Love Spells Trouble

by Nova Nelson

  “Too soon,” I replied. “Forever too soon.”

  Oliver began laying out the lesson plan for the evening, and I pretended to listen. A shiver shook my spine as we entered the library. Not because it was cold—it was probably a few degrees warmer inside than out in the October air—but because a spirit walked right through me.

  “Excuse you,” she said.

  “Excuse yourself,” I barked back.

  Oliver side-eyed me. “Ghost?”

  “Yeah. Rude one, too.”

  “Since we’re in public, we should probably stick to text-based learning,” he suggested as we planted in the large entryway and scanned for an open table.

  “You don’t think everyone in this library wants to see me botch spell after spell with my wand?”

  “No,” he said, overlooking the sarcasm, “I don’t think they want that.”

  I pointed to an open table next to Anton’s usual spot. He was there, as expected, with a large tome open on the table in front of him. Except, for the first time, the ogre wasn’t alone.

  And he wasn’t looking at the book.

  Octavia Pantagruel, the ogre on the High Council, sat across from him as the two of them gazed silently into each other’s eyes. As we passed, I caught a glimpse underneath the thick oak table where Octavia’s boot ran slowly up and down Anton’s leg.

  “What in the spell is going on around here?” I asked Grim. “I thought they were just friends.”

  “Who’s to say they aren’t? You never played footsy with a friend?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  We parked it at the open table, and Oliver, who’d apparently missed the ogres’ interaction completely in his preoccupation with the cover of one of the floating books, flicked his wand, summoned a stack of reading material to our table. They were all standard texts, he explained, which was why they could be levitated via magic from the main chamber of the library, rather than needing to be retrieved individually from the various tunnels.

  I wondered if he’d ever ventured into the winding caverns where the more dangerous and arcane books were housed, but every time I thought to ask him, a guttural grunt from beside us derailed my train of thought.

  I don’t remember what we talked about for the first half hour of our lessons. My mind was in twenty places at once.

  Oliver shut a heavy book with a thud that pulled me back to the present. “You’re not paying attention, Nora.”

  “What? How can you tell? I mean, yes I am!”

  He shook his head. “No. You have something on your mind, so let’s hear it. Until you talk about it, you’re not going to be able to focus, and Pondelwally’s Thin Line theorem is an important thing for you to know, as a Fifth Wind.”

  I doubted that, but he had a point about me needing a sounding board. I leaned forward to avoid being overheard. “Do you not hear the little grunts coming from this blossoming romance behind us?”

  He glanced over my shoulder at Anton and Octavia. “I wouldn’t call it a blossoming romance.”

  I chuckled. “What would you call it?”

  He shrugged. “Rekindled romance?”

  “Rekindled?”

  “Yeah.” He opened his mouth to speak, but shut it quickly, biting his lip in thought. Then he stood and nodded for me to follow him as he added distance between the ogres and himself. I hurried after him, and we stopped not far from the information desk, where the librarian Helena pointedly ignored us as she worked on her moving word puzzles.

  Oliver clarified what he’d meant earlier. “Octavia and Anton used to be married.”

  “Seriously?” I hissed.

  “Yep. It ended pretty poorly about ten years ago. Not sure who started the brawl, but Deputy Manchester was the one who put a stop to it. Both Anton and Octavia were pretty beat up by the time Stu managed to separate them.”

  “That’s horrible.” I glanced over my shoulder at Anton. “Wait, I’ve been employing a domestic abuser this whole time?”

  Oliver laid a hand on my shoulder to get my attention. “That’s how ogres handle things. They’re not the best at using their words, so they tend to use their fists. Besides, everyone is pretty sure Octavia threw the first punch.”

  “I … don’t know if that matters. But okay, go on.”

  “They patched it up pretty quickly afterward and have just been friends since. Or, at least, they were just friends.”

  “Now it looks like they’re something more.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. I didn’t see that coming, actually.”

