On the screen, Larissa Lang laughed at some unseen interviewer’s question. I couldn’t hear what she was saying due to the TV being muted, but suddenly I wanted to know what the segment was about.
I could have cast a spell to boost my ability to read lips, but I would need a warm pebble from a hen’s nest, and hen’s nests were never handy when you needed them. It was much easier for me to use simple telekinesis to press the volume button.
The volume came up as Larissa Lang said, “And that’s exactly why I’m so excited about the remake! Now that Mahra’s daughter Mahrissa is all grown up with children of her own, it’s going to be so fascinating to see how the characters have evolved.”
Larissa Lang played Mahrissa. The similar names led to some continuity errors within the show, where the character was occasionally called by the actress’s name and the editors missed it.
The screen cut to the interviewer. He was dimple-chinned and evidently smitten with Larissa Lang, judging by the puppy-dog eyes he was making at her.
He asked, “What about romance? At the end of the first series, fans got quite the cliffhanger. Your character was having a baby, but it wasn’t clear with whom.”
Larissa fluttered her thick, dark eyelashes. “Did you have anyone specific in mind?”
The dimple-chinned man’s cheeks flushed under his on-camera makeup as he let out a laugh.
Larissa’s focus shifted toward the camera, and she looked directly at the camera lens. It felt like she was looking at me. Darkness shadowed her eyes. The curve of her flirty smile drooped. I knew she was facing a camera lens, and not seeing little ol’ me, sitting under a piñata-strung ceiling in a Mexican restaurant, but I felt the connection anyway. Her eyes drooped, as though she was suddenly overwhelmed with sadness and regret. Or because the dark purple eye shadow weighed too much.
She’s exhausted, I thought. The woman was on a press junket, and that had to be grueling. The show was currently in production. In the midst of a hectic shooting schedule, she had to sit on a stool in a hotel room and answer the same five questions from every entertainment reporter in the city.
I felt bad for her, but not for more than a few seconds. Any sympathy I had for the woman’s exhaustion was quickly overridden by my own selfish desires. She was on the TV screen for one reason only, and it was a good one.
I turned to Charlize and said breathlessly, “They’re actually rebooting Wicked Wives? I have not been informed about this development! What is the point of having all these powers and connections of ours if we don’t receive updates about important, life-changing news?”
Charlize visibly relaxed, and let out the first chuckle of the day that wasn’t darkly ironic.
The sound of a commercial for yogurt blasted on. I muted the TV volume before the restaurant staff came to investigate the noise competing with the contemporary Mariachi music.
“You make a good point about our intel sources,” she said. “Who cares about the monster of the week?” She thrust one chewed finger in the direction at the TV. “This is something.”
“It’s not nothing.”
“We have to watch the premiere together.”
“We have to,” I agreed.
“With Chloe.” Chloe was her sister, also a gorgon. Chloe was a baker, and had probably lovingly baked the pastries that were now trash inside Bugsy or stuck to the bottoms of my socks.
“All three of us will watch the premiere,” I said. I liked the ring of that.
“We’ll have wine?”
Was that an actual question? I held out a hand and gave her a perplexed look. “We’re not going to not have wine.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I wish we didn’t have to wait. It’s not going to start airing for two months.” She glared at the screen. I turned and saw that she was right. According to the graphics on the screen, the premiere of the Wicked Wives reboot wasn’t scheduled to run until a few days before Halloween. It was good marketing for the network to hold back a show about witches until Halloween, but that didn’t make it any less annoying.
I groaned. “What about that screening program you guys have at the Department? Where you get the movies before they come out so you can make sure the magic isn’t too accurate?” I knew about the boxes because my neighbor, Ishmael Greyson, had been in possession of one, back when his head had still been attached to his body.
The gorgon slumped in her chair. “I’m on leave, remember? I can’t get access to anything.”
“That’s not fair. I can understand why you’d be punished, but what about me? I didn’t do anything wrong. Now I have to wait and watch the premiere with all the regular people.” I shook an accusing finger her way. “You’re the one whose baby turned out evil. Why should I have to suffer?”
Charlize gasped in mock outrage and tossed a nacho chip at me.
I caught the chip and ate it while I enjoyed the improvement in the gorgon’s mood. It wouldn’t last long, and she’d be back to chewing her fingers before our entrees arrived, but at least we had a girls’ night to look forward to. And all those plot twists!
What I couldn’t have known then was the plot twist that actress Larissa Lang had in store. The one that was just for me.
Chapter 8
I got home just as a 1986 Nissan 300ZX, custom-painted orange, pulled up to the curb. Neighbors walking their dogs all turned their heads to admire the classic vehicle. We didn’t call the car Foxy Pumpkin for nothing!
My sixteen-year-old daughter hopped out of the driver’s side, flung back her red hair, and ran to give me a hug right there on the sidewalk.
“Fancy meeting you here,” I joked as she squeezed me tight. When she didn’t release me from the hug, I asked, “Rough day at the museum?” She was working at the town’s museum for the summer, in a temporary position that would end when high school started in the fall.
“Not too rough,” she said. “More like a really long day.”
