by Mara Webb
“What is happening in here?” I said mostly to myself. I found Quin sitting on the counter next to his fluffy friendship group and spoke a little louder to counter their purrs. “Why am I making you a casserole? Have you not eaten today? And what is so terrible about how I look now that I need to go and fix it?”
Quin looked at the kittens then back at me. He had taken in the kittens after they had fallen asleep on a wand and turned themselves into familiars by mistake. It was supposed to be a temporary post for as long as they needed to learn the ropes and then they could be sent to new magical families. They never left.
“I just think it would be nice to, err…why not just give it a go? I’m sure you would look like a million dollars after a shower, not that you don’t already…oh flip. Guys?” he turned to the kittens and they were all shaking their heads. They wouldn’t help him navigate out of this one.
There was a knock at the door that caused Quin to jump vertically upwards about three feet from the ground, his knees didn’t bend, and his tail puffed out in fear. He landed with a thud, turned to the others and shouted, “No! It’s too early, this isn’t what we planned!”
What was happening?
2
Quin was looking anxiously towards the door and I wondered what he had ordered this time. Was this why he didn’t want me to pick up any food for him on the way home? I had helped him set up cards so that he could spend his money online. Familiars all received an allowance from the magic council, and he hadn’t spent much of it until recently, when he used it as the startup capital to launch The Catmosphere Café in the center of Sucré.
The allowance had been piling up in an account and I had recently helped him order replacements for the cards he had lost and typed in all of the card details into the various online shops that he so frequently raided.
He went through phases of ordering enormous meals, fitness equipment, scratching posts and single items from the grocery store. Last week he ordered a lime and then quickly remembered that he hated citrus fruits. I think that was a common dislike of all cats and I had warned him about it, but he learned better from making his own mistakes. Although he was annoyed that he didn’t listen to me when I suggested that he didn’t buy the thigh master. His tiny little cat legs didn’t really work too well with that one.
There was another knock at the door, and he scrambled across the wooden floor and stood tall on his hind legs to block my path. “What are you doing? Am I going to be spending my entire evening printing out return labels to ship a bunch of junk back to some warehouse?” I asked. I walked towards the door and reached for the handle.
“No, wait. I just think…you should wait,” he insisted. I leaned towards the peephole to see who was standing outside.
“It’s just Brent, move it or lose it furball.” I pulled the door inwards and it slowly nudged a protesting Quin along the ground. He was still trying to stop me. “Knock it off, what’s gotten into you? Do I need to take you to a vet?” I laughed. When I looked up at Brent, I realized that he was wearing a shirt I hadn’t seen before, it looked like all of his clothes were wrinkle free and I could smell a cologne I didn’t recognize. “Wow! You look great. Is this new?”
Brent stepped around Quin who was trying to push him back out into the front yard, ramming his back and shoulders against Brent’s ankles. He successfully got past my unofficial security guard and presented a large bouquet of flowers before kissing me on the cheek. A sudden flair of fear rushed through me as I tried to work out if today marked the anniversary of something significant. We had celebrated our one-year anniversary a month or two ago, I was pretty sure that’s the only one we have. Was it someone’s birthday? Was it Valentine’s Day again somehow?
“Don’t panic,” he said, reading the look on my face. “I just wanted to get you something nice. Being romantic without being prompted by the calendar shouldn’t make you look so concerned.” I took the flowers from him and walked towards the kitchen to put them in the sink.
“Thank you, they’re gorgeous,” I said through a huge smile. “How has your day been? I don’t think I have a vase you know.” As I entered the kitchen there was a vase waiting on the counter.
Magic.
I tossed the flowers gently into the air and used my magic as they began to fall. The paper that was wrapped around them unraveled and floated over to the recycling bin, the ends of the stems sheared off at the ideal angle and the flowers landed perfectly into the vase that I had grabbed and held underneath them.
I had been reading a few books from my attic library about good housekeeping and wanted to test out a spell I had taught myself. They looked like they had been arranged by a professional. Not bad for a first try!
“It’s been fine, no big cases for a while,” he said. For everyone else, the absence of crime was a wonderful thing, but it made for a slow day as a police officer. “I’ve finished up every outstanding bit of paperwork I had. I solved a cold case yesterday, actually. I’ve just got time on my hands.
“People aren’t even parking illegally around here anymore, it’s like we’ve all ‘finished’ policing and now everything is ticking over in a law-abiding fashion. I feel like I’m willing something dramatic to happen just to give me something to do, but like, something small. Like a missing bicycle or a noise disturbance.” He pulled out a stool at the breakfast bar and sat down. “The house re-decorated itself again?”
I had made the decision to tell Brent about my magic and I hadn’t regretted it once. He had obviously been aware that this town was a little different and with my explanation about the number of other witches in the area, talking cats, and ghosts, everything now made more sense for him.
It was strange to be on the learning journey together because I was new to all of this still and we would discover things that I was capable of by accident and both burst out laughing, like when I had a sneezing fit during a movie at home and the TV disappeared.