  I sighed. “It seems to be the season of past love.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said, shrugging.

  I arched an eyebrow for him to go on, and he added, “I’ve only ever been in love once.”

  Oliver, my boy! In love! It was hard to imagine such a composed, stony-faced intellectual falling head over heels for a girl. “Really?” I said, grinning. “How old were you then?”

  “Um. Twenty-nine,” he said.

  That stopped me in my tracks. “Hold on there. Aren’t you twenty-nine now?”

  He nodded sheepishly and his cheeks turned pink.

  “Ooh, boy,” I said, refraining from making the scene I so desperately wanted to. “She’s got you bad, hasn’t she?”

  “Yep,” he said, finally breaking and laughing at himself. “She does.”

  “I take it the two of you are officially dating, then?” Yes, I had other things to think about, but come on! How adorable was this?

  There was something so pure and uncomplicated about Zoe and Oliver that I just wanted to revel in it.

  “We are,” he said, blushing. “We officially ended our academic relationship last week. Had to go to the Coven leadership and inform them of the relationship. They agreed she should be assigned another tutor.”

  “And who’s that?”

  Oliver grinned. “Trisha Grainsworth.”

  I wasn’t familiar with the name. “Why are you smiling?”

  “Because Trisha is easily ten years Ruby’s senior, mumbles horribly, and smells like stewed onions,” he said, “it was between her and Jacob Stalwart.” He tipped his head like I should know what that meant.

  But I didn’t. I had no clue who Jacob Stalwart was, either. “Who’s he?”

  Oliver rolled his eyes. “Only the most dreamy teacher at the university. Wavy sun kissed blond hair, a truly useless amount of muscles for someone with a wand, and a perfectly symmetrical face.”

  “Sounds like someone’s hot for teacher,” I said.

  “Trust me, if I decided to go that direction, it’d be his office hours I would crash.”

  I nodded. “I can see why you’re glad Zoe didn’t get him as a tutor.”

  “Go back to what you were saying, though. Something about the season of past love.”

  Did I want to give him the scoop? It seemed a bit gossipy, but Oliver would approach it from a studious angle, so maybe it wouldn’t feel so icky.

  “Octavia and Anton aren’t the first to go back to old loves. I can think of at least two other romances …” I caught myself. No point in ignoring my own part to play in this. “No, four other romances that show signs of heating up again.”

  He stroked his chin. “Interesting.”

  There was one piece of the mystery that, as far as I knew, wasn’t quite like the others. “Would you say you keep in the know about relationships in Eastwind?”

  Oliver nodded adamantly. “Oh yeah, It’s part of being a West Wind witch,” he said. “And part of never dating. We’re naturally attuned to relationships, and because I didn’t have distractions of my own until recently, I’ve been able to observe others.”

  Perfect. Turned out, Oliver Bridgewater was exactly who I needed to speak with. “Any chance you know about Ruby’s history?”

  “Ruby True?”

  I nodded.

  He seemed confused but went on anyway. “I’ve heard plenty of rumors about Ruby’s younger days. Of the credible ones, it seems she’s ha
d two main romantic entanglements.”

  I cringed. “Please don’t use that word.”

  “Which word?”

  “Entanglements.” The images from only a couple hours before flashed fresh in my mind’s eye. “Don’t ask me to explain, please. You don’t want to know. Go on.” I waved for him to continue, and he did so, but hesitantly.

  “O-kay, as I was saying, to my knowledge she’s only had two romances since coming to Eastwind. The first was with Count Malavic.”

  If my jaw could have fallen to the floor, it would have. “What?!” I yelled.

  Helena looked up from her desk and shushed me fiercely.

  “Sorry,” I whispered back to her. I addressed Oliver again, more quietly this time. “Ruby and Malavic?”

  He nodded. “It was fairly one-sided, though, and from what I’ve heard, it was … mostly physical.”

  I put my face in my hands. “For fang’s sake,” I moaned.

