Casting Spells (23 page)

I suppose I could have stopped there but I didn’t. I did what cops weren’t supposed to do without a warrant. I opened cabinets, drawers, closets. I don’t know what I was expecting to find but no dead bodies tumbled out, no smoking guns hidden behind a few hundred skeins of soft purple stuff with a name I couldn’t pronounce.

I found a stash of Chamber of Commerce-style promo materials behind a nest of hairy pink balls of yarn. Restaurant info. A glossy brochure about the Inn that never had a room available. Lots of stuff about the various shops and businesses. They even had a foldout map, one of those simple ones that spelled out all the tourist sites in big block letters.

I spread it out on the counter in the small galley kitchen. There was Sticks & Strings, marked with a big red dot. Fully Caffeinated. The parking lot over there at the north edge of town. The Town Hall/old church. Janice Meany’s Cut & Curl. The library. I even found a smallish red dot marked Archie’s Electronics at the foot of Toothaker Bridge exactly where Paul Griggs said it would be but wasn’t. If I was still there during spring melt, I’d have to take another look.

The damn name still sounded familiar. I took another look at the map in front of me. Carrier and Nurse, Osborne and Good, Wilber and Parris and Hubbard. The been here/ seen that feeling that started when I drove into town for the first time returned full force and it pulled me back through my years in Boston to Bradford, the town where I grew up.

That wasn’t it—our streets had been named for the children of the first wave of 1950s tract house owners—but I was on the right track. It wouldn’t help me wrap up the loose ends of Suzanne’s death, but it was something to think about when life got too close for comfort.

Penny leaped out of that basket of fluff and meowed her way over. She twined herself around my ankles, letting me know she wouldn’t mind something to eat.

“I’m with you, cat.” I followed her into the makeshift kitchen and split a turkey club and some chips. I was more of a dog person but Penny had an old soul feeling to her. If you had to spend the night in a knit shop, it was good to have some company.

Dinner took about ten minutes, which brought me all the way to nine o’clock. I fell into one of those catatonic sleeps brought on by unremitting boredom then started awake a little after eleven.

Which meant there were another seven or eight hours until daylight.

With a little luck they would feel like only twenty or thirty.

 

CHLOE

 

By midnight I had learned how to keep small appliances, cutlery, and myself from launching unexpected aerial reconnaissance missions around the house. The cats finally decided it was safe to crawl out from their various hiding places and grab something to eat before the next surprise.

I was, however, having trouble keeping random thoughts from turning into random visits from my poor, unsuspecting friends.

Janice threatened me with permanent split ends if I transported her out of bed one more time. Lynette made me promise I would never tell anyone what she looked like without her eye makeup on. And I’m not sure I’ll ever recover from the sight of Frank and Manny from the retirement home without their vampire dentures in place and their hairpieces on. Of course, the bigger issue was why I was thinking about Frank and Manny in the first place but I refused to go there.

And then there was Luke.

He was sound asleep when he landed on top of the washing machine. He hit with a thud, grunted, then slid onto the floor with another, softer thud. The stack of knitted blankets awaiting felting cushioned his fall. Stubble dotted his jaw-line. His thick dark hair stood up in spiky tufts. And did I mention he was warm? I could feel his warmth all the way across the room and I couldn’t resist. I crossed the room and knelt down next to him.

He looked up at me with unfocused eyes. “What the hell—?”

“You slid off the washing machine.”

“What was I doing on the washing machine?”

“It’s a long story.” Transport was brutal on mortals. We’re not built for astral travel. Our brains have trouble convincing our bodies that the laws of physics don’t always apply, and the war wreaks havoc on our systems. Right now Luke was disoriented, unable to process what had just happened to him. In effect, his brain was short-circuiting.

The human body didn’t fare much better. Transport was more physical than
Star Trek
would lead you to believe. Tomorrow morning he would feel like he’d gone fifteen rounds with the current heavyweight champion and lost.

He gave me a loopy grin. “I’m still asleep, right?”

“You’re not asleep.”

“Sure I am.”

I decided not to argue the point.

“Come on,” I said. “You can’t stay here.”

I slipped my hands under his arms and tried to help him to his feet but no luck. Moving a grounded 747 would have been easier. His brain still wasn’t communicating properly with his body and wouldn’t for at least another six or seven hours if my own past experience was any indication.

He fell back into a deep sleep and I used the opportunity to grab some pillows and blankets from my bedroom.

“You’re going to wish I’d left you at Motel Six,” I murmured as I tried to make him comfortable. “These aren’t exactly first-class accommodations.”

He didn’t understand a single word I said but it didn’t matter. Even if he did, he wouldn’t remember it in the morning.

He groaned as he turned on his side and my heart seemed to shift inside my chest. The cats peered in at us from the doorway then, curiosity satisfied, they turned and went back to their respective beds.

He held out his hand for me and time stopped. The past didn’t matter. The future didn’t exist. There was only now.

The explosion of sparks when our hands met took my breath away. Or maybe it was the warmth of his touch that did it. We interlocked fingers and it was the most intimate thing I had ever done with a man, more intimate than kissing or making love. The sense of rightness, of connectedness, made me feel something I had never felt before.

Was this love? Janice and Lynette thought so but I had only books and movies to guide me. I felt sick to my stomach, headachy, dizzy—I’d never seen those symptoms mentioned in love poems or Valentine’s Day cards. But my heart felt suddenly too big for my chest, and I had the beginnings of powers I never thought would be mine. That had to mean something.

