Page 9 of Twice Bitten

Addy squawked. “Absolutely not!”

“Half-time!” I tossed back.

“No time!”

“Well, my graphics subscription is coming due again, and I might just have to turn it off…”

Addy loved that subscription. All the shop’s marketing materials came from there, and I’d agreed to share the software at no cost to her. I didn’t tell her I had a lifetime subscription because my mother knew the creator and was an early investor.

“You wouldn’t,” she breathed.

“Full pay,” I called back.

“Half!”

“Three quarters and I won’t lock you out of my account.”

Addy growled. “Fine!”

“Said and sealed!” I said, the ancient words sealing the bargain between us. Magic sizzled in the air, a single line appearing on the inside of our wrists.

She gasped. “You’d bargain with your boss?”

I never took bargains lightly. Especially not when itinvolved a paycheck. “Three quarters. One week. You still get the graphics program. Of course I’d bargain for that.”

She shook her head. “And here I was thinking we were friends.”

I snorted at that one. “I don’t even know where you live!”

She shrugged. “Friends don’t need to know personal details about each other.”

A stunned laugh cracked out of me. “That’s theliteraldefinition of a friend.” With a shake of my head, I waved and headed out of the room.

To my great relief, the rest of the shift proved uneventful. We moved a lot of lattes, but no more vampires came in. Instead, we served a mix of witches and humans, a few wolf shifters, and even a few cat shifters. We didn’t see many cats come in because they were already pretty hyper and didn’t need any further caffeination. But some of the slower breeds could handle the occasional coffee, especially those who worked in accounting.

Numbers people loved our shop.

The unfamiliar witches who came in greeted me cautiously. We weren’t the most trusting sort of people, given that our own kind was targeted by the witch hunts scattered across America and Europe all those years ago.

For several hundred years, it was every witch for herself until the leaders came together and encouraged us to at least try to move on. Old grudges died hard, though, but some of the younger, more progressive witches had formed newer covens while the older ones clung to their solitary way of life for as long as they could.

I was solitary for many reasons, the most important one being that I trusted no one. Before Mom disappeared, she’d become almost unrecognizable with paranoia. If a leaf blew by,it was a spell designed to spy on us. If a bird hung out around us for too long, she grew suspicious it was listening in. She would never tell me why she was so worried, but when she went missing less than a year after the paranoia started, I knew she’d been right to worry.

She’d made plans for me, though. I was shipped off to an aunt in south Texas, hundreds of miles from where I’d grown up in the rolling hills of Arkansas, ripped from my home and everything I loved in the blink of an eye. The new place wasn’t friendly to magic, and everyone there was human, or at least they pretended to be, including my aunt. She was just as much of a witch as Mom was, but she’d never embraced her power and had chosen to live as a human.

My aunt wasn’t cruel, but she was childless on purpose and hadn’t wanted to be saddled with a grief-stricken teenage girl who had zero control of her magic. The first time I’d lost control and turned my aunt’s pristine rare rosebush into a six-foot blooming monstrosity, she’d sent me to my room for a week and set my dinners by my door.

Unwelcome and feeling unloved, I’d put my head down and tried to finish high school, then college, but living with her made me feel like the walls were closing in. Mom had spent years training me, and before she’d disappeared, I’d had a pretty good handle on my power. But my emotional state when I realized she was not coming back had sent me into a spiral that had affected everything, including my hold on my magic. My sleep suffered. Fear and loneliness topped with bad dreams made me a shell of my former self. And while eventually my sleep had improved, my dreams were still plagued with the occasional nightmare, usually involving horrible things happening to my mother or me.

I hadn’t wanted to leave everything and everyone behind and start a new life in a state where summers seemed to never end. While my magic helped with the insane temperatures andhumidity, I’d still never quite acclimated to the hellscape that Texans called July.

A year after I graduated college, I took a leap and moved closer to the Austin area, where the temperatures were cooler and people were a lot more accepting of magic and fantastical things. I’d left a note for my aunt on the kitchen table telling her goodbye.

I hadn’t heard from her since.

Six months later, I called this place home, even if I still had a lot to learn about how a real magical town operated.

With a wave at G and Addy, I tugged my apron off and tucked it into my bag. Right before I reached the exit, Quinn swooped down from her regular perch and hovered in front of me, her eyes wide with fear.