Luke, however, said nothing.
“You think I imagined the whole thing, don’t you?”
“I don’t know what the hell I think.” He tossed aside the keyboard and pulled me across his lap. “I’m tired of thinking.”
My cheek rested against his thigh. My skin absorbed his warmth and made it my own. After a day of loss and chaos, I was where I needed to be.
His hands moved along my rib cage, my spine, my breasts, leaving silvery white sparks in their wake. He bent over me and I felt his breath against my ear. Warmth swiftly escalated into heat and in seconds we were naked on the motel bed.
The world fell away. I lay back on the soft mattress and opened myself, my heart, to him in a way I never had before and it both scared and excited me. Everything I thought I knew about my life, my future, had disappeared today along with Sugar Maple and now there was only Luke.
This all-too-mortal man.
Luke had been willing to walk away from the life he had known, the family he loved, and build a home with me in Sugar Maple and now here I was, wondering if I would be able to survive anywhere else.
But I wasn’t thinking of any of that as we made love that night.
For a little while I wasn’t thinking at all.
17
LUKE
If sleeping were a sport, Chloe would be on the Olympic team. Put her within shouting distance of a pillow and blanket and she was a goner.
Come to think of it, she had been asleep when I met her. I walked into Sticks & Strings that first morning and found her conked out on the sofa near the hearth. She was barefoot. Her feet were long and elegant. Her hands were long and elegant, too, but she bit her fingernails. A bright red blanket was pooled on the floor next to her. A fat black cat slept soundly in a basket of what spinners called roving.
They both snored.
And yeah, it was love at first sight.
Tonight she fell asleep minutes after we finished making love, curled up against me as close as she could get. I teased her once about being a heat-seeking missile and the look on her face made me regret opening my stupid mouth. The whole part-human, part-sorceress thing was still a touchy issue for her and probably always would be. I think she was embarrassed by her need for human contact. I had to remind myself that she hadn’t grown up surrounded by brothers and sisters who lived to tease each other until they cried or ended up in therapy.
I lay there with her for a long time, listening to the sound of her breathing, the water slapping against the dock not too far from our window, the faint rustle of the sheets each time we shifted position.
This is enough. The thought appeared full-blown and undeniable. If this was all we ever had, it would be enough for me. I was hardwired for home and family. Always had been. I had made the decision to walk away from the world I knew and become part of Chloe’s and I was okay with that as long as she was there with me.
Or I would be, in time. I had made a hell of a lot of progress in the four months I had been living in Sugar Maple. Vampire funeral directors and troll librarians and shapeshifters who morphed into parakeets in the kitchen sink. Trust me. You can get used to anything if you try hard enough. And I’d been trying. I wanted this to work. Chloe’s destiny had been set centuries ago by forces I would never understand. She had no choice about the life she was living. But I did.
And I chose her.
I chose Sugar Maple.
But now everything had changed. Here I was, back in the world I had left behind and my old dreams back within reach. I could get a job on a local police force. Decent pay. Okay benefits. A pension down the road. And it would be a hell of a lot less dangerous than chasing demons and battling Fae warriors. Maybe Chloe could open up another yarn shop like Sticks & Strings. We’d buy a dormered cape in the suburbs, a couple of cars, have the family over for barbecues on lazy summer afternoons and big Super Bowl bashes every winter.
I’d be lying if I said it didn’t appeal to me on a hell of a lot of levels. After years of seeing the worst of my species on the streets of Boston, the surburban dream sounded pretty good. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t fit Chloe into the picture. She wasn’t ordinary. She wasn’t regular. Asking her to be any of those things she wasn’t would be wrong.
And no matter how hard she tried to live the life of a mortal woman, she would fail because she wasn’t one any longer. In just a few months her powers had multiplied dramatically and there was no reason to think they wouldn’t continue to multiply. I had seen what she could do when she battled Isadora at the waterfall and that was only the beginning.
Or it would be, if we managed to find Sugar Maple and restore it to this dimension.
If we failed, the future was anybody’s guess.
At around two in the morning, Chloe turned over and hugged her pillow instead of me. I carefully climbed out of bed, hit the john, then stood by the wide picture window for a long time, looking out across the parking lot toward the cove. The beam from a lighthouse glowed softly behind the dense fog that blanketed everything.
I was home.
Chloe wasn’t.
It was a long time before I went back to bed.
And even longer before I slept.
CHLOE
I woke up a little after six. I was still tired and groggy but a few cups of coffee would take care of that.
Luke had already been out on a breakfast hunt and the desk in our room was piled high with goodies.
I tapped on the door between our room and Janice’s. “Breakfast! Better hurry or the bagels will be gone.”
The lock clicked. The door swung open. Penny the cat burst into our room and leaped straight into my arms.
“That cat’s crazy,” Janice said as she joined us around our makeshift buffet. “She slept on my head all night.”
“This is a surprise?” I arched a brow in Janice’s direction. “You know cats.”
“My cats don’t weigh thirty pounds and smell like Egg McMuffin.”
