Magic & Mayhem

by Susan Conley

  “Kelli likes to surround herself with free talent,” Lorna sniped, as Kelli fluttered by with a bouquet of flowers, terse nods for Lorna and Maria Grazia, and another inquiring look for Jamie.

  Who continued scowling. What bloody time was it? Maybe he could sneak away before Annabelle got here? Cooooowwwwwaaaaard, sang a nasty little voice in his head, and he leaned back up against the windowsill.

  He clocked Lorna and Maria Grazia, under the cover of scrutinising the room again, exchanged a series of arch looks. The noise level was growing as the techies had finally arrived, and their mass stampede toward the food had nearly lifted the roof off. The DJ raised the volume accordingly, and the lights began to spin when, as a nod to the high percentage of dancers in the room, the speakers blared the theme to ‘Flashdance’. A communal squeal of delight accompanied the swarm of bodies as the first of many impromptu performances commenced. Jamie, Lorna and Maria Grazia rolled their eyes in concert as smoke started to roll in from behind the DJ, and as Jamie opened his mouth to comment — well, he never got that far, and his mouth hung open like a fish’s because Annabelle had just entered the room.

  “She’s trying to kill me,” he muttered; Lorna smirked, and Maria Grazia sighed, and they both disappeared into the thickly gathering smoke as Annabelle made her way toward Jamie. Techies dropped shrimp toast and dancing mimes missed steps as Annabelle … sashayed — there was no other word for it — Annabelle sashayed across the room, one high heel clad foot in front of the other.

  Her hair bounced around her face, and it had a ‘fresh out of the shower’ look that immediately cast a tantalizing mental image of Annabelle in the shower into his mind. The red satin scrap of a dress she was wearing flashed under the disco lights — it clung to her curves without looking skin tight, and yet it revealed just enough leg, just enough cleavage, to be alluring — and she carried it off with a calibre of style and ease that was breathtaking.

  Sheer black hose hugged long, curvy legs that ended in — Jamie felt like weeping. Shiny black heels with the little toe thing cut out, so he could see two adorable little red toenails peeking up at him. “Howaya,” Annabelle mimicked his accent, and stole a sip of his beer.

  “Hey, how are you, how are you doing?” Jamie raised his voice and came down on his consonants like jackhammer.

  “What?” Annabelle shouted, the DJ having upped the volume yet again, as the party had found its feet and the dance floor was packed.

  He leaned in (she was wearing that scent again, bloody hell) and shouted into her ear, “Nothing! Bad joke!” He looked away from her inquiring gaze; the silence grew and grew; he knew he should be complimenting her on her (stunning) appearance, fetching her a drink, doing all the things he’d do under normal circumstances. But these weren’t normal circumstances. He felt his mood grow darker; he could almost feel her mood shift from sexy to sulky in the next heartbeat.

  “Humph,” said Annabelle.

  “What?” Jamie shouted.

  “I said ‘humph!’” Annabelle shouted back.

  “Let’s — we can’t talk in here.” Jamie grabbed her elbow, Annabelle jerked it out of his grasp, and walked back out to the landing. There was a smaller, quieter room on the other side of the stair, with more candles and more food and a few couches — that were already playing host to kissing couples. For feck’s sake, thought Jamie, don’t people even wait to get drunk anymore? Leading the way to a quiet corner — and following along behind her was going to kill him — he grabbed two more beers from a nearby drinks table. They clinked bottles perfunctorily, and Jamie couldn’t imagine how he was going to handle this, if he wasn’t just acting the biggest eejit going, and if throwing his love life into the lap of the fates mightn’t be such a bad idea. He hated to hurt her, she was such a sensitive type, and her heart had only recently been —

  “So what’s your frickin’ problem?” Annabelle asked.

  “Uh. What?” The kitten had turned into a tiger.

  “Let’s get something straight, okay? I am, admittedly, a sucker for a good romance, the whole thing with the running into each other all the time on the street, and the thing with turning up at my house with knives and whisks — I really liked that. It’s the sort of thing that, when you’ve met someone you’re attracted to that kind of … cuts out the bullshit wondering and doubting and stuff. I was looking forward to tonight, and, you may have noticed, took some trouble with my appearance — ”

  “You look — ”

  Annabelle raised a hand and cut him off. “You blew that five minutes ago. If you’d like to tell me what’s on your mind, that’s great, if not, I’ve got no time for this, because to be honest with you, I only recently discovered that my ex-boyfriend, the one that dumped me rather abruptly, is in fact engaged to be married. I have, therefore, had it up to here — ” She raised an arm dramatically as high as it would go over her head, “ — with, with, with, no communication, withholding, blowing hot-and-cold douches.”

  Hidden behind a couchful of groping couples, Lorna and Maria Grazia silently cheered her on.

  “That’s direct,” said Jamie, playing for time.

  “I really don’t have the patience for anything else.” Annabelle leaned against the wall, and wiggled her foot like it was paining her.

  Jamie stalled by chugging down the rest of his beer.

  Annabelle looked away, her high dudgeon depleted. “If you’re not interested, just tell me, okay? We’re adults.”

  That’s funny, Jamie thought, I was only feeling like a fifteen-year old gurrier.

  “I was wondering about your Pooka,” he said. “Like, what kind of Pooka it was. Exactly.”

