Chapter 29
The next morning, two days before Samhain, Talula headed to the café alone. She told Simon she needed some space to get her head in order.
“What? Why?”
“My mom’s on the run from magical trophy hunters, we just got through the town hall, we have a million things to do for Samhain, and I self-destructed in front of the girl I’m totally crazy about.”
Simon couldn’t say much to that. He did, however, give her a wistful smile. “Let me handle some of the Samhain minutiae. And I think you should bring your cake paraphernalia with you.”
Talula shook her head. “Simon, I told you there’s no oven—”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that.” Simon raised his doggy eyebrows. “Let’s just say your sorcery instructor had some thoughts, and our craftsman elf friends had some time.”
Talula looked at her mentor dubiously, but couldn’t say no to his wide, pleading eyes. She packed up and set off for the Blue Moon. Still under a gray cloud of worry and regrets, Talula opened the front door of the café, expectations low. She gasped.
The place looked like something right out of her chic coffee shop decor mood boards.
LED lights glistened from new display shelves and cases.
Sleek speakers replaced the outdated stereo system.
A coat of dreamy blue paint brightened the walls.
Buzzing with excitement, Talula opened the Employees Only door to find a brand-new stove with burners and a flat-top grill.
Two spacious ovens were stacked to the left of the stove.
Stainless steel prep tables held shelves full of every cooking utensil she’d ever seen in her favorite foodie social media feeds.
It was the café kitchen she’d always wanted it to be.
She owed the craftsman elves a dairy-themed gift basket and an ecstatic thank-you note.
But they weren’t the only ones.
Talula grabbed her order pad, tore out a page, and scrawled, It’s perfect, thank you.
Then, she concentrated on her latest skill, creating a mini magical doorway in midair.
She peeked through the portal and spotted Simon dozing on the living room couch.
She dropped her note through the blue window—it landed on top of his head.
As the portal disappeared, Talula could hear Simon’s pleased chuckle reverberating through her magic.
Talula looked around again at all the shiny new additions to her well-loved café. Instinctually, she thought, I can’t wait for Dahlia to see it.
The thought was a brass-knuckle punch to Talula’s gut. Last night’s tears threatened to return. But she shook her head. It was time to put the kitchen to good use.
Talula pulled on her apron.
With a mug of Earl Grey steaming beside her, she took a look at her notes.
Because the Cake as You Like It recipe had no instructions, she’d scoured the Internet looking at various cake recipes.
Her plan was to try one, see if it sparked any magic, and if not, go on to the next.
As she mixed up a batter, she focused on the only clue that Kiki’s book had given her:
Make it what you want, how you want it.
While her first cake was in the oven, Talula examined the next magical recipe. Thanks to weeks of Jinn vocabulary practice, she finished the translation in less than an hour. It helped that there were only five ingredients:
There’s Always Time for Fresh Scrambled Eggs
Butter
Five eggs
Salt
Pepper
Cheese optional, but optional cheese is for fools
The recipe’s first step was inexplicably detailed…and puzzling.
Begin by ensuring freshness. Pour water into a glass. Drop one whole egg (shell and all) into the glass. Focus on what makes an egg fresh. When the egg sinks to the bottom of the glass, remove it and repeat for every egg. Then proceed to the next step.
There was no marginalia here. No coy Kiki clue. Talula frowned as the oven timer went off. She set the cookbook aside to decipher later and pulled the cake out of the oven.
Talula thought back to the first of Simon’s illusion lessons: Powerful illusions can convince the systems of the body to react to illusions as though they’re real.
Talula drew up her magic, envisioning her cake as a four-tiered confection covered in rainbow sprinkles.
But nothing happened. Again and again, Talula imagined a new version of the cake (as she liked it), but the same cake just continued to cool on the counter.
Frustrated, she grabbed a fork and took a bite.
Talula coughed. It was bad. The flavor was essentially sweetened cardboard, the texture akin to a grocery-store muffin that had just… given up.
Maybe the cake’s the problem, she thought. She put on a pump-up playlist, took a moment to marvel at the café’s new speakers, then started working with the next set of instructions and measurements.
Which is how Talula wound up baking three tragically mediocre cakes in one morning. She lined them up on one of the prep tables, glaring at them like they’d purposefully thwarted her magical baking efforts.
