“The roads!” I sounded every bit as excited as Chloe did. “The grids are appearing.”
First faint gray lines in the grassy dirt, then paths worn smooth by horses and wagons, followed by the asphalt of our day.
And where there were roads, there were people. Houses small and large popped up like mushrooms everywhere we looked. Quaint cottages. Sturdy brick two-stories. Uncompromising capes and saltboxes.
And if you had people, you had businesses. Thriving mom-and-pop shops that were the lifeblood of every small town in this country. Appliance repair shops and beauty salons, delis and grocery stores, dress shops and tailors and dry cleaners and banks and one very special shop right in the middle of town that had put Sugar Maple on the map.
Standing in front of Sticks & Strings, Chloe began to cry. She buried her face in her hands and she sobbed as the people we’d thought we’d lost suddenly walked out of the shadows and gathered around us.
Paul and Verna Griggs and their sons. Archie the troll and his wife, the beautiful Lilith from the library. Chloe’s good friend Lynette and Lynette’s husband, Cyrus, from the playhouse. The girls from Fully Caffeinated. Frank, Manny, Rose, and the rest of the crowd from Sugar Maple Assisted Living. Chloe’s old friends Renate and Colm Weaver, from the Sugar Maple Inn, had been hovering nearby. Hovering being the operative term since they were Fae who did a lot of hummingbird maneuvers. They finally expanded to more human dimensions and approached Chloe.
The Weavers had been deeply angered by Isadora’s banishment last December and they had been responsible for much of the chaos that led to the talisman pulling Sugar Maple off the grid. The friendship had been strained to the breaking point and I wasn’t sure what was about to go down.
“Renate,” Chloe said in a calm tone of voice. Then, “Colm.”
Renate opened her mouth to say something but burst into tears instead and the next instant she and Chloe were hugging and crying and saying all those things women say to each other after a fight. The other Fae joined them and I imagined glitter was flying everywhere like confetti.
Colm and I shifted position a few times, cleared our throats, checked our cell phones for messages.
“Good to see you,” Colm said, extending his right hand.
“Good to see you, too,” I said, accepting it.
And just like that we were back where we had started, in the town Chloe had fought to save, surrounded by the people who had been her family since the day she was born.
With one exception.
Lorcan Meany was leaning against the doorway of Janice’s Cut & Curl. He was a big, broad-shouldered guy with a mop of curly black hair and an easygoing disposition. I don’t think I had ever seen him when he wasn’t smiling.
Until today.
His head was down. His kids stood a few feet away from him, hands jammed in pockets, heads down as well.
I nudged Chloe. She looked over at Lorcan and took my hand.
He lifted his head as we crossed the street and approached him. The disappointment in his eyes when he realized Janice wasn’t with us felt like a sharp kick in the gut.
“She’ll be here,” Chloe consoled him. “She’s in Salem. She’s fine. I know she’ll be here.”
I pulled Chloe aside. “Maybe she isn’t fine. I was the one who asked for Janice’s help when you were in danger.” What if something had gone wrong when Janice summoned up her healing powers to save her friend.
“What do you mean you asked Janice for help?”
I gave her the abbreviated version. “When I tackled those spirits in the dome, the explosion flung us into another realm. You couldn’t see or hear me but I saw everything that was happening to you. I tried to break free and get to you but time was running out so I pulled together all the powers I had left and reached out to Janice.”
“I don’t imagine Dorcas and Tabitha were too thrilled with that turn of events.”
“How do you think I ended up in that onyx orb?” I stole a quick glance at an increasingly more distraught Lorcan. “You’d better contact Samuel. He’ll know where Janice is.”
But, as it turned out, she didn’t have to.
Suddenly there was Penny galloping toward us like a shiny black Hummer. You could hear her purr from twenty feet away. She leaped onto Chloe’s shoulder but before Chloe could say a word, the cat coughed once, twice, then spat out a fat yellow canary.
