“Besides, the night when… well, besides that night and the emergencies I’ve been called to assist with, he’s made no attempt to know me. He doesn’t know anything about me and seems happy with it. He’s content to trust everything to ‘fate’”—I made big air quotes—“and people like me, we can fight that. Right now, you know more about me than he does.”

  “I do?”

  “You know the name of my first kiss and that my great-grandfather came over from the Old World,” I said.

  Terence sank back in his chair again, and I took him in. Someday, he’d be a very handsome man. He still had a lot of growing to do and much still to learn about being a man… and a wolf, I guessed.

  “You also know I like pumpkin spice chai, and you’ve seen where I work. Erik knows I’m a baker, but he still hasn’t asked the name of my shop,” I said. “Speaking of, how did you find Siren’s?”

  “I wasn’t looking for you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Not what I asked.”

  Terence sighed, all teenage melodrama for a second. “I didn’t feel like staying for Civics,” he said, cheeks rosy. “You’re not going to tell Erik that I skipped?”

  “I won’t say anything about you playing hooky, just don’t go telling Erik about Nathan the first chance you get?” I offered and extended my right hand. Terence thought for a while, then his palm shot out. We shook quickly. A small amount of progress. He pulled back and continued his story.

  “I mean, how is anything from Civics going to be useful for what I want to do?” he asked. I remembered that there were certain high school classes I hadn’t thought I’d need, like calculus. I used algebra and geometry on a daily basis, but I couldn’t think of the last time I had taken a derivative or used the chain rule. I found myself agreeing with Terence. Depending on what he wanted to do, he might never need Civics.

  “I snuck out and decided to find a place to grab a bite. Siren’s has good reviews and was an easy run. I figured I’d get back for woodshop. I didn’t expect….” He looked at the table between us.

  “You like woodshop?” I asked.

  “It’s something real, something solid. I want to be a carpenter like—” Again his dark eyes flicked down.

  “Is Erik the only reason you like woodworking?”

  “No,” Terence objected. The young woman finally looked up from her tablet and glared at us. Terence squirmed in his seat a little.

  “I don’t doubt you, Terence,” I said, my voice lower, carefully neutral. “Just curious.”

  “I really do want to be a carpenter, though. Our group has a well-known shop. It’s good money, and it’s something people can reach out and touch. When I finish working, I want to be able to touch what I’ve been working on all day,” Terence said.

  “I get it,” I said, smiling. “Pastries and cakes might not be as enduring as woodwork, but they’re still tangible. Lots of people take pictures of the things I make, and if heaven wills, they’ll remember those cakes for decades to come.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it like that.” He grinned briefly. There was an almost-companionable silence between the two of us, something I doubted was possible when I rushed to meet him outside of Siren’s. He had been all anger and accusation then, with the faintest hint of jealousy, but I had managed to talk him down. The overpriced drinks might have helped, but I would take the win.

  When I stood, so did Terence.

  “Come on, I’ll drive you back to your school,” I offered. Despite being twelve years younger, he had a comfortable two or three inches of height on me. He turned his head so we could lock eyes.

  “I can get back on my own.”

  “I know you can, Terence,” I said.

  “T. My friends call me T,” he said. I stumbled over a crack in the sidewalk. I caught myself but knew I looked far from graceful.

  “I’m going to try to get you back so you can attend your shop class at least, T,” I said with a shrug. Terence smiled, and I led the way to my Nissan. I wondered, if I were to become more a part of Terrence’s pack, would this be my role? Talking to wolves too nervous or otherwise unable to talk to their alpha? I stopped that thought as I turned the key in the ignition. I didn’t need to invite those thoughts in—not now.

  Chapter 6

  MY FINGERS connected with the mezuzah on my doorjamb. I felt the rush of home roll through me, and I closed my eyes and relaxed for a moment. I opened the door, and the cat rushed toward me, wound itself around my legs, let out a plaintive meow, and then ran back inside. I followed it to its preferred seat on the old couch and scratched quickly behind its ears. My duty to the cat finished, I stepped out of my shoes and headed to the tall bookshelf that dominated the combined living and dining room.

