Format: Paperback, 320 pages
Release Date: February 25, 2025
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Source: Publisher
Genre: Paranormal / Romance
A witch cursed to never find true love sets out to break the spell, and must team up with the last person who wants to help her–the witch who set the curse in the first place.
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Doreen MacKinnon is doomed to die of a broken heart - if she can’t break the centuries old curse placed on her family.
Three hundred years ago, Ambrose MacDonald, a powerful male witch, fell in love with a MacKinnon. And when the MacKinnon witches forbade him from seeing his love, by secretly hiding her away, he retaliated by cursing the family and its future generations to never find love. But it wasn’t without a cost. Now, Ambrose is imprisoned by those same witches, trapped in a tempest and doomed to outlive everyone he has ever loved.
But Doreen isn’t like the other MacKinnon witches. As the 13th generation of the MacKinnon line, Doreen is one of the most powerful witches in centuries… and one of the loneliest. So when she discovers where Ambrose has been trapped, she releases him to help her break the curse, once and for all. Ambrose agrees to help, but with his own motive: vengeance. He plans to use her as bait to enact his revenge on her family.
Together, they enter a series of trials, which take them to a castle in Scotland, off a cliff, and into a world beyond their wildest dreams. As they work together, sparks start to fly, but soon Doreen must choose how far she is willing to go to break the curse, and what she's willing to sacrifice.
A Circle of Uncommon Witches by Paige Crutcher is a story of adventure, romance, and destiny, all by asking one question: is true love worth the cost? After being kept from his true love, Ambrose MacDonald curses the MacKinnon witches, preventing them from finding true love. In turn, they imprisoned him; he'll outlive everyone, trapped in a tempest. Doreen MacKinnon is destined to die thanks to a curse placed on her family by Ambrose after he he lost the woman he loved. If she doesn't fine true love, her fate is sealed.
But there's something different about Doreen and her cousin. They are the 13th generation of Scottish Witches which means they are more powerful than those who came before. Every single person she shows an interest in, falls under her thrall. So when she discovers where Ambrose has been trapped, she releases Ambrose who has been trapped in a tempest and tortured for the past three hundred years. He agrees to help break the curse although he is more interested in vengeance against her family than helping.
As the two work together, sparks start to fly but Doreen must keep her eye on the bottom line: ending the curse and saving her family. Even if it means heartbreak. Together, they enter a series of trials, which take them to a castle in Scotland, off a cliff, and into a world beyond their wildest dreams. But soon Doreen must choose how far she is willing to go to break the curse, and what she's willing to sacrifice. Both Doreen and Margot are curious witches. Margot can create her own spells, while Doreen remembers every spell she's seen, or encountered.
Doreen narrates the novel primarily, although there are chapters where Ambrose speaks as well as Ada (who is an underworld Witch), which allows readers to explore the story from all viewpoints. There are journal entries, also, that are read aloud in parts, which helps to fill in the background of some of the more historical figures that play an important role. The story is a good mix of romance and fantasy but light on the witchcraft and obvious spellwork by our main cast of characters with Doreen, Ambrose, and Margot, despite witches being in the title. Also, I am still waiting for answers on the ending and since I hate open ended endings, thus my rating.
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ONE
For more years than she knew what to do with, Doreen MacKinnon had been waiting for the day she would turn thirty and find true love or die.
It was the curse of being a MacKinnon; the thirteenth generation of Scottish witches who had been cursed by a rival line, the MacDonalds, back during the times of King James VI. Each line blamed the other for alerting the blustering king to their existence, and the witch hunt and trials that followed.
“If Ambrose MacDonald hadn’t bewitched Lenora, none of this would have happened,” Doreen’s aunt Stella always said, usually when Doreen was up to her armpits in research, working on her own to break the curse. “You’ll never get anywhere with it, girl, but then again, neither will he,” she’d cackle, before returning to pruning the dark violet roses that ran along her drive while Doreen sat on a threadbare blanket in the shade surrounded by books, wondering how anyone could be so happy to have imprisoned another witch.
“Why did he bewitch her?” Doreen asked.
“Oh, he did not,” her aunt Kayleen had said during a visit when Doreen and Margot were eight and nine years old. “Stella, you know it wasn’t that simple. Ambrose fell in love with Lenora, and Lenora with Ambrose.”
“She had a bad picker,” Stella argued.
“Still, she chose him, and then she left him. All he knew was how she had been spirited away by her family in the night, taken and then gone. Deader than an exorcised spirit,” Kayleen said, while measuring out sugar and fermented grapes and hibiscus before pouring all three into her cauldron—a mixer she had purchased from a new store in town.
