Page 16 of Justice & Liberty

As far as the shop, it sounded like a lot of trouble, hiring someone to run it for me, but really, what else was I going to do? Sell the building? Liquidate the stock? No, I was going to have to give Mom’s shop some serious consideration. Not least because it was Mom’s. How could I do anything but continue it, when I had already lost the woman herself?

“I’ll think about that,” I agreed. “Don’t suppose you want to run a shop, do you? Seems like it might be a bit of a let down after the, um,agency.”

She chuckled at that, but then shook her head. “You shouldn’t hire me. Not because you’d have to worry aboutcartoony supervillains burning the shop down, but because I’m terrible with people. I’d run off your clientele inside a week.” She leaned in, pursing her lips. “Apparently, I’m abrasive and aggressive.”

I swallowed down the words that tried to push themselves out of my throat, about how she could be as abrasive as she wanted with me, or that I liked aggressive women, because “aggressive” was just society-speak for a woman who knew what she wanted. There was nothing I liked more than a woman who knew what she wanted.

Nothing at all, in the whole world.

Not even chocolate pastries.

When she changed the subject to Mom, and we fell into comfortable conversation about the shop and business in South Liberty, well, it didn’t get better. A beautiful woman who liked tea. Who likedme. Who was easy to talk to and so sexy my brain kept trying to melt every time I looked at her.

She was wearing a pocket watch, complete with chain, for fuck’s sake. How was that so hot?

And yet, there I was.

8

The shop was right nextto The Unique Bean, one of the reasons I hadn’t doubted Sabrina for a moment when she’d said it brought her business. I’d just always assumed it was the other way around, since everyone loved coffee.

I approached it with some trepidation, I had to admit, staring up at the old ornate sign on a hook over the door. It was old-fashioned but also not, like so many things in South Liberty. Mostly, the people and their attitudes. Sure, people had given me shit for dyeing my hair purple in high school, but no one had ever said boo about me being a lesbian, and well, I rather thought the latter was more important.

The sign had carved scrollwork on the edges and was painted to look like it was made of rolled up paper. In impeccable handwriting across the middle, it declared itself to be “Tea Book and Candle.” Mom had always called it TBC, which she’d found funny, for some reason.

Mom joke, maybe.

I looked through the keyring I’d gotten from her, not certain which was the shop. They were all pretty standardsix-pin keys, except for one, which I knew went with the padlock she’d kept on a chest in the house.

Hm. I ought to have a look inside that. I’d never been particularly curious about it before, since I’d assumed she’d kept things like birth certificates and such in it, but given the existence ofmagic, maybe it was something a little less benign.

I shrugged, grabbed the first key that came to hand, and turned it. It worked.

Huh.

After going in, I turned and relocked the door behind me, then headed for the back of the shop where the alarm was beeping. Fortunately for me, the code was the same as it had been for years. Maybe I should change that. I didn’t think anyone other than Mom and I knew it, but you were supposed to change them periodically anyway, weren’t you?

Ah well, a problem for another day.

Once the alarm was off, it was just me and the shop. Even more than the house, the shop was a relic of my mother. She’d chosen where every single thing in the building went, what objects were on each shelf, and what was and wasn’t important.

The cash drawer had the usual hundred dollars change she’d started every morning with. Well, the eighty-seven dollars in paper cash led me to believe that, but I wasn’t going to sit there counting pennies half the afternoon.

It was like the whole place was just sitting there, waiting for me to flip the lights and unlock the doors. No work necessary before getting started, just go for it.

I scanned the huge glass jars of tea, and noted a few that could use refilling. The bedtime tea was always in high demand, so it wasn’t a shock it was mostly empty. Also the willow bark Hunter had mentioned, because who liked being in pain? I reached for a bag and poured the last remaininginto it, using cursive to write out ‘willow bark tea’ on it, then setting it on the counter. I’d take it over to Hunter before I went home if she was still at the coffee shop.

It wouldn’t be pathetic at all, to carry a bag of tea around for someone I barely knew.

Which reminded me, Sabrina had said something about wanting three pounds of lavender Earl Grey, which was, I thought, more than Mom had ever kept in one of the jars at a time. I knelt down to look in the cupboards below, where she kept extra stock, and right in front was a huge paper bag labeled “lavender for Sabrina,” with a date just a few weeks earlier.

I opened it up, glancing inside to make sure it wasn’t just lavender but the actual tea, and the scents of bergamot and lavender flooded my senses. Lovely. I could see why it worked for Sabrina’s shop.

I added it to the willow bark tea on the counter. Maybe I’d get lucky and they would both still be over there.

Other than that, well...I was in a shop that specialized in spirituality books and stuff, wasn’t I? For the first time in many years, I wandered through the store, looking at the books Mom had deemed worthy of her shelves. It was an interesting selection. Multiple religions, multiple views on each. A few of those books that appealed to young people interested in Wicca. Nothing that stood out to me as serious, not in the way of the family grimoire. I wondered if I ought to grab one of the “Spirituality for Dummies” style books regardless, just to see what I could learn. I’d never taken any of it seriously before, and Mom had never pressed me into any kind of belief, so I’d be starting from zero.

Finally, after scanning the shelves for a long time, I grabbed two books. One a clearly academic endeavor about trying to wade through modern spirituality, and one cute book about “goblin life” just because the aesthetic appealedto me. I didn’t think it was going to be world-changing, though, and if it tried to convince me to go mushroom-foraging, I’d skip that, since I was precisely the kind of person who’d pick the wrong mushroom and end up dead.

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