  “That was years ago,” Oliver added. “As far as romances with any sort of tenderness go, I only know of one.”

  “And that is?” But I already knew the answer. I just needed him to confirm it for me so my theory could click into place.

  “Ezra Ares.”

  “When did that end?”

  “About forty years ago.”

  “Whoa. That’s a while.”

  He nodded. “From what I heard, it was the aging that doomed it. Whether Ezra can’t age or simply refuses to, Ruby wasn’t okay with growing old while he stayed the same age.”

  “That makes sense,” I said, “but I have news for you: she stopped caring.”

  He raised an eyebrow at me.

  “Yep,” I said. “It looks like the two of them have also rekindled this romance. And what’s more, I think we might have a real problem on our hands, Oliver. People are dropping left and right, falling right back into the arms of past loves. I think something serious might be going on in Eastwind.”

  He leaned forward, his brow creasing. “The Winds of Change?” he whispered.

  “That might be part of it, but I’m pretty sure there’s something more behind this. Or possibly someone more.”

  Chapter Nine

  “What you’re talking about,” said Oliver after I’d filled him in on the generalities of what I knew, “sounds a lot like a love spell.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?”

  He bounced on his heels anxiously and nibbled at a fingernail before muttering, “We’re not even close to learning about love spells. If they’re not a step beyond past-life magic, they’re at least level with it.”

  “Really?”

  He stared at me gravely. “Oh yeah. Making people fall for past loves all over again would require a level of power that no individual witch I know about possesses.”

  “Care to elaborate?”

  He smiled, waved his wand, and a moment later, a thick book bound in red leather flew at us. He caught it without much difficulty, tucked it under his arm, and made for the empty table again, under which Grim was still sound asleep. “Here, follow me.”

  Once we were seated, he browsed the table of contents until he found what he needed, then he flipped to that page and spun the book so I could read it right-side-up. “There,” he said, pointing at a short list.

  The words were scrawled in an elegant black cursive with decorative flourishes around the uppercase letters. “Connection, Emotion, Will, Intellect, and Spirit.”

  He nodded. “Each of those things relates to one of the winds.” He moved his finger down the list, starting with connection. “West Wind, East Wind, South Wind, North Wind, and Fifth Wind. It’s more complicated, obviously, but we don’t have all week to get into the nuance of this. Suffice it to say the powers of each wind must be combined before a love spell with any strength can be accomplished.”

  The implications of that new tidbit were many. “That means it would require either Ruby or me to make it happen. I can’t see her participating in anything that might bring more trouble to her doorstep, which this already has.”

  Oliver shrugged a shoulder. “Trouble with benefits.”

  “Stop.” I held up a hand, closing my eyes for a moment to regroup before continuing. “I didn’t start this either. So what gives?”

  “I think that’s obvious: it wasn’t a witch.”

  “Okay, what was it? What else could have cast a love spell on Eastwind, presuming that’s what we’re deal with?”

  “Lots of things,” he said, flipping to further in the book. I looked down at the page he stopped on. According to the heading, it was a complete list of every known creature capable of casting a love spell. The part I found most surprising was just how many things were equal to or more powerful than a witch circle. From speaking with folks in Eastwind, I might have guessed the number of beings in that category could be counted on two hands.

  Clearly, I needed to pay more attention to my studies. “This doesn’t exactly narrow it down,” I said.

  “Sure it does,” he said cheerily. “The half of these things don’t exist in our realm, so they can be ruled out.”

  “Only half? There has to be a hundred different things on here. I don’t even know what most of them are.” I let my eyes pick out a few random ones that caught me by surprise. “Hundun? Archetype? Does that really say demigod? There are actual demigods running around?”

  “Not here, thankfully,” he said.

  Then my eyes danced over to a single word that stopped me in my tracks: genie.

  Holy smokes. Could this be Emagine? Would she cast a love spell on Eastwind? According to this book, she could if she wanted to.

