Page 11 of A Witchy Spell Ride (31 Days of Trick or Treat, Bikers and Mobsters #15)

She lifted the pan from behind the counter. “Already selected.”

I climbed the stairs on legs that didn’t feel like mine. My apartment smelled like chamomile and cedar and the faintest trace of Briar’s perfume from last night. Normal, I told myself. Safe. Home.

On my dresser, the charm with red thread sat where I’d left it, slightly off-center because I’d knocked it with my elbow this morning. I paused. Checked the bathroom window. Locked. Checked the closet. Empty except for too many vintage coats and a pair of boots I couldn’t resist on clearance.

I opened the drawer and took out the box with the photo. The one from the envelope slipped under my welcome mat. I hadn’t shown Briar. Not yet. Part of me still wanted to pretend the universe was sending mixed signals I could ignore.

I opened the lid and looked at seventeen-year-old me. Hoodie. Smirk. Vex’s grin. Ghost a blur behind us like an omen I hadn’t learned to read. Everyone else crossed out. Me and Ghost left behind. Us against the world.

My stomach turned.

I slid the photo back, shut the box, and locked the drawer. If Briar knew, she’d go straight to Reaper. Reaper would turn the Quarter into a war zone. And maybe that was what I should want, scorched earth, zero mercy.

But I wanted to choose my own war.

I shoved clothes into a bag without thinking jeans, a black dress, three shirts, underwear, a hoodie. My toothbrush. My tarot deck. The tin I’d tucked the red-thread bottle into. Two knives. The old brass key to the shop that didn’t actually open any current locks but made me feel better.

On my way out, my eye caught the bathroom mirror. I’d left a lipstick print there a week ago, drunk on Briar’s sangria, thinking I was cute. I wiped it off with the corner of a towel before I could decide it looked like a target.

Back downstairs, Briar waited exactly where she’d promised, frying pan perched like a crown. “Three minutes thirty,” she said. “Efficient. Gross bag, cute shoes. I approve.”

I almost laughed. It came out as a sound I didn’t recognize.

She set the pan down. “We’re going out the back. Hoodie up. Head down. You do not turn around if someone says your name. You do not help a stranger with a ‘dropped phone.’ You get in the car.”

“What car?” I frowned.

She jangled keys. “Borrowed from Cross.”

“Cross knows?”

“Cross knows he lent me a car to get more candles,” she said brightly. “Which is not a lie. You are a candle.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“And yet you love me.”

I did. God, I did.

We killed the lights. I locked the door twice, then a third time for superstition.

We stepped into the alley, and the humidity kissed my face like a warning.

The bells at ankle height were silent as we moved.

The hair on the back-door latch, a new one Briar had insisted we tape, lay unbroken.

The chalk line at the hinge sat like a quiet dare.

We slid into the borrowed car. Briar drove like a demon if demons followed all posted signs until they didn’t. She took three extra turns to see if anyone tailed us. No sedan. No hooded figure. Just a city doing what it always does, pretending it doesn’t notice the undercurrent that feeds it.

Her apartment sat four blocks deeper into the Quarter, tucked over a voodoo shop whose owner minded his business and everyone else’s. Inside, she turned on every light and set a pot of water to boil.

“For tea?” I asked.

“For pasta,” she said. “And also, tea. Fear burns calories. Stay hydrated.”

“I’m not eating.”

“You will when you smell the garlic.”

I wanted to roll my eyes. I sat instead, elbows on knees, palms over my eyes. The note burned behind my lids, a negative image that wouldn’t let me blink it away.

You were made to be adored.

Watched.

Worshipped.

Soon, you’ll see.

I’m not the danger.

I’m the answer.

The word answer stuck under my ribs like a bone. To what? To who? To which question I wasn’t brave enough to ask?

“Talk to me,” Briar said, voice clipped clean of play this time. She slid a bowl in front of me and a glass of water I didn’t notice I finished until it was empty. “Everything. From the moment you woke up.”

I told her. Most of it. Enough to make a map. Not the photo. Not the part where my dreams felt like hands that knew me. Not the part where a name kept pressing against my teeth and I refused to let it out.

She made notes on a Post-it with a skull printed in the corner. “We establish a baseline of crazy,” she said. “Then we measure deviations.”

“You sound like Cross.”

“I’ve been rubbing off on him.”

“Gross.”

She smirked. Then sobered. “We have three working theories. One: Banks. Possessive, inexperienced, eager, with too much time and too little sense. Two: random nut job who latched onto you because you’re pretty and you smile at vendors, which you will stop doing.

Three: someone from the past, which opens the whole blood-and-bourbon Rolodex. ”

“Four,” I said, voice thin. “Someone who thinks the spell made me his.”

