CHAPTER 1
JAIME
NOTHING GOOD EVER HAPPENED in Saint Juniper, Vermont.
Okay, that might have been a little dramatic. Nothing good ever happened to me in Saint Juniper, and if I’d had to bet on it, nothing ever would. Maybe I didn’t have the authority to make a sweeping statement about a place I barely remembered, but hey, lack of common sense had never stopped me before.
For years, Saint Juniper had only existed inside my head as a sort of a fever dream—a tourist trap nestled neatly between the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains, seemingly staged for the sole purpose of producing exceptionally charming postcards. Everything about it felt suffocating, except for the vast forest and craggy peaks that formed a massive valley on the north side of town.
I didn’t remember much of anything else, but I didn’t think it mattered. As far as I was concerned, the odds I’d ever go back to my hometown were near zero. But when the summer before my senior year came barreling into my life, the universe and the Vermont Department for Children and Families had other plans for me. One flight and two bus rides later, I was unceremoniously dumped back into a past I had spent the better part of eight years trying to forget.
I’d set my expectations comfortably low, but I did have one goal when I came back to Saint Juniper: I wanted a fresh start. This was my last shot to get things right before I turned eighteen. I didn’t want to mess things up with my newly assigned legal guardian before I had the chance to unpack the single trash bag full of belongings I’d salvaged from my cross-country foster-care extravaganza of a childhood.
But the second I stepped onto Saint Juniper soil, I realized I was screwed.
It was like if a picture book about Colonial America and Children of the Corn had a baby. There was one elementary school, one high school, and one grocery store, all within walking distance of the town center, with its little brick sidewalks and candy-striped awnings. Every neighborhood was lined with white picket fences and two-hundred-year-old oak trees that probably had more laws protecting them than I had protecting me. I was eighty percent convinced that the adults in Saint Juniper had been beamed in by aliens or planted by the government, because I refused to believe that anyone would live here of their own free will.
And then there was the gossip. I’d lived in enough small towns to know that my entire existence would become a public spectacle. But Saint Juniper wasn’t like other small towns. It was worse. I thought I’d be able to enjoy a few days of anonymity, but when I ventured out to Main Street for the first time after my move, I realized that everyone had already gotten the memo about me. The cashier at the corner store held the twenty-dollar bill I gave him up to the light, and the woman bagging my groceries leveled a scowl at me that said she already knew my entire life story.
Anywhere else, dirty looks could have been about anything from the way I dressed to the color of my skin. It had never been a cakewalk, and I’d learned to shrug it off as best as I could. But in Saint Juniper, it was impossible not to wonder if the woman with the salt-and-pepper hair bagging my groceries remembered me from when I was a kid, or if the clerk at town hall had known my mom before I came into the picture. Every sidelong heavy-with-judgment glance carried the extra weight of possible recognition, or worse, pity.
After only two weeks in town, my nerves had practically rubbed themselves raw. I felt trapped, and I found myself—not for the first, the tenth, or even the hundredth time in my life—daydreaming about running away. But I wasn’t thinking about some far-off city where nobody knew my name or my face or the people who had given both of them to me. I was thinking about the valley. Because in the back of my mind, there was a persistent drumbeat telling me I would be safe in the woods. That something was out there to meet me on the other side.
I got the final push I needed when I stopped by Maple City Diner one night. The waitress knew which takeout order was mine before I could give her my name, and two women at the counter fell silent the second they noticed me.
“Oh, you look just like Samantha,” one of them said. It felt like all the oxygen was sucked out of
he room as she turned to her friend. “Doesn’t he look just like her?”
The other woman nodded. “Totally. You have her eyes. Shame about the way things ended up. We all thought Sammie was going to do such amazing things. And then, well—”
The door shut behind me before she could finish, my order still sitting on the counter. I walked out of the restaurant and down the street, not caring where I was going. I didn’t want to be seen. I wanted to disappear. So even when the sun set beyond the pines, when the sidewalk gave way to grass and the grass gave way to the forest floor, I kept walking.
