Sorcery and the Single Girl Read online

That was what he’d meant by his wink, by the tiny smile on his perfect lips.

  Melissa sighed and turned toward the trash can. Her wrist cocked; she was treating the card as garbage. “No!” I exclaimed. She looked at me as if I had two heads. “No,” I repeated in a quieter voice. “I think he meant for me to have it.”

  “Acquisitions?” Melissa read again. “How pretentious is that?”

  “Not pretentious at all!” I rushed to Graeme Henderson’s defense. Even as I protested Melissa’s dismissal, I realized that he couldn’t be a lawyer. Not with a card like that. A law firm would have sucked out any spark of creativity, would have bled dry the smooth polish of the silver-lined card. “I mean, it’s not pretentious if that’s what he does.”

  “But what does he acquire?”

  “Lust,” I said immediately.

  Melissa gave me a strange look, but she passed the card across the counter. I slipped it into my pocket, vowing to phone him the very next day.

  After all, didn’t the dating gods help those who helped themselves?

  If I’d known the havoc that one little phone call would wreak, I would have thrown away the card right then and there. Lust and everything, I would have just tossed it.

  Or at least remembered that witchcraft never made anything simpler. Never, ever, ever.

  2

  Melissa and I were well into our second pitcher of mojitos, almost soused enough to join the patrons of Rick’s club in singing their rousing rendition of “La Marseillaise,” when we were interrupted by a knock at the door. For just a moment, I thought that Graeme might have returned to Cake Walk, intent on finding satisfaction beyond Almond Lust, but I realized that I was being ridiculous even before Melissa had paused the DVD.

  As she opened the door, she sighed her disgust. “Oh,” she said, in a tone that let me know exactly who stood on the landing. “It’s you.”

  “And what a pleasure to see you, too, my dear,” Neko said, slinking into the room with the aplomb of his Egyptian feline ancestors.

  “Well, girlfriend,” he said to me, gliding across the living room. He kissed me on both cheeks—his latest affectation—and sat in the middle of the couch. “I thought I’d find you here. You really should let me know where you’re going to be, so that I can pass on urgent messages. And while you’re at it, you shouldn’t look quite so disappointed to see me.”

  He pulled his legs onto the couch, sitting cross-legged and stretching back, as if to show off his spinal flexibility. When he settled onto the overstuffed cushion, he looked for all the world like a cat occupying a particularly spectacular sunbeam. After studying his immaculate fingernails, he reached into the bowl of popcorn I’d been sharing with Melissa and extracted a generous handful. He held his cupped palm to his lips and extended his tongue, delicately gathering up a single puffed kernel. He chewed slowly, then cocked his head to one side. “What? You’re not even going to offer me a drink?”

  I shot Melissa a pleading glance, but she started to shake her head in the negative. She and Neko had scarcely been on speaking terms for the past three months. I mouthed, Please! and she recanted, stalking into the kitchen to retrieve a glass. She filled it with our magical concoction of rum, lime and mint before passing the drink to Neko. “Thank you, darling,” he purred, raising the glass to toast her before tossing back a healthy swallow. “Mmm. Could use a bit more mint, but any port in a storm, as they say.”

  Melissa bristled. “We thought that they were just fine,” she said through gritted teeth. “We made them just the way we like them.”

  I leaned forward to separate them. “Neko, if you’d rather go home, I have some chardonnay in the fridge.”

  He beamed a smile at me. “Not anymore. Jacques and I finished it last night.” He dragged out the foreign name as if it were a delectable appetizer. Lowering his eyes and looking up at me through lashes that were longer than any boy deserved, he went on, “Or should I say, this morning?”

  Melissa huffed in disgust and hustled down the hallway, slamming the bathroom door behind her. I glared at my familiar. “Neko, was that absolutely necessary?”

  “What? It was only a bottle of Turning Leaf. Hardly anything to get upset about.” A small frown creased the ageless arch between his eyebrows, and his mouth opened into a startled O. “I’m sorry! Did Melissa give the wine to you? Was she upset that I drank a gift?”

