The Witches We Are

CHAPTER ONE

On the gorgeously sunny morning of September 5th, Brenn Maren cracked her knuckles, straightened her shoulders, and drew in a deep, fortifying breath. And promptly started choking on her own spit.

She took a sip of her coffee and her coughs turned into a hiss of pain as the too-hot liquid burnt her tongue. “Ouch, ouch, ouch,” she gasped as she fanned her open mouth.

Her familiar, Mayhew, a large black crow, swooped through the doorway. He landed on her desk, hopping over to drop a stack of band-aids in front of her. He threw his head back and let out a cawing noise that sounded suspiciously like cackling.

“Very funny,” Brenn muttered. “What a hilarious guy you are. Listen to me chortle in glee.” She swept the band-aids into a drawer. Setting her coffee aside to cool, she cleared her throat several times. “Fifth time’s the charm?”

Mayhew cocked his head. “Maybe,” he croaked. He looked from her face to the deck of cards she held in her hands several times. “You try.”

Brenn thumbed through the deck, making sure she hadn’t shuffled in an unpainted card from the pile she kept next to her brushes. Dozens of images flashed past as she flipped through the entire stack. Since she’d turned sixteen, about a month before each solstice and equinox, she would have a dream she couldn’t remember, and when she woke up, the vision of a divination card stuck with her until she painted it. At this point her deck was a more personal record of her life than any album of photos from the same time could have been.

“Okay,” she said to herself. “One. Is that big thing still coming?” She laid a card face down on the table. “Two. Is it going to affect me directly?” Another facedown card next to the first. “And three. Are you done throwing whatever weird tantrum this is?” Brenn gently slapped the third card onto her desk.

Charles, her other familiar, leaned over with his paws resting on a pile of books on the corner of the desktop, craning his neck to watch her. The sleek white ermine looked at her with a hint of concern in his eyes, and chittered softly.

“Yeah, I know. I’m just going to do it.” Brenn stretched her fingers, her knuckles popping again. “I’m just going to flip these over and get my answers, and it will be like the last four days never happened.” She chewed her bottom lip. “Yep.”

She sat there tapping the back of the leftmost card with her fingertip, unable to make herself turn it over. Mayhew clacked his beak at her.

Brenn shrugged at him. “If I don’t do it, then I never have to know.”

He made a sound of disgust and flew out of the room. Brenn called after him, “Fine, okay. You’re right.”

She squinted, peering through her lashes barely enough to see where the cards were. Huffing a heavy breath through her nose, she flipped them over in quick succession.

Blank. Blank. Blank. Just like the last four days.

“Noooo,” she groaned, dropping her forehead to the desk with a clunk. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

All through the entire month of August, her cards had warned her something big was coming. Something life changing. Then on September first, they showed her nothing. That was the day her magic started faltering.

Now every card she pulled was blank, even though she checked the deck obsessively before she used it. Brenn didn’t usually put a lot of stock in harbingers, but this felt too big to ignore. One time, sure, she could write that off as a strange little hiccup, but day after day? And it wasn’t only her cards. Her magic had been glitchy too, reliable spells not working the way they should or even outright backfiring.

Brenn twisted her hands together under the desk, her eyes squeezed tightly shut. She could feel goosebumps rise on the back of her neck, and she clenched her body to try to stop her shivers. Her stomach twisted uncomfortably as she tried to remember if this had ever happened to anyone she knew. Talking to her family about her issue was not an option. Her oldest sister, Noelle, was obnoxiously self-assured and had never failed at anything in her entire life. If Brenn went to her, she would never hear the end of it. Sasha and Carl Maren, her parents, were semi-famous in the witching world for the prestigious magical advancement conferences they had developed when Brenn was a baby. They were embarrassed enough by the way Brenn used her skills in her business, Lost Seas Procurement and Persuasion; if she confessed she was magically deficient, they might try to whisk her off to some sort of secretive magical rehab. And Cleo, her younger sister, always expected her messes would be fixed if she called Brenn.

Normally, Brenn would go talk to her Auntie Violet, who had been her confidant since her childhood. However, every year Violet went on retreat with her coven, arriving back mid-September. They had a strict no-contact rule, which was extremely inconvenient for Brenn this year.

No, she had to figure it out on her own.

Feeling determined, Brenn sat back up quickly, startling Charles into leaping from the stack of books he had been dozing on. Unfortunately that made Brenn flinch, and her now-cool coffee was so close to her arm that she knocked it over. As she scooped up her divination deck out of the rapidly spreading puddle, she said her usual spill-cleaning spell. The coffee hovered in the air as a wiggly sphere for a few seconds then splashed itself down, missing her mug entirely and soaking a box of charms she had to deliver to a client this morning.

