It’s late when Alex takes me home. He can’t stay long, because he has to get back to Miles, so he drives off with a smile curving his lips, anticipating the morning, when he plans to introduce me to Miles in earnest. They’ll be staying at Half Moon Mill—a few wedding guests left right after the reception, which opened up a room for them.
I’m in the courtyard behind The Magick Happens, prying up stones buried in the four corners of my flower beds. Amethyst, rose quartz, moonstone, jade, all planted with the hopes of growing love. In their places, I leave black tourmaline, citrine, tiger’s-eye, carnelian. For protection. My haven is fragrant with fresh rain, straw from the chicken coop. Dark, moist dirt. The pavers below my shoes are eternally wet from a hose—not only from watering my plants but also from Aisling coming back here to play with it. I can tell by a thick wedge of twigs, petals, and leaves turned to mulch, caked into the crevices along one wall where the ground dips. Indicative of water flowing down there, time and time again, carrying loose debris. I close my eyes to breathe it all in, grounded in this sanctuary where I feel the most at home, where I know what I’m doing, that my choices are right because they are often guided by ancient forces.
I love flowers. They’re beautiful and predictable; some are capricious, some are hardy. They bring all different scents—woody, fresh, clean, earthy—and all different textures. Caterpillarish chenille plants, waxy heart leaf philodendron, velvety purple passion, papery cupid’s dart. I like putting them to bed in soil and watching them slowly rise, knowing I helped create life, that I’ve brought loveliness into the world. Closing my eyes as I run my fingers over a plant, feeling every cell of it from root to leaf, responding to my touch. I should have just stayed in my garden and minded my business. I should have declined Kristin’s invitation to participate in the scavenger hunt.
The charm bags tied to our witch hazel tree, weeping higan cherry, and royal purple smoke bush are turned out next, cinnamon and crushed rose shaken loose into a dustbin. What was I thinking, filling my home and garden with such dangerous requests? I’ve done nothing but draw trouble.
It was horrible enough when Alex and I broke up the first time—if we break up again, I don’t think I’d ever recover. The fact that he has a child makes it riskier, because I don’t know how to have a child in my life without making them part of my family.
I’m tired of losing family.
I’m not the only one who would end up hurt, either—how will Miles feel if he gets attached to me, and Alex and I break up? It’s horrible, at any age, to have someone you love and depend on suddenly disappear from your life. But it’s more confusing for children, who don’t understand why, who might blame themselves.
I have only one hard and fast rule for dating. Nobody with children. I’ve never voiced this out loud to anyone, because it might make me sound insensitive. But I can’t go through what I did with Adalyn, again.
And yet? Do I have a choice? It’s Alex.
Yes, I have a choice, I argue with myself, washing my hands under the spigot, rinsing off my trowel and gloves to prevent mixing magics with their next use. Cross-pollinating protection spells with any other, such as spells for weather, could result in any number of small calamities. End this now, gracefully, before you get in too deep.
I’m overwhelmed. I need help. With what, exactly, or from whom, remains unclear.
Up above the pergola embroidered with purple wisteria and soft, tiny lights that twinkle like fairies, a window in the apartment screeches open. A head of blond curls leans out. “It’s midnight, little garden elf,” Luna observes, fresh-faced from a bath. “Wanna talk about it?”
I sigh. “Maybe.”
She shuts the window, waiting for me up in her apartment.
Jingle and Snapdragon are stretched out on Luna’s bed, engines purring, their paws curling and uncurling. Snapdragon contorts himself to rub the top of his head against my knee as I climb under the covers beside my sister.
Luna’s bedroom is a nest of treasures: suncatchers hanging in the big round window, glow-in-the-dark cat eyes painted on the wardrobe doors. Rows of books by Tamora Pierce. There’s a gold birdcage hanging from the rafters, stuffed with dried Spanish moss and a plush fox from our childhood that we believe might hold a two-thousand-year-old sleeping demon. Glass-front cabinets display such riches as falling-apart vintage spellbooks, our grandmother’s perfumes, special editions of Tributales books, quartz known as “witch’s fingers.” Jareth’s crystal ball with Sarah trapped inside, from Labyrinth, which Luna won in a contest she found on the back of a cereal box. Harmonicas. A Disney World viewfinder souvenir of a vignette featuring us sisters barreling down Splash Mountain; every time I hold it up to my eye like a pirate’s spyglass, I’m immersed in sunscreen and ocean, the music of Main Street, USA, and the awe of watching fireworks boom over the parade.
