4
Never overestimate any supernatural creature’s sense of humor.
—A Guide to Traversing the Supernatural Realm
Andrea was staring at me. Hard.
I wouldn’t say that my new vampire friends “detained” me, but it was made quite clear that any attempts to leave would not be met with friendly handshakes and an exchange of e-mail addresses. With the customers cleared out, I was sitting at the coffee bar, trying to suss out exactly how much I should tell them. Since they’d kept me from dinner, Jane was nice enough to provide me with something called “lemon bars,” an odd cross between a biscuit and a custard pie. And Andrea was staring at me. It wasn’t an angry stare. She seemed to be looking for coded messages in my eyelashes. I started to blink in odd patterns while I chewed on lemon bars, just to see what happened.
Nothing, just more staring.
“Should we wait for Dick?” Jane asked, pulling the “Closed” sign over the front door of the shop.
Andrea gave me a quick, furtive look. “Um, Dick has a business meeting. I’m not able to reach him.”
“Why do the words ‘business meeting’ seem to be in unspoken subtext quotation marks?” I asked.
“My husband,” Andrea told me, in a tone that brooked no further discussion. “You’ll meet him later.”
“All right, then.”
Jane moved behind the bar as if she were going to make more coffee, until Andrea hopped over the counter with vampire speed and chased her away from the large, shiny cappuccino maker. Jane pouted a bit and plopped into the seat beside me. Andrea gave me a sweeping hand gesture and said, “Floor’s all yours.”
I straightened in my chair, clearing my throat. “ ‘Once upon a time’ is the best way to start, yes? Well, once upon a time, there was a happy little family in the wilds of Ireland, practicing what they called magic. For years and years, they kept the locals happy by caring for the sick, taking care of ailing livestock, and keeping the crops fertile. Even through the Inquisition and the witchcraft trials, the villagers kept peace with the family, because they needed them to prosper, and vice versa. You would think the lack of pitchfork-toting townsfolk would keep the family safe, but of course, in stories like these, there are always problems.
“It boiled down to a difference of opinion on magical policy. The family had always operated under the tenet of ‘do not harm.’ But a small branch of the family grew tired of being ‘servants’ to the locals. They argued that the family should take a firmer stance, domination instead of appeasement. They seemed to think that we should be leading the people around us, instead of working with them—through force, if necessary.”
“Are you telling me that there’s a real Voldemort?” Jane asked, what little color she had leeching from her face. Andrea smacked Jane’s arm and rolled her eyes. Jane winced and cried. “What? It’s a legitimate question!”
I chuckled despite myself. “These rebellious family members said that the witch who can’t harm can’t heal, that there has to be a balance of both. And unfortunately, this philosophy led to a few . . . well, let’s call them magical amputations. This was unacceptable to the main contingent of McGavocks, and they asked these rogue relatives to leave.
“So that branch left the village and settled halfway across the country. Several of the witches married into the Kerrigans, a local family who raised their children according to a more strident magical philosophy. While the McGavocks flourished and enjoyed plentiful harvests and peace, the Kerrigan branch got more aggressive and bitter—although as a side note, they have made a considerable amount of money in the last century or so manufacturing small arms. Anyway, the Kerrigans went out looking for problems to ‘solve’ with their magic. Because, in their opinion, some people just needed smiting. And eventually, that included members of the McGavock family, which started a vicious cycle of retaliation and misinterpretation.”
“It’s like the magical Hatfields and McCoys,” Andrea marveled.
“You’re not entirely wrong,” I admitted. “We lost people on both sides, to violence and curses. About three hundred years ago, the two matriarchs of the families met and agreed that matters had gone far enough. They selected four objects representing each of the elements and blessed them with magic from both sides. These objects, which they called the Elements, were scattered to the winds, given to strangers, sold to tinkers, that sort of thing. The matriarchs agreed that the family that found all four objects first would be able to bind the other branch.”
“Like magical Pokémon?” Andrea asked.
