Fia Ives is desperate to find a way past the ever-watchful gargoyles guarding the restricted archives of the great Thistledown Library. Teeming with powerful grimoires, the archives are her best chance at finding the spellbook that once belonged to her recently departed mother. So, one midnight (and entirely against her cautious nature), Fia sneaks into Thistledown—and glimpses three mysterious figures also searching the forbidden stacks.
The next day, the library announces the theft of an unsettlingly dangerous grimoire, and suspicion falls to Fia. The only way to clear her name is to root out the thieves she espied that night. But solving a magical theft isn’t easy work while running the spell shop her mother left behind. She’ll need assistance.
Impulsively, Fia hires the first person who applies to help mind the store—the insufferably dark-eyed Penbrook Madbury, who is as sleepy as a cat and just as stubborn. Fia isn’t sure she can trust him with her reckless plan (let alone her beloved shop), but there’s something about the secretive magician that seems to lower her guard. As a strange, treacherous magic begins curling through the town, Fia will have to risk her own gargoyle-guarded heart to break a string of curses before they claim her and Penbrook both. And if some of those curses require kisses to break them, well, that’s just part of the job.