“Hey!” Reg protested, trying to snatch it back.
Jessup kept it out of her reach. She broke the wax seal and unrolled the scroll. “You’re just torturing yourself. You’ll be happier a lot sooner if you read it.”
“Not if they let him off!”
“You’re making yourself miserable thinking that they did. You’re not going to be any worse if you know for sure.”
“That’s my scroll! Isn’t interfering with mail a federal crime?”
“It’s not federal post. It’s a hand-delivered message. It might not be ethical, but it’s not illegal. And in this case, I’m doing it to help you.” Jessup dropped her eyes to the scroll and read it. She turned it around and showed it to Reg, holding it open.
Reg scowled. “I told Davyn I can’t read his stupid old-fashioned writing!”
“They’ve shunned him.”
“Is that the same as censuring?” Reg didn’t know why they couldn’t just speak plain English. They were as enamored with their old-fashioned words as with the unreadable script and archaic attitudes.
“No. It means that no one in his coven can talk to him or have anything to do with him for the length of the sentence. He’s basically kicked out of the community.”
Reg was surprised. She hadn’t been expecting anything as severe as that. “For how long?”
Jessup looked at the scroll as she dropped it on the table in front of Reg. “Indefinitely.” She looked up. “I’ve never seen that before. Ever. He’s shunned from the community until he can prove that he can be a worthy member again.”
Reg’s stomach felt like it was filled with lead. “Really? That’s… they really are punishing him, aren’t they?”
“Yes. Hunter is a strong warlock and he has an incredible store of knowledge. They’re sacrificing those assets in order to discipline him.”
Reg was embarrassed about having made accusations that the tribunal was just going to let Corvin get off scot-free. She looked down at the scroll, her heart thumping.
“So what does that mean to Corvin? He can’t talk to anyone in his coven, but he can still practice…?”
“Yes. He can still support himself. They haven’t cut off his livelihood. But no one will refer business to him. No one will talk to him. He won’t be able to go to any of their gatherings.”
“But he can go to other stuff. As long as it’s not his coven.”
“Yes.”
“And he can still talk to anyone he wants to.”
“Yes.”
Reg took a couple more bites, but she was no longer hungry. She poked at her dinner. “I keep going back and forth between feeling sorry for him and being so angry with him that I could—”
She saw Jessup’s look of alarm and felt the people around her tense. Reg took a breath and tried to keep her voice calm and reasonable. There was no point in making people think she was going to start blowing things up. Hopefully, now that Calliopia had severed her connection with Reg, there would be no more incidents.
“I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about him,” she said in a more reasonable voice. “Am I supposed to be mad? Or feel bad? Or not care?”
“I don’t think there’s any one way you’re ‘supposed to’ feel. You feel how you feel, and if that’s ambivalent, then that’s fine. That’s just how you feel.”
“But what am I supposed to do with that? Should I go the other direction when I run into him? Should I ‘shun’ him too? Or do I pretend that I don’t know what happened or that it’s not my fault? I know I’m going to run into him again. So what do I do?”
Jessup studied her for a few long seconds. Then she gave a small, slow smile. “WWRRD?”
“What?”
“What would Reg Rawlins do? The Reg Rawlins I know doesn’t concern herself with what other people think. She has her own opinions. Why make a choice based on what someone else thinks you should feel or do?”
Reg felt herself flush. “Well… yeah. Why should I?” She considered. “I’m getting so wrapped up in how different things are here that I think I need to follow some set of rules to get along. But when have I ever fit in? Why start now? I am what I am.”
Jessup nodded. “Exactly. I’d still recommend following the local laws, but as far as who you choose to talk to or be friends with… you should make your own choices, not follow everyone else’s rules.”
Reg felt a rush of warmth confirming that it was the right path for her. The accusations of the warlocks at the tribunal had thrown her off balance and made her question her own decisions, but no more. She would do what she wanted and be friends with who she wanted, no matter what anyone else thought.
“So does that mean Hunter is in your crosshairs or that he’ll live to fight another day?” Jessup asked.
It was a relief to step out of the hot sun into the cool shelter. Ruan lowered his hood and took off his dark glasses, smiling at Calliopia.
“I am handling it better, don’t you think?”
Calliopia gave him an arch look, eyebrows raised. “You do very well for a pixie.”
