You’d think a witch would be comfortable with uncertainty.
We traffic in the unpredictable. Spells that fizzle, potions that backfire, magic that floats and fades like fog. To minimize the chances of this sort of thing, I’ve always been the cautious type, the one who measures twice and cuts once.
Vermont felt like the ultimate risk. Returning home was the biggest leap of faith I’d taken in decades..
Now that I was officially back in Hemlock Hollow, I finally understood why the phrase “go big or go home“ always felt less like a challenge and more like a vague threat.
My car’s GPS had been cheerfully announcing in a robot voice, “You have arrived at your destination,“ for the past two minutes. I sat in the driver’s seat, staring through the windshield at the Hollow Country Store. I stabbed at the “END ROUTE“ button on the display, then gripped the steering wheel like it might anchor me to something solid, something safe.
In the backseat, Bosco let out a soft whine and pressed his liver-colored nose against the window. My chocolate lab had been a trooper during the three-day drive from Florida. But even he and his adolescent dog energy seemed to sense the gravity of what we were doing. This wasn’t a visit. This was forever, the final stop. The second half of life, my coven sisters in Florida called it.
Everything I owned was either in the U-Haul hitched behind us or on its way in a moving pod. This was permanent.
After a long career as a newspaper librarian, after co-leading a coven, and after burying my husband, I was moving back in with my mother. It wasn’t entirely a bad thing. She needed me, and I needed her — and this place — more than I wanted to admit.
And there was a third reason. The women in my family had always just known things — when to plant, when a storm was coming, when to knock on a neighbor’s door before they’d worked up the nerve to call.
My grandmother used to say it was in our blood, handed down from the old country like a recipe you never wrote down. For more than a year now, that quiet knowing had been tugging me north, toward these mountains, insistent as a hand pressed flat between my shoulder blades. I’d told myself it was the need for a new adventure.
I was fairly sure that was a lie.
Now that I was finally here on Main Street, a small, nagging second thought had formed in my brain: had I made the right choice? For the entire 1,500-mile drive, I’d cried and second-guessed myself.
I still didn’t know the answer. Hemlock Hollow was gorgeous, though.
In early October it looked like a postcard someone had touched up with fairy dust. Which, knowing this place, wasn’t far from the truth. The maples blazed orange and red against deep green pines, and the air carried scents I’d nearly forgotten after decades in Florida: woodsmoke, pine, and that crisp sweetness that only existed in Vermont autumns.
I’d resolved last Thanksgiving to return home before summer, but an unexpected paying gig had kept me in Cypress Grove longer than I’d anticipated. Plus, it had been bittersweet saying goodbye to my Florida coven sisters, and so I’d taken my time selling my home and packing up.
“What do you think, buddy?“ I asked Bosco, reaching back to scratch his ears. “You excited to see Dave and Jinx again?“
Bosco’s tail thumped against the seat. He’d met Mom’s cats during two visits, but living with them was going to be different. Everything would be different. First, though, we needed the key to Mom’s house. That’s why I’d driven straight into town instead of to her cabin.
My family’s general store hadn’t changed since I last saw it, hadn’t changed in decades. The same weathered white clapboard, the same forest green trim, the same hand-painted sign. Mom had added a few autumn decorations: corn stalks by the entrance, a wooden barrel overflowing with random gourds. No pumpkins yet, which was a bit of a surprise.
We should have pumpkins by the beginning of October.
This looked exactly like the kind of place tourists drove hours to photograph, never knowing they were looking at the nerve center of one of Vermont’s most active magical communities.
I grabbed my purse-slash-camera bag from the passenger seat, checking that my vintage Polaroid was secure in its padded case. The 1979 instant camera had finally returned from its second repair stint after several months, and I’d been anxious about traveling with it, terrified of breaking it again.
My late husband Augustus had spent years enchanting the camera for aura photography.
