“I bet Delilah’s made a play or two for it, though,” I quipped.

He acknowledged the joke with a somber nod of his curly dark head, much grayer at the temples than I remembered; a testament to the time I’d let pass between us. “Like I always said, scoot. No one but you.”

He didn’t mean for it to sting, I could tell from the tenderness in the brown eyes behind the beatnik frames he always wore. But I’d known since I was little that my father always meant for me to inherit this place, and to travel the world in little bursts just like he did, venturing from Thistle Grove only to trade in books rare and old as relics. That was how he and my mother had met; she was studying English and literature at Oxford when he visited to sell a first edition of some obscure masterpiece to the Bodleian collection. They came across each other at a local pub, and the rest was history.

It was hard to forget that I was basically the product of my parents’ love affairs with books. And given how much I’d cared about this shop before I left—how much I’d considered it a certain part of my future—it was impossible not to feel that I’d let my father down with every single choice I’d made as an adult.

“It’s good to have you back, is all,” he said, on the wake of a long sigh. “Thanks for coming, scoot. I know you have another life to live out there. Means the world that you took the time.”

“Wouldn’t have missed it,” I replied weakly, such a giant and awkward lie that my cheeks threatened to combust. I turned away from him a little, clearing my throat against the discomfort. “So, Mom said the Halloween crowd’s kicked up already?”

“Oh, yes, it’s been chaos for weeks now.” He grimaced with distaste, rubbing the side of his narrow nose. “Feels a bit beyond the pale this year. It does occur to me that it could be the energy of the Gauntlet firing up. Might draw sensitives, maybe even dormant witches. It would certainly explain the uptick.”

“But the Gauntlet doesn’t even formally begin until Wednesday, I thought?”

My father cast me one of his rare smiles, wide and bright and startlingly rakish. It made him look more like a rogue wizard on the run from some Magical Establishment than a quiet, middle-aged proprietor of a store trafficking in mostly harmless books. Seeing it made me understand why my mother would have flung aside a whole life to forge a new one with him, on the other side of an entire ocean.

“Oh, it began as soon as you set foot within town lines, scoot—if not even before that, when you first agreed to come. Don’t tell me you didn’t feel Thistle Grove bidding the Gauntlet’s Arbiter welcome when you arrived.”

“So that’s what that was,” I said, thinking of the cresting swell of magic that had greeted me when I crossed town lines. “Nearly knocked me off the road.”