A Spell for Saints and Sinners

by Emily Carpenter

Genres: Southern; Domestic Thrillers; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

Like a gender-flipped Saltburn set amidst the moss-draped, haunted beauty of Savannah, this intoxicating blend of Southern suspense and modern witchcraft from bestselling author Emily Carpenter casts a spell of class, power, and possession.

In a city where ghosts linger in the moss and money buys salvation, a struggling psychic  is drawn into Savannah’s glittering elite, as obsession and need curdle the lines between magic and madness, seduction and salvation, pirates and protectors…

In front of an elegantly shabby townhouse on a Savannah side street sits a hand-painted sign: Miss Edie, Psychic. Ingrid White inherited the house and business from her beloved grandmother, a local celebrity in town. But unless Ingrid can find a way to pay for crushing property taxes and mounting repairs, she’s going to lose them both.

Ingrid has faith in the homespun witchcraft Edie passed down to her, yet hope and clients are dwindling. . . . Until Sailor Loeffler’s bachelorette party changes everything. Sailor is local royalty—part of the vast “Savannah Sauce” empire, beautiful and wealthy beyond imagining—and Ingrid’s reading is so accurate that she becomes the bride-to-be’s confidante. To keep that access and all the privileges it brings, Ingrid relies more and more on hexes and dark spells—using the baneful magic Edie always warned her against.

As Ingrid works even riskier spells, she is drawn further into the Loefflers’ inner circle and the obstacles in her path melt away. But is it witchcraft or other, more earthbound forces? Ingrid can feel the lines blurring even as her powers seem to grow, until she must confront the truth about just how far some people, including herself, will go to keep the life they’ve always wanted . . .

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

Help me sit up. Against the pillows, just like that. Now don’t start with that shaking your head. And stop crying. I got to tell you something.

My little Budgie. My girl. You know I have given you all my worldly goods … this house, the business … but there’s something more I have to give you. A gift I’m afraid is gonna be a burden to you. But I’ve got to hand it over. If I don’t, sure as shootin’ more pain and heartache’s gonna follow.

Evil upon evil …

It’s the pirates you have to look out for. You hear me, girl? Pirates, every which-a-way. Just scanning the horizon for a ship to take …

Budgie, come here. I remembered what I wanted to tell you.

A long time ago, there was a wrong done to me. I told myself that I should forgive … keep silent, but that was a mistake … and because I didn’t speak, the darkness grew. Now, here I am at the end, and I see it all. I see the Great Balance—the shining gold scales that measure every good and wicked thing—and it’s all wrong.

Do you understand, Budgie?

The Christians say a false balance is an abomination to the Lord. What they don’t say is that while it’s the rich who falsely weight them … it’s the least of us, the poor and the weak, who have to right them. That is what I’m asking you to do, little bird.

Right the balance …

Now listen to me, my Budgie. Listen closely. You must do it in the light. You must always stay in the light. If you don’t … if you stray off the path, into the shadows, that’s where danger is.

There are pirates out there, you know … in the dark. Pirates who’ll see your light and wanna snuff it out. They’ll shadow you, girl, flying a flag that belongs to another. Listen to me. They’ll sail closer and closer until they spot your weakness. And that’s when they come in for the kill.

You gotta watch for the pirates. Their false flags. You gotta be careful …

Do you hear me, Ingrid? Are you listening?

I wish I could explain it all to you, but I’m so tired right now. I’ll say more when I’ve had a rest. I promise.

Just do your spells for good. Always for good, Budgie.

Do ’em for the pirates. Sure, why not?

Do ’em for the saints and the sinners …

If Ingrid White’s checking account at First Chatham Bank of Savannah hadn’t held the alarming balance of $36.08, the two guys without an appointment would’ve never made it past her front door. But she was a witch—a psychic-witch, technically—and she’d seen enough of how the universe worked to know that just because you made a rule didn’t mean you wouldn’t need, at some point, to break it.

