by Mara Webb
“Are you crying?” Kate asked. “Oh for crying out loud. Yes, I heard you, extra pineapple!” She was clearly talking to a customer. “Sadie, you will have to go to the store and get it. I’ll text you the address. Bye!”
She hung up.
“Why can’t you go?” I asked Effie. “I feel like I’ve been played here.”
“The store that Kate goes for this stuff has a really strong smell of, like, patchouli oil. It makes me gag, I literally can’t handle it,” she grinned. The look on my face was giving away that I didn’t know what patchouli oil was. “It’s this stuff that smells like raw earth. It doesn’t agree with me.”
“Fine,” I sighed. “I’ll go buy you the special tea from the smelly place and you can wait here and make a plan for how we are going to tackle all that mess.”
“I just want it on record,” Effie began. “That I have been exceptional at keeping on top of this stuff, just not this past year. You know that I had that bad break up and, well, my heads not been in the game. I’m sorry that this is gonna be a sucky day, I won’t let it happen again.”
She was referring to her break up with a guy called Max. They had been very much in love if you believe Effie’s version of events. Kate and Greta had both thought the guy was a loser that was only out for himself. He had stolen one of Effie’s books and tried to use some dark magic to make him and the rest of his band famous. It was tragic, people had died, and Effie was still recovering from it all.
“It’s fine,” I smiled. “Look, I moved to Hallow Haven because of a breakup and it brought me everything I have now. Things will get better; this mess is fixable, and I am gonna go get your tea so that we can sort this out. You don’t have to apologize to me.”
“Thanks, Sadie,” she said. I could see that it was a relief for her that I wasn’t angry. Effie had helped me out of enough tough spots, it was nice to be able to return the favor. The text from Kate with the address pinged through to my cell phone and I stared at it for a second.
“Have I been to this street before?” I asked, showing Effie the message.
“Probably not,” she replied. “It’s sort of behind the Italian restaurant. There is an alley down the side of the building that looks like the type of place you might get stabbed and it’s really badly lit. Anyway, that’s where you’re headed.”
“Oh, good!” I grimaced. “Well, if I’m not back in an hour, avenge me!”
“Try and stop me!” she called back. I made my way out of the kitchen through the door that lead into my house. The two buildings were connected so my commute to work was about four seconds long. I grabbed my purse off the hook in my hallway and continued along the corridor until I reached the door that led from my house onto the beach.
Since Shell’s Day, a celebration created by a local jewelry store to try and replicate their valentine’s day sales by hosting a ‘love’ themed event four times a year, the island had been a buzz. There had been a parade, heart shaped donuts, live music, and fresh pineapple juice. People were dancing in the street into the early hours, and it had been more fun than I’d expected.
I’d had a date for the event, my handsome sheriff boyfriend, Miller. I should probably stop referring to him as my boyfriend as we hadn’t actually had that conversation yet. I was still wearing the necklace that he’d given me, a silver scallop shell pendant on a thin chain.
Miller had said that it was an important part of Shell’s Day that you were to give your beau a shell necklace. I thought it was maybe a little gimmicky, but I appreciated the gesture all the same.
I fiddled with it idly as I walked along the beach, quietly cursing myself for forgetting to bring my sunglasses. I could almost feel the crow’s feet either side of my face deepening as I squinted into the morning sun, navigating among the tourists that had made their way to Hallow Haven to join in with the romantic festivities.
I had to assume that they were now hanging on to be a part of the golf tournament. It was my idea of torture to be involved in it, but I guessed some people would be attending by choice. The high street was teeming with bodies that were sauntering from one place to another. No one was walking with any purpose; it was leisurely strolling as far as the eye could see.
They had a bunch of stupid terms for time here, the ‘Haven Hour’ was the most obnoxious of these.
If you asked someone what time they would be arriving, they might give you a time, but would rarely stick to it. The ‘Haven Hour’ was anywhere between forty minutes to three hours. It was a relaxed way of living, sure, but if you’d grown up in Virginia, like I had, then it was hard to get used to.
