I never understood why my witch parents named me Sunday.

There was a complex history with witchcraft and religion in my family, and I always suspected that might be part of it. Maybe it was the irony of a long line of witches marrying into a long line of Christians, leading to an interesting tradition that blended folk Catholicism with actual, real magic running through our veins. I thought that was a much more interesting explanation than the one my mom always offered me, which was that I was born on a Sunday, and she was inspired by a child's nursery rhyme at the last possible moment to choose my name.

Completely contradictory to the old nursery rhyme, though, I was never bonny, blithe, good, or gay. I didn't consider myself to be particularly pretty, though I don't know anyone who does. However, I also had a full sleeve of tattoos on my right arm, nose and lip piercings, and hair dyed bright purple at the roots, fading to pink at the ends. I would not call that traditionally pretty by any circumstance. I could understand that "good" is a morally subjective term, but blithe and gay? No, never.

I suffered from an affliction that my mother called "interminable melancholy." It's not that I couldn't ever be happy. It was just that even if I saw the glass as half full in the moment, I could always see a future where that same glass would inevitably wind up dry and empty.

A side effect of the ability to see the literal web of fate around me, I supposed. My disposition always veered in the direction of realistically pessimistic, planning for every possible outcome, preparing for every twitch in those shifting threads.

If I concentrated, I could ignore them. Or maybe if I didn't concentrate, I could ignore them. Either way, I learned to shove my strange sixth sense to the side. If I hadn't, I wouldn't be able to live a normal life.

... Not that my life was particularly normal, but I supposed "normal" was all a matter of perspective. I spent my days running my shop in the old part of town, and I lived my life in peace. That was all I really wanted.

I settled in behind the front counter of the shop to check over the books, and then began sorting herbs to make bags of teas. When I worked with herbs, I always used gloved hands and a clean counter space. I took my sanitation very seriously when it came to medicinals.

That was why, when the bell rang to signal someone opening the front door, I still had a pair of slightly oversized, neon green disposable gloves on my hands.

The first customers of the day were two... Well, I couldn't tell if they were teenagers. Apparently turning thirty eliminated my ability to tell the age of anyone more than about five years younger than me. In any case, the boy and girl looked a little awkward shuffling into my apothecary, their fingers laced together and eyes wide as they looked around at the jars of bulk herbs, the shelves of books and bottles, and the selection of prepared aids and rememdies.

Definitely first-timers.

"Can I help you find anything?" I asked, smiling as I continued to sort herbs.

They whispered for a moment, nudging back and forth between them, and my sense of good humor dropped. I could tell what they were looking for already.

"We're... um..." the boy began, shuffling his weight from foot to foot.

I decided to let him squirm a little, raising an eyebrow and putting on my best customer service smile, but he wouldn't even look me in the eye. The girl, on the other hand, finally stepped forward.

"Just something... to maybe help with... um..." she tried, but she couldn't finish her sentence either.

I finally dropped the smile, pointing to the aisle on the far side of the store.

"Aisle 2, but you have to be 18 to purchase," I said flatly. "ID required."

The two of them simultaneously turned red, but they nodded.

In my personal opinion, if you weren't ready to tell someone you'd like to look for a libido aid or other sexual enhancer, you probably weren't ready to purchase it. There were plenty of ways to phrase it that weren't incredibly mortifying. It could be a little embarrassing, sure, but I saw this all the time. It wasn't like their faces would be burned in my mind forever.

I went back to organizing my tea ingredients, but only a moment later, the bell at the door chimed again. Maybe it would be a busy day? That would be nice. Busy days always made the time go faster.

"How can I help—" I stopped, waving hello as I realized who had entered.

The man entering the shop was dressed simply in a button-down shirt and black jeans, but he was beautiful in a way that was ethereal, androgynous, and utterly liminal. Not quite human, not quite witch, but something else entirely. His white hair was shaved close to the skin on the sides, while a mop of snowy curls grew long at the top of his head, so long they framed his face on one side and threatened to cover his eyes if they shifted. His eyes were gorgeous, too— golden in a way that made you question if they were brown, but no, they were gold.

And, most interestingly, I could see the faintest outline of wings behind his back. They looked like a ghost, like the memory of massive butterfly wings, but they fluttered and moved with him as he entered, outlined by the Threads surrounding them. It could be a glamor keeping them hidden from most prying eyes, but my Threads often showed hidden things in this way.

It was easy enough to tell that he wasn't human. He wasn't a witch, either. That much was clear by the colors, sizes, and weave of his Threads. Plenty of Sylvan customers came into the shop here and there. I wasn't a stranger to a flash of a vampire's fangs or a werewolf looking for something to ease the pain of a teenager's first shift.

I didn't know what kind of Sylvan he was, to be honest, but I didn't care. I was used to the shimmering spectral form of his large wings by now. He was a good customer and a polite man, and as far as I was concerned, that's all I needed to know.

"Hi, Dante," I said cheerfully, waving hello.

Dante was a regular customer of mine. Though Sylvans certainly entered by shop now and then, Dante was here about once a week, sometimes more, making him my most frequent Sylvan visitor. I suspected he was fae, but I'd never asked. That seemed a bit rude. He was polite and gracious, and he enjoyed the occasional chat about magical history.

"Another one of those, hm?" he asked quietly, nodding towards the giggling couple moving to the shelves I'd indicated.

