Unfortunate Miss Fortunes, The

by Crusie, Jennifer; Dreyer, Eileen; Stuart, Anne

  “I really look like me?” she asked a few minutes later as she stroked his hair where he’d rested his head between her breasts.

  “Like no one else.”

  She chuckled. “Oh, hell. Now I’ll never be able to convince you that I’m a shapeshifter.”

  And then she slept, with Danny James in her arms, up on the mountain where the witches danced.

  At eleven o‘clock, Crash climbed the rickety trellis again and found Mare waiting for him on the roof, dressed in her Corpse Bride dress and holding two DQ hot fudge sundaes. Py was stretched out at her feet, eyeing the cups.

  “You look great,” he said, sitting down beside her, using every ounce of self-control he had not to touch her.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said, primly. “That was very forgiving of you.”

  He looked at her, round in the moonlight, smiling at him. “Not that much to forgive.”

  The moonlight was bright enough that he could see straight through that blue tulle to her spectacular legs, long strong legs, and the urge to run his hand up under that skirt was damn near overpowering. He reached for his sundae instead, but she cocked her head at him, holding it out of his reach. “So that’s all it takes? I call up and say, ‘I’m sorry,’ and you come back?”

  “What am I, stupid?” Crash said. “Of course that’s all it takes. ‘This is True Love. You think this happens every day?’”

  “Princess Bride,” she said. “I don’t know why anybody ever quotes any other movie.”

  “Well, there are other really good ones.” Crash closed his eyes to keep from lunging for her since he was sure he was in a good place right now. Mare smiling at him was always a good place. “Can I have my sundae now?”

  She stuck her chin out. “You remember what I tried to tell you last night? That I was magic?”

  “Mare, I have always believed you were magic,” Crash said.

  “Uh-huh. Here’s your sundae.”

  Crash reached out, but the sundae floated over to him of its own accord, bobbing along on the cool night air, ignoring the stiff breeze that was still promising the storm to come.

  He froze for a moment, watching it hover in front of him, while Mare took the lid off her sundae and spooned up the first bite as if nothing unusual were happening. His stayed just out of reach, moving up and down, side to side, back and forth, as if sliding on invisible strings. It had to be a trick, he told himself, but when it slid closer to him, he ran his hands around it, trying to find the supports and couldn’t.

  “You’re good,” he said finally. “How do you do that?”

  “Magic.” Mare spooned up more sundae.

  He took his and still couldn’t find the wires that had held it up. “You’re really good. Got a spoon?”

  The spoon floated over to him, too, spinning in lazy circles until it arrived at his cup and stuck itself into the ice cream.

  Okay, that was beyond good. Granted, he never did think clearly when he was with Mare, but this … He looked over at her.

  She looked back at him calmly, heat in her eyes.

  “My uncle used to do magic tricks,” he said, staring at the sundae and the spoon and then at her again. “Nothing like this.”

  “I didn’t say ‘trick,’” Mare said carefully. “I said ‘magic.’ I’m magic. My family is magic. I’m psychokinetic. Dee’s a shapeshifter. And Lizzie transmutes things. She’s trying to turn straw into gold right now. That’s why the shed roof hums.”

  Crash looked at the sundae again, took a deep breath, and dug the spoon into the ice cream. Mare was not crazy. She was odd, she did and said odd things, that was one of the reasons he loved her. But this … “Shapeshifter?”

  “Usually some kind of bird. She’s into flying. I think it’s a metaphor for her need to escape, but that’s just me.” Mare licked her spoon, sounding very matter-of-fact, but his mind latched on to the “licking the spoon” part as something pleasurable and understandable and much preferable to “My sister is a shapeshifter,” and it was with real regret that he dragged his mind back to the part he was going to have to deal with.

  “Straw into gold.”

