Stop, she told herself. It didn’t matter how handsome or thoughtful he was. It wouldn’t work out. It never worked out for Cass, and with good reason. Besides, he was probably married. She hadn’t gotten a look at his left hand to see if there was a ring there—not that that necessarily would have mattered, anyway, considering that not everyone wore a ring—but Connie had said most people tended to marry young in the Pacific Northwest, and it was something Cass herself had noticed during her brief period living in Seattle. The odds of there being a hot, considerate, single man her age in Riddle, Oregon, population one thousand, were close to zero.
So she needed to stop thinking about him.
Finally, after Onyx had finished his dinner and begun bathing his whiskers, and what she could see of the sky between the trees had faded from blazing red to dusky purple, Cass wandered upstairs, trying to decide which room she should sleep in that night. It seemed wrong to take Aunt Alexandra’s room—the room where her great-aunt had spent every night, the bed where she’d died (Cass tried not to let her mind dwell on that)—so she opted for the guest room she remembered sleeping in as a child.
It was a large room, especially for a secondary bedroom. She vaguely remembered Aunt Alexandra telling her about the original owners of this house, and that they’d been quite wealthy—wealthy enough to afford such a big house, with big rooms for everyone in the household, even the servants whose quarters were in the finished attic. This room had walls papered in a light spring green with small white flowers embossed in the silk. The brass bed was neatly made with an eyelet coverlet across the top. Though she knew this room had been unoccupied, there was no dust anywhere, and the bedding smelled fresh, not musty. Faded white wainscoting covered the lower half of the walls, and a white marble fireplace took up part of one wall. Cass was sure that would be wonderful in the winter, but tonight just the thought of it made her feel ill. Despite its reputation among out-of-staters for being a rainy state, most of Oregon got quite hot in the summer, and Riddle was no exception. Now, in late August, the house, with no air conditioning, was sweltering.
Cass opened the three windows on the east wall, revealing the sliver of the rising moon peeking between the trees; then she opened the transom over her bedroom door to let air flow in from the cool, dark hallway—or so she hoped, anyway. The room still felt oppressively warm, though. She went back downstairs to where she’d left her suitcase in the entryway, then dragged it up and into the second-floor bathroom. Though the bathroom itself was original to the house, the fixtures had been replaced in the forties, and it showed. The bathtub and the sink were pink, and the linoleum floor was in dire need of replacement. Cass hoped that might be something she could fob off on the buyers, since she certainly couldn’t afford a bathroom renovation on her librarian salary. She changed into her pajamas, a spaghetti-strap tank top and a pair of plaid boy shorts, and she pulled her dark hair back into a ponytail. That helped cool her off a little. She splashed some water on her face and then went back to her bedroom.
Onyx was in there now, sitting on top of the radiator, his attention fixed on the window. He sat stock-still, no part of his body moving except for the absolute tip of his tail, which twitched and flicked in agitation. At the sight of him, her skin began to crawl. “Oh, great, now what?” she said aloud.
She went over to the window to see what he was staring at, fully expecting to find some disgusting magical creature—another brownie, or maybe an elf—prowling along the sill. Her muscles tense, she came up behind the cat and followed his gaze, then breathed out a sigh of relief when she saw it wasn’t anything supernatural. It was a beetle, small and brown and speckled. A stink bug. The house would probably be overrun with them come fall; they always wanted to come inside for the winter. Slightly less irritating than the fae, but only just.
“Leave it alone,” she chided the cat, scooping the beetle up. “The last thing you want is a face full of stink spray.” She tossed the bug out the open window and then froze. Eyes were watching her between the leaves of a nearby tree. She stared back at them, and after a moment she recognized the face from earlier. It was the little green fae, the one who’d been there when she was leaving for the grocery store. She’d never seen anything like this creature before. Longer, pointier features than a brownie or gnome, but lacking the telltale wings of a faery or pixy. And that coloring! She wondered what species it was.
“You’re not coming in here,” she said to the creature. It raised its eyebrows as if to say, Oh, really? And what’s going to stop me?