“You have got to be kidding,” Brenn said to the mess in front of her. She massaged the spot between her eyebrows as she sat looking at the sodden cardboard. Maybe she should go back to bed.

Instead she crossed the hall to her storeroom, rummaging in a cupboard for a box to swap for the coffee-saturated one in her office. As she checked the contents of appropriately-sized containers, she mentally ran through the healing spells she knew. One of her great-great-multiple-great-grandparents had been a doctor and kept a thorough record of their knowledge and magical experiments. She loved reading about how her ancestors approached magic.

Brenn sat back on her heels. She had an entire bookcase of her family’s grimoires, handed down and added to by each generation. Surely she wasn’t the first person to have a case of magical incapacity.

She dashed into her office to drop the box she held on the desk and nearly fell as she spun around to hurry down the hallway. Charles stared at her from the foyer table where he sat smoothing his fur with his paws.

“Got an idea,” she shouted as she rushed past.

A few hours later, Brenn was sitting on the floor in her library, stacks of well-worn leather journals scattered around her. She was concentrating so deeply on the page she was reading that she didn’t hear Mayhew the first few times he spoke.

“LATE,” he yelled at her, landing on her knee.

She blinked at him.

He pecked gently at her watch. “Witch late,” he said at a slightly lower volume.

It was nearly noon, which meant she had been poring over her books for almost three hours. “Oh, fuck,” she spit out as she jumped up. Her first client had expected her thirty minutes ago.

She ran into her office, grabbing the box on her desk and tossing it in a bag with the rest of her deliveries for the day. “Thanks, Mayhew,” she called as she tried to shove her feet into her boots and snag her keys off the foyer table at the same time. Brenn caught herself before she could tie her boot laces with magic, and hastily did them up by hand. “I’ll see you guys later. Don’t move the grimoires. Charles, just stay out of the library entirely.”

* * *

As she pulled onto the gravel drive of Aurora Orchards, she brushed a lock of unruly hair out of her face, scowling at her phone as it buzzed for the seventh time since she got in the truck. Cleo again. Her younger sister almost certainly wanted her to come fix something or other.  Brenn made a funny little circular gesture above her phone. “Silenced,” she said firmly. A stinging spark of static electricity bounced from her phone to her fingers. Instead of silencing, it started blasting her ‘sad girl in the bath’ playlist. She sighed deeply, shaking the feeling back into her fingertips as she eased into a parking spot.

Elise Matthews waved and began talking before Brenn had a chance to get out of her truck. “Hey, Brenn! We missed you at the last couple of Spell Dev meetings. Everything ok?”

Damn. She forgot that there was a Spell Development meeting last night. She really was off her game. Not that she would have gone anyway, what with every spell she attempted lately fizzing out, but that did make three in a row she’d missed.

“No yeah, I honestly forgot last night. I’ve been dragging a bit this weekend. You know how it goes.” She rummaged in her truck for the box of harvest charms the Matthews used to keep their trees docile during the tourist rush. Last year, a particularly mischievous tree had goosed every person that walked near it, and they couldn’t spare an employee to watch the tree full-time this year. The box had shifted to the bottom of her tote, and she pulled the other orders out to get to it.

Elise followed her around to the other side of the truck. “You getting enough sleep? Vitamin D? You want a cup of coffee?”

Coffee. Coffee. Her hands stilled as she remembered the disaster in her office this morning. “Oh, for crying out loud. I don’t have your delivery.”

“You can’t find our delivery?” Elise wobbled a little on tiptoes, peering into Brenn’s truck.

“No, I know exactly where it is. I spilled my damn coffee all over your box, and I was going to switch it with this un-coffee-soaked box, but I got distracted. And then I was running late and rushing and grabbed this box without actually transferring your charms to it. Unless you want this box of...” She opened the lid. “Color-shifting miniature mice figurines.” Her shoulders slumped the tiniest bit.

“Nah, we’re good.” Elise’s sarcasm always came out slightly sweet, lessening its impact. “We aren’t going to need the charms until the end of this week anyways, so swing back by when you get a chance.”

“Thanks, Elise. I’m so sorry. I don’t know where my head is.”

“No worries. You know, Mina’s been working on her teas and made one for luck. You want some?”

She pushed the door shut and leaned against the back of the truck. “Luck tea? I don’t know that that’s going to do much for me.”

Elise gave her a grin. “Honestly, I think it just gets you a little high, but if it makes you stop overanalyzing every situation, well. Something to be said for that.”