“If I wasn’t under an enormous amount of stress, I would find that funny,” I assured her. “The potential of losing our magic was a considerable risk, a risk I can only imagine was inspired by desperation. It took decades, but we rounded up the Elements first and bound the Kerrigans from doing magical harm. For the most part, they’re no more powerful than the average disenfranchised teenager who has seen The Craft once too often. The most they’re able to pull off is a stirring of air, which, honestly, could be done with a strategically placed fan, so it’s not terribly impressive. But every one hundred years, on the night of the summer solstice, the binding has to be repeated by the family’s strongest witch. This leaves a small window of time in which the Kerrigans have the chance to obtain the objects and undo the binding, reversing it onto my family. They tried it once in the early 1900s, and my nana Fee’s great-grandmother laid down a witchcraft bitch-slapping of epic proportions. I also hear there was a mighty non-magical slap involved. And now it’s my generation’s turn, and by some bizarre accident of birth, the so-called strongest witch in my family happens to be sitting here in front of you.”
A Cheshire cat’s smile split Jane’s face. Andrea held up her hand and said, “No!”
“You don’t even know what I was going to ask!” Jane huffed.
“Whatever juvenile, ill-conceived test of her abilities you were about to demand could only end in tears.”
I stared at both of them. These were the people Mr. Wainwright had entrusted with his shop? They were the ones who were supposed to help me track down the Elements?
I was doomed.
“Sorry, Nola, you were saying?” Andrea asked, pouring me another cup of coffee.
“Under normal circumstances, the binding wouldn’t be a problem,” I said. “It’s just a minor incantation spoken over the artifacts. Around the time Mr. Wainwright visited all those years ago, Nana got rather worried about an increase in Kerrigan-related violence. She saw that he was trustworthy, that he was devoted to the pursuit of knowledge. So she took the objects out of the family vault and entrusted them to his care. She thought they would be safer with him.”
Both women winced, the corners of their mouths drawing back sharply. Jane said, “She probably should have rethought that. I don’t want to alarm you, but when I first got here, the shop looked like an episode of Extreme Hoarders: Book Edition.”
“I have a basic idea of what I’m looking for. There are some old sketches. Why Nana Fee didn’t think to take some pictures, I have no idea. But according to my family, she was incredibly secretive about the objects. She wouldn’t show them to anyone, for fear of the infamous McGavock loose lips. In other words, my aunt Margaret.”
“Quick question. Why the solstice?” Jane asked.
“Solstices are considered times of beginnings, endings, new cycles, so it made sense. And I guess no one wanted to travel to meet on the winter solstice.”
Nodding, Jane pushed up from her chair and paced a bit, straightening a picture frame here, shelving a book there. Andrea seemed to understand that her employer’s silence meant something, so, along with her, I waited patiently for the other vampire to speak. When she finally came to a stop, she said, “So, basically, you need to rifle through my stock and my records to determine if any of those objects are still in the store. And if they’re not, you need to use any information you find here to try to track down where they went?”
I nodded. “Yes. Please.”
Jane shrugged her shoulders. “OK.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes.”
“No other questions?”
“No,” Jane said, shaking her head. She stepped closer, her eyes narrowing suddenly. “Understand that we will be monitoring what you do very carefully. You will not be given free access to the shop. You will not be given a key. And if you try to tell me how I should be running things, so help me God, I will—”
“Jane!” Andrea barked.
Jane cleared her throat, seemingly forcing herself to relax. “Sorry. One day, we will get you drunk and tell you about your great-uncle Emery.” Andrea shuddered violently.
I did not quite know how to respond to that, so I said, “I’ll start tomorrow.”
* * *
I rolled into the driveway to find Jed frantically moving some tools into his part of the house. It was cloudy, the banks of wispy fog moving over the waxing moon in patches. Given the dim lighting, I wondered how he was able to see. I would have smashed my face into the porch steps by now.
Jed practically flinched when he saw my car, such as it was, pulling to a stop on the gravel. Irritation, fueled by the gnawing tension left behind when I bared my soul to the vampires, flared in my belly. Really? He wanted to avoid me that badly? The sight of my seminudity was so unappealing that he was eyeing the open front door with desperation?
That seemed like an overreaction.
I threw open the car door. As my sight adjusted to the scant light of the porch lamp, I watched his eyes dart from me to the sky and back again. He seemed skittish, like a colt not quite sure of his master’s goodwill. His sandy hair fell over his eyes, giving him the perfect excuse for not looking up. A strange energy emanated from his entire body. A sort of restlessness of his cells, as if he was going to jump out of his skin at any moment. Was he on something? He seemed so healthy, too healthy to be a drug user. And his jumpy, erratic energy was different from that of my mother, who’d made enthusiastic use of every recreational substance she could get her hands on. His head snapped up, and he pulled an angry face, as if he could feel me staring at him.
