The dramatic exclamation elicited no more than a raised eyebrow from me. She wasn't fooling anyone with her act. As my official faerie godmother, Evian's sister, Terra, had an inborn ability to track my whereabouts. All four of the elemental faeries had known where I spent the night well enough, but they just couldn't let it alone. Sleeping over with my boyfriend was a new and rare enough occurrence to become a topic of conversation.
"Where have you been. We checked your room, and you weren't there. You know how we worry when you're not in your bed at night." Soleil popped into the doorway behind Evian, trying hard to suppress a grin and I had to smile.
"I lost track of time and Kin was just so dreamy I couldn't help myself.."
"Fine. Don't take our feelings seriously. You could have called. It's the polite thing to do." I ignored Evian's fake pouty face and headed toward the kitchen.
"Is there breakfast?"
"Not for you, Missy. You want pancakes; you sleep in your own bed."
Other than the half-hearted attempt at teasing me, things seemed fairly quiet, which made me immediately suspicious. If you've ever spent any time around a toddler, you know it's when you can't hear them that they're into something dangerous. Same thing with elemental faeries except on a much larger scale.
"Lexi's here," Evian spoke loudly enough to command attention or as a warning to stop all suspicious activity.
The kitchen looked like a party goods store had barfed all over it. Several of those dry erase boards on easels ranged around the room, color coded notes covering their faces. Garlands of flowers draped over half the long trestle table and Terra, elemental faerie of earth, was busy making more of them. The process reminded me of a conductor skillfully directing an orchestra. A graceful gesture with her right hand sent out a vine to snake along the ceiling. When Terra judged the vine to be long enough, the drawing motion altered to a series of flicks with the fingers of both hands and buds burst forth to festoon the swag. When there were enough of those, and she had placed them to her liking, Terra stepped back and let Evian, mistress of water, and Soleil, whose element was the sun, take her place. A burst of concentration from each and another floral garland was born in a wash of scent and color that reminded me of a film shown at faster than normal speed. Vaeta, wielder of air, directed a blast of wind that wafted the piece onto the top of the pile. A magical assembly line.
"What's going on?"
"We're getting ready for the wedding, of course." For a split second, I thought Vaeta meant my wedding, and a full-blown panic attack threatened. Parts of my body lost the ability to communicate with the rest, and even my lips went numb.
"The wedding?" Words barely squeaked out of my closed throat.
"It's not a wedding, Vaeta, it's a 25th wedding anniversary," Evian corrected her sister, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
"What's the difference?" Vaeta's silvery eyebrows beetled in a frown. On her, the color gray would never appear drab or neutral, every tone and shade represented a shimmer of the sun at the edge of a cloud, or the sparkle of moonlight on still water. Lips the color of a dove's feathers contrasted with slate gray eyes over cheekbones sharp enough to cut.
"Twenty-five years of marriage, you twit."
"Ladies, please," I begged. Name calling is how almost every faerie fight I have ever witnessed got started. Nipping this one in the bud seemed prudent. I had visions of those garlands turning into Technicolor snakes. Shiver. "Explain."
"We've been getting calls ever since Harry and Lemon Tart got married here." Terra looked back at me over one shoulder as she knelt and buried her fingers in a planter full of soil. "That was so much fun; we decided to make a go of it." Earth mother in every sense of the word, Terra's hair coloring mimicked the rich, russet shades of fertile soil, her cheeks and lips as soft as the berries they resembled. It's a good thing I have a healthy ego of my own, otherwise living among such stunning women might have given me a complex.
"A go of what?" Why I bothered to ask was beyond me, the evidence was clear enough that when Vaeta gave me a look her sisters generally reserved for her, the one that accused her of being an airhead, I clued in. "Party Planning? Like a business?"
