Chapter 11
ELEVEN
JUNIE
The prickle along her skin announced the wrongness before she even reached the door.
Junie halted on the sidewalk, keys frozen in her hand. Glimmer went rigid around her neck, scales shifting to deep warning purple—the color of bruises, of danger, of bad decisions catching up.
The bay window display was dark. No softly glowing potions rotating through their lunar colors. No light spilling onto Main Street’s early morning sidewalk.
Just darkness.
She’d gotten up early, unable to sleep after another night of dreams she refused to examine. Dreams featuring tawny hair, broad shoulders, and a voice that made her skin feel too tight. Better to work. Better to lose herself in brewing than in thoughts of Leo Castellan.
The lock clicked. The door swung open.
And Junie’s world shattered.
Glass everywhere. Her beautiful antique apothecary shelves—the ones she’d spent three years restoring—torn from the walls and splintered across the floor.
Potion bottles smashed, their contents mixing into puddles of ruined magic that sizzled and sparked against the hardwood.
The Wellness section destroyed. The Emotional Support elixirs bleeding into each other in pools of contaminated color.
Her locked cabinet—the Special Requests—hung open, hinges wrenched loose. Empty.
“No.” The word came out broken. “No, no, no—”
Glimmer uncoiled from her neck and dropped to the floor, scales flashing urgent crimson as she slithered through the destruction. Cataloging. Searching.
Junie couldn’t move. Her boots crunched on broken glass as she took one step, then another, her brain refusing to process what her eyes were seeing.
Her grandmother’s copper cauldrons—overturned and dented.
Her distillation system—shattered into a thousand crystalline pieces.
The consultation nook’s velvet chairs—slashed open, stuffing scattered.
Not random vandalism. Too thorough. Too targeted.
She stumbled toward the back of the shop, toward her brewing station. Toward the shelf where she kept—
Please. Please, please, please.
The shelf was empty.
Bare brackets and dust outlines where her grandmother’s recipe book should have been. Where it had always been. Where Junie could reach out and touch the worn leather cover whenever she needed to feel Rosalind’s presence.
Gone.
Her knees hit the floor before she realized she was falling.
Glass bit into her palms, and she didn’t care.
The book. Twenty-six years of reaching for that leather spine when the world got too hard.
More than two decades of tracing her grandmother’s handwriting in the margins, of pressing her nose to the pages and pretending she could still smell Rosalind’s perfume.
All those years of wondering what secrets hid in those encoded entries. What knowledge Rosalind had deemed too important—or too dangerous—to write in plain text.
Gone.
Glimmer returned, butting her head against Junie’s thigh. The snake’s scales cycled through colors Junie had never seen before—grief and rage and fear all tangled into a pattern that made her throat tight.
“I know,” she whispered. Her voice came out thin. Hollow. “I know.”
She should call Wyatt. The pack. Her friends. She should do anything other than kneel in the wreckage of everything she’d built and everything she’d lost.
But she couldn’t force her limbs to obey. Couldn’t make herself care about the shattered glass, the ruined inventory, or the thousands of dollars in damages. None of it mattered.
The book was gone.
Rosalind was gone all over again.
The bell above the door—somehow still intact—chimed forty minutes later.
Junie hadn’t moved. She’d stopped crying at some point, her tears drying on her cheeks in itchy tracks she couldn’t be bothered to wipe away. Glimmer had coiled around her wrist, scales steady and present, the only anchor keeping her from flying apart completely.
“Junie.” Sheriff Wyatt Gentry’s voice cut through the fog in her head. Low. Calm. The kind of voice that expected answers and usually got them.
She looked up.
The panther shifter stood in the doorway, tall and lean in his khaki uniform, whiskey-colored eyes sweeping the destruction. His sharp cheekbones caught the weak morning light filtering through the broken display window. He didn’t gasp or curse or show any visible reaction to the devastation.
He studied it. Cataloged it. Filed it away.
“Got a call from Narla.” He stepped carefully over the debris, each movement containing that coiled grace panthers were known for. “Her candles started screaming around dawn. Knew bad news was coming.”
Of course, Narla’s candles knew. The candle witch’s emotional magic was connected to half the businesses on Main Street. She probably felt Moonrise Mixology’s violation before Junie did.
“They took the book.” The words scraped out of Junie’s throat. “My grandmother’s—they took—”
She couldn’t finish. Wyatt’s face remained impassive, but recognition flickered in those eyes. He’d grown up in Haven Shores. He knew what Rosalind Reed’s recipe book meant.
“Stand up.” Not harsh. Firm. “Let me see your hands.”
Junie blinked, confused, until she looked down and saw the blood. Glass cuts across both palms, embedded shards catching the light. She’d forgotten. It didn’t seem important.
She stood anyway.
Wyatt produced a first aid kit from somewhere—the man was perpetually prepared, unfailingly competent, three steps ahead of whatever crisis landed in his jurisdiction.
He guided her to the one unslashed chair in the consultation nook and began extracting glass shards with tweezers, his movements efficient and surprisingly gentle.
“Start from the beginning. What time did you arrive?”
“Six-thirty. Maybe six-forty.” Junie stared at her bleeding palms, watching red well up around the tweezers. “The window display was dark. I knew it was wrong, but I thought—power surge. Ley line fluctuation. A fixable problem.”
“Door was locked?”
“Yes. No signs of forced entry.” Her brain was starting to work again, logging details she’d been too shocked to notice. “The lock clicked normally. Someone had a key or—”
“Or magic.” Wyatt dropped a shard into a small evidence container. “There are spells that can bypass mechanical locks. Most of them require either significant power or significant knowledge of the target location.”
Someone who knew her shop. Knew her wards. Knew where she kept the book.
Junie’s stomach turned.
“Walk me through what’s missing.” Wyatt finished bandaging her hands and stood. “Beyond the obvious destruction.”
She forced herself to look. To really see the damage rather than drown in it.
“The Special Requests cabinet is empty. Those were custom formulations—not dangerous, but valuable.” She moved through the wreckage, Glimmer riding her shoulder, scales still that troubled crimson.
“The Wellness section is destroyed, but I think that’s collateral damage from—” She stopped.
Stared at the floor near her brewing station.
Scorch marks. Deliberate ones, forming a pattern she almost recognized.
“Wyatt.”
He was beside her in two strides, crouching to examine the burned symbols.
“That’s an amplification sigil. Someone was using your ley line access to power a larger spell.”
“The ley line—” Junie turned toward the basement door. It hung open, the lock melted into a twisted lump of metal.
She was down the stairs before she could think about whether it was safe.
The basement was worse.
Her carefully organized ingredient storage was ransacked. Aging racks overturned. But that wasn’t what made her stop dead at the bottom of the stairs.
The ley line access point flickered and sputtered. Weak. Damaged. The brilliant light that had filled this space days ago was dimmed to barely a glow.
Someone hadn’t stolen from her. They’d drained her.
“They siphoned the ley line.” Wyatt stood at her shoulder, his presence solid in the violated space. “Used the amplification sigil to channel power into a device or spell.” He paused. “This is beyond standard break-and-enter, Junie. This is a coordinated magical attack.”
She knew. God, she knew.
The buyout offer from three weeks ago. The shell company with the too-generous terms. She’d thrown the letter away without reading past the first paragraph because Moonrise Mixology wasn’t for sale, would never be for sale, was the only thing she had left of—
Her grandmother’s book. The ley line. Both targeted.
This wasn’t random.