Mr. Andrade nods at the door across from his. “I’d do that room next. I heard them telling someone on the phone this morning that they had the most marvelous dream about a pure black horse with a mane of snakes.” He smiles sheepishly. “I’m afraid my wife felt the need for a midnight gallop.”

I salute him with the bag. “We’ll take care of it.”

Colin looks to me as the door closes behind us. “How can you possibly keep all this under wraps?”

“People are pretty careful about their magic, so these kinds of incidents don’t happen a lot,” I reply, knocking on the other door. When no one responds, the house lets me in. “And when people do see things, they usually explain it away themselves. It’s easier than thinking ghosts and monsters are real.”

Colin locates the bag where it’s tucked in a flowerpot and replaces it. “I guess between that and these pouches, you don’t get a lot of problems.”

I shake my head. “If someone sees through the glamour and doesn’t come up with an explanation themselves, usually they’re very open to magic, and it’s not a problem anyway.”

We finish up the last of the pouches before sailing our way through several more chores. We give guests directions to town and help them choose restaurants and shops to visit, show them to reading rooms where my mother or Aunt Elaine awaits them, and help check people in. Colin helps me clean up spilled faerie dust on the deck, and we chase off a particularly grumpy gnome from the garden. Meanwhile, the house handles the simple stuff: cleaning, changing sheets, and delivering baggage.

As the last of the morning fog burns off, we head to the kitchen to help Nora carry food into the dining room for the brunch buffet we do on Fridays. Aunt Elaine, Rose, and Kara are there, too, since it takes all of us to get the food out. The house could do it itself but explaining floating platters of eggs and bacon is a little more difficult.

After inhaling our breakfasts, I grab Colin’s hand and pull him down a side hall with me before Nora can corner us for more chores, releasing him as we enter my father’s study. A warm, cozy room with a white stone hearth and curved walls that arch into a dome, the study is equal parts the dark wood paneling of a university library and the deep, cluttered shelves of a life-sized magpie.

“My dad’s a relic hunter,” I remind Colin as he takes it all in with open fascination. “He finds magical objects. Some of them he brings home, though a lot of these didn’t turn out to be so magical. He’s got a thing for tinkering, though.”