“Tell me about it,” I joked.
My day had started with the security wards being triggered at the house. Then I’d had a double fox encounter in the woods, a surprise visit at work from a sexy vampire and his new partner, followed by lunch with an angry gorgon. Then things really blew up in the afternoon. The head librarian received news of an impending budget cut, via a phone call from her old nemesis Vincent Wick. The minute she ended the call, Kathy flew into the worst tantrum I’d seen yet. Worse than when she had to spend her whole lunch break waiting in line at the bank. And even worse than the time some hacker set the public computers to play the Mexican Hat Dance at full volume randomly throughout the day for a whole week.
Frank and I had to use magic to subdue Kathy and put her in the Grumpy Corner for a timeout. She muttered about budgets and Vincent Wick while demolishing nine cinnamon buns from a distance of ten feet, thanks to her prehensile tongue. After an hour, she’d calmed enough to report back to work, albeit with a crooked, strained expression on her face. She was helping a patron named Helen Highbury with something, and handling it remarkably well—Helen was a known complainer—when suddenly a half-dozen of the public computers began playing the Mexican Hat Dance.
Frank ran interference, getting Helen Highbury clear of Kathy’s blast radius, while I subdued her with three types of calming spells.
It had been quite the day.
Zoey, still hugging me, said, “I should have taken a job somewhere calm and peaceful, like the library.”
I practically chortled at the irony.
She finally released me from the hug, and we walked up to the house.
She said, “Thanks for letting me take Foxy Pumpkin today.”
“No problem.” She could take the bus to her job, but, due to the universal cruelty of bus schedules, the bus tended to drop her off exactly one minute late for her shift, which didn’t work for my punctual daughter.
I said, “It was a good thing I walked into work this morning, anyway.” I paused to take in enough breath to finish with a breezy tone. “I
happened to bump into your grandfather.”
“Pawpaw?” She squealed and clapped her hands. When it came to the man she lovingly called Pawpaw while he called her Zozo, my sophisticated teenager lost all her cool.
“Don’t get too excited.” I opened the front door using magic instead of my key. “He’s probably here on some kind of business. Charlize doesn’t know what he’s up to, but I’m sure it’s something secret. You might not see him this time around.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“Um. He didn’t actually say anything. He was in fox form, and he, um, didn’t shift.”
We were inside the cool, dark house. She flicked on the light and leaned back against the closed door, her hazel eyes wide with concern. “Why? Was he hurt?”
“He’s fine.” I ruffled her hair.
She swatted my hand away. “Why didn’t he change and talk to you? Is he afraid of you?”
“I sure hope so. He’d better be.”
She put her hands on her hips and frowned. “What did you do?”
Busted. “I kinda, sorta cast a form-locking spell on him.”
Her eyes bulged and her arms went limp at her sides. “You did not.”
We were still in the entryway, and the foyer space felt claustrophobic. I kicked off my shoes and traded them for a pair of soft-soled ballerina flats I used as house slippers. I could do the Shoe Dance without looking, but I kept my eyes down to avoid the accusatory look my daughter was shooting at me.
Finally, I waved my fingers like a white flag. “I know, I know,” I said. “Frank already prosecuted me on behalf of all shifters everywhere when I told him.”
She snorted and muttered, “A form-locking spell. Poor Pawpaw.”
Poor Pawpaw? I straightened up and gave her a look of my own. The wise, motherly one. While she did have a point about my breach of supernatural etiquette, there had been a valid reason for it.
“Your grandfather is a dangerous influence,” I said. “Have you forgotten what he did to us? Maybe we need to get your brain checked. I know that my brain is working, because I sure haven’t forgotten.” Or forgiven.
“But we were okay, Mom. It all worked out.” Her eyes glistened. Her lower lip trembled slightly. We were standing so close, I could almost feel the raw teenaged emotions radiating at me. She’d had a long day, and her mother had only comforted her for as long as it took to walk from the sidewalk to the house before delivering news that made the day worse. And it wouldn’t get better for a while. I still had to tell her about the Moores being gone.
“You’re right,” I said softly. “We were okay, and it did all work out. You came into your powers, and you saved the day.”
I reached out and tucked a strand of her red hair behind her ear. She didn’t swat me away.
“There’s more,” I said. “Charlize told me some other stuff. Let’s go to the kitchen and talk.”
* * *
When I was done relaying what I’d learned about my father, Zoey smiled and said, “I knew it.”
“You did not.”
“Pawpaw is one of the good guys.”
I made a face. People being called “the good guys” was one of my pet peeves, like when salespeople say “trust me,” or when anyone says “calm down.”
The floorboard squeaked as another member of the family entered the kitchen.
It was Boa, the fluffy cat who was the manufacturer of all the white hairs that now decorated every single thing I owned, wore, or ate. She looked up and meowed at us. The meow could be interpreted as “hello,” or as “I see that you have been home for more than thirty seconds, and yet you have not begun preparations of my evening meal, so what is the deal with that?”
Zoey scooped up the fluffball and apologized for the slow service while I prepared her meal.