"Would that be so bad? We won't be hosting the parties here, just planning them. What's wrong with that?" Terra withdrew her hands from the pot, brushed them together until not a speck of soil remained, and moved on to the next while the first shoots broke the soil. There were six in all and by the time she thrust a hand into the last pot, the first one had sprouted a four-foot tall orange tree covered in fragrant blossoms.
Miracles like this happened every day in a house with four elementals and a witch.
Sending another vine twining across the ceiling, Terra repeated her question, "We pulled off Lemon's party without a hitch, what do you think is going to happen?"
Several scenarios of things going haywire leaped to mind, each one worse than the last. At least two of them had me bailing the faeries out of jail, and those were the most benign of the bunch. "You'll fight."
"We won't; we made a pact." Vaeta's assurance carried weight. Pacts among faeries involved blood oaths and catastrophic consequences if broken. Too bad I couldn't get them to make one about not fighting at home. Then again, the alternative of them taking it to the streets was worse.
"How are you going to transport all this stuff? You can't just pop in and out of places without someone catching you."
"Give us a little credit, Lexi. We're not stupid." Evian glared at me and a little rain cloud formed over my head. I needed to practice my summoning spells for just such situations. An umbrella would come in handy right now.
"We bought a van." Soleil clapped her hands and did a little two-step across the tile. Did any of them even have a driver's license? I doubted it. "The nice salesman is going to deliver it this afternoon." A short cap of fire-bright hair lifted in the breeze she made as she danced.
"You can't just buy a van and start a business. There's paperwork involved; you need an accountant, an insurance agent, and a bank account. Identification papers, birth certificates." Just for starters.
"Done, done, and done." There's a bit of irony involved when a water being speaks in dry tones. "We're not idiots, Lexi. It's not that hard to get a birth certificate." The rain cloud spat a mini cloudburst over me, then dissipated leaving me slightly damp, but not drenched. Evian was feeling merciful.
"Well, you'd need to be born." We've never talked about how new faeries come into the world. I've always assumed they're born like humans, but for all I know, they drift down out of the clouds on a puff of dandelion fluff like the Whos in Whoville.
Sometimes Terra's dirty looks really are dirty. This was one of those times, and suddenly, I felt sand and grime itching away under clothes now caked in mud due to Terra's ire combined with Evian's tender mercy. Taking a shower climbed to the top of my to-do list and arguing over their new endeavor dropped to the bottom.
"Or you can just buy them on the Internet," Vaeta practically chirped.
"You bought fake IDs from the black market so you could run a party planning business out of my house?" I just wanted to get the sequence of events straight in my head, but frankly, it wasn't the worst thing they'd ever done. There was the time they'd raised half a dozen pink ponies and put them on Craigslist for free. Money has never been the motivating force behind the quest for faerie entertainment. That catastrophe had gotten them on the news and required a widespread memory charm before the dust settled.
"Take a chill pill, Mrs. Fuddy Duddy, we only got driver's licenses, and we put the van on your insurance. We're not even charging for the parties."
"Nobody says chill pill anymore, and are you kidding me? If you do the parties for free, people will take advantage of you." Sad but true.
"Oh, people pay, they just don't pay us. We have them give the cost of the party to charity. It's philanthropic."
Terra chimed in, "Plus, we only buy from local businesses. We've got Kin in mind for entertainmen
t, have already ordered a couple of cakes from your friend Mona who works at Crumb, and we've even tapped your friend Sinclair Fuller for some top-of-the-line chocolates. Relax, we've got it under control."
On the pro side of the list, they'd be too busy to muck around in my life. The con side was too long to contemplate and had words like death and dismemberment on it.
Shaking my head and leaving them to it, I went upstairs for that shower.
"Look what the cat dragged in." My familiar cracked up at his bad joke. Even in human form, Salem was still a cat, which meant his sense of humor tended toward more juvenile levels. "Who'd you piss off this morning?"
"Evian and Terra, hence the mud bath. Did you know..."
"About the party planning? For days now."
