Did he even know what a donut was?

  Holly stomped along the track, her boots crunching on loose gravel, punctuating her chaotic thoughts. Only one thing made sense amongst the debris, and that was her decision to sell the cottage.

  She’d have to rent one of those big white transit vans and stuff it full of all Aunt Hannah’s crazy witch paraphernalia. There was no way she was leaving it for the next owner, and she wouldn’t have a garage sale where the hoity-toity Trine could pick over it, looking for Hannah’s journal. There were already enough people out there who thought her aunt was crazy, and she wouldn’t give anyone else the satisfaction.

  Her head ached in her attempts to mull over the logistics. What about her car? Maybe she should hire a moving company. She hadn’t even taken those boxes of clothes and things to the Op Shop yet, but maybe she should check them again for any witch-related items.

  What a mess.

  “Hey.”

  Holly almost tripped when she saw Sarah sitting on the verandah. “What are you doing here?”

  “I heard about…” She stood and shrugged. “I thought I better come over and repay you for the other night. You hold my hair, I hold yours…or so to speak.”

  Holly sighed, some of her anger fading.

  “I wanted to make sure you were okay,” Sarah went on. “And to see if I could help.”

  “Have you brought any boxes?”

  “Huh?”

  Holly snorted. The last thing she wanted to do was stay outside where a vampire could come swooping in at any moment and suck her blood—or whatever it was they liked to do—so she stalked past Sarah, unlocked the front door, and barged inside.

  Sarah followed, the door closing behind her with a thud. “I think you need to take a deep breath.”

  Holly found herself in the lounge room, drawn to the familiar warmth. She began to pace, wearing a hole in the floorboards in front of the fireplace. “I’m going to sell the house and go back to Sydney.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I don’t want anything to do with vampires or witches,” she replied. “And definitely not evil spirits who attack people.”

  “Evil spirits?”

  “In the diggings!” Holly cried. “I didn’t know anything about all this until last night. I don’t know what’s going on with your mum, Patrick, or Jin, but I know I don’t want anything to do with it. I’m barely a witch!”

  “You’re witch enough,” Sarah murmured.

  “Barely a glimmer,” she exclaimed. “Apparently, that’s all I have. Incredibly useful for the next time I’m attacked by my ghostly neighbours!”

  Sarah’s forehead creased. “I think you have to be careful…but you’re making a mistake.”

  “A mistake?” She pointed towards Moonlight Creek. “I live across from a haunted hellhole, I’m being stalked by a vampire, and I have no way of protecting myself! A faint glimmer, your mum said; not enough of anything to cast a spell or—” She threw her hands into the air. “Why am I even entertaining this? Why should I care? You didn’t even tell me!”

  She swallowed hard. “I know I didn’t say anything, but even if I did, would you have believed me?”

  Holly grimaced. “Maybe…if I’d seen it with my own eyes.” Like she’d seen Jin in vampire mode.

  Sarah shook her head. “Holly… I know it’s a lot, okay? Your whole world has been turned upside down, but now it’s my turn to help. I can show you all the good things about this world. It’s not all darkness out there, I promise you.”

  Her words didn’t sound convincing. All there’d been since Holly had arrived in Dunloe was heartbreak. Aunt Hannah’s heart attack, Marty Dunne’s death, Jin’s threats. Her own assault in the diggings. And that wasn’t even everything.

  “Things were simple in Sydney,” she said slowly. “I may have had a crappy job and paid way too much in rent, but it was simple. There were no vampires or witches. No one wanted to hurt me. I was just Holly Burke, office worker.”

  Sarah raised her eyebrows. “You’d be surprised.”

  “About what?”

  “How many supernaturals live in the city.” She shrugged. “It’s easier to blend into large crowds, especially for vampires.” She wiggled her eyebrows. “And there’s lots of food.”

  Holly cursed and slumped onto the couch. Rubbing her hands over her face, she didn’t even care if she smudged her mascara; she was too frustrated.