“The silver moth prophecy needs to hurry up and play itself out,” I say, reaching out to spin the mottled blue plastic ball of a world globe. Antarctica rolls face up like the losing number on a die.
Yes. That’s exactly where I should go to escape my mess.
“Why do you say that?” Luna closes her door, revealing an old Death Becomes Her poster taped to this side, the corners curling. She removes her septum ring and earrings, which fall with clinks into a dish, then rubs lotion onto her hands and elbows as she pads to the bed. Moves aside a bowl of milk with three Froot Loops floating around the spoon’s handle as if magnetized by it, which she must have set down when she heard me in the garden. Peculiar, since I don’t think I was making much noise.
“Once I meet my one true love,” I tell her, “I won’t ever think about Alexander King again. And then I won’t have to feel this way again.” Desperate. Unmoored.
“Ahh.” She snuggles beside me. “Unless you’re the in over her head sister.”
I make a face. “No.”
She taps my nose. “Have you considered that maybe—”
“Rawrrghhhh!” a small shape shrieks, throwing open the bedroom door and diving at us like a flying squirrel. Jingle’s a quick flash of ebony, diving under the bed.
“Ash!” Luna and I cry.
“You’re having a party in here without me. How cruel!”
“We’re not having a party.” Luna ruffles Ash’s bangs. “Go back to bed. It’s a school night.”
Aisling burrows under the quilt like a mole, tunneling her way up to the pillows to make herself at home between us. She closes her eyes and breathes heavily, pretending to be asleep. Luna and I lock eyes, amused.
“Just keep talking like I’m not here,” Ash whispers, eyes still closed.
“We were discussing what sort of summer school we should send you to,” I tease. “Math camp? Or maybe one especially for . . . dodgeball.”
“I bet you two were really gossiping about boys,” Ash reports sourly. “Mom, I heard you on the phone telling Great-Aunt Misty that Aunt Romina is still in love with—”
Luna muffles the end of Ash’s sentence with her hand. “Shh! You little eavesdropper.”
I smack Luna with a pillow. “She gets it from you.”
“Well, she gets her big mouth from—”
“Shut up.” Now it’s Luna’s turn to have her mouth covered. I slap a hand over it, sitting up. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Both of them still, ears perking.
And there it is again—
A gentle crash emanating from the direction of the kitchen.
“The cats?” I suggest hopefully, as Ash exclaims, “Serial killer!”
We count the number of cats in the bedroom. Snapdragon’s still asleep at the foot of the bed. I get down on my knees beside it, spotting Jingle’s effulgent eyes beneath. “She’s under here.”
Ash darts to the doorknob, locking it, as Luna rolls off the bed and draws a long sword from the depths of her closet. It’s foam. She made it to wear with her costume for Tributales conventions, dressing like her favorite character, a troll called Byorgilaf, from her favorite fantasy series. While Zelda favors werewolves, hobgoblins, and giant raven-spider hybrids in her fantasy, Luna’s tastes are more of the medieval dragons-and-swordplay variety in which everyone has really long names with lots of vowels.
Aisling wields the remote control. I grab a hardcover copy of The Tributales Three, which is so dense (both literally and figuratively) that it doubles as a weapon.
“Stay in here,” Luna orders her daughter, unlocking the door. Ash doesn’t listen, creeping behind us down the hall. I try to gently kick her back into the bedroom with my foot, but she dodges.
“Do you want me to call 911?” she whispers.
“Shh.”
“I wouldn’t be messing around in a house full of witches if I were you,” Luna calls out, voice even. I’m quaking in my gingham socks behind her. I want to be Luna when I grow up.
“Witches, eh?” We turn the corner into the kitchen, where a redheaded woman is rummaging through cabinets. “What are you going to do? Make me fall in love to death?”
We’ve been shrieking and babbling nonsense for the past five minutes. Zelda treads water in the chaos of our arms. “Not a single normal decaffeinated tea bag in the whole house! Nothing but weird stuff that’s supposed to meddle with my future.”
