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Well, by sheer luck and good-witchy genetics, the apartment had been passed down from generation to generation between the women in my family since before my grandmother. It was my turn to hold onto this gloriously rent-controlled space, and the magical laws of The Hollow made it so that as long as it remained in the family, we couldn’t be kicked out, and the price couldn’t be jacked up. It was a wonderful law.
Even so, I still needed a roommate to afford the utilities and such for the place, but that was okay because Emmy was exceptional when it came to roommate standards. If one didn’t count the fact that there were often jars of live frogs in our refrigerator and sometimes frozen squirrels (who had died only of natural causes, of course) in our freezer.
Or that sometimes, clouds of bruise-colored smoke would drift out of the dining room which Emmy had, over time, turned into her personal laboratory. Or that once, I’d found a chicken in the bathtub—alive and squawking. Emmy had her oddities, but so did I.
My thing was plants.
“You’re looking alive, Medusa,” I told my snake plant as I dropped my bag on the hook beside the door. I set my wine bottle on the counter. “But you, Bertha, could use a little spritz. I hope that’s not a spider mite.”
I ran my little cactus that I’d gotten from Le Jardín’s gift shop under the faucet before replacing it on the windowsill above the sink. It’d been a lifelong goal of mine to visit the actual Le Jardín, but that was never going to happen. Le Jardín was a garden so exclusive, so private and secret that only the most powerful witches in the world were extended invitations to witness the beauty inside.
So I made do with the knock-off version of Le Jardín right here in my apartment building. Between me and Emmy, it was a wonder that someone hadn’t reported us for some weird violation—like the smell of dirt coming from my balcony or the squawking of a chicken in the bathtub.
I supposed that was the benefit of living in a magical apartment complex. People didn’t necessarily look twice at a woman carrying a live chicken into the apartment under one arm or at a woman hauling a cart full of carnivorous plants into the elevator wearing bite-repellant gloves.
“Do your plant babies ever talk back to you?” Emmy spoke into the fridge where she was bent over something bubbling. “Come on, activate, you bastard.”
“Do your potions talk back to you?” I raised my eyes at Emmy’s rear end. She still hadn’t looked up since I’d entered the room. She did that a lot, got so sucked into her magical research that I doubted she’d notice if I spent a week away from the apartment without telling her.
“Touché.” Emmy pulled herself up, slammed the fridge door shut. “By the way, this came for you.”
Emmy tapped the front of the fridge where she’d taped a letter using an entire roll of industrial-strength duct tape.
“You do know I can’t take you seriously when you wear those,” I said. “Sorry, but I just can’t.”
“Wear what?” Emmy scrunched her nose in confusion.
She was wearing plastic boots that went up to her knees as if she’d been wading in a swamp. On her face were a set of goggles so oversized they just about swallowed her head whole. Her cute, curly hair was blown back from her face as if she’d walked through a wind tunnel. She wore a strappy little tank top beneath a white lab coat, and on her shirt it said Magic Geek.
“Your letter?” Emmy tapped the fridge again. “It wouldn’t leave me alone. Open it, will you?”
“It’s just a summons,” I said. “Open it yourself if you want. I’m not going.”
“A summons?” Emmy’s mouth flew open. “From The Circle?”
“Who else sends summons in the 21st century by way of rabid manila envelope?”
“Oh my-lanta. Can I go in your place to the event?”
“Sure.” I shrugged. “Be my guest.”
“Do you literally get a guest?” Emmy ripped the duct tape off the envelope.
The second the yellow envelope was free, it leapt out of her arms and shot at me like a dart. I ducked, and it narrowly missed knocking over the bottle of cabernet as it shot past me.
“Magneta,” Emmy said, and the envelope shot toward her, drawn by the words of her summoning spell. “Gotcha, you little twerp.”
Emmy ripped the attacking envelope open while I grabbed two wine glasses from the counter.
“It’s illegal to read my mail,” I informed her.
“You gave me permission,” she shot back.
I shrugged and poured both of us a very full glass of cab. Between a day filled with Little Hank, the run-in with a vampire in the alley, and now this pesky summons—definitely not the first one that The Circle had sent my way—I needed some liquid courage.
Emmy shrieked, doing a little dance. “You actually get a plus one! Can I come with you?”
“I’m not going.”
