Page 11

Chapter Eleven

W hit tapped his pen on the notebook in front of him. His shop was silent and deserted, and the rhythmic tapping seemed to ease his tension.

Normally, he would have put on a record for the customers—most people were unsettled by silence. But when he’d put on a Dion record earlier that morning, he found it only made his nervousness worse.

The website had said same-day delivery, but it hadn’t said when.

Every time the bell above his door chimed, his heart jumped, and his head snapped in that direction. But, so far, Clover had yet to appear.

The fourth time this scenario played out, he wondered if this wasn’t a good idea after all.

This was a crazy plan, a stupid plan. What if she said no? What if she called the cops? For gods’ sakes, what if she said yes? Was he really ready to marry someone he’d only met yesterday?

Was he ready to bring a summer witch into his life? Into his home?

By lunch time, he’d convinced himself he wouldn’t propose to her when she arrived. That would be too absurd. No, what he would do was he would talk to her, feel her out.

If he thought she wasn’t going to freak out, maybe he would tell her he was the man she’d kissed the night before. That was a much better plan. He’d see how she reacted first.

He had two months to try to convince her. He shouldn’t just spring something like this on her. But then, did he really want to drag this out? If he was trying to meet his grandfather’s conditions, shouldn’t he try to find a winter witch in those two months?

He was certain he could ask Alexandre to hook him up. He could even ask his mother if he was desperate. Maybe he’d finally ask out the daughter of what’s-her-name that his mother had hinted at a while back.

As he pictured what he would say, it dawned on him that he was going about this all wrong. What if she sensed he was a winter sorcerer and felt threatened? He’d called her into winter territory and was going to spring a marriage proposal on her? It was sort of creepy.

Groaning, he took out his phone and looked up the number to the flower shop.

“Bronwen Floral and Gifts,” a cheerful female voice answered.

He swallowed around the lump in his throat. “Um… Hello, I’m sorry. I ordered some flowers earlier today for same-day delivery, and I was wondering if it wasn’t too late to cancel.”

“You don’t want the flowers anymore?” she asked.

He hunched his shoulders. He knew how inconvenient it was for a customer to cancel. “It’s not that. It’s just…well, I’m not going to be at the delivery address much longer today, and I thought maybe I could just pick them up instead?”

“If you ordered same-day delivery, then they’re already on their way. If you’d like, I can call our driver and see how close she is.”

“No, that’s all right. I’ll figure something out.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry about it.”

“All right. Well, thank you for your order, and have a great day!” The woman hung up.

This was a horrible, stupid idea.

And the more he thought about it, the more he agreed with himself. It was too late now. He’d already ordered the flowers, but he would not ask the summer witch to marry him. That would be just too much.

Under the fluorescent lights of his shop with his dreams from the night before fading from memory, he wished he’d had more sense that morning. What was he even going to do with a bouquet of flowers? The winter faction didn’t mess with flowers unless it was for a funeral.

He threw his pen down on his notepad in disgust. This was all his grandfather’s fault. He shouldn’t have let him get inside his head. So what if Caldwell got the house? He’d move into the space above his shop. It was storage at the moment, but there was a bathroom. He could renovate anything else he wanted, maybe put in a kitchenette.

He glanced at the grandfather clock near the door. There wasn’t even an hour left before closing time, and he’d neglected most of what he’d wanted to get done that day.

Maybe I should just close early .

The lights inside the glass jewelry case he was sitting behind flickered, and a sudden chill raised goose bumps on his arms.

He froze, recognizing the ghost’s presence immediately. “Grandmother?” he asked.

But as his eyes swept the shop, he didn’t see even a wisp of her.

He thought about getting the spirit board he kept in the back.

His grandmother hadn’t been dead long, and she wouldn’t be strong enough to manifest as a full-body apparition, especially without an anchor.

But when he stood from his stool, he heard a whoosh followed by a thump as if he’d knocked something onto the floor behind him.

Glancing back, he knelt down and picked up a tattered deck of tarot cards—the lamination peeling around the edges from longtime use.

It was the deck his grandmother had given him for his tenth birthday. He smiled as he bent to pick them up. She always used to say that anxiety came from the unknown, and that, as winter sorcerers and witches, they had more than enough foresight to avoid it. She’d taught him how to read the cards—his mother favored a pendulum, and he had a talent for scrying. But every so often, when he felt particularly off-balance, he would bring out his tarot deck and pull a few cards.

He slipped the old deck from their torn box—thinking it was about time he got a bag or chest for them. The cards were winkled and hard to handle but oh so familiar.

He shuffled them on the glass case with difficulty. They stuck together, and he wondered if he couldn’t get them resurfaced. He’d clearly neglected them for too long and would look into fixing them as soon as he could.

As he continued to mix them, he could practically feel his grandmother hovering over him—her cheek pressed to his head—as she had done when his hands were still too small to properly shuffle the cards.

A shiver went through him again, telling him to stop. “All right, Grandmother. What is it you want me to know?”

Flipping over the top card, his stomach dropped. As much as other sorcerers might fear the death and devil cards, those had never much bothered Whit. But as he stared at the ravaged tower—on fire from a lightning strike as rain pelted its surface and people jumped from its heights in the hopes that gravity would somehow be kinder to them—fear coiled in his gut.

As a man who planned wisely and treaded carefully, he hated the tower card the most. It was chaos, upheaval, and destruction.

It was supposed to be a needed change, a change that was for the better overall, a change that would make one stronger and wiser and better equipped for the future. At its core, the tower warned that he was on shaky ground, and if he didn’t make some real changes soon, the gods of winter might just force the change on him.