Chapter 3
The evil eye pendant falling to the floor had only been the start of it. As morning turned into afternoon, Dina had found herself surrounded by bad omens on all sides.
A customer had opened their umbrella while still inside the shop, then Dina had accidentally knocked over the salt as she was clearing a table. With the pendant, that made three omens in one day. The last time Dina had had this many bad omens in a day she’d failed her driving test. Though that was possibly more to do with the fact that big machines and magical beings don’t tend to pair well together.
The face of the man from this morning kept popping into her head, almost unbidden. The way his smile had been a little lopsided, the way his eyes had burned into hers when he’d asked about the evil eye amulet. Clearly, she’d been reading some kind of flirtation into the encounter, when he was probably just one of those nerdy hot-professor types who made women swoon wherever they went. She wasn’t swooning though, was she?
Shaking her head, Dina realized she needed to get this man out of her mind and do something about all the weird magical energy in the café this afternoon. She texted her mother, Nour. She replied almost immediately, as if she had anticipated Dina’s message, which she probably had since she was a divination witch. Cleansing spells were an important part of her mother’s divination, so Dina always asked her for tips when it came to this kind of thing. In fact, Dina asked her mother for witchy tips about everything…well, almost everything.
Nour instructed Dina to burn some sage. Not wanting to set off the fire alarm, she decided to add a little of the sage oil she’d made last autumn to the cleaning spray she used, making the entire shop smell like a fragrant herb garden.
Dina made use of the peaceful afternoon crowd of readers quietly sipping her hallowed hot chocolates (the marshmallows were in the shape of small ghost pumpkins) as they escaped into a good book, to head outside into the crisp air and add a few new items to her chalkboard menu on the pavement.
Pulling out a stick of lilac chalk, Dina added “besotted briouats” to the list, followed by “rosy-cheeked ghriba.” The briouats—melt-in-your-mouth filo pastry filled with honey and almonds—were heavenly, even without the spell that made you feel like you’d been kissed on the forehead by a loved one. The ghriba, decadently soft sugar cookies with rosewater essence and lemon zest, were laced with a spell to warm up the fingers and toes.
About an hour before closing, Immy and Rosemary—Dina’s closest friends and the nearest things she had to sisters—swished into the shop, each carrying several bags of books from the bookshop around the corner.
Immy had recently had her blonde hair cut into a short bob in purposeful defiance of her soon-to-be mother-in-law, who had suggested that a bride always looked best with long hair. Rosemary, on the other hand, was a walking Pre-Raphaelite painting, with bright ginger hair that was plaited down her back, and a billowing green dress. If it weren’t for the vintage cat-eye glasses perched on the end of her nose, you wouldn’t know she was from this century.
Although their appearances were wildly different, both Immy and Rosemary were horror authors. Immy wrote sci-fi horror filled with tentacled aliens and strange sentient spaceships, while Rosemary was more of a gothic-haunted-house kind of girl.
If Dina was honest with herself, she’d always been a little too scared to read Rosemary’s books. At least with Immy’s writing there was an element of detachment, as she was never going to be the only astronaut left fighting an alien species, but Rosemary’s horror was the kind that would have her casting protection wards around herself as she went to bed.
Dina, Immy, and Rosemary had known each other since their early twenties. Rosemary had been completing half a year in England as part of her literature degree from Princeton, Immy was on the same course, and Dina had been at bakery school.
They’d met for the first time at an Addams Family movie night at the Prince Charles Cinema—costumes mandatory—when the three of them had all decided to go as Cousin Itt, complete with top hat and sunglasses. The costume choice had made it difficult to watch the movie, so they’d slunk out and ended up walking across central London before getting wine-drunk in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub. Dina remembered immediately feeling like she’d met her people. They’d been inseparable from then on. Even though Rosemary had had to go back to the United States, the three of them spoke constantly and visited whenever they could.
Immy and Rosemary were the first people Dina had ever revealed her magic to. One night, the three of them had been sitting on the floor of Dina’s kitchen, eating a lemon meringue tart she had made, when her witch’s intuition signaled that now might be a good time. After telling them her secret, she had levitated mugs of hot chocolate to them, just in case they thought she’d gone insane.