I liked being punctual, if not early, for all things. Hallow Haven attracted a crowd of lackadaisical folk that were never in a rush, so as I tried to bustle through the high street to find the alley, I found myself getting progressively more frustrated.
I have always been someone that agreed with the idea of a ‘fast lane’ sidewalk for people that are in a hurry. I overheard many conversations about people looking for a good brunch spot or trying to find a place to rent paddle boards. Hadn’t they bought a guidebook when they arrived? Shouldn’t they have thought about this before they set off this morning? I just needed to get from A to B.
I ducked along the side of the Italian restaurant and silently agreed with Effie that this was the type of place where you might get stabbed. It had everything; bad lighting, no CCTV cameras, no windows overlooking it and an unusual aroma. You could easily walk down here alone and night and never be seen again. I shook the idea loose and walked along the uneven path until I reached a store front that bore the name, ‘Coaled Water’.
I liked the play on words, but I hope they didn’t actually sell water with coal in it. Was that a thing? I knew that in California there would be a new health trend every fifteen minutes, so maybe it was already an established thing and I’d just not heard about it. I still shuddered at the thought of celery juice.
I stepped through the door and a windchime above my head announced my arrival. The scent of patchouli oil was more intense than Effie could have possibly described, and I could see why she was keen to avoid the place.
“The spirits have called you to this place, child,” a strange voice called out. Who was speaking and where were they?
“Excuse me?” I replied.
“You are here to seek your true purpose, to call upon the ancient ones and heed their warnings of—” the voice stopped. “Oh, s-sorry, I thought you were someone else.”
A door creaked open behind the counter and a short woman stepped forward with the thickest lenses I’d ever seen on a pair of glasses. They had to be almost half an inch thick, and they made her eyes look uncomfortably enormous. She had a paisley scarf in her hair, tangled among the red curls that sat on her head.
“Who did you think I was?” I asked.
“I sometimes have people make appointments to come and see me, people seem to like it if I really turn up the mystic vibe in here,” she smiled. She started waving her hands about strangely as doing a strange Tai Chi. “The weirder the better.”
“Well, I’m just here to pick up some tea for Effie,” I began.
“Tea for Effie!” she yelled. She had actually tried to interrupt me to say it, repeating my own words back half a second after I’d said them, but announcing it as if she had predicted what I was going to say. “I knew that’s why you had come, child.” The hand movements grew weirder, and she started to sway her hips too. It was like her whole body was a blade of grass caught in the wind.
“Do you know which tea that is? Should I call Kate?” I asked.
“Kate!” she shouted again. She tapped her temple in a knowing way, as if she was able to know what I would say next. The problem was, I was already friends with an actual mind reader, Kate, and she did a much better job. This woman was just weird.
“So…?”
“Yes, I know which tea she seeks!” the woman called out, twirling away from me to a large display of loose-leaf te
a, all held in separate jars. “Let me fetch my scoop… the sacred scoop.” She crouched low then stretched upwards suddenly, like a bird unfurling their wings, before running through the door behind the counter again.
Just when you think you’ve seen it all.
I heard a sound behind me, and I turned to look at its source. The shop was larger than I’d realized; multiple display cabinets filled with crystal balls and incense sticks filled the room. There were windchimes hanging from the ceiling and they were moving slightly from the air current. She seemed to sell food in here too, and boxes with strange writing on the outside.
There was a man lurking in the corner looking at a ceramic tea pot. Even though he was turned away, I recognized him instantly. Ryder.
3
My mouth felt dry. I hadn’t spoken to Ryder since before the Shell’s Day celebrations. I know Ryder had seen me with Miller, he had stayed away but watched us from a distance. It had appeared that he had gone to the event alone. I’d considered going over to talk to him, but I decided not to.
