Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a brown-shingled cottage, with frost-paned windows and a mobile, feathers and crystal, that clanks and spins in the storefront. In October, these roads are awash with wide-eyed tourists who come in and while away their time and money playing at belief or true belief.

But it’s December now, off-season, the week before Christmas, and there’s no one on these snow-ridden streets but a dark-haired woman in a green pea coat. She shuffles forward with her shoulders hunched against the wind, her hands thrust deep in her bulging pockets, and it’s with no small amount of relief that she shoves the door to the shop open.

Nathalie stands in the doorway and stomps to keep the snow from tracking in; it’s only polite. The door falls shut with a genteel clink.

“Be with you in a minute,” calls a bored, belated voice.

The shop’s much like it was when she came here before, with Hope back in the fall. Rustic without, but inside it’s odd snug minimalism. There’s the same few squat armchairs with tasseled cushions, labelled, with a cheerfully lackadaisical sign, ‘Cozy Corner.’ There’s the same tidy rows of pale wood shelves, lined with chunks of crystal and little placards explaining their significance and justifying their exorbitant prices. There’s the gallery of framed ink art, with women with reams of dark hair and spindly, long-fingered hands and mournful eyes that stare out of the frames as they twine round their willing victims. The air smells vaguely of myrrh and frankincense, a touch of ancient to bleed into the mouth of the real world.

Hope loved it, because it was playful and modern and witchy.

It reminds Nathalie of a vegan fast-food restaurant.

But it’s coming up Christmas now, and Hope needs a gift. “Hello,” she calls, when no one comes after a few minutes. She looks for a clock, but sees that there is none. “Excuse me, can I get some help?”

Nathalie doesn’t see why service is so slow; there’s no one else here. No one wants to frequent witch shops just before Christmas, in case it places their souls in peril or something. “Excuse me,” she says again, and there’s a touch more aspersion in her voice.

“Yeah, yeah, give me a minute,” says the voice. Nathalie shifts in place and glances toward the center table and thinks about it – but the salesclerk emerges from the backroom before she can do more than think. It’s a woman with tie-dye hair and a black apron streaked with chalk and a name tag Nathalie doesn’t bother reading. “How can I help you today?”

Her voice is bland. She smiles, but it is cursory. Stellar service this is not.

Nathalie doesn’t bother smiling back. “I want to buy a pack of tarot cards,” she says. “As a gift. For my girlfriend,” she adds pointedly, when the salesclerk doesn’t budge. “For Christmas. It’s her first pack, and she says those have to be a gift, if they’re supposed to work properly.”

The salesclerk just nods, like she doesn’t think it’s an important detail. “We’ve got a couple beginners’ packs over there,” she says. “The bestseller.”

Nathalie resists the urge to scowl, because Hope says it puts people off. “Hope knows how to read tarot already.” She read the cards for Nathalie, even, on borrowed cards the Christmas before – back when she still thought that Hope hated her, and she’d been afraid of the intensity of her eyes, dark as caves, and of the sardonic strength in her voice. Hope said her card was the ace of swords, which is new beginnings, though she’d frowned when she said it. She tells this to the salesclerk, to prove that Hope can read cards. Another one she’d drawn that night was the Lovers, which is duality, harmony.

Later they sat out together on the frosty balcony, and Hope told her that she didn’t hate her, but loved her instead.

“I don’t want the beginners’ pack,” she insists.

“The others are more expensive,” says the salesclerk.

“Did I ask?” says Nathalie.

The salesclerk does not admit that she didn’t; her face clams up, like she’s offended. She leads Nathalie over a table, and Nathalie tried to look like she’s curious. She curls her hands in tighter spirals in her pockets, trying to keep everything from jostling and spilling out. This would be a bad time for it.

“Here.” She gestures toward it in that way only annoyed salesclerks do. It’s a way that makes Nathalie’s temper rise, but she stifles it. Hope says she needs to be careful; she gets angry so easily.

The table is stacked with a few packs, with cards and little bowls of stones laid out round them in rings and things which might have some meaning or might simply be meant to look artistic. The stones are black and white and malachite green – their labels are handwritten and Nathalie’s sure they must claim some kind of magical property.

The cards are a little more impressive, at least. There’s a set with animals, wild and snarling, and a set with tidy ink drawings like the ones on the walls, and a set of bright hyper-realistic images. The woman on the front of one of these last has an unsettling wetness to her leathery skin and dead, dead eyes. Shocking in an interesting way, but also the kind that would upset Hope. She flips it facedown.

