Casting Spells (21 page)

I wouldn’t miss it. So far thinking hadn’t been getting me anywhere. Talking to Janice hadn’t yielded anything new beyond a haircut I didn’t need and some unsolicited romantic advice about steering clear of Chloe.

I had a few dozen people left to question but I didn’t expect any smoking guns. The signs still pointed toward an accidental drowning with no evidence of any complicity on the part of her boyfriend, Dan Sieverts. He was turning out to be nothing more than your average self-serving politician on the rise.

“Shit.”

Paul, who was patching some drywall, shot me a look. “What?”

“Do you have a number for...” Goober. Gomer. What the hell was his name? “Gonner?”

“Gunnar,” he said, barely suppressing a grin. “No number but I could pass on a message.”

“E-mail address?”

“Sorry.”

“Chloe probably has his number,” I said, stripping off the plastic painting gloves and tossing them in the trash. “Be right back.”

I didn’t bother with a jacket. That was my first mistake. The temperature had dropped a good ten degrees thanks to a squirrely wind that whipped the snow into minitwisters. The few feet between buildings felt like a trek across frozen tundra.

Second mistake?

I didn’t knock.

I’d been sucker-punched a few times in my life, ambushed in a drug raid, clubbed in the gut with a two-by-four that sent me flying.

Good times compared to the sight of Chloe in his arms.

They looked great together. They were both tall. Both blond. Their kids, if they had any, would look like movie stars, just like everyone else in this town.

So much for thinking we had some crazy kind of chemistry going between us. The woman had chemistry with every guy in town. Hell, her knit shop was starting to look like a female version of the Playboy Mansion.

I let myself out the back door.

The sad part was they were so caught up in each other that they never even knew I’d been there.

“Get what you wanted?” Paul asked as I knocked snow off my shoulders.

“More.” A monosyllable was the best I could do.

“You left your cell here. It’s been beeping its ass off.”

The phone was buried under a pile of crap in the anteroom between the bathroom and a store room.

The screen was black. I toggled the switch. Still nothing. The sound Paul heard must have been the low battery warning. Too bad I’d left the charger cord back at the motel. I dug deeper into the pile and found my Blackberry but it was dead. I pulled my laptop out of its case and pressed the ON button. I wasn’t surprised when nothing happened there either.

I dragged everything to the front. “Do you have trouble with electronic equipment up here?”

Paul shrugged. “Some. A big storm will knock us out of service.”

I gestured toward the snow swirling outside. “Is that big enough?”

He laughed. “Not even close.”

I told him about my graveyard of dead electronics.

“The wiring in this place sucks. You probably shorted out when you were recharging the batteries,” he said. “You met Lilith, didn’t you?”

“Not one of my biggest fans.”

“Her husband, Archie, keeps most of our stuff up and running. You should let him take a look.”

“Where do I find him?”

I thought I caught a little hesitation but it was gone before I could be sure.

“Archie’s is on the town side of the bridge. You can’t miss it.”

I grabbed for a jacket. “Save me some pizza.”

“No guarantees,” Paul said with a laugh. “I’ve got teenagers.”

I glanced through the window of Sticks & Strings as I walked past. Chloe was talking to a trio of women who seemed to be hanging on her every word. She looked up and for a second our eyes met but I kept walking.

 

CHLOE

 

“Chloe!” The woman’s voice was sharp. “You’re not listening to me. I still don’t understand how you make I-cord stick to the edging.”

I was a half step away from telling her to try duct tape when I caught myself. “Let’s go over to the worktable, Millie, and I’ll show you.”

That was when I looked up and saw Luke walk past the window. He glanced in and his eyes settled on me briefly but there was no smile. No wave of the hand. Not even a scowl.

Fine.

Great.

Whatever.

The last thing we needed in this town was another man with an attitude.

No, scratch that. The last thing we needed was a cop with an attitude.