She frowned at the unspoken question. After all, there were no screens on these windows—there really wasn’t anything to stop it coming in. She sighed wearily and closed all three of the open windows.
That just made the room grow even hotter, though. Cass lay on the bed, not bothering to pull the covers back; it was going to be way too warm for that tonight. Even though she had no plans on staying here longer than it took to sort out Aunt Alexandra’s belongings and sell the house, she found herself making a mental list of improvements. First, screens on all the windows, to keep out all the pests—of both the normal and magical variety. Second, replace the pendant lamp in this room with a ceiling fan. She knew installing air conditioning in a house of this size would be out of the question, especially on her budget, but days like this made it tempting. Maybe a swamp cooler would suffice.
She lay there, uncomfortable, her shirt drenched in sweat and her mind a tumult of thoughts—thoughts of Aunt Alexandra, of the house, of everything she still had left to do; of starting work at the library; of the fae just outside her window; of the guy from the grocery store. She couldn’t get her mind to settle down enough to be willing to pick up a book, or even browse her phone. An hour passed, and she felt nowhere near sleepy. She just felt ungodly hot.
“Forget it,” she said, sitting up. “I’ll just go back downstairs and sort more stupid books. It’s not like I don’t get enough of that at work—” She broke off mid-rant at the sight of a flash of color on the mantel of the white marble fireplace.
That wasn’t there before.
It was a tarot card, like the one she’d found outside. She’d forgotten all about it after everything that had happened at the grocery store. It was still lying, she assumed, in the passenger seat of her car. But as she drew closer, she saw that this couldn’t be the same card, anyway—it had a different image on it. This one depicted a woman in a long dress, sitting in a large chair—or maybe a throne? She had a crown of flowers and stars on her head, and held a scepter in her right hand. The text at the bottom of the card read: The Empress.
Cass felt her skin crawl once again. This was getting ridiculous. She couldn’t remember this ever happening before, so many premonitions in one day. Usually they were spaced out enough that she’d have time to process them, to intuit what they were trying to tell her, but it had been almost incessant ever since she got into Riddle: the feeling that something was going to happen, but she didn’t know what. And considering that her bad feelings usually translated to bad things happening to someone, not being able to figure out what these feelings were trying to tell her made her especially nervous.
She ran a sticky hand through her hair. She needed to get out of this oven of a bedroom. Without thinking about it any further, she shoved her feet into the same flip-flops she’d worn earlier and walked briskly down the stairs. But she didn’t return to the room she’d been sorting books in, the parlor-turned-Library-Number-One. Instead, she opened the front door and stalked out into the night.
The air outside was at least ten degrees cooler than it had been inside her room, and the relief was instantaneous. The moon was higher now, but the summer sky was not quite dark. It was a little before ten o’clock; still early enough to justify a before-bed walk to clear her head.
She circled the perimeter of the overgrown yard. A number of trails forked away from the house and into the woods, edged with uneven, moss-covered stones that kept the mess of ferns and groundcove
r from spilling onto the dirt paths. Cass chose one at random, clutching her phone tightly in case the trail got too dark or—in a worst-case scenario—she needed to call for help.
The trail led her down a gently-sloping hill and into a clearing that she assumed must have once been a garden. In its center was a crumbling stone fountain. Giant, unkempt rose bushes had grown up higher than Cass’s head, their woody canes covered in wickedly sharp thorns. In the moonlight, the reds and oranges of their flowers were muted. Cass noticed that many of the bushes had more hips than blooms now. Fall was approaching, even if today’s weather seemed to indicate otherwise.
A set of overgrown stone steps led out of the garden, and Cass followed them into the ever-deepening woods. The trees were tall, the black silhouettes of their trunks rising into the night sky. Giant oak trees with gnarled branches intertwined above her head, forming a canopy that during the day would likely look charming, but tonight left Cass feeling unsettled. These trees were wild. She’d never felt anything like this before. The air was thick, heavy with magic, making goosebumps ripple across her skin and a lump form in the pit of her stomach. Some distant part of her mind wondered if she should turn back, but her feet kept on going, dreamlike.