  “You know why she was upset.” I took the bowl of popcorn away from him before he could devour the rest of our microwaved bounty. “You didn’t need to mention Jacques. You know she still isn’t over him.”

  “And once again, I have to say that isn’t my fault! I can’t help it that Jacques liked me more than he liked her!”

  I took a deep breath, ready to explain, again, that Neko wasn’t helping matters. I was ready to tell him, again, that Melissa had found Jacques first. I was ready to state, again, that Jacques was the one who had posted on FranticDate.com. I was ready to remind Neko, again, that Jacques had said that his ideal date was a woman—a woman—who could bake like his grand-mère and who looked like Brigitte Bardot, circa 1960. I was ready to scream at Neko, again, that Jacques was the one who had thought that he could cajole himself out of his gayness, that he could “heal” himself, that he could start playing for the other side, if only he found the right woman to lead him onto the straight and narrow path.

  But we’d crossed that ground before, back and forth, countless times in the past three months. Neko had come into Cake Walk just as Jacques arrived for his second date with Melissa (a rare second date, I might add—Melissa was pickier than Jacques’s sainted grand-mère, but she’d been feeling desperate). The attraction between the men had been instant. Jacques had wandered off with my catlike familiar, barely remembering to say goodbye to Melissa, scarcely taking the time to cancel dinner plans with her that night.

  And Neko and Jacques had been inseparable ever since.

  I’d tried to tell Melissa that she hadn’t even liked Jacques all that much. She’d been bored by his conversation (all about fashion and designers and life on the haute couture circuit in, um, Gay Paree). She had thought that he was self-absorbed and more than a little snobby. She had found it odd that he had not even tried to kiss her good-night, despite a first date that lasted until nearly midnight.

  But her pride had been injured. Her pride, and her sense of security. There she was, turning over every stone that she could find as she searched for the man of her dreams, and Neko had been able to waltz in and pluck the plum from her dating tree, with scarcely a pause to catch his breath.

  And I was left in the middle, trying to bridge the gap between my best friend and my familiar. “Neko, would it kill you not to mention him here? Just until she finds someone else. Until she’s focused on another guy?”

  He frowned. “It’s not like Jacques and I were engaging in hot sweaty man-sex on her sofa.” I immediately thought of the cracked leather couch in my basement, Neko’s bed every night that he spent in the cottage that we shared. I did not need that image flickering in front of my eyes, thank you very much.

  With a precise moue, Neko leaned forward and touched the remote control, unfreezing the DVD. The rousing French anthem began to pour from the television once again, filling both Rick’s club and Melissa’s living room with the stirring strains of Gallic patriotism. Before I could decipher the buttons on the remote, Melissa stormed out of the bathroom. Her fingers flew over the electronic gadget, and the television crashed into silence. The laboring air conditioner made the only sound in the room. The air conditioner and my pounding heart, as I waited to see if this storm was going to pass.

  “Enough!” she said. “We all know how the movie ends.”

  Okay. So maybe the French national anthem wasn’t the best soundtrack at the moment. I guessed we were through watching Casablanca. I gulped down a large swallow of mojito, searching for a new conversational course to guide us into a safe social harbor. Before I could divine one, Neko said, “Any new men c
ome by the bakery?”

  I started to say something, anything. I fumbled for words about the golden stranger, Graeme Henderson, but was stopped by Melissa snapping, “‘Friendship is constant in all other things.’”

  I stared at her, utterly confused. I knew the rest of the line—it was from Much Ado About Nothing. “Save in the office and affairs of love.” Melissa and I played the Shakespeare game often enough, quoting snippets of the Bard to each other. We’d used his plays like our own private code since we were absurdly precocious teenagers, gaga over the romance of Romeo and Juliet.

  Nodding when she saw that I remembered the rest of the line, Melissa said sweetly, “Jane, could you help me in the kitchen?” She slopped the dregs of mojitos from the pitcher into Neko’s glass and practically dragged me out of the room.

  “What?” I asked her, as she began dismembering limes with a knife that was large enough to make me take a step back.

  “Friendship Test.”