The night had been full of revelations, as shortly after Dina revealed she was a witch, Rosemary explained that she could, on occasion, see ghosts. Immy couldn’t believe she was the only non-magical person out of the three of them.
When Eric had proposed to Immy, she’d asked Dina’s permission to reveal her witchcraft to him. She hadn’t been sure at first; it was a big part of herself she’d be entrusting to another person. But after looking at Eric’s cards, and reading his tea leaves on the sly, she knew he could be trusted. Also, she enjoyed his company; he had a witty sense of humor and clearly worshipped the ground Immy walkedon.
Dina had made a show of the reveal by making them a “happy engagement” cake that let off small fireworks in their living room when they cut the first slice.
Now, Immy pulled Dina into a hug over the counter, enveloping Dina in her clean linen scent.
“Missed you,” Immy mumbled into her hair.
“Missed you too, even though I saw you yesterday.”
Immy grinned. “I was talking to those pains au chocolat, but yeah, you too.”
Dina turned to Rosemary, who had popped around the counter, and they beamed at each other, falling into a hug. For such a short woman, Rosemary packed a seriously powerful hug.
“I wish I could live in this shop,” she groaned as she squeezed Dina. “Even the air tastes like cake.”
Dina smiled. “I hope you’re both hungry, since we’re about to eat ungodly amounts of pastry.”
“I’ve been fasting since this morning,” Immy said gravely. Beside her, Rosemary rolled her eyes and mouthed the words We had pizza an hour ago at Dina.
Immy and Rosemary headed back to the kitchen while Dina tidied the counter. She was glad for the distraction of these two loud, glorious women. They were probably the only people capable of getting the interaction with that guy from this morning out of her head.
“Would you mind serving the last few customers so I can get started on the baking?” Dina asked Robin.
“Sure, if you promise to save me some pastry cream,” they said, winking.
The lunchtime rush had passed, and now there were only a few regulars hanging around in the hour before closing. There was an elderly couple doing the crossword puzzle together, though they would occasionally ask the pair of students studying beside them for help if they couldn’t figure out one of the clues. A few customers were seated by the windows, sipping their drinks and looking outside at the blustery autumn weather. At least it was cozy in here.
There was also a couple that Dina remembered seeing before, although last time they’d been strangers sitting at different tables. If Dina remembered correctly, they’d both had the same order: a mocha with extra chocolate on top and a sugar-sprinkle doughnut on the side. It warmed her heart to see that all it had taken was the same order in her café to bring these two people together.
Usually, Dina would spend the quiet afternoons working on her recipes for the month ahead. She liked to tie in her baking with the seasons, and sometimes she needed to practice the more complicated recipes. She might be a kitchen witch, but even Dina knew that practice makes perfect, especially when dealing with pastry.
For spring and summer, Dina baked delicate and light pastries fragranced with rosewater, meskouta orange bundt cake, and delicate raspberry macarons. When strawberries were in season in early June, she made airy fraisier cake. For autumn and winter, Dina worked with heavier ingredients: thick, dark chocolate, cinnamon, cardamom, gingerbread, and pumpkin. As the days grew colder and the light dimmed earlier and earlier, people started to crave that feeling of warmth and comfort. And Dina would give that to them, even if only for a short while. One special bake for this season was a ginger and persimmon cake, yellowed with saffron strands, which Dina had bought on her last trip to Morocco, and fresh vanilla pods, their sweet scent so potent that it wafted across the café.
This was in addition to all the regular pastries and cakes she had on offer, which were all recipes her mother had taught her to bake. The cake made with dark honey from the Atlas mountains was an all-time customer favorite. Dina had imbibed it with a very specific spell, one that kept customers coming back for more. She’d crafted it from a childhood memory of a time that she must have fallen asleep on a car ride home, and although she was a little too big to be carried, she remembered her father lifting her into his arms, her mother closing the car door softly so as not to wake her, then carrying her upstairs and tucking her into bed.
