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said a little abruptly.
    Again, he laughed to himself. “Good point.” He drew in a breath, determining the best way to answer. “Why don’t you look in your sack? It might give you a hint.”
    Suspicious, I pulled the string at its opening just enough to peer inside and my confusion grew. Piled in a heap at the bottom were clear bags of what appeared to be herbs, a jar of broken glass, and a cross.
    “ I think I need a stronger hint,” I replied.
    He swung his head from side to side, checking the street to make sure no one else was within earshot. Even while we were alone, he still lowered his voice. “Well, based on the fact that you’re here outside this specific shop, having bought a bag of those specific items, I’d say that you’ve enrolled in the school to practice the supernatural arts.”
    “ What…” I started before having to swallow the lump in my throat. “Excuse me. What arts?”
    He shrugged and then replied as if it were widely known; something that took me only a second to realize was probably the case within the circles that he spent his time. “Witchcraft and voodoo mostly but the professors will bring up other subjects to keep it interesting.”
    My gaze quickly fell from his eyes to the cobblestone street as I absorbed this information. If I’d heard him right – and I was fairly certain given the solitude on the side street where we stood, that I had – I was enrolled in a school to practice mystical forms of magic .
    “ I take it you didn’t know?” he asked, earnestly, his interest keenly on me now, something that made the flame in my stomach grow.
    Considering what he’d said briefly, I realized that had I thought of it I might have figured it out. Over the course of my years at the academy, my mother had mailed me books at intervals, typically just prior to an upcoming holiday. It had always annoyed me because it interfered with studying for final quarter exams, compounding my workload. Then she would quiz me on the plane flights to our destination. I now understood why she’d done it. The books had all been studies of gems, stones, herbs, the Latin language, and cultural ideologies of mystical elements, and they had been preparing me for this point in my life without my knowing it.
    “ Let’s just say I didn’t know much.” I shook my head, angry, finally verbalizing the words that had rung through my head several times over the last eighteen hours.
    “ Hmm,” he mumbled. “Then how did you end up here?”
    That is a long story, I thought, but I knew what he was really asking was how I’d found this indiscernible store. Still struggling to contain the irritation that had risen up, I pulled the shopping list from my hip pocket and showed it to him.
    He gave it a quick glance before doing a double take. Then, his eyebrows furrowed inquisitively over those exquisite eyes before he dug out a similarly-sized piece of paper from his hip pocket and held it up next to mine.
    The messages were exactly the same. His instructions to stop at this shop first, and then move on to several other shops were listed in the same order as my shopping list. Only the handwriting and the names at the top of the lists differed. Where mine said Jocelyn , his said Jameson .
    “ The housekeeper where I stay…where I live,” I corrected myself, “gave me the list.”
    He paused before answering guardedly, “So did mine.”
    “ Maybe the school sent everyone the same instructions?” I offered, though I wasn’t convinced myself.
    “ Maybe…” he said skeptically. “I guess we’ll have to ask them when we get home.” Then his demeanor changed to something more lighthearted. “Good thing we learned of this or I would have thought you were following me around, Jocelyn.” He emphasized my name making certain I knew he’d noted it. His mention of it was both charming and stimulating.
    Nonetheless, my mouth fell open in offense. “And I would have thought the same thing about you,