“This was nothing,” Wendy said. “You should hear my friends when we get together.”
She made me laugh out loud with her stories about Diandra, Kelly, and Claire and their determined pursuit of a man for Wendy.
Then I made her laugh with stories about Janice and Lynette and the rest of Sugar Maple and their misbegotten attempts at matchmaking pre-Luke.
“And you guys met when he came to town to investigate a murder?”
I nodded. “One thing led to another and he decided to take the chief of police job and make Sugar Maple his home.”
“For love.”
I couldn’t deny it. “Yes,” I said, feeling blessed. “For love.”
WENDY
* * *
Chloe and I took a lunch break around eleven-thirty. In what Chloe said was a rare gesture, Elspeth had put together a platter of tuna salad sandwiches and prepared another pitcher of iced tea for us.
“She must want something,” Chloe mumbled good-naturedly as we carried them out to the back porch.
“Where is she?” I asked as we settled down on the rickety lawn chairs. “I haven’t seen her at all today.”
Chloe shrugged. “Laria is with Luke and his family. Elspeth has the day off.”
We ate in companionable silence for a while then compared notes on what had yet to be done.
The baby’s outfit was blocked and dried and ready to be unpinned from the towels.
“She’s going to look adorable,” I said, gesturing toward the yellow, green, and cream wonder.
“Thanks.” Chloe grinned. “I think so too.”
The shawl was another matter. She still had yards to go, and I wasn’t convinced she’d be able to get to the finish line in time.
“I’ll get it done,” she said with grim determination. “I’ll stay up all night if I have to.”
“On the night before your wedding?”
“I’m still breastfeeding,” she reminded me. “I haven’t slept through the night since Laria was born.”
“How about I take over when you need a break?”
She hesitated. I recognized the look. I’m one of those I-can-do-it-myself types too.
“I’d love to knit a few good thoughts in there for you.”
“That would be great,” she said, a big smile wreathing her face. “You’ve worked lace before?”
“I’m not in your class,” I said, “but I’ve been watching you and I think I can do it.”
“If you could handle the bind-off—“
“Done,” I said. “Jeny’s stretchy bind-off?”
“Perfect!”
We were discussing the merits of Jeny’s stretchy bind-off versus Judy’s magic cast-on when it happened.
A piercing whistle split the summer air. One loud, sharp note followed by two more in quick succession. We looked at each other.
“A bird?” I asked, not sure I wanted to see the bird that could make that sound.
Chloe went still. Her cell phone announced a text message but she ignored it.
Another whistle, longer and louder this time, and clearly coming from a point very close to where we were sitting.
“The roof,” I said. “I’ll bet there’s a bird on your roof.”
Chloe went freakishly pale and a moment later I found out why.
It wasn’t a bird whistling on her roof.
It was her baby daughter.
Chapter 16
WENDY
* * *
“We need a ladder,” I said, springing into action. “You keep her occupied while I—“
“No.” Chloe’s voice was unnaturally calm. “I’ll take care of this.”
A horrible thought crossed my mind. “You’re not going to try to catch her when she falls, are you?”
“Wendy, you’ll have to trust me on this. Laria is in no danger.”
The top of my head almost exploded. “She’s on the roof!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “Your baby is on the roof!”
The look in Chloe’s eyes stopped me cold. I saw compassion, acceptance, even shock, but I didn’t see fear.
Her eight-month-old daughter was perched on her roof and Chloe wasn’t scared?
“This is insane,” I said. “You stand there and watch if you want, but I’m going to find a ladder and get that baby down.”
She placed a hand on my forearm. “Trust me, Wendy.” Her eyes fluttered closed for an instant “I’ll explain everything later.”
The only explanation I could come up with was that she was bat-crap crazy.
I was tempted to jump into my car and get the hell out of there as fast as humanly possible, but there was still a baby on the roof.
Or was there?
Chloe said something to Laria in a language I had never heard before. Laria stood up, seemed to consider her options, then suddenly rose up higher than the house.
I’m pretty sure I screamed. I mean, who wouldn’t? But the scream was quickly replaced by a very real version of shock and awe.
Laria was flying.
I’d like to say she was just riding the thermals like a red-tailed hawk but that wasn’t the case. She was in full control of where she went and how she got there. Her tiny face was alive with joy and excitement. She did loops and barrel rolls while her mother watched with a definite been-there-seen-that expression on her face.
And more than a touch of pride.
As for me, I was beginning to wonder if maybe I was the one who was bat-crap crazy because there was no way on this planet that this was really happening.
Except that it was.
I mean, I was awake. I’d consumed three cups of coffee and two glasses of iced tea. A dead person couldn’t sleep, much less dream, after that much caffeine. I really was standing there in my distant cousin Chloe Hobbs’s backyard in Sugar Maple, Vermont watching her baby daughter fly.
“Come here now, Laria!” Chloe had the universal don’t-mess-with-mom tone down cold. After one last giggling loop around the house, Laria came in for a perfect landing in her mother’s arms.