“You can’t have a modicum of sympathy for that man,” Stella warned, adding a pinch of lavender to the mix. “He took his broken heart and devastated our family line, cursed us to the bone.”
“Broken hearts break hearts,” Kayleen said.
“And now we break him over and over again,” Stella said, before finally shooing the girls out of the room.
“All these years later, and I still don’t get it,” Doreen said to her cousin, Margot, some twenty years later. They were sitting in their family’s herbal apothecary shop in the small town of Pines, waiting for customers or time to hurry up and pass them by. “Why won’t anyone tell us where Ambrose is?”
Margot shot her a look. “He’s in the Dead House.”
“Which is a myth.”
Margot snorted. “Yeah, and so’s the curse.”
Doreen blew her too-long bangs away from her face. “The curse can be broken. And you know it.”
Margot shook her head.
“You do, and yet you’re really going to marry Dean Whitmeyer?”
Margot sighed, not bothering to look up from the soul cards she was sorting. “I love him.”
“But you don’t know if he loves you.”
Margot didn’t reply. She wasn’t about to lie to her best friend and cousin, and she couldn’t rebuke the truth. What Margot had chosen instead was to accept that she was marrying a man under her spell. Or enthralled, as Stella put it, but a thrall always made Doreen think of a B movie with a vampire rising from the grave, his black hair slicked back, eyes bulging as he sank his fangs into the neck of the first unsuspecting blonde who came his way. “I vant to suck your blood.”
Though what Margot was doing felt almost as bad. “I vant to steal your love.”
Doreen pulled out her final resource from beneath the table. It was a notebook adorned with a unicorn flying across a rainbow on the front, the cover bent and worn from age and love, and a last-ditch effort to convince Margot to make a different choice. She turned to a dog-eared page, and slid it under her cousin’s nose, over the cards.
“I know what it says,” Margot said, shaking her head at Doreen. “I wrote it.”
“Are you sure?”
When Margot made no move to glance at it, Doreen took it back and began to read out loud instead.
“‘I, Margot Rose Early, being of brilliant mind and even better body, do hereby promise to never give up on myself or true love. Unlike the aunts and mothers before us, I refuse to believe this hogwash of a curse. This jinx of a whammy will not take my sanity or my life or my heart. I am the goddess of my destiny and may no curse mess with me.’”
“We were kids, Doreen.”
Doreen huffed an exasperated breath. She leaned over and grabbed Margot’s arm, forcing her cousin to look at her. But she dropped it when she saw the tears in her eyes.
Margot was strong, fierce, and determined, and Doreen was always convinced it would be her who would smite the curse and restore the balance, once and for all. When they were small, Doreen and Margot had created a spell that enabled them to get into the magically locked attic of their home and steal Stella’s books on their history and craft. It was a spell they would use many times while researching how to break the curse and grow their powers. Doreen, the mimic, was able to duplicate any spell, and Margot, the creator, capable of crafting any charm from thought.
Doreen had never considered Margot would give up.
“Oh, Margot.”
Margot sniffed and turned back to the cards. “I don’t want to die, Doreen. This is my best option, and I do love him. I can be enough for us both. You’ll see.”
“You’re wrong, and what we’re forced to do is wrong,” Doreen said.
“We have a choice,” Margot said. “That’s more than most get about their fate. Maybe we should try to be happy instead of wasting our time dreaming we can change it.”
Doreen remembered vividly the day she had learned the truth. She was seven and had developed her first crush on a boy named Lucas in her first-grade class. Doreen always thought he was so mysterious, mainly because he ignored her no matter how often she studied him. But one day, during a field trip, they’d ridden the bus to the science museum in the next town over and gone over a bump. He’d looked back at her, grinning his gap-tooth grin. In that moment, it hit her—a bolt of lightning to the soft spot under her belly. She wanted to jump up, climb over the seats in the bus, and brush her fingertips against the curve of his smile.
Her stomach quivered and he blinked, and a change slowly came over his face. His eyes widened, his mouth trembled, and he got out of his seat. He moved toward her as though she were the only person on the bus. He bumped into Dave Sanders, knocking his bag to the floor, climbed over Suzie Macintosh and Lennie Brown in the seat in front of Doreen, and dropped into the bench beside her.
“Doreen,” he said, her name on an exhale. He smelled of caramel Pop-Tarts, and his eyes were so green she thought they might have been dipped in food coloring.
