Yuletide (Matilda Kavanagh Novels Book 3) by Shauna Granger Read Free Book Online Page B

I was talking about. She just smiled shyly. “How’d you find out?”
    “That guy told me about it.”
    “Oh,” she said, her pretty bow mouth making a perfect circle.
    I waited, and she closed the distance between us to show me her phone. She’d opened the Facebook app, and my face smiled at me from a tiny box with a picture of my kitchen in full brewing-mode behind it, taking up a bar across the page.
    “This is your fan page,” she said. “I post updates every couple of days about how busy you are or what’s a good spell for the time.”
    “Joey, you can’t do that,” I said, blinking at her.
    “I don’t put anything up you don’t actually do.”
    “But you’re not a witch. You can’t know what spells are good when,” I said.
    “Ronnie’s teaching me. I have a page for her too.” She swiped the screen quickly to show me a page with Ronnie’s quiet smile and a picture of her shop’s front window as the background.
    “I have more fans than her.” I didn’t mean to sound so proud, but it surprised me.
    “You have more Instagram followers too,” Joey said, showing me that app next. “But she’s got more Twitter followers.”
    “Dude, how many accounts did you open for us without telling us?”
    “Oh, Ronnie knows,” Joey said with a small shrug.
    I took the phone and paged through all the pictures and tweets. There were a lot of really cool pictures. She’d gone around my kitchen taking pictures of potion bottles with moonlight bouncing against the glass. My spell pots bubbling away on the stove. Pictures of me stirring a potion. A picture of me igniting a flame with my wand. Pictures of Artemis in different poses around the apartment, his yellow eyes always catching the light. The pictures of Artemis had the most number of likes. The last picture was posted less than three minutes ago. I was standing in front of the club, my eyes closed and face lifted to the night sky. It was sort of beautiful.
    “Ronnie knows about this?” I switched to Twitter to find that Joey tweeted for both of us. Most of Ronnie’s tweets consisted of specials going on at the store or tips about herbs and moon magic. My tweets were more sporadic and looked like copies of my updates on Facebook.
    “Yeah, it was her idea. Help drum up business, you know? Since I’m basically her assistant, she made it part of my job.”
    “You coulda warned me,” I said, handing her the phone.
    “Ronnie said you’d hide from the camera if I did.” She shrugged, finally tucking the phone away. She wasn’t wrong about that—I was practically photophobic.
    “Well, at least I know why I have so many new human customers.” I popped my collar against a cold breeze winding through the deserted streets. The noise inside was swelling louder, and I knew we would miss our chance to get out of the way before they spilled out into the night.
    Joey grabbed my wrist, twirled us around, and dashed away from the front of the club just as the doors burst open. The crowd inside flooded the streets like water from a broken dam. Joey pulled us up onto a bench to keep us from being trampled. She had her phone out again, holding it over her head to film the crowd.
    The biggest of the Krampus creatures led the rest, jumping and dancing as he went. His face was ferocious, frozen in a snarl with fangs that almost touched his hook nose. The others followed his lead, moving like a Chinese dragon, up and down and side to side. I don’t think the real Krampus ever danced. The crowd cheered and clapped, following the parade of Krampuses down the street, thankfully in the opposite direction from where my car waited for us.
    “Okay,” Joey said, “my battery is almost dead. We can go home now.”
    “Gee, thanks,” I said, nudging her in the ribs.
    She made an “eep!” noise as she hopped down. I hesitated, watching the crowd disappear down the road. A chill ran up my arms, raising my flesh in tiny bumps. Slowly, I turned my head, my eyes almost