"Business is business," I grumbled. Elbows resting on the counter, I cast one more glance towards the blushing couple at the back of the shop, then very grumpily started measuring things on the scale for those tea blends.

Sickening.

"Anyway, how are things?" I said suddenly, desperate to change the subject.

"Things are things," he sighed, plopping a newspaper down on the counter. For a moment, I wondered why he bothered with a physical paper instead of digital news, but then I read the headline.

TENSIONS RISE IN SYLVAN-WITCH CONFLICTS!

It was the Sylvan paper. It was only physical. The risk of someone outside the magical community finding Sylvan news on the mundane internet was too high, so they stuck to traditional publishing. I wasn't worried about the format so much as the headline, though...

"Sunday? You okay?"

I blinked, snapping out of my temporary, worried trance.

"Tensions rise every week, huh?" I muttered, nodding at the paper.

"I think it's a permanent headline by now," he said with a groan, running a hand through his white hair. "You're one of the few witches I know that will even take Sylvan customers."

"Well that's just shitty of them," I muttered.

Dante chuckled, but he sobered quickly. "I understand the paranoia on both sides. No one is sure where the attacks are coming from, and since witches haven't organized under an official ruling structure, Sylvans are afraid of groups going rogue."

"That's unfortunately fair," I admitted, groaning. "And then witches are afraid of all Sylvans lumping them into one despite their lack of ruling structure, which specifically hasn't happened because of the range of opinions on witch-Sylvan-human interactions."

"And so we just get worse and worse..." Dante sighed.

Another round of laughter and whispers came from the back shelves, and I fought not to roll my eyes as the maybe-not-quite-teenage couple finally emerged with a small bag in their hand.

It was my basic aphrodisiac tea blend— blue lotus, passionflower, gingko, angelica sinesis, and some saffron. I rang it up without much conversation (I did not want to know their afternoon plans), but I did ask for their IDs.

To my surprise, both of them were twenty-one, and their IDs weren't even fake. They left with their discreetly bagged tea without bothering anything or anyone else in the store.

I sighed as the door creaked shut behind them. They really weren't bad customers— just a little awkward. It wasn't their fault that I'd seen so many underage couples try to come in and buy sex-enhancing products that required ID.

It... also wasn't their fault that watching couples just made me edgy in general.

I started labeling the tea bags as they left, but Dante clearly wasn't finished talking. He wasn't always in the mood for conversation, but today he looked... a little softer somehow. There was something like sympathy in his eyes when I glanced up, something inquisitive in the way that he leaned on the counter, and it made me tense.

I could guess what he was going to say, and I already didn't like it.

"You could date, you know. You have the ability," Dante said.

"I guess," I said, shrugging awkwardly.

"You're still holding out, huh?" Dante tilted his head, eyes narrowing like he was looking for some kind of secret, but he didn't need to look. We'd had variations of this conversation before, and he'd hit the nail on the head.

In truth, I wasn't dating on purpose.

It wasn't that I'd never dated anyone. I'd had a few relationships in the past, but all of them ended up in flames for one reason or another. Some were as simple as different life paths, others ended in cheating, and some were just... Well, it didn't feel like enough to me. And, besides, none of them were my soul mate.

No. Like, literally.

At some point, my grandmother had finally told me why witches looked for other witches as partners. They looked for the person their magic called to, for a match made in the stars long before their birth.

Witches looked for a soul mate.

They were blessed with a soul mate, so said my grandmother, someone our magic would know and love and push us towards, someone to make our power infinitely stronger. Humans never had the benefit of a soul mate. Sylvans had mating bonds, but they were voluntary, and they required willing consent from both parties for the binding magic to work. Witches, she said, were the only ones blessed with an innate, magical draw towards the person truly meant to be theirs.

Witch's Marks were things of eighteenth and nineteenth-century legend, apparently used to identify poor, innocent women as witches. Some of them were witches, of course, but that didn't necessarily determine their guilt or innocence. In any case, my grandmother told me from an early age that Witch's Marks were actually used to identify a witch's soul mate. Mine was dark brown and on the back of my ankle, and it looked a little like a spider web, or maybe a cup, or maybe a Rorschach blot.

In any case, it was meant to exactly match your soul mate, the one person in the world meant for you. It wouldn't always be in the same place on their body, but the shape should match.

As a child, I didn't care about that. In fact, I thought it was a little gross and scary.

As an adult, I was obsessed.

At least, I'd been obsessed at one point. I looked absolutely everywhere for my soul mate, on both human and witch dating sites, checking out every random person as discreetly as I could to see if they had a Witch's Mark— everywhere. Once, out of desperation, I even tried searching through my own Threads to see if I could find them in my future, but I only wound up giving myself a migraine from trying to see so far ahead.

That's the thing about the Threads. The farther you go into the future, the harder it is to see accurately due to the sheer expanding, constantly branching tree of possibilities. Looking for my soul mate among all that did not go well.

So... here I was, still soul-mate-less, still waiting. I figured whoever it was had to come around at some point, right? And since that had to happen, there was no point in trying to date anyone that wouldn't work out. Keeping myself open for my soul mate kept us both out of trouble and stopped anyone getting hurt in the process, and then I could inevitably ride off into the sunset... as soon as they actually showed up, of course.

Okay, maybe I was still a little obsessed.

Why was that so bad?