“You know what she told me?” Priscilla looked at me like she expected an answer.
“I’m not telepathic, sorry.” I hadn’t meant to say that out loud, but it didn’t seem to offend her.
“I won’t even repeat it!”
“You know how excited everyone gets around Hettymoot,” I reminded her. “And Spring is in the air.”
“Air.” Priscilla shook her head dismissively. “Those Airy girls… I swear. Their irresponsibility and disrespect is the only thing that hasn’t changed around here.” She was over a hundred years old. It would be odd if everything hadn’t changed. “It has to be a noise violation.”
“I’m sure one of your daughters could cast a…” I trailed off as I remembered the human officer of the law within earshot. “I guess you could always ask him.” I pointed at Captain Kavanagh and shot her a warning look. Was I the only one that was worried about this investigation?
Priscilla stiffened up like she just remembered that he was there. “Hrmph. Happy Hettymoot,” she grumbled before stomping back up to her porch.
Goosebumps covered my arms as I passed the gallows. Do you say hello to the cop that might think you killed someone? Ignoring him seemed worse, so I just nodded politely and gave him a little smile.
“Ms. Iren,” he said, nodding back.
That was my last name. Had I told him my last name yesterday? Surely I hadn’t. Which meant he looked it up. Great. “Happy Hettymoot,” I blurted out.
“Pardon?”
“Um… Good morning.” I glanced up at the gallows and wanted to walk faster. Was it suspicious to walk faster? That’s what my feet did anyway.
“That is one hell of a tradition,” the captain said under his breath.
“Excuse me?” My head snapped back around.
He was clearly taken off guard, most likely because I shouldn’t have been able to hear that. Oh, Goddess. Please tell me that he’d at least said it out loud and I hadn’t suddenly developed the ability to read thoughts.
His face hardened as he told me, “I might have some questions for you later.”
“Well, apparently you know where to find me.”
The captain raised an eyebrow as I lifted my chin confidently. Too confidently? I had to get out of there, so that’s exactly what I did. But I could feel his eyes on my back all the way until I reached the town square.
Chapter 6
Spark was the first delivery that morning because we alternated days. I couldn’t wait to get it over with.
“Wow,” Feather gasped as I pushed the door open. “You are wearing a lot of makeup.”
“I am?”
She nodded, dumbfounded. “Like, I don’t understand how your eyelids can open again when you blink. Can you even see?”
I peeked over her shoulder to see my reflection in the mirror behind the counter. And I looked just like a… well, something between a clown and a stripper. Or maybe both at the same time.
“Oh. My. Goddess!” Panicking, I wiped my fuchsia pink lips on the back of my hand and watched as the lipstick reappeared. “I just saw that policeman like this!”
“It is kind of shadowy around the gallows with all those Elm trees,” Feather offered, trying not to laugh. “Here. Let me try to take it off.” She grabbed her wand out from under the register, along with the scale.
“Hurry!” I slapped the bundle of hyacinth down on the counter and pulled at my false eyelashes. No luck.
Feather’s magic swirled around me, but hit some kind of a shield. She closed her eyes and tried again. “It’s tied to the hyacinth delivery. Aunt Maudrey knows you too well.”
Across the square, Faustine was watching us through her window as we weighed out the hyacinth. I sent her a picture of the weight. If she said a single word about the harvest today, I’d strangle her.
“You know, maybe you should encourage your aunts to get their vision checked,” Feather said as I hurried away from the counter. “Happy Hettymoot.”
“Whatever,” I growled back.
She couldn’t help but laugh, which is exactly what Faustine did when I got over to Elements. But as soon as the hyacinth was on the scale, Feather’s spell took effect and the glamour dissolved. My hair stayed smooth and shiny though, and there was a touch of smoky eyeliner left behind. At least Feather had good taste.
Without asking, I ducked into the bathroom and changed out of that dress right then and there. I just couldn’t bear to spend another moment in the thing, Hettymoot or not. I ignored Faustine’s judging glare and slipped back outside.
So glad I changed. So glad.
I stopped dead in my tracks before I got to the well in the middle of the cobblestone square. It wasn’t tall enough to hide behind unless you ducked, and I resisted the urge to do just that. All three of Thomas’s friends were walking down the sidewalk, with Juno slightly ahead of the other two. And Thomas’s ghost trailing behind. The eyes of the living were red-rimmed from a night of grieving.
“Juno, wait up,” Alicia begged her.
“Just leave me alone!” Juno barked over her shoulder, her tone frantic. She stopped and turned, raking a hand through her hair. “Please,” she croaked. “Just stop following me. Please.”