“What?” he demanded, keeping a wary eye on the moon as the clouds slipped away. He was nearly flinching, as if he expected a slap instead of silvery light.
“Jed, is everything OK?” I asked, following him up the porch steps, under the protective shelter of the porch. The closer we moved to the house, the less agitated he seemed.
Once inside his front door, he said, “I’m sorry. I’m bein’ rude. I’ve just had a long day. Work stuff. I was just about to warm up some chicken and dumplin’s. How about you take over the stove while I take a shower? And then you can help me eat some of it?”
“You invite me to dinner, and I end up cooking? What sort of swindle is this?”
“You’re not cookin’, you’re warmin’ up,” he told me, eyeing the leather portfolio in my hand with some interest before turning that handsome grin on me.
“And I can’t use the microwave to do this?”
I was firmly antitechnology when it came to tea, but I didn’t see the point in dirtying up a bunch of dishes if I didn’t have to.
Jed unbuttoned his shirt and tossed it into a little laundry room off the kitchen. Oh, come on, now. I was starting to think he was doing this to provoke me. “Mrs. Reilly’s dumplin’s have been known to explode when nuked.”
I thought about the warmed-over chicken and rice casserole in my fridge and the prospects of trying to piece together a meal at this time of night. “Yes, if you explain to me what a dumplin’ is.”
He chuckled and dropped a heavy leather toolbelt near the front door. “You have your choice; you cook, or you eat dinner with someone smellin’ like he’s been diggin’ ditches all day.”
“Cooking sounds like the lesser of two evils,” I said, shuddering.
I placed the sketches in a drawer in my own kitchen, peeled my contacts out of my dust-plagued eyes, then locked my front door before rejoining Jed in his kitchen. He was setting out a large pot, French bread, and butter on the counter.
“Next week, I’ll invite you over to make me dinner,” I muttered, feigning indignation and trying hard to ignore the way he was stretching his massive arms over his head, making his shirttail ride up. This just wasn’t fair.
“Well, it would be the polite thing to do,” he said, grinning at me while he kicked off his boots, and I was thankful that he at least left the jeans on. I opened the fridge, boggling at the sheer number of labeled Tupperware containers stacked inside. “Just keep stirrin’. You don’t want it to stick.”
“If you don’t want to discuss your harem of church-lady caterers, can we talk about your tendency to strip in front of me?” I called after him. I dumped the congealed dumplings into a pot as he jogged up the stairs.
“Don’t pretend you’re not lookin’!” he called back.
I rolled my eyes but stirred as instructed. The food smelled delicious, particularly after I warmed up the loaf of crusty bread in the oven. Standing at the stove gave me time to look around Jed’s side of the house, which was considerably more comfortable than my own. He’d painted the walls a light, creamy beige, making the rooms airy and bright. It was a vast improvement over the dark, cavelike spaces on my side. The polished living-room floor was covered with an extra-large blue rag rug. He’d added a few sturdy, no-nonsense pieces of furniture in each room, but there were few personal touches. No pictures, no knickknacks. Several large bookshelves flanked his windows. When I got closer, I could see that they were full of language guides. Moon Phases, A Chinese to English Dictionary, Hieroglyphics, Translating Gaelic, The Dummy’s Guide to Understanding Ancient Sanskrit. The rooms told me very little about Jed as a person, other than that he had good color sense and hated reading subtitles in foreign-language movies. Or he’d bought a bunch of coffee-table books at a garage sale.
By the time Jed trotted down the steps, smelling pleasantly of Dial soap, I had the table set and the dumplings dished. I was bending over the oven to retrieve the bread when I heard, “This is why men like to watch women cook. It has nothin’ to do with bein’ sexist. It’s the bendin’ and liftin’.”
“Which is also sexist.” I turned to offer a rude response, only to find him wearing another pair of arse-cupping jeans and a T-shirt that showcased his indecently large biceps. I was standing in the presence of living, breathing arm porn.
“Oh, come on!” I cried, throwing up my hands and nearly flinging the bread across the room.
“What?” he asked, crossing to the window and closing the curtains.
“You know what,” I shot back. “When you go out and buy a shirt like that, do you actually calculate the number of bicep curls you’ll have to perform in order to do it justice?”
“I don’t work out that much,” he said as he held my chair away from the table.
