Casting Spells (16 page)

A wave of dizziness swept over me. I closed my eyes and waited for it to pass.

“Chloe?” His voice floated toward me from a great distance. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said as the dizziness receded. “I guess I really did drink too much wine.”

“I’ll walk you to your door.”

I didn’t protest. I wanted the night to last as long as it possibly could. We started up the shoveled path to my front door and were laughing about Midge and her trunk load of kitty litter when I realized we were following a trail of royal purple glitter. There was only one person in Sugar Maple who left a trail like that behind her and that was Isadora.

I shot a quick glance toward Luke. He was happily relating a story about last year’s Boston blizzard. He didn’t seem to have the slightest idea that he was kicking up shimmering purple clouds with every step he took.

I took another look around me and my heart kicked into overdrive. Smudges of steel blue glitter, Dane’s signature color, stained the windowsills and door frame. The sizzle and burn of major Fae powers unleashed had melted snow on either side of my driveway and singed the bark of the trees.

Luke was a sharp-eyed cop trained to be suspicious. It occurred to me that the only reason he hadn’t strapped on Ghost Busters gear and started collecting forensic evidence was because the spell was still working. He didn’t see what I saw but that could change any second.

I had to do something. We were less than ten feet from my front door. What if he wanted to come in for coffee? What if he needed to use the john? What if he suddenly decided to seduce me?

We were almost at the porch steps and I was up to my ankles in glitter. Lights glowed behind the curtains, psychedelic bursts of scarlet and magenta and acid yellow. My house glittered like a BeDazzled T-shirt. I could feel the energies building up toward some kind of crazy confrontation that would probably send my roof sailing back to Forbes the mountain giant.

Time was short and my options were limited so I did what any other red-blooded American girl would do in a similar situation.

I jumped him.

Considering Luke probably outweighed me by sixty pounds, the fact that he went down like a box of rocks was pretty amazing. Not even the element of surprise could have accounted for that. Aerynn and my ancestors must have been watching over me and I whispered my thanks.

Funny how many separate impressions you could register in the space of a moment. I mean, how long did it take to throw yourself at a guy? Maybe two seconds? But those two seconds were the best two seconds of my life.

The snow cushioned his fall. His body cushioned mine. I forgot about the banshees and the ransacking faeries, about vampires and spells and the kind of loneliness you could die from. I was crazy scared happy brave and everything in between. Who needed magick when life could be this good all on its own?

Did I mention that he smelled like the ocean on a spring afternoon?

Luke rolled us over so he was on top of me and life got even better. “What the hell are you doing?”

“I tripped.”

“You tackled me.”

“I was trying to break my fall.”

“With my body?”

“I had to grab something and you were the only thing available.”

The amazing thing was that I was able to form a sentence. We were close enough to share the same breath.

“Why, Chloe?” His words brushed my lips.

“I told you,” I whispered.

“I don’t believe you.”

“I know.”

“What are you hiding?”

“Nothing.”

“I’ll find out.”

“No,” I whispered against his mouth. “You won’t.”

His eyes were a deep green, a shade called bottle green that didn’t exist anymore except in imagination. A clear green with flashes of gold near the pupil like bursts of light.

He said something but his words were lost to me the second his mouth found mine. Everything else fell away.
Everything.
Reason. Caution. The thousand and one reasons why this was a Really Bad Idea. There was only this moment, and because I knew this moment couldn’t last, I melted into it.

Into the kiss. Into him. Into a future I knew I could never have, a life that could never be mine. I loved the weight of his body on mine. The heat growing between us. The hot, sweet taste of his mouth. The way time seemed to wrap itself around us.

But the sad truth about kissing is that sooner or later you have to stop and take a breath. I know better than most women just how fragile a thing magic really is. In the time it took to breathe, reality stopped us in our tracks.

He helped me to my feet. I brushed snow off the back of his jacket. He did the same for me. We plucked his cell phone out of a snow bank and found my keys beneath a wintering lilac. There was no sign of faerie glitter anywhere. The rainbow lights were gone and only a small blue lamp burned in my front window. I suppose I should have been relieved but all I felt was sad.

We faced each other near the front door.

“I’m sorry—”

“I shouldn’t have—”

We laughed uncomfortably. He plunged his hands into his jacket pockets. I hung on to my bag as if it were the last life-boat on the
Titanic.

“I think I can take it from here,” I said. “Thanks for driving me home.”

“No problem.”

He turned and walked back to his truck and he didn’t look back.

I got what I wanted: our secrets were still safe.

I just wished I felt happier about it.

12

LUKE

 

I waited a few minutes after Chloe went inside her cottage then slowly drove away. Nothing like slamming into a stand of maples to make you rethink your driving skills. We’d skidded on a patch of black ice. I was sure of it. The tires lost traction and not even all-wheel drive could compensate.

So why didn’t the merry mortician encounter it too? She was only five or six minutes behind us on the same road, traveling in the same direction. Ice didn’t suddenly evaporate when it was ten degrees Fahrenheit and dropping.

Midge wasn’t a stupid woman. She had stared at Chloe and me like we were crazy when we told her about the black ice that had sent us spinning across Osborne.

This was winter in New England. Black ice could happen anywhere to anyone. It was a geographical hazard. It was the price you paid for the picture-postcard views.

Hell, black ice had taken out Chloe’s parents. The look on her face after we slammed to a stop wasn’t something I would forget anytime soon. I had some of Midge’s kitty litter in the back of my truck. If I could find the ice, I could do something about it so nobody else got into trouble.