“See any you like?” ask the salesclerk, sounding very bored.

“I’m still looking,” says Nathalie vaguely, shuffling through the decks. More ink, some watercolor affair; she pauses on a naked man who hangs upside-down by his right ankle, mouth stretched in a pout of agony. He’s clamped into place with a manacle like bear-trap teeth, and blood runs up his leg. Nathalie flips that one over too. “Do you have any more?”

“That’s the whole stock.”

That’s not true. “Are you sure?”

The salesclerk shrugs. “These, and beginners’ pack – but you said you don’t want to see those.”

There is a trace of smug menace in her voice, enough that it gets on Nathalie’s nerves. This is for Hope, she reminds herself.

“Last time I was here,” she says slowly, like you do to stupid people, “we saw another deck. Very old and very fancy. I want to see that.”

The salesclerk gets a look on her face like she thinks she’s an old-fashioned cunning-woman. “The house deck?” she asks. “We moved it upstairs.” She seems glad to break the news to her. “It’s not for sale anyway; it’s used for in-house readings. Why on earth would you think it was for sale?”

Nathalie shrugs, and doesn’t mention that this was precisely what she was told the last time she was here, just the week before. Though then it was a much friendlier old man who had refused her. It’s not like she expected that answer would change. She is glad, in a way, that it’s this awful woman this time. “Can I see them anyway?”

“Twenty dollars for a reading.”

She resists the urge to roll her eyes. “Just one card for me, then. I only want to see them.”

“Five dollars.” The salesclerk won’t drop eye contact, like she thinks it’s some challenge.

Five dollars is a rip-off, but it doesn’t matter. “Sure. Whatever.”

The salesclerk doesn’t look pleased, but she nods all the same turns. “Upstairs,” she reminds her, like she thinks Nathalie’s an idiot who needs the reminder. She curls her fingers a little tighter in her pockets and follows.

Upstairs isn’t a full floor, but an extended catwalk that juts out halfway over the ground floor. Everything here is a little sleeker and a little more expensive, but there’s no escaping the vegan fast-food aesthetic. “Sit here,” says the salesclerk, and bustles away in a way that reminds her of a terrier nosing out a rat.

Nathalie sits. From here she can see down into the shop below – the only bird’s eye view available, the man had told her last time, because there are no cameras. Something about magic and technology being a bad mix.

Look, she’d wanted to boast to Hope afterward. I can make small talk with people! Though she couldn’t, because that would mean telling Hope what she meant by that, and thus where she’d been, and why. And above all things, she couldn’t tell Hope about the surprise, or else it would be ruined.

“What’s with the sighs? Trouble in paradise?”

Nathalie jumps, then scowls automatically. The salesclerk’s back, with her mean dark eyes and a dark lacquered box clutched in her hands. She tries to ignore the former and focus on the latter, watching as she sets it down on the table between them. “No,” she says.

The salesclerk’s smile is thin-lipped. “I was just curious. When people start reaching for the grand romantic gestures, that’s when the relationship’s fizzling out. Or at least, that’s how it was for my husband and I.” The smile gets sharper. “Ex-husband, now.”

“It’s not like that,” she snips.

She shrugs and settles down on the couch across her. Nathalie scoots closer; the salesclerk’s not paying attention. “Of course I wouldn’t want to presume anything about your relationship. I just mean splashing money around isn’t enough to show affection.”

She sounds a little like Nathalie’s mother, in that moment. She can even hear the sound of it, in the edge of condescension, and imagines the smothering heat of her voice, well-articulated and well-meant and sudden as a searing rod to the stomach.

But this isn’t her mother. This is some stupid salesclerk. “Can I see the cards now?” she asks.

“Sure,” says the salesclerk, though she quirks an eyebrow at Nathalie’s tone. But she doesn’t care – she leans forward, eager, and watches the box opens.

She’s no art enthusiast, but she can’t deny that they’re beautiful. The cards are worn but still vibrant with color, painted like stained glass. It’s all tall stone and jewel-toned robes and stern, merry faces that look slant-wise out of the card at you, like they know a secret about you that you don’t know yourself. No wonder Hope likes them. No wonder Nathalie can’t help but stare at them; they’re lovely in the way that Hope is.

