Witch Ever After: A Sweet & Quirky Paranormal Romance

by Kallie Khan

  Of course, the golf clubs would naturally utterly trash Ms. Argent’s shop—and embarrass him in front of a pretty young woman. He felt a prickle of heat rise up his neck as he handed the bag over to Mr. Yi.

  The woman—Tobie—had been small and serious-faced, with dirt on her nose even before he’d (very accidentally) thrown her into the display. Big dark eyes. Long brown hair, with one thick streak of faded green curling around her neck. He’d seen the way she smiled at her plants, though, that serious expression dissolving into a dreamy sort of grin.

  He couldn’t help but smile back at her—a knee-jerk reaction, like when the ticket taker at the theater says, “Enjoy your movie!”, and he bumblingly replies, “You too!”

  She probably thought he was an idiot.

  She must definitely think it now.

  “How’s Phoebe?” asked Mr. Yi, cutting into his thoughts.

  “She’s doing alright,” he said, nodding agreeably. “Ankle’s on the mend, but she still can’t move around a lot.”

  Mr. Yi shook his head, tongue clicking. “It’s a darn lucky thing you moved in when you did. When Peter passed away, it really got her down. Then she broke her ankle, and—well, you know.”

  “Phoebe’s become a great friend,” he said earnestly.

  She really had. Phoebe had taken pity on him when he arrived in Glimmerdale. She’d baked him cookies once a week and brought him dinner the first few days he was moved in but living in darkness and without a gas stove.

  (The utilities company had somehow misassigned his connection date, which didn’t bother him too much, but he got a whiff of himself on the fourth day of his utility-less existence and resolved that he’d join the local gym on the fifth to have access to the showers. Luckily, he did not have to do this.)

  Once Kaiden’s kitchen was in working order and the lights were on, he happily returned the favor for Phoebe, cooking her dinner every Tuesday and Thursday (he made a particularly mean pozole verde), and found out that not only was she sweeter than a cube of sugar, but she also had some surprisingly spartan talents.

  “Give me that,” she said to him one day, pointing at his Swiss pocket knife. She opened the largest blade with ease, then threw it at the ground. It stuck in the grass, and at first he didn’t know what to think, but then she pulled the knife up out of the ground, and a fat cockroach came with it. She’d shivered at the sight, very ladylike, exclaimed that roaches gave her the “heebie-jeebies,” and asked if he’d dispose of it.

  But when he told Mr. Yi about it later, he’d laughed and said, “Didn’t you know Phoebe was a champion knife-thrower? You should see her at Dogget’s on a Saturday night.”

  Phoebe demurred when Kaiden first asked her to see these champion skills, but eventually she relented.

  Watching a little old lady half his height split a bullseye with seven throwing knives while the other patrons shrieked and cheered was, to say the least, the highlight of his week. The smug little smile she’d given him afterward was even better.

  Mr. Yi ended up giving him three hundred dollars for the gold clubs (“Tell Phoebe I’m sorry it couldn’t be a little more”) and another twenty for the bag.

  When he dropped by Phoebe’s place to give her the money, he also asked if she happened to know a girl named October.

  “October? Sure, that’s Isidora’s younger daughter, from down in Spellhaven. Haven’t met the girl myself, but I know the family. Nice folks. I hear she’s very smart.”

  “Oh, I, uh...I kind of ruined her day, I think.” He ran a hand through his curls at the base of his neck.

  “Pfft,” said Phoebe matter-of-factly. “I can’t imagine you’d ruin a young lady’s day, Kaiden.”

  “I...knocked everything over in Ms. Argent’s shop.”

  Phoebe looked at him with a serious expression for a moment, then dissolved into a sharp, snorting laughter. “Oh dear,” she managed once she caught her breath. “And what did October do?”

  “She threw a bucket of water on me.”

  “She did nothing of the sort!”

  “Well, my pants were on fire.”

  Phoebe gave a small jerk of surprise. “Fire?”

  He shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  But then her lips twitched into a small, unmistakably smug grin. Phoebe, he was finding, was very good at smug grins.

