Of all times for my sister-in-law to decide to have a conversation with me, I groaned inwardly. “Just great. I’m having a blast.”
“I’ll tell Dean you called. Want me to have him call you back?”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll send an e-mail.”
I managed to get off the phone after another minute of chitchat, then told Owen, “The magical plague doesn’t seem to have reached Texas. And Sherri says hi.”
He shivered and pulled a knitted afghan off the back of the sofa to wrap around himself. I reached over and put a hand against his forehead. “You’re burning up. And I don’t know what to do about it if this is magical. Something tells me that your average cold-and-flu medicine won’t help.”
“It doesn’t,” he croaked. “Believe me. I’ve tried them all.”
“It seems to me that what we need to do is get you far enough away from the city that you’ll be able to think, and then we can come up with a solution.”
“I’m all for that, believe me. We probably ought to bring the boss, as well.” He pulled the afghan tighter around his shoulders and shivered again.
“Then we’ll need a car.” I knew of one person who had wheels and who might be in any shape to drive: Ethan Wainwright, the magical immune who was our corporate attorney, and whom I’d briefly dated just before getting together with Owen. I found my little address book in my purse and dialed his cell number.
As I expected, he was game—he was always up for a magical adventure. “It’ll be like old times!” he said. “It may be a few hours before I can get there, though. I’ve got a couple of things to wrap up before I can leave the office, and then I’ll have to swing by and get Merlin. I should be there around seven.”
While I was talking to Ethan, Owen had fallen asleep. I felt his forehead again and found that the fever was even higher. I wasn’t sure what to do for him. Would a magically induced fever really hurt him, or did I need to try to bring it down?
I decided that too hot was too hot, no matter what caused it, and the last thing we needed was Owen’s brain melting. I got a washcloth in the bathroom under the stairs, soaked it in cool water, then brought it back and placed it over his forehead. He moaned and stirred a little in his sleep, then caught my hand and held it, but didn’t wake.
I sat by him for the next couple of hours, rewetting the cloth when it dried or warmed up. I had a whole new appreciation for what my mom must have gone through when we were kids. As I held his hand and watched him sleep, I realized just how much I’d missed him lately. He hadn’t acted like he was angry with me when I came over, but he was probably too sick to fight. I knew I didn’t want us to be fighting. I liked him too much—maybe even loved him. I gave his hand a squeeze and whispered, “You’d best not abandon me, in any way, shape, or form.”
When he woke around six-thirty, he seemed surprised at first to see me there, but then I saw the memory return to his eyes. “Is it almost time to go?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.
“Just about.”
He forced himself upright and said, “Then I guess I’d better pack. I might need help with the stairs.” He leaned heavily on me as we walked up the stairs to his bedroom, then I went back downstairs and put out some food for the cat.
He didn’t come back down, so after a while I went up to look for him and found him asleep on his bed, but at least his bag appeared to be packed. I nudged him awake and helped him back downstairs, where he lay on the sofa and told me which reference books to bring.
When I saw Ethan’s silver Mercedes pull up on the street below, I hooked our overnight bags and Owen’s bag of books over one shoulder and half carried Owen down the stairs. He was looking worse and worse, and Ethan would need to turn the car’s air conditioner to “arctic” to keep Owen from overheating the car with his mere presence.
Ethan already had Merlin in the front seat, not looking quite as bad as Owen did, but almost looking his age, for once. Ethan got out of the car and took the bags from me while I maneuvered Owen into the backseat. He wasn’t a big guy, but he was pretty heavy when he was practically deadweight. Once we were all settled in the car, Ethan asked, “Which way do you want to head?”
“I don’t know.”
“West,” Owen rasped. “Into the mountains. That might block whatever’s coming from the city.”
“Okay, then, west into mountains,” Ethan confirmed. Owen was sound asleep on my shoulder before the car reached the end of the block.
When we’d been driving a couple of hours, I thought Owen’s temperature had dropped, and his color looked better. Merlin stirred in the front seat, showing signs of life. “It seems to be working,” I said. “Let’s keep going.”