“Yeah, what do you think? One of these days I’m going to walk in and find this kitchen has been replaced with a giant pile of packing peanuts or something. Are we still getting takeout? I asked. I reached over and pulled at the refrigerator door handle the light from inside rained down on shelf after shelf of delicious food options.
The house had stocked up and had made some great choices. “Wow, okay. Would you like to start with a drink? We’ve got beer, a few different types of wine, I think this is vodka, but this is all in Russian I think…and there’s a bottle of champagne at the back too. Jeez, I don’t really drink much but I like the variety.”
“Can we… talk first?” he said. I felt my heart sink. Nothing good ever followed ‘can we talk?’. My ex-husband had said that before telling me that he was having an extra-marital affair with a nurse he worked with, it was how he would start conversations over the phone during the divorce. It was a statement more than a question; it suggested that the other person needed to stay calm as they are forced to listen to things they don’t want to hear. It’s was a blunt weapon.
I gulped and closed the refrigerator. I turned to face him.
“It’s not bad, at least I hope not. I just wanted to talk to you about our relationship,” he said. Despite what he had just said, it sounded like this was about to take a downwards turn.
“Are you breaking up with me?” I blurted out. I don’t think the words had even journeyed through my brain first, they just leapt from my mouth and flew around the kitchen. His smile eased my worries, he almost laughed in response. There was a twinkle to each eye that I hadn’t seen before, it was reminiscent of the look someone has just before tears begin to fall down their cheeks. It made his expression look softer somehow.
“No! Not at all. I don’t really know how to explain this, and it probably won’t come out in the right order, so if you have questions then just blurt them out because I’m going to mess this up,” he said. He wasn’t looking me in the eye anymore, this felt like a breakup. His eyes were roaming around the kitchen looking for an
ything to stare at that wasn’t me.
“I love us, I love you, this is what I want. I think I should start there.” He paused for a moment to compose himself. He took a deep breath as if preparing to jump into cold water. “I feel like we are heading in the right direction and at some point, I want us to take this to the next level. I know that you’ve had a bad experience with marriage in the past and I hope that it hasn’t soured the whole thing too much that you wouldn’t want to be married again.”
My lips parted a little as my brain started to fire across every synapse. Was Brent about to propose? He seemed very anxious for a man about to propose, but wasn’t that normal? He had dressed up, there was a balloon net hanging above us, champagne in the refrigerator and Quin was acting weird. Quin doing something unusual wasn’t necessarily a clue, but it all added up to something.
Up until this conversation I hadn’t thought about a second marriage. During the break down of my last relationship I felt like everything I did was a waste of time, that I would be alone forever and that it was fine to be that way. I had pulled myself out of a dark hole and was now living a good life, Brent was part of that.
He has his flaws, but everyone does. If he were to ask me to marry him tonight, would I say yes? I felt a gut reaction to the notion and readied myself to hear the words.
“I’m open to it,” I said with a coy smile. He turned his head to face me again with a smile, he still looked worried. The skin at the top of his nose and across his forehead wrinkled as he tried to find the right words to say in response.
“I’ve been engaged before,” he said flatly. “Something unusual happened that I am only now beginning to understand, and I think it may affect you too, so I have to tell you.” The joy faded from me. If he was about to ask me to marry him, it was weird to mention an ex-girlfriend, kind of a mood killer.
“I’m sorry I haven’t told you before and you must think I’ve been keeping secrets and that isn’t the case. This past few weeks I’ve been working a lot, I’ve been trying to figure out what happened with her—my ex.”
My legs felt weak. I used my magic to slide a barstool across the tiles and sat down quickly. Brent had been busy all summer chasing his ex-fiancé around and he hadn’t told me. I didn’t know what to feel.
“And…?” I prompted. I knew that he could see the anger on my face. I had put myself in a vulnerable position to get into a relationship so soon after moving to Sucré, I had just discovered that I was a witch, owned a magical house, had a talking cat, and that my aunt had been murdered. I should have given myself the time I needed to process all of that properly instead of latching on to the first attractive guy I met.
If I was about to get hurt, it would partially be my fault.
“When we got engaged, she changed. I’m not talking bridezilla-like changes, it was serious. A lot of weird stuff started to happen around us, and I couldn’t explain it, I barely made it out of that relationship alive.”
“Brent, I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”
“Nora…” he said. He took a big breath. The ensuing silence felt suffocating. “I think I put a curse on her by mistake.”
3
Almost everyone I have ever met has described their ex-partner as flawed, that they changed suddenly, and all of their positive qualities were overshadowed by the negatives. A person enters your life and they consume your thoughts and your plans for the future, so much of your happiness is attached to the fate of the relationship.
Then it ends. Anger clouds the memories of being happy with them, every sweet moment is tainted retrospectively, and it makes you a poor judge of the character of your ex. Brent wanted to paint a certain image of this woman and I didn’t know why.
“Curse?” I asked. “Do you have powers that I don’t know about?”
“No, I didn’t do anything on purpose. Look, since being with you and learning more about your world, I feel like I have been able to look back into my own past and make sense of the unexplainable things I’ve experienced.