We were new at being cat owners—or cat parents, as some people would say, although neither term really explained the employer/employee nature of the relationship—but I had learned that begging forgiveness while preparing a cat’s meal was not uncommon.
The food smelled terrible to my nostrils, but the cat meowed with excitement. She knocked the dish from my hand as I was setting it down. I used magic to catch the plate. It’s never fun cleaning up a broken dish, but it’s worse when there’s an agitated cat watching with the how-could-you eyes.
The plate landed safely, and Boa happily munched away on the food.
Over the rhythmic sound of the dish rattling on the floor, I told Zoey about my day, including my walk that morning, and meeting the black fox in the woods.
“I knew it,” she said, for the second time.
“You did not,” I said again. “You’re a smart kid, but you don’t know everything.”
“A black fox? That makes perfect sense. I knew I smelled another shifter around the house. Corvin did, too. We agreed it was a fox, but not Pawpaw.”
“You smelled this shifter around the house?” This worried me. Harry Blackstone seemed like a nice enough man, but if he’d been skulking around the house, that changed things.
She shrugged. “Not just around the house, but everywhere. When there’s a new smell in town, you notice, even if you can’t put your finger on what it is, exactly. You wouldn’t understand. It’s a shifter thing.”
“No, I get it. You have a feeling for each other, like an extra sense.”
She glanced in the direction of the Moore house. “That’s funny,” she said. “Speaking of that sense, I can’t sense Corvin.”
She couldn’t sense Corvin, because he was gone. He’d left the country. Without a last goodbye.
My stomach clenched, and not just from the dank smell coming from Boa’s cat food.
This was the conversation that I’d been dreading ever since I’d learned the news. I had to break it to my daughter that spooky little Corvin Moore, who’d become like a kid brother to her, was gone for good.
She already knew about the family’s plans, but she had assumed, like I had, that we had until the end of summer.
I told her.
She... did not take the news well. After a long day of scraping gum off the undersides of benches at the museum, Zoey was in no mood to hear about a friend abandoning her. But who would take such a thing well?
I bit my tongue and let her process the information.
Her process included shooting the proverbial messenger, me. She blamed us for their abrupt departure, but mostly me. I took the flack for a while, because mothers were nothing if not resilient to a bit of undeserved flack, but eventually I had to point out that Dr. Bob was the guilty party to blame. He was the one who had imprisoned Chessa and soured her on the whole town. He’d started everything. Plus he was dead, and why not blame the dead guy?
“I’m sorry,” Zoey said, wiping her cheeks. “I shouldn’t take it out on you. I know it’s not your fault, but I feel so sad, and you’re the only one here.”
“It’s hard to lose someone,” I said.
“Life sucks,” she said.
Her sniffling slowed.
After a moment, I asked, “Are you ready to be cheered up, or do you want to sulk for a while longer?”
She put one finger to the corner of her mouth. “I don’t know.”
“If you’re ready to be cheered up, I do have some amazing, wonderful news,” I said.
The redness in her eyes disappeared instantly.
“They’re rebooting Wicked Wives.”
She rolled her eyes. “That show is so old, Mom. It went off the air when I was a baby. Why would you think that would cheer me up?”
“It’s a show about witches.”
She stared at me like I’d just started eating Boa’s dank-smelling cat food.
“Oh,” I said, picking up a clue from the passing Clue Train. “You’re still lacking in cheer because the show is about witches, not shifters. At least there’s magic. And a few shifters. I remember some wolf and cat shifters.”
She raised her eyebrows higher.
“Oh
,” I said again, as the Clue Train passed in the other direction. “Now I remember. The shifters on the show were all villains and monsters.”
“Yeah,” she said acidly. “Enjoy your cool show, Mom.”
“Things might be different this time around with the reboot,” I said. “The world is changing. It has already changed so much in the last sixteen years. Time sure flies. It seems like it was only yesterday when you waltzed out of my womb, shook hands with the taxi driver who delivered you, and corrected my pronunciation of the name of the hospital we didn’t make it to.”
She stared at me like I had just grown a prehensile sprite tongue and was wagging it around.
Bad timing, I thought. Some days she enjoyed the retelling of her birth. Today was not one of those days.
Just then, the doorbell rang.
“Doorbell,” I said.
“Doorbell,” my daughter agreed.
“Did I order a bunch of pizzas and forget? That doesn’t sound like me. The forgetting part, that is.”
“It’s not pizza,” Zoey said, heading toward the front door. “Mr. Caine is here.”
Mr. Caine, as in Archer Caine, her genie father.
“Wait,” I said. “You’re still calling him Mr. Caine?”
“Would you rather I called him Dad?” She paused on her way to the door, looked at me, and wrinkled her nose. “Or Daddy?”
I shuddered. “Mr. Caine it is.”
Chapter 9
It was quickly explained to me that Archer Caine was there to take my daughter out for dinner.
The two had met for an official father-daughter lunch less than a week earlier, and already another visit was happening? When I’d given my daughter my blessing to see the man, I figured they would take their time getting to know each other. This new weekly date thing was a surprise to me.
Wishful Wisteria (Wisteria Witches Mysteries - Daybreak Book 3) Page 5