I sat down, glaring up at him. “Well, then clearly, you have discovered some sort of magic testosterone tree in the back garden.”
“I can take it off if it bothers you,” he offered, peeling the hem away from a tanned expanse of stomach.
Please, I prayed, don’t let there be such a thing as a magic testosterone tree.
“Stop that!” I yelped, a laugh bursting from my chest as he dropped his shirt back into place. “Why do you think all situations can be improved by the removal of clothing?”
He snickered, taking his own seat and offering me a slice of bread. “Well, first—nah, that’s too easy. Anyway, I do it because it freaks you out, and that’s pretty damned adorable.”
“You are an altogether bizarre personality.”
“Right back atcha, honey.”
I giggled. I couldn’t help it. This strange, thrown-together meal was the first opportunity I’d had to relax since I’d arrived in the States. And here was a beautiful, peculiar man sitting in front of me, who didn’t know anything about me or my family or what we could do. I could be normal with him, or what seemed to pass for normal between the two of us. It was lovely.
“So, I noticed the quote-unquote ‘car’ in the driveway.”
“Hey, it’s transportation,” I protested. “And when I find a job, it will get me there, so I will eventually be able to pay for an upgrade.”
“What brings you down to the Hollow, if you don’t mind my askin’?”
“I just needed a change of scenery. Too many northern winters,” I lied smoothly. “What about you? How long have you lived here?”
“A couple of months,” Jed said, taking a large bite of dumplings. “I’m from a little town in Tennessee, just a few hours’ drive from here. I do carpentry work and general construction, especially in older buildings where the restoration work can be delicate. Jobs in my area were dryin’ up. A contractor from the Hollow put an ad in the paper, lookin’ for people who could handle that sort of work, so I moved. My boss, Sam, was hired to renovate this house. I needed a place to stay, so the owner agreed to give me a break on rent while we completed the work.”
“What does your family think of your moving here?” I asked, trying to avoid questions about potentially angry girlfriends who might not appreciate his constant state of shirtlessness in my presence.
“They’re not happy about it,” he admitted. “We’re pretty close-knit, and I’m the first one to move away in a long time. But it was just somethin’ I had to do. You know?”
“Oddly enough, yes, I do,” I said. “And it’s nice here, so far. The people seem friendly. A little strange sometimes, but I think that’s expected anytime you move somewhere new. That reminds me, have you seen anything weird around the house at night? Like a big dog in the back garden?”
A flicker of surprise warped his features for just a second, before he tamped it down. “No, nothing weird. Unless you count our neighbor Paul, who’s built a full-size wrestling ring in his backyard. He and his friends have ‘matches’ on the weekends.”
Well, that did qualify, I supposed. “Do they wear the spandex and tights?” I asked, struggling to keep a straight face.
Jed nodded. “If he invites you over this Saturday, just say no.”
I shuddered, and we fell into companionable silence as we ate.
“So what’s your deal?” he asked suddenly.
“Beg pardon?”
“Your deal,” he said again. “Married? Boyfriend? Vow of celibacy?”
“Do you always pose personal questions so abruptly?”
“You get more honest answers that way.”
“Boyfriend,” I told him.
He nodded. “Is he gonna be movin’ here anytime soon?”
I burst out laughing, picturing Stephen attending the monster-truck rally scheduled at the McLean County fairgrounds that weekend. As much as the “woo-woo supernatural shite” irked Stephen, his apprehension around my family had a lot to do with our “earthiness.” Living in the Hollow would be the equivalent of a permanent migraine for Stephen. “No, I don’t see him moving here.”
Jed shrugged. “I give it six months.”
I choked on a bite of bread and downed a large gulp of water to clear my throat. I spluttered. “What is wrong with you?”
“Long-distance relationships don’t work. And you said yourself, you’re makin’ a life here, and you don’t see this guy movin’ out to the Hollow. So you either didn’t think this move through, which is doubtful because you seem the type to think everything through. Or you did it on purpose, because you knew that movin’ out here would eventually kill off the relationship. You broke up with him without havin’ to be the bad guy.”
I stared at him, my spoon frozen halfway to my mouth. “Are you on medications I should be aware of, or is this some sort of personality disorder at work?”
“Neither. I just don’t like it when ladies use the long-distance boyfriend as a human shield,” he retorted. “Why are you making that face?”
“I’m trying to determine whether this dinner is good enough to put up with your nonsense or if I should abandon my bowl and storm out.”