“Joanne was an unexplainable thing, but this past summer I think I’ve figured it out. I ended that relationship a. while ago, you need to know that first of all. There was a grieving period obviously, but then I met someone. We were seeing each other for a few months and then Joanne started showing up outside my new girlfriend’s house.
“Each time I would date someone or even start talking to someone new, Joanne would appear. Bad things would start to happen, like, a lot. Flat tires every morning, anonymous phone calls to my girlfriend’s employer filled with lies, just…” he ran his hands through his hair.
“It was hard. They would see her outside their window and kept assuming that we were still together somehow, that I was messing them around or just wanted to get people hurt. I tried to involve the police, but they didn’t take it seriously, thought I was being too dramatic. Even my friends at the station didn’t get it.
“I watched her change into this vindictive, evil person that has stalked and haunted me since the day I proposed. I am telling you this because I want our relationship to be the one that lasts, you are all I want. I just have to warn you because I don’t know when she will show up and what she might do.”
My attitude shifted to one of sympathy, sympathy mixed with confusion. “But how do you think this was all down to something you did?”
He took a moment’s pause before answering.
“I didn’t have a lot of money at the time, I wanted to propose to her in a grand, romantic way but I couldn’t afford some huge fancy diamond. I went to a vintage store in town, it was down an alley I had never noticed before and it was claustrophobically small. There was a jewelry display case right in front of me when I walked in, and I saw this ring that I thought was just perfect. It had a ruby stone set into a gold band, the red was so vivid even in the darkness of the store and I felt like it was calling to me, you know?”
I didn’t know how I was supposed to be reacting to this story. I was struggling to keep a neutral expression; I knew that this was a situation where I needed to show support and understanding but I had this underlying confusion as to why he had never mentioned any of this before. “Nora?”
“Yes, sorry. Go on.” I’d been caught tuning out.
“Anyway, they seemed thrilled to sell it to me. I popped the little jewelry box into my coat pocket and set off for home. I felt strange for the whole drive back but didn’t think anything of it, I thought I had just been nervous about proposing, standard fear of rejection and all. Cut to a few days later when I actually did it, she accepted and put the ring on. It sort of, well it looked like it was glowing. She thought she might be having a bad reaction to the gold band but then the discomfort subsided, and she’s worn it ever since.”
“Wait, she is still wearing it?” I interrupted.
“Yeah, that’s another part of the weirdness. I can guarantee that she will make an appearance around here sooner or later and I just wanted to warn you. She can be frightening, violent, intimidating and cruel. She wasn’t like this before the ring. I think I gave her something cursed and ruined her life. If she shows up, I…I don’t know how to say this…”
“You want me to help her?” I finished.
“If the curse could be lifted and she could go back to a normal life then I would have less weighing on my conscience. I would feel freer. There would be no skeletons in my closet, and we could move forward, together. Is it awful for me to ask you that?” he had dropped his head onto his chest with the weight of his request and I felt pity for him over it all.
I didn’t know if there was a way I was supposed to feel about this situation as I doubted that it had ever happened before. The only comparison I could think of was a guy I once dated asked if I could lend his ex-girlfriend twenty dollars. I never saw that money again.
Or the guy.
“I’ll do what I can, but I’m not fully qualified. There might not be much I can do and if she starts trying to hurt me then my magi
c will come to my defense. All I can promise is that I will try, okay?” I walked over to kiss him on the cheek and wrap my arms around him as he sobbed. I wasn’t sure what triggered the movement above, but the net of balloons on the ceiling suddenly released and showered us with colored balloons. We both had to laugh despite the awkwardness of the situation. “Brent, did you, by any chance, tell Quin that you might propose tonight? I think he has the wrong end of the stick.”
“I mentioned it and he has been sending me text messages and emails constantly ever since, did I mess up?” he smiled.
“I wouldn’t have told him for a million bucks, but hey, it’s your problem now.” I laughed and felt grateful that our mutual frustrations with an overly enthusiastic, busy-body cat had allowed the tension to break. Brent’s cell phone began to buzz in his pocket, and he reached into his jacket to answer the call.
“Officer Murphy,” he said, waiting for them to state their business. “Yes, okay. Who’s on it? Right, I’m on my way.” He ended the call and turned to me. “I’m so sorry, there’s been a break in at a bar in the town center. It’s all hands-on deck. I’ll try to get back to you later on but feel free to eat without me. I love you; I’ll make this all up to you I promise.”
He was backing out of the room blowing kisses before I heard the front door close behind him and the sound of his car tires spinning on the tarmac as he pulled away. This sound was quickly followed by the pitter patter of little feet trotting into the hallway from the lounge.
“Can I see it? Oh, please can I see it?” Quin was running around my ankles like a cyclone and trying to speak through the loud purr escaping from his throat.
“We aren’t engaged, Quin. It wasn’t about that, or at least I don’t think it was. I’m not sure if tonight was ever supposed to end with me having a fiancé. He was warning me about his ex-girlfriend, he thinks that he might have given her a cursed engagement ring and ruined her life, typical ex drama, am I right?”