  Chapter 3

  TOBIE

  Several hours later, Tobie had the shop back in moderately presentable order. She’d cleaned with a mix of manual labor and tidying magic, but for all her magical acumen in other areas of study, she wasn’t great at tidying magic, so it was mostly elbow grease and a healthy dose of resentment toward Kaiden. Hettie had taken her to task for setting “that nice boy’s pants on fire.”

  “I didn’t hurt him, Hettie. He did far more damage to me.” She held up her forearms, both bruised by her fall into the display shelves.

  “And he apologized. Profusely.”

  Tobie didn’t roll her eyes, but she had to bite the inside of her lip to keep from doing so.

  “That Kaiden really is a nice boy,” Hettie said again, stepping over Tobie’s splayed legs as she sat on the floor, repotting leafy victims of the golf clubs incident. “He helped set my new computer up.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  Hettie gave her a sharp look at her contentious tone. “Yes, young lady, he did.”

  Tobie sighed. “Sorry. I don’t mean to be a jerk.”

  Hettie’s face softened. “You’re a good girl, Tobie. I’m sorry he made a mess. But he really is a nice boy. He used to work for a landscaper, so he’s got a knack for plants.”

  Tobie paused, fingers resting on the soil of a daylily. Its petals were a deep orange shot through with yellow. “A landscaper?”

  “He works in IT now as I understand it, but yes. He’s a real hobbyist. In here a lot,” she said pointedly, “so I can expect you to not hold too much of a grudge, right?”

  Tobie gave her a lopsided little smirk. “Not too much,” she agreed.

  But definitely a little one.

  Several rescued plants later, she washed her hands, scrubbed the dirt off her face in the restroom sink, and left for the day. She checked her phone on the way out. One missed text from Mystia.

  So I know you hate these matchmaker things, but Mom can’t wait for you to meet this guy. Can’t be all bad, right? ;)

  Along with her text was a screenshot Mystia had obviously taken from Facebook.

  Alistair Bloodsong.

  She’d heard of Alistair, but never met him. She didn’t believe in Facebook (though Mystia was quick to say, “But you know it exists, whether you believe in it or not”) so she’d never thought to see what he looked like.

  She had to admit he wasn’t the most unfortunate-looking person in the world—cool blue eyes, strong jaw, deep black hair swept pseudo-casually to the side.

  Okay, fine.

  He was downright gorgeous.

  But that made her even more suspicious. Nothing good ever came of “downright gorgeous.” Downright gorgeous men might’ve looked at her once or twice in college, when Mystia dolled her up with a good pound of makeup and made her go out on a Friday, but as soon as they struck up a conversation with her, their interest waned.

  Plants and books (and books about plants) set few hearts ablaze.

  But that suited her just fine, because she found those downright gorgeous men remarkably dull as well.

  Her phone pinged.

  Oh, by the way, don’t shoot the messenger, but Mom’s scheduled you a date for Tuesday.

  Another ping.

  Seriously please don’t hate me.

  Tobie slapped a hand to her forehead.

  She tried to call her mother in a fit of exasperated pique, but the dial tone rolled to voicemail and her mother’s sing-songy voice: “This is Isidora Takahama Moon; please leave a message with your name and number and I’ll return your call when I can.”

  “Hi Mom. This is Tobie Moon,”
she said, with an aggressive, fake cheerfulness. “How dare you?”

  She hung up and shoved her phone into her pocket. Then she pulled it out again, opened a new text between her and her mother (the last one was timestamped four and a half weeks prior), and typed furiously.

  Seriously. How dare you???

  Isidora Takahama Moon wouldn’t deign to respond to such impudent messages, but Tobie told herself she didn’t care.

  The act was cathartic enough.

  She tried to roll the tension out of her neck and shoulders, but her muscles were already bunched and sore from hours of cleaning. Her neck popped with an alarming crack, but that was it—still wound like a wire around a bolt.

  “Whatever,” she said to the stunted little tree twisting out of the ground, right at the lip of the back parking lot. It was just a few feet beyond the misted glass of the greenhouse, a sad, sweet thing.

