Chapter 2
Sabine
Idropped my head into my hands. “I can’t do another whole summer of this freaking camp!” I lamented as my older sister, Iris, rubbed circles on my back. “The fact that you volunteer to do this is insanity.”
At twenty-six, Iris was officially off the hook for her camp counselor duties, but she still came back every year.
She wasn’t assigned to mother hen a cabin of young witches like me though.
She got to live with a bunch of the fourth-year counselors in a giant log house beside the mess hall.
Her job this summer was to help teach the potions classes since she spent the rest of the year working at Poison Apple Apothecary in Maple Hollow and knew more about potions than anyone else I knew.
“Oh, come on,” Iris jeered, leaning her shoulder into me. “Camp is fun.”
I looked at her incredulously as she swept her red hair over her shoulder.
She used to joke that the red-hair printer had been running low on ink when our mom had me.
Both of our parents had the same bright red hair as Iris, whereas mine was more auburn.
Though I did inherit the same green eyes and family freckles.
“Camp is fun?” I echoed.
She looked back at me like I was the crazy one. “What? It is.” She waved around us. “The coven pays us to swim in the lake and make friendship bracelets and sing songs around a campfire while eating toasted marshmallows. That’s fun.”
“The pay is barely more than a cantina stipend,” I gritted out, frowning at my mustard-colored camp shirt with the letters SCUW emblazoned across my chest. “I’d make more working at Midnight Market.”
Iris laughed. “Even Dagmar isn’t as bad as Billy Bacchus, and you won’t develop ice cream scooper’s elbow.”
She had a point. The owner of Midnight Market was a nightmare to deal with, not that the camp’s director and head witch, Dagmar, was a slice of sunshine either.
One of the many curses of being a witch in a tight-knit magical town was that there were plenty of older paranormals to pester us like honorary aunts and uncles.
“You are being far too cheery for me right now.” I was normally a pretty upbeat, positive person, but my older sister made me seem like a grumpy raincloud.
“This is your last year, Sabi, and then you’ll be initiated,” she said emphatically. “You’ll be a full coven member with all the rights and privileges associated with that, and then you can do whatever you want.” She clapped me on the shoulder. “Two months. You can do anything for two months.”
This was my fourth—and final—summer at the camp. I’d spent my first two years as a camper, and last year, I was a junior counselor. The fact that I’d survived three summers without bailing was a miracle.
The truth was that I didn’t want to be a member of my coven.
I didn’t want to live in a small town like Maple Hollow, where everyone knew everyone practically from birth. The first time I’d gotten my period, the coven had already started planning the moon ceremony before I’d even gotten to the toilet.
That was how much the coven was all up in my business.
And tradition was everything to witches. There was never anything new or exciting or fresh.
But I was destined to live in a place where people didn’t only live at night, but at every hour of the day.
Where people had normal hobbies like club-hopping and jogging.
I was meant to live where no one knew my name, who my parents were, the fact that I’d failed third-grade math, or that I’d had an intense love for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie poster before I’d even known I was gay.
I was meant to be in New York City.
That was why I’d spent the last three years working at Midnight Market and saving all the money I’d made. New York City was where I could go to reinvent myself and be my own person.
Anonymity. That was what I craved.
“Listen,” Iris said calmly, “you can still run off and be a big-city witch if that’s what your heart desires.
You could set up an apothecary above a bodega and read palms and have a cool city life.
But you never know. Maybe it won’t be until you’re in your sixties that you decide you want to move home and be part of the coven, or maybe you never will, but you lose that chance to change your mind if you don’t stick out this summer. Don’t take away your choices, Sabi.”
“Ugh,” I groaned. “Why do you have to be so . . .”
“Sensible?”
“Annoying,” I chided.
But Iris just smiled and threw her arms around me. “It’s going to be fun. Just don’t sleep with any campers like I did last year, or the year before that, and you’ll be fine.”
“What’s this about sleeping with campers?” a voice bellowed from beyond the bushes.
Oh, how that voice haunted my nightmares.
Dagmar Wolfbane was an ox of a witch in her mid-fifties who gave off major Miss Trunchbull vibes.
In the offseason, she was the PE teacher for Maple Hollow High School, and she looked naked without a silver whistle swinging around her neck.
Her superpower was making everyone she looked at wish that the ground would open up and swallow them whole.
Dagmar appeared through the foliage, moving branches aside with ease as her barn owl familiar, Hera, swooped down from the trees and landed on her shoulder.
“It was part of our opening-day skit, Daggy,” Iris said in her puppy-dog voice. “You know, telling the campers about all the rules?”
Dagmar narrowed her eyes, her lips puckering in contemplation. “I appreciate your ingenuity, Iris,” she said, “but just stick to the script. Got it?”
“You got it.” Iris gave her an unironic thumbs-up.
As I dropped my chin into my hands, Hera clicked her beak in the air, tattling on me to her owner.
“Enough with the morose act, Sabine,” Dagmar snapped, clearly unaware of the irony as she barked at me to cheer up. “You set an example for these campers, so smile, for goodness’ sake.”
I smiled at Dagmar, showing too many teeth. She scowled before she stomped off toward the lake.
“Very smooth,” I muttered to Iris.
“Thank you,” she said with a bow.
We heard the rumble of the cars making their way up the gravel road, and she perked up like a meerkat.
“Campers are here!” she sang, doing a little shimmy. “Come on, let’s go greet them.”
I cursed up to the sky, pulling my baseball cap lower over my brow and trudging off after the effervescent Iris, my older sister whose shadow was so big, I could never quite seem to step out of it.