For almost three hundred years the Book helped an unbroken chain of Hobbs women keep Sugar Maple safe from harm, and if my mother hadn’t fallen in love with a mortal human, there was every reason to believe the chain would have remained unbroken for another three hundred years.
But not even Aerynn had been able to foresee the birth of a half-mortal girl who hadn’t a drop of magick in her entire body.
When my mother died, she left both the Book of Spells and her six-year-old daughter in the capable hands of Sorcha, the town healer. Sorcha knew that the magick on those pages was powerful and needed to be hidden away. Until a Hobbs woman with magick at her command claimed the Book, it was vulnerable to darker forces, who would use it in ways Aerynn never intended.
“But how will I find it?” I had asked Sorcha when it was her time to pierce the veil. “Where should I look?”
“Have faith, daughter,” she said, placing a tender kiss on my forehead. “When you’re ready, the Book will find you.”
It hadn’t been looking very hard if you asked me. Except for a short-lived college career at BU, I’ve been in Sugar Maple every day of my life. When someone like Suzanne Marsden came to town, the event had my full attention.
I’m not a stalker by nature or even all that nosy about other people’s lives, but that night I couldn’t seem to control myself. It was like I was starving for a glimpse of how it could be when things were right between a woman and a man. I wanted to see the sparks flashing between them with my own eyes, not read about them in a book.
Osborne is a long avenue that runs parallel to the park. Back when the town was first incorporated, the park had been part of a forest that had long since given way to the demands of modern life. Somehow we had managed to hang on to enough wooded acreage to provide a healthy buffer between Sugar Maple and the next town.
Which, all things considered, wasn’t a bad thing.
What moon there was that night splashed a silvery glow across the snowdrifts lining the sidewalk as I neared the Inn. The faint sound of laughter floated toward me and I imagined Suzanne Marsden in her naked dress with the shimmery shawl slipping off her shoulders as she flirted with her boyfriend.
Okay, so maybe I was really imagining myself in that naked dress and the shimmery shawl, perfectly lit by the glow of a half-dozen candles, smiling up into the eyes of a handsome Homo sapiens who couldn’t keep his hands off me.
I never said I didn’t have a few issues of my own. (Not to mention some fantasies that were frequently fueled by a box of Chardonnay and sappy old movies on DVD.) Sometimes I had to concentrate very hard to remember my parents’ faces, the sound of their voices, but the memory of how it had been between them was crystal clear.
And I wanted that. I wanted to love someone so much it hurt. I wanted someone to love me so deeply that I would believe in forever even if forever could never be.
I knew that sooner or later I would have to do whatever was necessary to keep Sugar Maple and her own safe from harm, but I couldn’t help hoping that love would be part of the solution. Not just the friendship kind of love I felt for Gunnar, but the real can’t-live-without-you kind that turned your world upside down.
But in a good way.
A handful of cars with out-of-state plates were parked in the lot behind the Inn. Two Massachusetts, two New Hampshire, one Wisconsin. Soft gray puffs of apple-scented smoke rose from the twin chimneys on either side of the sloped roof. I moved closer, careful to stay in the shadows, and watched as the Weavers delivered the ultimate country inn experience to their unsuspecting guests.
Renate poured wine for a middle-aged couple and said something that made them both laugh. A trio of businessmen in dark suits talked intently over thick porterhouse steaks. Colm, the patriarch of the Weaver clan, danced attendance on a white-haired woman in vintage Chanel. Bettina, the Weavers’ married daughter, sat on a ladderback chair near the hearth, playing the harp while her kids, Athens and Ithaca, bused the tables.
The diners hadn’t a clue that the owners were faerie who lived under the first step of the center hall staircase when they weren’t playing innkeeper. Part of Aerynn’s protective charm was the way outsiders saw only what they expected to see in Sugar Maple, not what was right there in front of them.
One of the businessmen glanced toward the window. His eyes widened in surprise when he saw me and I hit the snowy ground face first, praying he would blame it on too many vodka tonics and not a dangerously lonely knit shop owner with too many cats.
Talk about a YouTube moment.
“Chloe?” A familiar voice sounded above me. It just kept getting better and better.
