by Nova Nelson
He plopped his wide butt down on the tile floor. “I’m glad you’re starting to get it.”
“What’s going—” Tanner rounded the corner of the shelves and sucked in air when he saw the mess. “Did Grim do this?”
“Of course he did.”
“Did you forget to feed him?”
“What? No! I fed him two eggs and he’s been scavenging from Anton all day!”
Tanner tilted his head slowly and frowned apologetically at me. “Oh. But Nora, you know Grim needs his bacon.” He turned to my familiar and crouched down. “Don’t cha, boy?”
Grim trotted over to get his pets, and as the two of them did their weird thing where Tanner mumbled praise in a low voice and Grim moaned inappropriately, which only I could hear, I took stock of the rest of my inventory.
He’d only gotten into one bag. I still had three others, each the size of a typical kitchen trash bag. Did I salvage the chips he’d gotten into, despite it not being the best food safety?
I sighed, resting my hands on my hips. No, I’d just ditch that bag and take the other three. I’d have extra work to do to remake the chips we needed for Medium Rare when I started serving the dish the day after tomorrow.
“Sweet baby jackalope,” muttered Grim. I glanced over. He was on his back, a hind leg kicking furiously with each belly scratch. “How does he know all the spots?!”
“Oh holy spirits,” I said, averting my eyes. “Please stop, Tanner. You’re just reinforcing bad behavior.”
“Ah, yeah, that’s probably true.” Tanner stopped and stood up. “Someone better go check on Stu and Ted anyway. How about you cut out early and, um, I dunno, shop or something?” He clearly had no idea what women did in their free time, but, to be fair, neither did I. “And I’ll move your queso to the freezer and take it from here until Jane and Bryant come in.”
“Sounds good.” All except the shopping part, at least.
After another stolen kiss, I told Grim it was time to go and headed back toward Ruby’s house, excited for a magical shower, some hot tea, hopefully a quick lesson from Ruby, followed by a full night’s sleep before the big day.
I may not have the kind of magic that impressed in Eastwind, but, dang it, I had queso. And that would be more than enough, I was certain.
3
The temperature dropped ten degrees overnight, making the August morning of the festival perfect for outdoor activities. It almost seemed too perfect, like maybe some magic had gone into the weather. But could magic control the weather? During one of our private tutoring lessons that I now endured three nights a week, Oliver had mentioned something about North Wind witches influencing the weather. Since there were plenty of those in town, perhaps they had performed a connection ritual to pool their power.
Did witches do that, though? Just perform connections rituals with whomever was around? After the one I’d shared with Donovan and the strange feelings that came over me following it, I wondered.
I’m no prude, but forming a connection like that with any old witch seemed a little promiscuous, magically speaking.
Grim and I waited for Tanner on Ruby’s porch, me in the swing, Grim already asleep against the house despite having woken up only a half hour before. I waved to the familiar faces passing by, and I was surprised by how many there were. I was actually getting to know this town pretty well. Sure, I probably only knew half the people in it, but that was a way better percentage than when I was in Austin, a city of a million-plus.
Ruby’s house wasn’t far from Fulcrum Park at the center of town, which meant quite a few residents had to pass our row on the way to Fluke Mountain. And that’s where every person was heading, all flowing in a single direction like the steady streams of Eastwind Spring that ran underneath the town.
Then Tanner appeared. I felt him before I saw him. Floating just a step ahead of him was a large wooden crate, which I assumed carried our cook-off entry.
I nudged Grim awake with the toe of my boot and hurried down the steps to meet Tanner.
“Ready for the big day, my queen?”
I cringed. “Your what?” We were not that couple.
“Uh, it’s just … yesterday we were talking about being King and Queen of the Diners.”
“Oh! Right. That. Yeah, that’s much less weird now.” I got into character. “Yes, my king.” And curtsied.
Now it was his turn to cringe. “Eh, the moment kind of passed.”
“Totally.”
“Grim!” he shouted past me. “Get down here. You’ll miss all the scraps from the cook-off if you don’t hurry up.”
