“You’ve got all her pictures, so I bet you do.”
He leaned closer. “My mother was wearing it the night she was murdered. It was never recovered. How can . . . How can you have this?”
I explained about getting it in the mail, seeing the visions, and how it had disappeared from my trunk and then turned up in John Barrett’s hotel room.
Bryn lifted the brooch and cupped it in his hands. Nothing happened. “You said you saw her. Show me,” he said, holding it out to me.
I touched it with my fingertip. Nothing happened, so I took it from him and pressed it between my palms. She didn’t appear.
“What about an incantation? Or something you did?” Bryn said. “Think, Tamara.”
I reached my hand over and gripped his arm. “It’s okay. She doesn’t come out every time, but she’s in there. And now that I have the brooch again, we’ll save her. Don’t worry.”
Bryn ran a hand through his gleaming black hair and stood up, taking the brooch back from me. “I don’t understand why you’d see the vision the first time you touched it and I wouldn’t.”
“I don’t know.”
He stared at it and rubbed his thumb over the girl. “I’ll keep it,” he said finally. Then he looked at me, as if he expected me to argue.
“Yeah, she’s your mom. I think you should keep it.”
He blinked, as if emerging from a daze. “If her soul really is attached to this brooch, nothing can happen to her so long as we have it. Andre on the other hand may need help right now.” He slid the brooch into his pocket. “Want to help me cast a spell?”
“Love to.”
Chapter 28
“Do you feel like a drink?” Bryn asked as I followed him down the hall.
“I’m not sure I should mix alcohol and truth serum. Never know what I might say or do.”
Bryn smiled. “I’ll take my chances.”
“You say that now,” I murmured, pausing in the doorway of the bathroom. Bryn went inside and yanked the clear plastic shower curtain, cracking the plastic rings and bending the shower rod.
“Wow. Next time someone takes a shower, the water’s gonna go all over the floor,” I pointed out.
“So be it,” Bryn said.
“Spoken like someone who doesn’t mop.”
“Spoken like someone who cares more about his best friend than a house. Besides,” Bryn said with a shrug, like that finished the sentence.
“Besides what?”
“I can afford new floors.”
He went to the kitchen and opened a drawer full of pens and scrap paper. He pulled out a Sharpie marker and laid the shower curtain over the table.
“I couldn’t reach the mayor today. Or anyone from the city council. They must be tied up trying to calm the masses,” he said.
“I guess. I actually didn’t see very many people. Not that I could’ve seen them anyway with the fog and dark, but I didn’t hear many cars or people outside.”
“Well, I warned the mayor to try to stall any property sales. He was supposed to meet with the real estate agents this morning.”
“Not sure that worked out,” I said, telling him about Marsha. “And how come they want my house? We’re a family of witches. Shouldn’t we be on their list of desirable residents?”
“Yes, but Barrett probably wants the property because it’s on a spoke.”
“A spoke?” I said, watching him draw a line down the middle of the clear curtain.
“Yeah. It’s on one of the ley lines coming from the tor. Just like my place. I’m on the east meridian.”
Bryn drew long curved lines on the clear plastic and then filled in some continent-shaped blobs.
“Grab me a drink, sweethear t.”
“You sure you should drink before spell-casting?”
“I’m not planning to get drunk. I just want to pretreat myself. If there’s one of Barrett’s counterspell backwashes when I cast this, I want to be ready for the ensuing headache.”
“Oh, those headaches. Maybe I’ll have a little sip of scotch, too.”
I went to the cupboard and opened it. I lifted the decanter, then dropped it the half-inch back to the shelf. Standing inside in the amber liquor was a five-inch-tall scotch-soaked and furious Jenna Reitgarten.
“Holy moly!” I said with a gasp.
“What?” Bryn asked, bisecting the empty half of the shower curtain in half again with another black line.
