“Two hundred.” Hawk-sharp eyes set in the face of a kindly grandmother gave Margaret Balefire an unfair advantage. People rarely saw her coming, and with her skills, she could haggle the halo off an angel.
“One fifty.” Her opponent, a buttoned-up type with close-cropped hair and a condescending air countered, but she could tell he was good for a bit more.
“One seventy-five and not a penny less,” Mag fired back.
After a moment of watching her for signs of weakness, the customer swallowed her deceptively dainty hand in his, and sealed the deal.
“You won’t be sorry, and your wife will love adding this to her collection.” Turning, Mag winked at her sister, Clara, who returned the saucy gesture in kind despite the fact she was now on the hook for a lobster dinner.
When the bell over the door jingled behind the happy customer, Mag let out a witch-worthy cackle, and did the old-lady version of a booty dance.
“Told you I’d sell that French boudoir doll before the end of the week,” she told Clara, smirking. “You should never bet against me; I’m a sure thing.”
Driving a hard bargain rated one of the top spots on Mag’s list of fun things to do. Just above scoring one off her sister, but below kicking the butt of anyone or anything that deserved it. With magic, naturally.
“It’s not polite to gloat,” Clara replied, “though I’ll admit you earned the win. That was the creepiest doll I have ever seen in my life.” And that included a nasty little poppet gifted to her from none other than Marie Laveau during Clara’s one and only trip to New Orleans.
“Ernestine?” Mag scoffed. “She’s a beauty. That auburn hair, those painted eyes. Did you see the pin tucks in her dress, and the handmade lace? Sure, she had a few worn places, but who doesn’t when they’re coming up on ninety years old?”
Clara paused in her end of the day cleaning to consider. “It was the eyes that gave me the heebies. They’re crooked.” She waved the feather duster at Mag. Anything that stared in two different directions at the same time was not to be trusted.
“Hand painted,” Mag countered.
“They followed me around the shop, and I—” Whatever Clara had been about to say was lost in the aftermath of a violent shiver. “Did you feel that?” She craned her head around to see if the A/C unit had kicked on, but all the lights were out, and the plug dangled below the outlet.
Mag huffed a breath out through her nose. “It was just a doll, Clarie. Not the spawn of Chucky.”
“Don’t you even joke about a thing like that,” she said, glowering. A fan of horror movies, Clara was not. Just one more difference between the Balefire sisters.
It gave her no sense of triumph, then, when Mag shivered, skittered to the side, and stared at the spot where an icy wind had just washed not only over her, but through her.
“Okay,” Mag said, rubbing her arms and glancing around the room. “That was weird.”
A history spanning more than two human lifetimes spent pursuing rogue magic in beast form had provided Mag with a unique and deeply personal perspective on the term weird.
The bell over the door jangled and the unsettling experience faded into the background then was forgotten as the business day wore on.
Balms and Bygones, a store as unique as its owners, allowed the sisters to combine Mag’s love of all things old with Clara’s knack for creating personal care products. Polished to a shine, Mag’s carefully-chosen shelves and cabinets made the perfect showcase for the jewel-toned bottles and jars that held Clara’s wares.
Located on the edges of Harmony, a coastal resort community, the shop enjoyed a spillover of tourism, which the Balefire sisters didn’t mind at all. Even if they had to hide their inherent witchiness from most of the locals as part of the bargain.
“I’m telling you, it’s like magic.” A vivacious redhead assured her shopping companion. “I’m wearing sandals in public without shame, and my heels are as soft as a baby’s behind. First time that’s happened in years.”
She turned wide blue eyes on Clara. “You have a website I can order from? Because if you don’t, I’ll give you fair warning: I’m going to clean you out. We only come up this way once a year, and I’ll need to stock up.”
“We do.” Clara handed over a brochure, then watched with fascination as the woman whirled through the shop enthusiastically filling a basket anyway. Mag’s lobster winnings wouldn’t take much of a bite out of her half of the day’s profits. Cha-ching.