“Enough with the yelling. I didn’t get a wink of sleep last night.”
I rolled my eyes. “You got more sleep than I did. Maybe even twice as much.”
“Just because I had my eyes closed and wasn’t moving doesn’t mean I was sleeping.”
“And the whimpering and leg twitching? That wasn’t in your sleep either?”
“Okay, so maybe I got a little bit of sleep. But hardly enough.”
As Grim lumbered down from the porch, a familiar voice to my left said, “Morning, Ms. Ashcroft.” I turned to see Deputy Stu Manchester strolling up, half-eaten cream cheese danish in hand. He was out of uniform, and it shocked me. I’d never seen him out of uniform (except when he was all elk-ed out in the Deadwoods). Without realizing it, I’d always assumed he slept in his tan uniform, boots and all.
But here he was in a light blue and purple plaid button-down and navy blue slacks. Were it not for his caterpillar mustache and the fact that he was the only one in town who called me Ms. Ashcroft, I might not have recognized him.
“Morning, Deputy.”
He waved me off empathically. “Not today. Just Stu, please.”
“Only if you call me Nora.”
He stuffed a portion of the danish into his mouth, and when he pulled it back a tiny chunk of icing clung to the lower portion of his bristly mustache. “Fine. Nora.” He turned to Tanner. “What you got there?” He pointed at the large wooden crate floating just ahead of us.
“A bunch of illegal stuff,” Tanner replied.
Shrugging, Stu said, “Have at it. This is the one day of the year I don’t have to care.”
He stayed with us as we moved with the flow of the crowd, heading toward Fluke Mountain. “Is Sheriff Bloom the only one on duty today then?” I asked. It baffled me how a two-person police force was expected to manage an entire town, but it also explained why the detective work fell to me as often as it did. And in a way, I supposed it was good, because it made the community police itself, rather than relying on someone else to clean up all the messes. Or at least that’s how it worked in theory. In practice, there tended to be a bunch of messes everywhere that townsfolk expected someone else to clean up.
“Nah,” he said. “Sheriff Bloom has the day off, too.”
I stopped walking. “Hold up. Are you telling me the entire sheriff’s department is off today?”
Stu and Tanner stopped, too, and Grim, who’d been lagging due, I supposed, to getting only nineteen hours of sleep the night before, managed to catch up to us. “Yep,” Stu said. “It’s not as scary as it sounds. For one, the gold reserves aren’t getting any more stolen as time goes on. But also, the entire town will be at Lunasa, so we can keep a watchful eye. After all, you’re never really off duty when you’re law enforcement.”
“But someone could just waltz right into any of the empty shops and steal it blind, knowing everyone’s on the mountain.”
Stu and Tanner shared patient looks, and the deputy said, “If you knew the kinds of protective spells the Coven puts on the town for Lunasa, you wouldn’t worry about that.”
We began walking again as I considered it. “Why wouldn’t the Coven just put protective spells on the town all the time?”
“Terribly inconvenient,” Stu replied around a mouthful of pastry. “For one, a spell that powerful over such a large area won’t hold for long. The Coven would have to spend their p
recious time on protective spells, and we all know they wouldn’t bother themselves. But also, the spells would ruin commerce. The protective spell is actually a mix of a few spells. There are a couple different confusion charms and some repulsion hexes to keep people out of stores and homes that don’t contain their mark. That sort of thing isn’t good for business.”
“Their mark?” I asked. As far as I knew, I didn’t have a mark on a single home or business.
Tanner must have read the concern in my tone and on my face, because he replied, “Don’t worry, your mark was added to Medium Rare the moment you signed the contract for partial ownership.”
“Ah.”
“Mrs. Timberhelm!” Stu shouted, hurrying over to Janet Timberhelm, one of the town’s most prodigious gossips and the only other were-elk I knew besides Stu.
As the deputy left us, Grim took his place by my side. “You know how I promised that secrets forged in the Deadwoods remain in the Deadwoods?”
I looked slowly down at him, but he was keeping his eyes fixed straight ahead. I already didn’t like where this was going. “Yes, I remember you promising that.”
