the back of my head. “Ouch,” I say, rubbing the sore spot.
“Oh, shit, I see what you mean about haunted,” a familiar voice says. “Poltergeists are pretty serious, especially when they’re after a librarian’s to-do list.”
“Former librarian,” another voice says.
I squeal, turning around to see the sisters we’ve been waiting for all standing in the delivery doorway.
Ivy, with her brown hair in a riot of curls clouding around her head, her tortoiseshell glasses firmly in place above her trademark bright red lip, grins hugely at me.
Next to her, the middle sister, Rose, has her guitar strapped to her back, bright blonde highlighted hair pulled back into a ponytail that shines the autumn sunlight. She gives me an impish grin, petting the dog Ivy brought along absentmindedly on the head.
Posey brings up the rear, a duffel bag over her shoulder and a baseball cap set on top of her long, glossy dark hair. “Where are these ghosts? I built a contraption I want to try out.”
“Of course you did,” Rose says drily, rolling her eyes. “Hazel wanted to come, but even she knew she wasn’t ready for this.”
“Besides, I needed someone to watch the shop,” Ivy adds.
“Yeah, she’ll watch it… it just might not be the kind of watching you had in mind,” Posey mutters, and Rose snorts.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see you three in my life,” I tell them, and when I reach my arms out wide, they all pile into a group hug.
Even Posey, who usually could care less about displays of affection, grins at me as they pull back.
“I still can’t believe you were able to get away from your stores.
” Between Ivy’s candy shop and Rose’s music lessons and instrument empire and Posey’s mechanic shop where she works on everything from cars to clocks to, well, contraptions, I can’t believe they were able to make it here.
Especially now that I know just how hard it is to take any time off when you run your own business.
“Are you kidding me? Anything for you, Sylvie.”
“I just want to try my ghost trap,” Posey says, nose wrinkling.
Rose laughs at that. “I figured you might have some hotties down south.” She peers around me at Aiden, and it’s my turn to roll my eyes.
“You three must be the back-up witches.” Aiden wraps an arm around my shoulders, and I love the possessive gesture much more than I’ll ever admit. “I’m Aiden, Sylvie’s boyfriend.”
A blush fires up from my chest to my cheeks and I blink up at him, surprised and touched.
It’s the first time he’s called himself that, and while I wasn’t certain what we “were doing,” I wasn’t in a rush to have that conversation in the midst of opening a bookstore, running an event with him, and oh yeah, banishing the trapped spirits of a coven of witches.
“I would say nice to meet you,” Posey drawls, “But being called a back-up witch kind of pissed me right off.”
He laughs at that, and some of the Romantic sisters’ tension ebbs immediately. “That wasn’t how I meant it, I’m sorry. You three are the main event. We can’t do this without you.”
“Awww,” Ivy says, smiling at me. “I like him, Sylvie.”
“Hazel is going to be so pissed she missed this,” Rose says in a sing-song voice.
“So, do the ghosts just throw things at you? I didn’t get a sense of the whole picture,” Posey says. Always straight to the point, that’s Posey to a T.
Meanwhile, Rose has picked a book up off the shelf and appears to be reading it, guitar still strapped to her back.
“No, they don’t just throw things.” Prudence hops up onto an empty spot on the shelf nearest me.
“My witch hasn’t been able to actually do anything inside the store itself.
It’s too dangerous. She’s having the soft open this afternoon as a sidewalk sale.
” Prudence pronounces the word with the same attitude someone might say violent diarrhea.
“Heaven forbid,” Rose mutters, then shoots me a surreptitious wink. “On the sidewalk, like a common peasant!”
“Exactly,” Prudence bobs her head in fervent agreement. “Finally, witches with taste.”
I bite my cheeks to keep from laughing. Prudence’s ability to get under my skin has long since worn off, and now I’m mostly just amused by her absurdity. Otherwise? She’s a damn good familiar.