There was a light ahead. At first she thought it was the light of the moon drifting through the entangled branches, but after a time Cass realized that the moon had been behind her earlier. Had the trail wound around in a circle, or was it something else? As she walked, she became distantly aware of the sounds around her, different than the regular sounds of the forest. Was that the hoot of an owl, or a hoot of laughter? Nightingale song, or human voices singing? The rustling of leaves, or… feet… dancing? The light before her seemed to change, moving, shifting colors. The circle of the moon widened, separated. Became a ring. A ring of dancing, glowing lights. Music, laughter, inviting her in. She stepped forward as if in a haze.
A branch swung down, smacking her hard across her face.
“Ow!” Cass cried out, looking around herself. The ring of light had vanished. Now only the moon remained.
“What in the world?” she breathed aloud.
“You need to watch yourself. You were being pixy-led.”
The voice was high, reedy. She couldn’t tell if it was male or female. She jumped, looking around, trying to find the source of the voice.
There, sitting in the fork of an oak to her left, was the green fae. She wouldn’t have seen it at all were it not for the soft glow around its tiny body.
Cass blinked, staring at it. Had that creature just spoken to her in English? It was impossible.
The creature snickered. “If that’s what you want to believe,” it said.
Her eyes widened, and she took a step closer. “How…?” She’d never heard any of the magical creatures she’d encountered before speaking anything but that strange woodland language she could never understand. How had this one learned English?
The fae didn’t answer. It just smiled, quirking its head at her, staring at her in an extremely discomfiting way—as if it could see her from the inside out.
She shook her head, looking away. “I wasn’t being pixy-led,” she asserted.
“You were.”
She stubbornly crossed her arms. “I’ve been dealing with you pests for thirty years. I know better than to be pixy-led.”
“If that’s what you want to believe.”
Cass stamped her foot in frustration. She wasn’t going to give in to this… thing. Whatever it was. And she certainly wasn’t going to acknowledge that she knew it was probably right—the faery ring she’d seen, the way she’d been moving as if she were in a trance, those were all definite signs of being led astray by fae of some sort. How had she walked so neatly into their trap? Why did the magic of the fae seem to be so much stronger here than anywhere else she’d been?
“Because these woods are different,” the green creature said. She looked at it sharply, and it smirked. “You know it’s true. You’ve felt it. There’s no hiding from it. It’s inside you. You recognize the way this place makes you feel.”
“Whatever,” Cass said, turning on her heel and striding back in the direction she’d come in. The fae didn’t follow her, and the numbing sensation of the magic she’d felt on the trail soon vanished. Once she had her bearings back, she realized she’d walked much, much farther than she’d thought. The return trip seemed to take ages, and when she was back at the house, her calves ached and her feet were weeping from the strain she’d put them through, walking so far on uneven terrain in flip-flops. She paused on the stoop and pressed the lock button on her phone. The screen lit up to show her the time—well past midnight. The pixies had led her astray for over two hours. She cursed, kicking the colander on the porch aside before flinging the front door open. Onyx was sitting on the bottom step of the staircase, watching her as she stormed into the house.
“If that green thing comes in here tonight,” she told the cat, “I expect you to eat it. Understand?” Onyx’s only response was a blink, which Cass hoped was the cat’s way of agreeing.
She slammed the door behind her, pushing against it with her hip. With a scrape and a squeal, the deadbolt turned, locking her inside.
But somehow she got the feeling it wouldn’t be locking anything out.
The next morning, the doorbell rang early.
