Page 20 of The Folklore of Forever (Moonville #2)
Twenty
To protect your loved ones on their travels, dust the soles of their shoes with butcher’s broom root.
Spells, Charms, and Rituals, Tempest Family Grimoire
Morgan takes Grandma’s drawing. “You think she might’ve had a dream about where the witch lives?” He keeps his voice down, but I don’t think the others would hear; they’ve moved outside, shifting goodbyes into phase two, in which Misty and Nitya tell us goodbye while standing next to Nitya’s car. In about fifteen minutes, they’ll be saying goodbye from inside the car, with the windows rolled down, and that phase will last another fifteen minutes.
“I have no idea.” I’m still reconciling myself with the concept that Grandma’s visions were real , and what that means for me.
It would mean that the silver luna moth prophecy is real, that my sisters and I are destined to fall in love with our True Loves, within the same year. If Romina truly saw a silver luna moth a month ago, then that gives Luna and me…
“Zelda?”
…Five remaining months to fall in love with our fated ones.
Morgan passes his hand back and forth in front of my face. “Yoo-hoo! Still in the room?”
I shove the thought under a proverbial rug, desperate to be alone so that I can mull this more obsessively. Pacing will be involved. Graphs and charts.
“Zelda,” he repeats. “Back to the Black Bear Witch. I’ve got priorities here. Unless you want to reconsider your stance on the other plan? Go an easier route?” He wags his eyebrows.
“What route is that?”
Morgan slides an inch closer, his lips curving. A black smolder glitters in his eyes. “Love. Give me thirty minutes on any soft surface. I swear you’ll see stars.”
I scrunch my nose, but at the suggestive provocation my heart beats in double time. Stupid heart. Time to start incorporating more omega-3 fatty acids into my diet. “You are really awful. You know that? And sex is not love.”
He sighs. “You could at least try . My face is doing almost all the work for you, being this irresistible, so you’re halfway to love already. Plus, it would be so much easier than hunting down a bear witch. What if the witch eats people after she gives them powers? My new gift might be totally useless from within the intestines of a bear.”
“Yeah, no— What the hell is that? ”
I leap behind him with a strangled cry, and Morgan backs up as well. He grabs a pen as if he might try to defend himself with it. “What’s what? Where is it?” He brandishes the pen. “Show yourself! Unless you’re a spider. If you’re a spider, stay where you are.”
I point at an animal on the floor, my finger shaking. It’s some kind of rodent, I think. Or a red panda genetically engineered in a laboratory? It walks on all fours like a tiny bear, with orange-and-black-striped fur and a tail that curls. It’s got mole-like feet. Bulbous eyes, golden all over, no pupils. “ That! How can you miss it?!” I paw at Morgan’s shirt and force him bodily in front of me, quite possibly ripping off a button. The animal jumps from the floor onto a high shelf. “How’d it get in here? What is it?”
Morgan’s gaze bounces around the shop, panicked. “I don’t see anything!”
“It just jumped up on the shelf!”
He gapes in confusion. “What, you mean Snapdragon?”
“No! The weird little red panda–mole thing. Got a tail like”—words fail me, so I spiral a finger.
Morgan breaks away. Walks directly over to the shelf. “Don’t go near it!” I shout.
He raises a hand experimentally.
“Stop!”
Morgan pets it.
“It might bite you. I can’t believe you’re touching it.”
“He won’t bite me.” Morgan’s voice is calm. “This is a cat.”
“I have never in my life seen a cat like that. That is a cat after swimming through toxic waste. And you are still touching it!”
“Of course I’m touching him.” Morgan scratches the creature under its chin, and its eyes droop lazily closed, clearly enjoying the attention. “Snapdragon and I are BFFs.”
I move toward them, hesitant, not moving my eyes from the animal’s. “Snapdragon?”
Morgan nods. “Snapdragon.”
