The OPEN sign winked at her from the front windows of Greene’s Organics.

  Signs didn’t normally wink in Waycross. It was a blatant violation of Coven code, but this was Sage’s shop, and he had made it pretty clear how he felt about the Coven. It gave her hope.

  The broad puddles on the sidewalk below the display window mirrored the sign’s bright neon lights, painting the dim October evening in brilliant shades of red and blue. Overhead, the dark clouds that blanketed the sky twisted. It was going to rain again. It had rained all morning and all afternoon. By the time the storms had passed, most of the leaves that had only just changed from green to brilliant shades of autumn were plastered on the ground.

  Honestly, Nova felt a little bit like those leaves.

  She huddled deeper into the driver’s seat, nervously tapping her thumbs against the steering wheel as she summoned the courage to leave the safety of her car. What if Sage wouldn’t help her? She tapped her fingers faster and glanced in the rear-view mirror.

  The containers and black garbage bags in her backseat blocked her view down the street. Until yesterday, Nova had been an Acolyte of the Coven, earning a wage for basically doing nothing. However, after the debacle of yesterday afternoon’s Coven meeting, she had become both homeless and jobless in a matter of hours.

  She’d stored what she could at the local storage shed farm, along with what was left of her mother’s things, but it was only a temporary solution. Without the Coven’s paying half of the fee, she couldn’t afford the shed’s rent for longer than a month or two. And after spending last night in her car, she knew she had to do something. Even if it meant swallowing her pride and asking for help.

  As she watched, the front door of the store opened, and Sage stepped outside. He stuffed his hands into the front pouch of his red and white striped poncho and dashed across the street, hunching against the damp October air. He deftly sidestepped the puddles left behind by that morning’s storm as he jogged across the pavement to her parked car.

  Jeff ‘Sage’ Greene was the last of the true hippies in Waycross. Nestled amid the rolling hills of the northern Appalachians, Waycross once boasted a thriving community of bona fide hippies back in the sixties and seventies. They had purchased a large tract of land in the hills above Waycross and lived in a commune. Things were peaceful until the eighties when the Feds raided the compound. Turns out, the peace-loving hippies had been cultivating psychedelic mushrooms and selling them for a tidy profit. Sage, barely a teenager, was the only one not arrested. Fortunately for him, the older hippies hadn’t trusted nineteen-year-old boys to handle the goods properly, and the DA had taken pity on him. With most of his family either in jail or lost to the winds, Nova’s grandmother had taken Sage in. So she reasoned he owed her family something. Maybe it was enough to persuade him to help her.

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  Sage approached her car and rapped loudly on the driver’s side window with his knuckle. She rolled down the window, coming face-to-face with her mother’s first love for the first time in nearly a decade. He wasn’t a handsome man by any stretch of the imagination. Tall and thin like a praying mantis, he was the sort of man you saw and then immediately forgot. The scent of rain and wet earth filled the car’s interior as he leaned forward, peering at her over the top of the window.

  “Are you coming in or not?” he asked.

  “They blackballed me,” she said, unable to keep the words from tumbling out of her mouth.

  He hunched against the wind and nodded, the overcast sky reflecting off the shiny patches of his receding hairline. “I know,” he said, not unkindly. “Now come inside. I’m freezing my ass off.”

  Without waiting to see if she would follow, he pivoted and made his way back across Main Street, nimbly hopping over puddles and potholes. Once under the safety of the awning, he glanced over his shoulder at her parked car before disappearing back inside the store.

  Nova bit her lip and watched through the window as Sage wound his way through the interior of Greene’s Organics. She knew she didn’t have a choice. She was out of options. Without Ava or her mom, there weren’t a lot of places Nova could run to.

  Reluctantly, she got out of the car and followed him. She did her best to mirror Sage’s path across the road, leaping over the wide puddles and skirting the waterlogged potholes. But, she lacked the same grace as the aging hippie and ended up with cold water soaking the hem of her jeans. When she stood in front of the store’s window at last, trying to shake the water from her pants, she gazed up at the weathered sign. Seeing it made her nostalgic for the days when she and her mom used to come by the store so Camila could chat with Sage. Back then, the most pressing thing on Nova’s mind had been the possibility of getting a lollipop from the cash register.

  Now, things were quite a bit different.

  A biting autumn wind blistered down the sidewalk, kicking up the damp leaves and blasting her with cold, sharp air that poked through her sweat and pricked the shells of her ears. Shivering, she wrapped her arms around her waist and pushed the door open, stepping inside as the bell jingled merrily over her head.

  The air inside Greene’s Organics was warm and scented with cinnamon and caramel. The strains of a sleepy harp wove through the long open room while a moon-faced teenager in a black tunic and Doc Martens was stocking shelves out of the cardboard box at her feet.

  Sage was waiting for Nova on the other side of the old-fashioned wooden counter, rubbing his hands to ward off the chill from outside. Pam Olsen, the local hedge witch, sat in front of him at the bar, nursing a cup of tea. Her sensually plump figure perched on one of the many tall wooden stools that waited under the lip of the counter. Pam, a widow, supplied all of Waycross with organic fruits and vegetables from her farm up on Bluebird Hill. She also provided Sage with his supply of local fresh herbs. Many of them came with specific modifiers that catered to the Coven crowd, like being harvested under the light of a full moon or cut before dawn with a silver knife. She grinned good-naturedly and waved Nova over.