  Mare nodded. “That’s Lizzie’s big project. She does smaller things. Like when she gets nervous, she turns things into rabbits. On bad days, we’re up to our asses in bunnies. If she’s turned on, it’s shoes. Usually, whatever she transmutes turns back on its own. Sometimes it doesn’t.”

  Py lifted his big head and stared at Crash, his golden eyes solemn in the darkness, and Crash began to believe against his will because those were not house cat eyes.

  “Where did you say Lizzie found Py?”

  “The zoo.”

  “Right.” He rubbed his forehead with his hand. “Let’s try this again.”

  “We come from a long line of witches,” Mare said, as if they were having a completely normal conversation. “No real trouble aside from the odd pond ducking and one burning at the stake.” Her voice darkened. “We ever get time travel, somebody’s gonna pay for that one.”

  Crash took a deep breath. “Uh-huh.”

  Mare scooped up more ice cream. “Our aunt Xan convinced Dad and Mom to go on TV and we ended up the Little Miss Fortunes, and you’d have thought somebody would have seen the play on words there, wouldn’t you? But no, and the show was a success, but then something went wrong, and there was a fraud conviction, and Mom and Dad asked Xan to take their powers for some reason, and she took too much and they died.”

  Crash straightened at the bleakness in her voice there. That wasn’t magic, that was real, he knew that part, and suddenly her whole preoccupation with Xan began to make sense, magic or not. “Dee took us and ran from her, and it’s been thirteen years on the run since then, what with all kinds of people wanting to get hold of us.”

  “Hold of you,” Crash said, losing all appetite for his ice cream. He put the cup down for Py, having a feeling that anything he could do to make Py like him might pay off big in the future.

  “We were the Miss Fortunes,” Mare said. “Very big deal. Especially for Aunt Xan. All those powers, you know?”

  “I’m starting to. That’s the secret you could never tell me?” Okay, she thought she was magic. Except there was that spoon spinning around and sticking in the cup. So maybe she was magic.

  “It’s a lot to wrap your head around,” Mare said. “I’ve never told anybody before. I don’t know what the time frame on the learning curve is. Maybe never.”

  Crash took a deep breath. Keep an open mind. This is the woman you love. No matter what happens, this is the woman you’re with for the rest of your life, so … “So what else can you do?”

  Mare put her cup down on the roof for Py. “Nothing. I have the suckiest power in the family.”

  “Hey,” Crash said. “It’s a great power. I just got here, so I’m not fully clued in yet, but it’s amazing.”

  Mare looked at him oddly.

  “Well, it amazes me,” Crash said, with absolute truth.

  Mare nodded. “So you believe me. Just like that.”

  “I saw it,” Crash said, pretty sure he had.

  “It could be just a great trick.” Mare stuck her chin out. “I’m pretty smart, you know.”

  “Smarter than I am,” Crash said. “But you wouldn’t lie.” She wouldn’t, he realized. And she wasn’t crazy; Mare was a little off the wall, but at base, she was the sanest person he knew. “You wouldn’t lie about something like that. You’d lie about getting a tattoo while I was gone—”

  Mare groaned and put her head on her knees.

  “—but not about something like this. You’re serious about this. And I have to tell you, there are weirder things in the world. So why not? I saw it. Do it again.”

  Mare looked away from him, biting her lip.

  “Hey.” He put his arm around her, and when she looked back at him her eyes were bright. “Don’t cry. We’re good.”

  “We’re great,” she whispered. “If you can hear all that in five
minutes and believe it and still say, ‘We’re good,’ we are fucking great.”

  “Well, we knew that,” he said, and kissed her, and any doubts he had went away in the heat and the rightness of that kiss, the way she fell into his arms and became part of him, the way he went dizzy, wanting her.

  When she broke the kiss, she sniffed, and he thumbed away the tear on her cheek. “Hey, I love you,” he said. “You were always magic to me,” and she sniffed louder.