The canary flapped frantically, sneezed, flapped again and then in a burst of purplish smoke morphed into Janice right before our eyes.
Talk about making an entrance.
The naked look of joy on Lorcan’s face as his wife flew into his arms—well, let’s just say even tough cops can get a little misty-eyed.
All around us Sugar Maple was settling back into its familiar patterns. There would be time for questions later. Right now it was all about getting back to normal. Kids were hustled off to school. The girls at Fully Caffeinated got ready for the midday rush. Paul and his sons went off to repair Midge Stallworth’s powder room sink. Lilith flipped the sign on the library door to OPEN. Lynette and Cyrus hurried back to the playhouse to finish painting scenery for their next production.
Chloe and I stood there on the sidewalk across from Sticks & Strings, arms around each other, Penny securely perched on her shoulder, and watched as another day in the life of Sugar Maple unfolded.
Lucky? That didn’t begin to cover it.
“I wish Aerynn could see this,” Chloe whispered against my neck. “I think she’d like it.”
“Maybe she can.”
“Starting to believe in magick, are you?” she said with a soft laugh.
Vanishing towns. Volcanoes from hell. Bathtub ghosts. A four-hundred-year-old knitting sorcerer. Glittering disco balls with attitude. Attack cats. And despite it all, a happy ending.
“Magic and love,” I said as I ducked my head to kiss her. Maybe love was the best magic trick of all.
“Luke?” She peered up at me. “Are you okay?”
I wasn’t okay. I was about to explode with all of the emotions I’d kept trapped inside for days. Fear. Rage. Relief. Joy. Bottled up and ready to explode all over the place. I wanted to tell her that what she’d done was off-the-chart magnificent, that she was a warrior goddess, that when they wrote the history of Aerynn and her descendants, it would be Chloe’s name in big bold letters.
Luckily a big brown UPS truck rolled to a stop in front of us and I didn’t have to say any of it.
Joe, the regular driver, beeped his horn and waved. “Hey, Chloe! That was a helluva bad storm, wasn’t it? I got at least twelve giant boxes of wool for you and more at the depot.”
“Bring ’em around the side,” she said with an enormous smile. “We’ll help you unload.”
“We?” I asked with a grin. “I’m chief of police around here, not a yarn jockey.”
But she kissed me on the mouth, a kiss of such promise, that I would have taken up crochet if she’d asked me to.
“I’ll make it up to you,” she said.
“Damn right,” I said, then I kissed her until it was either breathe or die.
Her golden eyes glowed with happiness. Her skin was translucent. Her blond hair shimmered in the sun. The last few days fell away from her like a bad dream. She was back where she belonged, in the town she loved and fought for, surrounded by the people she called family.
Tonight we would go back to her cottage, feed the cats, nuke some frozen pizza, sprawl together on the sofa while she knitted and I watched Dirty Jobs. Later in the darkened bedroom maybe I could find a way to tell her all the things I couldn’t say in the bright light of day.
I took her hand and we ran back across the street toward Sticks & Strings.
It was good to be home.
EPILOGUE
CHLOE
Samuel pierced the veil a few moments before midnight.
There was no flash of lightning. No earth-shaking clap of thunder to announce his leave-taking. No astral visitors bearing
messages of farewell. I was lying next to Luke, listening to the even sound of his breathing, when suddenly I knew that Aerynn’s mate was gone.
Samuel had been part of my life for less than a human day but for that brief span of time I had been reminded of how it felt to be connected to someone by blood. The thought of what might have been pierced my heart. The stories, the wisdom, even the chance to make up for the years he had chosen to remain hidden away at Bramford Light—all gone in the blink of an eye.
My angry words to him at the lighthouse reverberated inside my skull. Who knew our time would be so painfully limited?
But he was with Aerynn now. Or at least that was what I wanted to believe. I tried to picture the two of them, beautiful and in their prime, building their life together in another dimension. The life that should have been theirs back in Salem all those years ago.
