Chapter 11
CALLIE
The closer we got to Familiarize, the more excited I was to try the restaurant that Brie had been talking up as the best in Nightshade Cove.
We were off the main strip and winding from one side street to another, the crowds increasingly thinning out as we went.
As we turned onto a quiet cobblestone lane, a horse-drawn buggy clattered past.
The sight made me smile. “Oh my gods, remember taking Solstice and my mom’s buggy into town?”
“How could I forget?” Brie laughed. “I still miss that horse.”
“Me too.” I ran my hand along a weathered brick wall covered in climbing jasmine. “This magical aging is so convincing. It feels like all these buildings are a century old.” I shook my head in wonder. “If I didn’t know this was all created in the last two years...”
“Yeah, we didn’t want to do the big Vegas glitz on every block. It was important to the coven we have different districts, different atmospheres.” Suddenly, her pace quickened. “We’re here!”
The building ahead was a Victorian house painted deep purple with black trim, its windows glowing warmly. No lines or flashing signs, only a small brass plaque by the door that read “Familiarize” in elegant script, the words glowing with enchantment.
Just inside the entrance, a sleek grey cat sat at a small podium. “Brielle! So good to see you again,” the cat said.
“Thank you, Vince,” Brie replied. “This is Callie.”
Vince’s amber eyes assessed me with interest. “Welcome! Always a pleasure to meet a friend of Brielle’s.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Especially when she’s a witch.”
“Human trouble?” Brie asked.
Vince sighed. “I’ll confess, when my witch told me we were going into the restaurant business, I was intrigued by the prospect of conversing with ordinary humans.” His whiskers twitched. “That lasted for the first three customers.”
I laughed. “That bad?”
“Let’s just say I understand why historically familiars have conversed only with witches.
” Vince hopped to the ground and led us into the restaurant proper.
“I complain, but the truth is Familiarize is my witch’s passion, so there’s nowhere I’d rather be.
If that means I have to endure insipid small talk with Betty from Scranton… every life has struggle.”
We arrived at our table, which had a beautiful view of the garden courtyard beyond the window.
Vince handed us off seamlessly to a raven familiar named Tracy, who introduced herself as our server and gave me a quick account of how the restaurant worked (eight witches and their familiars ran it in partnership, the witches cooking while the familiars handled front of house).
Tracy warmly informed us that the kitchen had prepared a special tasting menu for us tonight, no charge.
The first course materialized on our plates in a shimmer of golden light.
Delicate seared scallops rested on a bed of spring pea puree, garnished with micro herbs.
Tracy gave a brief account of how they infused a flavorful lunar essence into the scallops by only harvesting them under full moons, and then departed with a graceful flutter, off to check her next table.
As Brie and I dug into the scallops, which tasted extraordinary, I realized how overdue I was for an update on her life.
Ever since we’d reconnected, we’d only talked about two things: the implosion of my marriage, and the transformation of Nightshade Cove.
I was dying to know more about what my friend had been up to.
“So you’re a regular here?” I asked.
“Not as much as I’d like to be,” Brie responded.
“But they all know you.”
“That’s from work. This is my new project. We’re trying to develop a strategy to get the human world to recognize the legal rights of familiars.”
Brie then launched into the most fascinating account of her work at our coven’s law firm. As she spoke, it slowly dawned on me: now that Nightshade Cove was so big, working at the coven’s firm meant Brie was among the most prominent witch attorneys in the world.
“Now that humans know familiars exist, we need to make sure they’re accorded the full rights of people when they travel, and not treated like animals.
The human world has no legal status for fully intelligent, self-aware beings in animal bodies, and we need them to create one.
And I’m sure you can imagine the incidents we’ve had with attempted trafficking.
You have no idea how many humans will pay any price for their own talking cat. ”
“Oh gods, I never thought about that.”
“I’d love nothing more than to put tracker charms on all of them so we never had to worry, but… you know how strong-minded familiars can be. That idea gets a lot of resistance. Too much surveillance. And maybe they have a point.”
“I’m just so impressed by you, Brie. This project could affect the lives of familiars for… forever!” The scale of it was still hitting me.
