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If you are fortunate enough to receive a message from the other side, pay attention to it.
—A Witch’s Compendium of Curses
My week started with spectral portents of doom floating over my bed while I was trying to have anniversary sex with my boyfriend. It was all downhill from there.
Stephen had not been pleased when I’d pushed him off of me, rolled out of bed, and yelled, “That’s it! I’m going!” at the image of a half-moon burning against my ceiling. I mean, I guess there are limits to what men are willing to put up with, and one’s girlfriend interacting with invisible omens is a bit out of a perfectly nice investment broker’s scope. He seemed to think I was huffing off after taking offense to that counterclockwise tickle he’d improvised near the end.
Of course, telling him about the increasingly forceful hints I’d received from my noncorporeal grandmother for the last two weeks would have made the situation worse. Stephen tended to clam up when we discussed my family and our “nonsense.” He refused to discuss Nana Fee or the promise I’d made to her that I’d travel all the way from our tiny village to the wilds of America. So I’d tried ignoring the dreams, the omens, the way my alphabet soup spelled out “HlfMunHollw.”
I tried to rationalize that a deathbed promise to a woman who called herself a witch wasn’t exactly a binding contract. But my grandma interrupting the big O to make her point was the final straw.
And so I was moving to Half-Moon Hollow, Kentucky, indefinitely, so I could locate four magical objects that would prevent a giant witch-clan war and maintain peace in my little corner of northwestern Ireland.
Yes, I was aware that statement sounded absolutely ridiculous.
Sometimes it paid to have a large, tech-savvy family at your disposal. When you tell them, “I have a few days to rearrange my life so I can fly halfway across the world and secure the family’s magical potency for the next generation,” they hop to do whatever it takes to smooth the way. Aunt Penny had not only booked my airline tickets but also located and rented a house for me. Uncle Seamus had arranged quick shipping of the supplies and equipment I would need to my new address. And my beloved, and somewhat terrifying, teenage cousin Ralph may have broken a few international laws while online “arranging” a temporary work visa so I wouldn’t starve while I was there. Not everybody in our family could work magic, but each had his or her own particular brand of hocus-pocus.
Although my mother was an only child, my nana was one of nine. So I had great-aunts and uncles coming out of my ears, and their children were the right age to serve as proper aunts and uncles. I had more third and fourth cousins than I could count. Literally—I tried once at Christmas, got dizzy, and had to sit down. They never treated me as if there were any sort of line dividing me from the rest of the McGavocks. So when my mother walked out and I was shipped off to my nana, it was as if the whole town was one very large, very loud family. When Aunt Penny permed my hair, to disastrous results, it was my schoolteacher who undid the damage in her kitchen sink. When my uncles were too traumatized by incidents that shall remain undisclosed to let me get behind the wheel of a car again, it was the postman, Tom Warren, who taught me to drive. They gave me a home I could depend on for the first time in my life. They gave me a family. They gave me back chunks of my childhood I’d missed until then. I would do whatever it took to make sure they were healthy and protected.
Given how Stephen felt about my family, I’d decided it was more prudent to tell him I’d accepted an offer for a special nursing fellowship in Boston. The spot came open when another nurse left the program unexpectedly, I told him, so I had to make a quick decision. He argued that it was too sudden, that we had too many plans hanging in the balance for me to run off to the States for half a year, no matter how much I loved my job.
I didn’t want to leave Stephen. For months, he had been a bright spot in a life desperately needing sunshine, with the loss of Nana and my struggles to keep the family buoyed. And yet, somehow, here I was, sprawled in the back of a run-down cab as it bumped down a sunlit gravel road in Half-Moon Hollow, Kentucky. The term “cab” could be applied only loosely to the faded blue Ford station wagon—the only working taxi in the entire town, the driver informed me proudly. We had a fleet of two working in Kilcairy, and we had only about four hundred people living inside the town limits. Clearly, living in Boston until my early teens hadn’t prepared me for life in the semirural South.
Yawning loudly, I decided to worry about cultural adjustments later. I was down-to-the-bone tired. My skirt and blouse were a grubby shambles. I smelled like airplane sweats and the manky Asian candy my seatmate insisted on munching for most of the flight from Dublin to New York. It took an additional two-hour hop to Chicago and another hour ride on a tiny baby plane-let before I finally arrived in the Hollow. I just wanted to go inside, take a shower, and sleep. While I was prepared to sleep on the floor if necessary, I prayed the house was indeed furnished as Aunt Penny had promised.
While the McGavock clan had collectively bankrolled my flight, I needed to save the extra cash they’d provided as “buy money” for my targets. Living expenses were left to me to figure out. I would have to start looking for some acceptable part-time work as soon as my brain was functional again. I squinted against the golden spring afternoon light pouring through the cab windows, interrupted only by the occasional patch of shade from tree branches arching over the little lane. The sky was so clear and crystal blue that it almost hurt to look out at the odd little clusters of houses along the road. It was so tempting just to lay my head back, close my eyes, and let the warm sunshine beat hot and red through my eyelids.
“You know you’re rentin’ half of the old Wainwright place?” the cabdriver, Dwayne-Lee, asked as he pulled a sharp turn onto yet another gravel road. I started awake just in time to keep my face from colliding with the spotty cab window. Dwayne-Lee continued on, blithe as a newborn babe, completely oblivious. “That place always creeped me out when I was a kid. We used to dare each other to run up to the front door and ring the bell.”
I lifted a brow at his reflection in the rearview. “And what happened?”
“Nothin’,” he said, shrugging. “No one lived there.”