Spells & Stitches

by Barbara Bretton

  I shot Kim a look, which didn’t exactly stop her in her tracks.

  “You’re seriously telling a pregnant woman she can’t use the bathroom?”

  I could think of a thousand reasons why she shouldn’t, but short of tackling my pregnant sister, there was nothing I could do to stop her.

  The day just kept getting better.

  CHLOE

  By the time I ducked into the ladies’ room I looked like a giant Fourth of July sparkler and had to submerge my hands in water in an attempt to control the collateral damage. As it was, the door around the handle looked pretty scorched and I wasn’t so sure the carpet in the hallway had escaped unscathed.

  The first thing I did was turn one of the faucets on full blast and plunge my fiery hands into the cold water. Steam billowed up around me and I was glad my mascara was waterproof.

  “I told you so.”

  I let out a strangled shriek as Elspeth dog-paddled her way across the sink.

  “Get out of here!”

  “You got yourself in trouble, missy, and ’twill only get worse. The warning signs came to me even through the dimensional barrier. ’Tis time for you to go home before it be too late.”

  “It’s time for you to get lost. You promised, Elspeth. You know you can’t be here.”

  This was a public bathroom. I’d bet my entire stash that either Bunny or one of the sisters marched through that door within the next ninety seconds. If Elspeth would shut up for two seconds maybe I could pass her off as a runaway garden gnome, but other than that I was screwed because there was no way in the heavens or on earth that I could explain a troll to the MacKenzies.

  She did a choppy backstroke around my hands. “My only promise was to Himself and that was to see you through to your time and see you through I will.” Her loyalty to Samuel was starting to be a pain in the butt.

  I had lost the assistant midwife battle with her months ago when she petitioned Brianne and Lilith to attend the birth. She claimed it was to ensure the continuity of Aerynn and Samuel’s line, but I figured she was just yanking our collective chain.

  “Go back to whatever dimension you were hanging out in. We’ll meet you at the truck later.”

  “The things that protect you from harm cannot protect you here,” she said, ignoring my protests. “The wee one is in danger until you return home.”

  “I’m not due for another three weeks,” I said, cradling my belly in the time-honored way of all pregnant women. “We’ll be home before you know it.”

  She aimed a baleful glance in my direction, then, holding her nose between two gnarled fingers, circled the drain and disappeared.

  If only.

  Luke was right. That constant talk of doom and danger got old very fast. Nine months is a long time. I had spent most of my pregnancy so far worrying about all the terrible things that could go wrong along the way. None of them had happened, thank the gods, but I wasn’t at the finish line yet.

  “There isn’t a finish line,” Janice had told me over lunch the week before. “You think your worrying ends once you have that beautiful baby in your arms, but, honey, it’s only just beginning.”

  Lynette claimed that having a child was like wearing your heart on the outside of your body for the rest of your life and this time next month I would find out how true that was. But for right now my heart was doing a pretty good imitation. Elspeth’s rantings had sent my imagination skittering along pathways that were dangerous to an expectant mother’s peace of mind.

  Snow. Icy roads. A three-hundred-year-old troll with issues running wild in the mortal dimension. Not to mention about a thousand MacKenzies talking about me over brunch while I hid in the bathroom and waited for my fingertips to quit sizzling.

  Just your average Sunday.

  I stepped up to the paper towel dispenser on the far wall. It had one of those motion-sensing devices that required you to waggle your fingers in front of the red light in order to signal it to dispense a length of paper.

  I waggled and all hell broke loose. Paper spewed from the machine like lava from Vesuvius. I tried covering the red light with the back of my hand, but that only made things worse. You wouldn’t think such a small receptacle could hold so much paper. It was everywhere, entwined around my ankles, drifting across the tiled floor, draped over the sinks and light fixtures.

  As if that wasn’t enough, the toilets started synchronized flushing. I didn’t want to think what might be next. I needed help and fast. I wasn’t crazy enough to bring Elspeth back and I couldn’t call the Roto-Rooter Man.

