I could have. I could have told him that it probably wasn’t Fallon, that it was probably the thing that had taken over Fallon, the same thing that killed her. Of course, he wouldn’t believe that, and he’d probably think I was battier than an underground cave. Instead, I just played the ignorance card.
“You know, I can’t say,” I answered. “She never much cared for me in school. Though, I didn’t think that pettiness had risen to the level of ‘cursing me with her dying breath’ hate.” I winked at him. “That’s usually reserved for a special kind of traitor.”
“Again, with the prom thing?” he asked, shaking his head. “I said I was sorry.”
“Did you?” I asked. “All I remember is how you stopped speaking to me, how you ignored me until the day I left town.”
“Things are more complicated than that,” he said.
“Are they?” I asked. “I can’t imagine anything complicated enough to make you skip out on somebody you care about.”
“That makes you lucky, I guess. Not all of us can say as much,” he answered, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Did you see any strange people in or around The Lunch Pale at the time of Fallon’s poisoning?”
They thought she had been poisoned. That was a pretty complicated spell, Snow White garbage. I must have been dealing with a particularly nasty type of witch or warlock.
“I didn’t,” I said, this time, being honest. “But I wasn’t paying much attention. I was happy to be home, and I guess I was just soaking it all in.”
“Right,” he said, nodding at me. “And you came right to The Lunch Pale from the airport? Can anyone corroborate that?”
“Charlotte,” I answered. “Would you like to talk to her?”
“No, thanks,” he answered. “The day’s been long enough already.”
A smiled a little despite myself.
Riley looked at me. “I really am sorry, you know. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I would never have wanted that.”
“Okay,” I answered. Then, my grandmother’s voice filled my head again, though this time, in the normal ‘remembering what she’d said’ way. “Prove it.”
“Excuse me?” he asked.
“You say you’re sorry. Prove it,” I answered.
“I’m game,” Riley responded. “What did you have in mind?”
“Dinner,” I answered. “Tonight at The Roundabout. Seven o’clock.” Let me make one thing clear before I go any further. Regardless of what Charlotte might have thought about the current state of my feelings for Riley Davis, I did not, I will repeat, did not actually want to go on this . . . not even a date. It was more like a planned gathering with him. I did not love him. I did not even like him. If I had the power to, I would straight up banish this dude and never think about him again. But Grandma would get mad at me for that, and besides, banishing had been totally over since at least the 1980s.
More than that, Grandma had a point. If, by some strange occurrence, Riley did turn out to be the Ace of Cups, I would need to protect him. And why not protect him over the best fried chicken and BBQ ribs in the Smokies? It just made sense.
“You’ve got a date,” Riley said, smiling at me again.
“Not a date,” I answered. “It’s a planned gathering.”
“Sure, Izzy,” he answered, heading for the door. “Sure, it is.”
11
“You look fine,” Savannah said, standing behind me as I took a gander at myself in my old mirror. Unlike the lobby of the B&B, my old room was exactly how I’d left it five years ago, right down to the Justin Timberlake poster over my bed, which desperately needed updating. Still, embarrassing young adulthood crushes aside, it was comforting to find all of my things were the same as they had been the last time I was here. It was almost like time had stopped moving inside this one particular space, as though nothing had changed at all. In truth, even if that had actually happened, it wouldn’t stop the way everything else had changed. It wouldn’t stop the way I had changed. I was a completely different person than I had been the last I had set foot in this bedroom. Sure, I still bickered with my cousins, I still stood up for what I thought was right, and I still loved my family more than anything else in this world. But I was a stronger person than I had been when I left.
The witch I had been back then had sworn off magic, especially tarot card magic. If you’d have asked me back then, I’d have told you that I’d never, in a million years, do what I just did with those cards in my grandmother’s room. Turns out, it didn’t take a million years. It just took five. Five years and a darn good reason.
“Speak for yourself,” Charlotte butted in, also looking at me in the mirror, though her facial expression wasn’t nearly as sweet as Savannah’s.
