Chapter 2
By the time I pedaled over to Shadowkeep, there was already a small crowd of people outside with their faces pressed to the window displays.
Of all the shops on the main drag of Sedgwick Cove, Shadowkeep was perhaps the most obvious tourist trap.
Everything about it, from its sagging front porch, to its impossibly lush plants, to its ancient-looking sign screamed the Hollywood version of witchcraft.
Eager to avoid a scrum of people trying to get through the door after me, I cycled around the side of the house, and opened the gate in the fence that led into the garden.
I leaned my bike against the inside of the fence, unbuckled the basket from behind the seat, and turned to face the shop.
There was a trick to finding the secret entrance.
Only a witch could see around the glamour that hid the staircase in plain sight.
It wasn’t exactly invisibility—it was simply a trick of the mind that caused the passersby not to notice the stairs built up the side of the house that led to a door on the second floor.
I amused myself as I walked up by waving at passersby and watching them completely ignore me.
I wondered if that was how ghosts must feel, drifting invisibly along beside people, but the thought pricked at me like an unexpected thorn.
I didn’t want to think about ghosts right now, not when my own studies of my spirit abilities were going so poorly.
Well, I thought they were going poorly. Xiomara seemed to expect no better, a fact which I knew should have made me feel better, but instead festered inside me like an ulcer.
Like with Eva and other friends who were coming into more advanced studies of their powers, we were all starting to feel the pressure of expanding and honing our magic.
Was this what normal teenagers felt like with stuff like SATs and college applications?
I’d have to ask Poe or Charlie the next time I talked to them.
At the top of the stairs, I inserted my key in the lock and twisted the rattly old crystal doorknob to let myself in.
The door was so old, I could probably have opened it with one good shove of my shoulder.
I’d have to talk to Rhi and Persi about replacing it—it might be invisible to most people but, as we now knew, enemies had infiltrated the Cove without detection over the summer.
“Hi Persi,” I said as I entered the upstairs shop space, and found she had beaten me there.
Persi merely grunted in reply—she had a screwdriver clamped between her teeth as she stood perched on a stepladder, and adjusted the height of a new shelf above one of the windows.
“Do you want me to get things ready to open downstairs?”
She grunted again, this time with a nod which I took to mean “yes.” I moved past her to the opposite door, and descended the stairs into the tourist area of the shop.
I unlocked the old-fashioned cash register and double-checked the starting cash.
Then I walked around and clicked on the many stained-glass lamps, fairy lights, fake candles and lanterns we used to light the place instead of overhead strip lighting—nothing spoiled a spooky atmosphere like fluorescent lightbulbs.
I could hear the voices outside rise into an excited babble as they realized the store was waking up and getting ready to open.
I tried to ignore the faces pressed to the glass as I fixed some displays, restocked a few items that were running low and, at last, turned the sign from “BOO, we’re closed” to “Enter If You Dare.” With a sigh, I plastered on a smile, pulled back the deadbolt, and opened the door.
“Welcome to Shadowkeep,” I said, in what I hoped was a good imitation of Persi’s musical tones. “Please let me know if I can be of any assistance, magic-makers.”
The rest of the morning was a blur of cheap wigs, plastic vampire teeth, and melting face paint.
Nearly every visitor to the shop was decked out in their Halloween finest, despite the fact that the lingering summer heat was refusing to cede its ground to the crisp breezes of autumn.
I could never remember it being this warm in the run up to Halloween.
By the time Persi descended into the lower shop an hour later, Rhi’s cookies had already sold out.
This soured her mood, and she snapped at several customers before she got over it.
Around lunchtime, Zale and Eva braved the crowds, pushing past two girls taking selfies dressed as Elphaba and Galinda by the candle display, to arrive, breathless and grinning, at the checkout counter.
“Well? How did it—?”
“Say hello to Sedgwick Cove’s newest waterworker!” Eva crowed.
“I knew it!” I cried, leaning across the counter to pull her into a one-armed hug. “Persi, I’m gonna step out for a second, okay?” `
“Sure, I’m not drowning in customers over here,” came the dry reply, over the heads of the customers.
“Thanks!” I called blithely, ignoring the sarcasm, and slipped out onto the porch with Eva and Zale.
“So? Tell me all about it!” I said, as we settled ourselves on a cluster of Asteria’s creaking old rocking chairs.