“Let it be known that I’m upholding my end of the compact, but I don’t know that everyone is.”
My stomach jumped up into my throat. Donovan? Was he going around telling everyone about that first kiss? Or that other kiss? Or how I’d gotten in way over my head and channeled a dark entity and almost didn’t make it back? Or how obvious it was that I’d lied to him when I said that if I weren’t with Tanner …
I pulled the emergency brake on the crazy train before it picked up steam. “What do you mean?”
“The howling,” he said. “It’s hellhounds all the way.”
“What howling?”
“Good golem, don’t you never listen, woman?” he grumbled.
“Grim, seriously, what on earth are you talking about?”
“I heard it back at Medium Rare when we left yesterday, but I figured it was just coming from the Deadwoods, so I didn’t worry. Because hellhounds never leave the Deadwoods.”
Racking my memory, I came up with nothing so far as howling when I’d left work the day before. “I didn’t hear anything.”
“It was faint, even there. Maybe your useless witch ears couldn’t pick it up.”
I ignored the insult. After all, my ears were fairly useless in comparison. “Is it still faint?”
“Yes. Faint but persistent. And agitated. And it sounds like they’re talking to me specifically, calling me out or something.”
“How do you know? I thought you didn’t have a name before you left the Deadwoods.”
“I didn’t. They’re just saying the hellhound equivalent of ‘hey you!’ but I can tell by the tone that they mean me.”
I wasn’t so sure if I was buying that last bit. “Why didn’t you mention it sooner?”
“I did. You must have ignored me … as usual. Anyway, we’re almost to the Emporium, and I can still hear them when the wind blows this way. You seriously don’t remember me telling you this yesterday afternoon?”
“Um, no. Sorry. I was probably thinking about queso.”
“It’s why I couldn’t sleep last night. I could hear them up in my bedroom.”
“Whoa, back up. Whose bedroom?”
Hyacinth Bouquet and her husband, James, waved and bustled over, but thankfully Tanner intercepted them so I could continue my conversation with Grim. “You think they’re mad at you for something?”
“Of course they are! We tricked them, didn’t we? Told them that if they didn’t tear us to shreds we’d do what we needed to for Acher Lake to fill back up.”
“We didn’t trick them. The water flowed back into Acher Lake as soon as we banished Ba. Sure, it didn’t fill up immediately, but they couldn’t expect it to, right?”
“They’re stupid beasts. Who knows what sort of nonsense they expect.”
Grim was uncharacteristically shaken, but for some reason, it didn’t worry me. There was too much that didn’t make sense. Mostly, why would they wait so long to start calling him out? The lake was probably full, or nearly full, by now, so shouldn’t they be happy?
But at the same time, the idea of a pack of hellhounds with a vendetta against us was alarming.
I concluded with, “I can’t tell if my sense of foreboding stems from the words you’re saying or spending too much time around a death omen.”
“Says the death witch,” he snapped back.
Traffic bottlenecked at the bottom of Fluke Mountain, where a stony path wound up the incline to the festival grounds. As we said hello to each friendly face we recognized—Tanner more often than me—and deflected questions about what was in the crate, a ball of energy grew inside me and I realized that I was excited. Not just excited, elated. I was elated to be here, to be a part of this community, even if I was only in the outer echelon.
Everyone I knew was in one place and would be celebrating the harvest together, and life didn’t get much better or more wholehearted than that. The positivity was palpable. It was like each person had shaken off their heavy mantle of worries to enjoy themselves completely for an entire day.
Maybe I could, too.
I grabbed Tanner’s hand and he turned to me and smiled. Warmth filled my chest. Yes, I could do this. This would be fun.
The stone pathway ended at a giant vine-covered arch with Lunasa written in cursive with rope across the top. Beyond it, the side of the hill flattened out into an expansive green where rows of booths and tents formed promenades between them. A carved wooden signpost pointed in all different directions, showing visitors where to go, though I suspected most people either knew the layout by heart or were up for exploring.
“I smell roasting meats,” was all Grim said before disappearing into the crowd.
