Once our offerings were done, Wanda and I would spend a few hours making lavish masks (usually to commemorate our dead), and elegant costumes from all the centuries that witches have flown the skies. And later, we’d wear our creations to the bonfire as we danced around the flames, drinking our mead, while the flames would dance along with us.

  And now? Now all of that festivity was gone. Instead, I’d be celebrating ‘Halloween’ the way humans celebrated it and to say I was less than excited was an understatement.

  My eyes burned, and I dabbed at my face with the emerald green scarf Wanda had fashioned for me as an early Samhain present. For as long as I could remember, she’d been crafting magical clothing, and now sold those pieces at a premium in her store, Wanda’s Witchery. No doubt, she’d have a fit if she saw me crying on the fabric now—cashmere was delicate and difficult to work with and the fibers took forever to dry. But, at the moment, I didn’t have a tissue, and the silky fabric of my blouse would react to moisture even more poorly than the cashmere.

  And, no, I wasn’t crying about having to trade in Samhain for Halloween. I was crying over… a boy. And it also didn’t help that I still hadn’t come up with a gift to give Wanda for Samhain. Samhain was sort of like Christmas to the witching community, in that it was the one night of the year when we were meant to show those closest to us just how much we cared by presenting them with some over-the-top, usually expensive gift.

  Seeing as how I had no money (hey, I’m still a high school student!) I wanted to make something for Wanda. But, I just didn’t know what. I’d been getting decently good at knitting sweaters and then enchanting them, but an enchanted sweater that might ward off your allergies, or knitted mittens that would constantly keep your hands warm just seemed… blah. Yet, I couldn’t think of anything else worthy of becoming Wanda’s Samhain gift.

  In the back of my mind, I kept thinking there must be something I could do with a potion mixed with a spell—not only to present as a gift, but also to show off my skills. I’d been training with Poppy a few days a week in the art of crafting potions and Wanda had been teaching me my witchcraft, so it seemed only logical to put the two together.

  Regarding the other reason I was having an emotional meltdown—his name was Ethan Watkins. He was in a few of my classes and we’d spent the majority of the year making eyes at each other. Given all the eye motion, it seemed only logical that he’d come up with some excuse to spend some time with me. That excuse had been in the form of needing help with his science homework (I was the best student in the class when it came to science—go figure).

  Earlier in the day, I’d happily gone to Ethan’s house to ‘tutor’ him, but instead, we’d found ourselves locked in his room and busily engaging in numerous heavy lip-locks. Those lip-locks progressed to Ethan’s hands shifting southward to experience the topography of my chest. I’d been sort of okay with that, I guessed, but when he tried to venture further south like some exuberant adventurer discovering unchartered territory, that’s where I drew the line. And when I drew the line, I’d gotten a mouthful about what a tease I was and how everyone at school knew I was having sex with quarterback, Johnny Smith.

  Well, of course that got my tail in a big ruffle because it wasn’t true! As a young witch, who hadn’t yet experienced her eighteenth birthday, I was still a virgin. And even if I hadn’t still been a virgin, there’s no way I would have allowed Johnny Smith (who happened to look more like a bloated pig with mini volcanoes erupting all over his face than an actual human boy) to worship my body.

  Needless to say, I went off on Ethan and called him every disparaging word I could think of before I stormed out of his house and started walking back to Wanda’s, taking a short cut through town.

  And now here I was.

  I briefly considered confiding to Wanda about my disastrous after-school study date, but knowing Wanda, she’d probably curse the pants off Ethan Watkins. Literally. Wanda wasn’t so much a good listener—she was more the action type, but her temper usually got the best of her and in this case, I didn’t want Ethan turned into a rodent or locked in some parallel dimension, so, no, probably best not to tell Wanda.

  And even if Wanda didn’t hex Ethan into a hellscape, she still didn’t understand me. Wanda was around one hundred and forty years old, which meant she was totally out of touch with what it meant to be young. She’d grown up in the 1880s when people legitimately smoked cigarettes in an attempt to cure their asthma.

  No matter how hard she might try, Wanda just couldn’t understand my life or what I was going through.

