“Yes. I sell my flutes and drums, some CDs and books. This is the last weekend, though, and there’s a good chance we’ll also have the last of the bright days now that we’re past the Equinox.”
“How do I go about renting booth space for just the weekend?”
“How big a space and why?”
I told him.
“Take my space. It’s paid for. I got a package deal for the entire season, but I need to show some property out of town and was wondering who I could get to run my booth. You can use my table and awning, too. All I ask is that you also sell my stuff.”
“Deal. Your pastry and coffee are free at Magical Brews next week.”
“What can I do to help?”
“You’ve already done it. Unless you feel inclined to pass out flyers to everyone you know. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for the space.”
“You draw up the flyers and I’ll print a bunch. Can you have it done this evening? I’ll stop by the house and pick up a master.”
“About eight? I’ve got a lot to do between now and then.”
“See you at eight.” He made a kissy smooching sound into his phone.
My stomach turned. I disliked wet kisses. This one sounded very sloppy.
Besides, I wanted to explore a budding relationship with Ted. Nice Ted who didn’t challenge me or entice me with magic. Nice. Normal.
I had no time for this.
I left a few more organizational orders with Jason and left to pick up Shara and Belle.
Somewhere in there I managed a call to Gayla, alerting her to lay in supplies for a baking binge. I’d take the costs out of my share of this month’s profits.
“You will not!” Gayla protested. “This is a charitable donation. We’re in the black again, for the sixth month in a row. We might need to write this one off come tax season. How about I order more applesauce also, so you can present those wonderful vegan bar cookies. And what do you want for gluten-free flour for that segment of the population who are badly treat-deprived? Oh, and I’m adding croissant breakfast sandwiches to our menu. Be prepared. I’ll cook the scrambled eggs and bacon. Still thinking about choice of cheeses and where to put a microwave under the serving counter.”
“Thank you, Gayla, for being my friend as well as business partner. You’re the one who keeps this business running.”
“Couldn’t do it without your magic in the kitchen, Sweet Pea. Now what do you need from the big box store for those bath salts?”
I gave her a list of the basic ingredients of Epsom salts and alum and a few other things. Some of the herbs I could gather from the greenhouse. In quantity? I wasn’t certain. For the more exotic stuff, like jasmine, I’d need to visit an organic garden northeast of town. I’d just get it all there. Denise did suggest I could take reimbursement from the sales. No time like the present to go shopping. As soon as I picked up the girls.
I’d wait to give all three children THE lecture about staying out of their father’s safe tonight. Actually, I liked the idea of making him explain it all to them. Magic costs, and magic has consequences.
Hadn’t I read that in a novel or six back in the days when I had time to read more than three paragraphs in a sitting?
Twenty-One
“WHAT WERE YOU THINKING, inviting Coyote Blood Moon here!” G yelled about seven thirty that night as I assigned dishes and cleanup to the kids while I generated a flyer advertising the bake sale. My computer blinked at me, waiting for a command. That stupid icon almost accused me of being negligent and stupid for not letting it take care of every detail.
“He offered to help. And you said to go to him for help while you were out of town. What happened to ‘one of my oldest friends’?” I decided to let the curser blink. I didn’t like the picture of toe shoes I’d grabbed off the Internet. I wanted a picture of Tiffany in one of her classic leaps or at the top of a magnificent lift.
And I found one in my stash of photos from Vivaldi’s Spring. Quickly, I clipped around it and pasted the image into the center of the flyer. Perfect.
“I can’t trust anyone in the community right now,” G continued. “I told you that. Someone is sheltering the culprit in this case and hiding her with a spell that smells familiar, but I can’t locate the source.” G started pacing the tight confines of the sunporch turned office.
“Hiding her? Does that mean you know who we are chasing?”
“There is no ‘we’ in this equation.” He rounded on me, angrier than I think I’d ever seen him.
Angry at me?
We’d had our disagreements over the years. But no matter how mad at each other we might be during those disagreements, we always put a good face on it and said “I love you” before we turned out the light. Until I’d discovered his infidelity. Even that night I was more sad and disappointed than truly angry.
Tonight, I knew he was not angry at me. At her, perhaps. More likely mad at circumstances.
“Who is she?”
“An old nemesis. Nothing more.” He dismissed my question with a casual gesture. G was never casual.
“What happened when you arrested her the first time?”
Silence.
“G?”
“I can’t tell you. I am sworn . . .”
“I am beyond the ignorant mundane. I’m the woman who has raised your magically talented children. I will continue to be an important influence in their lives. ‘She’ just trashed your son’s ballet company props and costumes. Your children are involved in this case. I need to know what you know in order to protect them.”
He walked out of the room.
I continued playing with graphics for the flyer. G made noises in the kitchen, indicating he got a glass of water, drank it, rinsed the glass, and put it into the dishwasher. Then he tromped back into my office and quietly closed the door.
“Seal of confidentiality. But only because you were my wife for thirteen years and your role in the community is blurred. Blurring.”