By the time we pulled into a roadside motel that wasn’t the least bit scenic or picturesque, which probably explained why it was the first we came across that didn’t have the “no vacancy” sign lit, both our patients looked more human. Ethan went into the office to get rooms for us and came out with a deeply uncomfortable look on his face, just as the “no” in the “no vacancy” neon sign over his head lit up.
“There was only one room left,” he said. “I went ahead and took it because I don’t think we’ll find anything else in the Poconos on a summer weekend, and I don’t think we want to keep driving this late.”
“We’re not here for sleep and comfort,” I said. “We just need a place to work.”
“That’s what I figured.” He began turning pink in a blush worthy of Owen. “And one more thing—it’s a honeymoon suite. I don’t know if you know anything about the Poconos, but it’s a big honeymoon destination, and the honeymoon resorts are known for their excess of what some might call kitsch. Others would call it tacky. I guess this place is the low-budget equivalent of that. Anyway, they think I’m here on my honeymoon, so we’ll probably want to keep our other guests out of sight.”
“They’ll be busy,” I said with a shrug.
Fortunately, the honeymoon suite wasn’t visible through the office’s front windows, so we were able to get Owen and Merlin inside without anyone wondering why I was going on a honeymoon with three men, one of them old enough to be my grandfather. Once we got them inside, Ethan and I took our time unloading the car.
When I got my first good look at the room, I realized that Ethan had understated the situation. “Tacky” didn’t begin to describe the place. For one thing, just about everything in the room was either red or pink—or mirrored. The few parts of the walls that weren’t covered in mirrors were covered in a pink, shiny fabric. The bed was round, in the middle of the room, and draped in a red satin spread, with piles of pink and red pillows. There was a mirror on the ceiling over the bed. The lighting fixtures must have been found at Liberace’s garage sale. They dripped with crystals and fake gilding.
“Oh, my,” was all I could say. This really wasn’t the kind of place where you wanted to spend the weekend with your boss.
“There’s also a kitchen,” Ethan said. “And a heart-shaped hot tub. Too bad I didn’t bring a swimsuit.”
“This is ideal,” Merlin said. “Thank you, Mr. Wainwright.”
Ethan and I turned to stare at him.
“The mirrors will be helpful in some of the work we have to do,” Owen explained while avoiding looking at himself in any of the mirrors. He still looked pretty awful, so I could imagine that facing that image wasn’t fun for him.
“Maybe you two should sleep now and get to work in the morning,” I suggested. “You still look pretty fried.”
“Probably a good idea,” Owen agreed, sinking to sit on the bed and rubbing his temples. “Wow, I didn’t realize how bad that buzzing in my head was until it stopped.”
“So you’re feeling better?”
“Yeah, but it’s more like the week after you have the flu, when you’re not sick anymore, but you still don’t feel well.”
We let Owen and Merlin take the bed, since they’d been sick and were the ones who’d be working. I tried to convince Ethan to t
ake the sofa, since he’d been driving, but he swore it was too short for him and he’d be more comfortable dozing in a chair. The two wizards were still sound asleep when Ethan and I woke the next morning and slipped out to pick up some breakfast.
They were up and hard at work when we got back, and I thought I’d have to confiscate the books to get Owen to stop working long enough to eat. Hours later, there were pages of notes in Owen’s textbook-perfect handwriting scattered all over the room. When he and Merlin seemed to have come to an agreement, Owen said, “We’ll need some supplies for a spell to pinpoint what’s going on.” He handed me a sheet of paper. “I doubt there are any magic supply shops nearby, but you can probably find some reasonable substitutes. Where I thought of obvious ones, I made a note.”
“Maybe you should come with me,” I said, skimming the page.
“You’ll do fine. I’ve got some things to work out.” And then he buried his nose again in his book.