I drove slowly, carefully, down Osborne to the place where we’d hit the trees. The road was bone dry, just as Midge had said. I parked the truck on the shoulder and paced off sixty feet north and south. No ice anywhere. Not on either side of the road. No oil slick. Nothing that could cause a spinout.

But it had happened. The dent in my truck was proof of that.

Operator error? That was a possibility but not a probability. I had been driving slowly, not because there was a problem with the roadway but because I didn’t want the evening to end. The slower I drove, the longer I would have with Chloe. If I’d had the guts I had as a teenager, I would have played the out-of-gas card, but I was thirty-four years old and Chloe was too smart to fall for it.

I climbed back behind the wheel and was about to pull out when I saw a shadow moving toward me from the woods. Sugar Maple might be a town without crime, but trust me, cops don’t like seeing strangers pop out of the woods late at night on a deserted country road.

My gun was in the glove box. I probably wouldn’t need it but it was good to know it was there. The shadow began to take shape as the woods thinned and it moved closer. It was a male. Tall. Broad-shouldered. Moving with the distinctive glide of a cross-country skier.

Chloe’s friend Gunnar?

I beeped the horn as he exited the woods. He looked up, startled, and saw my truck, but there was no sign of recognition.

I climbed out again and called out a greeting. He looked at me across the snowy expanse, and I could see the wheels spinning inside his head as he tried to place the truck, the driver, into context.

“What the hell, dude? We just met a few hours ago.” I waited but still no click. “Luke MacKenzie. You stopped at our table to talk to Chloe.”

He glided over to where I stood. “You met Gunnar,” he said with an easy grin. “I’m Dane.”

Twins. Who knew?

I noted there wasn’t a mark on him. Clearly I was talking with the winner of the sibling brawl. We exchanged pleasantries. He was easier to talk to than his brother, and I chalked that up to the fact that Chloe wasn’t a factor.

“How long are you here for?” he asked. “This isn’t exactly a hotbed of crime.”

“A few months,” I told him. “Once we close the Marsden case, they’ll probably turn this over to the village to fill the position.”

“Makes sense,” Dane said. “Who else could put up with this burg over the long haul?”

Spoken like a man who was looking for a way out but I kept the observation to myself. I had learned a long time ago that you found out more that way.

“I’m heading for the highway,” I said, “if you need a lift.”

“Thanks, but I’m in training for a race and have to get some more miles under me before I quit.”

“A little late to be in the woods, isn’t it?”

“Best time,” he said with a grin. “See you around town, MacKenzie.”

A second later he disappeared back into the woods. The darkness swallowed him and it was like he had never been here at all.

 

CHLOE

 

 

I had to hand it to Isadora and Dane. They had trashed my house like a pair of rocker faeries with an agenda.

Every closet, drawer, cabinet, and secret hiding place had been rifled and the contents spread from one end of my home to the other. Bookshelves had been toppled. Cushions and mattresses tossed. I found my terrorized cats hiding in the basement behind the oil burner. Even the stash of kitty litter had been searched.

Isadora’s signature royal purple glitter was smeared on every available surface. Dane’s steel blue glitter was scattered across my bed and bathroom and beyond. Did they really think the Book of Spells was tucked away in the lettuce crisper? I mean, tossing perfectly fine produce was just plain nasty.

I felt angry and violated and everything in between, and if I had been living anywhere but Sugar Maple, I would have been on the phone with 911 so fast your head would spin.

But 911 wasn’t an option so I did the next best thing: I called my friends.

Lynette was the first to arrive. She flew down the chimney and into the room, shook out her feathers, then shifted back to her normal humanoid form. The bad news: she was on top of the china closet at the time, and both the closet and Lynette toppled to the floor with a resounding crash.

The good news: instead of stuffing my china closet with fragile dinnerware, I had stuffed it with Cascade 220, worsted weight, in every color of the rainbow.

“Let’s hear it for one hundred percent wool,” Lynette said as she checked herself for fractures. “That stuff is better than an air bag.”

I considered giving her a lecture on looking before she landed but decided against it. Who was I to judge? I was the one with the trashed house, no powers, and a missing Book of Spells.

Janice arrived a few moments later in a spectacular explosion of emerald green smoke that smelled like spearmint and made the cats sneeze. She was wearing an old chenille bathrobe she had found in a thrift shop and her ever-present Uggs. She glanced around the room. “Where’s Gunnar? We have work to do.”

I motioned them into the kitchen. “I made coffee. I’m going to try Gunnar one more time.” I pressed the redial on my cell phone and murmured, “Pick up, pick up, pick up,” but it flipped immediately to voice mail. I repeated my earlier message and disconnected.

“The phone?” Lynette arched a brow. “Since when?”

“He said we needed to play by human rules as long as Luke was in town.” I had to admit that our local phone company hadn’t mastered the communications link between this world and Gunnar’s.

“Screw that.” Janice brought the tips of her fingers together in a pyramid shape, and I watched as a pure blue flame began to glow from the base. I had seen her do that many times but it never got old. Her people had been sending messages that way for longer than Sugar Maple had been around.

But there was still no response from Gunnar. I added one more worry to my growing stack.

Lynette glanced around at the mountains of purple and steel blue glitter all over my kitchen. “Isadora really has it in for you, honey.”

I shot her a look. “You think?”