  So who did that leave? Well, I could go to Poppy, our resident gypsy, who was teaching me the art of potion-making. Sure, Poppy was nice and all, but we didn’t have the sort of relationship where I could cry about boy troubles with her—we just talked about potions. Besides, Poppy was pretty much occupied with her shop 24/7 and raising her kid—I doubted she even had time to listen to me moaning about boys.

  Poppy’s son Finn had his own sort of magic, but he was basically human. He also had a puppyish crush on me that, while flattering, was sometimes creepy.

  I briefly contemplated visiting Libby and Darla, who lived next door to us, but zapped that idea as soon as it surfaced. Libby was a zombie who’d lived in the 1950s, so she had that old-school way of thinking. Talking to Libby about Ethan would be like telling a nun how I’d been felt up by a boy. In her absolute horror, she’d probably smack me over the head with something heavy and then call in the priest for an exorcism.

  And Darla… she was more man-crazy than I was. Darla had once been a ghost, killed in the 1920s, by her then lover, Frank. Apparently, he’d murdered her in a jealous rage, even if I sometimes wondered if he’d just killed her to get her to shut the f up. Darla just had a way of going on and on and on (and on) about… everything. Anyway, Wanda’s out-of-control power had turned Darla into a real person again—now she lived with Libby in the other half of our duplex.

  Darla reminded me of Daisy from The Great Gatsby if Daisy had been a brunette with a slightly nasally, high-pitched voice. Of all Wanda’s friends and strange creations, Darla was the least likely to lecture me about boys, true, but she’d probably yap nonstop and I wasn’t sure I was in the mood for that. Plus, every time she used the word ‘dingus’ to describe a man’s penis, I cringed and wanted to jam something sharp into both ears.

  Lastly, there was the new witch to Haven Hollow, Olga Fischer.

  Olga hailed from the High Coven of Germany, and like Wanda and me, she’d fallen out of favor with Celestine and the coven. Why? Because Olga had the unfortunate tendency of falling in love with mortal men, something which was a big no-no in the witch community. To the coven, men were viewed as useful in as much as they could impregnate us with more witches. Otherwise, they were deemed useless.

  Since Olga kept falling in love with all the men she bedded, Celestine banished her. Well, banished her until Celestine decided Olga could play a monumental role in destroying Wanda’s life in Haven Hollow (Celestine hated the idea of Wanda being independent. All Celestine wanted was to have Wanda forever under her thumb).

  But, once we’d discovered Celestine’s plan, the whole thing had backfired on her when Wanda and Lorcan (and the rest of the gang) had rescued Olga and her raccoon familiar, Franz, from a cabin in the Blue Shadow hills where she was being kept prisoner by Celestine.

  Now, Olga was living in one of Lorcan’s rental properties while Wanda tried to figure out what to do with her. Because Wanda had claimed sanctum in Haven Hollow, Olga wouldn’t be able to remain in the Hollow unless Wanda formed a coven and inducted Olga into that coven.

  Of course, that was exactly my hope—I’d always wanted Wanda to form a coven in Haven Hollow, but she was less enthusiastic. In general, Wanda didn’t do well with lots of responsibility. She’d already been forced to take a seat on the town’s council once she claimed sanctum and she was having a hard enough time dealing with that—remembering council meetings and being on time to those meetings. Not to mention… I was fairly sure Wanda had an advanced case of ADHD because she couldn’t sit still longer than twenty minutes and she had a hard time paying attention to anything she found less than interesting.

  Hmm, maybe an ADHD potion disguised as perfume would make a good Samhain gift for her? I thought about it for maybe another two seconds before I rejected the thought. It just wasn’t… extravagant enough.

  As to my relationship with Olga Fischer? I didn’t really know her. Definitely not well enough to stop by to commiserate about boys.

  So… that left… no one.

  Literally no one.

  Right—so I basically didn’t have anyone I could talk to, and I needed a social life like yesterday. At this point, I’d probably settle for a ghost my age, just someone, anyone, I could talk to. As pathetic as it might have sounded, I’d seriously considered the ghost angle a couple of times. I figured with Wanda’s Blood Witch powers, there was a chance that ghostie could someday become a real boy or girl. I mean, Wanda had already dragged Darla back to the land of the living, so why couldn’t she do the same for some hapless seventeen-year-old ghost (once I located said hapless seventeen-year-old ghost)?

