Dagne said atmosphere was very important, so she wandered around her house and gathered up all the candles she could find.
Once she had the candles lit and placed around the room to create the right atmosphere, she flipped off Korean TV, opened the spell book to one of the pages she’d marked, took the lavender silk chenille and Dagne’s magic amulet, and placed them together. And then she rounded up a saucer, a pair of scissors, and some matches.
She read the spell several times. She thought if Grandma knew what she was doing, she’d have a double coronary on the spot. But Rachel was, she knew, attracted to this guy in a major way, and she supposed she was willing to walk the extra mile . . . albeit an extremely bizarre mile.
And in fact, the whole thing was so stupid to the intellectual side of her that she read the spell once more, wondered if the position of the moon or whatever really mattered like the spell book said, remembered all the things Dagne told her she had to do, and at last stood, let her hair down (atmosphere), draped the length of chenille on the floor, and cut an inch across the bottom. She picked up the chenille from the floor and draped it around her shoulders. She lit a match, and held it to the piece of chenille she’d cut. When it caught fire, she dropped it into the saucer, held the saucer up before her, and said solemnly, “From these ashes smoke will rise, and lift my color to his eyes.”
She put the saucer down, picked up the amulet, and began to swing it above the saucer as she walked in a circle. “The color of me shall my true love see,” she said, her voice rising and falling like she had heard on the WB’s Charmed, “and instantly know his desire for me.”
She paused there, watched the last of the chenille burn and tried not to wrinkle her nose, because it really stunk. Then circled again, chanting the same spell two more times. Once she’d done three recitations, she put the amulet down, and as Dagne had instructed her, she stood above the burned fabric and waved her hands in a circular, witchy way, dissipating the smoke.
After a few moments of that, it was over.
Rachel stood, hands on hips, and stared down at the plate. Was it her, or were all these spells a little anticlimactic? It would be cool if lightning would flash, or a clap of thunder would rattle her bungalow. But so far in her experience, there was only a mess to clean up.
When she’d picked up, she carried candles and her spell book upstairs. She put the candles around her bath and her bedroom, then started running the water for her bath. She undressed, added bubble bath, decided there wasn’t enough light in the bathroom, and looked out the door, into her room for the miniature twin torchères Myron had given her. How odd . . . they weren’t in her room.
Rachel wrapped a bath sheet around her and did a quick search of her house for the torchères, but still couldn’t find them. She supposed she had put them upstairs in the guest room and shrugged it off. She had enough candles, and besides, her tub was filling.
She hurried back to her bath, turned off the water, and studied her last spell. This was the one for insurance, the shot at losing her butt, otherwise known as Ben and Jerry.
Outside, on Slater, the rain had deteriorated into a heavy mist and fog was rolling in. Parked outside her house, below the limbs of an old sycamore tree that badly needed trimming, Flynn watched the windows of Rachel’s little house.
He’d thought to go to the door to present himself, and was working on a plausible explanation, but he had noticed that Rachel was the sort to leave her blinds open, and there she was, lying on the floor, doing some sort of strange thing with her legs, while on the telly, images of singing Asians flashed across.
Naturally, he’d not wanted to disturb her in the middle of whatever it was she was doing, but he really didn’t want to sit out in the car like some pervert, either.
While he was debating it, however, Rachel suddenly popped up, turned off the telly, and disappeared into the back. Flynn got out of his hired car, put on his trench coat . . . but then she had reappeared, carrying an enormous book of some sort, put it down, disappeared again, and just as quickly reappeared with an armful of candles. Something told him to wait. Something told him to get back into the car.
He watched, fascinated, as she lit the candles, let down what looked to be a mane of gorgeous, wavy hair from that odd poodle-ear arrangement, and opened that enormous book. She knelt in front of it, studying it for what seemed an eternity, and, he thought, she laughed once or twice.
Suddenly, she was up on her feet.