“Hi, Lucas,” she said, smiling and ducking her chin, shocked he seemed to feel exactly what she was feeling.
His hand reached up, and he ran a finger over the hair falling into her face, tucking it behind her ear. “Hi,” he said. “Want to split a grilled cheese with me at lunch?”
For the rest of the day, they stayed side by side, holding hands as they walked the star walk—a dark room filled with projections of stars—studied the mini tornadoes produced by controlled gusts of air inside glass domes, and made water flow back and forth in the crank tank to study the tides. It was the single best day of her life.
Until she got home.
“Who was the boy?” Stella asked. She stood in the doorway, waiting, her arms crossed over her chest.
“My new boyfriend,” Doreen said, grinning so wide she was afraid her cheeks might split in two. She hadn’t officially asked Lucas to be her boyfriend, but some things were simply destined.
Stella sighed. “It’s time.”
She ushered Doreen into the kitchen and sat a glass of milk and single biscuit in front of her. One of Stella’s secrets were her beloved biscuits. She only made them for birthdays and special occasions.
As Doreen gobbled the biscuit down, Stella drummed her painted red fingernails on the table. “You can’t have a boyfriend.”
“I’m not too young,” Doreen said, rolling her eyes, dusting crumbs from her lips. “Maisie Newnan and Sally Jones both have boyfriends, and so do Sam Haven and George Miles.”
“No, love, you don’t understand.” Stella sat at the table holding a tin can with a smiling dog on its front. “You can’t have them because it’s not real.”
“Of course it’s real, I like him.”
“I mean it’s not real for him.”
Doreen frowned, confused.
For years, any time Doreen had shown any romantic interest in members of the same or opposite sex, Stella had found a way to subvert it. She’d pulled her from library programs, preschool classes, and their one failed attempt at choir. Doreen had assumed she was either bad at the programs or Stella was just that grumpy. But now her trembling knees told her this might be something different.
“My girl, you’re cursed. We are cursed. You have no hope of finding true love, because every person you ever show interest in will fall under your spell, your thrall. Your only hope is to accept that what you have will never be real. I’ll bind the boy; he won’t bother you again.”
It was then that Doreen understood Stella’s ruthlessness. That her aunt would do whatever it took to protect her in whatever way she saw fit.
From the beginning, there were signs of disquiet in the love lives of the MacKinnon women. Doreen knew it in how no one ever spoke about love. Not in the ways people in storybooks would. There was no such thing as “happily ever after” or even “happily ever now.” While there were aunts and cousins who married, they didn’t see them often.
“Marriage is a cage for those of us unable to escape the lie,” Stella would say while baking her biscuits on a Saturday morning.
“What’s the lie when it comes to love?” Doreen asked Margot later, while they were lying in their twin beds in their attic room. “Love is why we’re here.”
“Stella says we’re here to balance the imbalance in the world and change it,” Margot replied, unable to suppress a yawn. Margot thought her mother, Stella, was grumpy and lonely, though she never dared to speak those words out loud. At least not then. She also thought her cousin Doreen thought too much. Margot didn’t have half as many words thinking in her head as the ones that came out of Doreen’s mouth.
“I don’t want to change the world,” Doreen said. “I want to hold hands and dance under the stars and laugh so hard we cry and then dance some more.”
“We do that,” Margot said, thinking it wasn’t like Doreen was missing out when she had Margot.
“Yeah, but it’s different than if, say, Lucas and I were doing it. If he held my hand I would burst into a firework, fly into the sky, and fall back down like a hundred shooting stars.”
“That sounds painful,” Margot said, before rolling over and falling asleep. And it did sound painful, but it also sounded like the most beautiful thing Doreen could think of.
It was no surprise, though, that when they confronted Stella for more details the following day, Margot was accepting and Doreen, angry.
After what happened with Lucas and Doreen, Stella invited both girls out into the garden to help cultivate the herbs they would need for her full-moon tea readings.
“Do you remember the story I told you,” Stella asked, as she cut the lavender and placed it into a stainless-steel tray shaped like a crescent moon, “of how the bee got its stinger?”
Margot looked up from where she was chaining daisies, pausing her knot. “The bee fell in love with a stingray, but the stingray couldn’t fly. It needed to live in the water.”
“Right, and then what happened?”
Doreen dipped her palm into the lavender tray, letting the flowers tumble from her fingers. “They realized they couldn’t be together and the stingray was so sad it tried to make a deal with the gods of the ocean, but the gods were tricky, as they so often are, and they cursed the bee and the stingray instead.”
