Page 41 of The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland

Ancestry is less important than we think in terms of connection to the other side. Blood is overrated—what matters is the connections we forget on this earthly plane. But if you have witches in your lineage, do let me know, okay? A little backstory in our heritage doesn’t hurt to know about.

—Evie Oxby, City Arts and Lectures

An hour later, Cordelia sent a text: SOS if you have time to help with party setup?

Of course she had time. Her father was settling in at the Skerry Lodge. With no job other than reading every single one of the approximately four million books published on magic and mediumship, Beatrice had nothing but time. Unless she didn’t, ironically.

At Cordelia’s house, she knocked and waited, admiring the way the porch wrapped around the side, as if the rails from which the paint was gently peeling were hugging the house.

The flowers in the garden almost shouted with joy, the purple hollyhocks waving their arms above the even more chaotic petunias.

She heard a muffled thump followed by Cordelia’s voice, but no one came to the door.

So Beatrice let herself in. She just did it. Pushed the door open as if she had every right to do so, as if she’d done it a million times before.

What would it have been like if she’d had decades of letting herself into her twin’s home?

What if Cordelia had carried a duplicate key for Beatrice’s house on her key chain, even though they lived in different cities?

Would that have changed who she became? Would Beatrice being around have smoothed Minna’s transition and Cordelia’s acceptance?

It was obvious Cordelia loved her daughter with all her heart now, but what if Beatrice had been around when Minna had run away—what if her niece had been able to run to her ?

Fresh anger at both Astrid and her father rose in her throat, but it dropped away when she found Cordelia in the kitchen, moving so fast, she was practically a blur.

Cordelia smiled and gave her a bone-crushing hug. “I missed you. Honestly, thank god you’re here. I’m making a huge mess of Mexican food and I’ve got the beans going already, but I need to start the mole, and I’ll need help with chopping a zillion things soon—”

“Dad’s in town.” The interruption felt harsh, but Beatrice didn’t know how to sugar-coat it.

“Oh.” Cordelia stilled. “Huh. That’s interesting.”

“He wants to come to the party. I’ll tell him no, though—”

“Of course he can come.” The smile she pushed onto her face was fake but bright.

“Dang it, though, I’ve done almost no decorating at all.

Can you make a start on that?” Smelling of onions and cumin, she gave Beatrice a quick kiss on the cheek before muttering something about harvesting cilantro, and zooming back into overdrive.

Beatrice spent the next hour or so draping the house in Halloween decorations, even though it was mid-July.

Spiders hung from the staircase railing, and webbing covered the legs of chairs and tables.

In one of the cardboard boxes Cordelia pointed her to, she found an entire family of dead things, related only by the fact that they’d been reduced to skulls.

She thought one might be a fox, another a possum, which had surprisingly sharp teeth.

There were four or five bird skulls, and one that might have belonged to a cat, though she didn’t want to think about it too much.

She set the skulls on top of any free space she found, placing silver candelabras next to them (Cordelia had so many candle holders!) and making sure their candles were fresh and ready to be lit.

Through the parlor’s window, she saw Astrid on the back deck, carving jack-o’-lantern faces into watermelons.

As if she felt Beatrice’s gaze, Astrid looked up.

Their eyes met and then broke apart with a snap.

But something had shifted between them—was it the way Astrid had done the thread spell, obviously trying to protect them? Whatever the reason, the anger Beatrice felt toward her was burning lower, just like her anger at Mitchell.

She might manage to forgive her father, someday, for lying to her. She loved him, and it was that simple.

Astrid, on the other hand, she loved not at all. Not one bit.

Damn. She cut her finger on the sharp edge of a tea light.

“Beatrice!” Her sister came out of the kitchen, wiping floury hands on a dishtowel.

She wrapped her lightly bleeding finger in a tissue. “Yeah?” Cordelia would want more info on their father, of course. And if she wanted Dad not to come to the party, Beatrice would tell him he wasn’t invited. Cheerfully.

But Cordelia only said, “Can you please track down my wayward daughter and remind her that she’s in charge of the deviled eggs?

I need, like, fifty of them, so if she doesn’t start the water boiling within the next sixty minutes, I will personally melt all the way down, and then she’ll be in charge of the entire party, and I assume she doesn’t want that. ”

“Absolutely. I’ll do that right now.” She’d do any chore her sister wanted her to. Especially if it had nothing to do with their father.