"And you didn't think this was information I needed to know?"
"What? And take away the surprise factor? Let them have their fun. You know it won't last." Salem changed the subject, "You smell like magic."
"I can't imagine why " was my sarcastic reply.
"You've been using some serious mojo." Salem rose gracefully from the under the covers of my bed. For once, he wasn't naked, although I'm not sure if boxers in a fish-patterned silk was that much of an improvement. At least he was trying.
He circled me, inky black skin brushing against my filthy clothes as he sniffed at me.
"Tell me about it." He ordered.
"Shower first, then I'll give you the rundown." I'd be leaving out any mention of thinking Delta might be Sylvana, but he was my familiar, and the rest was information he needed to know. We went over the whole thing several times before he was satisfied he'd extracted every nuance from the story.
"With the lag you're having at work lately, you have the time to get serious about your training. The studmuffin can do without you for a few hours so we can get you up to speed." The unspoken implication was that I needed a finer level of control over my abilities.
He was right; this was something I needed to do. With a paranormal gunning for me and the changes in how my matchmaking skills worked, I could use the extra edge. I'd just have to make sure I didn't let too much slip; until I knew if Sylvana was back for good, I'd be keeping her lack of deadness to myself or I'd never be let out of the house alone again. That meant also keeping mum on the subject of Delta and everything her presence entailed. Jett, however, was already a known issue, and I could use Salem's help getting him off my back.
"Pick a time and put it in my schedule. Work has gone from feast to famine over the last couple weeks, not that I'm complaining mind you, I could use the break with everything else that's going on." I tossed Salem my phone, so he could access the calendar app.
"What's wrong with today? You have the day off, right?"
"Plans with Kin, and don't give me that look. I'm entitled to a life."
I ignored Salem's rolling eyes and paired a pink and yellow flowered sundress with strappy white sandals and a matching belt. Mahogany curls cascaded down my back, and I'd applied nothing but a bit of mascara to my already thick black lashes and a dab of lip gloss to my ruby lips. Beauty was one thing that didn't run in short supply for the Balefire witches, but I was realizing it didn't solve as many problems as one might think. And if given the choice, I'd rather look like a harpy than turn into a wicked witch. "Try to keep the faeries out of trouble while I'm gone."
"I'm a familiar, not a miracle worker."
Chapter Four
Cool air hit my face, and I inhaled the heady scent of summer night like I'd been on a year-long diet and someone just offered me a chocolate cake. Looking back, I can't understand how I could have missed the metallic taste of magic on my tongue, or why it didn't register that a breeze of any kind--especially one running through a city alley smack dab in the middle of a record-setting heat wave--wasn't normal. Maybe I was just too green for words, or maybe I was distracted by the back flips my stomach had been nailing with perfect form for the past fifteen minutes.
Nevertheless, I should have known trouble when I smelled it. Then again, the stench of my own deceit was strong. I'd told Kin I needed some things from the grocery store when, instead, I'd followed my personal rabbit down the hole and detoured back to the place where I'd first laid eyes on Sylvana: Athena's Attic.
It was all his fault I was here; he'd spent the day talking about his mother and how anxious she was to meet me. Comparing his stories of her to what little I knew of Sylvana sparked a restless need for more information. The spark kindled a burning need to revisit the one place I no longer doubted she had been and I knew I had to come alone.
I pressed my face against the front window and flicked on the penlight from my key chain, hoping its meager light would pick out some clue to finding my mysteriously disappearing mother. Dust shrouded the fixtures and floors, the same as they had the last time I'd peered through this window in vain. If I wasn't wearing the amulet she had placed around my neck with her own two hands, I might be able to talk myself into thinking the whole experience had been nothing more than a wishful dream. That and the butterfly squad zipping around in my gut. The little buggers had been coming and going frequently since the day I learned my mother had not, as I had always believed, died shortly after I was born.