I couldn’t help but wonder if my biggest mistake was wanting too much—from Saint Juniper, from my ridiculous pipe dream of a fresh start. I wanted so badly to have a future that didn’t look exactly like what everyone else expected it to be. I didn’t want to be another foster kid who fell off the map, who never got to be happy. But maybe I was better off alone, out of sight and out of mind. After all, who would really care if a person like me walked into Saint Juniper’s Folly and never came back?
CHAPTER 2
TAYLOR
EVEN AFTER RINSING MY hands with rose water, the smell of cinnamon oil clung to my skin so strongly I almost got up to open a window. I wrinkled my nose, making a mental note to use rosemary oil next time, and forced myself to breathe through it. I only had a little time left, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to waste it.
In through the nose, out through the mouth. After weeks of trial and error, I thought I had finally found the right setup. The yarrow and bay leaves had spent hours charging in the light of a full moon, and I had swapped fresh thyme for dried in the wax-sealed jars spread in front of my crossed legs.
Another breath in, another out. I let thoughts meander through my head uninterrupted, and just when one of my legs started to fall asleep, I felt the unmistakable buzz in my chest that could only mean one thing: for the first time in months, I was tapping into my sixth sense. This is it. I let my eyelids flutter closed. You just have to reach out and—
Half a second later, a knock at my bedroom door made me jump so hard it practically gave me whiplash.
“Hija, do I smell smoke?”
My eyes flew open and instantly landed on the culprits: the white pillar candles that surrounded my makeshift altar. Shit. Shitshitshit. “Uh, no?”
I was leaning in to blow them out, careful not to let my ringlets get caught in the flames, when I remembered that blowing out candles disrespected the intention you set for your spellwork. In a panic, I licked my finger and tried to snuff the wicks as quickly as I could. Instead, I ended up with a burned thumb and a mouthful of truly foul curse words that tumbled out before I could stop them.
“What’s wrong?” Elias said from behind the door. “Forget it, I’m coming in—”
“No!” I squeaked, cradling my throbbing fingers against my chest as I shoved the altar under the bed with my foot. “I’m changing, I’ll be down in a sec.”
Elias didn’t respond right away, but hearing the floorboards creak as he rocked back from the door let my heart rate lower to a nonlethal tempo.
“Fine,” he replied, “but if you don’t get your ass downstairs in two minutes, we’re going to lose customers.”
I knew I’d cut it way too close for comfort as I listened to his footsteps retreat down the hallway. Elias wasn’t stupid, and if I wasn’t more careful, I was definitely going to get caught red-handed.
Not a lot scared me in life, but pissing my dad off was up there in the top five natural disasters I’d like to avoid at all costs. Elias had always made it very clear he didn’t think parents were supposed to be friends with their kids. Parents were supposed to be firm, strong, and unwavering. I was pretty sure it was more of an old-fashioned parenting thing than machismo, though I guess you could never rule that out completely with a traditional Boricua dad.
I rushed to get ready, which was a real feat even on the best day, given my room’s layout. Maps and movie tickets and hand-scrawled quotes covered the walls, while my floor space was taken up by houseplants and an amalgamation of vintage furniture salvaged from secondhand stores across New England. It was a great space to hide things, but terrible for getting ready in a hurry.
I quickly swapped the grungy tee I slept in for a flowy white linen shirt, checking myself out in the full-length mirror to make sure it wasn’t too wrinkled. After arranging my curls into the world’s messiest topknot, I snagged my apron off its hook and rushed down the stairs. There were plenty of drawbacks that came with living in the apartment above our family shop, but the nonexistent commute made it hard to complain.
I was still wrestling with the tie on my apron by the time I made it onto the shop floor. I always thought it looked prettiest in the mornings, clear light filtering through the latticed windows and bouncing off the dark hardwood floors. The walls were painted black, though you couldn’t see much of them behind the books, crystals, and relics that lined the shelves from floor to ceiling. The only exception was the spot over the fireplace, where a taxidermied owl spread its wings wide above the mantle.
