Page 2 of The Bookbinder's Guide to Love

“I don’t know if you’ll be interested, but I sometimes make special journals with an intent inscribed.”

“She made one for me and Poppy and it led us to opening the store,” Liberty said.

“How?” Amber sounded skeptical.

“Well, you write down an intention and then I will emboss it into the cover of the book. You fill out the journal, and when it’s full, the intention becomes real,” Sera said.

“Really?”

“Yes. It’s worked for all three of us,” Poppy said, coming over with the tea she’d made.

“Okay. I’ll try it,” Amber said.

Sera went to her workbench and took a piece of old parchment and a fountain pen and came back, handing them to Amber.

“What should I write?”

“Something you can believe in. I wrote, ‘There is magic in the words in this book, and they will create the life I want,’” Sera said.

“We did the same,” Liberty added.

Amber took a minute to think and wrote a version of Sera’s suggestion.

“Okay, it will take about thirty minutes for me to put this into the cover.”

“Want to have your cards read while you wait?” Liberty asked.

“Love to.”

Sera heard them move away as she went back to her workbench and carefully lifted the cardboard back under the front cover. She placed the handwritten piece of parchment on the inside and then closed the cover with glue and reattached the bindings of the leather. When she was done, Amber told them she’d enjoyed meeting them and left.

“Wow. We should have asked for a selfie,” Poppy said.

“No one is going to believe she was here,” Sera said. “But I think it was probably nicer for her to just be a girl in the shop than Amber Rapp, megastar.”

“Probably. Her cards were intense,” Liberty said. “So back to charm, curse or confluence. What do we think of Merle?”

“Gross. He’s my cousin,” Poppy said.

“Charm,” Sera said. She liked Merle, who bought a lot of books from her on wizardry and war for his Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. He was the dungeon master for his group.

“Great, so that leaves curse for me,” Poppy said.

“Confluence, then. He’s a bit too nerdy,” Liberty said. “But I’d still rock his dungeon.”

They all laughed. Sera had found something she’d never had the courage to write about in her manifesting journal.Sisters.

One year later, Amber Rapp dropped her new album and it went straight to the top of the charts. She gave all the credit to her visit to WiCKed Sisters in Birch Lake, Maine—which just confirmed for many locals that they were indeed a coven and most likely good witches. Since then, Amber’s fans had descended on the town in droves, all wanting to get their hands on the journal Amber had purchased, have tea in Poppy’s shop and get their cards read by Liberty.

One

Serafina Conte wished she had magic. Not the kind that everyone thought she had, where she could make their dreams come true, but the kind where she could turn an onerous man into a toad.

To be fair, she wasn’t sure what she’d do with Wesley Sitwell once he was a toad—maybe put him in a terrarium like they had for the fourth-grade class turtle and feed him dead flies once a week. That sounded perfect to her.

Except despite what Amber Rapp had told her followers, the co-owners of WiCKed Sisters weren’t modern-day witches. Sera and her friends had no control over anything paranormal. She was pretty sure Amber’s success had come from her own determination to release an album unlike anything she’d created before. She’d made her own magic.

But Amber wasn’t taking the credit and had given it all to them. So each day before they opened the shop there was a crowd of people outside, not just younger fans but their parents and grandparents as well.

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