  “You can leave if you want to,” Sarah continued, sitting on the armchair by the window, “but it’s too late for that. You’re in this now, no matter where you are. You’ll be walking down a street someplace and know there’s more to the faces passing you by. Is that a witch? A vampire? Or is it something else…?”

  Holly swallowed hard. “Something else?”

  “Werewolves, shapeshifters, fae…”

  Her heart skipped a beat. “W-werewolves?”

  “Don’t worry, there aren’t any in Dunloe. The only thing you have to worry about is Jin…and perhaps my mother.”

  “Your mum?”

  “No doubt she only wants to help bring out your magic, but…” She grimaced and shook her head. “Just be careful where the Trine is concerned.”

  “Patrick said you don’t agree with how they run things,” she murmured. “That they’re old-fashioned.”

  “Old-fashioned,” Sarah scoffed. “That’s one way of putting it.” She leaned forwards, picked up Aunt Hannah’s tarot cards, and began shuffling. “The way I see it, you have friends here; you have a family connection to Dunloe, despite whatever happened in the distant past. Right now, today, you have me and Patrick. I can teach you about magic better than my mother and her stuffy posh friends could. And Patrick can keep an eye out for Jin and whatever revenge plot he’s cooking up. I doubt you have anything to do with it, anyway.”

  “Because I remind him of—”

  “Hazel Burke.” Sarah flipped over a card and clucked her tongue. “If anything, you’re the safest out of all of us.”

  She had nothing to say to that. After her encounter last night, she didn’t feel particularly protected, not even by the ribbon-thin creek across the garden.

  But one thing was clear, Sarah seemed to hold the same misgivings about the Trine that Holly had felt that morning. Stuffy, posh…sugary-sweet. Maybe Sarah would be willing to give her some more insight to the minefield.

  “They said something about a book…” Holly began. “A journal?”

  The witch looked up from the cards and raised her eyebrow. “Grimoire.”

  “I haven’t seen anything like that, but they wanted me to bring it over when I found it.” She glanced at the tarot cards. “It sounds kinda personal.”

  “It is,” Sarah told her. “Whatever you do, don’t give that book to the Trine.”

  Holly hesitated. “Why not?”

  “A grimoire is sacred, Holly. It’s for your family alone. Other witches can be greedy when it comes to Legacy. Don’t let them get their grubby hands on it.”

  “Legacy?”

  “It’s what we call our magic.”

  It felt strange to think she had a ‘Legacy’ and that her glimpses fit into it. She thought about telling Sarah about the vision that led to finding her father’s body, but the same uncomfortable feeling she had when she was talking to Patrick surfaced again. So, she decided to keep it to herself. Besides, it’d only sour her friend’s mood, and she seemed to be doing better with her grief today. If Sarah was smiling, then that was something Holly wanted to protect.

  “I never felt connected to a place before,” Holly admitted. “Will you really tell me about all this witch stuff?”

  “Damn right I will!” Sarah paused and peeked at her. “So, does that mean you’ll stay?”

  She had to admit, she was tempted to see what all the fuss was about. She closed her eyes and sighed. “For now.”

  “Yes!” Sarah fist-pumped the air and laughed. “Hey, you wanna see something cool?”

  “Sure.” Her eyes rolled. “I could do with another thrill.”

  “Oh, don’t be like that!” Sarah put down the cards and held out her right hand. “Watch closely. I’ll manifest some Legacy for you. Pick a colour, any colour.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to see if you can guess what colour Dunne magic is.”

  “Magic has a colour?”

  Sarah groaned and rolled her eyes. “Just pick a damn colour, Holly.”

  Holly studied the witch, trying to think what colour she’d be. Blue? Green? Purple? Pink? No, definitely not pink. “Persimmon.”

  “Persimmon?” Sarah crinkled her nose. “What colour is persimmon?”

  “Orange, like the fruit.”

  “You could’ve just said orange.”

  Holly shrugged. “It was the first thing that came to mind.”

  “Fair enough.” Sarah narrowed her eyes until she was squinting at her open hand.

