Chapter 16 #2
I push the thought down and pick up my pace.
As I turn the corner past the Cackling Hen, Lin appears from behind the glass door before I’ve even had a chance to look in, moving with the barely-contained energy of a woman who has been watching for me.
She has on a long dress today in overlapping shades of amber and sage, her pince-nez magnifying her eyes, making them appear larger, as she steps out onto the pavement with a to-go cup held out in offering.
“Made your favorite,” she calls, her smile wide and bright, though her eyes are doing something different from her mouth.
Her eyes are worried. “Extra espresso today, sweetheart. You are definitely going to need it.” She taps two fingers to her temple and offers me a slow, significant wink, her particular shorthand for having already seen something she is choosing not to name out loud.
I take the cup gratefully, inhaling the dark, fragrant steam. “How bad?” I ask.
She squeezes my arm with one of her hands and her gaze slides briefly, instinctively, to the edge of town, toward wherever the sound of traffic is still faintly audible beneath the ordinary noise of Ruby Springs waking up.
“Be careful today,” she says, lowering her voice.
“The weather report says storms. But. . .” She trails off and leaves the rest of it hanging, because in Ruby Springs, neither of us needs it spelled out.
Weather predictions here have never been only about rain.
I nod, squeezing her hand once before I release it, and continue toward the shop. This is not how I imagined the day going.
Thorne Curiosities greets me with its familiar sounds, the soft complaint of the floorboards, the low, resonant sigh of the door swinging inward on its old hinges. I lock the door behind me and let myself just stand there for a moment, breathing it in.
The grimoires are safely tucked in the hidden cabinet behind the counter, where Ezra helped me store them.
Their presence fills the shop in a way that goes beyond the physical, a low, steady hum beneath the surface of things that I didn’t feel before they were here.
Since he brought them, I have been hyperaware of their presence.
As if the books themselves are watching, waiting, and anticipating my next move.
I pull my grandmother’s grimoire from my satchel and place it carefully on the shelf with the others, smoothing a hand over the cover before I let it go.
I busy myself with the ordinary work of the morning.
Dusting the high shelves, rearranging the display of carved wooden boxes near the window, pulling the crystal collection from their cases to be cleansed and re-sorted.
The physical rhythm of it is calming, something to do with my hands while my mind works through things I’m not quite ready to say out loud yet.
Sir stations himself by the front window, half-draped over the sill, his posture the practiced ease of a creature pretending to be merely decorative while absorbing every detail of the street outside.
“Will you teach me a protection charm?” The question comes out of me without a great deal of planning, but the moment I’ve said it I know it’s the right one. “Something simple. But effective.”
Sir turns his head from the window and regards me for a moment with something that might, on a different face, be called pride.
“Smart thinking,” he says, which from him is practically effusive.
“We’ll start with a basic warding sigil.
Something you can activate with minimal energy expenditure, you don’t need to drain yourself to establish a perimeter warning. ”
For the next hour, he guides me through the motions with the patient precision of someone who has taught this before, in other rooms, to other hands.
I practice drawing the sigil in the air, tracing its shape slowly at first, feeling the faint resistance at the tips of my fingers where magic gathers and tries to hold the form I’m giving it.
It’s not elaborate work. It’s the sort of thing you apparently teach children who have barely any magic at all, which I try not to dwell on.
I call it a win regardless, because by the fifth attempt I can see it.
A shimmer of blue-white light trails behind my finger, hanging suspended in the air for three full seconds before it dissolves like smoke.
“Better,” Sir concedes. “Now try it with intent behind it. It’s not just about the movement. The movement is only the vessel.”
I draw a breath, spread my feet apart, and raise my hand again. “If someone with ill intent approaches—”
The bell above the door jangles.
The temperature in the shop drops suddenly. It’s change is just enough that I notice it before I’ve even turned around. Enough that Sir goes very, very still on his window ledge.
Lenora Thorne stands in the entrance of my shop looking like she owns it.