“Okay.” I put the finishing touches on the flyer with a few clicks. Busywork.
“When a magician goes rogue, uses dark magic to do harm, gathers power for power’s sake, or breaks the code of invisibility for the wrong reasons, my job is to track them down. I have some authority to scare the crap out of them for minor offenses. For major crimes, I take them to the High Court of the Guild of Wizards.”
“And then?”
He drew in a deep breath and let it go, as if preparing for yoga. Or steeling himself for something painful. “If found guilty by a panel of seven master wizards, then they are stripped of their magic using a process that is painful and humiliating. I will spare you the details. Their wands are broken and burned before them. Then they are cast into a dungeon cell for the rest of their lives. They are fed, their medical needs seen to, and granted one hour of sunlight and exercise each day in the company of five guards.”
“Five guards each?”
“We have only a few prisoners. Rogue magicians of that caliber are rare. I’ve observed the process twice, but never been a part of it.”
“If this woman is your old nemesis, then I have to presume she was never convicted and incarcerated.”
Silence.
“If she had her magic stripped from her and her wand burned, how did she escape and come here? To menace you and my children?”
“I don’t know. She had to have had help. In over one thousand years of records, she is the only one to escape her dungeon cell beneath a ruined castle in the foothills of the Pyrenees.”
“Castle ruins crumble. Foundations weaken as the elements creep in.”
“Not this one. It only looks ruined.”
“Protected by magic. And I imagine the spells that make it look ruined also repel tourists.”
“Not even avid ghost hunters go there.” He cracked a smile.
“What did you find when you examined her cell?” He went to Marseilles recently, the closest big city to those forbidding mountains.
“She had help. Someone in the community went rogue but not overtly. I have theories and ideas but no proof. I suspect her helper must be a full wizard with a wide range of talents. But not one that is registered as a master wizard—someone strong enough to overcome wards and guards and physical locks as well as magical ones. Someone who has either manifested new talents later in life or has hidden a major talent all of his—or her—life.”
“Either way, that is a problem,” I mused. “You will be up against someone of equal skills with no conscience. Who is the escaped prisoner who would attract such a powerful rescuer?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“I have to know.” This was really scary. I wanted to crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head for a long, long, long time. I couldn’t. “I have three children to protect.”
“That’s my job.”
“You aren’t here twenty-four/seven. You’re busy finding this woman and taking her down. I can’t be certain that will happen before she endangers me or the kids because we are close to you. I don’t have to guess that she came to Eugene to get revenge on you for taking her down. What better way than to hurt your family. Perhaps destroy your home, with its protective pentagram.”
“She never would live in this house. I thought she hated the antique décor and the lack of open space in this house, the hidden nooks and crannies. Did you know that, for generations, kids have called this place the ‘Witch’s Hat House’ because of the conical roofs on the towers?”
He paused, drawing in a deep breath and gazing around the rooms he’d grown up in, and I knew he loved this house as much as I did.
“We had a condo overlooking the river, all glass and steel, open concept, every room flowing into all the other rooms, no doors, not even on the bedroom and bathroom. Lots of light. Everything this house is not.” He settled his gaze out the window into the far distance, beyond the backyard fence, deep into his past.
“Your lover?”
“My wife.”
“D’Accore died giving birth to Jason.” But he never talked about her, never reminisced. And he had no pictures of her anywhere in the house, not even in the trunks in the attic filled with family photos and memorabilia.
I searched the computer for other photos I’d taken, and hidden deep behind layers of encryption.
“The D’Accore I loved died long before Jason was born. The laughing, sweet, naïve girl I married in good faith never existed. She cast a spell on me, making me think I was protecting her from reality. All she wanted from me was more power. I was too young and inexperienced in love to realize that at the time. She was a ‘sport,’ a magician with no genetic links to power.”
“A genetic mutant,” I muttered. I’d seen enough kids’ cartoons and monster movies about mutants.
“Yeah. She grew up with power and thought she was unique, never even looked for a master to train her. That’s what eventually drove her insane.”
I cringed inside. Had Jason inherited her insanity? Hopefully not. He had a loving father training him, teaching him control, ethics, and morality in magic.
“When I discovered her experimenting with blood magic—my blood by the way—while she was pregnant, I had to do something to protect the baby,” Jason continued his confession. “If she’d continued, Jason would have been born blind and crippled, if he survived in the womb.”
“So you turned her in.” I found a photo of the woman in bed with G, the only one of the batch that showed her face. Blurry, as if the photographer had jarred the camera at just the wrong moment. I pointed to it. I couldn’t see more than that she was blonde and had classic, symmetrical features, and a curvy body worthy of a stripper.
G jerked his head downward once in agreement.
“I received a text that I thought was from you. It said, ‘Meet R’s apartment’ and was signed with a heart U and a picture of a daphnia flower. It never occurred to me at the time that you didn’t know about Raphe, his apartment, or my connection to him.”