Witches in my lineage could feel the glow that lived around people and places — the warm, shifting light of a living thing, there and gone before you could be sure you’d seen it. What Augustus’s camera did was hold it still. It captured what my eyes only half-caught and fixed it onto film, where I could actually study it, compare one day to the next, prove to myself what I’d felt. Without it, I felt off-balance, like I’d left behind a limb.
“Come on, Bosco. Time to meet your new life.“ I clipped his leash. He gave me a look that said finally and jumped out of the car like he’d lived here for decades. That’s what I loved about dogs — they lived in the present.
The temperature hit me immediately: crisp enough that I’d need a sweater over my long-sleeved shirt by late afternoon, and nothing like the perpetual humidity I’d left behind. Bosco made a beeline for the nearest maple, lifting his leg with the satisfied air of a dog claiming new territory.
As I waited for him to finish, I noticed the building next to the Hollow Country Store had been converted into something new. Where Murphy’s old hardware store used to be — it had expanded into a bigger building on Depot Street, according to Mom — a sign now read “Pucks and Pages.“ A bookstore? Cool. I wondered what that was all about.
Mom hadn’t said a word about it, which was unusual, because she loved to relay all the gossip in town.
Through the bookstore’s large front window, I could see someone inside: a man about my age with salt-and-pepper hair, wearing glasses and a serious expression as he studied what looked like a magazine or journal. He glanced up, his gaze landing on Bosco, who was taking the longest pee of his life. The man’s face creased into a scowl.
I winced. Not exactly a great first impression.
Then again, maybe he wasn’t the friendly-neighbor type. Or maybe he just hated dogs.
“Bosco, really?“ I murmured, though I was trying not to laugh.
I glanced across the street toward the town green. That’s when the leaves moved.
Not blew. Lifted. A whole drift of them peeled up off the grass at once, resplendent in orange and gold, and hung in the air.
“What the…“ I whispered.
They held for a breathless moment, suspended like a flock of birds that had forgotten how to flap. Then they began to turn — not scatter, turn — whirling into a shape with the slow deliberateness of something being drawn by an unseen hand.
A symbol formed. It was angular, spoked, and almost like a compass rose. Or one of the old survey marks my father used to doodle into his notebooks on our long walks in the woods. It tugged at the back of my mind, familiar in a way I couldn’t place through the mental haze of three days on the road.
But it wasn’t the shape that lifted the hair on my arms. It was the feel of it. Magic has a current, the way a river does, and a witch learns young to sense which way it’s running. This magic wasn’t running. It was jumping its banks, welling up out of the ground where it had no business being, wild and unspooled and wrong.
Bosco finished his business, shook himself, and let out a low warning growl. And my dog, bless his pure little soul, had the magical intuition of a doorstop. If he felt it too, it was real.
Then the shape came apart. The leaves let go all at once and drifted down lazily, and the magical current sank back beneath the green like it had never surfaced at all.
Everything was normal again.
I looked up and down Main Street, wondering if anyone else had seen. If they had, they didn’t let on. I glanced at the bookstore and met the eyes of the man in the window. Had he seen it too?
That was the thing about Hemlock Hollow. Magic could be weirdly selective — some people saw it, some didn’t. And the man in the window? Who knew.
He wasn’t scowling anymore. He was watching me, brow slightly furrowed, like he was trying to place me. Or like he knew something I didn’t. Then he flipped a page and disappeared deeper into the store.
I stood there a moment longer, one hand resting on Bosco’s warm, soft head, my heart thrashing. I’d come home to slow down. To help my mother, breathe mountain air, and figure out what the rest of my life was supposed to look like now that the first draft of it was gone.
But magic doesn’t rise up out of the ground for no reason. Somewhere beneath the postcard — the red barns, the majestic foliage, the maple-tinged sweetness of it all — something in Hemlock Hollow had come loose. And the oldest part of me, the part that just knew things, had felt it the moment I drove into town.