  As I had every night since my encounter with Erik, I went directly to the place of honor where my family’s grimoire lay. As I touched it, I recited the prayer my babcia taught me. Like my grandmother before me, I hid the grimoire in plain sight. Even if someone found it and tried to read it, it was written in six different non-English languages and would need a cryptographer to decipher what it really was. I opened it and inhaled, bringing in the smell of old paper and countless hands across the generations.

  The first time I held my family’s grimoire, I was four. My grandmother’s hands, as delicate as some of the paper in the book, guided my fingers over lines of crabbed writing. The letters sang beneath my fingertips and heat rushed up my arm. She had tested each of her children and grandchildren this way. I was the only one who felt it—the power flowing from the text—and a thread of light dangled from my finger as she pulled my hand from the book. That day was the first time I heard my grandmother swear, and it was one of the few times I could remember her doing so.

  Even though she had left Poland with her parents when she was still young and her English only had the faintest hint of an accent, she always spoke either Polish or Yiddish at home. She didn’t want those parts of herself to die.

  “What do—” I had begun, my voice high and my Polish nowhere near as flawless as hers. My father had tried to expose us to as much of his mother’s tongue as possible, but he preferred English. He said we weren’t in the Old World, that he hadn’t been born there. Later, in high school, he would push me toward Spanish or Mandarin. He even suggested Russian at one point. I remembered the look in my grandmother’s eyes when he said that.

  “Those are bad words. Cursed words. Do you know what cursed means?” she asked, her voice tempered with smoke and age.

  “Cursed, like in the stories about witches?” I asked. I couldn’t remember a night when my grandmother hadn’t told me some bedtime story or other in Polish, normally ones that were so fantastic and dark they would have shamed the Brothers Grimm, not that I knew who they were at four. Each story she told me… it felt like a secret between the two of us, something no one else would know.

  “Like in the stories I tell you,” my babcia confirmed. Outside of the kitchen, I heard my uncle Noah and aunt Charlotte arguing with my father. I knew from the tone that it wasn’t a serious argument. They’d all be smiling by its end.

  I scrunched up my face and thought as hard as a four- or five-year-old could. My grandmother was fond of asking me something to make sure I really understood what she had said. If my dad saw her doing it, he’d roll his eyes and say, “Mamo, don’t treat Jake like you treated us.” But my father wasn’t in the kitchen, so he couldn’t object. I was on my babcia’s lap—that was all that mattered. I was safe, warm, loved, and protected on her lap.

  “Cursed,” I said, “is being touched by bad magic?”

  “Are you asking or telling me?”

  “Telling.”

  “Then tell, don’t ask.”

  “Cursed is having bad magic touch you, like when the prince was turned to a frog.”

  “My clever boy. Yes, that’s a curse, and it’s why you must be careful what you say.”

  “Why, Babcia?”

  “Words have weight and power. If you say something and really mean it, then it changes things. Like how someone feels, or more,” she said. I nodded, thinking I understood her; she didn’t ask this time. It had been among the first lessons I got on the effects of magic, and would soon be followed by “an unprepared witch is a dead witch.” Good lessons to learn young.

  My family’s grimoire had traveled across generations and countries. My grandmother had inherited the book from her maternal uncle, and he had received it from his maternal grandmother. The earliest author I found was from the 1620s, but they—I still wasn’t sure who they were—had been a descendant of Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the rabbi of Prague who had awakened the Golem. There were instructions on how to do it, but as far as I knew, no one since Rabbi Judah had made the attempt.

