Page 4 of Never Been Witched (Starfall Point #3)

The Bancrofts were summer people. They didn’t even live on the island full-time.

Alice had learned to take her grandparents’ warnings with a grain of salt.

Besides, they’d never really elaborated on why they thought the Bancrofts were pure, unadulterated evil.

As usual, they just expected Alice to take their pronouncements as law.

Alice worked to keep her face impassive. It was very good that she hadn’t answered her grandparents’ calls, because they would have been furious to know a Bancroft was in the shop, even if he was spending several hundred dollars on an arguably very ugly desk piece.

“Yeah, those Bancrofts. I swear, I’m nothing like my aunt and uncle, if you’ve met them,” Collin told her, pursing his lips.

Alice wanted to bite his lips.

What was wrong with her?

“By the way, this is Riley Denton-Everett, Nora’s niece,” Caroline told him.

“Really?” Collin clearly recognized the name and reached out to shake Riley’s hand.

“Nice to meet you. When I wasn’t trying to illegally obtain alcohol, I pestered your aunt incessantly to let me inside Shaddow House.

She was very skilled at telling me where to quote ‘park my entitled little ass’—which always seemed to be elsewhere. ”

“Sounds about right,” Riley said.

“I wasn’t the most likeable kid,” he admitted.

“And this is Mina Hoult,” Caroline added.

Collin looked truly discomposed for the first time since entering the shop.

“Hoult? As in Ben Hoult? So, you and Ben?” Collin asked, his dark brows arched, as he looked between Caroline and Mina as if he was searching for shared features.

“No, no,” Caroline said, shaking her head. “I’m not her biological mom. Ben went away for college and only moved back last year. I serve in more of a mentor-slash-unofficial-stepmom-slash-boss capacity.”

“And she loves me,” Mina sighed, wrapping her arm around Caroline and grinning at her. “Way more than Josh.”

Caroline rolled her eyes. “She’s right. I do. It’s super annoying.”

Mina sighed, contented.

“Except for the Josh part. Don’t think I didn’t catch you there, because that was mean,” Caroline told her. Mina shrugged off the criticism with a saccharine smile. “Josh is Mina’s little brother.”

Shaking her head, Riley asked, “Wait, so you and Alice never met?”

Collin frowned. “Oh…”

“Alice was usually working,” Caroline reminded Riley. “Here at the shop.”

Riley grimaced, as she so often did when Alice’s grandparents were mentioned. “Right, sorry.”

“How am I being ignored here?” Arthur demanded. “I’m a ghost in a room full of people who can see me, for the first time in centuries, and I might as well be that hideous vase over there.”

Mina snickered. “Well, we’re used to it, so it’s not really a novelty for us.”

Collin eyed Mina speculatively. “What’s not a novelty?”

For one so young, Mina demonstrated an absolutely alarming ability to think on her feet and lie. “Alice, working her tail off, being great at sales and a generally awesome business lady that I strive to pattern myself after as an adult.”

Alice swallowed a little lump gathering in her throat as she handed Collin’s card back. Casual praise from her coven was something else she was getting used to, along with unexpected hugs and birthday presents.

Arthur grumbled. “Watch out. That one wants something.”

Caroline, who was clearly taking way too much pleasure in Alice’s discomfort, interjected, “Speaking of business-lady things, we will leave you to your sales, Alice, as long as you’re OK.”

“Everything is fine,” Alice promised.

“Well, we don’t want to interrupt your, uh, transaction,” Caroline said. “We’ll see you later.”

“You don’t have to make ‘transaction’ sound so dirty,” Alice muttered.

“Yes, I do.” Caroline waggled her eyebrows at Alice before adding, “Collin, good to see you again.”

“I’ll come by the Rose soon, to see if I can get someone to serve me something ,” he said, making her laugh. “Riley and Mina, nice to meet you both.”

Mina gave a passable curtsy, making Riley roll her eyes and drag the teenager toward the door. Caroline gave Arthur a significant look. Alice shook her head. Caroline shrugged and followed the other two outside. Collin watched this mime with very little response.

“So… Those are my friends,” Alice said, before biting her lip.

“It’s good to have interesting friends,” he told her. “I can’t believe we’ve never met before.”

“Like Caroline said, I worked quite a bit during the summers,” she replied as Collin’s receipt printed.

“Now that I think about it, my family didn’t exactly encourage me to come by the antique shops on the island,” he said, frowning.

“I always thought it was because they didn’t want me to destroy expensive things.

I was a teenager, so I didn’t see the appeal anyway.