I went on autopilot as I explained the intricacies of applied I-cord to the gaggle of knitters at the table. This whole thing with Luke was my fault. After years of dating selkies and shifters and the occasional troll, the lure of my own kind had been as intense as it was immediate.

And totally irresistible.

I couldn’t stay away from him. Put us within ten feet of each other and I flew into his arms like metal to a magnet. The only thing keeping me in my seat right now was the fact that I had three paying customers who would beat me senseless with US15s if I tried to escape before they mastered idiot cord.

It would take more than some wimpy 15s to stop me.

I pushed back my chair and stood up. “Okay, you’re doing great. Now we’ll need a good twelve inches of cord before we move on.”

“You’re leaving?” The youngest of the three looked up at me, wide-eyed. “What if we have trouble?”

“I ... I saw the mail carrier and I have a package that needs to go out right now. I’ll be back in a second.”

They nodded because, after all, Sticks & Strings was known for top-notch customer service.

I grabbed a poncho from my samples shelf, yanked it over my head, then raced out the door. Where had all of this snow come from? The white stuff swirled all around me, obstructing my vision, making it hard to keep my footing on the slippery sidewalk. I slid past knots of jubilant tourists who were over the moon to be in Vermont on a snowy day in December; I was determined not to let him out of my sight.

He was a football field ahead of me, striding toward Osborne, and I broke into a run. Bad idea. My right foot slid out from under me and the next instant I went airborne.

Visions of broken bones and long recuperations filled my head. The word
No
blossomed inside my chest, growing louder and louder.
No
I wouldn’t fall.
No
I refused to give in to the laws of physics and the lure of gravity.

No
...
No
...
No
...

I was an instant, a heartbeat, away from slamming into the ground when Sorcha, my surrogate mother, moved past my field of vision. I missed her so much I thought my heart was about to break.

This is your future, Chloe ... Don’t be afraid
...

Time stopped. The street fell quiet. The bustling tourists stopped bustling and stood frozen in space. Down the block Luke paused midstride near the café.

Me? Well, I was suspended in midair like one of those Cirque du Soleil performers who defy gravity and anatomy on a daily basis. I twisted a little to the left, reorienting myself with the ground, and the next thing I knew I was sitting on the snowy sidewalk while a very puzzled Luke looked down at me as the street came back to life.

He wasn’t the only one who was puzzled. I had just performed acrobatic maneuvers in midair and watched a grown man levitate the length of a football field during a snowstorm while forty or fifty people didn’t notice anything at all.

“Chloe?”

“Hi.” It was the best I could do.

“Are you okay?”

“I think so.”

I waited for him to ask how he had managed to fly backward up the street but he didn’t. He looked a little woozy, a tiny bit off-bubble, but the fact that he had been yanked one hundred yards by forces beyond imagination just plain refused to register on his wonderfully human brain.

I realized that basically he hadn’t a clue.

He looked down at me. I looked up at him. Neither one of us seemed to know what to do next until his latent chivalric instinct surfaced through the fog of confusion around us.

“Need a hand?”

I waved him off. I scrambled to my knees and pushed up, but my hands slipped and I went splat. I maneuvered myself into position again, slipped again, went splat again.

“Chloe,” he said, “take my hand.”

Oh, I wanted to. I wanted to touch him again. I wanted to feel his warmth against me. I wanted ... everything. The whole big fat dream life every thirty-year-old single girl with cats wanted: the husband, the kids, the Golden Retriever, the house with the white picket fence.

The normal.

The regular.

The impossible.

I pictured myself upright, focused myself on the image, and suddenly there I was, standing next to Luke.

“What the hell was that?”

I never played the blond card but there was always a first time. “What was what?”

“What you just did.” He made a swirling motion with his hand. “How did you do that?”

I shrugged as the wind blew snow all around us. “You mean, stand up? It’s a great skill. I’ve had it for a long time.”

“I’ve seen people stand up before. That’s not what you did.”

