VenCo(12)

Wendy scrunched her forehead in worry. “There’s always been a name before,” she said. “Even if it’s only partial.”

“Not this time. This one feels different. Heavy.” Meena wasn’t sure what she meant by heavy, but knew it was true as soon as she said it.

“What if that’s the name?” Wendy said. “Luck.”

“Luck? What kind of a name is that?”

“Maybe one for a witch from Toronto.”

Meena ducked around the table to plant a kiss on Wendy’s head. “You are brilliant. You know I married you for your brains.”

“Don’t kid yourself. You married me for my ass.”

“That too.” Meena grinned, then went straight to planning. “I hope this is the one that can do it, finish this hunt. Especially with the deadline.”

A wave of anxiety sent a shudder up Wendy’s spine. “Seventeen days from now. Yikes, that’s a tough one. I’m sure she’ll be ready to hit the ground running.”

Meena was biting her lip. “I don’t understand the celestial work plan of it all—that’s the Crone’s wheelhouse. I just know it’s now or it’s never.”

Wendy reached for her wife’s hands. “Listen to me, if there was ever a witch in the entirety of this doomed humanity who could pull this off, it would be you. You, Meena Amari Good, descendant of West Indian sorceresses and the witches the Puritans failed to burn. You got this. And I got you. I’ll make sure Freya is prepared.”

Meena smiled. As with most things, as soon as Wendy stepped in and put a thing into perspective, it seemed doable—exciting, even. She headed back to the kitchen. “I suppose I’ll be off, then.”

“Where are you going?” Wendy was gathering her belongings to follow.

“Book Club, of course. I need some heavy hitters to help me find out who this Luck might be.”

Wendy arched an eyebrow. “Of course. Just don’t spend all day smoking up with those potheads. Medical marijuana, my ass.”

Meena laughed, and a small yellow bird flew from the house and landed on a tree by the gate, singing like crazy into the green corners of the garden.



The Book Club normally met once a month, but Meena called and asked them to move up the date by a week.

“I need you, all of you,” she’d said on the phone. “It’s about the sixth.”

“Give us an hour. Then come to my house,” the voice replied, thick with a Boston accent. Before hanging up, she added, “Bring cheese. And crackers. And some cold cuts wouldn’t kill ya.”

“So a charcuterie tray, then?” Meena replied.

“What are ya, deaf? I said cold cuts. And cheese—”

“And crackers,” Meena interrupted. “Yes, will do.”

An hour later she was ringing the doorbell of a suburban bungalow, carrying a charcuterie tray. The Bookers were assembled and ready to get to work. The Salem chapter was made up of older women, so the youngest, the one they called “the Kid,” was well into her sixties. Meena gave them the appropriate time to get settled, make themselves small snack plates, complain about their small snack plates, and get settled again; then she told them about the dream.

They sat in a variety of chairs pulled into a loose circle in a very blue living room, chewing thoughtfully.

“No return address?” one asked.

“None,” Meena confirmed.

“No small print, you know that fine shit you gotta get glasses for?” another asked.

“None,” Meena replied.

“Write it out for us.” The Kid pushed a piece of paper and a pencil across the coffee table, and Meena dutifully wrote out the words.

“Exactly that?” she asked. “I mean, exactly?”

Meena looked down at the page, then added an exclamation mark and quotation marks to the text across the front. They repeated the two lines at least a dozen times at different volumes, with different intonations.

“‘Greetings from Toronto!’ Luck has entered the game.”

“Quotation marks around only the first part, like someone is saying it,” the Kid observed, tapping the page. The women all nodded, muttering their encouragement for the youngest Booker. “So the witch is talking to you herself. Interesting. Powerful.”

“What direction?” asked the woman who had answered her call earlier.

“How do you mean? It was the CN Tower in downtown Toronto, that’s it.” Meena was trying to trust the process but couldn’t see where this was headed.

“That’s it, then? Just a close-up of the tower with nothing around it?” It was asked sarcastically.

Meena sighed, rubbing her palms together. “Okay, no. It was, uh . . .”

“What? From the water? From the north end . . . What?”

“It was . . .” Meena closed her eyes to see better. “It was . . . There was a dome behind it. A white dome.”

There was a flurry of movement as every member of the Salem Book Club pulled out a laptop or an iPad and starting typing and scrolling.

“Looking west, so the speaker is standing in the east,” the Kid called out.

“Okay, then, let’s start looking for anyone named Luck in Toronto who lives in the East End,” another called out.