Chapter Twenty-Six
Over the course of the next week, Calisa and Jack returned to the various realms they’d visited to spread the word and take reservations: a room to a fishmonger couple from the mermaid-friendly village, one to the bone-like creature who covered its body in the pelt of a bear, another to the family made of bark and leaves, and another to the jewel-drenched fae queens from the Night Market.
Every time they returned to the inn between trips, Auntie Zee put them to work on preparing. Sitting on a cushioned chair behind the lobby desk, she issued orders while sipping tea from the enchanted teapot:
Excess seawater needed to be mopped up.
Towels stacked and folded in the bathrooms.
Pillows fluffed and bedsheets smoothed.
Bathrooms sprayed with room freshener made by mermaids.
Otherworldly flowers that smelled like sunshine on a perfect July day should be tucked into glass bottles and placed in every guest room on the mantel and windowsills.
A sprig of lavender on each bed. Check for cobwebs.
Lay a piece of fresh firewood in each hearth for the firebird—that was, Auntie Zee said, part of their arrangement.
In exchange for fresh logs, it would flit around the bed-and-breakfast from fireplace to fireplace and send up sparks when Auntie Zee was needed.
The number of sparks would indicate which room number required the innkeeper’s attention.
As Calisa passed through the lobby with an armload of towels for Jack—he was finishing soaking up what remained of Kendra’s disaster—she asked, “What about the mirror? How does it help with running the inn?”
“It doesn’t,” Auntie Zee said. “It’s just an asshole.”
I heard that, the mirror wrote.
Auntie Zee laughed. “The mirror is my security system. It watches the lobby and lets me know if it spots any threats to my guests. In exchange, I offer it a respite from people who want to ask it stupid questions because they read a ridiculous fairy tale and think it has opinions on human beauty.”
Calisa laughed and then saw she was serious. “Not sure it’s totally doing its job. It didn’t alert you when I stole…borrowed…the inn’s logbook. It had to have seen me pluck it out of the portal.”
Auntie Zee shrugged. “As I said, it’s an asshole.”
In my defense, I thought it would be funny.
“How is that a defense?” Calisa asked.
In small letters: It was objectively hilarious.
Hobbling out of the lobby, Auntie Zee grunted at the mirror.
After tossing the towels to Jack, Calisa followed her aunt into the kitchen. “The first thing to know about running a bed-and-breakfast,” Auntie Zee said, “is that you must be both visible and invisible. The guests should feel catered to but never smothered….”
Calisa wondered if she should be taking notes.
She continued on with the advice—answering questions that Calisa hadn’t even thought to ask about maintaining an inn with otherworldly guests—before concluding with: “We will, of course, need to fill the pantry before the influx of guests begins.”
From under the sink where he was working on the plumbing, Thomas called, “Make me a list. I’ll visit Rin’s stall in the Night Market after I’m done with this.”
Carrying an armload of damp, salty towels, Jack popped into the kitchen before heading for the washing machine.
“You are not going through a portal again.” He and Calisa had done all the inviting and making reservations.
This was the first time the possibility of his dad venturing through had come up.
“That’s not how you talk to your father,” Auntie Zee admonished as he sailed by. “You have been spending too much time with my grandniece.”
Thomas slid out from beneath the sink. “It’s not your decision to make. I have been visiting the Night Market for longer than you’ve been alive.”
Calisa located a pad of paper and a pencil. “Jack’s right. You aren’t going through a portal anytime soon. We’ll get whatever is needed. You have to stay put.” She leveled a look at Thomas. “For Jack.”
Huffing, Thomas began, “Everything I do is for Jack, for this place, for Zee, for our futures. If you think I’ll let my son take risks—”
Jack called over his shoulder, “You were gone for three years.”
His father fell silent.
Calisa held the pencil poised over the paper and asked with a steel edge to her voice, “Auntie Zee, what do we need?”
She thought she heard Auntie Zee give a quiet grunt of approval.
—
With the full supply list in hand, Calisa and Jack (and Steve, riding on Calisa’s shoulder, as usual) returned to the Night Market.
Working at his stall beneath an array of lanterns, Rin was delighted to see them and even more delighted when they showed him the list from Auntie Zee and explained about the grand reopening.
“She is truly a marvel. I had worried…Well, never mind an old centaur’s worries.
Passion cannot be stopped. It shines through, despite adversity.
You know that’s how you achieve happiness, having a purpose in life, and she found hers with that inn.
The last time I saw her, though, she was certain that the inn wouldn’t last much longer. May I ask what caused this change?”
“She got help,” Calisa said simply.
“Ahh, I see. Beautiful.” He read through the list, nodding at each item. “The breads, the pastries, yes—I will bring them myself.”
“How much?” Calisa asked.