  I sighed. That was probably just wishful thinking—actually, it was definitely wishful thinking. Not to mention, it was also downright tragic that I was trying to come up with ways for Wanda to make me a friend.

  As if the goddess herself heard my thought and rebuked me for it, my phone chimed. I jerked in surprise and then scrambled to fish the darn thing out of my backpack before the call went to voicemail. I caught it on the last ring and swiped to answer without checking the caller ID.

  “Hello?” I asked, breathless.

  A familiar baritone answered, amusement thick in his voice. “Is this a bad time, sister mine?”

  My heart did an odd sort of flip, and I thanked the goddess for her generosity. The person on the other end wasn’t exactly what I’d been pining for, but by Hecuba, it was something.

  Chapter Two

  “Charmin!”

  “Maverick,” he corrected me, sounding indignant.

  “Ugh, do you really expect me to call you that? It’s just so… dumb.”

  “Regardless, it’s a legal name change and thus, yes, I do expect you to call me that. I’ve been ‘Maverick’ for a while now.”

  My brother was always touchy about the name Charmin, and I guess I couldn’t blame him. When Tabitha had birthed him, ‘Charmin’ was considered an uncommon, yet still dignified, forename. Now it just brought to mind toilet paper. So, no, I couldn’t blame him for changing it, even if I thought ‘Maverick’ sounded ridiculous. No doubt, he’d probably thought his new moniker would impress Wanda.

  My brother had been obsessed with Wanda for years. And while that might sound gross, because they were technically cousins, cousin relations were legal by our laws but... blech. Regardless, Maverick and Wanda hadn’t worked out, anyway. She hated his guts.

  “Oh, Goddess, you have no idea how happy I am to hear from you!”

  I smiled to myself. That probably wasn’t a sentiment my brother heard often. My nuclear family was a little... odd, even by supernatural standards. Witch lines were matriarchal, composed of a witch and her daughters. Something about the Y chromosome tended to be incompatible with magic of any kind, so male children born to witches were raised to the age of maturity and then quietly released into the human world to interbreed with the mundanes and be forgotten. They didn’t live as long as the rest of us, usually only as long as a human did—eighty or so years, though one would occasionally manifest a modest talent.

  Maverick, a warlock, was the first male child in seven hundred years to manifest enough magical talent to rival that of a witch. Even so, warlocks tended to go nuts at some point, so they weren’t highly regarded. And Maverick’s prickly personality just made him less likable.

  He was older than I was, by sixty-six years, to be exact, and after the birth of Maverick, Tabitha had delayed having more children for fear of what she might have next. Apparently, she was right to think that way because she’d ended up with me, a redheaded upstart. No one knew why, but witches were almost always brunettes, so my fiery red hair was rare. And not rare in a good way: red-haired witches were usually regarded as bad omens because they were always trouble. After me, Tabitha swore off having more children, ignoring the long tradition of witches having at least a half-dozen offspring.

  “I was just thinking about you, actually,” I continued.

  “Oh? Good things I hope?”

  That edge of teasing was back in his voice, and my chest ached. Charmin... ah... Maverick hadn’t always been the best brother. He was hex-happy, self-centered and could be cruel when it suited him, but I still couldn’t bring myself to dislike him. He’d probably always be an asshole, but he was my asshole and, somehow, that meant something.

  There were also those rare moments when Maverick could actually be sweet—usually when we weren’t surrounded by people who hated him. If I’d been dogpiled with that kind of prejudice my whole life, I’d probably be a jerk too. Hmm, maybe if we’d grown up with mundanes, we might have turned out better.

  “I was thinking about the apple orchards, actually,” I continued, suddenly having to speak up over the wind. I looked up at the sky and though there were dark gray clouds obscuring the sun, they didn’t appear to be rain clouds.

  “Apple orchards?”