Her friends stood there dumbfounded as she stormed away, but she hadn’t been talking to them. She was begging the confused spirit following his friends, I was sure of it. Alicia’s lip began to quiver, then she threw her arms around Kyle, who buried his face in her shoulder. The ghost kept walking, chasing closely after the outsider that could see him. The two pairs went in opposite directions and disappeared from my view and I lingered in the square, waiting for them to get farther away.
I couldn’t face them. I wanted to curl up in a ball right there on the ground and pretend that none of it had ever happened. But that wouldn’t help anybody, so I shook it off and took a deep breath.
“I’m not supposed to play by the well,” the ghost of that little girl said, startling me as she appeared. “My dolly fell in once.”
Not today. I bit back an overwhelmed groan and fled away.
Dot’s bus was parked in front of Wicked Brew, which probably meant she was hitting the Confidence coffee again. Sure enough, I found her at the counter. They’d officially just opened, but she was refilling her cup a second time.
“Aren’t there laws about overserving someone, especially this early in the morning?” I asked Soleil, only half joking.
“This isn’t a bar,” Luna answered, but her eyes told me she was in complete agreement.
“Argh! Not you, too,” Dot grumbled. “I already told them, I learned my lesson yesterday.”
“Oh did you?” I leaned forward and sniffed her empty mug.
“See? Chamomile tea.”
“Chamomile. Isn’t it a little early for that? Although I guess from your perspective, it’s late.”
“I just can’t make you happy this morning, can I?” She stuck her tongue out at me. “But I will have a cappuccino now, please.”
For a moment, Soleil pretended she was going to cut her off, so Dot pouted and batted her eyes. Mine and Luna’s rolled.
“Save the eye batting for your boyfriends,” Soleil laughed, grabbing her mug. “And what enchantments will you be adding today?”
“Hmmm, let’s see.” Dot mulled over the menu. “Double shot of Clarity. Definitely Clarity.”
“Good choice,” the twins said together.
“What’ll it be, Gemma?” Luna asked.
“Um… I’ll have an iced caramel latte with a shot of Hope.”
“Hope?” they all exclaimed, looking at me like I was crazy.
“It’s Hettymoot!” Dot reminded me.
“Yeah, well, I still woke up as a murder suspect this morning.”
“You don’t know that,” Soleil said.
“Well, yeah I’m not positive, but...” I trailed off as a stranger wandered into the shop. My cousins ignored him, all silently agreeing it was probably a distant cousin we didn’t recogn
ize or a tourist. But not me. I thought he was a cop. Plain clothes, but a cop just the same, looking at me but not really looking. Or I was just being massively paranoid. “I think I’ll have a shot of Clarity, too.”
I remembered my promise to Priscilla and conveyed her frustrations to the twins. They cared about as much as I thought they would- not at all. In fact, they only stayed open until 3:00 and the music was kept low because everyone was there to mingle, not dance. Casting a soundproofing spell would easily solve her problem, anyway.
Dot and I sat down at our usual table. She was eager to chat about boys and I was eager to forget about ghosts and murders. Wicked Brew was the place to be last night and she’d met quite a few eligible distant cousins in town for a visit. And because of the earlier commotion, everyone wanted to hear her firsthand account, so it wasn’t hard to come up with things to talk about. There was one guy, I zoned out when she said his name, but they’d really hit it off.
“But I get what you’re saying. This is kind of weird.”
I tuned back in. “What’s weird?”
“Dating. Well, not dating, I guess. Like, I’m talking to him all night and I really like him, but there’s this weird cloud hanging over us, you know?”
“I can imagine.”
“It’s strange. I didn’t want to feel any butterflies in my stomach like human girls are always talking about, but I still did. And now I don’t want to like him too much, you know, because…” She shuddered and took a sip of her drink. “But I want to know him, so that if we do… I mean, I wish my mom had known more about my dad. This is just really weird.”
Gee, I’d only been saying that since, well, forever. “It’s probably more important to get to know his family.”
“That’s a good point.” There was something else she wanted to say, but she was hesitating. That was more like the real Dot, not the chatterbox I had to deal with yesterday. “I don’t think I’m ready for this,” she finally admitted.
“You could always do what a lot of witches do,” I reminded her.
“Marry a human guy?” Her face looked like she’d caught a whiff of something rotten. “That seems even more complicated. Those couples are always fighting.”
“It just seems that way.”
“Or the husbands leave.”
“No they don’t,” I scoffed.
“Well, if they do stay, they aren’t happy. Plus they have to drive all the way to Woodshade for their jobs.”
“Yeah, but they come home at night.”
“And the kids… They’re always going out of town, their mothers have to coach them about what not to say. And why does Christmas have to be so close to Yule? So inconvenient.”