Chloe pressed a kiss to the baby’s head then met my eyes.
“You probably have a few questions,” she said.
“You have a flying baby,” I said. “I just watched a baby fly.”
Chloe pressed another kiss to Laria’s head. “She has some . . . special skills.”
“You think?” The kid could barely walk, but I had just seen her zoom around like Maverick in Top Gun.
Her cell phone announced another text. This time she glanced at her screen.
“It’s Luke,” she said with a bemused shake of her head. “Letting me know Laria is on her way home.”
“Can he fly too?” It had to be asked.
“Of course not,” she said. “He’s only human.”
“As opposed to what?” I asked her. “I mean, we’re all—“ I stopped mid-sentence. “We are, aren’t we?”
Turns out, flying babies were just the beginning.
I listened for I don’t know how long as Chloe outlined what was really going on in Sugar Maple.
My second cousin I-don’t-know-how-many-times-removed was half-sorceress/half-human. Up until that moment, I didn’t know it was possible to be half-human/half-anything. She said she had magical powers and after seeing her daughter perform maneuvers over the cottage, I wasn’t about to argue the fact.
“You’re saying that rosy-cheeked, bitchy little Midge Stallworth is a vampire?”
We were seated at the kitchen table. Laria, earthbound for the moment, was napping in her crib.
“Yes,” Chloe said, “she’s a vampire.”
I was having trouble wrapping my human brain around it. “We’re talking Dracula here, right? Lestat? The guy from Dark Shadows?”
“Times have changed. Modern technology eliminated the hunt.”
Artificial blood on an auto-delivery program like Blue Apron. Who knew?
She must have noticed the look on my face and she grimaced. “’Hunt’ might h
ave been an unfortunate choice of words.”
I started to laugh and then a second later Chloe joined in and before I knew it, we were cracking truly terrible vampire jokes that had us almost crying.
“I didn’t know there were so many bad vampire jokes,” she said, drying her eyes with a paper napkin.
“Neither did I.” My stomach hurt from laughing.
“Did I tell you that Bunny says Midge creeps her out big time.”
“Does Bunny know the truth?”
She shook her head. “Only you and Luke.”
“You’ve managed to keep an entire townful of secrets from one of the nosiest women I’ve ever met?” I whistled. “Damn, you’re good.”
“It’s taken spells, charms, magick, and a lot of prayers to Aerynn, but so far we’ve managed.”
“Who’s Aerynn?”
She gave me the Reader’s Digest version of three hundred-plus years of family history, beginning with the Salem witch trials and ending at her kitchen table.
“I’m having trouble keeping up,” I said, head spinning. “So all of the magick is on your mother’s side.”
“Don’t worry. The Aubrys are one-hundred percent Homo sapiens, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
To my surprise, I was a little disappointed.
Chloe told me that she had lived the first thirty years of her life raised by magickal beings in a magickal town without any magick of her own.
“Not even a few card tricks?”
“Everyone had pretty much written me off as the last in the line of Aerynn’s descendants but then Luke came to town and everything changed.”
“I thought Luke was human.”
“He is,” she said. “Falling in love was the key to my magick.”
“How did the rest of Sugar Maple feel about that?”
She glanced away for a moment. “There are still some pockets of serious resentment.”
“Like the owner of the Inn?”
“You have good instincts,” she said. “Renate used to be one of my closest friends. We’ve been working at mending fences.”
“So what is she?” I asked. “Another vampire? A werewolf?”
“She’s Fae.”
“As in fairy tales?”
She laughed. “Not even close.”
I listened, struggling to keep my jaw from hitting the kitchen table. She told me about Isadora and her two sons, Gunnar and Dane. About glitterprints and ancient grievances and battles to the death. (Or what passed for death in this Neverland I found myself in.) And the Weavers who ran the Sugar Maple Inn.
“You’re telling me that Renate and her entire family are Fae who live under the windowsills in the Inn.”
“They take human form when needed.” She gave me a sheepish look. “Usually a very pleasing human form.”
“So that’s why everyone is so smoking hot around here.” If you’re going to take human form, why not be beautiful. It made sense to me.
“We may have overdone it a tad.”
The Fae, however, were supernaturally gorgeous to a dangerous degree and they used it to their advantage.
“The Fae are your enemy?”
“Not always and not all Fae.”
“I’m confused.”
“So was I for a very long time. I’m still playing catch-up.” She told me that the Fae had been at the heart of all Sugar Maple’s troubles the last few years.
I let the info rattle around in my brain for a few moments. “Does this mean the guy in the fancy cloak is one of yours?”
“I wish it did,” she said. “I don’t have a clue who he is, but I’ve seen him too.”
“By Sticks & Strings?”
She shook her head. “A few days ago, but in a different dimension.”
The crazy-big ring on her slender hand suddenly began to glow brightly.
“So is that a magick engagement ring?”
She made a face. “You noticed the glow.”
“You could land a 757 by the light that thing gives off.”