Ethan handed me his credit card. “Here, use this. There’s a shop off the motel lobby that seemed to have a good variety of stuff, and they think you’re my wife, anyway. I’d better stay here and keep an eye on them.” Then he handed me his car keys. “But if you need to go elsewhere, you can take my car.” I wasn’t sure which was the bigger responsibility, getting the right ingredients for a spell to help save the magical world, or driving Ethan’s Mercedes.
I took another look at Owen’s list so I could decide where to look. He needed candles and several kinds of herbs, some of which were the kind you cooked with and some that weren’t. He also wanted a map of Manhattan—which, if I knew Ethan, would be in his car’s glove compartment—a metallic powder, a compass (something else I suspected would be in the glove compartment, unless it was built into the car’s navigation system), aspirin, air freshener spray, several ashtrays, and salt. I couldn’t begin to imagine what spell he was going to MacGyver with all that stuff, but I thought I’d first try the motel shop.
I expected the typical motel shop—a cross between a convenience store and a souvenir shop stocked with necessities like aspirin in overpriced small containers, razors, and toothbrushes, as well as travel-related and souvenir items, like maps, postcards, and T-shirts and spoons with slogans about the local area.
This wasn’t that kind of shop.
Chapter Ten
This was the kind of shop that wouldn’t even be possible in my hometown. Let’s just say it catered to the honeymooning customer. If you looked in the mirror on the ceiling over your bed and thought you’d look better with body glitter, then you could dash across the parking lot and get it, along with several varieties of flavored lotions and powders, feathers in every color of the rainbow, bubble bath to use in that heart-shaped tub, and, of course, edible underwear, in case you worked up an appetite.
The motel’s manager came over from the office, and she noticed me before I could sneak away. “Hi there, how can I help you?” she asked.
I backed away a step or two. “Um, well, I was looking for some things, but this probably isn’t the right shop for me.”
“Oh, you’re the new wife from that couple who checked in late last night, aren’t you? Eloped, your husband said. I guess if you were in such a hurry, you must have forgotten something.”
Ah, so that was the story Ethan had told about why he wanted a honeymoon suite and hadn’t made a reservation. “Yeah, that would be us. And I did forget a few things.” I gave the display a sidelong glance and shuddered. “But not those kinds of things.”
She laughed heartily. “Don’t worry about the up-front merchandise. That’s just for show. I’ve got all kinds of stuff. What do you need?”
I looked at the list again, and there actually was an off chance that this shop would stock some of it. “I need some candles—but nothing scented. White if you’ve got them.”
“Of course we’ve got candles. Come on over here.” She led me to the other side of the store, which looked more like the motel shop I’d been expecting. “Candlelight in all those mirrors is very flattering. It makes your skin glow, and it hides a lot of figure flaws. Just don’t burn your room down,” she added with a wink.
She pointed at a shelf full of candles in ceramic holders. They all had various bride and groom figures and the legend “Our honeymoon in the Poconos.” Oh yeah, that was exactly what I wanted to buy to use with my boyfriend, my ex-boyfriend, and my boss, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. The woman got me a shopping basket and I put four of the candles in there.
“Do you need some matches?” the woman asked.
Owen could start fires with a snap of his fingers, so I shook my head and said, “No, I don’t think that’ll be necessary.”
“Anything else you need?”
I felt my cheeks burn as I realized that the body glitter might work as the metallic powder Owen had asked for. “Some of that body glitter would be good,” I said, unable to meet the woman’s eyes.
“What color do you want?”
I had no idea. He hadn’t specified. “Oh, I don’t know…”
“I bet gold would look good on you, especially in the candlelight,” she said after giving me a long, appraising stare.
“Um, okay, sure,” I mumbled. Owen would owe me for this, big time.
“Is that all?”
Since I was already there, I thought I might as well see what else I could come up with. “Can I just browse for a while?”
“Sure. Let me know if you need anything. Or if you need any ideas. Trust me, I’ve been married for thirty years. I know how to keep things spicy.”
