Page 32 of The Witching Moon Manor (The Spellbound Sisters #2)

Snowdrops

Appear when hope is about to be found after a period of difficulty.

When Beatrix stepped into the bookshop the next morning, she was struck by the icy chill that crept into the gaps between her knit scarf, making her shiver.

Startled that the room seemed colder than the streets, Beatrix walked swiftly toward the front windows, worried that the frigid temperatures may have deepened a crack in the pane that she hadn’t realized was there.

But everything was sealed shut, and when she moved her hand along the edges of the glass, Beatrix didn’t so much as feel a soft breeze.

Wondering where the source of the trouble was, Beatrix’s gaze flitted about the shop, her eyes catching every now and again on details that must have slipped her notice before.

It may have been because the sky was cloudier than it had been yesterday, but she could have sworn that there were more shadows creeping inward from the corners of the room.

And she thought there had been books stacked neat as pins along the top of the shelves, their covers facing outward, as if to tempt passing hands to pull them closer.

But now, they were scattered across the floor, their spines cracked down the middle and splayed on the dirty boards.

As Beatrix strolled from one shelf to the next, finally taking a moment to focus beyond the confines of her own thoughts, she began to notice something else beneath the veil of neglect that seemed to cover every inch of the shop.

Though coated in dust, the shelves were crafted with care, as if they’d been built with the intention of having them last several lifetimes.

And when she ran her gloved finger along the peeling wallpaper, Beatrix realized that the colors beneath the grime must have once been vibrant.

Her touch left behind trails of green, blue, and pink, remnants of handpainted floral buds that would have looked beautiful against the warm walnut of the shelves.

Before the boards were nailed to the windows and the sign out front started to fade, someone had loved this room and the books within it, that much was clear.

But now the shop felt like it was grieving, a sense of loneliness and loss of hope having settled into the wainscoting and cracks in the plaster.

The weight of it brushed against Beatrix’s shoulders, reminding her of what it had felt like to sit at the desk for hours the day before, only to walk away without having put a single word on the page.

Is this what she would become, the dusty memory of a story that had touched someone’s soul but couldn’t quite be remembered?

Suddenly, Beatrix heard the familiar sound of a book slipping from the shelf, and instinctively, her hands reached forward to grasp whatever was about to fall to the floor.

With a start, she looked down and saw that she was holding a battered blue book. Turning it over, Beatrix noticed that the spine was held together by the barest threads, and the cloth was worn about the corners in the way it always is after being held too many times.

Before Beatrix could think of what she was doing, her fingers were lifting the cover and flipping through the pages.

It was a collection of fairy tales, she realized, so similar to the one that she and her sisters had read as young girls that it felt like the years were falling away with every chapter she turned.

Once she reached the middle of the book, Beatrix noticed that one of the pages had been roughly bent at the corner, as if someone had marked their favorite story so often that the fold was about to rip apart.

A simple sketch of a raven was perched just beneath the chapter number, peering at Beatrix with a knowing expression that suggested the creature had something to say.

Skimming the first lines, Beatrix realized that it was a tale she’d read before, one about a sister whose brothers had been cursed to turn into a flock of birds.

Wondering why the book’s owner had been so interested in this particular tale, Beatrix shook her head and flipped to the very last page, knowing that a familiar phrase awaited her there.

But, to her confusion, The End had been crossed through with pen and ink.

And beneath that, Beatrix saw that a new message had been added. . . .

A good story has no end.

When Beatrix’s eyes drifted over the words, a sudden sensation of relief poured into her veins, melting the ice that had started to grip her heart long before the first snowfall. And as she read the sentence again and again, the pain fell away like chunks of sleet exposed to morning sunshine.

How would it feel to fill the silence with words that weren’t her own? Let the story beneath her fingertips pull her away from the present and toward possibilities that made her remember what it felt like to seek out a sense of wonder?

Instead of setting the book back on the shelf, Beatrix found herself wandering toward the wingback chair at the front of the shop, where the sun was now spilling through the glass so that the black ink was practically shimmering beneath the light.

It wasn’t long before the feeling of the cushions disappeared entirely and her thoughts had traveled far, far away from the shop, the troubles that had held her tight fading as she gradually returned to the girl who’d spent entire afternoons between the pages of a book in the attic.

Lost in the rhythm of the words, Beatrix didn’t even notice when the tattered wallpaper behind her started to piece itself together or the way some of the dust that had settled along the surface of the windows seemed to vanish of its own accord, chasing away the shadows between the shelves.

She wasn’t even aware of the barely perceptible curve that was just beginning to appear in the groove between her thumb and forefinger: the barest hint of a letter rising up along the lines of her skin.