“I can stay in the sun almost all day.”
She reached out a long, slender finger and touched his cheek. “I love you for you, not whether you can stay in the sun.”
“But you like the sun, so I like the sun.”
“You don’t have to like it.”
“But I do.”
Calliopia gave Ruan a long look, and he knew that she understood his words were not true. But he had not said them to be believed.
“I remember how I hated the sun when I was a pixie,” Calliopia said, her musical voice amused. “It burned my skin and hurt my eyes. I had thick dark curtains in my room. I would keep them shut all day. I would crawl under my covers and pretend I was in a burrow underground.”
Ruan’s heart went to the tunnels he had grown up in. He would have done almost anything to be able to return there or to be able to dig even a small burrow of his own. It was instinctual. Unable to return to a burrow of her own, Calliopia had approximated one the best she could until she had turned. Once she was a fairy, she no longer wanted to escape the sun, but to bask in it. Now the mere thought of returning to the underground realm made her shudder.
Ruan would have done almost anything to be able to go underground, far out of reach of the sun’s rays.
Anything but give up Calliopia.
Calliopia stroked Ruan’s face again. “So far away, my boy.”
“Just thinking.” Ruan caught her fingers and kissed them. He tugged her closer and she bent down to kiss him. Ruan felt the dagger in its sheath at her waist. He pulled back from her, his hand hovering over it. He again felt its dark presence, the menace that the blade held toward them.
“You must unmake the blade,” he urged her yet again. “It has peril in it.”
Calliopia’s hand dropped to the sheathed knife and she stroked the length of it.
“No. It will be safe as long as it is with me.”
⋆ Chapter Twenty-Eight ⋆
R
eg turned over, tangled in the sheets. Her mind wandered restlessly through half-formed dreams. There was an ominous presence that seemed to follow her from one place to another.
It was familiar.
She could remember it from when she was young, from her earliest memories. That threat had followed her from one place to another, making it impossible for her to sleep soundly, impossible to trust anyone, and impossible to do anything without fear.
She wasn’t sure when it had gone away. Maybe there had been one good thing about foster care, and that was that in her movement from home to home, she had eventually lost the presence. In her later years, she had been able to live a relatively normal life, without the constant anxiety that something terrible was going to happen.
Reg struggled to pull herself into consciousness. She needed to wake up so she could leave the nightmares behind once more.
She awoke with a deep gasp, like a drowning man rising for air. Then
she lay there for a few minutes, waiting for her heart to stop racing. She pushed the sweat-soaked sheets away from her and got up. After the bathroom, she walked into the kitchen and looked for something to eat. She stood at the counter, taking another deep breath and waiting for the feeling of impending doom to fade.
Like it always did.
Only this time, it didn’t.
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Erin Price pulled up in front of the shop and shut off her loudly-knocking engine. She took a few deep breaths and stared at the street-side view. She hadn’t seen it since her childhood, but it looked just the same as she remembered it. Maybe a little smaller and shabbier, like most of the things from her childhood that she re-encountered, but still the same shop.
Main Street of Bald Eagle Falls was lined with red brick buildings, pasted shoulder-to-shoulder to each other, in varying, incongruous styles. Each one had a roofed-in front sidewalk to protect shoppers and diners from the blazing Tennessee sun they would face in the coming summer. All different colors. Some of them lined with gingerbread edges or whimsical paint jobs. Or both. Some of the stores appeared to have residences on the second floor, white lacy curtains drawn in windows that looked down at the vehicles, mostly trucks, nose-in in the parking spaces. There was no residence above Clementine’s shop. She had lived in a small house a few blocks away that Erin had no memory of. She had spent most of her time at the shop and did not remember sleeping over at her aunt’s when her parents had brought her for a visit.
A US flag hung proudly on a flagpole in front of the stores, just fluttering slightly in the breeze. It was starting to get dark and she knew she’d have to find the house in the dark if she were going to stop and take the time to explore the shop.
With another calming breath, Erin unbuckled her seatbelt, unlocked the door, and levered herself out of the seat. She felt like she’d been pasted into the bucket seat of the Challenger for three days straight. She had been pasted into the bucket seat for three days straight, other than pit-stops and layovers. She wasn’t tall, so she wasn’t crammed into the small car, but she’d been in there long enough to want to get out and straighten her body and stretch her legs. And to go to bed, but bed was still a long way off.
