Halfway Hexed (29 page)

“You saw Barrett? Where?”

“At the hotel. Andre wasn’t there, by the way, so Barrett doesn’t have him, if that’s what you’re wondering. Also, I don’t think Andre was tied up in Mrs. Thornton’s room since she came chasing after me. Would she leave a prisoner tied up in a hotel room with flimsy walls and doors? The Duvall Motor Inn’s not exactly a secure holding place for kidnap victims. Although dead bodies can apparently lie around there for hours and hours without anybody finding them. It’s ridiculous! Not that I’m saying that Andre’s dead. I’m sure—well, I sure hope he’s not.”

“Tell me what happened,” Bryn said calmly.

My explanation was a bit scattered, and Bryn seemed more than a little impatient until I reached into my shirt and came out with the velvet box. When I opened it, he paled.

“I know that brooch.”

“You’ve got all her pictures, so I bet you do.”

He leaned closer. “My mother was wearing it the night she was murdered. It was never recovered. How can . . . How can you have this?”

I explained about getting it in the mail, seeing the visions, and how it had disappeared from my trunk and then turned up in John Barrett’s hotel room.

Bryn lifted the brooch and cupped it in his hands. Nothing happened. “You said you saw her. Show me,” he said, holding it out to me.

I touched it with my fingertip. Nothing happened, so I took it from him and pressed it between my palms. She didn’t appear.

“What about an incantation? Or something you did?” Bryn said. “Think, Tamara.”

I reached my hand over and gripped his arm. “It’s okay. She doesn’t come out every time, but she’s in there. And now that I have the brooch again, we’ll save her. Don’t worry.”

Bryn ran a hand through his gleaming black hair and stood up, taking the brooch back from me. “I don’t understand why you’d see the vision the first time you touched it and I wouldn’t.”

“I don’t know.”

He stared at it and rubbed his thumb over the girl. “I’ll keep it,” he said finally. Then he looked at me, as if he expected me to argue.

“Yeah, she’s your mom. I think you should keep it.”

He blinked, as if emerging from a daze. “If her soul really is attached to this brooch, nothing can happen to her so long as we have it. Andre on the other hand may need help right now.” He slid the brooch into his pocket. “Want to help me cast a spell?”

“Love to.”

Chapter 28

“Do you feel like a drink?” Bryn asked as I followed him down the hall.

“I’m not sure I should mix alcohol and truth serum. Never know what I might say or do.”

Bryn smiled. “I’ll take my chances.”

“You say that now,” I murmured, pausing in the doorway of the bathroom. Bryn went inside and yanked the clear plastic shower curtain, cracking the plastic rings and bending the shower rod.

“Wow. Next time someone takes a shower, the water’s gonna go all over the floor,” I pointed out.

“So be it,” Bryn said.

“Spoken like someone who doesn’t mop.”

“Spoken like someone who cares more about his best friend than a house. Besides,” Bryn said with a shrug, like that finished the sentence.

“Besides what?”

“I can afford new floors.”

He went to the kitchen and opened a drawer full of pens and scrap paper. He pulled out a Sharpie marker and laid the shower curtain over the table.

“I couldn’t reach the mayor today. Or anyone from the city council. They must be tied up trying to calm the masses,” he said.

“I guess. I actually didn’t see very many people. Not that I could’ve seen them anyway with the fog and dark, but I didn’t hear many cars or people outside.”

“Well, I warned the mayor to try to stall any property sales. He was supposed to meet with the real estate agents this morning.”

“Not sure that worked out,” I said, telling him about Marsha. “And how come they want my house? We’re a family of witches. Shouldn’t we be on their list of desirable residents?”

“Yes, but Barrett probably wants the property because it’s on a spoke.”

“A spoke?” I said, watching him draw a line down the middle of the clear curtain.

“Yeah. It’s on one of the ley lines coming from the tor. Just like my place. I’m on the east meridian.”

Bryn drew long curved lines on the clear plastic and then filled in some continent-shaped blobs.

“Grab me a drink, sweethear t.”

“You sure you should drink before spell-casting?”

“I’m not planning to get drunk. I just want to pretreat myself. If there’s one of Barrett’s counterspell backwashes when I cast this, I want to be ready for the ensuing headache.”

“Oh, those headaches. Maybe I’ll have a little sip of scotch, too.”

I went to the cupboard and opened it. I lifted the decanter, then dropped it the half-inch back to the shelf. Standing inside in the amber liquor was a five-inch-tall scotch-soaked and furious Jenna Reitgarten.

“Holy moly!” I said with a gasp.

“What?” Bryn asked, bisecting the empty half of the shower curtain in half again with another black line.

“There’s something I forgot to mention earlier,” I said, taking the bottle down. I kept it mostly level, but having the bottle tipped even a little made Jenna fall against the glass wall. It probably wasn’t only the movement. I’m sure it was plenty slippery in there. She sloshed around, lost her footing and went under. I winced and paused until her head popped up above the surface.

“Sorry,” I said. “Sorry about that.”

“About what?” Bryn asked.

I set the decanter in the middle of the table.

“Tamara,” he complained, reaching to move it away from where he was drawing a map of the U.S.

I grabbed his hand to stop him touching the bottle. “Here’s the thing,” I said, using my free hand to remove the stopper from the decanter. I could tell from her face that she was screaming, but it was just a barely audible squeak. I guessed that her rage was bottled up and, from a certain point of view, small.

Bryn stared. “Is that a pixie? How did she get in there?”

“Not a pixie.”