“I–I was speaking for myself,” Savannah answered, eyeing her sister warily.
“You can’t go on a date in that dress,” Charlotte said, ignoring her sister and shaking her head at my reflection.
“Why not?’ I asked. “I bought this dress at an exclusive boutique in Chicago. It cost me a week’s pay, and I think I look pretty darn good in it, if I do say so myself.” I cleared my throat. “Also, it’s not a date. It’s a planned gathering.”
Charlotte cleared her throat in response, as if to mock me. “It absolutely is a date. Planned gatherings are something you’d do with your co-workers if you worked at an insurance agency, not for the hot guy you’ve been holding a candle for since high school.”
“I’m not holding any candles,” I said, splaying my fingers out in front of me. “See? No candles. This is strictly business.”
“Of course, it is,” Charlotte scoffed. “That’s why you insisted on meeting him at his favorite restaurant.” She nodded at me. “Very business-like.”
I balked, feeling heat rising in my cheeks. “Is it?” I asked. “How was I supposed to know it was Riley’s favorite restaurant in town?”
“I don’t know,” Charlotte said. “Maybe the fact that you singlehandedly set up a surprise party there for his seventeenth birthday, and when he got there and saw the party, he said, ‘This is my favorite restaurant in town.’ Maybe that.”
I rolled my eyes at Charlotte. “You know, I had totally forgotten about that,” I lied.
“It doesn’t matter,” Charlotte said. “You can’t wear that dress.”
I looked at myself in the red low-cut number. “But I look good in this dress, like ‘I could date Leonardo DiCaprio’ good.”
“You do,” she answered. “But you’re not dating Leonardo DiCaprio, and you’re never going to because, God willing, he’ll marry me one day and we’ll have a bunch of gorgeous, environmentally-conscious children.” She nodded at me. “You’re meeting Riley Davis.”
“I know who I’m meeting,” I said.
“Then dress like it,” Charlotte said. “Riley Davis is a hometown boy, Izzy. He left for the big city and didn’t like it.” She eyed me. “A lot like a certain cousin I know and adore.”
“Go on,” I told her.
“Riley Davis didn’t fall for the ‘big city’ you,” Charlotte said. “He didn’t fall for the ‘head chef at a snazzy hotel restaurant’ you or the ‘goes for drinks with her fiancé’s politician friends’ you. And he certainly didn’t fall for the ‘goes to a BBQ joint in a red dress that only leaves her thoughts to the imagination’ you.”
I blushed, looking at myself in the mirror again and wondering if I was wrong about the low cut and the high hemline. That didn’t matter, though, because Charlotte had gotten one thing very wrong.
“Riley didn’t fall for any version of me,” I said confidently.
“Sure, he didn’t,” Charlotte said. “Because I know a lot of red-blooded high school boys who spent every waking moment around a girl he wasn’t in love with.” Now it was her turn to roll her eyes at me. “Happens every day.”
“You don’t stand somebody up for prom if you’re in love with them,” I reminded Charlotte.
“You and this prom thing. You’re like a broke
n record,” she scoffed, walking to my closet and pulling it open. “Fine. For the sake of argument, let’s say he wasn’t in love with you. If he was, though, it would have been with this you.” She pulled out a flowered sundress I used to wear on the weekends back in high school. “It would have been the you he used to sneak down to the creek with and the you he used to catch fireflies with after Saturday evening mass. It would have been the you he knew. You know, the real you, and not the you that you pretended to be when you ran away.”
I balked, honestly feeling a little hurt. “I didn’t pretend to be anybody,” I said.
“You did,” she answered. “Even if you didn’t know it.” She smiled at me. “It’s okay. You seem to be coming back to us now, and as it turns out, we like that version of you better too.”
She handed me the dress. “So, is the plan still the same? You take ‘loverboy’ out for dinner, and Savannah and I break into his house looking for clues?”