“By giving the bee a part of the stingray, a piece of its heart,” Margot said.
“And yet when the bee tried to use it, thinking it would lead it back to the stingray,” Doreen said, “it died, and they were never together again.”
“So the bee lives on land and in the air, and the stingray is stuck in the water,” Margot finished.
“Neither are better off for it,” Stella said, before she handed each girl a pestle and mortar containing a scoop of dried lavender and a pinch of her own blend of herbs she liked to call Hella Stella. Stella shifted back onto her heels from her kneeling position, watching them get to work. “We’re a bit like the bee, girls. We got stung by a very big jackass.”
“Jackasses are donkeys, not stingrays,” Margot said.
“Right, well, we would have done better with the jackass. Now we carry our own curse.”
“That’s why you don’t believe in love?” Doreen asked, her eyes locked on her aunt’s and the answer to a question Stella had been avoiding like a snapping alligator.
“I believe in love, but love does not believe in us. We are cursed so that love can no longer see us; only desire and infatuation can meet the wise women of our line.”
“Cursed like the bee?” Doreen asked.
“And the stingray?” Margot said.
“Cursed worse than both,” Stella said, with a huff that might have been a sigh. “We are the bumblebee. Many years ago, a stingray fell in love with one of us. And when she could not stay with it, the stingray cast a spell on us all. Because of it, our stingers will kill us if we don’t use them by the time we reach maturation, or the age of thirty.”
“Wait, is Ambrose the stingray? Also, I thought the gods gave the bee the stinger?” Doreen asked, still stuck on the word “kill.”
For more years than she knew what to do with, Doreen MacKinnon had been waiting for the day she would turn thirty and find true love or die.
It was the curse of being a MacKinnon; the thirteenth generation of Scottish witches who had been cursed by a rival line, the MacDonalds, back during the times of King James VI. Each line blamed the other for alerting the blustering king to their existence, and the witch hunt and trials that followed.
“If Ambrose MacDonald hadn’t bewitched Lenora, none of this would have happened,” Doreen’s aunt Stella always said, usually when Doreen was up to her armpits in research, working on her own to break the curse. “You’ll never get anywhere with it, girl, but then again, neither will he,” she’d cackle, before returning to pruning the dark violet roses that ran along her drive while Doreen sat on a threadbare blanket in the shade surrounded by books, wondering how anyone could be so happy to have imprisoned another witch.
“Why did he bewitch her?” Doreen asked.
“Oh, he did not,” her aunt Kayleen had said during a visit when Doreen and Margot were eight and nine years old. “Stella, you know it wasn’t that simple. Ambrose fell in love with Lenora, and Lenora with Ambrose.”
“She had a bad picker,” Stella argued.
“Still, she chose him, and then she left him. All he knew was how she had been spirited away by her family in the night, taken and then gone. Deader than an exorcised spirit,” Kayleen said, while measuring out sugar and fermented grapes and hibiscus before pouring all three into her cauldron—a mixer she had purchased from a new store in town.
“You can’t have a modicum of sympathy for that man,” Stella warned, adding a pinch of lavender to the mix. “He took his broken heart and devastated our family line, cursed us to the bone.”
“Broken hearts break hearts,” Kayleen said.
“And now we break him over and over again,” Stella said, before finally shooing the girls out of the room.
“All these years later, and I still don’t get it,” Doreen said to her cousin, Margot, some twenty years later. They were sitting in their family’s herbal apothecary shop in the small town of Pines, waiting for customers or time to hurry up and pass them by. “Why won’t anyone tell us where Ambrose is?”
Margot shot her a look. “He’s in the Dead House.”
“Which is a myth.”
Margot snorted. “Yeah, and so’s the curse.”
Doreen blew her too-long bangs away from her face. “The curse can be broken. And you know it.”
Margot shook her head.
“You do, and yet you’re really going to marry Dean Whitmeyer?”
Margot sighed, not bothering to look up from the soul cards she was sorting. “I love him.”
“But you don’t know if he loves you.”
Margot didn’t reply. She wasn’t about to lie to her best friend and cousin, and she couldn’t rebuke the truth. What Margot had chosen instead was to accept that she was marrying a man under her spell. Or enthralled, as Stella put it, but a thrall always made Doreen think of a B movie with a vampire rising from the grave, his black hair slicked back, eyes bulging as he sank his fangs into the neck of the first unsuspecting blonde who came his way. “I vant to suck your blood.”