When she’d been fashioning the spell for the first time, it had occurred to Dina that one day your parents put you down and they never picked you up again, and so she’d made the honey cake to recreate that feeling of childhood comfort. That sensation of someone taking the utmost care of you, holding you close, was a feeling that many in the rushing city of London didn’t experience often.
Sometimes she wondered if she was really in the business of café ownership, or if she was more of a fairy godmother in disguise. Undeniably, the magical pastries were great at keeping customers coming back for more, so that was a bonus on the businesswoman side of things.
Today she wouldn’t be prepping her winter recipes, however. Today was all about Immy’s wedding pastries. Instead of opting for a cake, like a normal, sane individual, Immy had decided—Eric had had no say in the matter—that she wanted either apple pie or cinnamon buns. She just wasn’t sure which one.
And so, being the best maid of honor in the world, Dina had promised she would bake both for Immy to choose between. Dina’s friends had practically begged to help her make the two recipes. The wedding was this weekend; Dina was planning to take whatever ingredients she needed to the old manor house where Immy and Eric were tying the knot.
Dina made her way back to the kitchen, where Immy and Rosemary were helping themselves to hot chocolates with whipped cream. Immy was telling Rosemary all about her planned honeymoon to Australia, and all the massive spiders and snakes she was hoping to see. It lifted Dina’s heart to see the two of them making themselves at home in her kitchen.
The kitchen in the back room of Serendipity Café wasn’t exactly roomy, but between the shelves of colorful jars and tins and the old industrial baking ovens, it had a cozy warmth that Dina loved. It was one of her favorite places in the world.
“All right,” Dina said, lifting mixing bowls onto the marble counter, “you’re both going to want to put some aprons on.” She nodded her head toward the rack of pastel-pink and green aprons hanging on the wall, and snapped her fingers, two aprons flying across the room to land in Rosemary and Immy’s hands.
“Finally, I get to witness Dina’s magical baking process.” Rosemary smiled, rolling up her sleeves and displaying her heavily tattooed forearms.
“I hope it lives up to expectations.” Dina grinned back. She looked over at Immy. “Are you sure you don’t just want a simple frosted vanilla wedding cake, Immy?”
“Not happening. Remember”—Immy narrowed her eyes—“that you made a blood oath to do whatever I want when I made you my maid of honor.”
“All right, bridezilla,” Rosemary said.
They pulled on their aprons and Dina went into her pantry to hunt for all the ingredients they would need.
“So, what’s your process then?” Rosemary asked, standing ready with Immy at the kitchen counter.
“First, we get out all the ingredients,” Dina called. She rummaged around for enough mixing bowls, as well as fresh unsalted butter, flour, cinnamon, yeast, vanilla pods, and sugar. She’d peeled, cored, and sliced the Bramley apples earlier, so for the apple pie it was simply a matter of cooking the butter, brown sugar, and apples on the hob while they prepped the shortcrust pastry. “And now…I get to boss you around my kitchen for the next two hours.”
They gossiped as they worked, Dina stepping in to add a pinch of cinnamon and star anise to the sweet apple mixture that Rosemary was in charge of stirring.
“Who’s going to help you do this on the weekend?” Rosemary asked, noticing that Dina had her hands so full that she had charmed a clementine to peel itself in mid-air.
“Oh, she’ll have help,” Immy muttered, an oddly maniacal gleam in her eye.
“What the hell does that mean?” Dina said. “Did you hire extra staff? Honestly, Imms, I don’t need the help, and it’ll be easier if it’s just me because then I won’t need to hide my magic.”
The bride-to-be only grinned mischievously.
“It’s not staff, don’t worry about it.”
Dina was worried about it, but she could tell that whatever plan Immy had up her sleeve, she wasn’t about to reveal it. Dina flashed Rosemary a Do you know anything about this? kind of look, to which her friend shook her head.
The apple pie was ready first, since the dough for the cinnamon buns needed proving and Dina’s proving oven was out of whack. Electrical appliances and magic often did not see eye-to-eye. They stood around the pie, the crust perfectly golden, and each grabbed a fork.
