Enchantment Emporium

The Enchantment Emporium (The first book in the Enchantment Emporium series) A novel by Tanya Huff

ONE

Shoot theh moon was considered to be one of the more dangerous yoyo tricks. Not particularly complicated—nothing like the crossovers of a Texas Star—but a moment’s inattention and the odds were good that 35.7 grams of hardwood would be impacting painfully off the front curve of the human skull. There were rumors that, back in ’37, Canadian and World Champion Joe Young had once bounced a Shoot the Moon and continued to ace the competition with no one the wiser until the next day when the bruise began to develop. She didn’t know about that, and she didn’t put much trust in rumors, but she did know that when Joe Young died during the war, the sport lost a master.

She executed the trick perfectly.

Pulled a glow-in-the-dark yoyo from the box, turned off the lights in the store, and did it again.

Perfectly.

Pity there was no one around to see.

In a valiant but ultimately futile effort to keep herself amused, she had a yoyo on each hand and was walking alternate dogs when the shadow finally blocked out the light from the street spilling through the grimy glass of the door. It took her a moment to pull the string off the second finger of her left hand and, in that moment, the metal doorjamb began to groan.

Another moment and it would buckle.

Lips pressed into a thin, irritated line, she shoved both toys more-or-less away and strode over to the door. It wasn’t locked, but that was clearly a detail these sorts of late-night visitors never bothered to check.

Yanking it open, she squinted up at the misshapen silhouette and snapped, “What took you so long?”

This was clearly not the expected response.

“Were you planning on getting up any time soon?”

Allie pulled the pillow over her head, hoping her mother would consider that answer enough. She was twenty-four years old, unemployed, friendless, and back home with no prospects. As far as she was concerned, she was entitled to stay in bed all day if she felt like it.

The silence, weighted heavily with unspoken advice, ended with a nearly audible eye roll, and the sound of her bedroom door closing.

Good. The last thing she needed right now was the kind of practical, levelheaded analysis of the situation her mother excelled at.

Pillow still over her head, she stretched out her left arm and patted the empty spot in the bed. Charlie was gone. Given how cool the sheets were, she’d probably been gone for a while. Stretching out her right arm, she patted the other side of the bed. Dmitri was gone, too. Face pressed into the bottom sheet that smelled faintly of fabric softener and sex, Allie frowned and tried to remember what day it was.

Her job as a research assistant at the Royal Ontario Museum had ended on Tuesday, the grant money that had paid her having finally run out with no hope of renewal. With almost a month’s warning, she’d been trying to get the last of the Cypriot artifacts into the new cataloging program. The Classical/Hellenistic period—the bulk of the collection—had made it in, but it seemed as though the Cypro-Geometric period never would. She hated leaving things unfinished.

She hated leaving.

Or more specifically—she hated having to leave. Hated the feeling that her life was out of her control.

It wasn’t as though she’d loved the job—although in all fairness, she’d enjoyed rummaging about the back rooms at the museum attempting to bring order out of chaos—it was just that she wasn’t finding the old joke about fine arts degrees and “would you like fries with that” particularly funny these days.

Her Uncle Richard and three cousins had arrived on Wednesday to help pack up her tiny apartment and haul home the stuff she hadn’t sold or handed off to other cousins in the city. The family didn’t exactly own things communally, but there were cooking pots still being passed around that predated frozen food. Charlie had stayed with her, they’d spent Wednesday night on an air mattress; she’d handed the keys in Thursday before they’d crammed the last bits and pieces of her life into the back of a borrowed car and left the city—Charlie complaining all the way home about the mode of transport—so today had to be Friday.

Friday, April 30th.

Which answered that question at least—Dmitri was at school.

Charlie could be anywhere.

Once again, she’d been left alone.

Her fingers plucked at the quilt the aunties had made for her, not needing to remove the pillow to find the square centered with a piece of one of Michael’s old shirts.

Left alone just like stupid Michael with his stupid perfect boyfriend and his stupid perfect job out in Vancouver had left her alone.