The guys were no more than twenty or twenty-one. Boys, she thought when she saw them, even though she wasn’t much older, just twenty-three herself. They were probably students at Georgia Southern, or the University, maybe fraternity brothers. Definitely C students. They had average written all over them.

But they had money, that much she could see, just from the way they were dressed. Vineyard Vines shorts, Sperry deck shoes, and crisp oxford shirts they probably sent out to be laundered. Even though they looked freshly showered, their eyes were watery and red, and they still smelled of the previous night: tequila, sweat, and sex. Somehow, they’d made their way down to the southern part of Savannah’s historic district, blocks from the tourist epicenter nearer to the river. She might as well snag them before somebody else did.

They were good for at least two hundred and thirty-five, she figured, eighty for each of the two palm readings, and maybe an extra seventy-five for an aura session. They wouldn’t tip; she’d bet every penny of her last $36.08 on that. But letting them in was still a better idea than sitting here at her table, scrolling her phone, waiting for several thousand bucks to miraculously drop in her lap.

She asked them to sit and, in the time it took them to man-spread on her green velvet settee in her anteroom, she’d assessed their auras:

Stupid. Shallow. Cruel.

She’d seen that last part immediately, that they were bullies, the minute the taller of the two had opened his mouth to ask if she “had something—wink, wink, ha, ha—extraspecial for them.” She understood the clumsy double entendre.

Filthy cockroaches, she thought. Hiding in dark places, scuttling in the daylight, allergic to real, authentic human contact.

She envisioned herself stomping them into a smear of guts with the thick soles of her well-scuffed combat boots, over and over again. Then, thinking of Edie, she amended the fantasy, and instead imagined Litha discovering them, snatching them up in her sharp teeth, and gently batting them around for hours with her hypodermic-sharp claws before finally crunching down on each, a late-afternoon treat. She smiled at that.

She took their credit card information and did the readings. Gave them her very best. Okay, eighty-five percent of her best. They ended up paying two-forty, but not after sniggering throughout both readings, as well as making more unfunny sexual jokes.

Afterward, though, she didn’t know what came over her. It wasn’t anger necessarily or resentment of the boys. It was more that she was tired. Tired of holding back. Tired of playing nice. Tired of trying to make her grandmother proud. As she opened the door, she stopped the first young man with a hand to his chest.

“You’ve broken your mother’s heart,” she said quietly to him.

He froze, looked down at her hand, then back up at her. Fear flickered in his eyes.

“That’s why she searches,” Ingrid said. “It’s not your father’s fault. It’s that she’s lost her child.”

His face seemed to melt, and in the way his eyes softened, there was a brief glimpse of the child he must’ve been at one time. She saw his innocence, his eagerness, his loving side. But then the curtain closed, his face hardened again, and he pushed past her.

Out on the sidewalk, Ingrid could hear his friend asking what she’d said. He didn’t answer, just turned around and shot her a look that felt like bullet fire.

“Fucking bitch,” he said to his friend, then spat on the ground and walked away.

In the small parlor where she did her readings, she sprayed the marble-topped table with lavender oil cleaner and wiped it down. The wrought iron door of the cozy anteroom was still propped open to the sidewalk—something she’d done earlier that morning when she’d been feeling optimistic about the river of abundance that was—definitely, absolutely, finally—flowing her way.

But this was the new Savannah, and optimism didn’t pay the bills here. Not like it had in the old version of the city—that quirky Shangri-la tucked away on Georgia’s coast, which had been her grandmother Edie’s home. In the mid-nineties a wildly popular book came out—Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, usually referred to by the locals as “that bestselling book”—and changed all of that. The book, then the movie, built a kind of mythos around the town, one of cheerful transgender cabaret stars, reckless gigolos, and murderous debutantes, and it drew tourists from all corners of the earth to it like a magnet. But the book was never a complete picture of the city. And now, the true artists, the provocateurs of this town, didn’t command the main stage. They’d been swept off the streets and into the gutter to make way for the real show: money.

