CHAPTER 1
Delphine Owens leaned on the railing of the ferry and took a deep breath of sea air, trying to let the fresh air clear out her mind as well as her lungs.
It was a bracing fall day, and the wind coming hard across the sea had a chill to it that made her grateful she’d brought her warmest clothes with her from the States. Having spent a lot of the last decade in Texas, there hadn’t been a lot of need for the kind of insulation she was currently sporting, but she’d been grateful for her mild hoarding tendencies when she realized what time of year she’d be visiting Skye. The box had followed her from house to house, still sealed from the original move down to Texas from her previous home in Montana… but when the news had come through about her trip, she’d been grateful to dig it out and excavate all the warm clothing that felt like it belonged to another life.
And she was pleased it still fit, too. Her twenties had been an interesting decade — she’d grown and changed a lot in the leadup to her thirtieth birthday, which she’d celebrated just before she’d left. But one thing that hadn’t changed was her figure. She’d been a tall child and an even taller teenager, but she was no beanpole — her curves had come in with a vengeance in her teen years, and she’d perfected the art of dressing to accentuate the feminine swell of her hips, her hourglass figure. The divine feminine. She was a striking woman, she knew that… olive skin, forest-green eyes, bold features accentuated by the dark, wavy hair that tumbled like spun silk to her shoulders… if it was who you were, why hide it?
Well, there were a few reasons, she thought drily, feeling the tell-tale prickle on the back of her neck that told her that unwanted male attention was seconds away. Call it a woman’s intuition, or something more supernatural… she turned on her heel and headed for the other side of the ship, and as she did she caught a flash of the disappointed face of a young man who’d been making a beeline for where she’d been standing. Yeah, that checked out. Even decked out in layers of warm clothes, she still managed to draw men like a magnet.
And that had been part of the problem, hadn’t it?
Delphine sighed as she found a place at the railing on the other side of the ferry to Skye, gazing pensively out over the waves as she felt her mind stray back to the subject she’d been so determined to use this trip to get away from. Work. It was just work stress, wasn’t it? But it had been work stress that had been building and growing for years — getting on a plane wasn’t a cure-all, no matter how much she might want it to be. Meditation helped, a little, as did a few rituals of calming, centering, cleansing… but she wasn’t just going to be able to act as though the last year especially hadn’t been especially taxing.
Start a bookstore in a city in Texas, she’d thought. Why not? She’d done the market research, done her due diligence — there was a growing market in Austin for independent bookstores, and that included eccentric and occult specialty places. The city had been calling her since she was a teenager — dreams, intuition, a little bit of scrying and a series of pointed coincidences that no practicing witch worth her salt would ignore. And the whole process of moving down there had gone so smoothly that she’d have been hard pressed to say there hadn’t been some kind of divine intervention. First, the location for the store had all but thrown itself at her — a perfect, historic little storefront with an incredibly low rental cost because of all the historic building restrictions that prevented many improvements to the place from being made. But Delphine didn’t need anything fancy, and the place had such character — it looked for all the world like a witch’s cottage. It was perfect. Eerily perfect.
Then there’d been the condo. She’d formed a few long-distance friendships in Austin as she’d made her steady plans to move down there, and in the week she’d spent down there checking out the potential space for her shop in person, she’d caught up with a lot of them… one of whom had exciting news to drop on her. Delphine and Marianne had met on a message board for practicing witches and struck up a quick friendship. Marianne’s pathway to witchcraft was a tragic one. As long as she could remember, she’d wanted to be a mother. She and her husband had been married at eighteen, right after high school … but as the years had worn on, their attempts to start a family had been in vain. They’d had their work to keep them occupied, establishing a foundation on which to build their family… but when Marianne turned twenty-five without so much as a late period, the two of them went to a specialist. The news was grim… and it had almost ended their marriage, with Marianne begging her husband in tears to leave her, to find someone else to give him children so that at least one of them could be happy.
He’d stayed, to his credit, his love for his wife stronger than his grief that they couldn’t start the family they both so badly wanted. The two of them had turned their attention to what else could be done, looking into adoption or fostering… but Marianne’s grief had been overwhelming. That had been when she’d begun to practice magic, first as a way of distracting herself from her pain, then as a way of healing it. That had been when she and Delphine had met — and Delphine had encouraged her to look into fertility spells. It couldn’t hurt, could it? At the very least, it would be a hobby to keep her busy… and though Marianne had been fairly clear that she didn’t expect anything to come of it, she’d picked up the project with some interest regardless.