Rin waved his hand airily. “For the witch of the inn, it’s a gift.”
Jack frowned. “She won’t want—”
“Please, let me do this for her,” Rin said.
“For years, decades, lifetimes, Auntie Zee has been sending customers my way. She is responsible for a significant portion of my family’s wealth.
It was that wealth that helped save my daughter’s life—when they said a miracle couldn’t happen, it paid the best doctors.
Truly, I owe her my happiness: my purpose, my family.
Did she tell you it was she who introduced me to my wife?
My Veracitu. It was Auntie Zee who brought her to the market, to me.
We’ve been married twenty-eight years now, and we’d never have had all those years together without Auntie Zee.
In fact…so many people have stories about her.
She doesn’t know the good she’s done, the lives she’s touched.
Let me share this list. I know others feel the same as I do.
She has done more than she knows, and she’s never allowed us to show our thanks. ”
Calisa was silent. She was both surprised and unsurprised—she’d known the Faraway Inn was special and that others cared about it too. Here was proof. “Are you sure? It’s a long list. Auntie Zee gave us lercats….”
“It would be my greatest pleasure.”
“And the other vendors?” Calisa pressed. “They won’t want anything in return?”
“What we want,” Rin said, “is for the inn to continue.”
All right, then. She glanced at Jack.
“Auntie Zee…isn’t exactly good at accepting help,” Jack said. “She only barely agreed to let us move forward with the reopening, so I don’t know how we’ll get her to agree to accept all of this.”
That was a problem, but they were talking about a gift. You didn’t need permission to give a gift. “What if we just sneak everything in? Let it be a surprise.”
“She won’t be happy,” Jack warned her.
“Outwardly, she’ll grunt, but inwardly, she’ll be happy,” Calisa said.
“Or she will be if she lets herself.” And the inn needed this—the kindness of others.
It could give them the boost to change the reopening from a risk to a sure success.
“It’s not a comment on her independence. It’s a thank-you.”
He thought about that for a moment and then nodded. “You’re right.”
She reveled in that. Not everyone would be able to say that so simply—to think about what she had said, take it seriously, and then change their mind.
It made her want to kiss him right here and right now.
Instead she said to Rin, “Can you be ready and by the portal at…What time is it here at our sunrise?”
“Your sunrise is our moonrise.”
“I’ll open the door on the other side at your moonrise,” Calisa said.
“Wait, what if Auntie Zee stops you?” Jack asked. “If she figures out—”
“That’s why I said ‘sneak.’ She can’t stop me if she doesn’t know.”
Smiling broadly, Rin wagged his finger at her. “I like you. You have style. You will make an excellent heir to Auntie Zee.”
Calisa laughed. Heir to Auntie Zee. She’d barely convinced her great-aunt to allow her to stay for the summer. It didn’t seem likely that Auntie Zee would want her to come back after all of this was over, despite her earlier apology.
Except that I did inherit her magic.
She sobered.
She hadn’t had time yet to think through what that could mean for her and for her future.
I’m part witch. She’d proven it by opening portals, and Auntie Zee had said in no uncertain terms that she’d inherited her special ability.
I’m a traveler cat? She didn’t feel particularly feline.
Or witchy. But then again, she had worked magic.
That much was indisputable. She’d have to think about what it all meant when she had a moment to breathe, after the grand reopening.
She left the list with Rin and tugged Jack with her, back toward the portal.
Now that this was all set, there was plenty more work for them to do at the inn.
“He loves Auntie Zee,” she told Jack. “I think she should be allowed to see that for herself.” Auntie Zee claimed she knew that guests needed her inn, but Calisa doubted that she really knew how much her B&B mattered to people—how much she mattered to people.
And how much the inn had come to matter to Calisa herself.
Hesitating, she leaned against Jack and said, “I don’t want to go back.”
“I know, but Auntie Zee needs us. And my dad—”
She cut him off. “I mean home. My home. Brooklyn. After the summer ends…I don’t want this to end.”
“It’s not ending yet,” Jack said. “We’ve got the grand reopening to get through. Can we focus on that and not think about what comes after?”
And then he said the words she didn’t know she wanted him to say:
“I don’t want you to leave either.”
Hand in hand, they walked back to the portal.
Steve rode on Calisa’s shoulder, and she thought he seemed noticeably heavier.
She wondered how much he was going to grow, and then she wondered if she was going to be around to see it.
And then she wondered if Steve was going to expect to go with her to Brooklyn, because that wasn’t going to work at all.
Future Calisa problem, she told herself.
“Maybe sometime after the reopening, we can come back to the Night Market?” Jack suggested. “Not for any purpose. But just, you know, as a date? A second date. I mean, if this counts as a first date.”
She smiled. “I’d like that.”
Together they walked through the portal back to the inn.