Page 34 of The Midnight Frequency

He practically flew out of the studio.

Alone, I rose and went to the door, pulling it open before Maggie had to try to shuffle her piles to do so herself.

“Thanks. I was just picturing myself spilling coffee all down my shirt. You can un-wrinkle that nose; I got you plain black coffee. Which sounds like sadness in a cup. But who am I to kink shame?”

She breezed into the studio, putting down the coffees and then the pile of paper, half of it sliding off the stack and scattering across the desk.

“Yep. That seems about right,” she mumbled under her breath.

“Allow me,” I said as she knocked more of it down while trying to reach for the original fallen pages.

“Thanks,” she said, exhaling hard as she leaned against the desk and rolled the tension out of her neck, filling the studio with little clicks as she did so.

“Long day?” I asked. I shuffled the papers into a stack and piled them several feet away from her so she didn’t knock them over again.

“For who knows what reason, there is now some sort of spirit haunting the mirror in the hallway. It heckles everyone and points out their biggest insecurities.”

“The witches need to pay closer attention to their protection circles.”

“They swore it wasn’t them. But someone needs to fix it. It told the poor delivery lady that it was a shame her eyes were so wide-set, but that they had to be to accommodate her large nose.”

“That’s unfortunate. Have you tried draping something over it?”

“I tried stapling something over it. Somehow, it keeps coming off. When I tried to unscrew it, all the screws stripped. So, it needs a magical intervention ASAP. I have some calls out to a rapid response unit.”

“The many challenges of running a paranormal radio station.”

“It sure keeps things interesting. Though now that I’ve done this for a while, I think I’d die of boredom if I worked at a normal station.” She paused, grabbing the swizzle stick in the mouth of her coffee cup and moving it in and out a few times, a soft rhythmic squeak. “Though at a normal radio station, I bet someone wouldn’t have enchanted my earrings and made me think I was having a mental breakdown because I was hearing voices.”

“Was that some sort of retribution?”

“The earrings were a gift from a young witch, actually. She no longer does podcasts, but when she worked here, she did a sort of magical self-help show. All about affirmations and positive self-talk. She thought that she spelled them to say positive things to me so I would feel more confident in my job. I’d been new then,” she added. “She never considered that a human might confuse magic with mental overwhelm.”

“How did you figure it out?”

“Tess. She came into my office while I’d been holding my hands to my ears and rocking. Then she told me that muffling the stupid earrings wasn’t making them any less annoying. But, hey, what’s a little nervous breakdown to keep things fresh? How’s your coffee?”

“Hot.”

“Can I ask why you don’t drink iced coffee?”

“Why would I?”

“Wouldn’t it be more, I don’t know, comfortable? Since you’re colder than humans, I mean.”

“I suppose it is a force of habit. I enjoyed hot beverages as a human myself. Iced coffee wasn’t popularized in America until the 1920s. By then, I was already stuck in my ways. I take it you don’t like coffee.”

“I love coffee.” She wrapped both hands protectively around the cup, as if my words might hurt the inanimate object’s feelings.

“That, I regret to inform you, is not coffee. It is copious amounts of milk and sugar.”

“Sorry if I like my coffee to taste like it wants me to have a good day instead of something that tastes like a nineteenth-century apology.”

My head tilted to the side, watching her as she smiled at me, a light dancing in her golden eyes.

There was something unique about her.

She was thoroughly modern, yet she had the quick wit and sharp tongue of a Golden Age movie heroine.