  “Okay, then.” She rolled to her knees and wiped her eyes. “Look in here.” She took the front of his jacket in her hand and pulled him toward her bedroom window, and he peered inside and got the first good look at it he’d ever seen.

  The room looked like Mare. The walls were draped with mismatched blue velvet and satin curtains with glittery gold butterflies embroidered on them and dark blue flowers painted on them. There was a long backless couch covered in blue zebra skin and a vase full of the black satin roses he’d given her for prom—she’d kept his roses, that was something—but the biggest thing in the room was a broken iron bedstead, huge and black with spirals and circles, spinning and turning in on each other, making Crash dizzy when he looked at it, mostly because it was Mare’s bed and he wanted her on it. A big black witch’s hat was stuck on one of the high posts, and the mattress was piled high with blue and lavender and green pillows, and even as he saw them, they began to stir and flip and tumble to the floor on their own—she’s doing that, he thought, she’s magic—and when the watery blue satin comforter rolled slowly back, no hands, he drew in his breath and looked at Mare, and she smiled at him in the moonlight. Then the blue-striped top sheet rose up and floated toward the curlicued iron foot of the bedstead until the bed lay open and inviting in the full moon, and all the blood left his brain, and he pulled her closer to him, feeling her soft flesh yield to him under that slippery, torn blue tulle dress.

  Mare whispered in his ear, her voice full and rich, making him shiver. “This is my room. No man has ever been in here before. We don’t bring men into our bedrooms. We’re magic in there and we can’t trust them.”

  Oh, Christ, he thought, and nodded and began to turn away, and then she whispered, “Come to bed, Crash,” and he shuddered as a wave of lust hit him and damn near knocked him off the roof, but she caught him and climbed through the window, pulling at his arm, and he fell into the magic that was Mare’s bedroom.

  Her room seemed smaller with Crash in it, a little kid’s room with a witch’s hat on the bedpost and the cheesy crystal ball and black fake flowers on the vanity, and she swished her Corpse Bride dress a little from nervousness because it was one thing to boink with her boyfriend on a mountaintop and another thing entirely to bring her One True Love and future husband home to meet her bedroom.

  “So this is my place,” she said, fighting back the heat that washed over her every time she looked up at him because that was the libido spell and she had to keep a clear head for this next part. He looked around, taking his time, and she did, too, biting her lip, seeing through his eyes the moth-eaten secondhand draperies she’d tacked to the walls every place she’d ever lived, covered with the sloppy blue flowers she’d painted on them when she was ten and the crooked gold butterflies she’d embroidered on them at twelve; and under them the beat-up iron bedstead she’d found in a junk-yard at fourteen, its spirals broken and bent and some of them missing; and the silky blue comforter she’d gotten on sale when she was sixteen, the day she’d decided to have sex with him someday, whenever his dad stopped calling her “jail bait.” She remembered that first time, how careful he’d been, and she put her hand out to steady herself on the bedstead as the libido spell got her again, or maybe it was just that memory. She jerked her mind back to the room and all its failings: the tacky zebra-covered fainting couch was missing one leg that she’d replaced with her copy of the OED, the cheval mirror that was so speckled with age that it looked like it had mildewed, the threadbare rugs and the cracked lamps, the whole place just so …

  “Great room,” he said, his voice a little unsteady.

  It’s a mess, she thought, it’s junk. Why would any man want to marry a woman who lives like this? “It’s not much,” she said. “But you know, it’s—”

  “No, it really is great,” he said, looking at her. “It’s hot and it’s magic like you,” and she looked around again and saw the splashy flowers and the jaunty butterflies and his wicked black silk prom roses that Lizzie had gathered up off the road for her after they’d wrecked, and Py stretched out yawning on the windowsill—

  “I like it here,” he said. “Do I get to stay all night?”

  “Yes,” she said happily, and took off her veil and tossed it toward the bed. It floated through the air—she gave it a little help—and landed on the bedpost opposite the witch’s hat, the ends curling down to fold themselves like arms over the post.