“I’m May, this is my cousin’s wife, Cindy. She’s local, but I’m the one who found this place first.” As she chattered, more things landed in the basket while Cindy merely nodded, and turned away to stare out the front window.
Shy, or maybe not into shopping, Cindy hunched her shoulders in the way some willowy women do when they’re feeling taller than everyone else and want to fade into the woodwork. Her back to the room, she stood with thin arms folded over her chest and let the conversation swirl into the space without her.
“Do you market your line to salons at all?” May asked, tossing a couple more items into the basket. “My pedicurist is going to flip when she sees my feet, and I bet she’ll want to buy in bulk. Maybe you’d better give me some more of those brochures. Does this purifying mask come in a larger size?”
“Yes—” Clara managed before May pelted her with another barrage of questions.
Maybe Cindy wasn’t shy—maybe she simply knew she wouldn’t get a word in edgewise with May around, and resigned herself to silence.
Fascinated, Mag slid onto one of the tall stools and rested her elbow on the counter and her chin in her hand to watch what happened next. Once, Cindy swiveled her head enough for Mag to catch a subtle eye-roll.
“Oh, that lemongrass-and-sage bath salt smells divine.” May discovered the tester shelf and opened every container for either a sniff or to try a dab on her skin. The woman smelled like a bushel of herbs in a flower garden by the time she got through the lot. But, to Clara’s delight, she continued adding items to her basket.
“Doesn’t this smell amazing?” Hustling over toward the window, May shoved the un-stoppered container in Cindy’s face.
“It’s nice, I guess.” A delicate shudder shook Cindy’s shoulders, and Mag saw the wave of gooseflesh crawl across the woman’s skin. “I’ll be out front, you take your time, though.” Her smile carried a hint of warmth, but her eyes refused to meet Mag’s. It was obvious Cindy didn’t want to be there.
“I’m sorry. She’s a really nice person, but she’s not very outgoing. I had to drag her out of the house or she’d never have come here at all.” Apology over, May returned to her shopping.
When she couldn’t squeeze another tube or bottle into her basket, she headed to the register and didn’t even flinch at the number Clara quoted when she rang in the final item. “I’m just going to grab another container of that lemongrass bath salt for Cindy, and then I think that will do it.”
“It’s on the house, and we’ll gift wrap it for you.” Clara said we, but she meant Mag since her sister was sitting in front of the gift-wrapping area. Despite her gruff demeanor, Mag found a certain Zen-like satisfaction in the precise nature of folding paper to create a pretty package.
She wrapped the jar in tissue paper the color of a tropical sea, creating soft pleats along the sides. Mag was tucking a few sprigs of lavender into the fan shape at the top, when cool air crept over her fingers, and this time, there was more. Her fingers fumbled when a sense of being watched sent a tingle up the nape of her neck, lifting all the tiny hairs to prickling attention.
More than six months they’d been running this shop, and she’d never felt anything like that before. Surreptitiously, she called on the magical Balefire from which the sisters derived their last name, and dropped her hands below the countertop to let it hover unseen over her skin. The warmth pushed back the lingering chill.
Working quickly, she threaded a length of cheery, yellow ribbon through the handle of a small wooden scoop, affixed the scoop to the top of the package, and handed the salts back to Clara.
“If you’ll excuse me,” Mag said, “I need to check on something.” She felt Clara’s puzzled gaze on her back, but kept going.
The building that housed Balms and Bygones rambled back from the storefront through a doorway and into a space magically enhanced to more than double its original size.
The front section of the back room contained Clara’s workshop, where she brewed and tested her wares. Mag restored furniture in the rear portion. Boxes of product, crates of knick-knacks, and boxes of seasonal merchandise took up the rest of the space.
When Clara walked in several minutes later expecting to see an empty room, Mag stood in the middle of her workshop, unmoving.