The new Savannah was buffed, shiny, corporate, and ridiculously expensive. A postmodern, gentrified, Airbnb- and Uber-infested playground whose rents were now out of reach for many of its own citizens. Savannah was the plain girl who had, after getting her glow-up, immediately dropped all her weird friends.

There were still pockets of the old city left, but there was no telling how long these places would last; from time to time, an old restaurant or shop would quietly shutter its doors only to be replaced by a Moe’s or Jersey Mike’s or simply a placard that read AVAILABLE. Downtown was all Urban Outfitters and Hilton Garden Inns and Starbucks. It made Ingrid glad Edie had lost her grip on reality before having to witness it.

And now, the vultures were circling Ingrid. If she wanted to keep her small corner of Savannah intact—her house and the psychic business she operated out of it—she’d have to somehow figure out a way to pay the property tax bill that was coming due next month. She was many thousands of dollars shy of having the full amount, and things weren’t looking good. Even after she’d sent Miles out with more flyers.

Ingrid walked out to the sunny sidewalk and glanced up and down the street. There was no one in sight. She looked at the chalkboard sign that proclaimed MISS EDIE’S PALM AND AURA READING in careful chalk calligraphy letters. Her grandmother had done business on this street, in this same town house that faced what used to be Calhoun Square but was now Taylor Square, nearly every day for more than fifty-five years and been able to easily pay off the mortgage on the place back in the eighties. She had been a fixture in Savannah for decades. Now it seemed like no one remembered her.

Five years ago, when Edie got sick, Ingrid had taken over the business. It had been a struggle to convince Edie’s regulars to entrust their psychic needs to an eighteen-year-old, but she’d managed to replace the clients who left with new ones. And then, two years ago, Edie died. She left her granddaughter the town house, free and clear of any encumbrances. But Ingrid was young and financially untrained and had been ignorant of the ever-inflating size of the property taxes levied on the well-located house. The realization had been a shock.

The small amount of cash Edie left her had been eaten up in that first year on a new furnace, foundation repair work, and the taxes. Since then, Ingrid lived in a state of near-constant panic. The place was falling down around her ears. She could barely keep up with the utilities. She felt the burden of the money she would soon owe every single day. How naïve she’d been, in so many ways. Naïve and foolish. No wonder her business was failing. What kind of psychic-witch loses her grandmother’s fully paid-for house? A bad one, that’s what kind.

Now, as Ingrid, squinting into the glaring midday sun, surveyed the house, a whisper of dread threaded through her. The place might look magical at night, in the moonlight, behind the lacy veil of Spanish moss, with the streetlamps and the flickering ghostly gaslight of the huge brass lantern above the front door casting shadows over the pink plaster. But right now, in the unforgiving light of day, it just looked like a dump.

“Ahoy there!” Miles’s golden-haired head, tied with a faded green bandanna, appeared on the roof of the town house. He was holding onto one of the fourth-floor gables, like the seaman he was raised to be. He was shirtless, his lean torso gleaming as golden as his hair in the burning sun, and even from the street she could see his startling, light blue eyes. Turquoise as the Caribbean.

Slight but sinewy, tanned beyond what his fair complexion should be, Miles had worked on his father’s shrimping boat right up until the man had lost it in a legal dispute. Now at age twenty-six, in exchange for a room on the third floor and whatever food she had in the fridge, he helped Ingrid keep the place running. But just barely. The town house was bigger than it looked, and he could only do so much. And he had another job that kept him busy enough—leading historical and ghost tours for a local outfit in town.

They’d met after Ingrid had found a Moonlight and Magnolia Tours brochure tucked into the garden-level, iron door of her town house and decided a ghost tour was the perfect place to meet tourists and rustle up some more business. She’d been assigned to Miles’s group, and they’d hit it off immediately. It was only a week later when she asked him to move in.