Bryn leaned down to peer closer. Jenna was shaking her fist, her eyes tearing, mascara running, scotch dripping.

I cleared my throat. “She’s Jenna . . . in a bottle.”

The corner of Bryn’s mouth curved up. Then he chuckled.

I chuckled a little, too. “Probably we shouldn’t laugh. It’s not very nice.”

“Probably not.” Then he laughed.

And I laughed.

He walked away from the table, putting his hands on the countertop while he kept laughing, which made me laugh harder.

When he turned around, he’d gotten hold of himself. “Tamara, what’s Jenna Reitgarten doing in my scotch?”

“How should I know?” I asked with mock innocence, then I realized that my throat hadn’t burned. I could lie again. Progress! “Maybe God did it,” I said. “They were quoting scripture and screaming and cursing in front of lost children that I was trying to save! He could’ve decided to smite them.”

“Did you help Him smite them with say—a spell?”

“God doesn’t need my help.”

“That wasn’t the question.”

“I might’ve said a few words about bottling up her rage and making it small.”

Bryn laughed again.

“She started it!”

“I’m sure.”

Bryn took out a piece of scrap paper and a pen. “Write down the spell before you forget what you said. We’ll need it for a counterspell later.”

I sat down at the table, my gaze shifting on and off to Jenna. “Calm down, little Jenna,” I said. “We’re going to get you out of there.” I looked down at the paper and smiled. “Sooner
or later.
” I cleared my throat and handed the paper to Bryn.

He looked at it. “
This
is the verse you used?”

“Yep. I said that and then, poof, she disappeared. Well, there wasn’t really a poof sound. She was just gone. And then here.”

Bryn smiled. “You’re like a force of nature.”

I couldn’t tell from his tone whether I should be flattered or insulted. “Is that a good thing? Or a bad thing?”

“Causing a human to shift into a different form—smaller, bigger, whatever, that takes an unbelievable amount of power.”

“Felt easy to me.”

“Yes,” he said with a wry smile. “That’s the irony of you, sweetheart. You can’t do spells I could do when I was six years old. But then most of the world of magic can’t do spells that you can do without even tr ying.”

Kind of a backhanded compliment, I decided. I glanced down at the bottle where Jenna was leaning against one of the glass walls, catching her breath after her tirade. “Well, Jenna, I’m pretty sure there’s a lesson to be learned from all this. When I figure out what it is, I’ll let you know.”

After pouring out the scotch, rinsing Jenna and the bottle with some tap water, and pouring that out, Jenna was sitting on the floor of the unstoppered bottle wiping her face and hands with a piece of fabric I’d cut from a washcloth and dropped inside for her.

I took it as a good sign that she wasn’t red-faced and screaming anymore. I left her on the table while I swept the stairs where I’d dropped the glass bowl because Bryn said we were going out behind the house.

Once the sweeping was finished, Bryn carried the markered shower curtain, and I carried a bedspread that he’d asked me to bring.

He smoothed out the shower curtain and put rocks around the edges to keep it from blowing away. Then he took off his shirt and set it on the steps. He glanced at the sky and then at the house, then back up at the sky.

“A lot of cloud cover,” he said, cocking his head. He moved around the shower curtain, back and forth, until stopping at the left side and taking a few steps back. He glanced up again and at the house. “I know the position of the house, where we are on the earth, and our relationship to the constellations, but there’s no way to do exact measurements without a telescope, which I couldn’t use with my view obscured anyway.”

“Do we need things to be exact to find him?” I asked. Bryn’s way of scrying seemed a lot more scientific than anything Momma or Aunt Mel had ever done.

“Maybe. Maybe not.” He glanced one last time up at the sky, then waved me over to him. He took the blanket from me. “Take off your shirt and socks and shoes.”

This was a normal part of the process for us sharing power. We were usually skin-to-skin—at least from the waist up—and I was barefoot with my toes in the dirt.

Unfortunately, any work you do that involves taking off clothes feels kind of dicey. Strippers. Adult films stars. Prostitutes. Not exactly the kind of company I want to be in.

Still, Andre was missing and doing magic was our best chance of finding him fast if he needed our help.

I took off my socks and boots, the wound on my foot stinging. “That cut on my foot’s not healed yet. I bet if Dr. Suri knew I was rubbing my cut in the dirt, he’d give me a really long lecture.”

“And a tetanus shot, I’d imagine.”

“You don’t think I’ll get a bad infection and have to get my leg cut off, do you?” I asked, removing my shirt and folding it up.

“Last week, I pulled an arrow out of your chest. This week, I’d be hard-pressed to find the scar. I doubt garden-variety bacteria stands a chance against your body’s ability to heal. Your fae blood, no doubt.”

I smiled. “I think so, too. Maybe my family shouldn’t have been so quick to condemn my half-fae status.” I walked to Bryn, and he wrapped the blanket around us, drawing me up against him. My skin prickled immediately with magical energy.

“Hold this,” he said, giving me the edges of the blanket.

I kept it around us and felt him fiddle with the clasp of my bra a second before it sprung open.

“You didn’t need to do that,” I admonished.

“Not for the spell,” he said a moment before he kissed me.

The power arced between us as we tasted each other. His fingers in my hair, skin sliding against skin. Before I knew it, he’d lowered us to the ground, and we were tangled up together.

“Bryn,” I gasped as he unzipped my jeans.

“Later,” he said, licking my throat.

“Andre is your best friend.”

“Which is why he’d understand.”

“Wow that feels good,” I mumbled, dizzy and breathless, before tugging his hand away from the inside of my thigh. “Bryn!”