“You’re a disappointment to your entire species,” she informed the cakes. She pretended they looked ashamed of themselves.
Then the café’s golden bell rang out.
Talula froze. Dahlia?
She rushed out of the Employees Only door.
But it wasn’t Dahlia, tragically unkissed, standing in the Blue Moon Café & 24-Hour Occult Emporium that Thursday morning before Halloween. It was, in fact, the last person Talula had ever expected to enter the occult café’s premises.
“Wow.” Mrs. Bochart looked around with genuine admiration. “This place sure looks better than the last time I was here.”
Talula blinked hard. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. After that, she did as much of the stroke test as she could remember.
“One cocoa, please,” Pine Hollow’s best baker said without a trace of animosity.
Talula felt like she was in one of those dreams that didn’t make any sense, but the dreamer had no choice but to play along anyway. So Talula, following dream logic, gave a dazed kind of nod and reached for her hot cocoa materials.
“Do you know why this place is called the Blue Moon?” Mrs. Bochart asked, leisurely perusing the occult displays.
“I don’t think so?” Talula replied. What is happening?
“It had some hippie-dippie name before, like The Wheel Turns Café or something. But then one night, not long after I had my third kid in three years, your mother asked me what it was like to be so…lordy, how’d she put it? ‘Epically life-giving.’ ”
Talula gaped, captivated by the completely impossible words coming out of Mrs. Bochart’s mouth.
“I told her, ‘If Bocharts know one thing, it’s baking. If it’s another thing, it’s baby-making.
’ ” Mrs. Bochart chuckled. “That made your mother laugh. She told me that in all her millennia of existence, she’s never been able to conceive.
She said it was one magic that she’d never get to experience.
I said, maybe it’ll happen. Maybe you need a special mystical something or other to be able to put one in the oven.
Maybe it’s just got to be a very special blue moon.
” Finally, Mrs. Bochart turned to Talula, her face kind and open.
“Then, a few years later, she started to look a little moon-shaped herself. With you. And this place got a new name.”
Talula abandoned her cocoa efforts. “What is happening?” she said, out loud this time.
Mrs. Bochart smirked. “One caramel macchiato, four shots of espresso, two decaf, two caf, and a drizzle of raspberry syrup. No whip.”
Talula braced her arms on the café counter, finally understanding how women in Victorian novels died of shock.
Mrs. Bochart slid onto a counter stool across from Talula. “Here’s the deal, girlie. I know what the Blue Moon does. I know the community it serves. I know the secrets it safeguards.”
“How?”
“Your mother.” Mrs. Bochart continued, “When you were born, Sara knew that you’d be a part of the human world.
Which meant that the front for the Volta would be a little more a part of the human world, too, and need extra protection.
We agreed that I’d be the ‘anti-ambassador’ of the Blue Moon to keep visitors to a minimum.
” She placed a hand over Talula’s. “Every awful word I’ve ever said about this place was to create a sort of…
social barrier to keep locals away from you and the people you protect. ”
Talula blinked, taking in this entirely different version of Mrs. Bochart. “Why are you telling me all this now?”
“Because I didn’t realize until now that Sara forgot to tell you about our little arrangement!
” Mrs. Bochart shook her head and laughed.
“But it makes sense. Your mother is a wonderful big-picture person but a little flaky on the small stuff. Sure, she forgot to tell you about me, but I’ll bet my bakery that she told you exactly where the Stick of Eternal Sparkles is, am I right? ”
The Wand of Ageless Opalescence was under their guest bathroom sink, next to the tampons. Mrs. Bochart read the look on Talula’s face with a chuckle. “Classic Sara.”
Talula felt her guard dissolve. “Then why were you so mean to me?”
“I thought you were in on it!” Mrs. Bochart threw her arms in the air. “I thought it was your way of saying hello and playing around, trying to make me break character.”
“You thought we were doing magical undercover spy banter?” Talula had to laugh.
“When you say things like ‘the weather is so weathery,’ what am I supposed to think, young lady?” Mrs. Bochart huffed, ears turning a little pink. “I didn’t realize how wrong I was until your girlfriend turned up at my door.”
Talula froze. “Dahlia came to your house?”