  “That’s amazing,” he said.

  “I can do better,” she said, and pulled her dress off over her head and tossed it into the middle of the room where it pirouetted, its skirt spinning out around it, and then curtsied to him. “How about that?” she said, and turned to look at him, but he was looking at her. “Hey, you missed it.”

  “I didn’t miss anything,” he said, looking at her blue lace bra.

  She sighed happily, and he didn’t miss that, either, so she kicked off her shoes and went over to crawl onto the bed and sit cross-legged with her back against the headboard, rosy with heat for him, smiling all over but determined to make sure he understood everything before they ripped into Xan’s libido gift.

  When he tried to join her, she pointed to the footboard. “Sit.”

  He sighed, but he took off his boots and sat down there.

  “Is there anything you want to know?” she said, gathering her hair up off her neck where the heat was making it stick.

  “Yeah,” he said. “How long am I going be stuck down here?”

  She let her hair drop. “I mean about me. About this.” She gestured to her dress, and it pirouetted again.

  “What’s to know?”

  “Well, it’s hereditary,” she said, a little annoyed.

  “All right.”

  “So if you’re serious about getting married and having kids—”

  “I am.”

  “—there could be some surprises down the road,” Mare finished.

  “Okay.”

  Mare leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. “That’s it? Okay?”

  Crash leaned forward, too. “You sit like that, anything you say, I’m going to say ‘okay.’ But yes, okay. Our kids will be all right. They’ll be ours. Now can we practice making one?”

  “You sure you want to have them?”

  “Yes,” Crash said. “We can start tonight if you want. I’m ready. I want to get married to you, and I want to have kids with you. But mostly right now, I want to have sex with you. Lots of it. As much as we both can stand. All night.”

  “Libido spell,” Mare said. “My aunt cast it.”

  “No,” Crash said. “I always feel like this about you. I always have. But you always had to come home and shut your window, keep your secret, shut me out. Now I’m inside. I’m staying. Anything else?”

  “Just like that,” Mare said. “You want to marry me and have kids, my aunt does libido spells, my magic’s no problem.”

  Crash sighed. “Okay. Tell me the part I’m missing that makes it complicated.” He leaned back against the footboard, patient. “Put a little speed on it if you can. I want you.”

  “Well,” Mare began, and thought about it.

  She wanted to marry him and spend the rest of her life with him. She wanted kids. She wanted them while she was young. If she thought about it, she was ready now. There wasn’t anything she wanted to do that she couldn’t do while backpacking a baby. Crash’s baby. Maybe two. Two would be good.

  “Two?” she said.

  “Two would be good,” Crash said. “Maybe three. Four.”

&nbs
p; “Two,” Mare said. “They shouldn’t outnumber us. We don’t know what they can do yet.”

  Maybe it wasn’t complicated.

  Crash stood up and stripped off his T-shirt. “Is this something we could discuss later?” He sat down on the edge of the bed and shoved off his jeans.

  “Why, yes, I think we could,” Mare said, looking at the muscles in his back. In his thighs. Well, everywhere.

  She cautiously let go of the edge of her control and let the libido spell in just as Crash rolled onto the bed and reached for her.

  He touched her and she shuddered, sliding against him as the memory of him came back.

  “Huh,” she said, as the heat washed over her, the bubble in her blood and the prickle under her skin.

  “What?”

  “You’re right. It always feels like this.” She arched up and kissed him, loving the feel of him against her, the sure pulse he started everywhere. “Just one more thing.”

  He groaned and put his head down on her thigh, and she patted the top of his head, loving the way her hand bounced on his thick, springy dark hair, loving more the weight of his head there, the heat of his breath, wanting to pull him into her.

  She drew in her breath. “You know how we always go up on the mountain?”

  “Yes,” he said, his voice muffled.

  “That’s because everything up there is too heavy for me to lift.”