Beck’s face appeared in my mind, and I thought of how miserable we would both be under the curse. And it was very likely the curse was going to lead to my demise. What the hell was I supposed to do with that?
I closed my eyes again. “No, I don’t.”
The reaper is near. Death clouds my sight.
I gulped but pressed on, “Yes, I know, but I have to find Charlaine Gould’s relative. Please, Henrietta.”
I’d never pleaded with her before. I didn’t plead for many things, but in this situation, it certainly couldn’t hurt. My hands were on the crystal ball, and it began to get warm to the touch. When I looked at her, I saw an address in big bold print glowing within her sphere. The pad and pencil were still beside me, so I grabbed them quickly and scribbled the information.
And within seconds Henrietta went cold and lifeless again. I slipped her back into her bag and stood from the floor. “Okay, let’s go.”
The address was a quaint little duplex in Florida. Rhiannon and I appeared right out in the open, and I quickly scanned the area to be sure no one had seen us. Satisfied, I turned to the door and rapped hard. There were several thumps and thuds from inside and then finally the door opened.
The woman standing before us was about my height, with mahogany hair that was pulled back into a messy updo. It was hard to say how old she was. She had a maturity in her eyes, but she could have been as young as late twenties. “Rolayna Gould?
I was fairly certain the Rolayna part was right. I recognized her from the dream. Gould was strictly a guess, based on the fact that she was likely Charley’s magical heir.
“Do I know you?”
“You don’t know us, but we know a relative of yours,” Rhiannon chimed in from beside me, and it was all I could do not to elbow her to keep quiet.
“I don’t have any living relatives.”
But there was a gleam in her expression that indicated she was curious about us. She took a teeny step back, though she continued to hug the door.
“Can we talk to you?” I asked.
She reached up towards her temple and pulled a pencil out of her hair. “I’m very busy.” She scratched the eraser end against her forehead as she regarded me. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Rolayna,” I murmured, rubbing my palms on the front of my pants in nervousness. “It’s really important.”
She took a few more seconds to chew on things, then finally stepped aside and motioned us inside. The place was a pigsty, which surprised me considering how cute it looked from the outside. She had papers and books stacked up on just about every hard surface. There were also half-eaten plates of food and nearly empty glasses of water every where. Whatever the girl was working on, it seemed she’d been at it for days and maybe weeks.
“Are you a college student?” Rhia asked, frowning at the mess.
“Sort of,” Rolayna muttered as she grabbed up a few of the books and carefully set them out of sight. “Now what is it you want?”
“Your name is Rolayna, right? But not Gould?”
She shook her head and the updo wobbled back and forth a bit. My mind told me she should have one hell of a headache with all of that weight on her crown. “No, my name’s Rolayna Hawthorne. Why do you think I’m a Gould?”
My eyes narrowed, and I studied her carefully. The name certainly meant something to her, but for whatever reason she wasn’t interested in offering anything up. Even if she wasn’t admitting to being a relative of Charley’s, it was no secret, to me at least, that she was a witch. I could see the latent power centered around her heart.
“We’re looking for a relative of a Charlaine Gould. She passed away recently, and we… uhm…” I paused, considering my words. “We have some information about an inheritance.”
Rolayna pursed her lips as if struggling to keep from speaking.
“Hey, look at this,” Rhiannon said, and for the first time I realized she’d wandered off to the opposite side of the living area. She was pointing at the page of a book, and when she did, Rolayna’s face blanched. She snatched the old volume away from my friend’s reach and held it to her chest.
“Do you know what that is?” I asked Rhiannon, eyes wide.
“Damn skippy, I do,” Her head bounced up and down for effect.
The binding was identical to the ones sitting at my house at this very moment. I’d suspected that Charley’s memoirs weren’t the only ones in her family. The name on the spine proved that somehow, some way, Rolayna Hawthorne was connected to the Gould family.
“What do you people want?” she pleaded, backing away from us.