  “Yeah, our Samhain celebrations at Celestine’s manor.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t imagine my brother missed the festivities—he wasn’t much for nostalgia.

  “This is going to be my first Samhain away from home,” I finished. My voice sounded hollow, even to my own ears. And all of a sudden, the sadness descended on me all over again.

  Maverick’s voice was gentle when he spoke. “It’s all a load of goblin dung, isn’t it?”

  “What is?”

  “The fact that we’ve been kicked out of the coven,” he responded. “We pariahs can’t exactly help what we are, can we?”

  Maverick was right—it was so unfair! My being cast out, Maverick’s being cast out, Wanda’s being cast out… it was all wrong, and it was all unfair. As to Wanda’s stroke of bad luck—that had been really unfair. If she hadn’t been involved in a car wreck that nearly ended her life, a certain vampire dentist would never have given her his blood. As it was now, she was trapped in a half-state, neither witch nor vampire, but a dangerous combination of the two. And none of that was Wanda’s fault, yet our coven, ahem our ex-coven, shunned her for surviving because they didn’t approve of what she was, a Blood Witch.

  And the same thing went for me—how was it in any way fair that I’d been punished for pointing out that the whole Wanda situation was as rancid as a year-old toenail potion?

  “No, we can’t help what we are,” I answered on a sigh, stopping to lean against the two-story colonial-style thrift store, Oddballs and End Tables.

  “Are you happy in Haven Hollow, sister?”

  I breathed in deeply as I thought about it. “Usually, yes. I like living with Wanda. Her new powers are weird, but I’m getting used to them. But right now I’m just so...”

  “Lonely?” he guessed.

  My eyes pricked with sudden tears, and I tried to repress a sniffle. “Yeah.”

  “I think we can fix that.”

  “We can?”

  “Why don’t you meet me in Riverport? We’ll have an early Samhain celebration.”

  While I loved the idea of celebrating Samhain with my brother, I didn’t love the idea of having to travel to Riverport to do it. Not that the town was that far away—it was maybe ten minutes or so outside Haven Hollow city limits, but it was an Uber ride for sure. “Why Riverport?” I asked. “Couldn’t you just come... oh,” I interrupted myself as I remembered.

  Right. I’d been too caught up in the moment to recall that Wanda and Maverick had had quite the disagreement when she’d first moved to Haven Hollow. That disagreement had resulted in a duel and Wanda had won that duel against my brother, which meant Maverick wasn’t allowed back in the Hollow.

  “Yes, oh,” he said and his tone was wry. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to come to me, sister mine.”

  “Okay. And if I do… you’ll celebrate with me… the way we used to?”

  “We can find a nice apple orchard and bribe the Autumn fae just like old times. We can even visit one of those hackneyed Halloween shops and perhaps find some ridiculous costumes, and then we’ll commit an act of minor arson with our bonfire, and…”

  “No arson!” I interrupted, but couldn’t help a giggle, suddenly cringing at how hopeful I sounded. I was beyond pitiful if a day in an orchard with my brother sounded like a fantastic idea.

  “Where has your sense of adventure gone, dearest?” he asked.

  “I’m not going to meet you if you’re planning on setting fires, Maverick,” I said, wanting him to understand that in no uncertain terms.

  “Very well,” he said on a sigh. “Meet me at the Riverport Bed and Breakfast and we shall start our Samhain festivities.”

  I felt my lips break into a huge grin. “See you there.”

  ***

  “Why are there so many people everywhere?” Maverick sniffed, skirting a group of giggling eight-year-olds.

  The smallest of them, a little brunette with pigtails, was doubling over under the weight of an enormous pumpkin clutched in her arms. I started to help her, but when I looked up, Maverick was already three yards ahead of me, and the distance was growing. If I stopped to assist the little girl, he’d reach the property line, hop the fence, and keep going without me. Besides, charity wasn’t exactly witch-like.

  When I’d been in the coven, my general concern for others had been something of a sore spot between my family and me. Now I was wondering if what made me so different from the others was just my overall respect for the well-being of other people. Even Wanda still had a somewhat stunted sense of empathy, though I had to admit it was improving.