They had a unique friendship, she and Miles. Close, but not in a romantic or sexual way. Just real, true friendship. He was a generous soul. Guileless, upbeat, and giving. He would drop whatever he was doing when she asked for help or a favor or even just something to drink. And while she always sensed that she fell short of reciprocating his particular form of ardent, fiery commitment, she still felt a deep connection to him.

He always had looked a bit to her like he could’ve been living in another century. Maybe kidnapped by Blackbeard to swab the deck of The Queen Anne’s Revenge and terrorize merchant ships. Poor Miles. Born to the water. Lost on land.

But he was her other half. A fellow traveler in this harsh, often cruel world. He made her feel less alone in this new Savannah without her grandmother. They would always be there for each other, no matter what.

She squinted up at Miles. It was so hot. She could feel her dress, made of an unbreathable polyester chiffon and purchased at the Goodwill, sticking to her. Drips of sweat were already coursing down her back, tributaries forming a river down her spine and into her ass. But she’d never dream of wearing shorts. Edie hadn’t approved of dressing casually for work.

Edie also revered the hot Savannah sun. The sun, the light, was female, she’d always said. The sun was their Goddess, not a male entity like some believed. The moon was male, only able to reflect the glory of the Goddess. Edie’s beliefs weren’t like anything Ingrid had read in witchcraft texts or teaching, but they made sense to her. Right now, though, Ingrid wished the Goddess would take it down a notch.

“You’re going to need a new roof,” Miles shouted down at her. “I did what I could with the extra shingles, but the flashing’s a mess. Even the decking is rotted through …” He held his hands up, apologetic.

“Okay.” She nodded.

“Don’t worry about this ship, though. She ain’t gonna sink. She’s got good …” He swung a hand around his head, trying to think of the word. “Um, the heavy stuff, down in the hull?”

“Ballast,” she supplied.

“Oh yeah!” He crowed like a lunatic rooster. “She’s got good ballast. The heaviest of the heavy, you know? It’s you, sitting down there at your table, pulling down all the power of the Goddess.” He shook his head. “You’re holding it down, Miss Ingrid. You’re the ballast.”

“All right,” she said with false cheeriness. “Okay.” She really was starting to dread these pep talks of his. In the end, it wasn’t him who had to pay the tax bill.

Miles turned back to the rotting roof.

“Hey—” she yelled up at him, suddenly feeling bad for taking his support for granted.

He appeared again, a grin lighting his eyes. “Hey!”

“Be careful up there.”

“Hey,” he said back.

She squinted up.

“Those guys give you any trouble?”

She waved him off. “Couple of college dummies. No big deal.”

He gave her a look that said he didn’t buy it. He knew her so well, which sort of annoyed her. Still, she wasn’t about to confess what she’d done. Basically, gone down a dark path and imparted information to a client that, while true, should’ve been delivered in a far more sensitive way, if at all.

She had been given a gift, the same gift Edie had. She was supposed to use it wisely, not to make a stupid kid feel bad about his life. Not for revenge or any other selfish goal. She was supposed to stay in the light. Edie had told her how important that was the day before she died.

Ingrid knew better.

She just had to buckle down and do what was right.

Out of the corner of her eye, Ingrid saw the sheer lace curtain in a window of the town house to the right of hers flutter and drop. Behind it, Gloria Ledieu’s powdery white face, blue-black hair, that slash of coral lipstick was visible for a brief second. She’d obviously heard the exchange between Ingrid and Miles.

Dried-up, Bible-quoting vampire, Ingrid thought darkly.

Once, when Ingrid was a little girl, Gloria had told Edie she didn’t know how Edie could worship Satan and not be afraid of going to hell. Edie hadn’t deigned to answer her, but later, when Ingrid asked her about it, she said who had time for someone who didn’t know the difference between a pagan and a Satanist, for Pete’s sake?