I shook my hand and called forth my wand, then pointed it at the book, snapping it away from her so that it flew through the air and straight into my grasp. I wanted to open it and read it immediately, but instead I placed it carefully on a table and then tapped my wand at my palm where I conjured an orb of warm, glowing energy.
Rolayna’s eyes were wide with alarm, but she watched every move I made as if awestruck. When I drew my hand back and tossed the sphere of blue and gold magic in her direction, she did exactly what I expected her to do. She raised both of her hands to cover her face and deflected the ball with her own brand of magic.
“Don’t hurt me!”
I advanced on her. “That was a perfectly harmless bubble. No one’s here to hurt you.”
She looked at me through her fingers, then dropped her hands slowly.
“Look, I wish I had the time to introduce you to your magic the easy way, but I don’t. I need your help now before it’s too late for me.”
“Magic?” Her voice was no more than a whisper, but instead of fear, there was a touch of excitement to it. Her lips tugged up a teeny bit, teasing a smile. “Real magic?”
No, the kind that pulls rabbits from hats. I didn’t say that, but I totally wanted to. “Yes, real magic. You’re the descendant of a witch. You are a witch.”
“Oh. My. Gosh.” She placed her hand to her forehead and then sank down onto the easy chair behind her. “Then it wasn’t just a stupid story. It’s all true.”
I followed her eyes to the book I’d laid on the table a few moments before. “Where exactly did you get that book?”
“I found it in my parents’ attic. Well, it’s kind of a long story …”
I watched her settle back as if to get comfy and decided that I should do it, too. My muscles were wound so tight that my bones hurt. I waved my hand at Rhiannon, and she took the side of the couch to my left. We both waited.
“So I’m a writer. I had a column in Trend-Star Magazine. You might be familiar …”
Rhia sucked in a breath, and I knew it was of the ones she fawned over.
“… special interest stuff, interviews. I was supposed to sit down with Delana Stackhouse when this whole thing started …”
“Holy crap!” My BFF jumped up from her seat, hands on her cheeks and mouth agape. “The Women’s MMA champion! You met Delana Stackhouse? Holy crap!”
“Rhiannon.” My voice was harsh with condescension. “Sit down.”
She did, her head drooping in embarrassment.
“I didn’t meet her.” Rolayna smiled to Rhiannon. “I had a little fender bender, and I was really late for the appointment. Stackhouse and her people threw a fit. She was on a tight schedule and missed a flight, and, well, the magazine had to do damage control. I was out of a job, and Dad insisted I should write a book.”
My patience was starting to wear thin. I couldn’t figure what all this had to do with her being a witch or her family heritage. I rolled my hand out in front of me in a gesture to get the story moving.
“I drew a blank. I had nothing. No ideas whatsoever. That’s when Dad told me about the fairy tales that were passed down from Mom’s great-grandfather, and he sent me into the attic to get this stuff.” She motioned to the array of books and notebooks, all strewn out across the room.
“Tell me about your great-grandfather … umm, I guess your great-great-grandfath
er.”
She pointed to the Gould family memoir. “When he turned eighteen, his parents gave him that book and told him they weren’t his real parents. Apparently his biological mother conceived him out of wedlock. That was in … I guess it was at the end of the Civil War and all. It just wasn’t done, so she gave the baby up. But it was all in the records, and she left some pictures and mementos for her baby to have one day. That book was with them.”
“Her name?” I asked, opening the volume and recognizing that it looked just the same as the one I’d found in Charley’s things.
“Ruth Elizabeth Gould.”
So it seemed that Ruth had treated poor Cedric after the Battle for Kennesaw Mountain. I imagined she probably even used some of her sister’s magical medicines to help him heal. It was clear from her letter to her child that Ruth loved Cedric, but she’d never intended to betray her sister.