Erin walked up to the shop and put her key into the lock. It ground a little, like it hadn’t been used for a long time. Maybe it needed a little bit of lubrication to loosen it up.
The air inside the shop was too still and too warm. She remembered when the little shop had been filled with the smells of exotic teas and fresh-baked goods, but Clementine had retired and closed it years ago. It had been a long time since anything had been baked there. It just smelled like dust and stale air. Erin left the front door open to let some fresh air circulate while she took a look around. There wasn’t much space to explore in front of the counter. She would need a couple little tables, with a limited number of chairs, for the few people who wanted to eat in. Most of her business would just be stopping in to pick up their orders. She walked behind the counter. Everything seemed to be in good shape. A good wipe-down and some fresh baked goods in the display case and she’d be ready to go. Maybe a fresh coat of paint on the wall and a chalk board listing the daily specials and prices.
She walked into the back. A kitchen with little storage and a microscopic office that might once have been a closet. The back stairs led to a larger storage area downstairs, she remembered. And what Clementine had always called the commode. There was a second set of stairs from the store front down to the commode for customers. Not exactly convenient, but it was a small, old building. The arrangement had worked okay for Clementine. As a girl, Erin had always been a little afraid of the basement. She would creep down the stairs to use the bathroom and then race back up again, always drawing a warning from Clementine to slow down or she would trip and catch her death on those stairs.
All the old appliances were still there in the kitchen. Even a decades-old industrial fridge stood unplugged and propped open. There was no microwave and Erin was going to need a fancier coffee machine, but everything else looked usable.
“What are you doing here?”
Erin turned around and saw a looming figure in the kitchen doorway at the same time as the clipped male voice interrupted her thoughts. She just about jumped out of her skin.
She put her hand on her thumping chest and breathed out a sigh of relief when she saw that it was a uniformed police officer. But he wasn’t looking terribly welcoming, jaw tight and one hand on his sidearm. There was a German Shepherd at his side.
“Oh, you scared me. I’m Erin Price,” she introduced herself, reaching out her hand and stepping toward him, “and I’m—”
“I asked you what you’re doing here.”
Erin stopped. He made no move to close the distance between them and shake her hand, but remained standing there in a closed, authoritative stance. His tone brooked no nonsense. Erin couldn’t imagine that she looked anything like a burglar. A little rumpled from the car, maybe, but she hadn’t been sleeping in it. Was a slim, white, young woman really the profile of a burglar in Bald Eagle Falls?
“I own this shop.”
He raised an eyebrow in disbelief, but he did let his hand slide away from the weapon and adopted a more casual stance. Erin allowed herself just one instant to admire his fit physique and his face. He was roguish, with what was either heavy five o’clock shadow or three days’ growth, but his face was also round, giving
him an aura of boyishness and charm.
“You own the shop. And you are…?”
“Erin Price. Clementine’s niece.”
“If you’re Clementine’s niece, why haven’t we ever seen you around here?”
“It’s been years since I’ve seen her. My parents died and I lost all my family connections years ago, living in foster care. A private detective tracked me down.”
He considered this and took a walk around the kitchen, looking things over. His eyes were dark and intense. “You’ll be selling the place, then? Why didn’t you just hire a real estate agent?”
“No, I’m not selling,” Erin said firmly. “I’m reopening.”
The eyebrows went up again. “This place has been sitting empty for ten years or more. You’re reopening Clementine’s Tea Room?”
“No, I’ll be opening a specialty bakery, once I get everything whipped into shape.” She folded her arms across her chest, looking at him challengingly. “I assume you don’t have a problem with that?”
“No, ma’am.”
But he didn’t give any indication of leaving. Erin swept back a few tendrils of dark hair that had slipped from her braid, aware that she was probably looking travel-worn after several days in the car. She had put on mascara and dusty rose lipstick before getting on her way that morning, but she felt gritty and sweaty from travel and would have preferred a shower before having met anyone in her new hometown.
Erin strode toward the front of the store and the policeman moved out of the doorway and then back around the counter toward the front door.
“You shouldn’t leave the door wide open.”
“I wanted some air in here. I’ve only been here five minutes. Do the police always show up that fast in Bald Eagle Falls?”
A Catastrophic Theft Page 21