  That left Janice.

  I cupped my hands together and prayed my blueflame capabilities were still manageable. The last thing I needed was to set Carole’s Lakeside Inn on fire.

  “Make it snappy,” Janice said as her hologram shimmied into view above the row of bathroom sinks. “I’m waxing the entire Griggs family and it’s bedlam around here.”

  “Bedlam?” I said and gestured at the chaos all around me.

  “Whoa.” She sounded impressed. “I take it you lost your temper.”

  “Big time,” I said and gave her a quick-and-dirty version of what had happened so far, including Elspeth’s afternoon swim.

  Janice let out a sigh that made her hologram ripple like the surface of a lake on a windy day. “I hate it when I’m right.”

  “Luke warned me. You warned me. Old Butter Head warned me. But did I listen? Of course not. I just had to meet the Fockers.”

  Janice snorted. “The Fockers?”

  “Worse. You wouldn’t believe the questions they threw at me. I’m surprised his mother didn’t ask my cup size.”

  “They’re humans. Nosy is in their DNA. You of all people should know that.”

  Okay, so maybe I had done more than my share of poking around town in search of gossip, but before I came into my powers it was the only way I could find out what was going on. I worked on a need-to-know basis and as de facto mayor I needed to know everything. Being half human put me at a major disadvantage. Everyone else was plugged into some kind of interdimensional Twitter account while I was stuck eavesdropping and peering into medicine cabinets.

  Metaphorically speaking, of course.

  I burst into tears and the doors to the stalls began to swing open and closed in unison. “They—they wanted to know about m-my father’s family and—oh, I don’t know what happened, Janice. I just plain lost it.” I struggled to rein in the waterworks, but they were as out of my control as everything else in my life. “Next thing I knew, flames were starting to burn my fingertips and I ran out of there.”

  “I would’ve just turned them all into stinkbugs.”

  I have to admit I was tempted, but reason won out over emotion for once. “Don’t worry,” Janice said. “You won’t have any magick at all right after you deliver. It takes a few weeks for those crazy postpartum hormones to regroup with your powers.”

  “I never thought I’d say this, but I could use a break from magick.”

  Janice laughed. “You’re definitely Sugar Maple’s first pregnant flamethrower.”

  “You’ve got to help me before his mother or sisters storm the bathroom!”

  Magick didn’t travel well and trying to launch a spell over blueflame was pretty much destined to fail, but I was desperate.

  Better yet, Janice was game. “I’m thinking the seventh variation of the Triad might work if we can sync it up, but only if we supplement it with the third ritual from the Householders ceremony.”

  “That’s your territory,” I reminded her. “That ceremony is limited to members of your bloodline.”

  “Crap,” Janice said. “Then we’ll have to—”

  “Chloe?” Luke’s sister Kim stood in the doorway, staring at the scene in front of her. The look on her face was the kind of look you’d expect from a woman who had just walked in on her husband while he was trying on her favorite lacy red bra.

  I felt like someone had punched me in the solar plexus. We weren’t in Sugar M
aple. There was no protective charm shielding the truth of our magick from human eyes.

  I waited for Kim to either run screaming from the room or approach Janice’s hologram for a closer look, but she did neither. She just stood there staring at me.

  Was it possible to get lucky twice in an hour?

  “Which one is that?” Janice asked from within her hologram. “She’s either pregnant or hitting the Ring Dings pretty hard.”

  “Be quiet!” I didn’t mean to say it quite that loud.

  Kim’s cheeks reddened. “Did you just tell me to be quiet?”

  Janice snickered and I glared at her, which, thanks to some unfortunate positioning, looked like I was glaring at Kim, whose cheeks grew even redder.

  “Listen, I’m sorry things got crazy out there,” Kim said, completely oblivious to Janice’s intense scrutiny, “but, believe it or not, I’m on your side.”