Cass was awake, at least, sitting at the kitchen table staring off into space—and wondering if there was any coffee to be found in this house—while Onyx gobbled down his breakfast. He’d been the one who woke her this morning, poking her cheek with one claw over and over until she finally snapped into consciousness. He’d had a list of demands for her. The first was that she scoop his litterbox, which she found in a corner of the downstairs bathroom with a plastic scoop stored neatly beside it. He’d guided her there, making persistent little grunting sounds in the back of his throat until he was satisfied that it was pristine. Once he’d ensured that the litter inside was nice and clean—hopping into the box and poking and prodding around to make absolutely certain—he christened it, and then led her into the kitchen to demand his breakfast. It was clear who ruled the roost around here.
When the doorbell rang, Cass’s first inclination was to ignore it. But when it rang a second time, she decided to creep to the front of the house as quietly as she could to see who it was without having to commit herself to answering.
No such luck, though. When she reached the entryway, she saw a man’s face peeking through the beveled glass window beside the door. She wasn’t sure he’d seen her, but then he said loudly, “Good morning, Ms. Russo! I hope I didn’t wake you.”
Creeper much? she thought in irritation before opening the door. The man was older, probably around her parents’ age, and wearing a suit. “No, you didn’t,” she said. “How can I help you?”
“The name’s Kowalski. Tom Kowalski. I own the property that borders yours to the north.”
“Oh. Nice to meet you, Mr. Kowalski,” Cass said after a moment, relaxing. From the way he was dressed, she’d been worried he was someone from her aunt’s law firm, that there was some sort of problem. This was just a neighbor, probably trying to be friendly. Though what kind of neighbor would think it was appropriate to be friendly before nine o’clock on a Sunday, she didn’t know.
“Yes, yes,” he said, adjusting his tie, and Cass got the distinct impression he was thinking, Of course it’s nice to meet me. I’m aware of my own excellence. She wondered if all of Aunt Alexandra’s neighbors were as odd as Connie and this Kowalski person. “Anyway, I won’t waste your time—let me get straight to the point. My understanding is that you’re not intending to make Riddle your permanent home?”
Good grief, did these people have anything better to do with their time than gossip? “No, I’m not,” she said with a tight smile. “I’m here for a few months to sort out my aunt’s things, but I won’t be staying beyond that.”
“Excellent,” Mr. Kowalski said, surprising her. That was
the exact opposite of the reaction she’d gotten from Connie. “Ms. Russo, I’d like to make an offer on this property. How does one million dollars sound?”
Cass choked. She wasn’t sure what she even choked on—the air? Her saliva? The words coming out of Mr. Kowalski’s mouth? She didn’t know, but suddenly she was coughing her lungs out, shaking her head as Mr. Kowalski stepped forward to offer help. She braced herself on the doorjamb. Had she heard him correctly? A million dollars? Was he insane? She knew it was a lot of land, but the lawyer had indicated to her that with the condition of the house and grounds, she shouldn’t expect more than $400,000 or so. Kowalski was offering her well over twice that amount. What was the catch? There had to be a catch. Even though a big part of her was screaming Take the money! an even larger part was urging caution—and suspicion.
“I’m sorry,” she said once she’d regained her breath. “I haven’t really thought about selling yet. Everything has been happening so fast…” She shrugged in what she hoped was a conciliatory way.
Mr. Kowalski smiled, though it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Of course. I understand. There’s no rush. You can get in touch with me once you’ve had a chance to think it over.” He pulled a leather wallet out of his back trouser pocket and withdrew a business card from it, handing it to her. Cass glanced down to see a logo of a stylized mountain top. It read Cow Creek Investments in a bold sans-serif typeface, and below that, Tom Kowalski, CEO.
“If you get any alternative offers, please let me know,” he said. “I would be happy to negotiate. This property means a lot to me. I know it did to your aunt as well. I’d hate to see it fall into the hands of someone who doesn’t… appreciate it as much as it deserves.”
Cass furrowed her brows as Mr. Kowalski turned and started back down the steps. It was only as he moved away from her that she saw he wasn’t alone—a second figure hovered at the bottom of the steps. A little girl, probably around eight or nine years old. She was crouched, looking into the overgrown flowerbed next to the stoop.
Alexandra's Riddle (Northwest Magic Book 1) Page 3