“Breaking in is a really harsh word for it,” I answered. ‘Especially since it’s his parents’ old house and I still remember where she hides the spare front-door key.” I nodded. “But yes. While I’m trying to get some info out of him through conversation, you guys can go through his house and look for clues as to why some supernatural being might want to kill him. Since he’s almost certainly not the Ace of Cups, I doubt either of us will get much of use. Maybe then, Grandma Winnie will let us move on to something more productive.”
“Fair enough,” Charlotte said. “Now, the only question remaining is, which dress are you going to wear?”
I looked at myself in the mirror again, thinking about how I looked, the way things used to be with Riley, and the person I was as well as the one I might be becoming.
“Just give me the stupid sundress,” I said, grabbing it from her.
She chuckled loudly. “Don’t you hate it when I’m right?”
“I really do,” I admitted, already starting to change my clothes. “Thankfully, it almost never happens.”
12
I walked into The Roundabout wearing the sundress Charlotte suggested and trying not to think about all she’d said to me. Though I knew I had changed as a person during my time in the city, the idea that my family knew that as well, that they might have been sitting around talking about how the bright lights and crowded streets had turned me into someone I wasn’t, didn’t sit too well with me.
I wasn’t mad at them by any stretch of the imagination. Family talked about family. That was the way it went. It’s not gossip if you have the same last name, which was what my grandmother always said. Still, the idea that they might be disappointed in me, not only because of the way I handled what happened to my mother by moving away in the first place, but also in what happened in the years after that, pulled at my heart and made it ache.
I didn’t have time to let any of that really sit with me, though. We all had jobs to do. Mine just so happened to include going on a ‘not date’ with the guy I used to love in a place we’d frequented during our high school days. I took a deep breath, looking around the crowded restaurant and humming along with what I was fairly sure was the same country song that had been playing the last time I was in here. Guess the owners didn’t place updating the jukebox very high on their to-do list.
“Izzy Lockheart!” A familiar voice screeched at me from across the room. Speaking of the owners, I looked over and saw Emily Morningside rushing over toward me. She was the daughter of Abe Morningside, owner of this establishment. She also happened to be a great friend of mine from high school. A wide, natural smile broke across my face when I saw her. She was just as she had been when I left, bright-eyed and short, with red ringlet curls on her head and a grin that would have done such a good job at lighting up the sky that the moon could feel comfortable taking the night off.
“Emily!” I said as she collided with me, wrapping her arms around me in a big hug. Now, because Emily was a mortal, not a witch, and certainly not a Lockheart witch, I couldn’t feel anything from my hug with her. Her thoughts, emotions, and experiences stayed safely tucked away in her head. If I wanted to know them, I would have to find them out the old-fashioned way, by asking her over coffee. That was a comforting idea, that I could still have a friend who had no trappings of the witchy lifestyle that permeated this town and my life in it so greatly. Heck, Emily didn’t even know I was a witch, or of the existence of witches, werewolves, vampires, or any of that stuff. To her, the supes were nothing more than stories we’d grown out of when we were children, and that was exactly how I liked it.
“I had heard you were back in town. I was hoping you’d come see me,”
Emily said, pulling away and looking up at me with a huge grin.
“Of course, I was going to see you. Don’t be stupid,” I answered warmly. “I just got here a few hours ago, though, and then there was the whole thing with Fallon at The Lunch Pale.”
Emily’s face dropped sympathetically. “I heard about that,” she said in a faint voice. “It’s a shame. I heard she was poisoned and that the police don’t have any suspects. It’s really scary.”
“You’re telling me,” I answered quickly. “I was there when it happened.”
“No kidding!” Emily said, her eyes widening. “Are you all right? I’d be scared to death that I had contracted whatever killed her.”
“I don’t think it works like that,” I said. “In any event, I’m okay.” I shook my head. “It’s so good to see you. I see you’re still rocking out the butterflies.” I motioned to a pendant on her shirt, a golden butterfly sitting right at her heart. She had gotten into them when her father got sick a few months before I left town. She saw them as a sign of hope and wonder. Back then, she used them as something of a crutch. She’d see a butterfly or walk by a dress with a butterfly print and take it as a sign that her dad was going to be okay. It wasn’t magic, per se, but it was maybe the closest mortals got to magic, and it seemed to work. Last I heard, her dad had gone into remission and moved to the Caribbean with his new wife.
