Witch Ever After: A Sweet & Quirky Paranormal Romance

by Kallie Khan

KAIDEN

  Although summer was fading fast and late afternoon was turning chilly, Phoebe was still doggedly brewing her tea as iced as possible.

  “I know it’s weird, but I don’t care,” she told Kaiden, jabbing her sugar spoon at him.

  “You keep making it and I’ll keep drinking it,” Kaiden said, sipping his own glass of iced tea. He smacked his lips and set his glass down. “Okay, now show me how this works,” he said, rubbing his hands together.

  “I think we’ll start with the hammer grip,” Phoebe said, nodding smartly. “You won’t win any awards for originality, but it’s a good start.”

  She handed Kaiden a knife, slick and chrome and designed for the sport of throwing, dull on the edges but with a wickedly sharp point.

  “Now hold it like you would a hammer,” she said, demonstrating with her own knife, “thumb along the edge.”

  “Like this?”

  “Very good. Now, you want to throw with a calm mind. Calm arm. It’s a very zen process.”

  In this moment, Phoebe, with her braided white hair and large blue eyes and kind, wizened face, speaking of zen and mindfulness, looked for all the world like a spiritual master. He clung to her words, nodding earnestly.

  “You don’t want to wind it up like you’re throwing a baseball,” she continued. “You take it over the head. In a clean line. Like this, okay dear? And then release. Keep your arm straight; it makes one unbroken line with your knife—that’s very important. And then release.” She demonstrated with a silent, serene sort of intensity, the knife a brief streak of silver before sticking right in the center of the fat log round that served as their target.

  Kaiden took a breath. “Okay. Hammer grip. Straight line. Calm. Zen. Release.” His knife flew wide and into the grass.

  “Good,” said Phoebe.

  Kaiden laughed. “I may not know a lot of things, but I know that wasn’t good.”

  “The intent was good, dear. You follow instruction well. It’s moving from instruction to instinct that takes practice.”

  Kaiden wished fervently to be as wise as Phoebe one day. Even just half as wise; that would suit him wonderfully.

  Phoebe demonstrated again, and then it was Kaiden’s turn. They continued in that fashion for a good twenty minutes, by which time Kaiden had thrown at least twelve knives into the grass—but had hit the target once, so he was at least proud of that.

  Phoebe, on the other hand, had created a work of art. The first knife had stuck at a sharp ninety degrees from the smooth face of the log, but she’d fanned the others out like a metal flower, points mere millimeters away from each other, their handles angled strategically so she never hit an already-stuck knife with another.

  “Holy smokes,” he breathed, walking over to collect the knives. He took a picture with his phone. “Phoebe, this is incredible.”

  She gave him an arch, smug look.

  He picked his way carefully through the grass, brushing the knives off before setting them in their box, and returned to the log to admire her work once more. “That’s really something. That’s like magic, Phoebe.”

  And then as they were sitting on the back porch, watching the sun go down and finishing their iced teas, he told her about the other bizarrely magical thing he’d witnessed at Aster’s earlier that day.

  “I couldn’t believe it. I mean, she just froze. In midair!”

  “Do you believe in magic, Kaiden?” Phoebe asked. She had an open, but also appraising, expression on her face.

  He thought about it for a moment. “I’d like to believe in magic,” he said finally.

  “But?”

  “But what?”

  “Well, dear, you said that like there was a caveat,” she said pointedly.

  “Oh,” he said, surprised. “No. No caveat. I don’t know if I believe it in. But—I guess that’s the caveat?—I’d like to. I’d like to think I do. My mom believed in magic,” he added, nodding so faintly he didn’t even realize he’d nodded. “Maybe not the big flashy stuff, but she definitely believed in some higher power. Some kind of cosmic benevolence. And I think I believe in that too,” he said, a ghost of a smile passing across his lips.

  “I believe in magic too,” said Phoebe, her voice soft and serene and far away.

  He looked over at her with a smile.

  Her eyes were closed, and she had her hands raised in front of her chest, palms facing each other, as though in some meditative pose.

  And a knife was twirling slowly through the air between her hands.

  Kaiden gaped.