She told me again about finding the ring in an old shoebox filled with mementoes. “I slipped the damn thing on to keep it away from the baby and the next thing I knew, it shrink-wrapped itself to my finger.”
“So take it off.”
She shot me a look. “If I could take it off, do you really think I’d still be wearing it?”
I reached out to touch the glowing metal but pulled back at the last moment. You didn’t need magickal powers to feel the harnessed power in the room. I had never felt more vulnerable, or more human, in my life. “It looks like it’s glowing in Morse code.”
“I hate it!” She burst out, eyes filling with tears. “My Sugar Maple friends think the ring is casting some kind of spell over us. The MacKenzies can’t stop asking questions. Bunny’s ready to go at it with a pair of wire cutters and—“ She met my eyes and in her gaze I saw both fear and sorrow. “I’ve felt it for weeks, Wendy. Change is in the air. I feel it in my bones.”
“Wedding nerves,” I said, trying desperately to make light of her fears. “It happens to every bride.”
“This is more than wedding nerves,” she persisted.
“Have you talked to Luke about it?”
She nodded. “He can’t see what I see. The danger isn’t from his world. It’s from mine and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”
Chapter 17
GAVAN
* * *
The betrothal ring on his hand blinked as he watched them through the kitchen window.
Humans, even half-humans, were unpredictable. Chloe had revealed Sugar Maple’s secret to the mortal named Wendy and, to his deep surprise, the mortal seemed to accept it without fear or aggression.
Chloe was right when she said something terrible was coming. The life she loved was about to be torn apart by an old promise made by loving parents who didn’t know they were hours away from leaving their child forever.
Guinevere and her mortal mate had wanted to ensure their young daughter’s safety.
Rohesia had wanted to ensure their clan’s future.
A simple promise, they had believed, one that would be easily kept.
He understood sacrifice. He had seen sacrifice in action over the course of his life. His clan’s situation was dire. All that he knew, all that he loved, would cease to exist if he was unsuccessful. The path forward was clear and he was willing to hand over his future to secure a future for all.
Maybe Chloe of Guinevere would surprise him. She was half-human, but magick flowed through her veins, same as it flowed through his. She had chosen to live her life in Sugar Maple, raise her family side by side with those she had fought to protect. In any dimension, that meant something.
Maybe she would understand why it had to be this way.
It would be easier if she did, but ultimately it didn’t matter.
Her fate had been decided a long time ago.
Chapter 18
CHLOE
Early evening
* * *
“Wendy knows about Sugar Maple?” Luke asked.
“You sound surprised,” I said. “The baby dive-bombed her head. I think she figured it out for herself.”
We were sitting on the living room sofa, eating take-out Chinese. Wendy was holed up in the guest room, working the bind-off on my wedding shawl. From the sounds of splashing and giggling drifting down the hallway, Laria was having her evening bath, courtesy of Elspeth.
“How much did you tell her?” he asked.
“Pretty much everything.” No point denying it.
“You trust her?”
“Yes. Actually I do.”
“How the hell can you trust someone you don’t even know?”
“I trusted you,” I reminded him, “and that’s worked out pretty well.”
His cop-face softened for an instant, just long enough for me to register the fact. “It took a hell of a lot longer than twenty-four hours.”
“Apples and oranges,” I sai
d. “I was falling in love with you and I only had one chance to get it right.” Being a descendant of Aerynn had a few downsides and that was one of them. Love came once to us and it was forever.
I told him that Wendy was family, part of the DNA I had inherited from my mortal father. I had never thought I would be lucky enough to know any of my father’s kin and meeting Wendy was an unexpected and wonderful gift.
He put down his chopsticks and leaned back against the sofa. “I don’t want you to be hurt.”
“She wouldn’t hurt me.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I think I do.”
“You’re being naïve.”
“You’re being a cop.”
“For all you know she’s back there texting her friends.”
“She’s a knitter,” I said, knowing how stupid that sounded to a non-knitting cop. “She’s not going to be texting anybody until she finishes that eight-hundred-stitch bind-off.”
“And then what happens?”
Sparks were starting to fly and not the good kind.
“I don’t know,” I said, jaw clenched.
“You don’t trust my mother with the truth and you’ve known her a hell of a lot longer than you’ve known Wendy Aubry Lattimer.”
“I love your mother, but she isn’t my blood.” Not to mention the fact that Bunny MacKenzie was a world-class gossip and snoop.
“She cleans houses for a living,” he persisted. “She can’t be making a fortune. How do you know she won’t make a few phone calls and sell the story for big bucks?”
“I don’t,” I said, my jaw clenched even harder.
“You told her to keep her mouth shut, didn’t you?”
The relentless barrage of human logic made me want to scream. “I didn’t think I had to.” I tried to ignore just how ridiculous that statement sounded. “It was understood.”
“Tell her.”
The take-out cartons on the coffee table in front of us were starting to levitate from the force of my anger. “Don’t push it, Luke.”
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