I only bothered Miss Denton about Shaddow House because she was one of the few adults outside my family who told me no and meant it.

I found it fascinating. Now that I think about it, nothing I just said paints me in the most positive light.

Can we go back and pretend I didn’t say that? ”

As Alice chuckled, Arthur rolled his eyes. “This is painful to watch.”

Alice dropped the receipt into Collin’s maroon Superior Antiques shopping bag. “You recognized that it wasn’t flattering, which is a good sign. Thank you for your patronage. We hope to see you again soon.”

“Oh, I think you will,” Collin told her, giving her a smile that had Alice propping herself against the counter for support. That was just unfair . “It was lovely to meet you, Alice.”

Alice nodded. And it was the best she could do, in terms of responses. Collin turned on his heel and gave her the gift of letting her watch him walk out. This time, she did grab the nearest file folder and fan her face. The man could fill out a suit.

And the phone began ringing again.

Well, in for a penny, in for a pound of her grandparents lecturing her about her irresponsibility. She crossed the room and watched Collin walk down the street toward Main Square. Because apparently, she had no dignity left in her body.

“I’m assuming it has been a while for you, then, since you’ve had a gentleman caller?” Arthur asked, appearing to her left. Unlike the ghosts of Shaddow House, Arthur could leave the cabinet temporarily. He would just be uncomfortable until he returned to his “Bessie.”

“That’s none of your business,” Alice told him, backing away from the window. “Also, that seems like a very direct question for someone who was embarrassed to curse in front of me a few minutes ago.”

“No reason to be prim,” he told her, watching the summer crowd begin to filter into the street. “It’s a natural thing, and your generation has the right of it. It’s one of the few things I admire about this new age.”

It had, in fact, been a while for her—almost a year .

For a practitioner of magic, all that bottled-up energy could be dangerous.

And while certain parties had made it clear that they would be happy to help her release some of that energy, she couldn’t walk back into that particular trap after her eyes had been opened. She would not be fooled again.

“Is that really what you lot consider outerwear in this day and time?” Arthur asked, watching a woman walk past in denim shorts. “That wouldn’t have even passed for drawers in my time.”

Drawers . Right. Alice used this moment of Arthur’s shorts-based distraction to yank at the drawer pulls in a series of sharp tugs, finally opening the bottom drawer of the cabinet with a shriek of hinges.

Wow, even she wasn’t prepared for that to work. She tried not to make any triumphant noises as she realized she was the first person to open it in more than a century. Inside, she found…the ugliest candelabra she’d ever seen. She eased it out of the drawer just as Arthur whipped his head around.

“Ooh, you got that one past me,” Arthur said. His eyes were narrowed at her, but he was laughing. “But it’s my own fault for being so distracted by a woman’s bared thighs.”

“We are a wily and devious bunch,” Alice told him absently as she dropped the candelabra on a nearby sofa.

She held her hands up and shook them, as if she could rid them of the negative energy she felt coming off the truly hideous copper monstrosity shaped into nine connected loops, large enough to take up most of the deep drawer.

Each loop was indented with a little cup shape, not quite deep enough to hold a candle.

It was cold—not the normal cold of a bare metal object in Michigan, but a bitter temperature drop that radiated a malevolent energy.

This object had a will of its own, and it did not want good things for Alice.

It reminded her of—oh, no, something about the angry-looking runes etched into the candelabra’s loops reminded her of the Welling locks.

The locks themselves, which were made up of three circles that interlocked around empty space, resembled nuclear symbols.

And they were etched with runes that seemed to match the ones in front of her.

Now that she was looking closely at the object, she realized that each little “eggcup” was just about the right size to hold one of the locks. The whole thing was like an ugly accompaniment to the Welling locks from Hell’s Hideous Home Accessories catalogue.

“Oh, yes, that thing.” Arthur sniffed. “Shocking, isn’t it?

Some cousin of the family, several generations back, hid it away in my Bessie during a visit and then slunk off to who knows where.

As much as I hated to store such a thing in her, I didn’t want that cretin having access to whatever it is.

So I kept it shut away, until now. Gave me the creeping dread, that did. ”

Alice’s gaze bounced between the candelabra and Arthur, then back again.

This was a major development in her work with the coven, and it had just been shoved in a linen cabinet somewhere on the island, to be discovered by sheer dumb luck?

What if Sherman had decided to keep the cabinet?

What if he’d sold it off-island? What if the Thigpens had had a house fire?

Then Alice used language she’d never uttered in her grandparents’ shop—or presence—before. “ What the fuck? ”