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“What now?” Clement looked up from behind the till where he’d been reviewing the day’s sales. He frowned. “Bonnets on a stink beetle! Why on earth isn’t she wearing her gloves? Reckless girl!”

“Oh, my! Pest’s forgot her gloves again? I hadn’t noticed!” Archibald held his hands up in an utterly false show of innocence. He most certainly had noticed before he threw the book at her.

“Really, Arch? Was that necessary?” Barnabas chided his twin. “And of all the books to hit her with. Now she’s going to be spouting off all this ridiculous trivia at us and the customers for the rest of eternity.” He considered this for a moment. “Though it might help her sort out which questions to use in the window display.”

“Silver linings,” Clement nodded.

None of them noticed how she was trembling. Her knees went wobbly.

Why hadn’t she put her gloves back on after eating? Why had she taken them off? It was never safe to take her gloves off when she was around books. How was it that she was almost thirty-three years old and she still hadn’t fully learned that lesson?

Fortune swooped down from her perch and pried the trivia book from Tempest’s hand just before her knees buckled. She fell to the floor, fighting to remain conscious. Somewhere in the distance she heard the front door creaking open again and the scrape of wheels against the floor as a customer dragged a grocery trolley full of books across the threshold.

“Oh, my dear! What’s happened! Are you alright?” The same elderly couple who had been in the shop earlier were looking down at her now, with great concern.

“I’m fine. Totally fine!” Tempest sat up and popped back up onto her feet. She was still a bit unsteady and had to lean against a display round. She reached into her back pocket for her gloves. She pointed down at her favorite pair of black and white wingtip loafers. “New-ish shoes. Must have rolled an ankle.”

“Still…” The white-haired woman tutted and shook her head. “Maybe you should sit down.” She raised an eyebrow at the stepbrothers who had gone back to unpacking the boxes. “Don’t you think one of you two boys should fetch her a cup of mugwort tea?”

“No, no… I’ll be fine!” Tempest insisted. She gestured at the trolley. “What have you brought me now?”

“We realized we had quite a few more books back home that we’d love to trade in for new ones,” the rumpled man said. He was at least eighty years old but clearly one of the magical folk. Owl’s enjoyed a mixed clientele of mostly Ordinaries but there were always a few magicals mixed in. She’d sensed the older couple were like her the minute they’d come in. They had a certain celestial sparkle in their eyes.

“The used book buying center is closed for the day,” Clement droned from the cash register, where he was still doing calculations on a small plastic calculator.

“Oh dear,” the woman said. Her disappointment was so obvious. “I was hoping to trade in one of my old books for a copy of⁠—”

“Come back another time,” Clement cut her off.

Fortune, who was back on her perch, whistled her disapproval. “In for a penny, in for a pound… of flesh!” she squawked, nonsensically.

“Come dear.” The man took the woman’s elbow. “We’ll try again some other time.” He looked sympathetically at Tempest, then frowned as he gazed back at the ABCs. When he met her eye again, he raised his brow. “You take care, now. I’m not sure anyone here knows how lucky they are to have a wonderful book witch like you in residence.”

After the couple left, Fortune hopped onto her shoulder.

“What did he call you, now?” Archie snorted.

“A book witch!” Barnabas twittered.

“Nonsense! No such thing!” Clement slammed the cash drawer shut. He reached for the two old textbooks at the top of the stack on the counter and tossed them into the trash. Tempest tried not to flinch as she heard the hollow thud. She excused herself to go to the washroom. She would rescue the books later.

Tempest stared at herself in the bathroom mirror. Her blue-gray eyes had dark circles beneath them, and her thick, curly red hair stuck out in every direction but down, where it belonged. She looked like someone who’d taken a tumble in the clothes dryer and she felt like it too. Her head was still swirling and fuzzy from all the facts she’d attracted. They’d all start to settle soon. But she might not know for years how much lint she’d gathered. She’d have to go slow and have patience with herself for the rest of the day. Easier said than done when you had to do the work of six employees at your family’s bookstore. Perhaps Priya would help her sort the books. She could do with a little of her friendly coworker’s magic at the moment.

Cats have a specialized collarbone (clavicle) that floats freely, not attached to other bones the way a human clavicle is. This allows them to always land feet-first, and to squeeze through any opening wide enough for their head.

There it was.

It could have been worse. Nonfiction was always easier to assimilate than fiction. A trivia book was relatively straightforward. A well-thumbed Dostoevsky novel might take her out for a month.

Tempest had a love/hate relationship with her affliction. As unpleasant as an unplanned encounter was, there was still a certain raw electricity about it that left her tingling. She never felt more alive than when the facts were flowing, unfiltered like that. As awful as she felt afterwards, there was that brief ecstatic high. And there were perks.

Even when the ABCs mocked her, she had to admit she kind of liked knowing random stuff. Sometimes the information came in handy. Nobody complained about her ability to recall a recipe or recite conversions to the metric system. Her best interactions with her stepsiblings were the ones where they stubbornly argued with her about something, only to discover they were wrong. Even if her only reward was being able to shout out all the correct answers when she watched quiz shows, it was still something. It proved that she had some magic in her, after all. And having some magic, even if it was unruly, was better than having none. It was another way that she was nothing like the ABCs.

Despite their impeccable bloodlines, her stepbrothers and stepfather were grubs.

“Grubs” was, perhaps, an unkind name for the lowest form of magical folk, but it was just so fitting in their case. They couldn’t combine their talents to cast themselves out of a brown paper bag that was riddled with holes.

“But neither can you,” she mouthed to her reflection. Her eyes lingered on the tiny golden locket that sat at her throat. The initials HG were rendered in a vining script. Her mother’s initials. She wondered what Halcyon Glass would make of her daughter’s erratic magic if she were here today. Would she have had the words to help Tempest tame and tend to it? Surely, she’d have known the secret to unlocking and controlling it. Her mother had certainly never made her wear gloves or treated her like someone with an embarrassing affliction.