  Then, in a move that would forever bring mild embarrassment and a touch of color to his cheeks (he had the cruel misfortune of chronically low blood sugar levels), he fainted dead away.

  When he came to, it was to Phoebe gently sprinkling iced tea across his cheeks and muttering to herself (something about men being “sweet but also absolute babies”).

  “Phoebe, was that real?” he asked in a daze.

  She smiled down at him as he sat up, head pulsing with a mild headache.

  “Perhaps,” she said. “If you’re willing to believe.”

  Chapter 15

  TOBIE

  It was Wednesday afternoon, and Tobie was just wrapping up her shift. “Bye, Hettie!”

  “Bye, Tobie. Great work today!”

  “Thanks!” she called over her shoulder as she pushed out the door.

  Hettie had given her three magically infused moss cultures, beautiful green and blue and grey things that smelled like earth and enchantment.

  And Kaiden was picking her up today.

  “Heya,” she said, and nodded thankfully when he opened the passenger door for her so she could climb in without needing her hands. “Do you mind if we swing by my place? I just don’t want these little guys to sit in the truck for too long.”

  “Of course not—you’re talking to the guy who sings to his trees when he plants them.”

  She giggled. “Oh, really? What exactly do you sing to them?”

  “Usually something really manly. Backstreet Boys. Spice Girls. New Kids on the Block. Hanson—but only the early stuff.”

  She snorted with laughter. “Why so much nineties pop?”

  “The real question is why not?”

  “Well, because people have ears, for one.”

  “Oh, ha-ha.” He rolled his eyes, but added a grin and winked. “Well, my trees don’t have ears, and that’s a good thing, because as bad as you think those songs are, they’re ten times worse when I sing them.”

  “I thought you did a good Phil Collins,” she offered, raising a finger, and was admittedly quite satisfied when he tilted his head and hid a grin in a bashful sort of acknowledgement.

  He drove them to her house, where she ran inside and rigged a quick makeshift bed for the moss to lie on until she got back—a small stack of paper towels dampened with a spray bottle, moss set carefully on top.

  Then she ran back out and hopped into the truck, stomach giving a rollercoaster whoosh when he smiled his warm smile at her.

  “Ready?”

  “Let’s do this.”

  Kaiden had described Dowercaster as “Glimmerdale, but slightly bigger and with a fixation on antiquing, and also an overabundance of fried chicken places which everyone complains about but secretly loves.”

  Tobie thought it was downright adorable. Victorian-looking but clearly modernized lamps lined Main Street and several of the other quaint, manicured streets in the historic downtown area (which was about two square miles, all told), flames dancing merrily behind the glass. It was still too bright to truly appreciate the lamps, but Tobie looked forward to seeing them when the sun set in the evening.

  They parked at the north end of Main Street. Kaiden turned to her with a significant raise of his eyebrow. “When we step outside, there’s no turning back.”

  “I believe that’s the most ominous thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

  He pointed outside the window. “Fiola’s Antiquarian Wares is the
beginning of the trail. Then you’ve got CurioBitez, Dolores Antiques, Aunt Ethel’s Attic, and Rabbit’s Babbits.”

  “Rabbit’s Babbits?”

  He threw up his hands in shared confusion. “Been here since I was a kid. Still have no idea what it means.”

  “We can’t start with Rabbit’s Babbits?” she said, grinning.

  He seemed to think about it for a moment, nodding thoughtfully. “I mean, we could start with Rabbit’s Babbits. It might create some quantum loop in the universe and shatter space and time, but we could do that.”

  “So you’re saying the integrity of the universe is held together by the postulate that we will start at the north end of the antique store row in Dowercaster and move down the line in an orderly fashion as we shop?”

  He nodded as though she’d finally grasped a concept he’d been trying to explain for hours. “It’s basically a cosmic zipper. Pull the wrong way and everything falls out.”

  “Wait, is it like a purse zipper or like a pants zipper? What kind of cosmic zipper are we talking about? What’s falling out?” she pressed.

  He turned pink and she couldn’t help but giggle and snort and until he raised his hands defensively, trying to smother the smile on his lips.