  There was no organization to the book. One page might have nineteenth-century Polish and the next would be written in seventeenth-century Aramaic. Most of my experience with the grimoire had been devoted to creating an index for it. It was an ongoing work, and I often lost track of where and when magical formulas occurred. Since Erik bit me, I had stopped and focused instead on how to unpartner myself from an alpha werewolf. Between my great-uncle’s Polish and the Lithuanian of his grandmother, I had learned any number of protections and wards, but nothing about breaking ties. Of course, the fact that the book was written to prevent it from being easily understood didn’t help.

  When I was seven, I asked my grandmother why our ancestors hadn’t been plainer in their writings. She sighed and said, “We are already hated for being Jews. If the book fell into the wrong hands and real magic was discovered, what would happen to us?” While she had been spared the horrors of the camps, not all of our family had been so lucky. I understood her fear.

  “Doesn’t the Torah say that witches are bad? That magic is bad?” I asked. It was a question I had been wrestling with for a little while. Hebrew school was teaching me that much, and it would later be my d’var Torah at my Bar Mitzvah.

  “You always know how to ask hard questions, my clever boy,” my grandmother said. I couldn’t tell if she was complaining or praising me.

  “I don’t understand, Babcia,” I said.

  “I will tell you what my uncle told me. Magic is something we do. It is not what we are. I use magic to help others, for the community. Our tradition is one of wonder workers and sages. Is a prayer not a type of a spell?” she asked. I wrinkled my forehead, trying to think of an answer.

  “A prayer asks, a spell does. That’s not the same,” I said.

  “But if a prayer is answered, is that not magic?” She reached out to ruffle my hair and looked down at me, a smile on her lips. “In the book of Kings, when Hashem wouldn’t answer Saul, what did Saul do?” my grandmother asked. I closed my eyes, remembering the illustrations in a book I had gotten for my birthday the year before. It was filled with stories from the Tanakh.

  “He met a witch,” I answered.

  “He met a witch, and she helped him. She prepared for what was to come. Later, Jonah was found by the casting of lots. Is that not magic? Did Moses not pray and was Miriam not healed? The scripture guides us, but we have to understand the authors of the scripture.”

  “What are you saying, Babcia?”

  “The hands that wrote our scripture were human. Yes, they felt and knew G-d, but theirs were human hands. Even in trying to understand the Divine, man is flawed.” She had turned from me, and I knew this part of our conversation had ended. When my grandmother decided she was done with something, no one could change her mind. My father and his siblings remembered this from their childhoods and had learned to live with it.

  Like my grandmother before me, I walked the tightrope between faith and the rich magicks that were part of our stories and traditions.

  I turned to a page on which I saw Hebrew characters written to follow the rules of Polish grammar. I put my fingers to the text and let heat and light flow between myself and the book. The characters were uniformly warm and nothing sang. Magic was not guiding me to an answer, at least not directly. These pages had been written by my grandmother and were a reflection of the many trials our family had faced. Like me, she had done some indexing, but in over sixty years as the keeper of the grimoire, she hadn’t finished.

  I turned to one of the oldest pages. Writing in cramped Aramaic, the first author had been the most paranoid, and all their ciphers were nearly impossible to crack. Perhaps it was why no one in the family had tried to make a golem. We were all afraid that the first author had left something out or deliberately obscured some vital piece of information. Granted, writing about magic in seventeenth-century Prague was a risky undertaking, so the paranoia of the first author was understandable. What little I had been able to intuit from the first author was about the strength necessary to perform a “great working.”

  When I was thirteen, my grandmother had mentioned “great workings” and said that every witch had only one. They always knew the working when it was done and they felt it deeper than blood or bone. It was something a witch remembered, no matter what. I asked about hers. She sighed and put down the cleaver in her left hand.

  “When I am ready to tell you, you will write mine in our book,” she told me as she pushed the diced mushrooms to one side and reworked the dough of her pierogi.

  “When will that be?” As soon as the question was out of my mouth, my hand moved to cover it, as if I could grab it back. My grandmother glared at me over her shoulder and I retreated, just a little.

