The citrus scent of cleaning supplies hit me when I stepped onto the first floor. I walked into the kitchen to find Minerva wrapped in a blanket and draped over the table, sound asleep, and Annette on her hands and knees in front of the oven in the same clothes she’d changed into the night before. Tufts of curly brown hair had fallen from her bear-eared buns, and she wore latex gloves, too big and bright yellow, with a sponge in one hand and a toothbrush in the other.
“Have you been up all night?” I asked, my voice rising an octave.
She looked up at me, the dark smudges on her cheek and above her right brow bringing out the gray in her eyes. They sparkled a deep, cool pewter, like a storm over a misty ocean. That, combined with her long, thick lashes, captivated anyone who happened to look her way. The effect was fascinating. “No.” She rubbed her brow with the back of a yellow glove, smearing the smudge a bit further. “I slept a couple of hours.”
“There’s no need to clean the oven, hon. We’ll have to get a new one either way.”
“I’m not. I’m just trying to clean the floor.” She sat back on her heels. The white tile did seem a little worse for wear. “Unless the insurance people need to see it all as is.” Suddenly alarmed, she glanced around at all the work she’d put in.
I followed her panicked gaze.
She’d cleaned almost the entire kitchen. Even the white cabinets had a fresh glint to them. “Maybe I should have left it for the adjuster to see. Crap, I didn’t think of that.” She rubbed her brow again, creating two new smudges over her other brow.
“Do we even have insurance?” She’d been conscious a lot longer than I had these last few months. She knew much more about the estate than I did.
She beamed at me. “As a matter of fact, we do.”
“Do they cover mysterious explosions?”
“That, I don’t know.” She pointed to a small box of takeout coffee on the island. “Coffee and breakfast sandwiches.”
“You went out?”
“I did.”
“May the Goddess bless you with a dozen children,” I said, reaching out a hand to her.
“Bite your tongue.” She took it and struggled to her feet. “That used to be so much easier,” she said with a groan, swiping at the knees of her gray yoga pants. She removed the bright-yellow gloves and threw them across the kitchen into the sink.
“A lot of things used to be so much easier,” I agreed. “When did Minerva come down?”
“Shortly after I got up.” We each grabbed a cup and a cheese croissant with egg and bacon and sat at the table. “She was asleep when I got back from my coffee run. Poor thing.”
I sat beside her and tucked a lock of long black hair behind her ear before returning my attention to Nette the Jet. “Are you sure you’re okay?” When she blinked over at me, confused, I elaborated. “Well, you were kidnapped, placed under a building being demolished, turned into a crow so you could escape—I still stand by that decision, by the way—then you shifted back into human form only to live through another explosion, and now you can suddenly see both my spells and the departed.” When I thought about everything that had happened to her—to us—in the last few days, I shook my head, astonished we hadn’t run from Salem screaming. “How are we still alive?”
“Right?” She scooted closer, the curls that had fallen loose bouncing around her face. “With everything that’s happened over the last few days, we should be dead. And yet, here we are, alive and kicking. I think it’s you.”
Here we go again. I rolled my eyes and took a sip of my lukewarm coffee before getting up to reheat it. At least we still had a microwave. We wouldn’t perish anytime soon.
“Hear me out.” She rose to follow me the grueling ten feet it took to reach my destination. Because no way could I hear her from that great a distance. “You’re a charmling. You must have some kind of protective”—she waved a hand in a circle to indicate my exterior—“mojo. Like a magical barrier that keeps you safe.”
“Fine.” I set the microwave and turned back to her. “What about you?”
“It must extend to those around you.” She chewed on a nail in thought. “Like a shield. And you can push it out with your mind.” She couldn’t be more wrong if she’d proclaimed cheesecake a health food. Much to my undying chagrin.
“You’ve seen too many movies.”
She pressed her mouth together. “Okay, then, Miss Debbie Doubter, how do you explain it?”
“I can’t,” I admitted before taking out my now-scalding coffee and hurrying to my seat, alternating the thick paper cup between my hands three times before I made it. “Holy crap, that microwave works well.”
“I think you’re like a superhero.”
“You’ve said that before.”
“Only, you know, way less cool.” She sat across from me all nonchalant, like she hadn’t just insulted my very being.
“What do you mean? I’m cool.”
The unladylike snort she emitted would argue otherwise.
I wilted. “I used to be cool.”
She shook her head. “You were never cool.”
My lids narrowed to menacing, razor-sharp slits. “I’ll have you know, I was totally cool in tenth grade.”
“No, you weren’t.”
“I was so cool, they called me the ice queen.”
“No one has ever called you the ice queen.”
“I was so cool, I ate popsicles in January.”
“I’m not sure that has anything to do with—”
“I was so cool, they once asked me to leave the swimming pool because I was turning the water to ice.”
After a careful analysis that involved her staring at me for a semi-endless eternity, she reminded me, “They asked you to leave the pool because you swallowed half of it then coughed so hard you threw up before you could get out.”
“Oh, yeah.” The memory washed over me in disturbing waves of disappointment. “That was a horrible day.”
“I know. I was still in the pool.”
I tested my coffee, decided to give it another minute, lest I lose several layers off the roof of my mouth, and asked, “Can we talk about something else?”
She perked up. “Like… say… the business?”
Ah, yes. Our new startup. “How’s that going?”
“Fantastic.” She reached over Minerva and grabbed a notebook off the counter. Flipping through the pages, she said, “You have your first official office hours next week.”
I’d been in the middle of testing my coffee again when I spit it onto her notebook.
She wiped it off with a sleeve and continued, unfazed. “And we have our first séance tomorrow night. Kind of like a kickoff, you know?”
I shot to my feet. “Annette!”
“What? We talked about this.”
“You talked about this.”
“There are at least two sides to every conversation.”
She clearly had no idea how often I talked to myself. “As a possible draw for business in the future.”
“No time like the present.”