Maybe Hobbs women did have happy endings after all—they just had to wait longer than other women to get them.
My brief time with Samuel had been spent mostly in anger and confrontation. My heart had been too filled with resentment over the lost years to grab hold of the hours I had been given.
Tears slid down my cheeks and onto the pillow. “Damn,” I whispered, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand.
Next to me Luke mumbled something in his sleep and sank back into his dreams. I maneuvered my legs around Lucy and Pye, who were dozing at the foot of the bed, and made my way into the kitchen to start a pot of tea, my all-purpose cure for just about anything.
The pot of tea led to a bag of Chips Ahoy, which led to the need to work off some of those calories at the wheel. I’m not sure spinning does much for the cardiovascular system but it definitely does wonders for the soul.
In seconds I was under its spell. The only sound in the cottage was the faint click of my wheel. Moonlight spilled through the windows. Tree branches cast eerie shadows across the floor. The heady scent of merino and blue-faced Leicester filled my head.
This was my legacy, I thought as the fiber slipped through my fingers. Every time I sat down at a wheel, every time I picked up my needles, I was tapping into my history, keeping alive the traditions that Aerynn and Samuel had both held close.
And magick. Not that I was about to forget about that, but the truth was I’d been knitting and spinning a whole lot longer than I had been casting spells and battling Fae enemies.
“Chloe.”
I turned at the sound of Luke’s voice in the entranceway. In the splash of moonlight washing over him I could see the toll our battle with the Fae had taken. The left side of his jaw was bruised and swollen. His left cheek bore a jagged cut. A shiner was blossoming beneath his right eye.
He had been overmatched from the start. He could have played the human card and backed away and nobody would have faulted him for it. But he fought by my side every step of the way and I loved him so much I thought my heart would split open like a piñata.
“What are you doing up?” I asked, hiding my emotions behind my spinning.
“I woke up and you weren’t there.” He struggled to stifle a yawn. “I like it better when you are.”
I love spinning but not even the pleasures of the wheel were any match for straight-up love.
“I like it better when I am, too,” I said, and moved into the warmth of his arms, chuckling softly at the hazy spray of sparks our touch ignited.
“Do you think we’ll still be striking sparks a year from now?” he asked as they faded into the moonlit room.
“I think we’ll still be striking sparks a hundred years from now.” I told him about my certainty that Samuel had pierced the veil and he held me tight as he listened to my regrets.
“Come on,” he said once my emotional storm had passed. “We both have a busy day ahead. Let’s get some sleep.”
I had almost forgotten that a group of gay knitters from Cincinnati was coming up for a design workshop in the morning. They would be joined in the afternoon by a ladies church group from Nashua for an advanced finishing class that promised to turn good knitters into great ones. Both groups were repeat attendees I had grown to know and love but it would still be a very long and very busy day.
Arms wrapped around each other, we headed slowly down the hallway to the bedroom.
“Are you still planning to go back to Salem tomorrow?” I asked.
“Paul’s taking me up to Montpelier around lunchtime. I’ll drive a one-way rental down there, pack up the Buick, settle the motel bill, then drive back.”
A big fat lump formed in my throat. “You hate my Buick but you’d drive it all the way home for me?”
“Guess I’m just a fool for love.”
Who needs chocolates and roses anyway? Sometimes true love shows up behind the wheel of a dented gray clunker with Vermont plates. My overheated emotions threatened to get the better of me so I quickly shifted gears.
“I’ll make you a lumberjack breakfast before you leave. You won’t need to stop for food until you’re on your way back.”
“Didn’t you say something about pancakes and bacon the other morning before things got crazy?”
It seemed like a lifetime ago. “Blueberry pancakes, a river of maple syrup, eggs over—” I stopped as a loud noise rattled through the cottage. “Did you hear that?”
“They could hear it in Montpelier.” He snapped instantly into cop mode. “Since when do they pick up the trash at two in the morning?”
“Maybe they’re playing catch-up,” I said. “Things haven’t exactly been normal around here lately.”
