Page 9 of Best Hex Ever
Dina had meant to get a black cat when she’d gone to the cat shelter a few years ago; she loved the way they looked like little pockets of midnight. But then she’d heard a grumpy yowling coming from a small cage near her feet.
“That one’s just come in, the vet reckons it’s a feral one. No microchip,” the man who worked there had said. Dina had crouched down and locked eyes with the cat, who was mostly black but with a golden crescent shape on top of her head and a creamy white belly. Heebie, who hadn’t even had a name then, had bumped Dina’s outstretched knuckle with her head, and Dina had felt the warmth of the cat’s cheek and known instantly that she had found her familiar.
If she had been feral once, Heebie Jeebie was the opposite now, eating small pieces of cheese from Dina’s hands as they sat on the kitchen floor. Dina ruffled a spell up between her fingers, and all the lamps switched on in her flat, their warm pink glow helping her settle in for the evening.
But she couldn’t settle down just yet. She’d promised Immy a reading. Dina thought she may as well do two—one for Immy and Eric’s wedding and one for herself. Even after the magic-pastry tasting, the omens from earlier in the day still nagged at her, like a belt strapped too tight.
There was only one thing for it: divination. This might be her mother’s kind of magic, but Dina had her own special way of doing it. She flicked on the kettle, watching the steam curl. Then she slipped into her pajamas and brewed herself two cups oflemon verbena tea, sweet and comforting. Her favorite herbal tea of all time. In Darija it was called louiza, and her mother swore by it for healing anxious minds. Tonight, it would have another purpose.
Dina needed to read the leaves; she needed to understand the meaning of the omens she’d witnessed today. She settled on her green velvet sofa, Heebie busy grooming herself on a cushion beside her.
Dina turned off most of the lamps with another flick of her fingers and lit a white pillar candle on the table in front of her. Witchcraft was always done best by candlelight.
For Immy’s reading, Dina took a couple of sips from the tea, keeping her mind on her best friend and her fiancé, envisioning the wedding ahead. When she looked at the leaves, everything seemed as she’d expected. Two strong lines of tea coming together, with a smaller circle at the bottom. The wedding would go well; Immy and Eric’s connection was strong. She texted Immy to that effect.
Now, Dina settled in to do her own reading, taking a few deep breaths in an attempt to clear her mind.
As Dina drank the tea, she focused on the day just past. The fallen amulet, the salt, the umbrella all replayed in her mind, but her thoughts kept twisting back to the man she’d served. His forearm as he’d leaned on the counter, the slight break on the bridge of his nose that had never properly healed. The deep golden brown of his eyes. A flicker of heat shot through her at the memory of his rough hands against hers. He had lit a fire in her that she didn’t want to interrogate.
She sipped the last of the tea and placed the cup down on the table. Tasseomancy, the art of reading tea leaves, was one of Dina’s strongest magics—she quite often had to stop herself from reading customers’ fortunes as they left the shop.
Every witch had different magical strengths. Dina’s hadalways been baking and brewing—anything that involved mixing spices and herbs in a kitchen. If her magic was a scent, it would be freshly baked brownies.
Her mother was more of a seer; she read tea leaves, fortunes, sometimes she could even read the stars in the night sky. She had an uncanny way of predicting what the lottery numbers would be, though she had never once seen fit to cashin.
Dina scooted forward until she was looking down at the tea leaves from directly above. That was an important part of the reading. You had to read from an aerial viewpoint, because the center of the cup represented the “now,” with the edges curving around it representing the “near future” and the “far future.” If your view of the leaves was skewed from an angle, the entire reading could go awry.
Once, Dina had read the shape of a wand in Rosemary’s tea leaves before a date she’d arranged. The wand signified an exciting new beginning, and Rosemary had gone on the date sure that it would end well. She’d come back an hour later, a mess of snot, tears, and smudged mascara, saying that her date had seen her in the café and done a one-eighty. Dina hadn’t seen a wand, but a dagger. After that she’d been sorely tempted to take a dagger to the idiot who had stood up Rosemary, but after a night of ice cream and watching old Hollywood musicals she’d let her murderous intentgo.
Now, Dina craned her neck to read the leaves sogging at the bottom of her cup.
Three leaves in the center, with the root of their shared stem branching out to the left in a wing-like shape. Two other leaves curved together in what could be the bottom half of a heart, or a V-shape. And then at the top, a single leaf curled in on itself in a near-perfect spiral.
Dina didn’t like what she saw. She knew instinctively what the leaves were telling her, but she didn’t want to believe it. Shemade her way to one of the many bookshelves that adorned the walls of her small flat. Flipping through the pages of her worn tasseomancy dictionary, her heart beating a little too fast, Dina looked for other options, other signs that would point to a different future.
“Why do they always have to be so dramatic?” Dina muttered as she read the portent defined in her dictionary:Romance is on the horizon; it will only end in disaster.Honestly, it was as if these dictionaries were meant more for Roman emperors in danger of being stabbed in the back than for coffee shop owners.
Dina slammed the dictionary shut and reshelved it. Slumping back on the sofa, she pushed the cup further away from her so she wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. Heebie, sensing her mood, crawled onto Dina’s lap and peered up at her with a worried expression in her eyes.
“Romance is on the horizon…” Dina muttered aloud, stroking behind Heebie’s ears. “Maybe I’ll meet someone at the wedding?”
Even as she said it, her mind was wandering back to the man from the café. No, forget him. He was just a guy passing through who she’d probably never see again. Besides, she wasn’t open to dating anyone seriously. And even if she was, she wasfarmore likely to go for a woman than a man.
The second part of the reading was, unfortunately, very easy to understand.
Call it a sixth sense, clairvoyance, or even just that feeling you get deep in your bones—Dina already knew that the bad omens from today all pointed in one direction: the hex.
Insidiously weaving its way back into her life, leaving misery in its wake.
Chapter 4
The hex had been the worst mistake of Dina’s life. She could trace its origins back to when she was only thirteen, and feeling the first flutterings of love. And something else that wasn’t quite love but left her blushing and tingling in strange new places.
Her body had woken up for the first time that summer, her senses eager to explore. Her magic, too, had come into fruition. Oh, she’d been able to do spells before then. Small ones, like turning a light on and off, and levitating a feather or a pen in the air. But this magic was stronger, wilder.
It came with her first period and tossed her as if she were a single swimmer on the open sea, lost in its current. Her mother had helped her navigate it, teaching her the different forms of witchcraft, letting Dina learn which ones suited her most. She taught her how her magic would change each month along with her cycle, and how she would be at her most powerful a couple of days before her bleed. Something about the pain of premenstrual cramps added to the potency of a witch’s magic.
Dina had been able to perform magic in a way that astounded her at first. She had summoned a spirit of luck the day before her yearly school exams, just because she could. She was a reckless teenager, and her crush on Luke Montgomery had onlymade things worse. Luke was the guy that every single girl fancied.