Gunnar, my best friend and occasional movie date, was bending over me. The shimmer of Transition still clung to him like a fine web of silver-blue stars. Even though I had known him my entire life, there were still times when his Fae beauty shocked me into reverent silence.
This, however, wasn’t one of them.
I took his outstretched hand and rose to my feet, shaking off the snow like a dog spraying water after a bath. “If you say one word about this, so help me, I’ll tell everyone about that time down near the lake when you—”
He gave me that smile of his, the one I wished made my toes curl. He knew his secrets were safe with me. “You want to tell me why you were spying on Renate?”
“You’re here too,” I pointed out. “Who were you spying on?”
“They had a full house tonight. I helped in the kitchen.”
I shook my head in bemusement. “I never understood why Samantha let Darrin talk her out of witchcraft, and I don’t understand why Renate doesn’t just conjure up those delicious meals of hers.” She was Fae. Her whole family was. They had powers and magick I couldn’t even imagine. “If I had even half Renate’s powers, I’d never block another shawl.” A twitch of the nose, a blink of the eye, and voilà! Perfection.
“Magick isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” he said, brushing glitter from his golden blond hair. “Sometimes I envy you.”
“Sure you do,” I said with a grin. “Tell me that next time you magick yourself out of paying for bagels at Fully Caffeinated.”
“So why are you spying on Renate?” he asked again. For a nice guy, Gunnar could be remarkably determined.
“I wasn’t spying on Renate.” I brushed snow off the front of my coat. “I was spying on someone else.”
He glanced toward the window and grimaced. “Not the guy in the brown suit.”
“Give me a little credit.” The whole thing sounded so foolish I couldn’t wrap my words around it. “A customer locked herself out of her car while she was waiting for the Inn to open. I wanted to see if she found her keys.”
“You can do better than that.”
“I wanted to get a look at her boyfriend, okay?” I kicked a fine flurry of snow in his direction.
I told him about the naked dress and the Orenburg and the way she lit up the room the moment she stepped into the shop. “And it’s not just that she was drop-dead gorgeous or that she had magick like Simone or your mother. I’m telling you, Gunnar, when she was in the room, you couldn’t take your eyes off her.”
“It’s called star power,” Gunnar said. “Dane has it too.”
I managed to keep my grimace to myself. Gunnar and Dane were twins, but believe me, the likeness was purely physical. They shared astonishing good looks and one set of full Fae powers that were unequally divided between them. As beautiful as Gunnar was, his brother was even more so. But fate hadn’t been entirely unfair because Gunnar had claimed the lion’s share of powers, a fact in which I took wicked pleasure.
The town matchmakers had done their best to turn our friendship into a love match, but finally even the most hopeful of the lot realized we were fatally platonic and tried to hook me up with his brother. I’m not proud of myself but Dane knew how to work that whole faerie/beauty/sex thing, and one long-ago night I had come close to taking a walk on the wild side. (Believe me, you don’t know what seduction is until a faerie turns up the wattage.) Fortunately I came to my senses before I had to disinfect my entire body with Lysol. Call me strange but I like my men a tad less sociopathic.
Still there was something to be said for the chase. Being pursued had its charms. If Gunnar had been able to channel his energies the way his brother could, we would probably be married right now and expecting our fourth or fifth child. And I guess you could say if Dane had been even one-quarter as decent as his brother, I might be living an entirely different life right now.
But cruelty had never been a turn-on for me and I was glad when Dane started spending more time in the faerie realm than the earthly plain doing his mother’s dirty work. Their mother, the terrifying Isadora, wielded enormous power in their world and craved it in ours as well.
Dane was hot-tempered and selfish. Gunnar was easygoing and loyal. Janice once said that I made him sound like a golden retriever but that wasn’t how I meant it. He had a good heart and a good soul, and I would have given all my hand-painted silk to find a way to make it work between us, but the hard truth of the matter was I didn’t love him the way he loved me and I probably never would.
As the only nonmagick taxpayer in Sugar Maple, I pretty much operated on a need-to-know basis and that position had served me well when it came to navigating the tricky waters between the real world out there and the world our ancestors had created. They called it plausible deniability in Washington. Up here we just called it common sense.