Lately, every time Gloria ran into Ingrid and Miles outside their houses, the old bat said in a pinched, high-pitched, baby voice that she’d buy Ingrid’s town house if she ever wanted to sell. She sometimes added that she was praying for them.

Gloria probably couldn’t wait for the whole roof to cave in on Ingrid and Miles so she and her red-faced husband, Harmon, could unload their much plainer brick town house next door and buy Ingrid’s prettier place. In fact, Gloria Ledieu was probably on her knees right that very moment, before that framed picture of Blond Jesus she had hanging in her living room, practicing her own form of witchcraft—that old Bible magic known as “name it and claim it”—telling God she wanted the place for herself.

Dear Lord, how does a Satan worshipper like Ingrid White deserve to live in such a historically important piece of property? With such intricate ironwork? And plaster ceiling medallions and herringbone oak floors? It’s blasphemy, Jesus, that’s what it is …

Ingrid was glad there was no foot traffic. She wasn’t in the right frame of mind. She went back inside and pulled the iron door shut with a deafening clang. She hoped the neighbors heard it, that it had scared the bejesus out of Gloria Ledieu and knocked Blond Jesus off the wall, falling right on that judgey noggin of hers.

Maybe it had given her other neighbor, Dean Remington, a fright, too. Such a fright that one of his precious eighteenth-century French porcelain soup dishes slipped from his pale, elegant fingers and shattered into smithereens on his waxed floor. Old Dean wanted her house as well, so he could make it into an Airbnb that his much-younger husband could run instead of modeling or acting or whatever the guy pretended to do while he actually smoked weed all day by the soaking pool in their manicured courtyard.

But no one was getting this place.

No one.

It was Ingrid’s place of business. Her home and her birth-right from the last remaining family member she had. This is what the Ledieus and Dean Remington and his lazy husband could never understand. She didn’t care how the paint peeled, or the roof leaked. They would carry her out of this place dead before she gave it up.

She closed the inner door, letting her head rest against it. She closed her eyes. All she had on the books for the remainder of the day—a gorgeous Saturday in May, Memorial Day weekend—was a single bachelorette party. One single bachelorette party, when every hotel, bed-and-breakfast, and Airbnb in the city was fully booked. When downtown was crawling with tourists. When no one could get a seat at The Grey or Saint Bibiana or The Olde Pink House, she had one measly bachelorette party.

Despair crashed over her. She was fooling herself to think she could keep her neighbors or anyone else who had enough cash away from this place. She was going to lose her home. It was only a matter of time.

She pushed away from the door. Her hands were shaking, her breath coming out in short, scary puffs. A panic attack. She could feel it coming, and the fear of that was almost greater than the original fear. She had to calm down before the bachelorette party showed up. Otherwise, she couldn’t hear anything the Goddess had to say to her. Her readings would bomb, and if that happened, there was no chance of a tip.

Her panic grew. She owed the Chatham County tax commissioner $8,900 in exactly one month. What was she going to do?

Nothing, right now. Right now, she had to calm herself. She looked around the room where she received clients—her grandmother’s parlor—and catalogued all the things she saw in the calmest way she could.

Pink marble table (in the center of the room) …

Moss-green velvet Victorian settee (by the door) …

Threadbare, mismatched armchairs (flanking the settee, there since 1969 when Edie first opened up shop) …

She breathed in and out, slowly and steadily. There used to be a grass rug covering the pine floor back then, but when Ingrid had gotten Litha, the cat had scratched it to ribbons, and Edie’d had to throw it on the curb. When her grandmother had taken to her bed, confused from the cancer, and refusing to eat or bathe, Ingrid had dragged a dusty Turkish rug out of one of the guest rooms and down the stairs.