Both Miller and Ryder had discovered that they were supposed to be my guardian. Each peacekeeper gets one, but somehow, I’d ended up with two. It was making things complicated to say the least.
They both disliked each other and hadn’t made a secret of it. I liked to flatter myself into thinking that the source of their loathing was that they both had feelings for me, but I knew it ran deeper than that. Miller was a werewolf and Ryder was a werewolf hunter, or at least he had hunters in his ancestry. I had managed to persuade him not to kill Miller so far.
“Sadie,” Ryder said softly. “I didn’t think you would be here. Don’t you have a golf tournament to attend?” I felt as though he was looking through me, it was unsettling. I could feel a strange tension between us, and I wondered if seeing me with Miller was the reason.
Ryder had come to speak to me outside the doctor’s office a few days before the celebrations, but I had been so fried with stress that I had fainted. Miller found me in Ryder’s arms and demanded that he leave. We hadn’t spoken since.
“I don’t have to go over until the final golfers arrive,” I smiled. “So, I have a bit of time. Effie is having a nightmare with some finance paperwork, so I’ve been sent to get her tea.”
“That’s kind of you,” he mumbled.
“Are we okay?” I asked, surprised that I had blurted out what I was thinking. “You seem off.”
“Do I?” he said, finally making eye contact with me. There was a sadness there, it was impossible to miss.
“You’re normally a little happier to see me,” I grinned. He didn’t smile back, or at least not at first.
“Will you and Miller be staying at the resort together?” he asked.
“I—”
“It’s okay. Look, I know you were put in a position where you had to make a choice, and that choice was never going to make everyone happy,” he said, looking at his shoes again. “Seeing you holding hands with that…” I knew he wanted to say something cruel about Miller, the fact that he was a werewolf got Ryder riled up more than anything. “It was hard to watch.”
“I don’t know what to say,” I shrugged. I wasn’t going to apologize. I know that his feelings were hurt, but I wasn’t going to be made to feel guilty for dating someone else.
Ryder and I had a connection, and I’d felt an energy between us more than once, but I had to put that to one side now. Seeing the look on his face made my chest ache though, I hated how it felt.
“Ryder, dear, I have your heartache brew and—” the strange woman burst back through the door into the room and stopped suddenly when she saw me. She seemed to have completely forgotten I was here. Heartache brew? The guilt hit me like a freight train.
“I have been working with Greta,” Ryder said. “She’s been teaching me more about weather magic and she suggested that I try and give everyone cloudless blue skies for the duration of the tournament. I’ve just been struggling to focus so…”
He took the paper bag from the strange woman and counted out the cash he owed her. What could I possibly say that would make him feel better? I had been in a love triangle, and now I wasn’t. Or at least I’d thought it was over. I guess I hadn’t ever had a conversation with Ryder about the fact that I was choosing Miller.
I tried to put myself in his shoes and I cringed; I should have spoken to him before he caught me out at the parade with his rival. I didn’t think I was a bad person, but this wasn’t something a good guy would do.
“Ryder,” I began. He looked back at me, turning his shoulders so that I could look at him straight on. He was in such good shape from climbing and hiking, that every small movement of his body looked effortless. His t-shirt clung to him perfectly. I felt my heart thudding in my chest.
“You don’t have to say anything, Sadie. Just promise me you’ll be careful,” he said. With that he walked out of the store I was left alone with the woman behind the counter.
“I have your tea here too!” she bellowed. I was only a few feet away and the sudden burst of her loud voice made me flinch. “I sense that he needed that tea because of you, child.” Oh, you picked up on that?
“Hmm,” I said, it was the only noncommittal noise I could think of.
“Heartbreak is a dent in the soul,” she added, this time at a more appropriate volume. “It comes in waves, each time it rises up it takes more of you as it retreats. Not dissimilar to the way the ocean destroys salt caves.”
“Jeez, what an analogy,” I winced, pressing both of my hands to my face and covering my eyes. I already felt guilty enough, I didn’t need a stranger telling me that I was eroding his soul. That was such a graphic, painful way to describe it.