“Decaffeinated?” I repeat. “Who are you?”
“Aunt Zelda!” Ash cries, attaching herself to my sister’s waist. “You’re here! Just in time. These two are trying to make me play dodgeball, and they won’t tell me any gossip. I have to hide on the stairs to hear anything good.”
“Very rude of them,” Zelda agrees, eyes narrowed at Luna and me. “No one’s been responding to my texts. Do you have any idea how annoying that is?”
“Yes.” I beam at her, my arms around her neck.
“Monsters, I say. Both of you.”
“I knew you were coming, I could sense it,” Luna gloats.
Zelda rolls her eyes. “You could not.”
Hm. Come to think of it. “I must’ve subconsciously known, too. I swear magic’s been planting echoes of you all over the place. Every closet I’ve opened this week smells like the ocean for some reason.”
Zelda turns to Luna. “Well done. You’ve brainwashed her.”
“She’s brainwashed me, too! Save me.” Aisling’s unzipping Zelda’s bag, rooting through it. “Oooh, Pringles! Can I have these?”
I peek through the blinds onto the front street, where a station wagon is parked. “What’d you do with the camper van?”
“Esmerelda was on her last legs, so I had to send her off to the great junkyard in the sky.” She picks up Luna’s foam sword, pokes her with it. “What if I was a robber? What’s this gonna do?”
“Distract you while I get this.” Luna opens the freezer, retrieving a box of three-year-old freezer-burnt asparagus. A jagged dagger tips out.
I jump back. Aisling tries to grab for it. Luna frowns, rolling the dagger from hand to hand. “Ouch. Keeps sticking to my skin.”
“I’m glad you didn’t attack me in the dark,” Zelda tells us, “or I’d be on the floor right now, dying. From laughter. Luna, it took you, like, six minutes to open that box.” She tears off her jacket and lays it over the back of the couch, revealing a floor-length black dress that makes her look like she’s in mourning. Her fashion sense is self-described as “goth Emily Dickinson meets art curator who’s going through a divorce and trying to rediscover her fun side”—all black with a tiny splash of color. Pearl cameos featuring zombies, miniature cereal box brooches, hot pink panda earrings. Striped pointy boots with spurs. Today’s color pop is a sparkly Pusheen hairpin. “By the way,” she tells Luna, “we need to clear all of your junk out the attic, because I’m moving in.”
Luna blubbers at Zelda that she’s insensitive when it comes to people who just really love to collect stuff and we’ve missed her tremendously. Zelda expels a sigh at the ceiling while we jump around her in a tight huddle. “Curses, misery, bother, blast,” she mutters. (When Zelda is excitable, she becomes a glitching thesaurus.) She stiffens and raises her shoulders up to her ears, but once we’ve disbanded I detect a microscopic gleam in the corner of her eye.
Ash leads our small parade back to Luna’s bedroom. With so many Tempests in Luna’s bed, we have to lie in it sideways. “I can’t sleep without a fan on,” I complain.
Ash whines. “I can’t sleep without the TV on.”
“I can’t sleep, period,” Luna replies, “because my bed’s full of other people.”
We ignore her, Aisling hunting for The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance on Netflix while I plug in a box fan. Then I snuggle close to Ash, tousling her hair until her eyes grow heavy. The familiarity of my loves—Aisling wearing her mother’s tie-dye maxi skirt, fabric bunched together at the waistband with a scrunchie because it’s too big on her; Zelda’s river of orange-red hair, scented with sea, sunlight, and coconut; the sunflower tattooed on Luna’s shoulder, the small bump on her narrow nose in profile—all combine to form a thick lump in my throat. No matter what happens, where I go, how badly I mess up, I’ll never lose these three.
“So,” Zelda mentions finally, with a careful eye toward her sleeping niece, “what’s all this gossip I’ve been missing?”
At last, I tell them both about Alex. How right it feels, being close to him again, and how terrifying. I tell them about Miles. The subject wanders to kids in general.
“I love being able to get up in the morning and work all day long if I want to,” Zelda says, kneading a knot in her calf. “Not fitting my day around others’ needs. I love the freedom of knowing I could jump on a plane tomorrow, fly around the world, stay gone as long as I want.”
“Mm,” Luna and I both hum.