Edie …

Edie, where are you? I need you …

And yet her grandmother did not appear. Ingrid stood and walked farther into the depths of the garden level, through the warren of bare brick and pine floors that had been Edie’s storage rooms. The cramped bathroom had a single light bulb that cast a sickly yellow glow from the ceiling, a corner sink with a crumbly rubber stopper on a chain, and a toilet that sounded like a 747 taking off when it flushed.

She splashed her face with water and looked hard at the medicine cabinet’s corroded mirror. She looked paler than usual with shadows under her deep-set hazel eyes. In this light her eyes looked dark and depthless, full of fear. Not good. Not the kind of aura that drew clients in.

She smoothed the curtain of light brown hair that hung around her narrow face, the bangs that lay across her forehead. She swiped under her eyes. Lifted her hands up beside her face and swished outward, brushing away the nasty stuff those boys had brought in with them. Brush, brush, brush. All the negative energy moved away from her. Moved to another place. Wave, wave, wave in the good, the light, the fortune.

She closed her eyes and pictured Edie. Not the Edie at the very end who lay in bed, thin and gray, hands like claws, with her mouth hanging open, teeth unbrushed because she fought Ingrid’s attempts with the toothbrush. Not the Edie ravaged by a cancer of the lungs that made the doctors frown in bewilderment because, not only had the woman never smoked, she hated the smell of cigarettes.

No. She pictured Edie the way she was when Ingrid first came to live with her.

Edith White had been short like Ingrid, with birdlike arms and long, loose, gray hair held back by twin gold barrettes. She had kind brown eyes and pleasantly wrinkled, pink-as-a-bunny-rabbit skin. The day Ingrid arrived, Edie was wearing a shapeless linen dress, a lavender mohair sweater, and Birken-stocks with moisture-wicking socks. She’d welcomed Ingrid with three brisk kisses, one for each cheek and one on the forehead. Then she had served her a plate of warm gingerbread topped with whipped cream.

Ingrid was six years old and at the time, nobody had explained anything to her. Her mother, Tess, and Tess’s nameless boyfriend, not Ingrid’s father, had simply dropped her off at Edie’s and driven off in a cloud of Dodge Charger exhaust. Edie told her granddaughter that she was there because Edie was a widow and lonely and had wanted Ingrid to come live with her. Had insisted on it, frankly, so many times that Ingrid’s mother finally relented and dropped the girl off for a forever sleepover.

But now that she was grown and Tess was lying in a grave somewhere in Florida that Ingrid had never seen, she knew the story was bullshit. A fantasy concocted by a grandmother to make a little girl feel loved. Still, the story made her feel warm inside. It made her love Edie even more.

Eyes closed, Ingrid could see her grandmother in perfect detail. The version who opened the black door of the pink plaster town house when she was six years old, standing alone on the small marble stoop, clutching her nylon duffel bag. Ingrid saw Edie’s smile, a smile that bathed her in warm, liquid light. She followed the sharp eyes that darted down to the Dodge idling at the curb, then back up to Ingrid’s face. She heard the message they sent: You are mine now. I will take care of you.

And she had. She had loved Ingrid and taught her everything she knew. She had left her all her worldly possessions. And she had charged her with a mission, even though that mission remained as murky now as it had when Edie bestowed it two years ago. A bunch of vague talk about righting balances and keeping an eye out for pirates.

It was the cancer talking, she’d convinced herself. Definitely not something she could figure out by trying.

“Edie,” Ingrid said now, out into the small bathroom. She mentally bent that very same light that had connected the two of them all those years ago, using it to link her heart to her grandmother’s spirit. “We are connected.”

The room was still. She could hear Miles banging somewhere above her, up on the roof.

Her brow furrowed as she imagined the light looping around each chamber of her heart, blasting open the valves and shooting directly into her grandmother’s spirit. Help me, Edie. I’m so alone. I don’t know what to do. I need your help …

She waited, but the air in the bathroom was still. She opened her eyes. Her face looked exactly the same, except now, there was a distinct bloom of red in the corner of her right eye. Probably a speck of dust from this crumbling house. Great.