I don’t believe it. “But I saw him this morning. He was doing his usual cat thing, sitting on the stairs, waiting to trip people. He definitely didn’t look like this.”
“What does he look like to you now?”
My lips part, throat dry. “It sounds strange.”
He clasps a hand over his heart, and by the anguish on his face, I think he missed his Broadway calling. “Darling, please . Give me all your strange.”
I have to take a moment to get over this phrasing. Morgan Angelopoulos is calculatedly charming, but give me all your strange is, for some reason, unintentionally charming to me; and while I consider myself a levelheaded person who lives according to reason and objective judgment, it turns out that I am still susceptible to a dark-eyed, dark-haired man with tattoos. Curse my baser instincts.
By the time I’m finished explaining Snapdragon’s transformation, Morgan is recording my every word, eyebrows knitted. Taking notes is a good-looking—I mean—a good idea. Frogs, I might be in trouble. When Morgan takes notes, it makes my neck feel hot and itchy. He’d better not start using color-coded tabs, or I’m going to be in some real danger here.
“Morgan,” I rasp, my hands hanging limply at my sides. I’ve broken out into a cold sweat. “I’m…” I can’t even say it.
“Hm?”
“I’m…” The room spins a bit. “I think I might be a witch. A real one.” It’s the only explanation that makes sense, even though it should make zero sense, because even though I am apparently a witch I still half believe that witches are not real. The two positions are coexisting in a chaos state in my head.
Morgan laughs. “Yeah, I know. Haven’t I been telling you that?”
I just gape at him, at Snapdragon, totally dumbfounded. A witch !
A beyond-logic, unprovable, no-concrete-evidence-to-support-this witch! I catch my reflection in Maxima, which is the name of Grandma’s crystal ball, and am shocked to find a huge grin on my face. I touch my mouth to feel the broad curve, in awe. I am just like my sisters, just like Dottie and Aisling. They weren’t wrong, or lying, and I can trust them…they haven’t been leaving me out of a big secret con…
It is going to take some time for this to truly sink in.
As to what sort of witch I am, I’ve got no idea. What magical layers might be wrapped up in paranimals and my ability to see them? I have so many questions. I am going to need at least four new Moleskine notebooks for conducting research on myself. Soft-covered for pliability, with ribbon bookmarks and elastic closures.
Morgan pokes the cat-thing gently. When it doesn’t react, he pokes it again. “Meow,” Morgan prompts.
Snapdragon yawns, jumping down.
I watch, disturbed and delighted as it wends between my ankles, staring up at me with those golden eyes, tail not so much switching as uncurling and curling again. And I am struck by an alarming thought. “Paranimals are, by definition, Moonvillian animals that have been enchanted by the Black Bear Witch,” I hedge, swallowing a lump in my throat. “Which means…if Snapdragon’s been enchanted…”
Morgan sparks with understanding. “Then the Black Bear Witch was here, in our shop. Today.”
—
Friday evening, Morgan strolls into the Cavern of Paperback Gems while I’m shelving books. When I’ve exceeded my capacity for socialization upstairs, the Cavern is where I flee to be alone. It’s got atrocious marmalade carpet that I don’t have the heart to rip up because Grandma was so proud when she installed it herself, but I’ve hidden it with rugs, fringed Edwardian lampshades, and buttoned leather armchairs so weathered and creased that they’re about six shades lighter than they once were. The colors and textures here are rich. Dark but cozy. I want customers to wander down and feel like they’ve stepped into 221B Baker Street.
He’s wearing Angelopoulos Business Casual, which for Morgan means snug plaid trousers and three shirts with all of the collars popped. He’s swinging a burgundy briefcase.
“Guess what.”