  I considered mentioning that to Oliver, but I didn’t know how he would respond, and now was not the best climate to start rumors and lob accusations when I lacked any evidence. Eastwind might not have experienced its own witch trials like my old world, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t entirely capable of launching a witch hunt.

  Of course, this one would be a genie hunt.

  “I’ll have to think more about it,” I said. “Maybe it’s nothing. Why don’t we finish up our lesson?”

  “You think you can focus on it?”

  “I’ll try.”

  He sighed heavily. “That’s about as good as I can ask, I guess.” He moved the love spells book to the side and opened the other one again. “Where were we? Right. Pondelwally’s Thin Line theorem. Now, as Pondelwally famously stated …”

  I may have only had a lead on what was going on, but it was enough to quiet down the swirl of disparate encounters that had clogged my attention thus far: Eastwinders were being influenced by a love spell that made them want to return to old stomping grounds. I had my answer to the question of Bruce and Heather’s return from the beyond. Unfortunately, with that answer came even bigger questions: Who was behind this, and how could I put a stop to it?

  Chapter Ten

  “You gotta admit,” said Grim as we descended the stairs leading away from the library, “the timing of Emagine’s appearance in Eastwind is suspect.”

  “I know. But we can’t jump to conclusions. For the time being, she has means and opportunity, but no motive. How does she benefit by random Eastwinders returning to past loves?”

  “I’m just saying, you need to speak with her.”

  “I plan on it, but before that, I need to speak with Jane.”

  Since speaking with Ruby had been a bust and I had a pretty good idea of what was going on, even if I had no idea who was doing it or how to stop it, I thought I should update my best friend on the issue that originally hooked me into this strangeness.

  I hugged my overcoat closer to me as a cold wind whipped at my back. Not the Winds of Change—those gusts carried a bit of anxiety with them that seeped into my bones with each blast—just the usual variety for this time of year.

  “Maybe I should visit Landon,” I said. “This sounds like just the conspiracy for him.”

  “We don’t need him for this,” Grim replied. “All w
e have to do is work backward. What’s the effect of this spell?”

  I thought about it. “You mean besides the emotional trauma we both suffered back at Ruby’s?”

  “Yes, besides that.”

  “Right now, it’s just a few people getting a second chance.”

  “You and I both know that second chances can be unwelcome. What I wouldn’t give to have died and stayed dead …” he moaned.

  “You would have missed out on a lot of bacon if you had.”

  “Fair point.”

  I considered again what he’d said. Not the part about wishing he were dead, but the other thing. “In Jane and Ansel’s case, the second chance is disruptive and might even hurt an otherwise good relationship. And for Octavia and Anton, a second chance might lead to another knock-down drag-out fight.” I nudged the current situation further down the slippery slope, like Landon would do. “If this spreads, it could cause complete chaos in Eastwind.”

  “Exactly. Love is not your friend.”

  “Oh please. You’re telling me you’ve never been in love?”

  “That wasn’t what I was saying, but for your information, no, I’ve never been in love. Outside of you and Mr. Dark and Stormy, the Deadwoods isn’t generally known as a matchmaking haven. But back to the chaos. Who benefits from chaos in Eastwind?”

  I knew the answer immediately. “The people in power. Especially if they’re trying to push through fear-mongering laws. You think the mayor might be behind this?”

  “That seems to be the direction the conspiracy leans. But then again, conspiracies are usually nothing but unicorn swirls.”

  As we approached Medium Rare, someone else was approaching from the other direction. He nodded. “Evening, Ms. Ashcroft.” Then he opened the door for us, but I paused before entering.

  “Are you just getting off your shift, Stu?”

  “Yep. Got stuck on a call until I could hand it off to that boyfriend of yours. A couple of teen witches thought it would be fun to hold a chugging contest with a growth potion.” He shook his head, exhaling roughly. “It’s quite an incredible thing that any man survives his teen years.”