“You’re basically describing what normal is,” I laughed. “You know that right?”
“Normal,” she huffed, shaking her head. “I think that’s the problem, Gemma.”
“Back in the day before there were so many of us, everybody had to marry humans. Including all of Hetty’s daughters. For generations.”
“They had enough magic to get diluted. I don’t.”
Dot was more powerful than she gave herself credit for. She had magic on both sides of her lineage. Insecurity held her back. But she wanted witch stock, someone who understood her world. It was just what she needed, even with the price.
“Maybe next year,” I said.
“Yeah, but maybe next year, the guy I met last night won’t be around.”
I simply nodded, waiting for that Hope to kick in. “That’s what I keep thinking about Wesley.”
“Yeah…” Dot’s crystal blue eyes filled with sadness. “At least we understand it, you know?”
“In a sense.”
“Yeah, but we know it’s coming. And so do they. Like, all the guys I was talking too last night seemed kind of… eager. And not for that.” She drew in a deep breath and her expression became overwhelmed. She’d never dated in her brief foray into college life. “They wanted to connect on a deeper level, too. It’s not like the human girls used to talk about, where the guys didn’t care. Ours do. And they want to leave something of themselves behind. Someone.”
“I just wish they could stick around, too.”
“Of course you do. I don’t have a brother. Wesley was so much older than me, at least it seemed like it when we were kids. But now he’s back and... It’s just so sad. Why should I pile on the sadness?”
“You can’t look at it like that.”
“You do,” she reminded me.
“Yeah, but... Maybe you’re just not ready. And there’s no hurry.”
“There really isn’t. Maudrey didn’t have kids until she was 42! It was weird last night. All these witches in their late thirties on blind dates with younger guys.”
“I took anthropology in college. Lots of cultures have strange customs when it comes to pairing up.”
“I think Belinda went home with a 21 year old. He had red hair, too. Apparently that’s one of her criteria.”
“She already has three kids! Like we need more redheads around here,” I chuckled.
“I know. It’s such a stereotype humans have about us, but it’s kind of true.”
We glanced at our dark auburn haired twin cousins. They were anything but a stereotype, though. “You know, if anyone is probably ready…” I said.
“I know. They just need to find eligible identical twins.”
“They’d totally have to get pregnant at the same time. I can’t imagine it any other way.”
“It’s be easier to tell them apart for a few months if they didn’t,” Dot laughed. “Geez, listen to us. Enough fertility talk already.”
“It is planting season…” But I was eager to move on to a more important subject. “So when you were mingling last night, did you hear anything about—”
“Thomas?” My very own not-quite-a-mind reader. “Yeah. It turns out that Zinnia was renting a room out at the Inn to them. Three rooms, actually. Two to them, and another to that group of girls that won’t stop taking selfies everywhere. And there are like five more groups staying in Woodshade.”
That’s what everyone was talking about? Figures. “I was wondering if you heard any theories.”
“Theories? About what?”
“About who killed him.”
“My money is on pixies. Stupid pixies. They kill everybody.”
“He isn’t related to us, though.”
“Oh, he has to be. Why else would it have happened?”
“Because… Like a hundred reasons, Dot! Humans murder each other all the time.”
“Not around here. A lot of witches are betting on a poltergeist, though. Eliza and her cronies are planning to summon those ghosts that appear around the gallows, but Luna said her aunt has tried to help them before and they aren’t very… with it.”
“Tormented spirits usually aren’t.”
“I don’t really know much about ghosts.”
“I saw his yesterday,” I told her.
“Whose?”
“Thomas’s.”
“Oh, my Goddess, really?”
“Yeah. He talked to me. Maybe Isla can ask him what happened.”
“I wonder if he’d be able to understand it. I mean, most humans probably couldn’t recognize sprite activity even when they weren’t confused about why they were dead.”
“Yeah, but if it wasn’t pixies—”
“Oh, it was definitely pixies.” Feather appeared at our table, startling me.
“Hi!” Dot squealed and jumped up to hug her. “Who’s watching Spark?”
“My sister. She thought this was her vacation, but she didn’t realize that it was mine.”
“Oh, you’re aren’t going to leave her there,” Dot said.
“I will for an hour. I need coffee.” Feather turned to me. “It was totally pixies, though.”
“I don’t think it was pixies,” I grumbled.
“Come on Gemma, we’ve had a pixie problem for over a century!” Dot tipped her mug
back to finish the last drop. “And I know what you’re thinking. They aren’t strong enough.”
“A swarm of them would be,” Feather added. “Or they could have tricked him.”
“Too bad we can’t spray for them like humans can for mosquitos.”
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