Brenn thought about the sticky spots of coffee she still had to clean off her desk, her possibly-fried phone, her deck full of mysteriously blank cards, her burnt tongue, the newest mess she would have to deal with for Cleo, and gave into her base impulses. “Yes. Yes, please, I’d love some tea today.”

* * *

She was feeling slightly better as she headed back through town towards her house. Sure, it was a little hot for this time of year; the weather should have been showing the first stirrings of autumn, but it was a lovely, relentlessly sunny day. She stuck her arm out of the window as she drove, letting her hand ride up and down on the breeze, admiring the way the golden light highlighted the warm undertones of her brown skin.

Aside from the four years she spent at MSU getting her business degree, Brenn had spent her entire life living in Briar Vale. It was a small town, around 9,000 people, and had grown up out of land that held an excess of magical energy. Like most other magic towns scattered around the world, every resident had some degree of magical ability.

The Vale was quaintly charming, tucked into the forests of western Michigan, with a vibrant downtown area of small businesses and restaurants and strange little hotels and inns. Two rivers framed the town, one leading into the largest of the three lakes on the west side. Tourists enjoyed the festivals and events that were held every few weeks or rode the vintage steam train that circled the town to marvel at the scenery. And in every direction a person looked, there were huge tangles of wild roses, the namesake of Briar Vale, in any color imaginable. And some beyond that.

Her phone pinged again, another ‘hey I need you’ text from Cleo. Well, at least the thing still worked.

Glancing over at the tin of tea Elise had sent home with her, she decided to keep ignoring Cleo and push the rest of her work to tomorrow. She’d take this afternoon to herself, bliss out with Mina’s luck tea, and after some rest, her magic was sure to work normally. She hoped.

She dismissed another text notification from Cleo.

* * *

Walking back through the door of the Moon House, she stroked the door frame. “Hello, house.” Her keys almost made it into their regular place as she tossed them across the room. Mayhew cawed as he swooped down to pluck them off the floor and dropped them in the novelty caldron Brenn used as a key bowl. Charles ran up her arm as she bent down to untie her boots. “Thanks, Mayhew. You guys want a snack?” Charles chirped quietly as she stroked the downy spot of fur under his ear. The three of them walked down the long hallway to the kitchen at the back of the house.

Sunlight streamed in through the mullioned windows that stretched the length of the kitchen. Brenn pulled her smallest teapot from the armoire in the corner, careful to shut the door with her hand and not a flick of magic. The last thing she needed was blasting her cupboard to smithereens. She filled the electric kettle with water and turned it on. She decided that after the tea kicked in, she would try for another divination card vision. That bothered her the most about her magic not working properly; she was overdue to make her next card by nearly two weeks. When the cards had been behaving normally, she thought maybe she had to first deal with the big thing they had said was coming. Now she had a sneaking suspicion her lack of visions correlated to her magic being off.

As she waited for the water to heat, she was struck with a horrifying thought. What if the visions disappeared not because of her faulty magic, but because her deck was complete? Acid crawled up the back of her throat as she considered that. She was not ready for whatever milestone that would mark.

A gentle squawk from Mayhew broke her train of thought. He cocked his head to the side inquisitively, his shiny black feathers gleaming like an oil slick in the sun. “Work?” he croaked as he hopped closer.

“I’m taking the afternoon off.” But that did remind her she needed to reschedule everyone she was going to skip.

The ledger with the day’s delivery list was still lying open on her desk. Ignoring the three missed call notifications from Cleo, she called each client, distributing appointments to the rest of the week. Yawning, she stretched, wincing as her joints cracked. She scribbled a note to re-up her yoga pass the next time she was near her gym and tossed it on a pile of other hastily recorded notes.

She set out her card supplies in the lying room. A nice cup of mildly enhanced tea, a doze in her lying room, her ‘vision time bitches’ playlist, and she should be set to rights. Seventeen more days until the equinox—that gave her plenty of time to dream up her card. Simple. The kettle whistled in the kitchen, and she pushed herself up from the floor.

In her rush earlier, she had knocked some of the photographs in the hall askew, and she straightened them absently as she walked back to the kitchen.

She shrieked as Cleo appeared from around the corner. “Oh good, you are home. We need you to come—”

Standing in the broken glass of the picture frame she had just knocked off the wall, Brenn glared at her younger sister. “Cleo, what in the fresh hell!”

Her sister scoffed, then looked at someone Brenn couldn’t see. She could, however, hear her older sister Noelle speaking bossily in the background. “Look, Brenn, can you come down to the store? We need you to find out some information for us.”