  “I didn’t tell you to be quiet,” I said, struggling to ignore Janice, who was rolling her eyes like an overdrawn cartoon character. “I was talking to the baby.”

  At that Janice let out a howl of laughter that made the outer edges of her hologram vibrate like a tuning fork gone wild.

  “You told the baby to be quiet?” Poor Kim was starting to look scared.

  “Get out of this one, Hobbs, and I’ll babysit free for the first year.” Janice was enjoying this way too much.

  “No,” I said, doing my best to pretend none of this was happening, “of course not! Be still. That’s what I told her. Be still! She’s been moving around so much today I’m getting seasick.”

  Kim frowned. “I could swear you said be quiet.”

  “Acoustics can be very deceptive,” I said. “Did you know there’s a sweet spot in the Capitol Building where you can hear a whisper clear across the Rotunda?”

  “Good one,” Janice said, “but I don’t think she’s buying it.”

  If there had been a window in the bathroom, I think Kim would have made a break for it. Good thing the swinging doors and mountain of paper towels took her mind off my historical non sequitur as she carefully stepped into the room and looked around.

  “What on earth happened in here?”

  I struggled to look innocent. “All I did was turn on the faucet and all hell broke loose.”

  Janice was still laughing as her pixels dissolved and the blueflame connection guttered. Kim, however, continued watching me like I was a runaway convict about to take her hostage. She bent down and untangled a length of paper towels that had ensnared her ankles and tossed the crumpled mess into the trash container near the door.

  “I went to jiggle the handles,” I said by way of explanation, “but the new toilets don’t have handles.” I gestured toward the wonky towel dispenser. “Not quite sure what I did to that.”

  “You should tell the hostess,” Kim said in the tone of voice you would use with a troublesome child. “She probably has a list of plumbers or handymen she can call.”

  “I really hate to bother her.” More than Kim could possibly understand.

  “Oh, wait!” You could almost see the light dawn. “You’re friends with the owner, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said, “business acquaintances, and I’m totally humiliated.”

  “Accidents happen,” Kim said, relaxing visibly as if it was all beginning to make some kind of sense. “She’s not going to hold it against you. We’ll talk to her together.” A smile broke the tension on her face. “I can be your witness.”

  I made a mental vow to arrange for a group of itinerant working pixies to add Carole’s Lakeside Inn to their list of secret stops. An anonymous mea culpa for causing this disaster in the first place.

  “So,” Kim said, hands splayed across her burgeoning belly in a gesture I knew very well, “except for the water and the paper towels and my family, how are you doing?”

  I curled my fingertips into my palms and willed myself into a no-flame zone. “Better, thanks.”

  “Sorry about what happened out there. I think the excitement got the better of them. You’re pretty much all they’ve talked about since Ma met you at your yarn shop.”

  “They’re pretty much all we’ve talked about, too.”

  “They came on pretty strong, but I guess they figured this might be their only chance to get some answers so they went for it.”

  I chose my words carefully. “I know Luke’s been a little ... distant.”

  “We were beginning to wonder if he’d gone into witness protection.”

  Kim laughed and I smiled along with her. The tingling in my fingertips abated and I found myself relaxing for the first time since I opened my eyes that morning.

  “I didn’t just come in here to spy,” Kim said. “I also came to pee.” The toilets had finally tired of autoflushing and she chose the second stall. “If it makes you feel any better,” she called out through the closed door, “they’re interrogating Luke like he’s wanted for murder.”

  “Actually it makes me feel guilty.”

  “Guilty!” Her laughter rang out in the small room. “He earned every second of it. You can’t disappear the way he did. Families don’t work that way.”

  “A bit of a sweeping statement, don’t you think?”

  I heard the sound of the john flushing normally, then Kim joined me at the sink.

  “We know he went through a terrible time after—” She stopped abruptly and looked down at her soapy hands and regrouped. “After Steffie died, he wasn’t himself. Then he and Karen divorced and there was a lot of pressure from my parents to get back together. I guess he reached his limit. God knows, I would have reached it a lot sooner. But at least when he was on the force in Boston we knew where to find him. Once he left, he seemed to cut all ties.”