Minna wasn’t upstairs in her room, and presumably she wasn’t at her library job, so that meant she must be in the hideout or in the cemetery.

A joyful thought struck her: she knew enough about Minna to have an educated guess as to where she might be.

Hugging herself, Beatrice let herself out the front door, the better to avoid Astrid on the back porch, and went around through the side garden, under the jasmine arbor, and in the gate of the separate hideout garden.

The door of the shed was open, and Minna was flopped backward on the orange sofa, staring at the ceiling, her hands lying open at her sides.

“May I come in?”

A shrug was her only response.

“Are you okay?”

Another shrug.

“Are you high?”

Minna snorted. “I look that couch-locked?”

“You do.”

She wriggled into an upright position. “While it’s true that many of my friends are budding professional potheads, I don’t actually enjoy feeling paranoid.”

“Yeah,” said Beatrice easily. It was nice, this camaraderie. “I never really liked that, either.”

Minna made a face. “Yeah, yeah. That’s what adults say. All buddy-buddy, all hangovers suck so bad am I right? ”

Okay, being lumped in with clueless adults didn’t feel quite as good. “What’s wrong?”

Minna laced her fingers together and stared at the white-and-red polish. “I can feel my dad trying to reach me. It’s like he’s so close… but he just can’t get to me.” She threw herself backward on the couch again. “I’m so frustrated.”

What was Beatrice supposed to say to this? “I’m sorry. That sounds hard.”

“You’re not sorry.”

Ouch. “I am, actually. Don’t you think I understand what it’s like to not know a birth parent?” Whoops, she still sounded like a know-it-all adult, didn’t she?

Tears filled Minna’s eyes. “Last night, he was in a dream I had about being at the library, but it wasn’t a visitation dream, it was just a stupid one where he was trying to return a book and I wanted to give him a hug, but he didn’t have any idea who I was and pushed me away.

Gran always says that you know when it’s a visitation in a dream. And that wasn’t one.”

“How do you know?”

“She says they’re short and sharp and clear.

Maybe you just see the person for a few seconds, or you hear them say one really direct thing, and you know your brain isn’t making it up.

But last night, it was totally stupid. He rode off on an elephant, and then the whole building turned into a chocolate factory, and I was in charge of roasting the almonds. Idiotic. ”

“That would be a good-smelling job, though.”

Minna rolled her eyes. “Can you try the writing for me again?”

Nope. Her gut didn’t like that one bit. “Why don’t you ask one of your guides?”

“They won’t talk to me about it.”

“Huh.” Seemed like a pretty good indication it was a bad idea, then.

“Please try the writing?”

This time, Beatrice’s response was instant. “No.”

“Please.”

“Hey.” She needed to distract Minna, get her mind off this. “Your mom sent me to wrangle you into the house. Within the hour, she wants you to start making eleventy-million deviled eggs—did you know that?”

Minna reached for the tattoo gun. “You don’t even have to hold this. I can hold it. I think that might work.”

A bigger distraction was called for, then. “You know, I actually might want a tattoo from you at some point.”

It was like releasing a mouse into the middle of the room. Minna gave a little scream, bounced into the air and then back down, all while clapping. “Yes. Yes! What do you want?”

“Wait, I didn’t mean right now—”

“No time like the present!” She jumped up and started clattering tools on the work cart, arranging bottles of alcohol, boxes of needles, and wipes.

“I’m a good artist, so you can basically tell me whatever you want, and I’ll sketch it—wait.

” Minna spun to stare at her. “Oh. You already know what you want. It’s a sigil, isn’t it? ”

Beatrice lost her breath. She hadn’t, actually, known what she wanted until that exact second. “Maybe.”

“Show it to me.”

So Beatrice pulled it up on her phone. The photo of the sigil in the sand.

“Ohhh,” breathed Minna. “That’s pretty.” Without asking, she reached forward to flick to the next photo.

Beatrice gasped. She hadn’t looked at the photo after she took it. In it, she and her father smiled at the camera. A nice, normal photo of a father and daughter at the beach.

What wasn’t normal was the light. A blinding ray of blue-white sunlight hit the top of her father’s head. Another one lit the top of her own head. The rays streaked down from the top right of the shot.

But judging by the shadows cast by the streetlight on the sidewalk behind them, the sun had been to their left.