“I just put the kettle on for some tea, and I pushed work off until tomorrow so I can rest this afternoon. There’s gotta be someone else around who can help you. Or I can come by tomorrow between deliveries.” She stretched over to the console table to grab a couple pieces of junk mail to scoop up the worst of the glass.

“No, Brenn, we need you right now. I’m not leaving until you agree to come down, and Howie is here. You know you can’t break his projections.”

Cleo had her in a corner and they both knew it. Brenn couldn’t counterspell Howie’s uncanny astral calls. She definitely wouldn’t manage it today. A truly impressive magical working, he could send a real-time projection of a person to any location within five miles of himself. Both the projector and projectee could fully see and hear each other. It could be very irritating, and he knew it, which is why Howie didn’t often do it. Except when Cleo asked, because nearly anyone would do what Cleo asked.

Brenn swallowed a frustrated scream. “Fine,” she huffed. Cleo gave her a steady look, pointed at her, and disappeared. Brenn let herself have one little irritated howl and stomped into the kitchen to turn the kettle off.

* * *

Luckily for Cleo, there was plenty of parking in front of Witchery Aesthetica when Brenn pulled up. This month Cleo had a display for celestial witches in one window, with little mobiles of stars lazily orbiting a precarious-looking stack of lunar-themed goods in the middle, and a cozy cottagecore scene in the other, with teacups charmed to send up little columns of steam. Inside, the shop was a large, nearly circular room divided into sections devoted to two dozen different kinds of witchy aesthetics, with six separate counters in the very middle arranged in a hexagonal formation. Above the counters hung a gigantic chandelier composed of hundreds of tiny twinkling lights like a cloud of golden fireflies.

As Brenn wound around tables piled high with witchy sundries, she grudgingly admired how Cleo had spelled each section to create an atmosphere appropriate to the goods featured. The bright and cheerful garden witch segment smelled like tomato leaves and peaches, with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons playing gently. Dark academia smelled like old books, and instead of music, customers could barely hear pages turning and people murmuring in the background as if they were in a library. Gothic witches were treated to a mix of The Cure and Soiuxsie and the Banshees and a loamy, stony scent under dimmed lighting, like shopping in a forgotten corner of a castle courtyard. Brenn found walking through the different departments both relaxing and oddly stimulating at the same time.

The finishing touches that drew the most customers in, however, were the photo walls Cleo had scattered throughout, set up and spelled so that every picture taken turned out perfectly, every video had a dreamy, polished quality. There was a group of people gathered around the rose wall in the botanical section. Brenn caught a glimpse of her younger sister’s blue curls as a couple of people shifted. She made a beeline for her.

Cleo and Noelle flanked a white teenage girl with bright copper-colored hair in two long braids and a port wine birthmark over her left eye and cheek. A lurid purple-green bruise stood out starkly on her forearm, her skin translucent in that way redheads sometimes have. She was staring at the floor with an uncertain but slightly defiant look on her face.

Brenn pushed past a pair of gossiping people. “Cleo? What’s going on?”

“Brenn! Great!” Cleo moved them to the edge of the small crowd and spoke in a hushed tone as Noelle kept interrogating the girl. “We need to find out what this girl’s name is and where she came from.”

“Why?” Brenn asked, trying to tune out Noelle’s voice. “Who is she to you?”

“She’s been here since we opened this morning, like three hours. She wouldn’t talk to anyone about what she wants, and I thought maybe she was stealing, but then I saw the bruise on her arm. So I called Noelle.”

“Ugh, Cleo.” Brenn made a disgusted noise.

“I know,” Cleo hissed. “But I didn’t want to jump straight to child services, and she works with kids. Who else was I gonna call?”

Brenn made a face at her. “And this is somehow better?”

“It’s done now, so deal with it.” Cleo turned back to address the girl. “If you can give us some basic information, sweetheart, we can figure out how to help you.”

The girl met Brenn’s eye. “I just need a place to stay for the night. I have a little money, or I can work to pay for it,” she said quietly.

“I think it’s best we go down to city hall and talk to a social worker, and they can find you a place to sleep tonight and a doctor to look at your arm,” Noelle said briskly, like it was already done. “Then tomorrow, we can arrange to get you home.” She addressed the group still standing there. “She’s much too young to be on her own.”

Cleo looked at the girl with sympathy. “Sweetheart, I agree with my sister. You can’t be more than, what, sixteen?”

The girl’s wide-eyed look darted between the three of them. “No, but—”

Noelle gave a resigned sigh. “There you go. You shouldn’t be wandering around an unfamiliar town without a parent with you.”

Brenn could feel the situation slipping sideways. “Cleo. Noelle. If she’s that young and managed to come here on her own, there’s probably a reason for it.” She moved to reach a hand out to the girl, but Noelle put her own hand on Brenn’s wrist, holding her back.

