Page 25 of Justice & Liberty

The bookstore wasin immaculate condition, which wasn’t a huge shock, all things told. Mom had always been very good at keeping up with details. The bookstore had been like a second home to her, and she’d always kept a tidy home.

I had a moment to wonder about the electricity being on in the shop, but it was resolved as soon as I started going through Mom’s paperwork on her desk.

In the weeks before her death, she’d transferred everything over to my name in the shop. Electricity, internet, water...setting it up so that a transition to me running the place would be entirely seamless.

Even the point of sale setup had had me as the owner of the system with the login I’d used way back in high school, so nothing would change. Paperwork would be mailed to me at the house, and sent electronically to the same email address I’d been using most of my life.

Part of me wanted to shake my mom and point out what a mess that would have been if I hadn’t come home, hadn’t planned to start running the shop myself, but also...It wasn’t as though I could have just gone back to my life in LAand left the shop dormant and house empty. Sure, I’d gone back right after the funeral thinking I would do exactly that, but I hadn’t been thinking clearly at the time.

I certainly hadn’t been planning to reopen the shop, but as it turned out, all I would have to do for that was just...turn the lights on and flip the sign to open.

Although...there was the matter of the teas I was out of.

I’d been carrying Mom’s book around with me as though it was a security blanket, so I’d stuffed it in my purse that morning. With no small amount of trepidation, I fished it out of my bag, along with the keyring, carrying both to the storage room door in the back of the shop. I tried each key till I found the right one to open the locked door.

A chilly breeze seemed to blow out of the back room, and I...well hell, I couldn’t tell anymore if it was my imagination or reality.

I’d been in that storage room before.

It was just a room, dammit.

I pushed the door open and marched inside, and . . . froze.

As a kid, most people learn that you can test if a battery still has a charge by touching your tongue to the end. And this was...it was like that, but as though I’d somehow dipped my entire body into the end of a battery. A strange buzzing electric feeling, filling me up, giving me goosebumps, and making the hair all over my body stand on end.

It got worse as I went to the center of the room, and my gaze was drawn down...to the worn old wool rug Mom had over the main part of the floor. I’d always thought it was because the original hardwood floors in the old building were freezing in the winter, but a suspicion struck me, and I reached down to grab the end of the rug, pulling it up.

There, laid into the wood in neat metal lines, was a five-pointed star surrounded by a circle, the center part of the star big enough for me to sit inside.

Holy crap.

A noise grabbed my attention, and I looked up to find that the cats had joined me. They lazily sauntered into the room, both coming to sit at the edge of the metal circle, looking up at me expectantly.

“I don’t...I don’t know how to do this, guys. I don’t even know if there’s a ‘this’ to do?—”

Hex meowed at me, long and low, and instead of just “meow,” I heard “Kittens always start slow. It’s okay.”

I blinked, staring at her as she leaned down to sniff at the circle.

Bee blinked at me, then turned to Hex and also meowed, and this time I heard a younger, slightly annoyed voice insisting, “Hecate, I think she understood you. That’s not fair. She’s supposed to understandme.I’mher familiar.”

Hex gave a long-suffering sigh. “She can understand both of us, silly. She has the magic now. It just took a little time to settle in.”

I collapsed to the floor in the middle of the circle, staring at both of them in utter shock.

In front of me, Bee gave a little bounce. “What are we going to do? Magic? Can we curse Tanya? Make her toenails all fall out?”

I blinked in shock, but also, I wasn’t the one Tanya had locked in the coat closet, so it was understandable Bee was still pissed at her.

“I was...I was gonna make tea. We’re out of bedtime and willow bark.”

“Those are easy,” Hex announced. “I’ll get the lavender. Bee, you get the ashwagandha.”

Bee turned and stared at her for a moment, as though shocked. “How the heck do you spell that?”

“I don’t know. It’s an ‘a’ with a bunch of letters behind it, and it’s brown.” Hex motioned with her head toward a spoton the storage shelves, then turned and hopped up to a different shelf, returning a moment later with a bag of lavender clutched in her teeth. When I sat there, continuing to stare at her, she nudged me with her head, dropping the bag in my lap. “You should get the container, kitten. And the candles, and find the page with the spell.”

I had no idea what else to do, so I...I did what the cat told me to. Wasn’t that a mindfuck? “Definitely going to end up in the hospital,” I mumbled to myself as I opened the book, searching the last handful of pages for—there. Bedtime tea. White tea, lavender, ashwagandha, and a handful of other ingredients. Oddly, while most comparable teas had chamomile in them, Mom’s recipe didn’t. Mostly, I suspected, because the woman herself had despised the flavor of the little yellow flowers.

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