Casting Spells (29 page)

I made my way to Row C and claimed the aisle seat as the music rose and the lights went down and I got ready to be swept back to Dickens’s London and a different kind of magic.

At least that was what usually happened when I watched a show at the Playhouse. This time, however, I had brought my own magick with me and saw sights I had never seen before. I gasped at the sheer volume of theatergoers who didn’t need numbered seats. The Harris family hovered above the orchestra. The Souderbushes were perched on the chandeliers. Benjamin, his wife, and extended family had claimed front row center, sharing the seats with tourists from Quebec who hadn’t a clue.

Ordinary-looking people I had believed were pure human exhibited nonhuman characteristics when seen through my newly magicked eyes while suspects I would have bet my roving had special powers were totally earthbound.

“I hear you were stood up.”

I jumped as Gunnar popped up next to me in the aisle.

“Your lucky day,” I said, gesturing toward the empty seat next to me.

“Clarence drank too much rum. I’m taking over the lighting.” He glanced around. “Where’s the cop?”

“On his way back to Massachusetts.”

He arched a brow. “Permanently?”

“For the weekend.”

He studied me carefully but didn’t pursue the topic. “You’ll be at the after-party?”

“Pigs-in-a-blanket and sangria. Try to keep me away.”

He touched my shoulder and the next instant he was gone.

22

LUKE

 

I was exiting the highway when the truck climbed up the outer edge of the curve and came close to tipping over the embankment before I was able to regain control and ease it back down again.

“Shit.” I pulled over onto the local road and waited for the adrenaline surge to fade. Twice in a few days? If things kept going this way, I wouldn’t make it to the end of the winter in one piece.

The twenty miles of local road between the highway and Sugar Maple were unlighted so I kept my speed relatively slow even though the full moon cast a brilliant glow over the snowy fields. Deer crossing signs appeared every hundred yards or so. I passed a buck standing in the shadows and saw a doe a few feet behind him, a pair of fawns by her side.

You knew you were in trouble when a family of deer had a better chance of living happily ever after than you did.

Not that I believed in the fairy tale ending. I had spent my adult life cleaning up the mess left behind when the ending didn’t match the dream.

Chloe knew I was a cop. She knew I’d been on the force in Boston. She knew I was divorced and that I believed in locked doors, hot sex, and not much else.

Up until tonight I would have figured that was enough.

Now I wasn’t sure about anything.

A giant fir tree lay across the foot of the Hollandsworth Bridge, which linked the secondary roads to Sugar Maple.

“Now what,” I muttered out loud. Three hours ago the road had been passable. I was still a stranger in the area. I didn’t know the side streets or the shortcuts locals used. I was tempted to aim the truck toward town and off-road it through the woods, but I’d probably end up in Cincinnati.

Nothing wrong with utilizing a little twenty-first-century technology. I flicked on the GPS and the NO SIGNAL message blinked back.

I should have taken that class in celestial navigation back in high school.

At this rate I’d be lucky if I made it back to Sugar Maple in time for Christmas.

 

CHLOE

 

I started feeling not so great around the time the Ghost of Christmas Past took Scrooge by the hand and led him down the avenue of lost dreams.

Normally I’m a pushover for the story. A sick kid. A cranky old man. Redemption on a grand scale. It didn’t get much better than that.

Tonight, however, it wasn’t working for me. When I looked at the stage, I didn’t see nineteenth-century London: I saw a family of Vermont shapeshifters and one immigrant selkie playing pretend.

I wasn’t an expert on energy fields but the room felt off balance and so did I. I told myself it was probably my burgeoning powers creating a disturbance around me but that wouldn’t explain the sweaty palms, the nausea, or the throbbing pain behind my eyes.

Oh wait. I forgot. This was how it felt when a Hobbs woman fell in love.

I tried to concentrate on what was happening on stage, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the spirit cats clawing their way up the heavy velvet curtains. Tabbys, calicos, Abyssinians, tuxedos, and a very familiar black cat with golden yellow eyes, who stared down at me from the top of the curtain.

Penelope?

I watched in astonishment as she grabbed one of the tattered shreds between her front paws and swung across the stage like a feline Tarzan, landing atop a huge basket of brightly colored yarn that belonged to Mrs. Fezziwig.

“Sit down, Chloe!” Verna Griggs whispered from the seat right behind me. “You’re blocking the view!”

“Did you see that?” I asked, pointing toward the stage. “Penny—”

“Down in front!” an angry voice shouted.

I looked back at the stage. The curtain-clawing cats were gone, but Penny had grown to three times her size and was standing at the foot of the stage hissing red and orange flames straight at my head.

And that wasn’t even the weird part. The weird part was the fact that nobody in the entire theater seemed to notice what was going on.

Penny expanded from bobcat size to full-grown lioness. She howled and flames shot from her mouth, over the heads of the audience, then wrapped themselves around me. I could feel the heat but not the pain. The flames clung to me like a second skin but they didn’t burn.

And still nobody noticed.

I had to get out of there before I went crazy.

I raced up the aisle past the curious faces of friends and strangers then burst through the double doors into the brightly lit lobby. A gathering of spirit women in nineteenth-century clothing looked up from their quilting bee set up near the refreshment counter.

“Join us, Chloe,” the oldest one said with a smile. “We’ve been waiting.”

Oh god.

I ricocheted past a Colonial-era serving wench, barely missed a World War I nurse, and then exploded out the door to freedom.

