Before
“The wards are down.”
Andria glanced up from the pile of prickly leaves and white berries she was slowly wrapping into decoration. Her sister loomed over them, hands on her hips.
“Nonsense, I would have felt that,” her mother said from across the table.
They all glanced at Granny Francis at the end, who was slowly picking apart the little leaves and berries Andria had already put together. She didn’t show any sign of seeing or hearing them.
Samantha sat down. “I’m telling you. The last maple gave out.”
Andria let her hands drop to her lap. If Samantha was right, the Abbott coven wasn’t a coven anymore. They hadn’t been able to field a full Circle of thirteen witches in a decade, but her grandmother, mother, and sisters had kept the wards up. With Granny Francis losing her mind, they didn’t have the juice.
Samantha plucked one bit of mistletoe from the pile and inspected it. “I don’t know why this is for kissing. It’s a very unfriendly plant.”
Andria rolled her eyes and snatched the little herb from her sister’s fingers. As the herbalist of the coven, Samantha was responsible for the garden, the wards, and the forests surrounding them. It was not Andria’s talent, and she squinted at the harmless plant. “It’s pretty.”
“Stop talking of trivialities,” their mother declared. “What do we do?”
“Ma, the Mistletoe Dance is not a triviality,” Andria said. “If we don’t get more revenue coming in, we’re going to lose our house on top of our territory.”
She looked around the renovated third floor of the Abbott Family Vittles and Lodging Shop. They’d taken out the rooms in favor of a giant dance floor during the war when there weren’t a lot of tourists passing through, but there were a lot of people wanting to blow off steam. She regretted it now since boarders brought in more money after VE Day. She had vowed to revive the dances this year.
They’d already hung boughs of evergreen around the columns in the vast space and polished the floor until it gleamed. Now they were dangling the mistletoe.
“I’m here!” her older sister Bitsy said, clattering up the stairs with a baby on one hip.
“The wards are down,” Andria said.
“I told her,” Samantha replied.
“And I’m here,” Bitsy said and waved something in her fist. Her primary talent was empathy, but she had some luck making charms. She’d been trying to create a self-protection one for years. “These won’t help if we’re overrun by werewolves or something equally sinister, but they’ll make it a little less likely you’ll be found.”
Joseph reached for the glimmering necklaces, and Bitsy put them down on the table. “Not for you.”
She let the toddler go, and he immediately reached for the mistletoe. Samantha swept it out of his way with a wave of her magic. “Really not for you.”
Andria leaned forward and disentangled one of the silver chains. It had a simple circle of silver at the end. She slipped it over her head and fisted the charm. Would it work? She didn’t feel any different.
Samantha clutched her growing belly. “Do we expect to be overrun by werewolves?”
There was a pack just south of them, Andria knew, and rumor of one in the woods to the north, but they hadn’t tested the wards in her lifetime. Witches and shifters hadn’t mixed for centuries. They kept to their own territories. Would the wolves know that the wards were down and her coven was vulnerable? She rolled her eyes. Her coven was nonexistent.
Bitsy put her hands on her hips. “What are we going to do about it?”
Their mother looked at the three of them. “What can we do about it except have more girls? Until we can field thirteen, we’ll be vulnerable. It’s a race between the other covens and the wolves and—”
“Our fertility?” Andria asked, exasperated. Was that all they were good for?
Samantha caressed her stomach. “She’s going to be a girl. I just know it.”
“How?” Andria asked.
Samantha sniffed and pulled her charm over her dark hair.
They all pivoted to look at Bitsy, then at Joseph on the floor.
“Hey, we tried the ‘Get-a-girl’ spell. It just doesn’t work like that.”
At her mother’s thunderous expression, Bitsy threw up her hands. “We’re trying again, but it takes a second. We’re not rabbits.”
Inevitably, their gazes swept to her, and Andria fought the urge to hunch. Her sisters were married and starting families with respectable sons of witches.
“I’ll start calling around,” her mother said, not even giving her time to volunteer.
“Who’s going to take a witch from a family that can’t even field a Circle or keep the wards up?” Samantha asked.
Andria laced her fingers together. Was it too much to ask that they find someone who wanted her for her? Samantha had gotten lucky. Sam and Abe had taken one look at each other and fallen head over heels in love. They were fixing up an old cabin out of town, growing a garden, and carving cradles like fairytales really existed.
She glanced at their oldest sister, who seemed to like her husband well enough, too. Andria wondered if all was truly well in the empath’s household. She was a very hard woman to read, but she never said a word against the man her mother chose for her.
