Spotlight & Giveaway: What Became of Magic by Paige Crutcher

Today, HJ is pleased to share with you Paige Crutcher’s new release: What Became of Magic: A Novel

From Paige Crutcher, the author of The Orphan Witch and The Lost Witch, comes a new tale about a witch, a book of magic, and a beguiling and powerful creature whom she must free, even if it puts her life and soul at stake.

 
Aline Weir, a witch who can talk to ghosts, has kept her talents hidden ever since a disastrous middle school slumber party, choosing to be invisible and use her powers in secret to help lost souls reunite with the keys to send them home. All the while, she finds solace in a bookstore and the three mysterious women who run it… until Aline discovers the book of Mischief, and her powers are enhanced.

Living a solitary life until the age of thirty, Aline’s life takes an unexpected turn when the wrong (or perhaps right) person witnesses her using her powers and she is invited to a town that doesn’t exist on any map. Arriving in Matchstick, Aline learns of a lost magic that desperately needs to be found and only her unique powers can do it. But what she’s not told is that Magic is a person. One that is dangerous and seductive and has been waiting for a witch with a power like hers for centuries.

Enjoy an exclusive excerpt from What Became of Magic: A Novel 

From What Became of Magic by Paige Crutcher. Copyright © 2023 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

THREE
The perk of being invisible is no one saw Aline at the soccer fields. The meteoric storm, a freak of nature, came out of nowhere. There was damage to the stands, but thankfully no one in the field or on the stands was hurt. The same could not be said for the new soccer star, Noah Bones.
Noah was crushed by concrete that fell on him when a sinkhole occurred. It took two crews to recover his body.
Aline wasn’t simply a lonely witch anymore; she was a murderer. She did not go to the funeral. She stopped going to school entirely.
“I don’t feel safe,” she told her parents. A half-truth.
“You don’t have to feel safe. You just have to graduate,” her father said.
“Then you can leave and do whatever you like,” her mother said.
Aline didn’t want to leave. She still had Dragon and her ghosts, though she hadn’t been back to the cemetery since Noah died. His spirit was not one she wanted to cross. She cried a lot and stopped reading and watching her documentaries. Everything reminded her of Noah, and of his words. “I don’t know what I want, but I know it isn’t you.”
She was still a freak, and unlovable. And her anger had cost Noah his life. She might hate him, but she hadn’t planned to kill him. She wished she felt worse about that. And yet, she didn’t.
Aline tried to find Dragon, but she was nowhere to be found. It was then the third unexpected thing happened.
It was on the way home from getting a packet about her GED that Aline stopped into the bookstore tucked inside a historic building in the center of town. The kindly librarian from middle school, Chlo Moirai, had opened it the week prior. Chlo’s library had been the only place Aline felt safe, and she needed to see if she could find such a space again. If one could even exist.
When she went inside, Aline looked for Chlo, but didn’t see anyone. She wandered around until she reached the children’s section, with its brightly colored books and thick rugs and beanbags for reading chairs. She crumpled to the ground and reached for the first book she could find. For the rest of the afternoon, she shifted from the harsh world of Whistleblown and the destruction she had wreaked into the soft one of the Baby-Sitters Club series. She was too old for such a book, but it was like going home again, so she read until the three owners—Chlo and her sisters, Liset and Atti Moirai—waltzed into the room on a cloud of Chanel No 5, chattering, and carrying a tray full of chocolate milk and warm Pop-Tarts.
“Aline, dearest. You finally came,” Chlo said, her brown frizzy hair moving around her face like a cloud of cotton candy being blown in the wind. She took Aline’s chin in her hand and stared for so long into Aline’s eyes, Aline nearly forgot what it meant to blink. “It is temporary, dearest.”
“Oh yes, absolutely,” agreed Liset, adjusting her pearls and pressing a perfectly manicured hand down her skirt. “Nothing is permanent, after all.”
“Not a single blessed thing. You are always welcome here,” Atti added, her large green eyes blinking bright under her thick fringe of bangs. “This is a safe haven, and the books are happy for the company, as are we.”
Aline found her salvation with the bookstore and the trio of women who ran it. In the bookstore, Aline lived a life where she could escape. She didn’t have to pretend the indifference or whispers from other kids cut into her like the angry blade of a serrated knife or keep the peace during one of her parents’ many arguments. She could study for her GED, and lose herself in worlds where the villains were clear and the heroes indefatigable. Where she could pretend for hours at a time she had not killed the first boy she’d ever loved.
“A broken heart is a terrible thing to waste,” Chlo said to her one day, setting a chocolate Pop-Tart in front of her. The sisters had the misguided belief that chocolate was its own food group. “You are clearly grieving dear. Can it really be all that bad?”
“Worse,” Aline said with a grimace.
A wonderful thing about Chlo, and the other two sisters, was they never lingered. Once a period was at the end of a sentence, they were gone, back to their offices or a nook and cranny where they could gossip and knit. They never minded how Aline treated the shop more like her own personal library and less like a brick-and-mortar store, or that she left chocolate smudged on the corners of half the pages she turned.
“How come you let me stay?” Aline asked, after watching them hurry out a few teenagers with sneers from the store.
“You are our favorite kind of female: wild and free,” Atti said. “The shadows under your eyes won’t always be there, dearie. One day you will soar.”
Aline thought they liked her because she was as odd as they were. For owners of a store, they spent most of their time knitting and keeping an eye on the door for customers they more often than not ran off. On rainy days, they whispered in tones too low for Aline to properly hear, and on sunny days, they read Aline’s palm and compared it to those found in their anatomy books.
It was on one of the rainy days that Aline stopped being scared of what had happened with Noah and started thinking about what could happen for her future. She sat, turning the pages on the latest adventure of Nancy and Ned, when a book tumbled from the third shelf up. Anne of Green Gables.
Aline sighed in relief as she took in the cover. She looked up and saw Dragon, leaning against a shelf of science fiction and smiling.

From The Witches of Bone Hill by Ava Morgyn. Copyright © 2023 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
 
 

Giveaway: One print copy of WHAT BECAME OF MAGIC by Paige Crutcher, US Winner Only

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Meet the Author:

PAIGE CRUTCHER is the author of The Orphan Witch and The Lost Witch. She is a former journalist, and her work appears in multiple anthologies and online publications. She is an artist and yogi, and when not writing, she prefers to spend her time trekking through the forest with her children, hunting for portals to new worlds.

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