I was suddenly very glad Owen had made me go on my own. I might survive the mortification, but if he’d been there, I wouldn’t have been able to look him in the eye ever again, assuming he survived the stroke he’d have had. I checked the list. Owen wanted fennel, marigold, rosemary, and peppermint, as well as cloves and anise. I couldn’t imagine finding all that here, but I might as well look. Among the bath products was a package labeled “Bath Herbs for Lovers.” I picked it up and read the ingredient label. It contained fennel, marigold, rosemary, and peppermint, along with a few other things like orange blossom and rose petals. I wondered if that would work and threw the package in my basket.
Owen hadn’t specified what scent air freshener he wanted, so I took a bottle of room spray in “mountain fresh.” Back in the less embarrassing gift shop part of the store, I found some souvenir bowls of potpourri. One shaped like a heart smelled of anise and clove, so I put that in the basket. I also picked up several “Souvenir of the Poconos” ashtrays. At the very back of the shop was the convenience store that I expected to find in a motel, and there I got a couple of plastic salt shakers and a travel-sized tin of aspirin.
The woman gave a low whistle when I went to check out. “Well, well, well, you’ve got some honeymoon planned, haven’t you?” she said, waggling her eyebrows. “You didn’t need my help, after all. Not that I judge. Whatever floats your boat, I always say. But this is definitely unusual.”
“Yeah, well, we are from New York,” I said with a shrug.
“Oh,” she said, as if that explained everything. “You do know the room is nonsmoking, right? I allow candles, but I draw the line at cigarettes,” she said as she wrapped the ashtrays in paper.
“Those are just souvenirs,” I said. “Gifts for some relatives.”
“Okay, then.” She leaned forward across the counter and gave me a leering wink. “Have fun, and enjoy your honeymoon.”
My face burning as hot as Owen’s fever had been, I fled the store as soon as I had my shopping bags in hand. I stopped by Ethan’s car on the way back to the room, and just as I’d expected, there was a Manhattan map and a Boy Scout compass in the glove compartment. Heck, from what I knew of Ethan, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find most of the rest of the shopping list in his trunk, because he never knew when he might need gold body glitter and a bunch of herbs.
“Wow, that was fast,” Ethan said when I got back to the room.
“I found everything I needed at the motel shop. And before I bring out any of this, I want to make it clear that I don’t want to hear anything about the nature of the items. I had to get creative, and let’s just say the shop goes right along with the theme of this room and leave it at that.” I gathered from the alarmed expressions on all their faces that I’d made my point.
I emptied my shopping bags onto the room’s table and let Owen inspect what I found. “The herbs are all mixed up, but I’m sure we could separate them, if we have to,” I said when I got nervous about the fact that he was taking so long to look at my purchases and hadn’t said anything yet.
“We’ll have to pull the cloves and anise out of this stuff, but all the rest is fine,” he said. He raised an eyebrow at the body glitter and the label on the Lovers’ Bath Herbs, but otherwise kept his mouth shut. I thought I caught Ethan smirking out of the corner of my eye, but he schooled his expression into neutrality before I could turn and look. I could tell that Merlin was dying of curiosity about the uses for these items, but he also said nothing.
Owen put me to work sorting the cloves and anise out into the ashtrays while he and Merlin set up the spell. They pulled the bedspread off the bed and covered the bed with a dropcloth Ethan had in the trunk of his car. Then they spread the map out on the middle of the bed and placed a candle at each corner. Once I was done sorting spices, Owen put a pinch of the herbs into each ashtray, along with the spices, and arranged those around the map. He then sprinkled a fine line of salt on the floor around the edge of the bed. He had the compass in his hand, but I didn’t see that he was doing anything with the aspirin or the air freshener, so I wondered what role they would play.
“We may want to disable the smoke detector,” Owen said as he settled cross-legged on the bed in front of the map. Ethan took a chair and climbed up to remove the batteries. Merlin sat across from Owen on the bed.
“What do you need me to do?” I asked.
Instead of answering me, Owen turned to Ethan. “Do you have a fire extinguisher?”
Much Ado About Magic Page 11