“Fucking hell,” Rosemary said, taking a bite. “This is better than my dad’s. Don’t tell him I said that.”
“It is insanely good…” Immy began.
“But? I sense a ‘but.’?” Dina waited.
“But I think it’s not quite right for the wedding. And Eric and I had cinnamon buns on our second date.”
“That’s decided then—cinnamon buns it is!” Dina clapped her hands, flour going everywhere.
Dina wished she could spend every day baking with friends; it was a joy unlike any other. She hummed under her breath as she rolled out and began kneading the proved dough for the cinnamon buns. Usually, this was when Dina would lace a spell into the bake. For something like a cinnamon bun or a muffin, she might put in that feeling you get of wrapping yourself in a soft, woolly blanket. Baking magic worked best when it was peppered throughout the process.
Today was different.
“Immy, tell me about the first time you knew you loved Eric.” Dina had heard this story many times, but she needed Immy to tell her now, so she could let the story flow through—turning it into a spell, into a feeling that could be baked into the buns.
“It was our third date, we were meeting near the entrance to Hampstead Heath to go for a walk, and it was fucking freezing that day. I remember waiting for a while, because I got there disgustingly early, and when he turned up he saw me shivering and he blew on my hands until they warmed up and bought me a tea. And on our next date he brought me gloves so my hands wouldn’t get cold. And then I knew I was head over heels for him.”
“Ugh, that makes me feel so single. When will men learn that women don’t want grand gestures, they want someone who cares about them keeping their hands warm,” Rosemary groaned.
As Immy spoke, Dina had taken that memory—Immy’s feeling of Eric caring about her, the sensation of cold hands warming up—and turned it into a spell, kneading it into the dough. As they continued to prepare the cinnamon buns, Dina prodded Immy to tell them other things she loved about Eric, to recount other treasured memories, and she put them into the dough too. Anyone eating these cinnamon buns would be filled with a deep sensation of love all around them. It wasn’t a love spell, because those simply didn’t exist—magic could create a false sense of love, but never the real deal. Dina had learned that the hard way. No, this spell would just make people look at Immy and Eric and think, Wow, they really love each other.
Beside her, Immy and Rosemary worked together to make the cinnamon-sugar paste for the buns.
“Does it need more cinnamon?” Immy said, frowning over the mixing bowl.
Dina ran a finger through the mixture and popped it in her mouth. The whipped buttery sugary goodness met with the soft earthiness of the cinnamon.
“No, it’s perfect.”
Once everything was in the oven, they sat around drinking more hot chocolates, and chatting about Rosemary’s horror novel that was soon going to be made into a movie. The air in the kitchen was soon filled with the delicious scent of baking buns, spiced with cinnamon and clove.
Dina had made an extra batch. None of them waited for the buns to cool down before they tuckedin.
Immy’s eyes began to water as she took a bite.
“Dina, these…Your magic…How did you…It’s like you put me and Eric in them. I don’t understand.”
Dina went over and gave Immy a flour-covered hug.
“I’m glad you like them, love.”
“Mmmfckinggood,” Rosemary mumbled from the other side of the counter, mouth full of cinnamon bun.
Dina had bites of a bun too, but she mostly liked to watch as the magic took hold of her friends as they ate, the frown lines disappearing from their foreheads, the way they sighed contentedly.
“You’re a damn good kitchen witch, Dina. Can you start posting these to me weekly, please?” Rosemary begged.
They continued snacking until none of them could manage another bite. Dina gave them both bags full of pastries and cakes to take home, knowing that Eric would be grumpy if Immy came back from the café without a selection of baked goods.
Dina pulled each of them into a tight hug at the front door of the café.
“Thanks so much for being my baking guinea pigs,” she said with a smile. At least she wouldn’t have to wait long to see them—Immy’s wedding was only a few days away.
“Will you do me a favor?” Immy said, leaning in close.
“Anything.”
“Would you check the, um, tea leaves or the cards or whatever you normally check, to see if the wedding will go all right?”