I wanted it to stop. I wanted the magick to go away. Giving me magick was like handing a toddler a loaded gun and expecting her to shoot straight every time. The odds were definitely against it. I couldn’t even attend Lynette’s opening night performance without freaking out because my cat was trying to muscle in on Tiny Tim’s territory.

I mean, if I couldn’t handle some feline histrionics, what hope was there? I had lived in Sugar Maple long enough to know that magick wasn’t always neat and predictable and neither were the men and women who practiced it. If I flipped out every time a cat talked to me, I wouldn’t make it to next Thursday with my sanity intact.

I leaned against a tree and struggled to catch my breath. All sorts of crazy images spun past me. Luke behind the wheel of his truck, his face illuminated by the light from the full moon. My mother at her spinning wheel. Sorcha, her dear face creased and lined with worry. Isadora, bathed in a shimmering mist, as she ripped through Sticks & Strings—

“No!” The word exploded from my throat like gunshot. If Isadora managed to claim the Book, Sugar Maple was doomed.

A thick purple cloud had settled itself over the town like shrink wrap. The air grew syrupy and sickeningly sweet, like roses past their prime. My stomach lurched sideways. I thought I was about to be sick until the tree I was leaning against suddenly threw its limbs around me and tried to squeeze me like a tube of Colgate, effectively taking my mind off my nausea.

I don’t know if it was magick or good old human adrenaline but power surged through me like an electric current. I wasn’t going to give up without a fight. I leaned back into the tree and closed my eyes, gathering together every ounce of strength I had at my command.

When a sugar maple grabbed hold of you, it meant business. Sharp branches dug into my rib cage. Rough bark sliced through my down parka and tore skin from my face as I fought against it. I might as well have been a flea fighting an elephant.

With a yell, I threw myself forward one more time and heard a loud crack as the branches snapped in two and I fell free. My left knee hit the ground. I think my hip did too but I didn’t have time to care. I scrambled to my feet and propelled myself toward Sticks & Strings and I didn’t look back.

 

LUKE

 

 

After five minutes of dead ends, the light dawned. I remembered reading about abandoned logging routes in some of the research materials I’d snagged from the library. Supposedly they had run from the base of what became the highway to the southwest boundary of Sugar Maple, right near Snow Lake. With a little luck, maybe there was a map tucked in with the newspaper clippings and magazine tear sheets.

I pulled over and clicked on my hazard lights. I reached into the back and grabbed for the huge stack of stuff I’d rubberbanded together. Menus. Promo materials. Where to ski. Where to fish. Where to shop. Where to skate.

I stopped flipping through the stack and pulled out a clipping from the
Sugar Maple Gazette.

She looked very young and very self-conscious standing there next to a big maple tree while a dozen little girls in old-fashioned skating costumes knelt in front of their queen. She hadn’t changed much in the last dozen years. She was still tall, still skinny, still blond. And she still had that oddly appealing blend of confidence and uncertainty that made me want to get closer.

She’d be hearing about the big hair ...

I tossed the clipping on the passenger seat and continued the map search when something clicked. I looked past Chloe, past the little girls, and zeroed in on the huge maple tree next to them.

I knew that tree. I had noticed it on my drive-through the first night in town, the tree with the big circle gouged into the bark. I remembered feeling relieved that there was at least a spark of rebellion alive there in Stepford. But I hadn’t realized there were other symbols carved or burned within the circle itself.

A crescent moon. A full sun. Symbols so common they barely registered when you saw them. Hell, half the kids under twenty-one probably sported tats of the sun and the moon or one of their variants.

Chloe’s store logo was a line drawing of a beautiful woman holding the sun aloft in the palm of her hand.

That wasn’t it either. There was something else, something darker and more recent.

The cemetery.

Carved into one of the flat, white marble stones that marked the resting place of Chloe’s parents was a big round sun with dozens of rays extending outward. Carved into the other was a crescent moon.

I pictured moonlight sweeping across the frozen pond. Starlight shining down. I imagined Chloe’s parents carving symbols instead of initials in the tree, crazy/drunk with young love. Thinking it would never end.

But it did. Everything did sooner or later.

Bad things happened every day to good people, and they’d been happening since man stood upright and took his first step. Thinking about things you couldn’t change was a waste of time.

But something wasn’t right back there in Sugar Maple. I could find a way to explain the lack of crime, the missing birth and death records, the general sense that I was the only one not in on the joke. But when you added them up, what you got was way outside my comfort zone.

Take the woman at the cemetery. People didn’t disappear like that. Not in a relatively open space with no place to hide. But it happened and I still didn’t know how.

And the Salem thing. The replica of the lighthouse, the street names. Why had the powers that be sought to honor the infamous history of a small Massachusetts town? The Salem I had known as a kid was a theme park for witches and things that went bump in the night while Sugar Maple was New England’s version of the American dream.

Or was it? In less than a week I had seen Fourth of July fireworks explode every time Chloe and I touched. I had seen a snifter of brandy hover over my lap like a Harrier jet. Hell, for a few moments yesterday I had almost believed I had levitated from one end of Carrier to the other. And not under my own power.

People left footprints in the snow when they walked and I hadn’t left a single one. When I asked Chloe, she had looked at me like I was hallucinating. Disappearing black ice on a thoroughly dry street. Wonky electronic equipment. Snapping power lines. A lightning bolt with my name on it.