Penny swiveled around in my arms and shot Janice a look that would have quelled a lesser woman.
“Stick a sock in it, cat.” She dumped four packets of sugar into her coffee and followed it with two containers of cream.
We jokingly elbowed each other as we grabbed for bagels and donuts and claimed the creamers.
Finally Luke and I were settled on the bed while Janice took the desk chair. Penny was off in the corner enjoying Fancy Feast and a piece of bagel with salmon cream cheese.
“The blueflame erupted twice during the night,” Janice said.
I stopped, midchew. “Who was it?”
“Wish I knew. No identifying signal. Just a sputter of flame then nothing.” She fiddled with her coffee cup. “I doubt if any Salemites know about blueflame.”
I glanced at Luke then over at Janice. “Don’t be so sure. I had visitors last night.” I told her about the pair of critical wenches who had dropped in while I was in the bathtub.
“So where is this Bramford Light?”
“We googled it but no luck,” Luke said. “A couple of subdivisions here and there. That’s it.” He didn’t say it but I knew he thought I’d dreamed the whole thing.
“Shit.” Janice leaned back in her seat. Her despair was palpable.
Luke slipped back behind his cop face. “If we’re going to make any headway, we’ll need to split up.”
I nodded. I can’t say I was happy about it but the job was big and our time was short.
“Janice?” Luke asked. “Is that okay with you?”
She shook her head. “I can’t.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I just can’t bring myself to go out there.”
“That’s okay,” Luke said, dropping his cop façade long enough to let the real man show through. “You can work the phones and the Internet.”
We were looking for any indication that not all the magickal beings followed Aerynn to what became Sugar Maple. In my experience, magickal beings had a great deal in common with their human counte
rparts. The odds against getting everyone to agree to a plan of action were astronomical. Someone must have stayed behind and left a trail that extended down through the years and it was up to us to find it .
“I want to check out the waterfront,” I said to Luke as we walked across the parking lot to the car. “Maybe someone knows about Bramford Light.”
“No way,” Luke said. “I’ll take the waterfront. You start looking around town.”
“I’m going to the waterfront.”
“Not a great idea.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“Docks aren’t always the friendliest places.”
“I’ll be fine. I have magick.” Humans didn’t scare me. The Fae were another story.
“I grew up around here. You’re going to have to trust me on this.”
Back in Sugar Maple I was the one with most of the answers. I think I liked that better.
“So what do I do in town? Wander around asking where the faeries are?”
“Why don’t you try looking for some of those symbols Sugar Maple is so nuts about.”
“That’s not a bad idea.” I shot a conciliatory glance his way. “Almost like you did this for a living.”
“Yeah,” he said with an answering grin. “Almost.”
Clans, families, and individuals all had their own avatars, so to speak. Easy-to-recognize symbols that were woven into our art and our history. Sugar Maple was, not surprisingly, a leaf from the sugar maple tree. The New England Fae were represented by the infinity symbol. My mother’s gravestone bore a glowing sun; my father’s, a crescent moon.
“Tell me again why we’re doing this,” I said.
“Because there’s a damn good chance not everyone fled to Sugar Maple during the Witch Trials and a lot of knowledge found in the Book of Spells stayed here with them. Maybe as oral tradition, maybe passed along some other way.”
I shrugged. “Maybe that and a miracle will bring Sugar Maple back.”
“You got anything better?”
“No.”
“So we go with plan B.”
Luke would search for information about the mysterious Bramford Light while I headed into the heart of town. We would meet back at the motel around lunchtime to exchange notes with Janice.
We drove along Washington Square, looping around Salem Common, where I saw the empty band shell that apparently had served as the model for the gazebo that graced Sugar Maple’s village green. It felt both familiar and uncomfortably alien.
“When was that band shell erected?” I asked Luke.
He thought for a moment. “I’m thinking maybe a hundred years ago.”
“Not 1692.”
He shook his head. “Not even close.” His eyes slid toward me. “Why?”
“The gazebo on the green looks exactly like it.”
“So?”
“Our founding population fled Salem during the Witch Trials two hundred years earlier.”
He was quiet for a moment. “That makes a copycat gazebo a little weird.”
I nodded. “That’s what I was thinking.”
I was also thinking maybe Luke’s original theory about magickal beings left behind might have more merit than I’d first thought.
So where were they?
I willed myself to stay open to whatever might be out there (within reason, of course) but no thought probes or blueflames or anything else attempted to make contact. I was starting to wonder if maybe the two spirits I saw in the bath the previous night had been the product of exhaustion after all.
Luke left the car on the third floor of a parking garage near the visitor center and gave me the keys as we exited the tiny elevator.
“Drive the car back to the motel when you’re finished. We’ll meet up there for lunch.”
“Be careful.” He could handle whatever his world threw his way but my world was a whole other story.
He pulled me into a quick hug. “You have the cell with you. I programmed in my number and Janice’s. Use it if you need it.”
