Sorcery and the Single Girl by Mindy Klasky Page A

lamps to fill a showroom. All of the lightbulbs were subdued, as if the entire room was on a dimmer switch.
    There must have been two dozen women present, all talking in voices low enough to match the lighting. I felt as if I had stumbled into a supersecret midnight meeting of the Junior League. Each woman looked more composed than the one before. There were a few girls, relative youngsters who looked as if they had only recently graduated college, but most had twenty or more years on me. Three women on the far side of the room looked like they’d be more in Gran’s demographic.
    No matter their ages, though, the witches looked fit and healthy. There was an air of determination about them, a razor-edged intensity that marked the multigenerational gathering as special in some indefinable way.
    I’d been so confident in my black dress and my fused glass jewelry, but now I saw that cashmere and pearls would have been more appropriate. As if I owned cashmere. As if I owned pearls. I thought about hissing a rebuke to Neko for approving my outfit, but I knew this was neither the time nor the place.
    In one cluster of women, a faint laugh rang out, and I wondered if I would ever get to hear the punch line. I caught a sudden gasp of surprise from another group, the universal sound of shocked gossip that begs for more details even as it warns away the impropriety of telling tales out of school.
    A doorway arched to my immediate right, and I could hear a low hum of conversation emanating from behind an oak door. A low hum of masculine conversation—I immediately pictured an Edwardian smoking lounge, with welldressed aristocrats cradling snifters of brandy as they pulled on fat cigars.
    “David Montrose.”
    A woman materialized in front of us. Okay. I shouldn’t say “materialized.” It wasn’t as if a fog swirled into the room and then a woman magically appeared. It wasn’t like there was a flash of light and then she stepped forward. It wasn’t magical.
    Rather, she moved with perfect grace. Perfect grace and balance and…majesty. Instantly, I knew that this must be Teresa Alison Sidney. Her greeting to my warder toppled the entire room into silence.
    “Coven Mother,” David said, and he inclined his head in a gesture that would have been a bow in another age, in another land.
    Coven Mother. Not that there was anything the least bit maternal about her.
    Teresa Alison Sidney was the sum of all my nightmares from high school. I knew instinctively that she was one of the Popular Snobs; she’d created the cliques that the rest of us could only dream of joining.
    She was tall, probably close to six feet, and slender, and she carried herself in a way that advertised the hours she spent at the gym. Her midnight hair fell straight around her face; its black depths gleamed blue in the dim light. It curled in a soft natural flip just above her shoulders, as if it had never heard of a breeze, or humidity, or any other summer challenge. I couldn’t read the color of her eyes in the darkened room, but I would have given my eyeteeth if they weren’t slate-gray.
    She wore a perfectly tailored cashmere sweater—short sleeves in acknowledgment of the heat outside, but bloodred, as if we’d already moved the calendar forward to the heart of autumn. Her charcoal trousers must have had an invisible zipper on the side. They were impossibly slim and cut to exaggerate the length of her legs. She wore a single strand of pearls around her neck, and each earlobe was kissed by an unadorned milky sphere.
    “Warder,” the Coven Mother said, and the title made David stand a little straighter. “You may join the other men in the front room.”
    There was no question in her voice, no uncertainty. She was not asking David his preference or giving him any option. He was being ordered from my side, as certainly as if the Red Queen had shouted “Off with his head!”
    Unable to stop myself, I reached toward him, brushing my fingers against his