Briar didn’t blink. “Magic doesn’t absolve monsters,” she said. “It just gives them new excuses.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

I rubbed the heel of my hand over the ache between my eyes. “It felt like a message. Not to scare me. To claim me.”

“People like this don’t understand the difference.” She reached across the table and squeezed my fingers. “We are going to get ahead of him, Selene. But you have to let me call in help.”

“Not Reaper.”

“Not Reaper,” she agreed. “Yet.”

I waited for the name I knew she’d say next.

She didn’t make me ask for it.

“Ghost.”

The room felt smaller when she said it. The lights seemed brighter. My breath sat wrong in my chest.

“I can’t,” I whispered.

“You don’t have to. I will.”

“He’ll tell Reaper.”

“He won’t if I frame it as a favor, not a threat.” She held my gaze. “You can hate me later. I’ll take it. But I’m not letting you stand here with a rose and a note and a target on your back because you’re being brave.”

“It’s not about brave.”

“I know what it’s about.” Her voice gentled. “I know you want to choose your own war. Ghost doesn’t take that away. He just makes sure you have time to choose.”

I closed my eyes because she was right, and I hated that she was right.

“Give me tonight,” I said. “Just tonight. We set the traps. We reset the shop in the morning. If anything, else happens, you call him.”

“Deal,” she said without hesitation. “But my definition of ‘anything else’ is broad.”

“I figured.”

We ate. I didn’t mean to. But the garlic did its work, and so did the way Briar kept the conversation on safe ground long enough to let my nerves stop buzzing.

We talked about meaningless things, the way Cross kept pretending he didn’t like her weird horror podcast, how Bones swore he could hear a mouse in the garage, and everyone told him he was haunted, how Vex bought a candle and pretended he didn’t.

Later, we turned her apartment into a trap masquerading as a living room.

Fishing line at ankle height. Bells on doors.

Flour dusted lightly across the doormat to catch a footprint.

A glass balanced on the front knob. An empty wine bottle perched on the back handle.

Cheap tricks. Old tricks. They worked because people underestimated them.

I took the couch. Briar took the floor. She insisted the floor was her “kingdom.” We slept in shifts. When it was my turn to lie awake, I listened to the city’s pulse through glass and brick, counted the breaths between cars, cataloged every creak.

At 3:12, I sat up. Not because anything had happened. Because the kind of silence that presses a hand over your mouth crawled across my skin.

“Briar,” I whispered.

“I’m awake,” she whispered back without opening her eyes. “Any bells?”

“No.”

“Any ghosts?”

“One.” I pressed my palm to my sternum. “He lives here.”

She didn’t tease me. She reached up and patted my knee. “We’ll evict him when we’re ready.”

We didn’t sleep much after that. Dawn came like a blessing.

By nine, we were back at the shop. We did everything backwards, opened the back first, not the front, checked the markers, the chalk, the hair.

All intact. No flour disturbed on the threshold where we’d dusted it before leaving.

No bells chimed when we unlocked. But when I stepped inside, I felt the air shift the way it had yesterday.

I held my breath.

The counter was clear.

No rose.

No note.

No new felt on the bell.

I exhaled slowly, the relief thin and too sweet. “Maybe it was a one-off,” I said, and the lie echoed off the walls like a dare.

Briar didn’t reply. She walked to the register and looked down. “Selene.”

“What?”

She pointed at the space beside the cash drawer, just under the lip where customers couldn’t see without leaning all the way over. Tucked there, pressed into the shadow, lay a single, small petal.

Deep red. Velvet. Fresh.

I picked it up with shaking fingers and felt the softness collapse.

Briar’s eyes were flint. “It wasn’t a one-off.”

The room tilted, very slightly. I put my palm on the counter and felt wood under skin, the realness of it, the anchor I needed. “Okay,” I said, and my voice didn’t shake. “Call him.”

“Ghost?” she asked, though we both knew the answer.

“Ghost,” I said, tasting the word like medicine I didn’t want and knew I needed.

Briar didn’t hesitate. She pulled out her phone and typed, fast. I didn’t ask what she said. I didn’t want to hear the shape of my fear translated into text.

I walked to the door and flipped the sign from Closed to Open.

Because if someone wanted to play a game with me, I’d choose the battleground.

I straightened the shelves. Lit the candles. Put the rose petal into an evidence bag and slid it into the drawer. Counted the till. Answered a tourist’s question about whether frankincense could fix her ex-husband’s aura (no, but it might make her apartment smell like church).

I did the day.

I moved inside it like a woman who still owned her space.

Because I did.

Because I would.

Because love and danger might wear the same face but only one of them gets to keep mine.