  I watched as she grabbed a length of dry towel that was draped over the sink. “Like you said, he had his reasons.”

  “If Fran Kelly hadn’t bumped into the two of you in Salem last spring, we probably still wouldn’t know about the baby.”

  Kim was his sister but she didn’t have a clue what made him tick. Another one of my notions about family shot down. Blood mattered, but it wasn’t everything. It seemed his friends in Sugar Maple understood him better than his sister did.

  “You’re right,” I said. “He didn’t plan to tell you until after our daughter was born. You might not agree with his decision, but you should respect it.”

  She blinked as if my words had startled her. They definitely startled me. But they were the right words and I was glad I’d spoken them. Luke and our baby came first. Everybody else would have to fall in line behind them.

  The baby kicked hard—noticeably harder than usual—and I winced.

  “Are you okay?” Kim’s image wavered in front of my eyes and I closed them against a surge of dizziness.

  “I’m fine.” At least I thought I was. “I guess she’s tired of waiting for breakfast.”

  But, as it turned out, breakfast wasn’t exactly what my daughter had in mind.

  12

  LUKE

  I was a half second away from barging into the ladies’ room to see what was going on, when Chloe and Kim strolled back into the dining room.

  “Better watch out, Luke,” my sister Jen called out. “Now Chloe knows all your secrets.”

  Kim gave an exaggerated wink and some of the tension in the room vanished. “You’re in trouble now,” she said to me. “I gave the woman all the ammunition she’ll ever need.”

  Chloe laughed along with the rest of us, but her mouth was tight and the twinkle in her eyes had gone missing. You didn’t have to be a cop to know something was wrong.

  “You feel okay?” I brushed her left ear with my lips.

  “I think I’m just hungry.” She took my hand and placed it on her belly. “She’s kicking up a storm. It feels like she’s wearing cleats.”

  I studied her face. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” she said quietly, leaning into me for a second. “I just
don’t feel right.”

  “Better get yourself some pancakes, Cleo,” my dad said, “before I eat them all.”

  “It’s Chloe,” my mother said, “not Cleo.”

  Chloe flashed him a tired smile. “I kind of like Cleo.”

  “You know what?” He pushed back his chair. “I’m gonna fix you a plate.”

  “The last time he fixed anyone a plate, Nixon was in office,” Ronnie said, to raucous laughter, but my dad was on his feet and on his way to do a little hunting and gathering.

  “My mom’s a nurse,” I reminded Chloe. “You want her to take a look?”

  “There’s nothing to see. There was a little excitement in the ladies’ room, but everything is fine now. I guess I just tire more easily than I realized.”

  I’d lived with her long enough to know that “a little excitement” was a euphemism for “disturbance in the magickal force field.” I also knew that magick had a way of knocking you on your ass. No wonder she was wiped.

  My dad presented her with a plate piled high with pancakes and bacon and scrambled eggs and a side of hash browns that looked like half of Idaho contributed to it. Chloe gulped hard but thanked him and made a show of digging in even though her appetite was clearly nonexistent.

  Okay, now I was worried. The woman I loved was slender, but she could outeat a lumberjack. She was picking at her pancakes like food was an alien notion.

  Conversation ebbed and flowed around us. I did my best to keep up with it, but I was mostly focused on Chloe, who was clearly drooping fast.

  Finally I made a show of checking my watch. “I think we’d better shove off,” I said. “We have a long drive and I’d like to get home before the roads ice over.”

  The look of naked gratitude in Chloe’s eyes told me I’d read the situation right. There were the usual protests, but one look at Chloe’s face kept those protests to a minimum.

  My mother pulled me aside while Chloe said her good-byes to my dad and the others.

  “Why don’t you see if you can get a room here for the night?” she suggested. “I don’t like the way she looks.”