The group of customers Elias had mentioned was clustered around our assortment of potions at the
back of the shop, and Elias was nowhere to be seen. If I had to bet money on it, I’d have guessed he was in the storeroom going over the books. Customer service wasn’t exactly his number one priority. After all, a guy who hated witchcraft owning an occult shop wasn’t the greatest combination.
The whole situation was still ridiculous to me, even after four months of him running the place. Avalon Apothecary was the reason my family had moved from Boston to Wolf’s Head, Vermont, when I was thirteen. It was my mom’s passion, not just as a business owner, but as a true-blue ancestral witch. And yeah, to a lot of people that was like saying my mom was the queen of the damned or something equally outlandish. But I was the latest and greatest in a long line of witches. I grew up smack-dab in the middle of magic, so much so that my parents once had to sit me down and explain that it only existed for other kids in the pages of storybooks. Until that point, I thought everybody’s mom could help spirits pass to the other side, just like I thought everybody washed their hair on a specific day of the week or had a dozen mismatched containers of homemade salsa in their fridge.
Elias revered magic when I was a kid, cherishing it with as much care and admiration as he loved every other thing about my mom and our little family of three. He had grown up in Puerto Rico surrounded by Santería and Brujería, so when he’d moved to Boston for college and met my mom, none of her practice seemed out of the ordinary to him. Running the apothecary wasn’t just her dream, it was his too.
But Elias’s attitude toward magic inexplicably soured when we moved to Vermont, and his resentment had only grown after my mom suddenly passed away in the spring. He decided to keep the shop open until we managed to sell off our remaining inventory, but after that, I was pretty sure he’d shut the place down and never want to hear a peep about spellwork again. In the meantime, Elias made one thing perfectly clear: I was forbidden (yes, that was really the word he used) from practicing magic on my own.
Personally, I thought he was full of crap. But even though we didn’t see eye to eye, helping him run the shop felt like the only way to keep my mom’s memory alive. It hurt and healed in equal parts that every time I looked at our antique cash register, all I could see was her perched on a stool behind the counter, bronze hair piled into an impossibly messy bun, gray eyes bright as she talked to customers about divination even if they didn’t believe a word she was saying.
I was pretty sure that wasn’t how the interaction between me and the gaggle of teenagers at the back of the store would go, but I kept my head held high as I made my way to the rack of potions.
“Can I help you with anything?” I asked.
They all jumped apart like I’d doused them with a hose. It probably would’ve struck me as a bit
funnier if it didn’t happen so often. It was painfully obvious that they were from Saint Juniper—the postcard-perfect next town over that was stuffy as hell. Most people from there saw Wolf’s Head as Saint Juniper’s earthier, grungier younger sibling. By extension, our shop was just a tacky little tourist pit stop. They would come in for a laugh, then get embarrassed when I actually expected them to buy something.
One of the girls held up a glass jar sealed with red wax, similar to the ones I’d been working with upstairs. “How much for this one?”
“The love potions are forty-five a pop,” I said coolly, and her face pinched.
“My god, why?” muttered one of the boys at the back of the group. Another kid jammed an elbow into his ribs, and the girl holding the potion had the decency to glower at him too.
“Well,” I replied with a smile, “you’re paying for quality.”
The girl nodded and chewed her lip while the boys shuffled behind her. After she finally announced she would take it, the group whispered among themselves the entire time I rang them up at the register.
Okay, I’ll admit the quality comment was bullshit. The love potions we sold were fake and always had been. Forcing someone to fall for you without their consent was beyond creepy, and no self-respecting modern witch would make the real thing for just anyone. Plus, that kind of stuff was never really the focus in our house.