“Always,” she said, tapping her pendant and smiling. “And I see your style hasn’t changed much either.” She eyed me up and down. “For some reason, I think I remember that dress from when you left.”
“You reason you do is because it is from when I left,” I said in a whisper. “But don’t tell anybody.” I shrugged. “I guess I just wanted to remember everything the way it was. Speaking of all that, I’m surprised you still work here. I remember your wanting to get as far away from this place as humanly possible when we were kids.”
“Yeah,” Emily muttered. “We had medical bills that had to be paid, and by the time Dad was better, I had already kind of settled in. It’s not that bad. Judging by how both you and Riley Davis have come running back, the outside world doesn’t seem like a much better option, anyway.”
I blanched. “I guess that depends on when you ask me,” I muttered. “Speaking of Riley, though. He’s who I’m here to meet. Have you seen him?”
“Not yet,” Emily said, smiling hugely. “Didn’t take you long to jump back into that. Look at you. A few hours back and you’ve already scored a date with the guy you were crazy about in high school.”
“The guy who stood me up on prom night in high school, lest you forget,” I said. “I’m not crazy about him anymore, and this isn’t a date. It’s just a planned gathering.”
“Oh,” Emily mused, nodding slightly. “I know what you mean. The guys from Starcrest Insurance have those almost every Saturday in the back room.”
I grimaced, remembering Charlotte’s comment about such things.
“Anyway, I’m so glad you’re back. There’s kind of a wait here tonight, but I can squeeze you into the family table. After all, you’re the closest thing I’ve got left in town,” Emily said, slapping my back and turning me toward the dining room.
As she did, my phone rang. It was Charlotte. “Can you excuse me?” I asked, nodding at Emily. She nodded back, and I stepped closer
to the door, pressing the Answer button on my phone.
“Charlotte?” I said.
“We’ve got trouble, Izzy,” Charlotte said, obviously frustrated.
“What’s happening?” I asked. “Did you already make it to Riley’s house?”
“We did, and that’s the problem,” Charlotte said. “There’s some kind of spell on it.”
“A spell?” I asked, narrowing my eyes. “On Riley’s house? He’s a mortal. Why would his house be spelled?”
“I’m not sure, but it is,” Charlotte said. “Savannah can’t get in at all, and I can only walk into the living room.”
“I don’t understand,” I answered. “If you can get into the living room, what’s stopping Savannah from following you?”
“My guess is that she’s never been in the house,” Charlotte said. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I have been in this house once when I went to pick you up, but I’ve only ever been as far as the living room. I think each room is spelled, and unless you’ve already been in it, you can’t get in it.” She sighed. “So, I’m afraid I can’t help, and unless you know somebody who has been in literally every room in this house, we’re kind of up a creek without a paddle.”
“Not only do I know someone who has been in every room in that house, but you do too,” I said, taking a deep breath. “In fact, you’re talking to her.”
“Really?” Charlotte asked. “Even his bedroom? You saucy minx.”
“It wasn’t like that,” I answered.
“I’m sure it wasn’t.” She chuckled. “Let me guess. You guys just had a ‘planned gathering’ on his mattress.”
“We were studying,” I said through newly clenched teeth. “Nothing happened.”
“You’re almost boring enough for me to believe that,” Charlotte said. “And if he wasn’t so dadgum hot, you’d have had me sold.”
“I don’t care if you’re sold or not,” I answered. “What I do care about is your getting out of there before someone sees you.” I shook my head, even though Charlotte wouldn’t be able to see it over the phone. “We’ll just regroup and try to get some information on him some other way. Maybe I’ll get him to open up to me at dinner tonight.”
Mountains, Mystery, and Magic Page 6
