The wrongness of it whipped through me, along with a bitter tinge of regret that I’d let my connection to this place snuff out so thoroughly that I hadn’t even known about any of this. I might have forged a new life away from Thistle Grove, but this was still the town that grew and made me. I owed it to my own family, as well as the Thorns and Avramovs, to help right its foundering balance.
And seeing Gareth Blackmoore, Prince of Bastards, take it on the chin surely wouldn’t hurt.
“You know what, fuck it.” I slammed my hands flat on the table, my fingers flexing. “I’m in, witches. Let’s run amok.”
6
The Original Grimoire
As I swung open the heavy door to Tomes & Omens, a brass bell sang out above my head. I could feel the wisp of an identification spell it sent flitting through the shop’s dust-laden air, spinning this way and that like a sprite until it darted off into the back room. Letting my father know who’d darkened the bookshop’s door, so he could attend to or ignore the visitor at his leisure.
While I waited for him to emerge, I wandered between the bookshelves and glass cases, running my fingers over cracked spines and the magical novelty items displayed between them. Athames with sigil-inscribed hilts, carved figurines of gods and goddesses, stoppered jars filled with dried herbs and incense sticks. Everything I touched buzzed under my fingers with a prickly warning energy. A protection spell wreathed the entire space, my father’s most ambitious magical undertaking; it surged in every object on display, ready to singe the greedy hands of any aspiring shoplifter or vandal who wandered inside with ill intent.
Good-natured as he was, James Harlow would never stand for one of his charges being hurt or misused.
And it worked the other way around, too. While most of the books in here were the sort you could find at any indie bookstore, my father was also a rare and antiquarian book seller, collecting magical treatises of every kind. Years ago, while I was dusting, I stumbled across a hoary copy of the Necronomicon on one of the back and topmost shelves; a single touch infected me with hideous nightmares for over a month. The protection spell also made sure you never left with anything you weren’t equipped to handle.
“Everything like you remember, scoot?” my father’s deep voice rumbled from behind me.
“Definitely smells the same,” I answered, smiling as I turned to greet him. He still towered over me—I’d inherited my diminutive height from my mother’s side, no question—bending down to draw me into a brief hug, my cheek rubbing against the coarse wool of his houndstooth vest. And he smelled the same, too, like cedar and strong coffee, mingled with the bitter tang of the old ink always lingering on his fingers. “Maybe dustier, if that’s even possible. Couldn’t bribe anyone else to keep the place up for you after I left, huh?”
“Wouldn’t trust anyone but you with the job,” he corrected with a wry grin as he pulled away, a network of lines creasing into his weathered cheeks. For a dyed-in-the-wool bookworm, the man who taught me to love books and play chess, my father played against type by being outdoorsy, too. I could barely remember a Saturday without him coaxing me awake with Darjeeling at dawn for some adventure, hiking on Hallows Hill or kayaking on the lake. “Always said I’d only ever have one apprentice.”
“I bet Delilah’s made a play or two for it, though,” I quipped.
He acknowledged the joke with a somber nod of his curly dark head, much grayer at the temples than I remembered; a testament to the time I’d let pass between us. “Like I always said, scoot. No one but you.”
He didn’t mean for it to sting, I could tell from the tenderness in the brown eyes behind the beatnik frames he always wore. But I’d known since I was little that my father always meant for me to inherit this place, and to travel the world in little bursts just like he did, venturing from Thistle Grove only to trade in books rare and old as relics. That was how he and my mother had met; she was studying English and literature at Oxford when he visited to sell a first edition of some obscure masterpiece to the Bodleian collection. They came across each other at a local pub, and the rest was history.
It was hard to forget that I was basically the product of my parents’ love affairs with books. And given how much I’d cared about this shop before I left—how much I’d considered it a certain part of my future—it was impossible not to feel that I’d let my father down with every single choice I’d made as an adult.
“It’s good to have you back, is all,” he said, on the wake of a long sigh. “Thanks for coming, scoot. I know you have another life to live out there. Means the world that you took the time.”