  She immediately felt like a jerk. “Sorry, little dude,” she said softly, and signed a small charm of unconditional love to the tree. It was a thing witches and warlocks did for their children, something her father still did whenever they visited.

  Something her mother did too, once upon a time (though it stretched the bounds of imagination to picture it happening now).

  It didn’t do much, but imbued the recipient with an incandescent sense of love.

  She hoped the tree felt that sense of love, despite its small, knotted presence.

  Then she thought of Kaiden and his bright, warm smile. She rolled her eyes and slouched into her car. At least she’d only have to see him at work.

  She had Friday off. Mystia had to drive into the city proper of Evermyst for her work, which was something-something-consulting-something (okay, fine—Mystia worked as a marketing and advertising consultant for luxury and boutique brands whose names, Mystia insisted, were confidential, but Tobie preferred “something-something-consulting-something” because Mystia would cross her eyes and touch her nose to her tongue when Tobie said it, and it made Tobie laugh too hard to quit).

  She really didn’t want to devalue Mystia’s work. Mystia worked harder than Tobie’d ever had to work—at anything. Tobie’s obsession with plants transitioned easily into collegiate study, and she’d always had decent magical talent.

  But Mystia was smart and stinging like a whip, sharper than the rest of her family put together when it came to people and one-liners and an eye for written copy. She was also insufferably cool—she read cult webcomics and was known to quote obscure anime in so-called “polite conversation” involving vapid Old World witches and warlocks their mother was forever inviting over.

  And Mystia was so stinking sweet that Tobie couldn’t even be mad at how ultra-cool she was. She could be jealous (and she admittedly was, on occasion) but she never held it against Mystia personally.

  But because Mystia had such a lofty profession, she was never at home, which left Tobie to potter around by herself a lot of the time. (Tobie did not do “crowds” or “scenes” or whatever people her age normally did. Tobie hung out with her plants and Veronica, the family’s possibly immortal but definitely centenarian cat who had an uncanny knack for English.)

  Today, left to her own devices, Tobie was cleaning. It wasn’t particularly glamorous, but she was stressed and she liked nothing more than to clean when she was stressed.

  She had her hair in a handkerchief (a rare habit her mother had instilled in Tobie so completely that she’d actually adopted it), sweatpants rolled up high around her calves, and wide strips of old t-shirts strapped around her knees to keep her skin away from the cleaner if she had to get down on her hands and knees to scrub. (Veronica had turned her nose up as soon as Tobie spritzed some cleaner along the countertops and muttered a not-quite-a-word-but-still-quite-evocative, “Stinker-whiff,” and padded off to the back of the house.)

  Tobie also had a concentration potion going—an easy but time-consuming concoction of rosemary, thyme, bergamot oil, dried chives, and several sprigs and petals of flowering summer annuals that had to be chanted over in precise rounds.

  Concentration potions were revolting to the palette, truth told, but she was desperate to get through some peer-reviewed articles that discussed the comparative mechanical roles of leave sheaths among grass families (“Holy crackerjacks, Tobie, how are you so stupidly smart?” Mystia would ask, followed by a wicked grin and: “Also can you teach me some botany? Because I’d really like to impress my date tonight”).

  Then the doorbell rang.

  Tobie grunted, and jutted her lower lip out to puff a breath at the wisps of hair hanging in her face. She clamored to her feet, groaning and simultaneously feeling like she was way too young to be groaning, and went to the door.

  “Hi there.”

  She gaped.

  It was Kaiden, standing in the threshold with a spray of flowers wrapped in delicate tissue paper in his hands. And he was beaming at her, teeth glinting like some obscenely photoshopped advertisement for those whitening strips that never seemed to actually work.

  “Hi,” she said, stupefied. “Are you lost?”

  “Oh!” He thrust the flowers toward her. “These are for you.”

  She took them out of reflex. “Thanks…?”

  He raises his hands in a gesture of goodwill. “Look, I know I have no business being here, but I confess—you weren’t in the shop today, so I asked Hettie to tell me where you lived. Which is super-creepy, I know. But I wanted to apologize. And give you those,” he added, gesturing to the flowers. “I feel like I ruined your day yesterday.”