Dina got it. It was a lot of stress hosting a wedding, and all Immy was asking for was a little peace of mind. Dina was overdue a reading anyway.
“Of course.” She smiled. “I’ll text you what they say.”
“Okay, but if it says there’s going to be some kind of Red Wedding situation then I just don’t want to know.”
“Duly noted.”
—
Closing the shop on her own was a nightly ritual. Not that she didn’t trust Robin to do it, but it was much easier—and more efficient for both of them—if she had the quiet to focus her mind on several cleaning spells at once.
Robin would be in charge of the café for the next few days while Dina was in Little Hathering, the village north of London near where Immy’s wedding would be taking place. It helped that it was the same village where Dina’s parents lived.
Dina pulled her jacket tight as she locked the shop door behind her, taking a deep inhale of the crisp evening air. She whispered a protective warding spell as she turned the key in the lock. Sometimes Dina cast in English, other times she fell into Darija or French, whichever felt right in the moment. And this wasn’t a malignant spell—Dina didn’t do those. It was simply a spell that would incline any potential burglars away from the café, making it look entirely uninteresting and definitely not the sort of place where cash was stored overnight.
The sun had mostly set, and the leaves swirled around in the autumn breeze as Dina made her way to the station. The trip home was thankfully uneventful, although Dina did use an itching spell to make a man vacate the priority seat that a heavily pregnant woman was too polite to ask for. Dina got off the tube at Putney Bridge and walked down the riverbank to absorb the last of the sunlight.
There were a few rowing boats out on the river, their oars pooling the water around them in small circles. Dina never felt the magic of the city more than she did when she was beside the river. It was as if all of London existed in the swell of every small wave.
Or perhaps it was the river itself. The way it twisted and turned through the city, always flowing. It had been there since before London was anything more than a few mud huts cobbled together on marshland, and Dina had no doubt that it would be there when London was no more. Just the kind of melodramatic thoughts she tended to have when she was tired and wandering home. It was all the water—it brought out her pensive, melancholic tendencies.
As always, Heebie Jeebie was waiting for Dina, yowling something awful the moment she stepped through the door.
“I missed you, you tiny menace,” Dina said, cradling the rotund cat in her arms like a baby, a position Heebie would sullenly endure for the unspoken promise of treats later.
Dina had meant to get a black cat when she’d gone to the cat shelter a few years ago; she loved the way they looked like little pockets of midnight. But then she’d heard a grumpy yowling coming from a small cage near her feet.
“That one’s just come in, the vet reckons it’s a feral one. No microchip,” the man who worked there had said. Dina had crouched down and locked eyes with the cat, who was mostly black but with a golden crescent shape on top of her head and a creamy white belly. Heebie, who hadn’t even had a name then, had bumped Dina’s outstretched knuckle with her head, and Dina had felt the warmth of the cat’s cheek and known instantly that she had found her familiar.
If she had been feral once, Heebie Jeebie was the opposite now, eating small pieces of cheese from Dina’s hands as they sat on the kitchen floor. Dina ruffled a spell up between her fingers, and all the lamps switched on in her flat, their warm pink glow helping her settle in for the evening.
But she couldn’t settle down just yet. She’d promised Immy a reading. Dina thought she may as well do two—one for Immy and Eric’s wedding and one for herself. Even after the magic-pastry tasting, the omens from earlier in the day still nagged at her, like a belt strapped too tight.
There was only one thing for it: divination. This might be her mother’s kind of magic, but Dina had her own special way of doing it. She flicked on the kettle, watching the steam curl. Then she slipped into her pajamas and brewed herself two cups of lemon verbena tea, sweet and comforting. Her favorite herbal tea of all time. In Darija it was called louiza, and her mother swore by it for healing anxious minds. Tonight, it would have another purpose.
Dina needed to read the leaves; she needed to understand the meaning of the omens she’d witnessed today. She settled on her green velvet sofa, Heebie busy grooming herself on a cushion beside her.
Dina turned off most of the lamps with another flick of her fingers and lit a white pillar candle on the table in front of her. Witchcraft was always done best by candlelight.