It’s hard to tune Morgan out because he talks so incessantly, which means I’ve done a lot of accidental listening while trying to write a manuscript proposal (and by write, I mean read The Silver Kiss by Annette Curtis Klause and feel sorry for myself because I can’t write about vampires again, even though Henriette is not a traditional vampire, deriving her sustenance not from blood but from making men fall in love with her and then breaking their hearts). He’s forever guess-what-ing, and nobody’s able to accurately predict what he’s going to say. Guess what? If you drink Mountain Dew and then do forty push-ups, you’ll burn off all the sugar and only be left with pure, raw energy. (I do not think there is science to support this claim.) Guess what? Go read James Joyce’s love letters to his wife. Because I did, unfortunately, and now everybody else should have to.
I take a stab at it. “If you throw yellow socks into the dryer with a purple marker, they’ll come out with perfect stripes?”
He brightens. “Is that true?”
I tilt my head. “My first impression of you was so deeply wrong.”
“What’s that mean? What was your first impression?”
He doesn’t need to know. I sort through this week’s new arrivals, Snapdragon nudging the back of my leg for attention. His big, unsettling, pupil-less eyes have taken some getting used to. Despite looking so different to me now, Snapdragon’s personality is the same. This morning, I watched him try to jump through a closed window because he saw a reflection of Alex’s cheeseburger in the glass.
Morgan bows to Snapdragon. “How do you do?”
I fight back a smile. “Do you think he understands you?”
“Anything’s possible! We don’t know what all the witch has done to him. By the way, I’m calling this new paranimal a gingersnappus because he’s got gingery fur in cat form as well as paranimal form and, you know, Snap dragon. I looked it up on the Internet to see if there are stories about other gingersnappuses, found nothing, but then it hit me!” He thunk s his head with his fist. “You wrote about it! In The Serpent Tree .”
I frown. “No, I didn’t.”
He picks up several books I’ve wrapped in brown kraft paper, brief descriptions written on tags shaped like crystal balls. They’re for our Blind Date with a Book selection. He proceeds to juggle them. Books fall everywhere. “Yes, you did.” He then unlatches his briefcase (which turns out to be a backgammon case) and withdraws a battered copy of The Serpent Tree , stuffed with color-coded tabs (oh dear) like rainbow shark teeth. Morgan rambles through the pages, then taps one particular passage. “Aha! Look at this.”
Curled up beside a dented woodstove is a sleeping animal Henriette has never seen before. It has orange fur with black stripes, and its feet are wide, seemingly designed to burrow tunnels.
“Zelda.” He freezes me with a fierce, unwavering gaze, and the emotion that washes through me in response is one hundred percent professional. “Do you think you’ve seen one of these before? When you were little, like how you saw the huggle? And maybe you’ve held on to it subconsciously?”
The thought makes my head glitch. “I…I don’t remember what I thought was real and what I knew was only pretend. The lines blurred. But possibly?”
“I can’t believe you forgot you wrote about these! But you forgot you wrote about sleep paralysis demons, too.” He shakes his head at me, grin lopsided. “How does a writer forget their own characters?”
“Probably because I don’t ever reread my books.”
Morgan leans over the counter, eye contact unwavering. “Are you serious?”
“After editing’s wrapped, the book is dead to me. I still consult my series notes and lists of dates, main characters, important beasts, et cetera. But minor background stuff melts away.”
His jaw goes slack. “So you’re telling me—”
He begins to pace.
“That your book”—he points in my direction, truly getting worked up—“arrives in your hands fresh from the printer, smelling all new-book-y, and you don’t immediately sit down to appreciate all the hard work you put in? You don’t devour it cover to cover and go ‘Hoo, yes, that was satisfying. Good job, me’?”
“I did once,” I admit, “but it wasn’t satisfying at all, because I found typos. All I could focus on were the mistakes, things I wanted to edit but couldn’t because it was too late.” I make a face, skin warming with chagrin. “Repetition, consistency errors, somebody I forgot to thank in my acknowledgments. A pop culture reference that didn’t age well.”
“Ahh. Your crooked doors.”
“Where’d you hear that from?” I croak, my mind flying to Grandma Dottie.
