Chapter 11 #2
“I opened the envelope because the dude on the phone said that I should. He’s the rep from the book company.”
Cat finally got a look at one. Her job for the Cauldron and Broom was ordering inventory.
With her divination talents, she often sourced new stock for the best prices.
Books weren’t the biggest part of their inventory—that was the candles and incense—but they were probably a third of the business.
They’d specialized in philosophy and all sorts of self-improvement literature.
This was a new vendor she’d solicited information from.
“He called three times asking to talk to you. He really wants to talk to you,” Annie said.
Cat nodded and ate her toast as she flipped through the brochure. They seemed to be heavy on astrology of multiple kinds, as well as tarot cards and dream interpretation. If she didn’t know better, she thought a divination witch had written this.
There were a couple of titles she hadn’t heard of before, and the quality looked okay, though you could never really tell. The brochure was printed well.
She examined the card on the front. “Dennis Hitchens, sales rep. I’ll call him.”
“Like now? Because if he calls the store that many times when Dylan’s working, she’s going to smite him over the phone.”
“Telekinesis doesn’t work over the phone,” Siobhan declared from her greenhouse off the kitchen. It was really just the back, south-facing corner of the house where they installed a bunch of windows, and Siobhan had filled it with shelves of plants.
“Well, she would try,” Annie said, and Cat laughed.
Dylan was younger than her, another stray taken in during high school.
She’d known about witches and telekinesis, but her coven had fallen apart, and rather than be taken over by another coven—the usual thing that happened if a family lost power—Dylan refused to toe the line and ended up 400 miles away from California in downtown Denver, shoplifting things out of an electronics store.
A Denver police officer was still trying to figure out how she’d lifted some of them.
Fortunately, there was a sympathetic judge in the system the twins had met years ago who looked out for unusual cases. After a stint in juvenile detention, she came to Silver Spring. She was the angriest, prickliest, craziest witch of all of them.
“Is she there now?” Cat asked.
A couple of witches nodded.
“I will tell her to give him my number. No worries.”
She finished the toast and looked around at a loss for what to do. Normally, she would have orders to take in at the store, but no truck was getting to town until Friday after that kind of blizzard, which meant there was no new inventory.
Sometimes she helped with the online orders, the majority of their business, but no mail would leave Silver Spring either until tomorrow at the earliest. She could stop by the coffee shop, the bookshop, or the library, or she could catch one of the yoga classes a crazy hippie ran out of the back of her house, but nothing seemed to appeal.
She loved the simple life in a small town. She loved that she could call on anyone for help if she needed it, and when she didn’t love it and it got too much, she loved that there were literally miles of forest around them where she could disappear anytime she wanted.
For some reason, this morning she was itchy. The simple pleasures in town didn’t hold her interest, and she didn’t want to go into the great outdoors. She’d fully topped up on her dose of both cross-country skiing and snowshoeing for the month at least.
She took a deep breath. “I’m going to take a shower.”
“If you take a bath, I’ve been working on a new bomb.”
Alarm flared before Cat remembered the existence of bath bombs.
Niamh went to her potion cabinet, which was next to the stove. There was a food pantry next to it, and every witch who lived here learned early which was which and never to mistake the two.
Niamh spun, holding out a Christmas ornament filled with a glittering pink liquid.
“Why is it in that?” Cat asked.
“I ran out of bottles.”
“Aren’t all of your killer werewolf spells also in Christmas ornaments?”
“Well, yeah, they break if you look at them wrong. It’s the perfect material.”
“I do not need a bath at all.” She backed away.
“Well, hurry down, because we’re going to start on all the wards when you get back.”
Oh yeah. That was what she was doing with her day, helping the twins fortify the house against wolves.
She took the world’s fastest shower, changed into a skirt and thick leggings for a day of spellcasting, and headed back downstairs when the doorbell rang. The particular chime meant a stranger.
“Maybe it’s a delivery!” Niamh said.
“In this weather?” Siobhan retorted. “Your eye of newt is still in a warehouse in Denver.”
Cat shook her head and chuckled as she made her way toward the front door, opened it, and froze.
Mateo Amato, alpha werewolf, was standing on the porch of the purple house.
The only thing she could think of was how grateful she was that he hadn’t waited a couple of hours until they had alarms in place that would shriek the moment he stepped on the property.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“We didn’t get to say goodbye.”
“Goodbye,” she said automatically and swung the door toward his face.
He stopped it easily. “Can we talk?”
“Who is it?” the twins asked.
Cat could think of absolutely nothing to say. A werewolf called to say goodbye. I slept with him last night.
She had a vivid flash of his skin against hers and felt an unwelcome roll of heat.
“Cat, are you okay?” Siobhan asked with a particular note in her voice.
She looked down at the brochure she still held in her hands and said, “It’s Dennis.”
“Who’s Dennis?” Niamh asked as she came down the hall.
Dumbly, Cat held up the brochures and pointed to the business card. “Dennis Hitchens, books.”
She swung back to him. “This is my family.”
“Very nice to meet you,” Mateo said after a second processing delay.
“It’s so amazing of you to come in person to tell me about your books,” Cat said.
“My books?”
She shoved the two brochures against his chest, and he turned them around to look at them as both eyebrows slowly rose.
“I suppose we can hear a sales pitch,” Niamh said. “The pot—soup will not be ready for another hour.”
“Sales pitch?” Mateo echoed.
“The twins own the Cauldron and the Broom, the store you’ve been pitching. I buy books for the store.”
“Like these books,” Mateo said, holding up the brochures with two fingers as if they could burn him.
“Come in,” Cat said and took a huge breath as he stepped across the threshold.