“She flooded the Humanities building,” Zale said, deadpan.
“Very funny. Wait, did you?” I gasped, rounding on Eva.
“Of course I didn’t,” Eva snapped, shoving Zale so hard that he fell out of his chair and into a planter full of climbing roses.
Ignoring his curses, she went on. “I really thought my nerves were going to get the best of me, at first. I sat down at the practice altar, and my mind went absolutely blank. I honestly don’t think I even remembered my own name. I thought I was going to pass out.”
“So what snapped you out of it?” I asked.
I was having a vivid flashback to the time freshman year when Poe had dragged me into an audition for the musical.
My brain had similarly short-circuited, though rather than recovering and nailing my audition, I’d given up and became a stage manager instead.
“Well, I opened up my notebook and found this,” Eva said.
She pulled a folded-up piece of paper from her shorts pocket, and unfolded it.
It was a sketch of Eva herself, but she was dressed as a superhero with a water droplet on her chest, and more little drops dancing at the ends of her long braids.
Streams of water shot from her eyeballs onto a burning building, while a crowd of firefighters cheered her on.
I grinned. “Bea?”
Eva nodded. “She must have swiped my notebook last night after my mom demanded I go to bed early. That kid drives me up the wall, but sometimes, she’s all right. Anyway, it made me laugh, and it was like my brain just clicked back on again. It was smooth sailing after that!”
“And she just told you that you passed right on the spot?” I asked, as Zale slumped back into his seat, grumbling.
“Yup! I’ll get my actual score next week, but she said she didn’t want to leave me in suspense.”
“Wow, this is so awesome,” I said. “We’ll have to celebrate!”
“My thoughts exactly!” Zale said. “Are you free tonight?”
My face fell. “No. I have lessons with Xiomara.”
“Can’t you just sk—” Zale began.
“No,” Eva and I said at the same time.
“It’s okay,” Eva said. “Let’s wait for Friday night.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “I don’t want to delay the celebration.”
“It won’t be a celebration if you’re not there,” Eva insisted. “It’s only one more night. And anyway, my family will probably want to celebrate tonight, which means it will be hard to get away.”
“Okay,” I said, brightening. Weathering my lessons with Xiomara would be easier if I had a night out with my friends to look forward to. “What do you want to do?”
Zale and Eva traded a knowing look. “It’ll be a new moon on Friday,” Zale said.
“It sure will,” Eva said, a smile spreading slowly and mischievously over her face. “The moon that ushers in Samhain. Let’s introduce Wren to a Sedgwick Cove tradition, shall we?”
I looked back and forth between the two of them, starting to feel nervous. “What tradition?”
But Eva shook her head. “You’ll see. Don’t want to spoil the surprise. See you tonight at my house?”
They both stood up and headed for the stairs.
“What tradition?” I repeated.
But neither of them answered, still just grinning like a pair of cheshire cats.
“WHAT TRADITION?!”
“See you later, Wren!” Zale called over his shoulder as they took off down the street, cackling now.
I shook my head. I squeezed back into the shop, determined to ask Persi what Zale and Eva had been talking about, but instead was overpowered by an incredibly strong smell.
Coughing, I slapped my hand over my nose and mouth, and looked around for the source of the sudden olfactory assault.
Finally, I spotted Persi. She was bent low, cleaning up a pile of shattered glass with a prop broom with one hand, while pressing her scarf over her nose and mouth with the other.
A pair of teenagers dressed as anime characters stood beside her, apologizing profusely and looking miserable.
“We were just trying to get it in a video,” one of the girls was babbling.
“Well, maybe if you learned to experience the world with your own eyes instead of through your phone screen, these things wouldn’t happen,” Persi snapped. “Everyone out! We need to air the place out! No, not you two, you come to the register, please. You’ll have to pay for that.”
The two girls shuffled miserably against the milling crowd, which was now moving steadily toward the door amidst coughing and retching sounds.
“What is it? Incense? Perfume?” one man gasped.
“If it’s perfume, it’s the worst one I’ve ever smelled,” a woman replied.
“It’s a potion, and if you don’t all clear out, you’ll all start breaking out in pimples!” Persi shouted over the crowd. That made everyone push harder for the door. “Don’t panic, just get some fresh air!”