“Sometimes men lie to me. Say they’d be good with not having kids, but then it turns out they thought they could change my mind. I’m tired of always feeling like I have to justify my reproductive choices.”
I tie a gold thread at the end of a thin braid I’ve woven into her hair. I’ve always loved playing with Zelda’s beautiful hair. When I was little, she cut it to chin-length and I actually cried, which she and Luna teased me for. Such are the woes of being the baby sister. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, and a favorite pickup line,” she goes on. “You’d look so good pregnant with my baby.”
“Ew! Has someone seriously said that to you?”
“An old landlord. All credit goes to him for my transition to the camper van lifestyle.”
“Gross.” Luna makes a face. “Give me his name and address.”
“Feels like everybody thinks they know what I want better than I do, trying to convince me my life has a hole in it. That it doesn’t have enough meaning unless I’m a parent, that I won’t know real love unless I have children, and I’ll change my mind sooner or later. Like I have to have kids in order to be a whole, fulfilled person.”
Understanding crosses Luna’s face. “Something happen with Zeke?”
Zelda releases a long, slow exhale. “It’s over.”
“He do something to you?”
“No, he was perfectly wonderful.”
Luna and I exchange glances. “Then what happened?” I venture. Much like her penchant for moving restlessly around the country, she’s swift to end relationships before they’ve truly begun.
“I did,” she replies darkly, emotionally zipping up. “I happened.”
When she doesn’t elaborate, I sense her desire for a change of subject. “You’re whole just as you are, Zelda,” I tell her. “I love your life for you. I love Luna’s life for her. Both are equally worthy.”
“What about yours?” Luna’s looking at me.
“I love mine for me. For now. But you both know I want kids. It’s so weird, the peer pressure we get, to have them when you’re young and energetic, to have them when you’re older and more settled—”
“To have another one the second you’ve popped out your first,” Luna cuts in. “I get that from Dad and Dawn sometimes. When are you going to give Aisling a sister? She must be so lonely!”
“Boundaries!”
“There aren’t any.” Zelda folds her pillow in half, punching it to get comfy. “Why do I have to justify myself? What’s wrong with being fulfilled by working and traveling?”
I like to stay busy with my work, but I’m a homebody. “Whenever I’m away from Moonville, I spend the whole time thinking, This is nice, but I can’t wait to go home. I find traveling stressful.”
“You’d have to pry me out of this town with an ice pick,” Luna declares. “You know, at this stage of my life, I can’t see myself having another baby. I used to be eaten up with guilt over that, not giving Ash a sibling, like she was missing out, but if I’d had another kid, I wouldn’t have been able to give Ash as much time and attention. Now, Ash has everything she wants, so I don’t regret it. I think society makes women second-guess their choices no matter what they are.”
“Give me all of the babies,” I declare. “I want five.”
“Five!” they crow.
“I thought the magic number was three?” Luna props her chin in hand.
“That was before I held one of Trevor’s baby cousins the other day. Every time I see a baby, the number grows.”
They laugh.
“Good.” Zelda grabs her contacts case, removes her lenses. “I’ll get to snuggle your babies for a while, then give them back to you when they start crying.”
“The best arrangement,” Luna agrees. After a long look at Aisling, she switches off the TV. “I cannot sleep with the television on. I don’t know where she gets that.”
Mutually validated, we all wind down. Some time later, I break the silence. “Zel?”
A few beats pass. “Hm?”
“Why’re you here?”
She pats my head sleepily. “To help with the night market, silly. And, I’m tired of missing out on everything that happens around here, watching Ash grow up.” I sense an undercurrent to her words—maybe she’s running from something. Zelda’s told us a hundred times that she had no interest in moving back to Moonville.
On the other side of Ash, Luna reaches across to grab my waist, shaking me just a bit in a silent show of excitement. This means she’s here to stay! I feel her thinking.
I’m in a cocoon of safety—my sisters, my niece, Snapdragon. Jingle, too, judging by the set of small, careful paws sinking into the mattress near my feet. The hum of a breeze through the cracked window and corresponding flutter of pale curtains, the smell of wooden bowls with blown-out floating candles, the soft old carpet, the half-paneled walls, and Luna’s house slippers discarded on a rainbow rug. This place is my constant.
I cannot risk it.