“It’s like a little death, dear,” she continued. “Only love can cause a pain like this. I know it when I see it, nothing breaks like a heart.”
“Can I just pay up and leave?” I asked. “I feel like I’m going to need something stronger than tea if this conversation carries on much longer.”
“You feel for him, Sadie,” she said. I looked at her eyes and the color had faded from them completely. “I see it in you, the conflict. You aren’t sure if you chose the right man. You worry that you are losing your chance with Ryder.” Her eyes were completely white, and her dress was billowing as if she was standing in a wind tunnel.
I had no idea what was going on, but it looked a lot like witchy nonsense, and I didn’t have time to be bombarded by the bizarre this morning. I took the bag of tea from her hand, left cash on the counter and ran out of the store. Was that going to come back to bite me later? Probably.
I found myself walking slowly through the crowds on the high street. I’d turned into the very thing I hated, a shuffler. I blended in with the folks that were slowly wandering from place to place, so no one noticed me. I couldn’t stop thinking about what the woman had said.
Was she right? Did I think I’d picked the wrong one? Ryder and I had almost kissed once and I sometimes wondered what it would have felt like, but I had chosen Miller. I shouldn’t be thinking that way. Her strange ramblings were in my head now and I couldn’t shake them loose.
By the time I got back to the café I felt as if I’d played out every scenario that could possibly crop up over the next few days. Overthinking was an art form that I had mastered.
It reminded me of all the conversations I used to practice in the mirror as a kid. The most common one was probably when I would pretend I’d tracked down my birth parents. I would rehearse things that they would say, and then my own responses. I totally get how tragic that sounds, and I daren’t tell Effie and Kate about it as they would mock me mercilessly.
I practiced what I would say if my parents told me they hoped I’d never find them, I practiced how to respond if they told me I had a bunch of secret brothers and sisters, I once even played out a version of us meeting where my high school principal pulled off a mask and revealed that she had been my mom all along. I blame all the Scooby Doo I watched
when I was younger.
“And I’m telling you, young lady, that this wasn’t cooked!” I had walked in through the café entrance and was immediately struck by the sound of an irate customer trying to argue with Rosie, one of my staff.
“Ma’am, you ate the entire dish, so I am confused about—” Rosie began.
“Don’t you dare question me!” the woman interrupted. “If I tell you that my lasagna was still frozen, then that means my lasagna was still frozen. You don’t get to judge me for accidentally eating the whole thing. I am a very successful businesswoman; I was probably busy thinking about all the business things I have to do today and didn’t notice that my food was dangerously prepared until it was too late.”
I was paralyzed in the doorway as I watched the scene unfold. Rosie, to her credit, was being incredibly patient with this lunatic. There was a man stood behind the complaining customer with his head in his hands, I noticed a gold ring on his finger. Was he her husband? He looked mortified. I would feel the same way.
“Excuse me,” I said, injecting myself into the situation. “What seems to be the problem?”
I stepped behind the counter to where Rosie had been and quickly looked over my shoulder to see if anyone had moved the mirror. It was an old trick I’d learned a few years ago, if you place a mirror behind the counter then complaining customers are able to see their own reflection.
If you make eye contact with yourself when you are acting like a jerk then you are more likely to reign it in, it works more often than not anyway.
“Who on earth are you?” she barked.
“That’s Sadie Alden,” her husband muttered. “She’s the owner of the café and the new peacekeeper.” I wondered how long I would still be referred to as the ‘new’ peacekeeper.
“Who cares? Do you plan on handling my bill? Because I certainly won’t be paying for a frozen lasagna,” she huffed.
“I’m just a little confused about your concerns, we prepare the lasagna fresh each day and it has never been anywhere near a freezer,” I said. If I could have taken a picture of her face in that moment, then I would have framed it and hung it up in the café kitchen. Her blood must have been boiling with fury.