  Holly didn’t know what she was looking for at first, but then a drop of light began to glow in Sarah’s palm. It was a pinprick at first, but it grew larger, bulging into a blob that reminded her of molten metal.

  Thick, glowing, orange metal.

  Holly stared, her eyes wide. “Is that…?”

  Sarah grinned. “My Legacy.”

  “It’s beautiful,” she whispered. Maybe being a witch wasn’t as scary as she first thought.

  Sarah closed her fingers, dousing the light. “Maybe there’s more than just a drop of magic in you, after all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Sarah grinned. “You chose the right colour.”

  Holly laughed, the sound fading away as her thoughts turned to Aunt Hannah. Could she conjure up balls of light, too? What else could she do? Maybe she had visions just like her glimpses. “Did… Did you know about my aunt’s magic?”

  “Yes. She was definitely a witch,” Sarah replied. “She was good at divination, though I’m not sure of anything else. She wasn’t like the Trine.”

  Holly found the notion comforting. From what she’d known about her, Hannah was the cool, alternative aunt who encouraged her niece to follow her dreams wherever they took her. “Divination? What’s that?”

  “Predicting the future.”

  Holly froze. “Really?”

  “Yeah, it’s not an exact science. The future can always be changed, you know? It’s like tarot cards, a tool for guidance.”

  Holly looked at the tarot cards on the coffee table and thought about Hannah’s heart attack. Did she foresee her death?

  What a morbid thing to think.

  “What is it?” Sarah asked, watching her expression.

  “I wonder what colour her magic was,” she murmured. Purple, blue, red… Maybe she was all about green.

  “I don’t know,” Sarah said and shrugged. “Hannah wasn’t a showoff.”

  “No,” Holly smiled, “she definitely wasn’t.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Even though she was exhausted, there was no way Holly would sleep that night. It’d been almost two days since she’d gotten any significant sleep, and the dark circles around her eyes had aged her at least a decade. But she didn’t care one iota about what she looked like.

  After Sarah left, Holly took every book down from the shelves in the lounge room and flipped through them. If Aunt Hannah had a grimoire—or whatever it was called—then it had to be somewhere around here.

  She paged through books on crystals and tarot cards, shook open paranormal romance novels, thumbed through National Geographic photo books, and searched non-fiction titles on herbs and Australian botany, but all she found amongst the pages were a few stray receipts and a cross-stitched bookmark or two. There was nothing that even remotely looked like a handwritten diary.

  Holly was sitting amongst the stacks of books, contemplating what hiding spots there could be around the cottage, when she heard a knock at the door.

  Her heart skipped a beat as her head flew up. Who was hanging around in the bush at one a.m.? Who…? Her expression fell as she crept to the window and peeked through the curtains.

  In the gloom, she saw a figure standing on the verandah and didn’t know whether to panic or find a splinter of wood…but it was her anger that won out in the end.

  Swearing, she stomped out of the lounge room, into the hall, and wrenched open the door, revealing the one and only Jin Xu, make-believe police detective.

  “What?” she demanded. “What are you doing here?” She could almost envisage the steam pouring out her ears.

  The vampire’s eyes narrowed, but it wasn’t anger she sensed, but disappointment. “You listened to them, didn’t you?”

  “I-I…” Holly was taken aback by his tone. She’d been expecting something more…forceful.

  “Of course, you did.” He sighed and turned away from her.

  “They’re helping me understand,” she told him. “Sarah’s going to show me what it is to be a witch.”

  He curled his lip. “Oh, is that right?”

  “Yes, that’s right. Not that it matters, anyway. I don’t have any magic that means anything.”

  “Oh, it means something,” Jin drawled. “Your ‘glimpses’ don’t come from something meaningless, Holly.”

  Her eyes widened and she edged backwards, her hand tightening on the doorjamb.

  Jin smiled, his step mirroring hers until he pressed right up against the invisible barrier keeping him out of her home. “I see… You haven’t told anyone about them, have you?”