Cedric was about to rejoin his unit when she told him about the pregnancy. He immediately penned a missive to his aunt in Tennessee, and that was where Ruth carried and delivered her baby, a boy she named Samuel. The baby, no more than two weeks old, was handed over lovingly to a woman whose child had died that previous winter.
There was no way to know how it was that Ruth and Cedric were reunited to board the doomed train that would lead to their deaths. And of course there was no way for Charley to know about her nephew.
“I guess she could have used her magic to search for him,” I mused as I placed the letter back into its protective sleeve and returned it to Rolayna. “But she wouldn’t have known to look for him, and I’m sure it never would have crossed her mind.”
Rhiannon sniffed and dabbed at her eyes. “It’s just so sad. I feel like I just got through watching a Nicholas Sparks movie.”
I patted my friend’s hand, the look on my face not nearly as sympathetic as the gesture probably seemed. Just mere mention of Sparks’ movies sort of made me want to vomit.
“So what does all of this have to do with me?” Rolayna interjected.
“Great question.” I perked up as I stood. “Your great-great-great grandmother’s sister Charlaine Gould was a witch. She was also married to your great-great-great grandfather, and when she found out about the affair her sister had with him, she was one very pissed-off witch. She decided it was a good idea to curse some wedding dresses. A lot of wedding dresses. She’s dead now, but unfortunately for me, I’ve picked up one of those wedding dress curses.”
Rolayna looked a little green which had me frowning in concern. But I pressed on anyway. “Don’t get the wrong idea. Charley was a wonderful old woman. She changed her ways, and this curse shouldn’t have ever gotten me except for one teeny problem. You. But we’re hoping you can fix all of this.”
“Me?” She pointed at her own chest.
Standing along side me, Rhiannon nodded. “Yep, you’ve got the magic mojo now, so you can remove the curse.”
I fixed my friend with a hard stare. “Maybe.”
Rhiannon couldn’t know it, but I could tell that the amount of magic Rolayna had was only minimum. Like I’d said before, hag witches have very diluted powers. It was entirely possibly this girl would be absolutely no help to me at all.
“A curse? Like, it will kill you or something?”
I turned back to her. “Or something.”
“So whatya say?” my friend asked, ignoring my pessimism. “Are you willing to help us?”
“Are you a witch, too?”
“Nope, I’m a werewolf slash—” She whipped her hand through the air like a karate chop. “—vampire.” Then she winked and headed for the door.
“We don’t need to leave the house, Rhia. We’ll orb from right here.”
“Orb?”
Yeah, I was seriously afraid Rolayna was going to puke. I stood there watching her, my toes tapping with impatience to get going. After a few seconds, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then her head lifted and dropped in a nod.
“Okay, I’ll help. I mean, it’s my family’s fault you’re in this predicament. And if I’m a witch and all, I should learn to use it, right?”
Before she could change her mind, I transported all three of us back to the grotto. When I glanced at her, I was pleased to see that Rolayna’s disposition was slightly different now. There was a spark of interest in her eyes as she watched the sparkle of magic dissipate from her hands.
“We can try a few simple spells first, just to test you out,” I was saying as I rushed through the tunnel of the cave. A look over my shoulder confirmed that both Rhiannon and Rolayna were close on my heels. “Then we’ll push a bit further until we think we can try a … holy crap. What are they doing?”
Dusk was falling, but there was plenty of light to see that Beck, Tig and Sandy were all setting up the cauldron right on Beck’s property. And the scene looked eerily similar to my death vision. Panic took over.
“I said the abandoned church grounds! Why are you putting this here?”
My furious eyes were focused on Beck, who was heaving as she pulled the cauldron up by a chain through a wench to which Sandy attached a hook to held it in place. From the woods Justin and Jilly came bounding out, carrying sticks and limbs that they both began stacking under the huge pot.
“You explain it to her,” Beck deflected and pointed at Tig, then brushed his hands on his hips.
“Well, lots to explain. Lots to explain,” my mentor told me as he motioned me towards the house. I followed, but I was feeling really annoyed by my lack of control over the entire situation, so I stomped my feet all the way.