His eyes blaze, like he can see the direction of my thoughts. “Right after I started renting desk space in your store, Dottie heard me complaining about the mistakes in one of my articles, which I wasn’t aware of until after it printed. There was, like, a letter g that wasn’t printed correctly, dropped lower into the next line. I can’t remember what word it was, but without the g , its meaning changed, and having a g in the word underneath where it wasn’t supposed to be changed the meaning of that word. Also, my own last name was spelled wrong and I used ‘although’ twice in one sentence. It was an important story, I was so proud of it, and those mistakes completely ruined it for me. Then, Dottie told me that written magic—”
“Likes aberrations,” I finish, a forgotten memory roaring back. My mind arcs through time to first grade, when I wasn’t very good at spelling. While writing stories in composition notebooks, I’d get angry when I didn’t know a correct spelling. “Grandma told me it was okay to leave a few mistakes in, that I was drawing magic’s attention with all my bumpy writing, and it would make me more powerful. With verbal witchcraft, she said, you had to get it precisely right. But with written witchcraft, magic is a bit more mischievous, delighting in discrepancies. Scrambled letters, the same sentence copied twice, a capital letter where there shouldn’t be, a missing apostrophe, random words thrown in. When I told her that I wasn’t making witchcraft, I was only writing stories, she said that everything a witch does is some form of witchcraft.”
He nods fervently, a few strands of midnight hair slipping messily across his forehead.
“I started doing it on purpose,” I remember, talking faster. “We called it crooked-dooring, because she said The Magick Happens wouldn’t be quite as interesting if the storeroom door wasn’t crooked—you know how you have to shove it a couple times to get it to close all the way?—and other stuff we all liked to complain about, like how you can’t plug in two things at once in the upstairs bathroom or else the circuit breaker pops. Grandma told me she used to wish she could get it all fixed, but then one day she realized—”
“They give the house character, which magic likes,” Morgan supplies. “And a perfect house is boring. She told me to think of my work like that.”
We stare at each other, half smiling, a deep grief rattling my bones. I wish I’d moved home sooner. Wish Grandma hadn’t been stolen away by dementia. When I was in my teens, I stopped purposefully littering my stories with errors, figuring that Grandma had just been trying to put a kindhearted spin on my blunders so that I wouldn’t be so hard on myself. She had a way of doing that for all of her grandchildren, infusing the magical into the everyday. That she chose to share this with Morgan, as well, alters the angle from which I view him.
“I crooked-door every article I write,” he tells me. “I don’t think I’m making witchcraft, sadly, but maybe if I keep doing it, magic will see that I’m trying to get its attention and…I don’t know. Let me in.”
I wonder what Grandma saw in Morgan, for her to tell him about crooked-dooring. If she genuinely thought he’d ever be able to generate real magic for himself, or if she was being nice, or…well, there was the dementia, which certainly started to get much worse two years ago. Maybe she was confused and thought he might be a witch. I still wonder if she made the whole concept up.
We’ll never know, unless we ask her for confirmation through Aisling. Which we won’t do, because it doesn’t much matter. Whether every single story Grandma told us is true isn’t what’s important, I’m beginning to think. Maybe what matters most is what we get out of believing.
“Anyway. Speaking of the inexplicable.” Morgan hops onto the rolling ladder, kicking off to make himself glide across a bookcase. “Let’s go to the woods and look for this Falling Rock Triangle thing.”
“Don’t play on ladders. And I can’t.” I check the time on my phone. “I’ve got plans.”
“Break them.”
“Cancel my date with an hour’s notice? That would be rude.”
He draws back in surprise. “A date? At a time like this? You’re going on a date ?”
“It’s a Friday night.” I lift his hand, which has unconsciously lunged out to grasp my wrist, and remove it. His eyes are so wide that I can’t help but laugh, and his gaze drops to my mouth, the corners of his own lips tightening. “This is the optimal time for a date.”