She is draped in an expensive camel coat, possibly cashmere, by the look of it, belted precisely at the waist. Her hair flawlessly styled, her posture the kind of straight that comes from decades of reminding rooms that she is the most important person in them.
The Thorne family crest gleams at her throat, the crescent moon cradled between two cupped palms, catching the light as she tilts her chin slightly upward and surveys the space around her.
Her eyes move across the shop with the slow, deliberate interest of someone conducting an appraisal. “Keisha,” she greets me, the single word delivered with the smooth, cool precision. “The shop looks,” a brief, considered pause, “quaint. You’ve certainly put your own stamp on things.”
The way she says your own stamp makes the compliment feel like a small, precise cut.
“Lenora,” I reply, keeping my voice as level as I can manage. I deliberately leave it there, offering nothing further. No warmth, no invitation, no deflection toward pleasantries. Just her name and the silence that follows it. “What brings you by?”
She moves through the shop with practiced ease, unhurried, one hand trailing along the edge of a shelf with the casual authority.
Her fingers graze the edge of a display without quite touching anything, the gesture landing somewhere between curiosity and assessment.
“I was in the area. Thought I’d see what you’ve done with the place.
” She pauses at a carved wooden box and tilts her head slightly.
“Your grandmother had such a specific vision for Thorne Curiosities. A very particular sensibility.”
“Her vision still stands,” I say, straightening behind the counter. “I’m honoring her approach. Updating where it makes sense.”
Lenora’s lips twitch, just slightly, in what cannot be called a smile.
“Of course.” She moves on, pausing this time at the small display of hand-bound journals I’ve assembled near the window, lifting one carefully.
She turns it over in her hands, examining the binding.
“I was actually wondering whether you’d come across any of mother’s old record books while you were organizing.
Business ledgers, that sort of thing. Inventory lists. Historical accounts of the property.”
There it is. Wrapped in the language of administrative interest, dressed up in the vocabulary of family record-keeping, but underneath it about as subtle as a knock to the door at midnight. She is not here about ledgers. We both know that.
“You mean her grimoires,” I say flat and deliberate.
Lenora’s eyes move to mine. They narrow a fraction, just enough to be visible, before her expression performs its return to polished neutrality. “Among other things. Family records represent important historical artefacts. Especially in a town with a lineage as significant as ours.”
“Especially magical ones,” I add, watching her face the way Ezra would watch a fluctuating ward reading. Careful. Looking for the pattern beneath the surface.
“Yes,” she replies, the word chosen with visible care.
“Indeed. As a Thorne who has been actively involved in Ruby Springs for decades, who has dedicated herself to this town’s preservation, I have a very vested interest in ensuring our family’s legacy is properly maintained.
I wouldn’t expect you to fully understand the weight of that. ”
This woman. I call on every ounce of patience my mother ever instilled in me and find it running considerably low. My momma raised me to respect my elders. I know better, I do, but the word that forms in my mind is not a polite one.
I lean back against the counter with my arms crossed, studying her the way she studied my shop when she walked in.
“Let’s stop playing games, Auntie. You sabotaged my grand reopening.
You’ve spent months warning townspeople away from this shop.
You delayed the inheritance paperwork for two full years.
Now you’re standing in my shop asking about magical texts you assume I can’t comprehend, because you still believe I’m powerless.
” I keep my voice even, but I don’t soften a single word.
“So, let’s skip the performance. What do you actually want? ”
The mask slips, not completely, not all at once, the seam shows, and for just a moment something raw and unguarded moves beneath it.
“I am protecting this town,” she says, and the smoothness in her voice has gone tight and sharp around the edges.
“You walked back in here after years away and think that because you’ve had a few flickers of something you understand what responsibility looks like in this place.
You have no idea what you’ve walked into. ”
“Of course I take this seriously.” My hands go to my hips. I tip my head back and direct a brief, silent appeal at whatever is above me and paying attention. Give me the strength to stay civil, because I have genuinely run out of grace. “Why would you assume I wouldn’t?”
She opens her mouth, closes it.