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CHAPTER ONE

I was being stalked by an enchanted broom. It had been shuffling around the shop for weeks, delighting the customers and driving me crazy. I only had myself to blame. A month ago, I'd insisted on The Sword in the Stone for our family movie night, and when Merlin magically animated the kitchen to clean itself, my parents took it as a challenge. (There is always a great deal of wine involved in family movie night.)

I barely managed to convince them that flying dishes were a bad idea, so the broom was a consolation prize. As the only one of us sober enough to be trusted with a blade, I used my boline to carve the runes into the broom handle while Mim gave instructions over my shoulder. Even when she was drunk, her spellwork was unparalleled. Mama, who at her most sober still found runes too fiddly for her taste, had chosen to contribute by dancing around and singing the evil Madam Mim's song from the film. Our Mim was unamused.

I had hoped the next day's hangover would dull the excitement and they would decommission it, but instead I found the broom to be my new companion in the shop. My parents insisted that the novelty would be good for business, and I couldn't deny that the customers enjoyed its whimsical dancing down the aisles while they browsed. I would have been more impressed if it had kept the floors clean, instead of just getting in the way while I went about my chores.

This particular Saturday morning, it was more underfoot than usual. I'd come downstairs an hour early to set up a spell, and the broom dogged my heels while I gathered ingredients, until finally I slipped into the work room and shut the door. While I set out a shallow clay bowl, a saltcellar, and a glass bottle of Florida Water, I could hear the broom scratching at the door like a forlorn puppy. I couldn't believe a nonsentient aggregate of wood and straw had me feeling sorry for it.

By the time I finished setting up, the broom had given up on the door to continue its ambling circuit around the shop, and I was finally able to concentrate. The worktable was piled with paperwork and random inventory that needed to be reshelved, so I knelt on the floor in front of the bowl. Decades of Sparrow family spells had imbued the floorboards and walls of the stock room with a permanent smell of smoke and burnt herbs that most customers found unpalatable but to me was the scent of home.

First, I took a length of thin red ribbon from my pocket and tied it around my wrist in preparation for the casting, and then I turned my attention to the bowl, which was about the size of a dinner plate. I spooned in salt until there was a thin layer covering the bottom.

I flipped through the pages of the leather-bound book next to my knee. The spine was so well-worn that it rested open without any trouble when I found the page I needed. Mama had taught me the white fire limpia when I was in high school, but I still liked to read over the instructions I'd penned into my grimoire at fourteen, to reassure myself that I wasn't going to make any terrible mistakes. As if after thousands of iterations, I was one day going to accidentally use sugar instead of salt or forget how to light a match.

I settled back on my heels and closed my eyes to meditate. My family had a few different cleansing and protection spells that we performed periodically to benefit Chanterelle Cottage, but this was a special one-off. We'd been forced to keep the shop closed yesterday, after waking up to find that someone had broken the transom window and reached inside to unlock the front door. You'd think three witches under one roof would be enough of a theft deterrent—it had been for the past two centuries. Even in this day and age, Owl's Hollow was the sort of small town where people left their purses unattended and kids were allowed to roam unsupervised. Our sheriff spent all his time writing parking tickets and taking naps in his office.

Once we'd taken stock of the damage, we didn't even bother calling the sheriff to report the break-in, because the loss was nowhere near our insurance deductible. The cash register, surprisingly, had not been touched, and only a couple hundred dollars' worth of merchandise had been stolen: some spell jars, wands, books, and all but a few of our specialty hand-packed tea bags. The incident was more odd than troubling, as long as I didn't dwell on the thought of a stranger rifling through the shop while my parents and I slept upstairs. But that thought had been hard to put out of my head with negative energy permeating the shop, seeping into the edge of my consciousness last night while I tossed and turned. Hence the early-morning cleansing ritual.

I realized that my meditation had morphed into obsessing about the burglary, and I took a deep breath to recenter myself. Mentally, I gathered all the anger and fear and confusion. I picked up the bottle of Florida Water and poured some into the bowl, imagining that I was pouring out all my negative emotions with it.