Once inside, I saw that many of my paranormal and magic books were open in various places around the house. Tig went directly to one and started skimming a page. “So the recipe calls for ‘loving kiss of green, green earth’ which I had no idea what that meant so …” His finger traced the paper then he pointed with a thump. “This says, ‘a kiss of green, green earth shall be added to any potion by the blowing of lips from a nymph, water nymph, sprite, sylph or other earthy creature, provided the action takes place on the grounds from which said creature derives its powers.’ So, there you have it.”
“There I have what?” I demanded. “That doesn’t explain why we’re setting up here.”
“You need a loving kiss of a nymph. Jilly’s the one. We have to be here on her grounds.”
My mouth dropped open, and I began shaking my head side to side, “No! No way. We are not making her a part of this. It’s too dangerous. I want her and Beck and Justin far, far from this when it goes down. I’ll call Breena, and we’ll move our headquarters to her lake house.” Immediately I grabbed my cell phone to contact the nymph who’d been helping teach Jilly about her powers. Tig dropped his head to the side and gave me a look that told me I was missing something. “What?”
I could hear the back door open and close, but I ignored it, still staring down at the goblin.
“Lynlee, the recipe says loving kiss. I’m sure Breena likes you plenty, but she don’t love you.”
The hand holding my phone dropped to my side, and my shoulders drooped as well. “Tig, I can’t. I just can’t”
“You’re our family, Lynlee.”
It was Beck’s voice, and when I heard him, my heart cracked wide open with all the love I felt for him and those two kids. I swallowed, wanting so much to look at him, to fall into his arms and let him hold me. But I stayed perfectly still. “This is dangerous, Beck. I don’t know who or why someone comes after me. I can’t put Jilly’s life in jeopardy.”
When two hands that I knew so well came down on my shoulders, I closed my eyes and leaned back into him. Just the stalwart strength of his body to mine was like a bastion for me to cling to in that moment. I pulled my lips into my mouth to keep them from trembling.
“Tig says he’ll have safeguards in place. A door.”
“Don’t worry, girlie. I’m gonna give ‘em this little key, and all they have to do is twist it in the air to open a door that will take them to
a place where no one can find them.”
I pulled air into my lungs and then allowed it to hiss out between my lips before opening my eyes and nodding to Tig. He grinned, baring his big yellow teeth. “Could you give me and Beck a minute?”
“Sure thing.”
When he was gone I carefully took a few steps to put space between my boyfriend and I. To my dismay, he matched those steps so that he could stay as close as possible to me.
“Don’t pull away from me,” he said, reaching out for me.
I gently pushed his hands away. “Give me a minute, okay?”
I watched him grit his teeth, but he slipped his hands into his back pockets and raised his head to look down his nose at me, waiting for me to speak.
“Beck, I need you to understand what’s happening here. I’ve had a death vision. They’re never wrong.”
A little twitch in his eye gave him away, but he managed a smile to try to ease the moment. “I know. Rhiannon explained it to me. I get it.”
“Damn it, you don’t get it! You none of you get this at all! Yes, I’ll do what I can to keep this from happening, but never, not one single time in the history of witches and death visions has a single witch ever successfully defeated the death vision. Not one time, Beck. There is like a trillion to one chance that I’m going to make it to see Thursday morning. And you and the kids need to accept that. Don’t go believing whatever crap Tig or Rhia or whoever tell you. You’ve got to protect yourself and your family.”
His face had gone pale, and there was a pained look in his eyes. “You’re a part of our family,” he said again.
I crossed my arms around me in a pitiful attempt to shield myself from the feelings created by his words. When he reached for me, I backed up. I didn’t want to be touched. Or coddled. Or anything at that moment.
But Beck Hale was having none of that. “Lynlee…”
Reaping Trouble (The Lynlee Lincoln Series Book 4) Page 6
