Chapter One
In the thirty-one years of Augustine Pepperday’s life, there had always been one golden rule: never — never, ever — tell anyone you’re a witch.
That was it. Clean. Non-negotiable.
It was like the first rule of Fight Club, except with significantly higher stakes (as in burning ones). It was like ‘We Don’t Talk About Bruno’, but with a less catchy melody and far more magic.
Witches didn’t talk about witchhood. End of.
With Theo, she broke that rule in under a week. But she was getting ahead of herself.
He first arrived in mid-October, just as she was getting ready to decorate her shop for Halloween.
So far as customers went, he was fairly innocuous.
Brown-haired, fairly tall. Wearing a coat a size too big for him.
Lurking in the runes and crystal healing section and surreptitiously looking at her over a copy of How To Channel Your Inner Spirit Guide.
So far, so everyday-straight-guy-out-of-place-in-a-Wicca-shop.
He was probably trying to buy a gift for a free spirit girlfriend, or maybe picking up a manifestation candle for his slightly kooky sister.
Nothing Augustine hadn’t seen before, and nothing she wouldn’t see again.
She watched him for five minutes as he ambled about her shop, looking at everything from candles to incense sticks to salmon flavoured healing teas for emotionally overwrought cats.
She gave him those five minutes out of professional courtesy, which was really just another way of saying she was people watching.
Augustine had always been good at that. You didn’t grow up in a house stacked with tarot decks and spell jars without learning how to read someone the way other people read bus timetables.
It was when he gave her another furtive look from behind an oversized apothecary table that something twigged in her mind.
This one is nervous.
Not the usual I’m scared this witch will curse me nervous, either.
His hands weren’t twitchy, and he didn’t flinch every time a bell chimed or a candle guttered.
He just kept . . . well, hesitating. Circling the same shelves over and over again.
Glancing at her in a way that suggested he needed help, and then looking back down when she raised a brow at him.
That, more than anything, was what made her sigh softly and straighten up. “Do you need any help at all, sir?”
Her voice carried through the shop brightly, in the nondescript tone she used to suggest he was very welcome and that there was no judgement here.
He could have told her he thought astrology and astronomy were basically the same thing (they aren’t), and that crystals were just rocks with a better colour palette (actually, kind of true) and she’d still sell him some overpriced candles.
He blinked at her. Properly blinked, as though seeing her had derailed whatever he’d been thinking. For a split second he looked genuinely startled she was real, or that she’d noticed him at all.
“Oh. Um . . .” He glanced down at the book that was currently in his hands, then back at her. His eyes were a blue that just crept onto the palette of grey, and he searched her face with them fervently, as though seeking out something hidden within her own.
It was the oddest feeling, Augustine thought, as a spark lit within her at his gaze.
It wasn’t quite recognition, but nor was it unknowing, and for just a moment she allowed herself to look back at him, meeting his eyes and holding them.
Something that felt a little like electricity slid down her spine, and she held his gaze for a second longer than strictly necessary, before chewing on her lip and looking away, momentarily taken aback by her own reaction.
Stunned by the unexpected pull of attraction, pure and unadulterated, she felt towards him.
Then, a beat later, suspicion clicked into place. “Oh God, are you a shoplifter or something?” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Because if you are, I feel like I should warn you there are much better shops in this area to rob. Like, offensively better.”
He flushed, his cheeks turning a deep, immediate red. “I’m not a shoplifter.”
“Are you sure?” She folded her arms. “Because you’ve been staring at that book like you’re either about to steal it or hit someone over the head with it, and as my shop insurance is skimpy at best, both of those options are concerning to me.”
“I was just, uh, looking.”
“Mmm,” Augustine said, in a tone that suggested she didn’t believe him even slightly.
She crossed the shop towards him, her long skirts swaying as she moved, and stopped at his side.
Leaning in, she peered down at the book in his hands.
“’Turning Menopause into Zenopause: A Wiccan Guide to the Change of Life’,” she read aloud, her voice going distinctly flat.
There was a pause, before she turned her head slowly to look at him. “I’m going to be honest,” she said. “Shoplifting might actually be the more respectable choice for you right now.”
If Augustine thought he’d been blushing before she’d been utterly mistaken, because now he went a shade of red so dark he was nearly purple.