  “What?” This time, I let my voice reflect my utter confusion.

  “Friendship Test. You know.”

  Well, I knew all about Friendship Tests. I knew that you could call “Friendship Test” on your best friend any time you needed to confirm your relationship. You could Friendship Test the last slice of chocolate cheesecake, for example, calling out those two words and freezing the treat on its way to your best friend’s plate. You could Friendship Test packing for a trip, dragooning your best friend into staying up till the wee hours of the morning, deciding whether the stonewashed jeans or the overdyed jeans were more likely to make your great-aunt have conniptions at Thanksgiving dinner. You could Friendship Test a movie, shoving out the latest blockbuster romance for an action flick that everyone knew would be terrible, but it starred Brad Pitt, so you just had to go, no matter what the critics said.

  But Friendship Testing an entire topic of conversation? Especially one as innocuous as Graeme Henderson, Acquisitions, and my dreams of British romance?

  Melissa rolled mint leaves into a careful pile before employing her knife with the unshakable rhythm of a trained professional. The sharp scent mingled with the rum that she glugged into the pitcher, melded with the citrus tang of the limes. She fumbled in her freezer for ice cubes, and when she turned back to me, unshed tears glittered in her eyes.

  She wasn’t crying for Jacques.

  She was upset about all the other First Dates. She was saddened by her endless quest for happiness, her constant searching for completeness. And, truth be told, she was probably just a little jealous about my relationship with Neko, about my mysterious bond with my familiar. She knew I was a witch, and she understood that I had new powers, new abilities, a new life that was separate and apart from the years we’d known each other.

  If she’d be happier knowing that we kept a few secrets just between the two of us, well, that was actually fine with me. After all, it wasn’t like anything had happened with Graeme Henderson. It wasn’t like I really had anything to tell Neko at all. I’d keep the confidence, just with Melissa.

  “Friendship Test,” I said, and I shrugged. I lifted the pitcher as Melissa rinsed her hands, taking a moment to press her fingertips against her eyelids. “Okay?”

  She smiled, and her lips were only a little shaky. “Okay.”

  Neko had switched the television to the Game Show Network, and he was gleefully shouting out answers to an ancient avatar of Alex Trebec. He bombed out at Final Jeopardy!, though, and sat back on the couch with a pout. “Stupid game.”

  “You’ll get no argument here,” I said.

  He started to surf through stations, bypassing anything that hinted of education or drama and stopping for agonizing minutes on any station featuring large rhinestoned objects for sale at ridiculous prices. “There,” he said, waving the remote at a “Classic” peacock pin. “You should have one of those.”

  “It would clash with the embroidery on my brocade petticoat.” My job at the Peabridge Library included a colonial wardrobe—rich taffeta and linen, hoops to make my waist look tiny, and delicate embroidery that made my fingers ache every time I looked at the stitches. All right. I wasn’t such a big fan of the costumes, but they did give me an extra fifteen minutes of sleep every morning. I never needed to decide what to wear to the office.

  The costumes had been part of my boss’s last scheme to keep the Peabridge budget in the black. She required all of us librarians to dress like colonial matrons, in hopes of bringing in local library traffic. The same desperate measures had led to my living in a cottage on the Peabridge grounds—I had exchanged twenty-five percent of my salary for a fully-furnished cottage. A cottage that just happened to contain a collection of books on witchcraft. Books—and Neko, whose fashion sense (at least in jewelry) seemed twisted from the years he had spent enchanted as a statue in the basement.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Melissa shudder at the hideous rhinestone disaster. “Come on, Neko,” I pressed. “Why did you come over here? What did you need to tell me?”

  “Oh!” He put down the remote. “Clara phoned.”

  Clara. My mother. “And?”

  “She wanted to remind you that you’re both having brunch with your grandmother, a week from Sunday.”

  So now Clara was my calendar tickler? Brunch was more than a week away. I guessed she just didn’t want to disappoint Gran.

  Monthly brunch meetings had been my grandmother’s idea. She thought that if the three of us got together on the first Sunday of every month, then we’d get to know each other better. We’d learn to trust each other more, to share with each other like mothers and daughters are supposed to.