Yes, I had taken to scanning every female face in every room I entered, hoping she would turn up again. My biggest sin was not telling the faeries about Sylvana masquerading as Athena. The woman had been in our house at Beltane, for Goddess sake. That fact alone would be enough to send them looking for payback.
It didn't help that dear old mum was the only person I had ever met who could get a glamour spell past what I thought were my infallible detection skills. For all I knew, Sylvana Balefire could have been standing right next to me, disguised as a man, or a dog, or even a mote of dust. Her powers were yet another mystery to me, and another thing to lament on and curse the stars for. The stars, not the gods; I now intentionally avoided blaspheming anyone who might be considered a God, lest I insult some random family member currently lounging on a cloud and tallying up all of my mistakes.
If that was even how it worked. Just add my uncertain heritage to the list of things I didn't understand. Speaking of the incomprehensible: had Sylvana been following me around for my entire life, watching from the sidelines? And why now, and not during the confusing teen years when I had wished and prayed for a connection to someone like me, had she found me, only to disappear again? See how I circled back around to that one big question? It had been happening for days.
Don't get me wrong, my faerie godmothers filled most of the gap--most witches never even come face-to-face with their one godmother, and I was lucky enough to have been raised by mine, plus two of her faerie sisters. I often wondered why Soleil and Evian didn't have charges of their own but had never summoned the courage to inquire on that subject. Now that I think about it avoiding certain subjects with them was sort of a theme.
Still, they were Fae, and I was a blood witch with no blood relatives to guide me. Well, not until Sylvana, disguised as Athena, magic shop proprietress, and sporting a look that was almost the complete opposite of my own--blond hair, crystal blue eyes, and a gentle face--popped up to give me some crucial guidance. Scratched or cut out of every photo in the house, I still had no idea what my mother looked like which, needless to say, was making it quite difficult to find her. My grandmother and I could have been twins, but Sylvana was an unknown quantity.
I'd tried every variation of location spell in the Book of Shadows but was loathe to ask for help. When Terra, Evian, and Soleil found out I had come into my powers, their fear I no longer needed them resulted in a truly epic enchanted backyard faerie fight--boulders with teeth, sprites dancing in the trees, and a foul-mouthed chickadee.
I was still washing swamp slime out of my clothes, and figured if that was the molehill, I sure as Hades didn't want to see what happened when they had to face the mountain. I could only imagine what kind of catastrophe would ensue if they knew my "real" moth
er was alive and well. Which didn't matter much at the moment; I realized this whole trip was an exercise in futility and turned back to Pinky, the matching helmet still clutched in one hand.
With the myriad of thoughts rolling around inside my head, you can see why I might have let my guard down momentarily. I realized my mistake in an instant, as magic, intuition, and biology culminated to set my arm hair on end and send a chill up my spine. Talk about being fashionably late to the party.
Immediately, my muscles tightened; even muscles I didn't know I had, and a fleeting resolution to kick my geriatric-style workout of power walking around town into high gear ASAP flitted across my subconscious, not to be revisited until New Year's Day, approximately 937 years later.
If I were a wolf--or a dog, or a raccoon, even--I would have bared my teeth and growled out a warning. Instead, I allowed the warm and fluffy thought that I was Lexi Balefire, Daughter of Cupid, Demi-God inflate my self-confidence, and spun toward the source of the wonky vibes with a hip and an eyebrow cocked, my arms akimbo and the pink helmet dangling at my side.
"Nice ride." The supernatural who had chased me through town and identified herself as Delta (I'll save my diatribe about people who refer to themselves in the third person for another time)--stepped out of the shadows and insulted my scooter with her sarcastic remark. Away from the dim lighting and pumping bass that had enveloped her during our last encounter, her face had softened to a large degree, lulling me into a false sense of security for a moment longer than it should have.
All Spell is Breaking Loose: Lexi Balefire: Matchmaking Witch (Fate Weaver Book 2) Page 3