  “Okay, I admit, it’s not a perfect analogy. I’m just saying—”

  “You’re just trying to protect the sanctity of the order of the known universe. I get it,” she said sagely.

  He laughed and shook his head at her. “You’re mean, Tobie Moon.”

  “You already knew this.”

  “Why do I feel like you’re going to run down to Rabbit’s Babbits as soon as we get out of the truck?”

  “Because you’re apparently psychic,” she said.

  The way he laughed, loud and full and belly-aching, sent a shiver of joy through her. He lead the way up the cobbled steps to the storefront, throwing a hand out to guide the way and letting her pass him. He opened the door for her with a smile, warm and sweet and comforting all at once.

  Then she thought of her mother.

  She’d texted three times in the last day, meaning she wanted to speak to Tobie about something very desperately, because she never texted if she could help it. Texting was “common and stunted a young person’s ability to speak intelligently and extemporaneously.”

  Tobie rather thought that was beside the point, because she’d never been decent at what she called “people-ing.” She was good at plants.

  She was, however, usually pretty good at quips and jabs, thanks to the way she and Mystia went back and forth.

  “Tobie!”

  She looked up from a box of tiny, skeletal animal figurines to see Kaiden shove a spectacularly wide purple hat on his head.

  “I think it’s my color. No?”

  She laughed, but her stomach sunk—and this time not in the sweetish way it somersaulted when she thought about how much he (may or may not) like her, or the way he made her laugh, or the way his body made a strong, broad line from two heads above her down to the floor.

  She was thinking about introducing him to her mother.

  Goddess, Isidora Takahama Moon was a battleship. A beautiful, graceful, soft-spoken battleship. She wouldn’t even bother pretending to get to know Kaiden, let alone get to know him in any other capacity beyond “that mundane boy that you won’t be seeing anymore.”

  It was like someone had pricked a water balloon filled with slushy ice just above her head; it made her want to punch something.

  He seemed to guess something was wrong, and she realized her face had hardened into an expression that was probably somewhere on the continuum from extreme displeasure to extreme rage.

  “It’s not that bad, is it?” he asked with a laugh, but there was a sudden discomfort in the shadows of his expression.

  She managed to recover quickly, smiling with a quick, fierce twitch of her lips. “Not at all! It’s the kind of statement piece that says, ‘I love me even if everyone else thinks I need to be institutionalized.’”

  He pretended to be deeply wounded.

  She laughed and went to him. “It’s really awful,” she began, “but in the best way I think I’ve ever seen.” She reached up to tweak the brim, tugging the purple felt.

  He looked down at her with his signature warmth, like some sort of cozy Christmas commercial.

  Something with bears in festive and exceptionally ugly sweaters. (Tobie was an avid fan of ugly sweaters, and although Mystia had resisted, particularly in high school, Tobie managed to convert her so thoroughly that from Thanksgiving to Easter, Mystia could be found at least three days out of the week lounging in one of many.)

  That’s what he looked like in that purple hat, she realized. An ugly Christmas sweater.

  Except he wasn’t ugly in the least.

  And his eyes sparkled as he looked down at her watching him. His lips twitched upward. He reached out, pressing his palms against her upper arms.

  Her breath hitched.

  He cleared his throat. “Um...chilly in here, huh?” he said, and rubbed her forearms gently.

  But Tobie was anything but chilly. Her face was flushed; her heart thudded against her ribcage like a grumpy old man rapping at his neighbor's door to lodge some sort of formal complaint.

  Except, while she was often grumpy, she was neither old nor a man, and the only complaint she could think of was that she was too stinking shy to grip Kaiden’s purple hat brim and yank him down so she could kiss him—which was definitely a complaint against herself and not her (attractive, friendly, and purple-hatted) neighbor.

  They continued on down the line of antique shops, but the icing on the proverbial cake was—unsurprisingly to Tobie—Rabbit’s Babbits.

  Rabbit’s Babbits was incredible. Two stories, several rooms, and the hum of magic sent a thrill through her. When the proprietor, a tall, tomboyish older woman in her late fifties, came over to greet them, she recognized in an instant that the woman was a shifter. She didn’t know what, exactly, but the woman was wearing a baggy sweater with a faded kitten print on it, so she felt pretty confident about her guess.