I stood on the sidewalk and watched him walk away. We didn’t have much time. The only way we could accomplish what we needed to accomplish was to split up. I accepted that. But that didn’t mean I had to like it.
Especially not in a place like Salem. I walked to the visitor center then along New Liberty and made a right onto Brown, fully expecting the weight of all that tragic history to land on my shoulders. But I felt nothing.
No connection at all to my surroundings.
No sense that magick had ever walked here except maybe on Halloween for the tourists.
I didn’t care about Salem. Long may it thrive but it meant nothing to me. What I did care about was the fact that I was afraid we had been played. Dorothy and the Scarecrow hadn’t faced half as many obstacles on their way to Oz as we’d battled on the drive to Salem. Pissed-off trees lobbing apples at your head? Piece of cake. I’d take that over crashing through a guardrail any day.
So what was all that drama about? Had someone or something been screwing with our heads for the fun of it or was it really trying to keep us away from Salem? I was more confused than ever.
For all the good I was doing, I might as well have been in Boise. I had no sense of the ancestors at all. It was pretty clear that Aerynn had left no blood family behind.
When it came to Salem, I wasn’t feeling the love.
But if there was one thing Luke and all my years of watching Law & Order had taught me, it was to keep on looking.
Even if the whole thing seemed pointless.
18
LUKE
Detective work is a hell of a lot easier when you know what you’re looking for. Not only didn’t I know what I was looking for, I didn’t know where to start looking.
The waterfront was a long shot but it was as good a place as any to begin. Salem’s early history was largely seafaring. If any of Aerynn’s ancestors remained behind, the waterfront was most likely where they would gather. It was away from the center of town where most of the population lived and the sea would provide an easy escape route if trouble erupted again.
It wasn’t much but at the moment it was all I had.
Lighthouses had been on my mind since I got out of bed. I’d walked over to the window to enjoy the view of the lighthouse I assumed was out there beaming its light through the fog.
At least that was what I thought. The morning fog had lifted. The visibility was great. And there were no lighthouses visible from our window. We did, however, have a great view of the New Pinky’s Crab Shack but I don’t think that was what kept me up last night.
Then again, anything was possible.
I wasn’t crazy about splitting with Chloe but there was no choice. I set off at a reasonable pace, trying to keep the cop vibe under wraps and a more benign local vibe front and center. It wasn’t hard to do. I pretty much was a local. I’d put myself through two years of community college working in this town. I ate my weight in chop suey sandwiches and rolled my eyes with the rest of the summer workers at the tourists who blew their vacation looking for things that didn’t exist.
Irony.
You gotta love it.
One thing about Salem: you were never far from the water. I started near Central Wharf and worked my way toward Derby.
It was still too early in the year for the pleasure boats to be out. Here and there rowboats thumped against the docks where they were tied. A RENT A KAYAK sign was posted over the window of a shuttered sporting shop.
The sun was rising higher in the sky. The morning chill was turning warm. The smell of fish was strong but not unpleasant. Spring in this neck of the woods was capricious—especially by the water—but the signs were good.
I stopped in at the usual conglomeration of businesses you would see along a waterfront.
“Any idea where I can find Bramford Light?” I asked the manager of a boat rental place near the Maritime Historic Site.
He looked up from his Sports Illustrated. “Bram
ford? Never heard of it.”
I tried the mechanics at the engine repair shop. “Bramford Light?”
“You sure you’re in the right town?” the oldest of the group asked.
“Thanks anyway,” I said and moved on.
I nodded at two young guys in T-shirts and leather wrist-bands who were leaning against an abandoned shack across from the House of Seven Gables. The words BAIT AND TACKLE were painted over the door in faded white letters. A Harley was catching its breath ten feet away. If I were on the force in Salem, I’d stop for a moment, make a comment about the hog, make sure everything was the way it should be, then continue on my way.
But I wasn’t a cop here so I stopped and said instead, “Bramford Light?”
Maybe they didn’t hear me.
“Bramford Light?” I asked again.
Dead-eyed stares a cop would envy. I took the look as a no and moved on.
It was hard to believe Salem had once been a thriving fishing village. Now it was more a shore community with great seafood and lots of tourists.
And, as far as I could tell, no magic.
CHLOE
As it turned out, Salem had been waiting for the right moment to let me know I wasn’t welcome.
It happened first at the Witch House. The building was undergoing renovations and visitors were instructed to go around back. I attempted to follow the path but it was like being on a treadmill. No matter how hard I tried, I got nowhere.
Even stranger was the fact that nobody around me noticed. Other people came and went with no problem. Small children dashed past me like trained athletes while I metaphorically treaded water.
Not being a big fan of humiliation, I dashed across Washington Square North to Salem Common with the purpose of checking out the band shell that had been duplicated in Sugar Maple. Great plan, right? Too bad I couldn’t seem to get in.
“Not funny,” I muttered under my breath, to the consternation of a jogger stretching near me.
Who needed the common anyway? A few trees. Some scruffy, winter-pale grass. Some sad-looking joggers and dog walkers. Nothing I could use there.
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