Page 1 of An Amateur Witch's Guide to Murder
CHAPTER ONE
“You a witch?”
Mateo Borrero pulls an earbud out, muting the furious screeching and synth blasting his ears to see who’s leveled this super creative insult at him. He’s greeted by the least surprising answer: a douche-bro hanging out of a truck, halted at a red light. The guy comes in a matching set, another at the wheel, craning around his friend to help jeer. The truck is big, and the douches are bigger. A guy in all-black and eyeliner is a threat to their dicks in some ill-defined way.
Because it’s a bad idea to humor assholes looking to start something, Mateo pretends he doesn’t see them, even though he unmistakably turned and stared. This flies for all of six seconds.
“Hey, witch bitch!” the guy yells even louder, getting innovative with rhyming now. A real poet screaming from his car. “You deaf, too?”
This is primewords will never hurt youterritory. They’ll get bored if he doesn’t react. But his mouth and temper operate at a different speed than his brain. “I heard you, I’ve just got zerointerest in getting blown by a guy in a polo, so I’m pretending I didn’t.”
There’s a beat of silence as the pair try to navigate the meaning of this witty retort, and then a Slurpee cup explodes inches from Mateo’s boots. The truck peels off, the poet hanging out the window cackling.
The crosswalk pings, but Mateo stands motionless, searching desperately for calm—three breaths, staring after the truck as it disappears around a corner. He tries not to envisionhow nice it would be to drag the poet out the truck window, grate his laughing face off on the asphalt, slit him from belly to neck, reach inside, and squeeze a handful of viscera until it pops.
The crosswalk light goes through another cycle before he can run his tongue over his teeth and confirm they’ve returned to their usual human bluntness so he can continue on to work.
He steps through the Slurpee. Cherry. Like a snowman died in traffic.
The print shop opens and closes late on Wednesdays for reasons no one remembers—and therefore never explained to him—so the front is locked when Mateo walks up at ten till noon. Pizza Lady next door waves as he struggles with the steel grate that separates him from his low-paying-but-needed job. Not for the first time, he longs for a spell that might fuse it locked forever—and give him a million dollars—but the mechanism slides open like it always does.
Wednesdays are the best days of his week, excluding paydays. All of the joy of a cool room that smells like paper with none of the misery of getting up at 6AM. Stylish sweater stowed and hideous uniform polo applied to body, Mateo surveys theorders from last night. It’s clear Angelica was on shift because everything’s done and the handwriting is serial killer neat.
He pours a coffee from the shitty pod machine in the back—which is a sin in Seattle, but he doesn’t have twenty bucks to waste at an artisanal café—brings out the cash drawer, and uses a boot to ferry the brown rubber doorstop into place between door and frame. The front door sticks, so it’s easier to leave it ajar, even if it means flies come in as the days get disgustingly warm.
As a proper, self-respecting goth, he hates the approaching summer. He’ll go to his grave in long sleeves and black skinny jeans with too many zippers. It’s a stereotypical look for a novice witch—the douche-bros were correct, but he still hates them. When he started practicing brujería, he considered changing his style, but he looks good in black.
Flicking the switch by the door,Turbo Print and Shipblazes to life against the front window in neon blue. Glancing at the schedule, he’s surprised to see a new name. Doris could have told him. This is probably revenge for caving to his oft-repeated request for staff.
This new guy’s late, though. He should have shown up ten minutes ago. Bodes horribly.
Officially open, Mateo retreats to his post behind the counter, sips his bitter coffee, and tries to improve his mood via force of will. In flows a ceaseless mix of office workers who’ve waited until the last second to print their proposals, college students with homework assignments who just realized their ancient instructors expect a physical copy, and people who haven’t used a computer since 1982 but have the sudden and inexplicable need to fax something.
Plastic customer service smile slips into place over black-painted lips. It’s his only defense against the masses. As handsdo the automatic motions of drudgery, his mind wanders, counting up the extra hours worked this week and calculating the paycheck.
Things are tight again. Always. Mateo’s perma-roommate, best friend, and non-blood-related family, Ophelia—who only sometimes exists in this plane of reality—can’t even afford her share of utilities, let alone rent. Another roommate would help, but it’s tricky to screen for sincerely-okay-with-goth-shit, not just on a superficial level. Though, rent isn’t at the top of his list of problems. What he really needs is enough cash to handle hisaffliction.
But every time he gets a little ahead, Ophelia’s car dies, something critical breaks in the house, or a collection agency comes knocking about his deadbeat mother’s debts.
He has to ring up the next two customers with a close-lipped smile for fear his teeth have gone pointy again. His mother, who conveniently went missing five years ago—happy eighteenth birthday to Mateo—left him a crumbling house with a lien on it, a box of vintage Mister Donut cups, and her demon.
He needs to up his side hustle, but his skill set isn’t easily advertised, and he’s vowed never to use WorkList again. In retrospect, puttinglet’s make magic togetheron the internet was an obvious mistake that would result in needing to change his phone number.
A customer surrounded by printers asks if the print shop prints things, and Mateo takes three more measured breaths like his mother taught him—ironic—presses the bad feelings down, and relinquishes himself to the flow of stupid, letting it gently wash over him.
At two, the door bangs open, letting in a wash of pizza smell from next door and a scrawny, pale twenty-something withwhite-blond hair. He looks like he drove with his head out a window, hair messy in a way that can’t be fashion. He makes wide eye contact with Mateo that swiftly shifts into surprised confusion. People don’t expect goths at retail establishments.
“You’re Christopher Nystrom?” Mateo hazards, the level of alarmed disarray pouring off the guy appropriate for someone an hour fifty-five minutes late for their first day.
Messy Hair Guy freezes in the doorway like those videos of deer finding themselves unexpectedly in convenience stores, and it’s unclear if he’s going to answer or start flailing his stick legs wildly as he tries to flee. “Yeah. No. I mean, yeah, but Topher. My dad was Christopher.IsChristopher. He’s not dead or anything. Which is … I mean … that’s a weird thing to say. I realize. The dead thing. Not my name,” Topher-not-Christopher says, confidence and volume evaporating from his words until he’s whispering by the end.
It’sa lotfor a first impression. Mateo considers how to play this because it feels like the wrong word will obliterate Topher. “I’m the manager, and I super don’t care that you’re late. Stuff happens.” This isn’t true, but if he doesn’t train Topher, he’ll never get a lunch break.
“You’re Mateo?” Topher makes it sound like an off-brand cereal.Matt-ee-oh.
Mateo enunciates it correctly, and sounds only a little derisive.
“Sorry. Sorry about that. And about this. Being late,” Topher says, taking one step and then two, finally entering enough for the door to bang back into place against the doorstop. “The bus I was on was supposed to be the express, but it wasn’t, and then I was scared to get off, like I wouldn’t find the right one. But then it stalled, and we had to get out and get on a different bus, but thatwas still the wrong bus, and then it got sideswiped in the tunnel, and it was a whole thing, so then I just sort of …” He trails off, having run out of air within his slender frame.