  “Well hello, there.” She looked directly at Tobie, sizing her up, likely realizing Tobie was also of the preternatural persuasion. “Please make yourselves at home, and let me know if there’s anything I can help you with.”

  The woman blinked, and for a second her pupils became vertical, catlike slits. She winked at Tobie as Kaiden turned toward a display of variously sized wooden turtles.

  Tobie let her eyes flash a bright banana yellow in recognition (although the goal was always a respectable amethyst or a stately dark gold, or basically anything but banana yellow, but Tobie could never manage any other color, much to her mother’s perpetual disappointment).

  The woman gave a startled little laugh, then stifled it quickly as Kaiden jerked his head around.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, a touch of mortification to her tone. “I just, um, I thought of—”

  But Tobie snorted too, and then couldn’t stop laughing.

  The woman began to laugh again, and then they were both laughing so hard that they were doubled over, clutching their stomachs and waving at one another to stop.

  “I feel like I might’ve missed something...” said Kaiden, expression utterly bewildered.

  They just laughed harder.

  The woman’s name was Ana Maria Jimenez, and she made them both tea and sent them looking around the store with small slices of lemon cake. Ana Maria indicated that Tobie might enjoy the collection of mirrors upstairs.

  “Seriously, is there something going on that I don’t know about?” asked Kaiden.

  “No,” she said brightly. “I had to sneeze for a second and I guess she thought my sneeze preparation face was hilarious.”

  “Demonstrate, please.”

  She screwed her face up in the closest approximation to her actual sneeze preparation face, but embellished slightly by flaring out her nostrils and curling her upper lip.

>   Kaiden laughed. “That’s an incredible face.”

  “Thank you,” she said, giving him a little bow. “I try.”

  They perused the mirrors collection, and Tobie realized immediately why Ana Maria had suggested she look at them; half were enchanted (a few quite poorly, but most with some element of skill), one of which showed her in a rotating assortment of hairstyles and outfits when she stood in front of it.

  “Kaiden! Come look.”

  He stood next to her and peered into the mirror. “It’s really nice,” he said.

  “Mmhmm,” Tobie agreed distractly, watching with glee as it materialized new hair and clothes for Kaiden. One was very pirate-y, including an eyepatch and spectacularly striped parachute pants, and she grinned so hard at him in the mirror that he laughed.

  “Seriously, do I have something on my face?”

  She waved her hands in a canceling motion. “You don’t, honest! I’m just saying, I knew Rabbit’s Babbits would be the best.”

  “That’s why we saved it for last!” he said happily. “I’m glad you like it. My mom and used to come here a lot. I’d never met Ana Maria before, but that’s a shame. I think Mom would’ve really liked her too.”

  She smiled back at him. “I wish I had nice stories about going antiquing with my mom,” she said, voice tinged with wistfulness (and just the faintest touch of jealousy).

  “Your mom doesn’t like antique stores?”

  “My mom doesn’t like anything,” she said sardonically.

  Kaiden let out a sharp laugh, but quickly schooled himself into seriousness when she didn’t also laugh. “I’m sorry. I thought that was a joke.”

  “It sort of was,” she said, nodding agreeably. “But also it totally wasn’t.” She made another sneeze preparation face as a kind of non sequiturial transition, and was deeply pleased when Kaiden gave a snort of laughter.

  “That really is incredible. I understand why Ana Maria couldn’t help but laugh.” He looked around again, moving slowly through the mirrored hall. He passed a few of the enchanted ones, and she saw various things inside: a mirror that showed a female version of Kaiden (and subsequently a male version of Tobie, whom she found herself incredibly creeped out by); another that showed her spinning dizzily in space; and one that showed no reflection at all, but instead gave a leisurely tour of an underwater garden, zooming in close with crystalline clarity so she could see the fine subterranean hairs on the fronts of spindly towers of seaweed, and the coarse texture of fern-like plants that swayed in long radial shapes along the seabed.