“Come on,” Gunnar said, glancing back toward the Inn. “We’d better get out of here before Colm comes out for a smoke.”
We quickly moved across the yard and driveway, then fell into step when we reached Osborne.
“This is getting to be a habit,” I said lightly as I pulled my scarf more closely around my neck. “Third night in a row you’ve walked me home from work.”
“Not that you’re counting or anything.”
“So what’s up, friend?” I asked. “Why the escort service?”
Unlike most Fae of my acquaintance, Gunnar wasn’t good at emotional camouflage. “I heard the banshee wail.”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed out loud. “You did not.” It sounded like something from a cheesy horror movie.
“Last night. Three minutes to midnight.”
“After a few margaritas I usually hear U2.” He didn’t laugh with me so I regrouped and tried again. “You probably were having a bad dream.”
“I was wide awake.”
“I told you to quit reading Stephen King before bed.”
Again nothing. He didn’t even crack a smile.
Call me a wimp, but I wasn’t a big fan of banshee talk. Things that went bump in the night, horror movies, your average circus clown could all give me the screaming heebie-jeebies. Which, considering where I live, was pretty ironic. “Come on, Gunnar. I know this is Sugar Maple but I don’t think anyone here has ever heard a banshee. I mean, are you even sure banshees exist?”
“I heard one the night before your mother died.”
“I really wish you hadn’t told me that.”
“I wish I hadn’t heard it.” He unwound the cashmere scarf I had knitted for him from around his neck and draped it across my shoulders.
“How far away was it last night?”
He hesitated. “It was windy. I couldn’t—”
“Tell me, Gunnar.”
“Close,” he said. “Very close.”
I pulled in some icy air. “Okay, so let’s say for the moment that you did hear a banshee’s wail. Nobody dies in Sugar Maple, at least not in the mortal sense. That would mean it has to be an outsider.”
“Not necessarily.”
My heart was pounding so hard I could barely speak. I knew the answer in my bones but I needed for him to say it. “Who else could it be?”
“You’re half-mortal, Chloe.”
I flexed an imaginary bicep. “I’m healthy as a horse,” I said. “I don’t ski. I almost never drive. Unless I fall onto a stash of double points, I think I’m good for a few more years.” I waited for him to laugh or smile or at least acknowledge my attempt at humor but his expression remained grim. “Okay,” I said, “now you’re really scaring me.”
A train whistle blew in the distance, followed by mournful hooting from somewhere nearby.
“Maybe you heard an owl,” I said. “The woods are filled with them.”
“Or a lovesick fisher,” he said, forcing a smile. “I spotted tracks last week in the woods.”
“Lilith said they were repopulating. I’ll bet that’s exactly what you heard.”
He made an upbeat comment about conservation and forestry. I answered with an even more upbeat comment about wildlife and the environment. We both ignored the fact that it wasn’t mating season. We were practically back to our pre-banshee comfort level until we locked eyes and a terrible certainty moved between us.
Change was coming. You could smell it in the air.
He walked me to my cottage at the edge of the woods, where we exchanged awkward good-byes. I wanted to throw my arms around my best friend and hug away the worry in his eyes, but when your best friend was also in love with you, a woman had to think twice. I squeezed his hand instead.
“It’s nothing,” I said even though we both knew I was lying. “This time tomorrow we’ll laugh about it.”
But once I closed the door behind me, tomorrow seemed a very long time away. This was one of those nights when the loneliness cut through me like a well-sharpened knife.
I was glad when a loud meow rang out and my feline family materialized from their various hiding places. After an initial burst of excitement, they assumed their usual looks of disdain and I hurried to do their bidding like a good human.
I spent the next forty-five minutes cuddling, cleaning litter boxes, and opening cans of Fancy Feast. Once I had Lucy, Pyewacket, Dinah, and Blot settled down, I popped a Lean Cuisine into the microwave, pumped myself a glass of red from the box on the counter, then plopped down onto the sofa to get pleasantly buzzed while I waited for my meat loaf with whipped potatoes to be ready.