The rumble grew louder.
And a whole lot closer.
Luke tilted his head. “If I didn’t know better I’d say that sounded like the Buick.”
“That’s crazy,” I said.
Still, this was Sugar Maple where crazy was a relative term. It wouldn’t hurt to check.
We swung open the front door in time to catch a major display from Mother Nature. The sky erupted in flashes of lightning that slashed the firmament and lit up the landscape like the Fourth of July times ten.
“Damn,” Luke said as we stepped out onto the porch where the roar of an invisible engine almost drowned out conversation. “That really does sound like your car.”
“My car’s in Salem. Remember?”
He shot me a look. “Are you sure?”
Beads of sweat broke out on the back of my neck. “I was five minutes ago.”
Twin beams of light appeared near the curve in the road, heading straight for us at warp speed.
I froze in place but Luke quickly threw me to the ground, then threw himself on top of me.
The front porch shook as something huge and heavy crashed into the saplings at the edge of my driveway, then hit the ground with a monster thud.
“Guess you don’t have to rent a car in Montpelier,” I said to Luke as we stood up and brushed ourselves off.
“Guess not,” he said.
My Buick was back. Okay, so it was half in the rhododendron bushes and smoke was spewing from under the hood, but it was definitely back and so was Aerynn’s wheel and mountains of yarn trying to escape through the open windows.
It would have been an almost-perfect ending to the craziest few days of my life when an all-too-familiar voice rang out from the depths of my battered car.
“Don’t just stand there, missy. Help me out of here.”
Luke and I locked eyes. He looked as horrified as I felt.
“Elspeth?” we said in unison.
“And who else would it be?”
I could think of any one of a thousand people, living or dead, but I managed to hold my tongue as Luke and I pulled old Buttercup from the backseat of the car.
Her mob cap was askew. A skein of sequined cashmere was draped around her neck. Her plain white apron and voluminous black skirts were wrinkled and definitely worse for the wear.
Luke tried to check for injuries but she batted him away like he was a pesky fly.
“Hands to yourself,�
� she said, visibly recoiling from his touch. It isn’t easy to show disdain when you barely reach a human’s navel, but somehow the yellow-haired troll managed just fine.
“He was trying to help you,” I snapped, annoyed by her old-school prejudices. “What are you doing here anyway?”
Which probably wasn’t the most hospitable thing I could have said but Samuel’s friend didn’t exactly bring out the best in me.
“Samuel sent me,” she said, puffing up like a blowfish. “It was his last wish.”
I aimed an eye roll at Luke that made him grin. Even my cats could come up with a better story than that. “You’re telling me that Samuel’s last wish was for you to deliver my car.”
“No, missy,” she tossed over her well-padded shoulder as she stomped up the steps to our front door. “I’m telling you his last wish is for me to deliver your baby.”
BARBARA BRETTON’S ROAD TRIP PROJECTS ROUNDUP
Like Chloe and Janice, I’m a big fan of road trip knitting. Give me a long stretch of open highway, a circular needle, and a fat ball of yarn and I’m a happy knitter.
I’m also not alone. I surveyed some of my knitter friends and came up with the following unscientific findings.
#1 Favorite Road Trip Project: Socks
We love socks! If you’re a sock knitter, you’re probably a road trip sock knitter as well.
Rho loves making socks on a magic loop (Lifestyle pattern and fleegle’s no-holes heel pattern with Judy’s Magic Cast-On and Jeny’s Surprisingly Stretchy Cast-Off):
• Magic Loop http://www.knittingdaily.com/blogs/daily/archive/2009/09/16/the-magical-magic-loop.aspx
• Lifestyle pattern: http://www.k1p1design1.com/lifestylesocks
• Fleegle’s heel: http://fleeglesblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/no-sock-holes-for-you.html
• Judy’s Magic Cast-On: http://knitty.com/ISSUEspring06/FEATmagiccaston.html
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