  Most of the time, we managed to make it through the meal without any outright argument, but I had to admit that I’d taken to ordering Eggs Benedict, so that I could take out some of my frustration on the English muffin base. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to eat a simple breakfast of Special K and skim milk with my mother. There wasn’t enough of a subtextual battle there to get us through the meal.

  I attended our monthly get-togethers religiously, though, seeing them as a sort of penance for my grandmother’s complete recovery from the pneumonia that had sent her to the hospital the year before. While it had taken months for her to regain all of her proverbial vim and vigor, she was finally entrenched in her volunteer work again, helping out the D.C. concert opera guild.

  She was also wholly devoted to the cause of strengthening my bonds with my mother. There were now entire weeks when I didn’t sulk about Clara abandoning me for two and a half decades. (I could recite Gran’s explanations in my sleep by now. Clara had needed to defeat her own demons. She had needed to grow up herself. She had needed to find the spiritual anchor of her life in the whirlwind world around us. Yeah, yeah, yeah.)

  I glared at Neko. “And that reminder couldn’t wait until I got home?”

  My familiar plucked at an imaginary thread on his black jeans. “There was another message.”

  I caught Melissa rolling her eyes, and I had to admit that I was getting annoyed with my familiar as well. “Yes?” I prompted.

  “Teresa Alison Sidney called.”

  I couldn’t keep from catching my breath.

  “Who’s that?” Melissa asked.

  Neko cocked his head, clearly asking if I wanted him to elaborate. I fortified myself by filling my lungs and said, “The head of the Washington Coven. The leader of the local witches.”

  I hadn’t met Teresa Alison Sidney yet, but I’d heard her name often enough in the past ten months. She’d been invoked, like a saint or a sinner, every time I strayed from my studies with David Montrose, my warder. Teresa Alison Sidney and the Coven had the right to control all witchcraft in their territory. If I passed the Coven’s inspection, if I learned enough witchcraft to satisfy them, then I would be permitted to join their secret circle. I could keep all the arcana in my possession—spell books, crystals, runes.

  And Neko. My familiar was part of the package. Part of the package
I would lose if the Washington Coven deemed me unworthy of membership. I pictured Teresa Alison Sidney as a forbidding woman, wise, waiting—like Whistler’s Mother in modern dress. I knew that I’d have to meet her eventually, but I’d been perfectly content to put off that reckoning. Put it off until I’d learned more about my powers. Until I’d gained some confidence. Some courage.

  Melissa, not being up on the witchcraft celebrity watch, failed to register the importance of the call.

  “What did she say?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant. After all, she might be calling for any number of reasons. She might…she might have realized she had a sudden need for colonial American recipes. Or she might…she might have been looking for advice on locally grown herbs and aromatics. Or she might…

  I couldn’t really think of any good thing that she might.

  “She wants to meet with you. Next Friday. At midnight.”

  Despite the summer heat, gooseflesh rose on my arms. Midnight. The witching hour. “A—” I needed to clear my throat. “Alone?”

  “She’ll have the entire Coven gathered,” Neko said helpfully.

  That did nothing to ease the sudden fear that whispered down the back of my neck. I thought of Gran’s old-fashioned expression: someone had walked across my grave. “I mean,” I managed to say after thinking out each word, “do I have to show up alone?”

  “Of course not.” Neko’s smile was sympathetic, and I could tell that he was trying to make his answer light. “I’ll be there. And David.”

  My familiar and my warder. To help me work magic and to protect me. I didn’t really feel any safer, though.

  “Is this it, then?” I folded my arms around my belly, suddenly wishing that I hadn’t downed the last couple of minty mojitos. I wanted to rock back and forth, find some comfort in acting like a rebellious toddler. “Are they going to test me?”

  “Of course they’re going to test you,” Neko scoffed. His casual dismissal converted my apprehension into annoyance. “You’ve known that all along. No, this isn’t the time for the testing itself. They’ll wait for some big important day to do that. This meeting is just to lay the groundwork. To tell you the rules.”