“Godspeed, you beggar.”
“This way,” Tanner said, pointing at the arrow that read contest entries. “We can drop this off and get it all set up with the officials.”
“Then what?” I asked.
“Then we go enjoy a beautiful day together.”
“Oh. That sounds okay.” I wanted to kiss him in the middle of the crowd, but first things first. We needed to get our soon-to-be award-winning appetizer where it belonged before we could let loose. Grim breaking into the bag had been a close call, and I didn’t want anything else threatening the quality of the product and therefore my ultimate victory.
I’m not sure who I expected to find inside the drop-off tent, but I do know it wasn’t Count Malavic dressed down in black slacks and a bloodred V-neck shirt. Like with Deputy Manchester, part of me had assumed Sebastian lived and slept (or whatever vampires did) in an obscenely expensive tailored suit. Something about seeing him dressed like a normal person left me uneasy, battling with feelings and impulses I don’t even want to think about. After all, rub away that veneer of jerk, and he wasn’t hard on the eyes.
“Nora Ashcroft,” he said, rounding a rickety wooden table and approaching Tanner and me. “Long time no see.”
Before I could respond, a deep, baritone voice said, “Hey, Sebastian.” I whipped my head around to see who’d just spoken. Sure enough, it was Tanner. Tanner? I’d never heard him sound like that. He didn’t have a high-pitch voice, but his natural tone wasn’t that rich. Rarely had I ever encountered a man with a voice like that who hadn’t developed it intentionally after spending a few years as the smallest in the schoolyard.
Tanner’s hazel eyes bored into Sebastian’s as he extended his hand and once again spoke in that low growl. “You in charge of the contest?”
“Tanner Culpepper. Good to see you, sir. Yes, I’m in charge of babysitting the entries. Gives me an excuse to stay out of the sun as much as possible.” He winked at me. I hated it when men who weren’t Tanner winked at me. “Of course, Mayor Esperia is bestowed with the honor of the final prep, which I assume yours will need?” He motioned to the floating crate with a slight nod. “What’s in the box?”
“Our entry, obviously,” I said. It was probably a good idea not to agitate the person guarding the queso from any form of tampering, but Sebastian’s casual, bored tone, his slow, intentional movements, and that dumb little smirk that always rested at the top corner of his lips, like he knew something no one else did, drove me up the wall.
He chuckled. “Competitive, I see. Looking for a big reveal. I respect that. There’s a reserved spot just behind the table.” He pointed at a small sign pinned to the canvas tent that said Medium Rare, and Tanner floated the crate over to it, setting it down gently.
My eyes caught on the sign two slots over from ours. Franco’s Pizza. Below the sign was a vacant spot. They hadn’t dropped off their entry yet. Shoot. That meant I couldn’t start guessing what it might be. The suspense was killing me. If we didn’t beat Franco’s Pizza … No, I couldn’t even think about it.
Don’t get me wrong, I had nothing against Donny Franco or Trinity or any of the other wonderful people who worked there and weren’t Donovan Stringfellow. But I knew that this year, whatever Franco’s submitted would be something that Donovan played a major role in creating.
Why? Because he would want to beat Tanner and me on a deeply personal level. I knew that with a certainty. I knew that because Donovan had been right in what he’d said in the Deadwoods: he and I were just like each other.
And I wanted nothing more than to win this stupid contest with such a distinction that he would be smarting for months over the brutal beatdown.
But, again, I wasn’t competitive or anything.
“See you around, Sebastian,” Tanner said, placing a hand on my lower back to guide me outside the tent with him.
“You take good care of her, Tanner,” Sebastian replied. His words sounded more like a warning than a farewell, causing both of us to pause and toss him over-the-shoulder glances.
“Yeah.” Tanner said it like a curse. “I will. But she can also take care of herself just fine.”
I scowled at Sebastian unabashedly. His mouth softened and he bowed his head. “True, sir. You two lovers have fun today. And hey, lighten up a bit.” He winked again and I scrunched up my nose before I could steady my expression. Then Tanner led me out of the tent.