  “When I am ready to die, you will write for me,” she said. I knew she would say no more. I had moved from my spot on the wall and begun mincing the sauerkraut so she could focus on the dough. We worked in silence next to each other, and my grandmother’s presence gradually shifted from arctic to its more usual sunshine. I hadn’t been aware of the door swinging open and my mother’s measured footsteps.

  “What’s the occasion, Chava?” my mother asked.

  “Dinner. That is occasion enough,” my grandmother answered. I didn’t need to look up to know my mother was rolling her eyes.

  “Did Babcia put you up to this?” my mother asked me. The kitchen would always be my grandmother’s. No matter how old she became, she ruled the kitchen. My mom had said once that she was uncomfortable with how much time my grandmother spent in the kitchen and that there was no need for an elaborate meal every night. My grandmother shrugged at that. The next night, there were mountains of gołąbki waiting when my mother returned from her shift as a nurse.

  “No, Mom,” I answered, only knowing I had used Polish when I looked up to see my grandmother’s smile and my mother’s exasperation.

  “You two are impossible,” my mother said as she marched out of the kitchen so she could change out of her scrubs and get ready for dinner. I had gone back to work on the pierogi, my grandmother and I moving in companionable silence. I didn’t need to say anything; I knew where she would be, what she would need. It wasn’t magic, but it was close. I felt my grandmother’s right hand tremble as she pinched off the top of a pierogi. I covered her hand with mine to help steady her fingers.

  A bright strobe flash made both my grandmother and me look up. My grandmother said, “Misiek, you took my picture without warning me?” My babcia had an unexplained aversion to being photographed. My father just crossed the kitchen and pressed a kiss to her forehead.

  “That gets you out of nothing,” she said, but it was clear some of the fight had left her voice.

  “I know, but Jakob looked so handsome, and I had to take the photo.” Even then, I was used to being my father’s scapegoat and hearing his lies. I would never win best dressed or most handsome in the yearbook. I was shorter than most, rail thin, and wore thick glasses. I wasn’t going to grace the cover of any romance novel, even if I hit the gym on a daily basis.

  I trailed my fingers down the page of the grimoire and touched the photo my dad had taken. While not a photo album, my family’s spell book held a few photos and illustrations. I felt the love of three generations in that photo. This love was power too—a magic all its own.

  I put the spell book back on the shelf. Although I hadn’t found a way to free myself from Erik, the picture had reminded me of family, of magic that required no words and no gift to access. I went to my freezer and took out pierogi, made by hand. While they would have been better fresh, these would keep my family with me, no matter that my parents were now living in Florida and my grandmother was buried in the Shaare Torah cemetery, over one hundred twenty miles from where I lived in Cleveland.

  I thought of my family and of Nathan and Nicole. There were worse things to have in common than complicated families, I supposed.

  Chapter 7

  “I NORMALLY don’t have to wait for two weeks before someone gives me a call, especially after I’ve suggested dinner,” Nathan said as I arrived at the table and sat opposite him. The restaurant was set to emulate a Parisian café—dark red walls with racks supporting bottles of wine against the back, dim light with something vaguely classical piped in through the sound system, and a fireplace in one corner with real burning logs. This was the sort of place that was perfect for a first date, and I wondered how many first dates Nathan had taken there.

  “Sorry, your sister isn’t our only bride-to-be.” I smiled.

  “I didn’t think you’d be that busy in November.”

  “Nicole’s doing it right. She’s tasting early and getting everything set up for May. But there are lots of couples who use the winter holidays as dates to get married. Even without weddings, we have panettones, fruitcakes, and gingerbread treats to take care of.”

  “People still order fruitcakes?” The grin on his face was wide and showed brilliant white teeth. It had been fifteen days since I met him, and in that time, my life had been free of werewolf-related drama. I thanked heaven for small miracles. I had debated warding Siren’s itself—as I wouldn’t always be able to catch a wolf near the bakery, like I had caught Terence—but how would I explain that to Cara? I doubted she’d like me putting up mezuzot everywhere.

 

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