“I was sitting and now I’m vertical. Somewhere in there I must have stood up.”

Too bad I went one step too far. I improvised a little dance step, my feet went out from under me, and I was halfway to being on my butt when he caught me.

You know the falling dream, the one where you’re tumbling through space faster and faster and you start yelling to your sleeping self, “Wake up! Wake up!” even though you know it’s only a dream and nothing bad can happen to you?

Well, it was like that except it was real. I
was
falling. Faster and harder than I had ever dreamed, faster and harder than anything I’d ever read about in a book or cried over in a movie.

And he caught me before I hit the ground. Sparks shot out from our fingertips, our eyelashes, the ends of our hair. Snow melted at our feet.

Or did it? We moved apart and everything was the way it had been. No sparks. No fireworks. No melted snow. Just Luke and I looking at each other across a divide wider than he could possibly imagine.

“I—I have to get back to the shop.”

“I saw you with him.”

My breath caught. “I didn’t see you.”

“You were kissing him. Is that how you treat all your friends?”

“I needed to be sure about something and now I am.”

“Good,” he said. “Glad you two worked it out.”

Now was the time to tell him that I had kissed Gunnar only because I wanted to be sure he wasn’t the one, but the words wouldn’t come. For weeks I had sensed change was in the air, but I never thought I would be the one to do the changing.

“I’d better go. I left my customers struggling with some I-cord.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’d better get going too.”

“I’m closing early,” I rambled on. “If you need to work or anything, I’ll leave a key on the ledge near the back door.”

“Sounds good,” he said.

And that was that.

 

LUKE

 

 

What the hell had just happened?

One second I was about to turn right onto Osborne and the next I was a hundred yards away picking Chloe up from the ground and there was nothing in between, no memory of getting myself from Point A to Point B.

I mean, I walked it. I knew I walked it. This wasn’t the
Starship Enterprise.
Nobody had beamed me aboard. So why the hell couldn’t I remember doing it?

It was either love or insanity, and I was coming down hard on the side of insanity. I already knew I didn’t do love and I had the divorce to prove it.

I slogged up Osborne through the snow until I reached the foot of the bridge. I saw a dry cleaners and a post office substation but no repair shop. Maybe there was another bridge on the other side of town that I hadn’t seen. I spotted a memorial plaque screwed to the side. Toothaker Bridge. Weird name but familiar. I had probably seen it on one of the maps I’d briefly looked at earlier that afternoon in the library.

The snowfall was moving swiftly from moderate to heavy. Visibility was disappearing almost as fast. If I wanted to get back to the motel tonight, I’d better close up the shop, then head out before I ended up spending the night there.

I muttered a few inventive curses as I pushed into the wind. I also gained a new appreciation for those Big Foot down coats and the art of layering. Hell, a pair of gloves and snow boots would have been a good start.

I cut across Bishop Drive and was halfway to the corner of Goode when a big blue minivan angled to a stop in front of me. The driver side window whirred down and Lynette, the Catherine Zeta-Jones look-alike, gave me a big smile.

“I thought that was you. Hop in before you turn into a popsicle.”

She had the heat in the minivan cranked up so it felt like the inside of a pizza oven.

“Thanks,” I said, unzipping my jacket. “It’s intense out there.”

“What on earth were you doing down here dressed like that?”

I told her about the dead electronics. “Paul said there was a shop near the foot of the bridge but I couldn’t find it.”

“Archie’s,” she said, nodding. “It’s tucked away so far even the townies can’t find it.” She flashed me a wide smile. “We always have trouble with storms. I’ll bet if you tried your phone again, it would be working.”

“Not a chance. I got the cell equivalent of the Blue Screen of Death.”

“Go on,” she urged. “Give it a try. You might be surprised.”

Surprised was an understatement. The cell, the Blackberry, and the laptop all worked fine.

“Thanks,” I said, shaking my head in amazement.

“For what? I didn’t do anything.”