Then the two of them met for a cup of coffee — and the look on Marianne’s face had given her away before she’d so much as opened her mouth. Delphine had held up a hand to arrest the small talk, eyes narrowed and intuition prickling at the nape of her neck.
“Marianne,” she’d said slowly. “Why do I feel like I’m here with three people, not just one?”
Her friend had all but burst into tears with the telling of the story, her joy so overwhelming that she could barely speak. She’d been experimenting with a spell she’d found in her research — something between a mantra and a verse, reciting it morning and evening. It made her feel calm and focused, seemed to improve her sleep and her memory — she’d all but forgotten what its original purpose had been. That was, until she’d been cleaning her bathroom and realized with a start that the boxes of tampons she bought once a month like clockwork were piling up in the drawer.
“They called it a miracle,” she confessed, pulling off the bulky cardigan she’d been wearing to reveal a small but undeniable bump. “Every test and scan confirms it’s a healthy, normal pregnancy, though. Davey just about fainted when I told him. And then he all but carried me down to the real estate office to look for a house with more bedrooms.” Another tear rolled down her cheek. “Twins, Delphine. Can you believe it?”
“I’m so happy for you,” Delphine had said, beaming. And then she’d blinked. “Hey — what’s going on with your condo?”
“Not sure,” Marianne had admitted. “We bought it when we’d given up hope of a family, but a one-bedroom is obviously going to be too small for the four of us. It’s a wrench to sell it — Davey’s put so much work into the place but—”
“Rent it to me,” Delphine said, her eyes widening. “Marianne, it’s perfect. I’ll pay whatever you’re still paying on the mortgage each month and owning a property already will make it easier to buy your next place.”
It had been a perfect confluence of events, and the timing had been ideal. Two weeks after her visit, Delphine got a tearful call from Marianne to tell her that they were closing on their dream house. And so she’d moved down to Austin, into a condo that was so well-cared for and full of love… and bicycling distance from her new shop, too.
People often thought witchcraft was about working your will, inflicting your influence on the universe… but they were wrong. The vast majority of the work Delphine did was sitting back and listening to what the universe had to tell her. And for those early years, the universe had been all but singing to her that she was in the right place, doing the right thing. Her bookstore had been a runaway success in its first year. Her market research had been on the money — the area she’d set up in had the perfect combination of artists, students, and general intelligentsia to take an interest in the occult, whether genuine or ironic. She soon had a revolving cast of quirky regulars… and close relationships, of course, with local covens, all of whom were delighted to have a place not only to shop for books and supplies, but to use as a meeting place. Delphine had wasted no time in setting up the upper story of the shop with tables, chairs and couches — a reading nook with a community space, which she offered up free of charge for meetings, book clubs and social groups. Before long, word spread among local students, and she ended up hosting more than a few open mic nights for poetry and play readings. She loved Austin, the weird and wonderful scene she’d become a part of… and Austin, it seemed, had loved her.
At least, it had at first. When had it begun to turn? she wondered now, her eyes on the waves that were rocking the ferry on its steady journey over the sea to Skye. When had things gone sour? It had been around the twins’ fifth birthday party, hadn’t it? Delphine had been an aunty to Marianne’s twin daughters from their birth, and she’d been unable to resist spoiling them rotten on their fifth birthday with a small hoard of books for Isabelle and a collection of magically-imbued gemstones for Sable, who was already taking a keen interest in her mother’s craft. Marianne had given her a lift home that evening, joking that she needed the break from Davey’s fussing — she was pregnant again, still in the very early weeks, and she had her suspicions that it was yet another set of twins. Their five-bedroom house would manage.
That had been when she’d seen them first — a couple of people, peering in through the windows of her shop. Not unusual, in and of itself… plenty of people strolled up and down the busy street, especially on fine evenings, and window-shopping was as nice a way to pass the time as any. But there was something about these two figures that made her intuition sit up and take notice… and she could feel Marianne doing the same. The two figures looked over their shoulders as the car pulled up, and then they hurried away into the evening without looking back.
And even then, Delphine had known that she hadn’t seen the last of them, whoever they were.
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