The backs are painted too, rich deep colors with delicate traceries of moons and stars worn with the softened imprints of countless fingers. She imagines Hope on Christmas morning, sitting on the floor in her pajamas and woolen socks, shuffling through them with that quiet pleased smile of hers.

But it’s not her shuffling now, it’s the salesclerk. She taps them together in a hand, then splits them in three smaller piles. “Isn’t it funny, buying occult tools for Christmas? Maybe you can get her some crystals – we have a good selection downstairs. They’re popular as gifts to family members.”

Nathalie’s lip curls. As though Hope could settle for anything less. “Can we get on with it?” she demands.

She’s not really interested. But it’s easier if the salesclerk’s distracted.

“What question do you want answered?”

“None,” says Nathalie. The salesclerk gives her an odd look at that, so she smiles for the first time since she entered the shop. The salesclerk doesn’t seem reassured. But she looks down at the cards and shuffles the cards back together, so Nathalie supposes she must pass muster. She edges a little closer, turning her hand in her pocket.

The cards are spread out on the table, facedown, and the salesclerk, intent, sits there with her hands skimming their backs, muttering something to herself under her breath. Nathalie edges to the side as she goes, because it’d be a waste of all this effort if the cards were ruined.

“Let’s see the immediate future,” murmurs the salesclerk. She reaches out and picks a card, and flips it.

It’s a man, impaled by a score of swords.

The irony – the salesclerk looks up, face white as a corpse’s. But Nathalie’s already thrown off her coat – because Hope likes that coat, and it can’t get dirty – already started scrambling across the table to get to her –

It takes the salesclerk a moment to noticed the knife she holds aloft, and by then, it’s already buried in her throat.

She gurgles. When the knife’s yanked free, blood spurts out: jugular blood, frenzied and frothy as water from a hydrant. Still, Nathalie know that doesn’t guarantee anything, so she shoves her back, away from the table, and stabs again, this time for the chest, for the lungs. The salesclerk convulses violently on the fourth swing and the blade lands in the shoulder-blade and gets stuck there for a moment, which irritates Nathalie. She has to press down on her throat to pull it free. The salesclerk jerks again, like a stranded fish. There’s blood in her gasping mouth.

“Stop moving,” she says, then laughs at herself because that’s a rather silly thing to ask for. “It wouldn’t hurt so much if you stopped moving!”

The salesclerk doesn’t stop moving, because she’s deeply stupid and also probably suffering oxygen deprivation and can’t think clearly. Nathalie lifts and brings down the knife a good dozen times more before it’s done. In the sudden silence after she stops, there’s nothing but the pop of little blood bubbles.

Nathalie’s breathing hard, and her shoulder aches a little. That’s a better workout than she’s had for a while. Maybe she should go to the gym like Hope keeps trying to convince her to.

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” she asks the salesclerk. Then she immediately feels a little embarrassed. That’s a gauche thing to do, mocking corpses.

Instead she gets to her feet, careful not to slip in the spreading pool of blood, and glances back over the table to check on the cards. She’s relieved to see not a marring speck of blood anywhere; not on the constellated backs, not on the pale man with his gut full of swords and his agonized face.

Though there is some on the sloping ceiling. There’s some on her clothes too, but she wore black for a reason.

Now that the work’s done, she’s no time to dally. So she races to the bathroom and scrubs at her blood-stained hands and face – out, damned spot! except it washes away easy as it always does. She’s relieved to see that the salesclerk hadn’t managed to swipe at her – the last thing she needs is defensive wounds to incriminate her. But then the element of surprise has always worked in her favor.

Nathalie takes a moment to dry her hands and fix her hair before she heads back outside.

The salesclerk lies on her side, her head twisted and sagging on the burst stalk of the throat, her eyes bulging. The colors in her hair are being eaten up by the red of her blood. A leg points toward the table. Nathalie kicks it away as she goes over. She looks over the cards once more, just to make sure that everything’s in order, then packs them all up in the black lacquer box. She crouches over the body, wrenches the knife out, then wipes it on her shirt. She retrieves her discarded coat and puts it on – and now she’s not a blood-stained murderer anymore, but a soft-faced woman with a green coat and a package.

She sticks the knife in her pocket. When she gets home, she’ll clean it when Hope’s not watching and put it back in her closet.

But now it’s back out again, into the snowstorm, back to her car parked two streets over, and back home on the icy roads. Such a pain; she hates driving.

Hope better appreciate her present. It’d be a little rude of her not to, anyway, after all this effort Nathalie went to.