“There’s something I forgot to mention earlier,” I said, taking the bottle down. I kept it mostly level, but having the bottle tipped even a little made Jenna fall against the glass wall. It probably wasn’t only the movement. I’m sure it was plenty slippery in there. She sloshed around, lost her footing and went under. I winced and paused until her head popped up above the surface.
“Sorry,” I said. “Sorry about that.”
“About what?” Bryn asked.
I set the decanter in the middle of the table.
“Tamara,” he complained, reaching to move it away from where he was drawing a map of the U.S.
I grabbed his hand to stop him touching the bottle. “Here’s the thing,” I said, using my free hand to remove the stopper from the decanter. I could tell from her face that she was screaming, but it was just a barely audible squeak. I guessed that her rage was bottled up and, from a certain point of view, small.
Bryn stared. “Is that a pixie? How did she get in there?”
“Not a pixie.”
Bryn leaned down to peer closer. Jenna was shaking her fist, her eyes tearing, mascara running, scotch dripping.
I cleared my throat. “She’s Jenna . . . in a bottle.”
The corner of Bryn’s mouth curved up. Then he chuckled.
I chuckled a little, too. “Probably we shouldn’t laugh. It’s not very nice.”
“Probably not.” Then he laughed.
And I laughed.
He walked away from the table, putting his hands on the countertop while he kept laughing, which made me laugh harder.
When he turned around, he’d gotten hold of himself. “Tamara, what’s Jenna Reitgarten doing in my scotch?”
“How should I know?” I asked with mock innocence, then I realized that my throat hadn’t burned. I could lie again. Progress! “Maybe God did it,” I said. “They were quoting scripture and screaming and cursing in front of lost children that I was trying to save! He could’ve decided to smite them.”
“Did you help Him smite them with say—a spell?”
“God doesn’t need my help.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
“I might’ve said a few words about bottling up her rage and making it small.”
Bryn laughed again.
“She started it!”
“I’m sure.”
Bryn took out a piece of scrap paper and a pen. “Write down the spell before you forget what you said. We’ll need it for a counterspell later.”
I sat down at the table, my gaze shifting on and off to Jenna. “Calm down, little Jenna,” I said. “We’re going to get you out of there.” I looked down at the paper and smiled. “Sooner or later.” I cleared my throat and handed the paper to Bryn.
He looked at it. “This is the verse you used?”
“Yep. I said that and then, poof, she disappeared. Well, there wasn’t really a poof sound. She was just gone. And then here.”
Bryn smiled. “You’re like a force of nature.”
I couldn’t tell from his tone whether I should be flattered or insulted. “Is that a good thing? Or a bad thing?”
“Causing a human to shift into a different form—smaller, bigger, whatever, that takes an unbelievable amount of power.”
“Felt easy to me.”
“Yes,” he said with a wry smile. “That’s the irony of you, sweetheart. You can’t do spells I could do when I was six years old. But then most of the world of magic can’t do spells that you can do without even tr ying.”
Kind of a backhanded compl
iment, I decided. I glanced down at the bottle where Jenna was leaning against one of the glass walls, catching her breath after her tirade. “Well, Jenna, I’m pretty sure there’s a lesson to be learned from all this. When I figure out what it is, I’ll let you know.”
After pouring out the scotch, rinsing Jenna and the bottle with some tap water, and pouring that out, Jenna was sitting on the floor of the unstoppered bottle wiping her face and hands with a piece of fabric I’d cut from a washcloth and dropped inside for her.
I took it as a good sign that she wasn’t red-faced and screaming anymore. I left her on the table while I swept the stairs where I’d dropped the glass bowl because Bryn said we were going out behind the house.
Once the sweeping was finished, Bryn carried the markered shower curtain, and I carried a bedspread that he’d asked me to bring.
He smoothed out the shower curtain and put rocks around the edges to keep it from blowing away. Then he took off his shirt and set it on the steps. He glanced at the sky and then at the house, then back up at the sky.