Though what Margot was doing felt almost as bad. “I vant to steal your love.”
Doreen pulled out her final resource from beneath the table. It was a notebook adorned with a unicorn flying across a rainbow on the front, the cover bent and worn from age and love, and a last-ditch effort to convince Margot to make a different choice. She turned to a dog-eared page, and slid it under her cousin’s nose, over the cards.
“I know what it says,” Margot said, shaking her head at Doreen. “I wrote it.”
“Are you sure?”
When Margot made no move to glance at it, Doreen took it back and began to read out loud instead.
“‘I, Margot Rose Early, being of brilliant mind and even better body, do hereby promise to never give up on myself or true love. Unlike the aunts and mothers before us, I refuse to believe this hogwash of a curse. This jinx of a whammy will not take my sanity or my life or my heart. I am the goddess of my destiny and may no curse mess with me.’”
“We were kids, Doreen.”
Doreen huffed an exasperated breath. She leaned over and grabbed Margot’s arm, forcing her cousin to look at her. But she dropped it when she saw the tears in her eyes.
Margot was strong, fierce, and determined, and Doreen was always convinced it would be her who would smite the curse and restore the balance, once and for all. When they were small, Doreen and Margot had created a spell that enabled them to get into the magically locked attic of their home and steal Stella’s books on their history and craft. It was a spell they would use many times while researching how to break the curse and grow their powers. Doreen, the mimic, was able to duplicate any spell, and Margot, the creator, capable of crafting any charm from thought.
Doreen had never considered Margot would give up.
“Oh, Margot.”
Margot sniffed and turned back to the cards. “I don’t want to die, Doreen. This is my best option, and I do love him. I can be enough for us both. You’ll see.”
“You’re wrong, and what we’re forced to do is wrong,” Doreen said.
“We have a choice,” Margot said. “That’s more than most get about their fate. Maybe we should try to be happy instead of wasting our time dreaming we can change it.”
Doreen remembered vividly the day she had learned the truth. She was seven and had developed her first crush on a boy named Lucas in her first-grade class. Doreen always thought he was so mysterious, mainly because he ignored her no matter how often she studied him. But one day, during a field trip, they’d ridden the bus to the science museum in the next town over and gone over a bump. He’d looked back at her, grinning his gap-tooth grin. In that moment, it hit her—a bolt of lightning to the soft spot under her belly. She wanted to jump up, climb over the seats in the bus, and brush her fingertips against the curve of his smile.
Her stomach quivered and he blinked, and a change slowly came over his face. His eyes widened, his mouth trembled, and he got out of his seat. He moved toward her as though she were the only person on the bus. He bumped into Dave Sanders, knocking his bag to the floor, climbed over Suzie Macintosh and Lennie Brown in the seat in front of Doreen, and dropped into the bench beside her.
“Doreen,” he said, her name on an exhale. He smelled of caramel Pop-Tarts, and his eyes were so green she thought they might have been dipped in food coloring.
“Hi, Lucas,” she said, smiling and ducking her chin, shocked he seemed to feel exactly what she was feeling.
His hand reached up, and he ran a finger over the hair falling into her face, tucking it behind her ear. “Hi,” he said. “Want to split a grilled cheese with me at lunch?”
For the rest of the day, they stayed side by side, holding hands as they walked the star walk—a dark room filled with projections of stars—studied the mini tornadoes produced by controlled gusts of air inside glass domes, and made water flow back and forth in the crank tank to study the tides. It was the single best day of her life.
Until she got home.
“Who was the boy?” Stella asked. She stood in the doorway, waiting, her arms crossed over her chest.
“My new boyfriend,” Doreen said, grinning so wide she was afraid her cheeks might split in two. She hadn’t officially asked Lucas to be her boyfriend, but some things were simply destined.
Stella sighed. “It’s time.”
She ushered Doreen into the kitchen and sat a glass of milk and single biscuit in front of her. One of Stella’s secrets were her beloved biscuits. She only made them for birthdays and special occasions.
As Doreen gobbled the biscuit down, Stella drummed her painted red fingernails on the table. “You can’t have a boyfriend.”
“I’m not too young,” Doreen said, rolling her eyes, dusting crumbs from her lips. “Maisie Newnan and Sally Jones both have boyfriends, and so do Sam Haven and George Miles.”
“No, love, you don’t understand.” Stella sat at the table holding a tin can with a smiling dog on its front. “You can’t have them because it’s not real.”
“Of course it’s real, I like him.”
“I mean it’s not real for him.”
Doreen frowned, confused.