  “Oh, uh…”

  Downright gorgeous.

  She cleared her throat and tried again. “It was really—I mean, it was—I mean, thanks. The flowers are really nice.”

  Really, they were utterly lovely, but her mouth wouldn’t form the words.

  “Hettie told me you were into plants.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, a smile that Tobie interpreted as shy blooming across his face.

  Shy? This toothpaste campaign dude?

  But her lips betrayed her. They twitched upward. Just a little. Just enough.

  “Guilty,” she said. “Biology, with an emphasis on plant science.”

  He raised a hand in an embarrassed sort of commiseration. “Computer science. But I took a lot of gothic lit courses for some reason.”

  A bright laugh bubbled out of her before she could stop it. She glanced down at his feet, cheeks warming, when he met her laugh with an encouraging smile.

  He cleared his throat. “So, uh, you’ve been here long?”

  “All day.”

  “I mean, you know, Glimmerdale.”

  “Oh! Oh, yeah. I mean, no. Not very long. We moved in like three weeks ago.”

  He peers curiously past her shoulder, then stops himself. “Wow, that’s rude of me. Used to be a landscaper and did a little carpentry on the side during college. Just curious as to how the new house is treating you. It’s a nice place.”

  She snorted. “‘Nice’ is one way to put it.”

  “How would you put it, then?”

  “‘Better than a cardboard box but, not quite so fancy as a lean-to.”

  He laughs. “Wow. That bad, huh?”

  “Oh, it’s not all bad,” she said ruefully, giving him one of her lopsided grins. “The backyard is a great space. Can’t wait to set up a garden. Maybe even a fountain. I have a little solar panel for the pump the I’ve been dying to use, but—” Suddenly her cheeks when hot. She coughed.

  Downright gorgeous. Not interested in fountains and water pumps.

  She swallowed the lump of nerves hard in her throat, but it was no use. Her belly squirmed. She wanted to go run and hide.

  But to her massive relief, Kaiden didn’t seem to notice. He just nodded amicably. “It’s a good space. You’ll have to let me see the back sometime, okay? Hettie’s told me you’ve got an artistic eye, and I’m still kind of obsessed with landscaping. I’m a computer guy at the core, but I can’t seem to shake t
his landscaping thing. Hah, maybe I have dual cores—sorry, that was lame. I don’t even know what that means.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway. Just wanted to say I was sorry again, and that I hope I see you around.” He shoved his hands in his pocket and turned to go.

  She watched him retreat down the porch steps and onto the pavement for several heartbeats. Then she called after him, voice pitched slightly too high, “Wait! Wait.”

  She hopped down the porch steps after him. “Wait, please,” she said again. “I wanted to say I’m also sorry.”

  “You?” he says, eyebrows kitting in confusion. He gave her a short, confused breath of a laugh. “Why on earth should you apologize to me for ruining your plants and your day?”

  “Well, first of all,” she began, falling into a matter-of-fact tone that gave her confidence, “you didn’t ruin my day.”

  Lies. But she didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

  “Second of all,” she continued, “I definitely threw a bucket of water on you.”

  “Not really. You just threw the water; not the bucket.”

  She barked a laugh. “Really splitting hairs, huh?”

  He spread his arms out. “Not at all! If you’d thrown the actual bucket at me, I might’ve thought you didn’t like me. Just making sure you aren’t being unfair to yourself. You seem like the type of person who’s their worst critic.”

  She chuckled uncomfortably. That hit weirdly close to home for her.

  “And I still don’t see what you’re apologizing for. You saved my life from that freak fire.”

  She shrugged, half at him and half trying to slough the guilt off her shoulders. “It was no big deal.”

  “Oh, I dunno about that,” he said, hitching one thumb through his belt loop. “My life is one of my biggest deals. Top five, at least.”

  She laughed again. Then she was suddenly and cripplingly aware of the fact that she looked like a something small that had gotten stuck in a sewer drain and was just recently fished out. She tucked an escaped wisp of hair back behind her ear.