Maybe I was my mother’s daughter in ways that went beyond a talent for knitting. Love had brought her budding gifts to full life. If she had chosen life, to stay here in Sugar Maple, most villagers believed she would have been the most powerful of Aerynn’s descendents.

But the power of love had been stronger.

I would never forgive her for leaving me, but maybe I was finally starting to understand.

Just a few nights ago I had walked up Osborne with Gunnar and shivered at the thought that change was coming, but I never guessed that the change would be happening inside me.

That night I didn’t care about protective charms or the Book of Spells. Not even the possibility that Isadora might win and drag Sugar Maple through the mist and into the world of the Fae was enough to dim my sense of wonder. My life was changing faster than I could comprehend. Magick had already started to bubble through my veins. My heart beat to a new, strange rhythm that left me breathless. By this time tomorrow my chance for something real would be gone forever. I would have to accept the fact that I had changed and that my dreams would have to change along with me.

Luke drew me close and I lay down beside him on the soft bed of blankets. He wouldn’t remember any of this in the morning. The rigors of transport would wipe away his memory of these hours. They would exist only in my heart.

So I did something I swore I would never do.

I told him everything.

17

CHLOE—JUST BEFORE DAWN

 

“Don’t worry,” Janice said, looking down at a sleeping Luke MacKenzie. “Remember how long it took you to snap back the summer Gunnar accidentally called you to the lake? Humans just aren’t built for astral transport.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” I said. “You know what it was like around here last night. Every thought I had—” I stopped.

The look she gave me could have curdled cream. “Don’t tell me you slept with him. Please don’t tell me that!”

“He slept,” I corrected her. “I watched.”

“What the
hell
does that mean?”

“He slept on the floor of the laundry room while I watched.”

“You watched?”

Now I was really starting to feel uncomfortable. “Stop repeating everything I say. Transport hit him hard. I watched to make sure he was okay.”

It wasn’t exactly a lie but it wasn’t the truth either. If I told Janice that I had spent the night in his arms, spilling the truth about my family, myself, and Sugar Maple, she would spontaneously combust.

“He doesn’t look okay,” Janice observed. “He looks like he’s in a coma.”

I took a deep breath. “He won’t remember any of this, will he?”

She shook her head. “From the looks of him, he’ll be lucky if he remembers his name.”

She was being her usual funny, sarcastic self, but I couldn’t manage a smile, much less laughter.

“You have to help me get him out of here before he wakes up.”

“Your powers got him here, honey. Let’s see what you can do about getting him back again.”

“I tried but he ended up wedged upside down in the doorway.”

She could have laughed but she didn’t. Sometimes good friends were worth their weight in cashmere.

“Poor guy,” she said, shaking her head. “He’ll need therapy after this.”

“We’d better hurry,” I said. “The sun’s coming up. The day-trippers and everybody else will be out and about before we know it.”

“We could wrap him up in a blanket and carry him to your car.”

“He’s six-three and two hundred pounds!”

“We could call Gunnar to come help.”

“Don’t even think about it.” Explaining this to Gunnar was not high on my list of things to do today. “There must be a foot of snow out there. I hope the highway’s been cleared.”

“Why do you care about the highway?” Janice asked.

“We have to get him back to his motel.”

“He didn’t make it to the motel last night. I saw his truck in front of Sticks & Strings.”

“He was at my shop?”

“I know,” Janice said. “It freaked me out too.”

I glanced at Luke then back at Janice. “Do you think he’d snoop?”

“He’s a cop. That’s what they do. They can’t help themselves.”

“Don’t they need warrants or something before they start poking around?”

“I never thought I’d say this to you, Hobbs, but you need to watch more television. Some cops do what they need to do and worry about the details later.”

My shop was all about the knitting. Except for the basket of roving from my mother, there wasn’t a drop of magick anywhere.

We couldn’t use any of Janice’s magick because he was still zonked from transport so we ended up wrapping him in a blanket and dragging him through the snow to my Buick. We just about had him folded into the backseat when one of those spine-chilling wails rolled toward us from the direction of Procter Park.

Our eyes locked over Luke’s blanket-clad body.

“I didn’t hear that,” I said. “Did you?”

Janice shook her head. “Hear what?”

We both shivered as the sound faded away.

After much manipulation, we got Luke into my car and headed toward the shop.

It had been a night for the strange and the new. My quiet, bucolic village was as crowded as Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Spirits were everywhere. In the trees. On rooftops. Walking arm in arm down the streets. Drifting overhead. Africans who had escaped the slave trade. English men and women who sought religious freedom. Dutch. Irish. Abenaki Algonquins who had welcomed the newcomers and taught them the ways of the land.

Spirits from our earliest days mingled with spirits who fought in the War of Independence and the War Between the States. A flyboy shot down during World War II saluted me as he sailed overhead. The energies I had sensed all around me for my entire life were suddenly visible, and I alternated between wonder and fear as I steered the car down Osborne toward the shop.

It was too much. My head throbbed from the assault on my senses. Was this the way Sugar Maple looked to Lynette and Janice and Lilith and everyone else? How did they stand this on a daily basis? It was like living in the middle of a teeming city filled with colors and sounds and people everywhere. There had to be a way to turn it off or I would go crazy.

Thirty minutes later we managed to get Luke installed on the sofa in the shop. Janice, in an uncharacteristically indulgent mood, covered him with one of the throws I’d knitted during my 2004
Ab Fab
frenzy. I smiled as Penny abandoned her roving basket and curled herself around his feet and started purring.