For years, any time Doreen had shown any romantic interest in members of the same or opposite sex, Stella had found a way to subvert it. She’d pulled her from library programs, preschool classes, and their one failed attempt at choir. Doreen had assumed she was either bad at the programs or Stella was just that grumpy. But now her trembling knees told her this might be something different.
“My girl, you’re cursed. We are cursed. You have no hope of finding true love, because every person you ever show interest in will fall under your spell, your thrall. Your only hope is to accept that what you have will never be real. I’ll bind the boy; he won’t bother you again.”
It was then that Doreen understood Stella’s ruthlessness. That her aunt would do whatever it took to protect her in whatever way she saw fit.
From the beginning, there were signs of disquiet in the love lives of the MacKinnon women. Doreen knew it in how no one ever spoke about love. Not in the ways people in storybooks would. There was no such thing as “happily ever after” or even “happily ever now.” While there were aunts and cousins who married, they didn’t see them often.
“Marriage is a cage for those of us unable to escape the lie,” Stella would say while baking her biscuits on a Saturday morning.
“What’s the lie when it comes to love?” Doreen asked Margot later, while they were lying in their twin beds in their attic room. “Love is why we’re here.”
“Stella says we’re here to balance the imbalance in the world and change it,” Margot replied, unable to suppress a yawn. Margot thought her mother, Stella, was grumpy and lonely, though she never dared to speak those words out loud. At least not then. She also thought her cousin Doreen thought too much. Margot didn’t have half as many words thinking in her head as the ones that came out of Doreen’s mouth.
“I don’t want to change the world,” Doreen said. “I want to hold hands and dance under the stars and laugh so hard we cry and then dance some more.”
“We do that,” Margot said, thinking it wasn’t like Doreen was missing out when she had Margot.
“Yeah, but it’s different than if, say, Lucas and I were doing it. If he held my hand I would burst into a firework, fly into the sky, and fall back down like a hundred shooting stars.”
“That sounds painful,” Margot said, before rolling over and falling asleep. And it did sound painful, but it also sounded like the most beautiful thing Doreen could think of.
It was no surprise, though, that when they confronted Stella for more details the following day, Margot was accepting and Doreen, angry.
After what happened with Lucas and Doreen, Stella invited both girls out into the garden to help cultivate the herbs they would need for her full-moon tea readings.
“Do you remember the story I told you,” Stella asked, as she cut the lavender and placed it into a stainless-steel tray shaped like a crescent moon, “of how the bee got its stinger?”
Margot looked up from where she was chaining daisies, pausing her knot. “The bee fell in love with a stingray, but the stingray couldn’t fly. It needed to live in the water.”
“Right, and then what happened?”
Doreen dipped her palm into the lavender tray, letting the flowers tumble from her fingers. “They realized they couldn’t be together and the stingray was so sad it tried to make a deal with the gods of the ocean, but the gods were tricky, as they so often are, and they cursed the bee and the stingray instead.”
“By giving the bee a part of the stingray, a piece of its heart,” Margot said.
“And yet when the bee tried to use it, thinking it would lead it back to the stingray,” Doreen said, “it died, and they were never together again.”
“So the bee lives on land and in the air, and the stingray is stuck in the water,” Margot finished.
“Neither are better off for it,” Stella said, before she handed each girl a pestle and mortar containing a scoop of dried lavender and a pinch of her own blend of herbs she liked to call Hella Stella. Stella shifted back onto her heels from her kneeling position, watching them get to work. “We’re a bit like the bee, girls. We got stung by a very big jackass.”
“Jackasses are donkeys, not stingrays,” Margot said.
“Right, well, we would have done better with the jackass. Now we carry our own curse.”
“That’s why you don’t believe in love?” Doreen asked, her eyes locked on her aunt’s and the answer to a question Stella had been avoiding like a snapping alligator.
“I believe in love, but love does not believe in us. We are cursed so that love can no longer see us; only desire and infatuation can meet the wise women of our line.”
“Cursed like the bee?” Doreen asked.
“And the stingray?” Margot said.
“Cursed worse than both,” Stella said, with a huff that might have been a sigh. “We are the bumblebee. Many years ago, a stingray fell in love with one of us. And when she could not stay with it, the stingray cast a spell on us all. Because of it, our stingers will kill us if we don’t use them by the time we reach maturation, or the age of thirty.”
“Wait, is Ambrose the stingray? Also, I thought the gods gave the bee the stinger?” Doreen asked, still stuck on the word “kill.”
