Social Medium (Hedgewitch for Hire #2) - Christine Pope Page 0,1

my own age. Almost thirty, I reminded myself, since my birthday was now only a few days away. She had flamingly red hair the color of a Crayola crayon…a color that didn’t even bother to make a nod toward nature, like Josie’s bright Titian dye job. The woman in the image on the phone wore a black hood over part of her head, making her hair look that much brighter, and a dizzying assortment of amulets and crystals hung around her pale throat.

“Lilith Black,” Josie said as I stared down at her phone. “She’s one of the most popular Instagram witches, as far as I can tell. She has two million followers on Instagram and almost that many on her YouTube channel.”

“That can’t possibly be her real name,” I replied, since those numbers didn’t really mean much to me and I’d instead latched on to the thing that stuck in my brain first.

Josie lifted an airy hand. “Oh, probably not. But what does it matter? Just think of all the people we would attract if we could get Lilith Black to visit Globe.”

Despite the twitchy feeling at the back of my neck, I sent Josie a wry smile. “I don’t think we could fit two million people in Globe,” I told her.

She lifted an exasperated chin. “Well, of course I don’t expect all of them to come here. But just think what it would do for our local tourism industry if we could get even a few hundred of her followers to visit!”

For a moment, I didn’t say anything, only finished hanging the last of the bags of incense from the display rack. Then I brushed my hands against my jeans — I never bothered to dress up when I was doing inventory — and said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, Josie, but why would this Lilith Black even want to visit Globe in the first place? It’s not like we’re some hotbed of psychic activity.”

“Oh, but we are,” she protested. “Didn’t you encounter Lucien Dumond’s ghost down by the San Ramon River?”

“Yes,” I said calmly. “But that’s because he was murdered there. It’s not like that particular spot has a history of spirit activity.”

“Maybe not,” she returned, apparently undeterred. “But I’ve heard from several people that all the copper ore in the hills around here has its own power. Haven’t you felt it?”

I had to confess that I hadn’t. Then again, it wasn’t as though I’d been reaching out toward it, either. Frankly, the last few months I’d been mostly keeping my head down, trying to ignore the notoriety that Lucien’s inheritance had given me…and also trying to pretend that Calvin Standingbear, chief of the San Ramon tribal police, hadn’t ghosted me in the worst possible way.

And all right, maybe that was a bit of hyperbole on my part. It wasn’t as though he’d disappeared off the face of the planet or something. But right when we were about to go on our first official date, he called to cancel, telling me something had come up and he couldn’t make it.

At the time, I hadn’t been too worried. He was the police chief, after all, and I realized he was on call pretty much all the time, even though he had a team of six deputies in his department. But if something important enough popped up, then of course he’d be the one who’d have to drop everything and handle it.

Except he kept making excuses…and then just quietly disappeared out of my life. I tried to ignore the sting of his defection, since it had now been more than six weeks since he’d ghosted me, but it still hurt.

A lot.

The hardest part, though, was trying to pretend as if nothing had happened. Josie had asked a few probing questions before she finally got the hint that I needed her to back off, and although my friend Hazel Marr, a local artist, could tell something had happened…or, more to the point, hadn’t happened…she’d also figured out pretty quickly that I really didn’t want to talk about the situation.

Really, what was there even to talk about? So Calvin and I had shared an awesome kiss, a kiss that I’d thought would be a prelude to even more intimacies. Obviously, though, he didn’t think our kiss had been a big deal, and so I had to pretend that it wasn’t, either.

“I don’t know about vibrations from the copper,” I told Josie, since she was giving me her patented lifted eyebrow, the