“What’s wrong, Maggie?” The question startled Mag and she jumped. “You’ve been gone so long, I thought you went home.”
“Don’t sneak up on me like that. I’m old; you’ll give me a heart attack. Is she gone?” Craning her neck around, Mag glanced back through the doorway to see the open sign now flipped to closed. “What happened? Did Mrs. Moneybags buy you out?”
“May?” Frowning, Clara said, “She left half an hour ago, and I closed up the shop. Is something wrong? Have you been standing here this whole time?” Heart thumping against her rib cage, she searched Mag’s face for signs of illness or pain. Seeing neither, Clara released a relieved sigh.
“Seems like,” Mag replied, her attention elsewhere. “Got any white sage in your supplies?”
Like any good alchemist, Clara kept her workstation neat. A ruthlessly organized set of shelves held paper bags full of dried herbs labeled in permanent marker. It took only seconds for her to locate the container of sage and set it on the table while Mag rifled through cabinets.
“Where are the smudge pots? I can’t find anything the way you keep changing things around.” The normally unflappable Mag seemed pretty flapped. “This place is overdue for a good cleansing. Get me the salt, too, while you’re at it.”
Nudging past her sister, Clara picked up on the radiating tension.
“Is this about Hagatha’s no-cursing charm again? We’ve searched the place from top to bottom. It has to be in the walls.”
Mag shook her head, some of her focus still on the aura of the room. “This isn’t Hagatha’s doing, I don’t think. It feels different, but I suppose she could be up to something. Honestly, I’m not sure why she decided to sell this place and move.”
While she considered the devious mind and possible intentions of the store’s former owner—an old witch named Hagatha Crow—Mag piled sage leaves into the bowl of a smudge pot and plucked an ember from the Balefire.
Taking more than just her last name from the source of witch’s magic, Mag could have crawled into the fireplace and felt nothing more than a pleasant tingle on her skin: one of the perks of being born a Balefire, the family that guarded and fed the sacred flame, a responsibility handed down through the generations.
“I’m sure she had a reason.” Taking a second smudge pot and using a feather to direct the smoke, Clara followed her sister back into the shop and peeled off in the opposite direction to get the job done faster. The scent of burning sage tickled her nose as it spread through the space. “And I’m just as certain I don’t want to know what it was. We’re in too deep with her already, and she’s been suspiciously quiet since her trip to the Faelands. I don’t want to buy trouble, but we both know a quiet Hagatha is a—”
The rest of the sentence went right out of Clara’s head when an eerie keening split the air—the kind of sound that vibrated along her back teeth and set them on edge. A rumble echoed up from deep beneath the floorboards, and the old house quivered like the skin on a cow’s flank when she twitches to dislodge a biting fly.
A slow, rolling wave of electricity crawled along Clara’s skin and crackled across her scalp, sending her hair floating around her head. Her ears popped under a sudden heavy pressure, and the air misted, turning the light in the room an eerie shade of green.
Mag’s smudge pot hit the floor with a resounding crash and spilled embers onto wooden floorboards unprotected by the Balefire affinity. The scent of hot wax and charring wood smeared the air as Clara shook off the shock and wrapping her fingers around the burning coals, added them to her own pot.
“That’s going to leave a mark,” she said, shaking her fingers. While in no actual danger of the Balefire burning the place down as long as one of the sisters was there to exert control, fire was fire and if the hungry flames saw a chance to take a taste of polished oak, they would. “What just happened?”
Mag never answered, and when Clara looked up, she figured out why.
A thin haze of smoke curled and clung to a hovering, vaguely human-shaped figure. A ghost. In Balms and Bygones. No wonder Hagatha had sold the place to them for a ridiculous sum.
“Hello, Roma.” Or not, since Mag recognized the spirit and greeted her warmly. “Uh. Sorry for your …
What, she wondered, was the proper protocol for expressing condolences to the newly dead?