“Andria?” her mother asked, her eyes gouging holes in her.
She was actually asking? Hope soared for one fleeting second, then crashed hard. She was not asking.
“Of course.” She’d delayed, wanting love, and now she was stuck with the dregs of other covens who were probably falling apart themselves. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t be kind, that they wouldn’t be compatible. She glanced at Samantha who was still caressing her belly.
Suddenly, a vision sparked. She tasted metal, and her gaze went blurry. Her divination talents had fallen silent as the rest of her coven weakened, but sometimes she still got glimpses of the future.
This was more than a glimpse. The room faded away, and she was thrown into a dance with a whirling, beautiful man, her perfect match. He was young, cocky, beautiful, and hers.
With the gasp, she snapped back into the room.
Her whole family was staring at her.
She gulped, wishing for water. Visions always seem to drain her dry.
“What did you see?” her mother asked.
She felt a glimmer of excitement. Maybe there was some hope for her? “Call the covens.”
She struggled to hang on to the vision of his face. In seconds, he went from young and cocky to a thousand years old, wrinkled and stooped. Would that mean they would grow old together?
Briskly, she stood up and looked around the room. “These bundles aren’t gonna hang themselves.”
Samantha swept them into her arms with a wave of her hand; she had more telekinesis than any of them. She started for one column, and Andria shook her head.
“No, we need them in the middle of the floor. Nobody can kiss if it’s on a column.”
Samantha obliged, and Andria headed for the three enormous windows that looked out into the back alley and the fire escape.
“Put one out here, too.” It was always a favorite spot to get some privacy during the dance.
Samantha laughed and tossed her a little bundle. Andria affixed it to a bit of wire they’d hung as a clothesline above the fire escape.
“Well, you guys do your little decorating,” Bitsy said. “I’m gonna walk the perimeter. See if I can charm some other bits to maintain a semblance of a barrier.” Bitsy marched toward the door.
“Mama!”
They turn to watch Joe toddling after her.
Bitsy groaned. “Can somebody—”
Andria swept the toddler into her arms. “You want to stay with me?”
“Mama!”
Bitsy hustled back to them, her heels clicking on the boards, and kissed him on the cheek. “Stay with your Aunt Andria.”
Then she turned on one heel and headed for the stairs.
He started to cry.
“He’ll get over it,” Bitsy said and rushed down the stairs.
Andria bounced him, shaking her head. Aunt Andria. She wasn’t used to the name. It felt like shoes a size too big. Her own aunts had scattered to the wind as their power waned. It had just been her mother and her sisters for years, trying to keep the business together through the war and now.
“Mama,” Joe said again in a hopeless voice, and she squeezed him tight. Bitsy had never forgiven herself or him for the temerity to be a boy, and Andria was terrified that he would grow up knowing that.
“You are beautiful, sweet boy, and worth the world,” she said as the child finally quieted.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Samantha said, and Andria twisted with the kid to watch her lose all patience with her decorations and fling her hands in the air. “Just go where I tell you. I know it’s ridiculous.”
The plants flew from her fingers up to the ceiling, spaced equidistant from each other.
Samantha put her hands on her hips. “I know it’s not far enough away from each other, and you’re gonna spend your last few nights on earth hanging from the ceiling. Deal with it.”
Andria worried the outburst would upset Joe again, but the kid just laughed and pointed up to one of the little bundles wrapped in a red ribbon right above their heads.
“Do you know what this means?” Andria whispered and started kissing him all over his face.
He shrieked and batted at her, and she let him down to run around more. She patted down the front of her dress as she stood up. “I’ve got to get down to check out the guests.”
It felt like such a mundane thing on this day that rocked their world. The wards were down. They were no longer a coven. Her mother was calling the matchmakers. And she had seen a glimpse of the man she would marry.
Maybe she would kiss him under this very mistletoe?
She was a young child during the war and had vague memories of this kind of hope and fear.
They lost so many men on the battlefields of Europe and the South Pacific. It was one reason the covens were failing now. So many aunts had lost their husbands before they could even have children. Or they lost too many years, so even if the men had come home, it had been too late. She looked at Joe, wanting to tell him again that he meant everything.
The world was at peace now, mostly, but that still hadn’t sunk into her bones. She wondered if it would ever sink into the bones of anyone alive for that horrible time.
This was so much smaller and so much less serious, but it felt the same. They would put up the mistletoe and dance, even though her family was already gone.