Brie looked pleased. “Well, someone special has come into my life who helped inspire it.”
My eyebrows arched. “I didn’t know you were seeing someone.”
“Oh, I’m not. I’m working fourteen-hour days, so there’s no time for romance.
But I finally met my familiar! His name is Brady.
” Brie was beaming. She took out her phone and pulled up a selfie of her cuddling with an adorably round black cat.
“He’s been essential in helping organize the familiars. We’ve been working on this together.”
“That must feel amazing,” I said. “To have that connection.”
“It does.”
I kept my smile in place. When I’d chosen life with Maddox, getting my own familiar was one of the things I’d known I was giving up.
Familiars only came to witches who had embraced their power and found their magical purpose.
Maybe I could still do that now, but I was so far behind. I might have missed my window.
Brie was fighting for civil rights that would shape the lives of familiars for generations.
Nina had revolutionized sex work. And what had I accomplished during that same time?
I’d spent years learning all the tiny likes and dislikes of a serial cheater, so I could be the perfect housewife to a man who was treating me like dirt.
I had no direction, no purpose, and no achievements worth mentioning.
“Hey,” Brie said softly. “Where’d you go?”
I set down my fork. “I’m just thinking about how much you and Nina have accomplished, and how I wasted so much time.
And it’s not like I have my mother’s lifespan to play around with.
” As High Priestess, my mother would live centuries more beyond the centuries she’d already lived, but the rest of us regular witches had to take advantage of our ninety-ish years of life.
“Stop that,” Brie said forcefully. “Life is not a straight line, and you can’t do everything at once. You just need time. Time to get over Maddox, and time to figure out what you want.”
“But I don’t even know how to start.”
“Yes, you do. You have started. You’re getting divorced, you’re reconnecting with your magic, and you’re figuring out what comes next. That’s all huge. Give yourself some credit.”
I managed a faint smile and was relieved to have something else to focus on when the second course appeared on our table. Tracy arrived to explain this was Phoenix-charred Swordfish, as it levitated off the plate and became briefly engulfed in flames to finish the cook.
“It looks incredible.” I couldn’t wait to dig in.
But Tracy wasn’t done. “Also, Callie, we have received a message for you from the High Priestess.”
My heart immediately started racing at the mention of my mother.
I had been so hopeful I could get in and out of Nightshade Cove before Astrea knew I was there. How could I have been so naive? She’d probably known I’d arrived from the very moment I teleported onto Main Street.
Tracy continued. “The High Priestess welcomes you back home and requests your presence tomorrow at noon in her office at the Obsidian Spire.”
I murmured thanks to Tracy, and she flew off.
“I should have known there was no avoiding Astrea,” I said with resignation.
“Well, it was worth a shot.”
I shuddered. “I wish I could get out of it. It’s just going to be ‘I told you so’ about Maddox, and ranting about how the Council has ruined her perfect little enclave.”
Brie jerked her head up. “Ruined? Callie, you don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“This was all your mother’s idea. Becoming the Vegas of witchcraft was her project. She spearheaded the whole initiative.”
“What?” That was impossible. My mother was the ultimate traditionalist. She would have chosen for witches to stay hidden forever, and she had never been more furious than when the Hellebore Coven revealed all of us. “The Council didn’t force this on her?”
“No, it was the other way around. She brought the Council on board, over their skepticism,” Brie said emphatically.
“That makes no sense. Astrea never wanted anything to do with the outside world.”
Pensive, Brie took a bite of the swordfish. “It’s not only the buildings that have changed here.”
As I took my own bite, I realized I had no idea what awaited me tomorrow.
It was a bizarre maternal dynamic when you were the daughter of a High Priestess.
It was the only parent/child relationship where the parent could expect to watch all her children die of old age, while she remained mostly ageless.
On my deathbed, Astrea would appear only a few years older than she had the day she gave birth to me.
That kind of longevity led you to become uniquely intractable and stuck in your ways. At least, that had always been my theory for explaining my mother.
But the mother I knew never would have been able to support this transformation of our community, much less conceive and execute it.
If I had gotten that so wrong, I no longer had the first clue what I would be walking into tomorrow.