We wouldn’t have gotten nearly this far without her.
But today is the day it all comes to fruition, when we finally see if what we’ve been working on is going to work—or if the Romantic sisters will be able to figure out another solution.
“Can I peek inside?” Ivy asks, rubbing her hands together. Her eyes sparkle behind her glasses, and she pushes them up as she heads for the back entrance to the bookstore proper.
“Yeah, just watch out for the salt line,” I tell her. She’s already moving, and I know once Ivy gets going with an idea in her head, she’s not going to stop.
It’s best just to let her figure shit out on her own and get out of her way.
Sure enough, the moment she opens the door, sulfurous-smelling cold air blasts through the back room, ruffling the pages of the books and sending the alley door slamming shut.
The lights flicker, then go out, and Prudence lets out a low, menacing growl.
“It’s okay, kitty.” I pet her head, and the growl subsides slightly.
“Holy shit,” Ivy says, her voice full of wonder. Not fear, nope, that wouldn’t be Ivy. Just pure, unadulterated awe. “And it’s like this all the time?”
“Nope,” I tell her, then sigh, because hot damn, things have escalated quickly. “It was little things for a while, stuff moving around. It’s gotten worse every day since, well, since Aiden and I were forced to watch the memory of the whole coven snuffing it after a spell went wrong. Best guess—”
“It’s not a guess,” Prudence sniffs. “It’s a working hypothesis.”
“Right.” I pause for a second, trying to collect myself. “Between the grimoire and Prudence’s esoteric,” I grin, pleased with the five dollar word, before continuing, “knowledge, we hypothesize that the increased, er, magical usage here attracted all the ghosts within a certain radius of town.”
Through the door, over three dozen distinct spirits slam into things, throw what’s left of my long-abandoned cleaning supplies around, and generally cause havoc. Icicles hang off the balconies and ceiling, huge, stalactite-sized things with vicious points.
I know there are over three dozen because I spent one morning over-caffeinated and over-sugared, counting them with Tara. We lost count around thirty-seven or thirty-nine when frost began creeping across the doorway.
“It’s unpleasant, to say the least.” Prudence’s whiskers twitch.
The potential damage to the salt line was too dangerous to risk, so we kept that door closed as soon as we realized how much worse it could get.
The Romantic sisters, needless to say, are agog. Aghast, even.
It’s surprisingly gratifying to see.
“Sometimes they make the walls bleed. It’s gross,” I tell them. “I’d shut that door before they mess with the salt barrier again.”
Ivy stares for just a second longer. A spirit shambles over, one of the worst-looking ones, big old blank holes where eyes should be, a dislocated jaw, stringy hair—basically if zombie and a ghost banged, this would be the extremely graphic result.
“Nightmare fuel, anyone?” I say cheerily.
“Ew,” she says, slamming the door. “Alright. That is hands down the worst haunting I’ve ever seen.”
“What did you say caused it, again?” The book lies forgotten in Rose’s hand.
“Best as we could find out, there was a bad outbreak of smallpox here over a hundred years ago. That was documented in the library.”
Posey snorts at the word library, but I ignore her.
“A bunch of kids got it and the vaccines that would have kept them safe were late arriving. The coven who lived here cast a spell to protect them, but something went wrong.” Most of the story had been in the grimoire, and Tara and Prudence and even Em, when she could get away from work, had poured over it in the previous weeks.
“Best I can tell, either the spell inverted and drew strength from the coven as it killed them, trapping them here,” I jerk my chin at the closed door.
“Or it drew strength from them as it killed them and trapped anyone else who died here in the following ten years.”
“That feels like a random number.”
“We found the spell they used and went through what could have gone wrong. It’s a best guess.”
“When do the other witches show up?” Posey doesn’t seem nearly as flippant after seeing what’s going on in my bookstore.
“Tara and Em should be here soon, and they’re bringing Tara’s aunt Tilly with them, too.”