“A lot of cloud cover,” he said, cocking his head. He moved around the shower curtain, back and forth, until stopping at the left side and taking a few steps back. He glanced up again and at the house. “I know the position of the house, where we are on the earth, and our relationship to the constellations, but there’s no way to do exact measurements without a telescope, which I couldn’t use with my view obscured anyway.”
“Do we need things to be exact to find him?” I asked. Bryn’s way of scrying seemed a lot more scientific than anything Momma or Aunt Mel had ever done.
“Maybe. Maybe not.” He glanced one last time up at the sky, then waved me over to him. He took the blanket from me. “Take off your shirt and socks and shoes.”
This was a normal part of the process for us sharing power. We were usually skin-to-skin—at least from the waist up—and I was barefoot with my toes in the dirt.
Unfortunately, any work you do that involves taking off clothes feels kind of dicey. Strippers. Adult films stars. Prostitutes. Not exactly the kind of company I want to be in.
Still, Andre was missing and doing magic was our best chance of finding him fast if he needed our help.
I took off my socks and boots, the wound on my foot stinging. “That cut on my foot’s not healed yet. I bet if Dr. Suri knew I was rubbing my cut in the dirt, he’d give me a really long lecture.”
“And a tetanus shot, I’d imagine.”
“You don’t think I’ll get a bad infection and have to get my leg cut off, do you?” I asked, removing my shirt and folding it up.
“Last week, I pulled an arrow out of your chest. This week, I’d be hard-pressed to find the scar. I doubt garden-variety bacteria stands a chance against your body’s ability to heal. Your fae blood, no doubt.”
I smiled. “I think so, too. Maybe my family shouldn’t have been so quick to condemn my half-fae status.” I walked to Bryn, and he wrapped the blanket around us, drawing me up against him. My skin prickled immediately with magical energy.
“Hold this,” he said, giving me the edges of the blanket.
I kept it around us and felt him fiddle with the clasp of my bra a second before it sprung open.
“You didn’t need to do that,” I admonished.
“Not for the spell,” he said a moment before he kissed me.
The power arced between us as we tasted each other. His fingers in my hair, skin sliding against skin. Before I knew it, he’d lowered us to the ground, and we were tangled up together.
“Bryn,” I gasped as he unzipped my jeans.
“Later,” he said, licking my throat.
“Andre is your best friend.”
“Which is why he’d understand.”
“Wow that feels good,” I mumbled, dizzy and breathless, before tugging his hand away from the inside of my thigh. “Bryn!”
He pulled me closer and sucked my tongue and plenty of magic into himself. When he exhaled, he shoved his hand out of the cocoon of the blanket and whispered a spell in Gaelic. Needles of bright light pierced his hand and bent off it to light up the shower curtain.
“Beautiful,” I whispered.
He rolled us closer and moved his hand slowly, watching the light dance over the surface. North America, Texas, and a place somewhere to the southeast of Dallas lit up brighter than the other parts of the map.
He whispered another spell and closed his eyes. “I recognize the spell that’s cloaking him. It’s one I wrote. He’s doing magic, so he must be all right.”
Bryn pulled his hand back inside the blanket and bent his head to kiss me again. His blue eyes glittered as if lit by the star-light, too. I stared into them, feeling caught up in the universe of Bryn as usual.
"Are you sure we have time for this?”
“I’m absolutely sure we have time for this,” he murmured back, tugging on my lower lip with his teeth.
That was the last time we talked about anything for a while.
Chapter 29
“Andre’s miles outside Duvall, but he’s in Texas,” Bryn said. We were still wrapped in the blanket and lying on the hard ground, but somehow it didn’t bother us, our warm bodies pressed together under the night sky.
"Who told you Andre was missing?”
“His dad. Maybe the spell Andre’s doing is shorting out his phone. After all, Gwen’s dead and you saw Barrett and the Winterhawk this morning. If they’d taken him to get to the rest of the underground or to me, he wouldn’t be using my spell to cloak his location. He’d want to be found.”