“Because you were super horny after a trip out of town.”
He gulped and nodded acknowledgment. “I thought you wanted a romantic interlude away from the kids. I admit I was more than ready and thinking with my hormones rather than my head. I wanted you, Daffy, not a one-night stand from a woman I met in a bar. D’Accore wore an illusion of you, in face and form. A perfect match even down to the birthmark under your left breast.”
I grabbed at my chest in shock, wondering who could have gotten close enough to me to see that and copy it. No one but G. Well, maybe one high school boyfriend who’d gotten my bra off before I panicked and ran home. Maybe a hidden camera in the shower? “It wasn’t me,” I gasped.
“I know that now. A mundane camera can’t capture an illusion, even one that good. When you showed me those photos, it was the first indication I had that D’Accore had escaped prison. My bosses were too embarrassed to warn me. I think she was trying to steal some of my power. But she couldn’t know that I have some psychic implants that prevent that. Imposed by three master wizards who are much more powerful than she is now, or her helper is. You are the only one outside the High Court who knows that, by the way.”
“She has no power of her own?”
“Not much. Just what she can strip from wands and the murder of the owners of those wands. Which is why she went after the ones Shara found in my safe and Jason disguised as props. I don’t know what kind of talents she could absorb from those pieces of wood. They were pretty much spent, dribbling away power from the time they were separated from their owner. I hadn’t had time to truly examine them closely.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, much like Jason did when he got an allergy migraine.
Some of me melted inside. G was a victim in this whole mess.
But that didn’t make up for his manipulation of me with magic. He seduced me into moving in with him so that I would care for his child, freeing him to travel on magical business.
“I didn’t fight the divorce because I thought she wanted to kill me. You and the children would be safer if I was elsewhere.”
“What did you do to her fifteen years ago?” Was I asking about her, or about me?
“I built a methodical case against D’Accore and called the then Sheriff to take her away—he has since been promoted to the High Court and I replaced him as Sheriff a year later. I was only a deputy then and assigned to this region, not the world. After the trial and conviction, the Guild kept her in a straitjacket in a secure asylum for four months until . . . until our physicians were forced to take the baby by C-section to save Jason. Then I brought our son home, to this house, with the protective pentagram and family ghosts to care for him while the High Court stripped her of her magic. I had already destroyed her wand.”
He’d gone through three nannies and two housekeepers until I moved in with him. None of them satisfactory to guard his precious son.
“What was her wand?”
“A vintage Zippo lighter with a death’s head soldered on one side. The names of her victims appeared etched on the back as they died.”
“A fire starter with smoke for eyes. Not smoke colored eyes.” That left Flora Chambers out of the running. Dang.
“Now her eyes are almost colorless. She went blind trying to free herself from the straitjacket—maybe even gave herself a mild stroke. She tried so hard she burst blood vessels in her eyes, over and over again until she fried nerve endings and brain synapses and lost her eyesight and any possibility of restoration. I have reports that she lights a fire with damp kindling and sends the smoke through keyholes or under doors to ‘see’ for her. That’s what Raphe was trying to tell us after the second fire at Magical Brews.”
A foreboding chill coursed through my body, turnin
g my bones to icicles. All those times I’d smelled smoke. The two fires at Magical Brews. “She wants Jason’s eyes to replace her own.”
“And his power. Blood link. Oh, my God! Where is he?”
“I hope he’s in the dining room doing his homework.” We both headed for the door. I ran through the kitchen, G right behind me. We skidded to a halt as we passed through the open swinging door.
All three children, plus BJ were sitting at their accustomed places, laptops and tablets open, books piled beside them. Not a word passed among them.
What surprised me was that BJ sat next to Jason without even glancing up at Belle. She secured a sloppy bun at her nape with her hair sticks. Frequently, she turned her head so the jade charms clanked against the ivory. And still BJ did not look at her.
Had she lost her adoration talent?
Or had BJ found a way to circumvent it?
I heard the tinkle of a tiny bell. BJ had left his house key on the table beside his laptop. A silver bell the size of his thumb dangled from the chain. He flicked it twice.
Belle cringed and touched her jade charms.
The chill returned to my body. I’d learned the signs watching my own children. BJ was a late blooming magician—probably a sport—and the bell was his wand.
The doorbell rang, echoing the note from BJ’s keychain.
Twenty-Two
TOO MUCH NON-INFORMATION twisted through my mind as I yanked open the front door. John Mooney, dressed as a real estate agent, rather than wearing his witchy batik caftan stood on the front porch with a bouquet of coral, orange, and apricot roses. In Victorian flower lore, the perfect blossoms symbolized attraction, lust, desire, and enthusiasm.
Or could be just seasonal colors past the Equinox and approaching harvest festivals and Halloween.
G growled deep in his throat as he hovered behind me.
“I’ve got the flyer ready for you, John. I just have to print it.” I stood away from the door and gestured him in.
G moved as if to block him.
A Spoonful of Magic Page 16