It was actually kind of cute.
“I promise I’m not going to steal anything,” he said, putting the book down. “And if I was, it wouldn’t be that.”
“Why not? Don’t you believe that women having a positive experience of menopause has a place in society? And I’d be careful how you answer here. I was raised with three sisters. Where the patriarchy is concerned, I’m remarkably well informed.”
He swallowed. “Of course I think it has a place.”
She nodded. “Okay, well then—”
He wasn’t quite finished though. “I mean, statistically, women’s health has long been underprioritized, it has to be said, and access to HRT, therefore, remains inconsistent,” he carried on.
“Meanwhile, the NHS dispenses millions of prescriptions for erectile dysfunction every year like they’re giving out Halloween candy. ”
Augustine’s mouth dropped open. Of all the things she’d thought he’d say, it wasn’t that.
“So, you’re saying women get the trick while men get the treat?”
He nodded. “If the treat in this case is access to healthcare, then generally speaking, yes.”
Her gaze lingered on him a second longer than necessary, before she frowned. “Why do you smell like cinnamon?”
He frowned, clearly taken aback by her abrupt change in topic. “I smell like . . . what?”
“You smell like cinnamon,” she repeated, leaning in slightly, almost double-checking. “Not in a ‘I baked something charming’ kind of way either. More in a . . . ‘I’ve just taken a bath in the wax vat of the Yankee Candle factory’ kind of way.”
He looked genuinely baffled, lifting a hand to sniff at the sleeve of his coat by means of some sort of explanation. “Okay. Uh.” His brow furrowed. “I have absolutely no explanation for that.”
The motion drew her attention to his hands first. They were broad-palmed, long-fingered, and elegant.
The sort of hands people had when you knew you could trust them.
From there, Augustine’s eyes trailed over the rest of him with a new and sudden focus.
He was handsome, she suddenly realized, and not in an understated or debatable way either.
No. This man had the sort of face that made her immediately aware of herself: of the old jumper she’d thrown on that morning, of her bare face, of the fact that she’d expected nothing more eventful before her mid-morning coffee run than wrestling with a box of tangled pumpkin fairy lights and deciding where to hang the paper bats.
He had a strong nose and a soft mouth and his hair, falling just slightly in his eyes, looked soft.
Those eyes . . . His lashes were dark and so absurdly long they nearly brushed his cheeks when he blinked.
As for that eye colour, it looked like someone had taken all the clouds of a winter storm and mixed them with the sky of a summer’s day.
Beneath his obvious good looks though, there was something else.
A kind of heaviness which Augustine struggled to name but could see all too well in the tiredness lingering in his eyes, like sadness sat just beneath his surface — like a bruise that was only visible when the light caught it in a particular way.
“You know,” she said slowly, “cinnamon aside, you’re either the best or worst shoplifter I’ve ever met. The jury's still out.”
“Again, I’m not a shoplifter,” he replied quickly. “I was honestly just looking. I didn’t come in here with a criminal agenda, I swear . . . or a menopausal one.”
“Right,” Augustine said, before she smiled.
It was a smile she’d developed in the years she’d owned The Priestess Reversed, one that told people she was approachable but wouldn’t tolerate any nonsense.
She still remembered the day, just after she’d first opened the shop, when she’d smiled at three customers only to have them brand a crucifix at her and demand she recant the ways of the devil (honestly, it was so dramatic, and what was this?
The Salem witch trials?). She’d had to firmly eject them, after which she closed her shop early, poured herself a glass of wine and burned some cleansing rosemary.
She’d then called her sister, Maddy, and asked her to hex them — nothing cruel or dramatic, just a small spell to ensure that their socks would forever feel slightly damp in their shoes.
She might own a witch’s shop, but she wasn’t a monster.
“I’m just looking,” he promised.
“Okay. That’s allowed. Looking is free. Although,” Augustine added thoughtfully, “I suppose stealing is technically a kind of free as well. Might cost you your soul, though.”
She offered him another smile, and he smiled back, holding her gaze.
There it was again, that feeling of electricity, a spark of recognition Augustine found impossible to ignore. The air between them seemed charged, like the moment before a storm, and it settled somewhere deep and unexpected within her.