“Brenn, I don’t know why you’re here, but now that you are, could you just get her name?”

Most of the people around them made sounds of assent, Cleo included. Brenn felt a sudden flash of irritation that she was not unused to feeling around her sisters. “Hey, you called me. She’s not going to talk to anyone if you all keep overwhelming her like this.”

“I didn’t call you. And I have five kids, Brenn. I think I know how to handle this.” Noelle shot her own look of annoyance at Brenn. Cleo stepped between them.

“I called her,” she said to Noelle. To Brenn, she continued, “Sorry I dragged you down here. All we need is for you to persuade her to talk to us, and then you can get back to your ‘restful afternoon’.”

Brenn could hear the air quotes in Cleo’s voice. She drew in a deep, steadying breath and looked away before she was tempted to say something rude to her sisters. As she did, she locked eyes with a short Asian woman slouching by the bohemian witch photo wall one section over, hands tucked deep in the pockets of her oversized canvas jacket. She held Brenn’s gaze for a long second and then gave her a flicker of an eye roll.

Biting back a smile, Brenn turned back to the group arguing over the girl. “Look, let me take her to get some lunch, just the two of us—”

“Brenn, if you can’t get her to tell us her name and where…” Noelle interrupted, then trailed off. The quiet woman had pushed off the pillar she was leaning against and walked over to join the group.

“Didn’t she,” the woman gestured at Cleo, “call her for a reason?” She indicated Brenn with a nod of her head. “Lot of effort wasted, looks like.”

Noelle looked taken aback at being questioned by a stranger. “And who exactly are you?”

“Nat,” the woman said mildly.

Cleo snapped her fingers. “I thought I knew you! I’ve run into you at The Clover Yard before, right? The solstice committee meeting? I appreciate you trying to help, but my sisters and I can take care of this.”

Nat took her hands out of her pockets, palms out, fingers up, shrugging. “You asked for her help, why not let her give it to you?”

Exasperated now, Noelle spoke firmly. “Look, we don’t need any more opinions here—”

Brenn saw her opportunity and cut her off. She put on her innocent voice. “Nono, isn’t Willa done with kindergarten right now?”

Noelle glanced at her watch and sighed heavily. She looked authoritatively at Brenn and then Cleo. “I will be back in twenty minutes. Do not go anywhere.”

When she left, the group lost steam, drifting away. Brenn spun around to Cleo. “Thanks for that, Cleo. For crying out loud.”

“Whatever. You know why I called Noelle first.” She fluffed an errant curl back into her fauxhawk. “Your whole thing with her isn’t my fault.”

Brenn pointed a finger in her baby sister’s direction. “I’m not interested in any more from you.” She turned to the girl who was standing like she was trying to melt beneath the floor. “Hey, sorry they were treating you like a helpless child.” She pointedly ignored Cleo’s indignant ‘hey’ and held her hand out for the girl to shake. “I’m Brenn. Can I buy you some lunch or a coffee or something?”

The girl seemed slightly less mortified. She glanced around to make sure they were alone but still spoke softly. “Audrey. Lunch would be good.”

“Okay, good. Let’s get out of here before my nosy sister rushes back.” Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a tiny smile on Audrey’s face. A little feeling of accomplishment glowed in her for the first time all day. And her taking off with the girl would annoy Noelle like nothing else. Maybe her luck was turning.

As the two of them walked out of Witchery Aesthetica, Nat stood from the bench on the sidewalk. She walked over to them, smiling at Audrey. “Brenn? Could I have a minute?”

“Oh. Uh, sure.” Brenn motioned to the bench, asking Audrey to wait for her there. “What can I do for you?”

“First, I wanted to apologize for pushing into your conversation. I didn’t intend to overstep.” Her eyes twinkled. “But your sisters seemed very…set in their interpretation of the situation, and I have experience in redirecting that sort of energy.”

Brenn’s mouth twisted wryly. “Yeah, they can be a lot. Thanks for interrupting.” She took a step towards her truck.

Nat stopped her with a hand on Brenn’s arm. Her voice low, she said, “I actually wanted to say, I was on my own a lot when I was a teenager. If you ever need to talk, or insight, or any help at all, feel free to call me.” She handed Brenn a business card with a phone number written on it.

Brenn held the paper for a minute, feeling a little tingle in her fingers. “I, um. Thank you. I was only planning to take her to lunch, but I’ll keep this in mind.” She punctuated her comment by tapping the card on her other palm before putting it in her pocket.

Nat gave her a strangely knowing smile. “Sure. Well, just in case.”