  Her cheeks flushed. “Don’t look so smug.”

  “I can’t help it.” He chuckled, his gaze studying every inch of her face.

  “I know what you can do,” she blurted, “and you can’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Mind-control me. Patrick said—”

  “Patrick said.” Jin spat the other vampire’s name, the hatred she felt in his voice making her flinch. “Then you know that I can’t come inside. No part of me can enter your home.” He stared at her, his gaze cutting right into her flesh to where she supposed her soul resided. She wondered why that was. “Remain in that safety while I stand here,” he went on, “but please… Please allow me the opportunity to tell you my position.”

  “Why should I?” She hesitated. “You killed Sarah’s father.”

  Jin’s expression twisted, though she wasn’t sure if the remorse she saw in his eyes was because he truly regretted his actions or because he was caught.

  “I didn’t ask to become this,” he murmured.

  “But you are!”

  Jin’s featured darkened as he scowled. “I am what they made me. They stole my human life and took the only thing I cared about in the entire world and destroyed it.”

  “The ‘they’ you’re referring to are the Trine of the past,” Holly hissed. “The people here now are not the same.”

  “Maybe,” he scoffed and rolled his eyes, “but the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

  She shook her head, unable to believe the absurdity of the denial he was in. Jin was prepared to let a whole generation of witches suffer for the alleged mistakes of their ancestors.

  “Then tell me,” she said. “Tell me who you are.”

  Jin hesitated.

  She scoffed and slammed the door in his face, the bang echoing through the silent house.

  “Holly.” His voice was muffled.

  “Go away!”

  “Holly, please.”

  “Please?” she replied. “Please, what? You can’t even say what you mean! Why can’t you just tell me?”

  “Because…” There was a pause. “Because it hurts too much.”

  “Do you think you’re the only one who’s been through a tragedy?” she shouted. “You’re not the only person who’s lost somebody, Jin. My aunt died. My mother died. I was attacked last night. My whole world has been turned upside down, and I haven’t even had a chance to catch a damn breath!” A sob burst from deep in her chest, and she began to cry. “I don’t want to be stalked. I have nothing to do with what happened to you. I feel guilty enough for helping you cover up Marty Dunne’s murder.” She pressed her back against the door and slid down until she hit the floor. “I want to be left alone.”

  “You had nothing to do with that,” Jin said. “Nothing at all.”

  “That doesn’t help. Y-you’re basically Hannibal Lecter.”

  “I don’t know who that is.” She heard a rustle, then his voice seemed to echo from a place by her ear. “If it helps…then I’ll tell you.”

  Holly sniffed, her tears stopping. He was sitting on the other side of the door, and she pressed her palms against the wood, trying to imagine her magic reaching out. Maybe she could zap him.

  “I was born in the New World,” he began. “My father was British, my mother Chinese. My father didn’t want anything to do with us, of course, so we were on our own. I think you can imagine how it was for her, so I’ll spare you the details. Some wounds are best left closed.”

  “The New World?” she asked, lowering her hands. “You mean America?”

  “Yes.” He paused for a moment. “My mother died young. She was sick and we were poor, so there was nothing I could do but make her comfortable. I could’ve gone anywhere after she passed—there were opportunities all over the country. Gold was being found in California and the Klondike, and there was plenty of work, even for someone like me, but I wanted to go as far away from the memory of her as I could. How she was treated…” So he’d decided on Australia.

  Holly didn’t know what to think. Jin’s human life hadn’t been easy, but history told as much. She’d seen his photograph in the museum, read the stories, learned about the harsh treatment of the Chinese on the goldfields in school. Nothing about his story was a revelation where Hazel Burke and the Trine of the past were concerned.

  “I came for Xin Jin Shan,” he told her. “Gold.”

  “Jin…” she whispered, recognising the word.

  “Jin Xu is my birth name,” he told her. “What’s ironic is that my name, Jin, literally means gold, and still, the British gave me an English name so I didn’t sound threatening. John Smith, the blandest, most common name they could think of.”