“So he’s okay?”
Bryn shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s trying to keep his location secret and he’s here, in the U.S., in Texas. He knows things are precarious. There are plenty of places in the world that would be safer for him. I wish he hadn’t felt compelled to come.”
“Do you think we should track him down?”
“And possibly lead Barrett and the Winterhawk to him? No. I hope he stays where he is.”
I dug through our clothes until I found the brooch in Bryn’s pocket. “If he doesn’t need us, then we can use the power we generated for something else.”
“Like what?”
I opened my hands. “To call the dead.”
Bryn sighed and shook his head. “I want to see her. I always have, but I’ve got to think long and hard about the spell I want to use to try to draw her out.”
“I’m connected to her. I can feel it. And so are you as her son. Who better to call to her?”
“I need to be sure that I can control what happens,” he said, taking the brooch and setting it away from me.
“It’s your mom,” I said, holding out my hands to show that I wouldn’t interfere. “So that just leaves one really important thing that I need to use magic for.”
"What?”
“To look into the past.”
He laughed. “Time-walking. Even more dangerous than calling ghosts.”
“I have Lenore and Edie’s spellbooks. I have actual things that they touched, spells they wrote, possibly with remnants of their actual magic. There are spells in their book to enhance soothsaying. I could do a spell that’s the opposite of that. I’ll keep it simple.” I thought of John Barrett lecturing me about being blinded by love. I needed to hear that prophecy for myself. Or better yet, to see it firsthand.
“You can’t just change a few words and expect it to work the way you want it to,” Bryn said.
“Then help me. Tell me what to say.”
“No.”
“You’re afraid, aren’t you? That I’ll find out why we shouldn’t be together. That it’ll be something really horrible. But, look, how horrible can it be? It’s probably not even about us.”
“I’m sure it isn’t. What worries me is what will happen if you try to send your mind on a time-walk and it goes wrong. It could damage your brain.”
“I heal really well. You said so yourself.”
“We’re not talking abou
t a cut. We’re talking about fracturing your mind. Sending a part of it out into the universe with an untested spell. I won’t risk it.”
“Ever?”
He didn’t answer.
“Ever!? So before, when you said that you’d help me later, you didn’t really mean it? You just wanted me to stop bugging you?”
“I wanted time to think about it. I’ve thought about it.”
“I have to know.”
“You don’t. You’ve lived your whole life without knowing.”
“But I wasn’t sleeping with you then!”
“Your grandmother’s premonition wasn’t about us.”
“Edie!” I called.
"What are you doing?”
I closed my eyes. “Edie, come to me.” Edie’s not the type to come when she’s called, but I could feel Bryn’s power coursing through me below the surface and knew that getting a taste of our mixed magical energy would infuriate her.
“Tamara, don’t do that.”
A bright green light flared and then Edie appeared. “Well, well. Still sleeping with the enemy, biscuit?”
“We want to know the nature of the prophecy. Lenore told it to you. Will you let us do a spell to try to retrieve the memory from you?”
“Let him do a spell on me? Have you lost your lust-addled mind?”
“If you don’t help me, I’m going to try a time-travel spell.”
“Those never work right.”
“First time for every thing,” I said with a sweet smile.
“Witches who dabble in time travel usually end up in a mental institution afterward. But, of course, with your superior skills, there’s no risk of that. A dangerous and complicated spell is sure to work out because your spells never go wrong,” she said, her sarcasm martini-dry.
I glared at her. “At least I’d be doing something instead of following along like a good little sheep the way I did for years.”
“You were far better off when we did the thinking for you. Every important decision you’ve ever made has ended badly. Marrying your first boyfriend when you were barely out of high school? Ahem. Divorce. Going away to work in Dallas at that restaurant? Too homesick and lonely to concentrate, you came back to work in Cookie’s pathetic little bakery for a pittance. And now, left on your own, you’re letting a Lyons ride you like a magical whore.”
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