There were some witches that were all about potions and alchemy, while others had grimoires full of info on every crystal you could imagine. But my mom had always been drawn to herbalism and spiritualism, and by extension, so had I. Our brand of witchcraft was all about drawing energy from nature to connect with spirits, living or dead.
Under Elias’s judgmental eye I couldn’t do much, but I still managed to practice in my own way. I remembered how to purify spaces with smoke cleansing and minor spells, mimicking how my mom used to do things and hoping for the best. I worked on tapping into my sixth sense, tuning in to the energy around me, like I’d been trying to do that morning. But I couldn’t improve much without proper direction, and without access to my mom’s catalogue of spells and vast breadth of knowledge stored in our family grimoire. Her things were packed in a box somewhere, and any chance I had to advance my magic was packed away with them.
After the girl paid for her love potion, the rest of the day dragged on for what felt like forever. A handful of other customers wandered into the store, and Elias checked in with me a few times before closing. In my downtime, I wandered the shop floor, tucking a bay leaf into my apron here and a sprig of lavender there. I liked to think it didn’t count as shoplifting if it was from your own business. Elias was desperate to be rid of the stuff anyway, so figured I might as well take it off his hands.
Later that evening, when the store had been swept and locked up for the night, I returned to my room and emptied my pockets to take stock of my spoils. As I carefully hid my new stash between my box spring and my mattress, I wondered for the millionth time if things really had to be like this between me and Elias. I didn’t want to feel like a criminal in my own house, but I also knew there were some things he would never budge on no matter how hard I pushed.
With my dad, the big, bold questions in life always got answered with some variation of “ya, se acabó la discusión” or “I don’t want to hear that from you again.” My mom was a bit different when she was still around, but not by much. “Why aren’t there other kids at school who look like me?” and “Why can birds fly but I can’t?” were usually answered the same way. She would sweep a ring-heavied hand across my curls, a perfect mix between the color of her hair and the texture of my father’s, and say, “Sweetie, that’s just the way things are sometimes.”
That was the answer I got right after we moved, when I asked my mom why my dad suddenly seemed so wary of magic. It was the answer I got in the years after that, when she got sick but never went to the hospital. And it was the answer I gave myself when the principal pulled me out of class in the spring to tell me that my mom was gone. That’s just the way things were sometimes.
It took me too long to realize the questions my parents didn’t want to answer were the ones that held the most power. Questions like why they insisted I stay away from Saint Juniper’s Folly—the massive, yawning valley on the south side
of town. When I asked, they didn’t say people slipped and fell and went missing. Instead, they brushed it off or changed the subject every single time.
After my mom passed, I started to understand why. There was something about the valley that wasn’t quite right. I had always felt it tugging at the edges of my mind, thrumming with a magnetic sort of energy that I couldn’t identify. And then I found the note.
The weather had turned in May, and I’d been cleaning out our coat closet when I found my mom’s favorite jacket crumpled on the floor. My chest ached just looking at it, but the ache shifted to a painful sort of pinch when I saw it was caked with mud. I couldn’t imagine she would’ve gone on a hike after being chronically exhausted for years. When I shook off some of the larger chunks of debris, a piece of paper had fallen out of one of the pockets.
Still kneeling by my bed, I felt around my hiding spot until my fingers connected with the well-worn note. Pulling it out, I turned it over in my hands like I had a hundred times. When I unfolded it and flattened it out, I saw four miles south, three miles west scrawled in handwriting I knew as well as my own. A crude drawing at the bottom was crowded with shorthand for different species of trees, the kind only a dedicated herbalist would think to note. It took me a while to figure out that the lines formed a map, and along with the mud on the jacket, there was no doubt in my mind that one of the last things my mom had done was go into the valley. A week after I found it, Elias moved all my mom’s clothes into storage.
I didn’t ask him about what I’d found, because by that point I’d learned it would save us both a lot of heartache if I stopped asking questions I’d never get proper answers to. It was the same reason I deferred my acceptance to my dream college so I could keep running the shop without asking my dad if he wanted the help in the first place. ...
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