She switched off the light in the bathroom and headed back to the parlor. At the old rolltop desk, which had also been her grandmother’s, she checked the green-and-gold ledger, where Edie used to record her appointments. It even still had the last few clients Edie had seen before she died, the appointments written on the first few pages in her elegant, slanted handwriting. The ledger was enormous, taking up most of the surface of the desk, with large pages of thick vellum that required an actual finesse when turning them and therefore felt somehow of import. Like she was some kind of medieval mage, thumbing through an ancient codex.

She’d used the ledger when she’d first taken over for Edie, eventually transitioning to the calendar on her laptop for convenience. But that laptop had given up the ghost a few months ago and she didn’t have the funds to replace it, so she’d returned to the ledger.

Ingrid flipped the page to the day’s date and ran her finger down to the one o’clock line and the name she’d written there.

Sailor Loeffler, bachelorette, 5

As she read the entry, she felt a strange prickling up the back of her neck and over her scalp. Also, at that very same moment, she heard the iron door rattle and whine on its hinges. Then the inner door opened, and sunlight filled both the anteroom and the parlor, almost immediately followed by a heady cloud of multiple brands of perfume.

Ingrid turned toward the open door to greet the party. For a brief moment, she was blinded by the bright sunshine, which made the shadowy parlor look even darker, but then her eyes adjusted, and she was able to perceive the outline of a woman. The woman who stood in front of the others.

Her.

She.

The most important one. The one who mattered.

She stood out from all the rest. Her … she … was tall and willowy and graceful. Dressed in an extremely short, ruffled flower print dress that showed legs, long and sculpted like a ballerina’s. Her hair was a cool vanilla blond that spilled over one shoulder and all the way down to her waist. It framed a face made of sharp, smooth, flawless planes with wide-set, startlingly blue eyes. Not merely homecoming-queen pretty, this woman was a real, honest-to-God beauty. When she turned to say something to her friends, the hair swung and wrapped around her shoulders and arms …

Salt water and cane sugar, Ingrid thought instantly.

Then the other girls came into sharp focus. Four of them and not girls, actually. Women in their mid-twenties. All beautiful, too, in various ways. Short, tall, curvy. Each impeccably dressed, each bejeweled, carefully coiffed, and expertly made up.

Richies, Miles would call them.

“Oh my God, she’s staring at you,” said one of them. “She must be seeing something in the spirit world.”

There was a ripple of laughter. Ingrid flushed, looked down at the floor.

“Finley.” The girl, the leader—her … she—spoke in the tone of someone who was comfortable being in charge, always being the final word, in both praising and reprimanding. The tittering ceased.

In the sudden quiet, Ingrid looked up. She was smiling at her, not with the practiced smirk of an Instagram model but with a pure sincerity. As she did, her eyes crinkled, and her perfectly straight, white teeth flashed.

“Hi, Edie,” the girl said to her in a mellifluous voice. “I’m Sailor Loeffler. It’s so nice to meet you.” She held out her hand, forthright and frank, and Ingrid took it. Squeezed once, gently, then released it.

Weak in the knees. Isn’t that what they said when you met your Prince Charming? Ingrid wouldn’t know; it had never happened to her. But this … this felt like something awfully close to that. Not romantic or sexual. Something much, much more important. Something like destiny.

She finally found her voice. “Edie was my grandmother. I’m Ingrid, actually.”

“Ingrid. I love that name.”

Ingrid flushed. “Please come in. Everyone.”

Ingrid might’ve said everyone, but she kept her eyes on Sailor Loeffler. The words were said to her and her alone, because, in some strange way, in the way Edie had taught her to trust, Ingrid knew that the only one who would ever matter to her in that room, the person who was going to change her life forever, was Sailor Loeffler.

Ingrid, distracted by her money woes, hadn’t realized the Sailor Loeffler in her appointment book was one of the