Sorcery and the Single Girl Read Online Free

the Peabridge Library included a colonial wardrobe—rich taffeta and linen, hoops to make my waist look tiny, and delicate embroidery that made my fingers ache every time I looked at the stitches. All right. I wasn’t such a big fan of the costumes, but they did give me an extra fifteen minutes of sleep every morning. I never needed to decide what to wear to the office.
    The costumes had been part of my boss’s last scheme to keep the Peabridge budget in the black. She required all of us librarians to dress like colonial matrons, in hopes of bringing in local library traffic. The same desperate measures had led to my living in a cottage on the Peabridge grounds—I had exchanged twenty-five percent of my salary for a fully-furnished cottage. A cottage that just happened to contain a collection of books on witchcraft. Books—and Neko, whose fashion sense (at least in jewelry) seemed twisted from the years he had spent enchanted as a statue in the basement.
    From the corner of my eye, I saw Melissa shudder at the hideous rhinestone disaster. “Come on, Neko,” I pressed. “Why did you come over here? What did you need to tell me?”
    “Oh!” He put down the remote. “Clara phoned.”
    Clara. My mother. “And?”
    “She wanted to remind you that you’re both having brunch with your grandmother, a week from Sunday.”
    So now Clara was my calendar tickler? Brunch was more than a week away. I guessed she just didn’t want to disappoint Gran.
    Monthly brunch meetings had been my grandmother’s idea. She thought that if the three of us got together on the first Sunday of every month, then we’d get to know each other better. We’d learn to trust each other more, to share with each other like mothers and daughters are supposed to.
    Most of the time, we managed to make it through the meal without any outright argument, but I had to admit that I’d taken to ordering Eggs Benedict, so that I could take out some of my frustration on the English muffin base. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to eat a simple breakfast of Special K and skim milk with my mother. There wasn’t enough of a subtextual battle there to get us through the meal.
    I attended our monthly get-togethers religiously, though, seeing them as a sort of penance for my grandmother’s complete recovery from the pneumonia that had sent her to the hospital the year before. While it had taken months for her to regain all of her proverbial vim and vigor, she was finally entrenched in her volunteer work again, helping out the D.C. concert opera guild.
    She was also wholly devoted to the cause of strengthening my bonds with my mother. There were now entire weeks when I didn’t sulk about Clara abandoning me for two and a half decades. (I could recite Gran’s explanations in my sleep by now. Clara had needed to defeat her own demons. She had needed to grow up herself. She had needed to find the spiritual anchor of her life in the whirlwind world around us. Yeah, yeah, yeah.)
    I glared at Neko. “And that reminder couldn’t wait until I got home?”
    My familiar plucked at an imaginary thread on his black jeans. “There was another message.”
    I caught Melissa rolling her eyes, and I had to admit that I was getting annoyed with my familiar as well. “Yes?” I prompted.
    “Teresa Alison Sidney called.”
    I couldn’t keep from catching my breath.
    “Who’s that?” Melissa asked.
    Neko cocked his head, clearly asking if I wanted him to elaborate. I fortified myself by filling my lungs and said, “The head of the Washington Coven. The leader of the local witches.”
    I hadn’t met Teresa Alison Sidney yet, but I’d heard her name often enough in the past ten months. She’d been invoked, like a saint or a sinner, every time I strayed from my studies with David Montrose, my warder. Teresa Alison Sidney and the Coven had the right to control all witchcraft in their territory. If I passed the Coven’s inspection, if I learned enough witchcraft to