Page 11 of Ghost With the Most
She smirked, leaning across the counter with a wink. “In this town, it’s all the same thing.”
“Gross—no, it isn’t,” Zelda assured me, speaking out of the corner of her mouth.
Gigi shrugged, all nonchalance and sharp corners. “We flirted. He was easy on the eyes and allergic to commitment. He also borrowed a few of my business ideas and tried to repackage them with worse branding.”
Zelda snorted and made a noise like a dying cat. “Oh, please. You didn’t invent crystal-infused coffee. You just trademarked the phrase ‘drink your damn aura.’”
“I copyrighted it,” Gigi corrected, smug enough to curdle milk. “There’s a difference. And Beau was a parasite. Had the audacity to open a café-slash-‘spiritual lounge’ three weeks after I opened here. Called it ‘Bean There, Hexed That.’”
I winced like I’d just heard a dad joke in the middle of a summoning circle. “That’s cringeworthy.”
Gigi shrugged.
“So you didn’t like him,” I pressed.
“No one liked him, darling,” she said with a roll of her heavily mascaraed eyes. “We tolerated him because he threw good parties and made bad decisions. The man had the moral compass of a squirrel in a diamond shop and the emotional depth of a bathtub plug. But he had charisma, I’ll give him that.”
I glanced sideways at Zelda, who was suspiciously quiet.
“Did you ever threaten him?” I asked, keeping my tone casual, like we were chatting about bad dates and not potential murder.
Gigi let out a sharp, sparkling laugh. “Please. I don’t waste good spells on walking cautionary tales.”
Zelda barked a laugh at the words good spells.
Gigi raised a brow, but continued. “If I was going to curse anyone into the afterlife, it wouldn’t be someone with as much lingering energy as Beau. Too messy. Too sticky. I’d go for someone boring. The kind of ghost no one misses. Like my last accountant. Or Cheryl from the zoning board.”
She began fussing with a tray of pink macarons that shimmered faintly with embedded runes that were probably charged with lust, stamina, or something else that didn’t bear thinking about. Her bracelets chimed with each movement, delicate and distracting all at once.
I turned, about to suggest we cut our losses and bolt when I realized Zelda was no longer beside me.
A cold prickle slid down my spine.
I scanned the shop quickly and found her crouched in the back corner, looking suspiciously guilty, beside a tiered display labeled Clarity Cakes – Now With Extra Self-Awareness! She had bright yellow frosting around her mouth and the kind of frozen posture that screamed caught in the act. Her pupils were dilated. Her lips twitched. And her aura was sparking with a bizarre shade of chartreuse, which was never a good sign.
I hissed, “Zelda. Seriously?”
She looked up like a puppy with a stolen cookie. “I thought it was lemon!”
“It glows, Zelda.”
“Well, now I know,” she whispered, then hiccupped. Her cheeks flushed with unnatural emotion. Then, from somewhere deep in her diaphragm, she belted, loudly, and with alarming pitch-perfect clarity,
“The hiiiiiiiills are aliiiiiiiive… with the sound of muuuuuuu-sic!”
Every crystal in the shop vibrated in response. A candle snuffed itself out in the corner.
I clapped a hand over her mouth mid-aria. “What was in that?” I asked Gigi without looking back.
“Emotional expression enhancement,” Gigi called unhelpfully from the counter, not even pretending to hide her glee. “They’re very cathartic. Sometimes they unlock show tunes. She’s probably repressing something.”
Zelda tried to sing through my hand, but just ended up sounding muffled, indignant, and still somehow in key. I dragged her bodily toward the door, resisting the urge to kick over the entire snack display.
“We’ll be in touch,” I growled, which was a lie.
“Oh, I hope not,” Gigi called cheerfully, waving a macaron like a wand. “Don’t come again. I’ll put your names on the loyalty hex.”
The bell jangled behind us as we stumbled back into the daylight, Zelda humming something from Les Misérables under her breath like a possessed jukebox and me questioning every decision that had led me to this godforsaken town full of cursed desserts, chaotic witches, and ghosts who flirted like it was their job.