He nodded and took another bite. “Come to a decision yet?”
“Curse Carol-Anne Reilly and her devil dumplings,” I grumbled into my meal. Jed laughed. “But honestly, you can’t say that sort of thing to people.”
“Why the hell not?”
“The bounds of common courtesy?” I proposed. “Conversational filters that most people grasp by the time they’re ten?”
“Your prim Yankee voice sayin’ ‘common courtesy’ while you look over the top of your little wire-rim glasses is doing strange things to me,” he said, grinning impishly. “Do you think you could put your hair up in a bun when you say that?”
“Of course.” I sighed. “You have a librarian fetish.”
He shook his head, all innocent brown eyes and choirboy smiles. “Not a fetish, more like a fascination. So what do you say?”
“I really don’t want to ruin our burgeoning friendship by reacting honestly to that.”
“Fair enough,” he said, offering me another slice of bread and none too subtly moving the knife to his side of the table. “So where do you think you’ll look for work?”
And that was the end of the confrontational portion of our conversation. Jed seemed to sense how far he could push me. All discussions of Stephen were off-limits from then on. We talked about his hometown of Hazeltine and about his family, which seemed almost as large and “colorful” as my own. I got the impression that there was a lot of information he was leaving out. That was fine, since I gave him a heavily edited version of my own childhood—growing up in Boston, the only child of Anna McGavock and her physician husband, moving in with my grandmother after my father died.
Jed was a good listener, although there was a lot I couldn’t tell him. I could have said that my parents had divorced but not that when my dear departed mother met Martin Leary, an American medical student touring through Dublin, she assumed she would be marrying into money. In her mind, “doctor” equaled “rich,” although Dad was traveling as cheaply as possible. Dad’s parents, who had died when I was a baby, had saved for years to send him overseas as a graduation present.
Getting pregnant with me as quickly as possible seemed like the best way to secure her future, or so she thought. She wasn’t counting on marrying a student who was working his way through medical school while bartending. Dad said the look on her face when he brought her home to his tiny walk-up apartment over a pizza shop had been priceless.
I couldn’t tell Jed about my mother’s meager magical gifts, how she saw them as a natural advantage over regular people. That she would take the neighbors’ wives for their pin money by offering tarot readings, telling them what they wanted to hear, even if she saw trouble in the cards. I couldn’t tell him about the irresponsible fertility rites, the love spells on Dad’s coworkers, just for her own amusement, or the money spells my aunts and uncles were smart enough not to try that she did two or three times a year. Her “prayers” always created a windfall, but then we would end up with a major car repair or a cracked foundation at our new house or some disaster that sucked up whatever money she’d gained and then some. I couldn’t tell him about her abandoning us, about the years of absence and that final explosive argument before she left for good. This was definitely not appropriate getting-to-know-you banter.
Clearly, being irritated and sharing personal history were not a good combination. I hadn’t thought about my mother this much in months. But now that I knew a bit more about Nana Fee, it was ironic that my mother did just as Nana had, seducing the first American tourist she came across. Mother just did it a bit more permanently.
Dinner was followed by pecan pie, prepared by yet another church lady. I helped Jed clear the table and looked up at the clock on the microwave. How could it be eleven o’clock already? Between my confessions to Jane and Andrea and trying to keep up with Jed’s abrupt directness, I was exhausted.
“Thank you for dinner,” I said, moving toward the door. “It was an experience.”
“Anytime,” he said, throwing a dishtowel over his shoulder as he followed me through the living room. “I, uh, I’m sorry if I threw you with the questions about the boyfriend.”
“Were there questions?” I chuckled, opening the door wide. The moon had risen, bright and full, casting silvered light across the dark expanse of lawn. “I thought it was mostly insulting assumptions and forecasts of impending doom.”
“I did feed you,” he noted, eyeing the door warily. He stepped back toward the kitchen. “That has to count for something.”
“It does,” I assured him. “Next time, I’ll make dinner, so I can demand extremely personal information from you.”
“Me?” he scoffed. “I’m an open book.”
An open book who seemed to have some serious issues with being outdoors after dark. He seemed absolutely incapable of stepping closer to me as long as the front door was open. What was his issue? Was he phobic? Did he owe vampires money? I opened the door a bit wider, and he immediately took another step back.
“Somehow I don’t think so. Good night,” I said, slipping into the moonlight and closing the door behind me.