For Immy’s reading, Dina took a couple of sips from the tea, keeping her mind on her best friend and her fiancé, envisioning the wedding ahead. When she looked at the leaves, everything seemed as she’d expected. Two strong lines of tea coming together, with a smaller circle at the bottom. The wedding would go well; Immy and Eric’s connection was strong. She texted Immy to that effect.
Now, Dina settled in to do her own reading, taking a few deep breaths in an attempt to clear her mind.
As Dina drank the tea, she focused on the day just past. The fallen amulet, the salt, the umbrella all replayed in her mind, but her thoughts kept twisting back to the man she’d served. His forearm as he’d leaned on the counter, the slight break on the bridge of his nose that had never properly healed. The deep golden brown of his eyes. A flicker of heat shot through her at the memory of his rough hands against hers. He had lit a fire in her that she didn’t want to interrogate.
She sipped the last of the tea and placed the cup down on the table. Tasseomancy, the art of reading tea leaves, was one of Dina’s strongest magics—she quite often had to stop herself from reading customers’ fortunes as they left the shop.
Every witch had different magical strengths. Dina’s had always been baking and brewing—anything that involved mixing spices and herbs in a kitchen. If her magic was a scent, it would be freshly baked brownies.
Her mother was more of a seer; she read tea leaves, fortunes, sometimes she could even read the stars in the night sky. She had an uncanny way of predicting what the lottery numbers would be, though she had never once seen fit to cashin.
Dina scooted forward until she was looking down at the tea leaves from directly above. That was an important part of the reading. You had to read from an aerial viewpoint, because the center of the cup represented the “now,” with the edges curving around it representing the “near future” and the “far future.” If your view of the leaves was skewed from an angle, the entire reading could go awry.
Once, Dina had read the shape of a wand in Rosemary’s tea leaves before a date she’d arranged. The wand signified an exciting new beginning, and Rosemary had gone on the date sure that it would end well. She’d come back an hour later, a mess of snot, tears, and smudged mascara, saying that her date had seen her in the café and done a one-eighty. Dina hadn’t seen a wand, but a dagger. After that she’d been sorely tempted to take a dagger to the idiot who had stood up Rosemary, but after a night of ice cream and watching old Hollywood musicals she’d let her murderous intentgo.
Now, Dina craned her neck to read the leaves sogging at the bottom of her cup.
Three leaves in the center, with the root of their shared stem branching out to the left in a wing-like shape. Two other leaves curved together in what could be the bottom half of a heart, or a V-shape. And then at the top, a single leaf curled in on itself in a near-perfect spiral.
Dina didn’t like what she saw. She knew instinctively what the leaves were telling her, but she didn’t want to believe it. She made her way to one of the many bookshelves that adorned the walls of her small flat. Flipping through the pages of her worn tasseomancy dictionary, her heart beating a little too fast, Dina looked for other options, other signs that would point to a different future.
“Why do they always have to be so dramatic?” Dina muttered as she read the portent defined in her dictionary: Romance is on the horizon; it will only end in disaster. Honestly, it was as if these dictionaries were meant more for Roman emperors in danger of being stabbed in the back than for coffee shop owners.
Dina slammed the dictionary shut and reshelved it. Slumping back on the sofa, she pushed the cup further away from her so she wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. Heebie, sensing her mood, crawled onto Dina’s lap and peered up at her with a worried expression in her eyes.
“Romance is on the horizon…” Dina muttered aloud, stroking behind Heebie’s ears. “Maybe I’ll meet someone at the wedding?”
Even as she said it, her mind was wandering back to the man from the café. No, forget him. He was just a guy passing through who she’d probably never see again. Besides, she wasn’t open to dating anyone seriously. And even if she was, she was far more likely to go for a woman than a man.
The second part of the reading was, unfortunately, very easy to understand.
Call it a sixth sense, clairvoyance, or even just that feeling you get deep in your bones—Dina already knew that the bad omens from today all pointed in one direction: the hex.
Insidiously weaving its way back into her life, leaving misery in its wake.