Read Online Sorcery and the Single Girl by Mindy Klasky - Free Book Online Page B

alone again. “Cheers!” my acquirer said, raising up his Grand Marnier. I scrambled for my cordial, touched glasses, and then watched him pour his into his coffee. I didn’t know if the custom was British or Graeme’s own, but my Baileys quickly met the same fate.
    “So,” Graeme said, when I had tasted the extremely satisfactory result. “You’re a librarian who knows the Bard, and you help out friends in a bakery. What else should I know about you?”
    What else? Well, I could tell him that I’d been raised by my grandmother because my own mother didn’t want anything to do with me after my fourth birthday. Hmm…not exactly an upbeat introduction. I could tell him about the last person I’d spoken to in London, my ex-fiancé who had broken my heart after twelve years of dating and the longest engagement known to man. Yeah, not a great conversation starter, either. I could fill him in on the I.B., and we could spend the rest of the evening coming up with more and more horrible meanings for the initials. Yeah. Right.
    I needed something charming, something witty, something unique that would keep him here, chatting with me into the wee hours of the morning. I sipped my coffee, transferred a raspberry tart to my plate and said, “I’m a witch.”
    As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I couldn’t believe I’d said them. I mean, it wasn’t precisely a secret. David had never told me not to mention my powers. Nothing I’d read required me to take an oath of silence. If the Coven had rules, they’d never told me and, besides, I wasn’t a member of the Coven yet.
    But I could count on two hands the people who knew that I had magical powers. David. Neko. Melissa. My mother and grandmother. My grandmother’s friend, Uncle George. The I.B.
    There were likely others who suspected. My relatives in Connecticut had powers of their own to varying degrees, and they must have noticed the…odd…events surrounding the unmasking of the I.B.
    But I had never told anyone before. I had never looked anyone in the eye and said, “I am a witch.”
    I waited for Graeme to laugh. I waited for him to look at his watch, to remember that he had somewhere else to be, to recall that he had promised to read the collected works of Dostoevsky to his Great-aunt Gertrude that night.
    But he didn’t.
    Instead, he set his fork down, and he said solemnly, “There are Wyrd Women in my family, going back generations.” Wyrd Women. Witches. “I don’t know many of the details, but my da told me stories when I was a boy. Told me about what his mum could do, when she was angry.”
    “You believe me?” I was a little shocked.
    He swallowed a bite of almond cake. “Why wouldn’t I? What possible reason would you have to lie?”
    To make myself more interesting. Because I’m a delusional madwoman. Because I’m an ax murderer, waiting to bewitch you into my bed and then do away with you under the light of the full moon.
    “None, really,” I said. My voice quirked on the second word, twisting into a semblance of a British accent, and I bit back a wince. I wasn’t consciously trying to imitate him, it just happened. I rushed out more words, so that he wouldn’t think I was mocking. “It’s just so strange the way all this has happened. I haven’t told anyone. It’s not that I’m ashamed or anything, it’s just that it’s so bizarre, I’m afraid people will think I’m lying. That I’m making it all up.”
    “When you’ve seen as many odd things as I have in this world, you start believing more of what you’re told.”
    “Odd things?”
    “I’ll tell you,” he assured me. “But there’s plenty of time for that. You go first. I want to hear about how you became a witch.”
    And so I told him. Just like that. I told him about how the Peabridge had been on the edge of bankruptcy and my salary had been slashed, but I’d been permitted to move into my cottage on the library grounds as a sort of substitute for a full