  “Exactly?”

  “Whether or not it is in fact trapped in one of your cupboards, or in a closet, or … ?” He crossed his arms, and felt grim satisfaction at her apparent discomfort.

  “What other kind is there?” She tried for an evasive shrug and a noncommittal laugh.

  “The kind that shapeshifts. The kind that follows a person around, and makes all kinds of trouble for a person, the kind that needs a person to marry another person or else it will be resigned to the darkest realms of limbo or some such bollocks.”

  “Oh,” she said, looking a little shifty-eyed. “That kind.”

  “I finally met my auntie. The witchy one.” He went to take another drink, and finding his bottle of Dutch courage empty, put it on a nearby windowsill. “She’s heading for the West of Ireland, waiting for your Pooka, or waiting for whatever’s supposed to happen with your Pooka to … happen.” He shoved his hands on his pockets. “And then I remembered the story, the one she used to tell all the time. About the Pookas and the Queen of the Ban Sí.”

  “Yeah, okay, I know that story. Dan Minnehan told me.” Annabelle moved restlessly, nervously, and put her half-finished beer on the sill next to his.

  Her movement stirred the air and caused her lemony-limey scent to waft all over him and he thought he’d drop bloody dead right on the spot. “Wait. Dan Minnehan knew the story? But it’s a family story!”

  “He said he had an aunt that had had the same Pooka problem. Maybe you guys are related.”

  “Maybe we’re cousins!” Jamie couldn’t get his head around it. “But he’s — but — shite — the mother knows the genealogy business — but maybe — what a turn up!”

  Annabelle tapped a foot and waited for Jamie to stop imaging his reunion with his long-lost, internationally famous cousin.

  It was taking too long. “So,” Annabelle prodded. “So you remembered the story.”

  “The business with the Queen and Pookas was, like, the main bit of the tale, but there was always this little part at the end that we used to torment each other about, when Maeve would say that one day down the road, maybe in our lifetime, a Flynn and one of the last Pooka’s people would marry to make up for the wrong don
e in years past. That when the last Pooka had to right its wrong, it would have to do with one of us.”

  He decided to leave out the part where it had always seemed that Maeve was directing this epilogue directly to him, and how his sisters and brother and cousins had slagged him to death about it.

  “So, you think that you have to marry me, is that it? That what’s gotten you all worked up?” Annabelle had raised herself to her fullest height, and looked him dead in the eye. She moved closer, and ran a finger down his chest to his belt buckle. This, he thought, is going to kill me. “Well, let me clear this up for you right now. My Pooka — Callie is her name, by the way — said that I’d only have to kiss, uh, somebody, and then she’d be portable again, or whatever, and I could take care of the rest of it. On my own.”

  “I — I really, em, like you Annabelle, em, and I’ll kiss you if you want,” he stuttered. Her gaze was frigid, nothing like the look he’d come to know. “But the marriage thing, I mean, you know yourself, we’ve only just met, and to, to, to, to — ”

  Annabelle stepped back. “Dude, listen, you’re no prize yourself.”

  “Now, that’s not what — whatd’ya mean, I’m no prize?”

  “Conceited, as if I was going to drop dead with joy at some kind of proposal. Cocky, acting as though you had to let me down gently or something — ”

  “Listen to yourself, ya wagon, assuming that I was ever going to propose in the first place — ”

  “A, a, a, cooking snob!” Annabelle was reaching and she knew it. “And — disorganized!”

  “As opposed to so feckin’ organized that there’s not breathing space for a bit of creativity to rear its ugly wee head — ”

  “I am creative! I am talented! I don’t need to wallow in some faux-artistic mud puddle of a mess because of some crackpot notion that neatness equals — ”

  “And manipulative! Turning up in some dress designed to bleed every man in the room of reason, and smelling like, like, some bloody gorgeous lemon tree on legs, and … and … .”

  In their fury, they had ended up nose-to-nose, practically chest-to-chest. Jamie ran out of gas and they stood there, face-to-face, angry eye to angry eye, eyes dark with fury and hurt.

  “This isn’t the way I thought things were going to go tonight,” whispered Annabelle.

  “No.” Jamie fought the urge to tease a few strands of touchably soft-looking hair out of her eyes. “I, I don’t know what to think.”

  Annabelle brushed the hair out of her face. “There’s nothing to think. You’ve made yourself clear. I’ll save my Pooka somehow, by myself.” She took a deep breath. “Thanks for the dinner. It was nice.”

  She stepped back, broke the connection. “I’m going to go dance. I love to dance.” She smiled, faintly. “Good luck with the council.”

  “Your friends said you had good news?” But Annabelle shook her head, and turned and left the room.

  Bereft was a word he’d always liked to come across in novels. He’d say it aloud, luxuriating in the ‘r’, sliding through the ‘f’, and hitting the ‘t’ like pebble out of a slingshot. First time, he thought morosely, that he’d ever felt like it. More beer, he decided. What else was a cowardly eejit of a man to do.

  He was torn out of his reverie as Annabelle’s friends rose up from behind a couch like the wrath of God. What he had begun to think of as Maria Grazia’s pleasant and warm countenance was set like stone, and Lorna’s eyes were narrowed with such dislike they were practically invisible. She made a movement to go at him, but Maria Grazia held her back.

  “Don’t waste your time, Lorna,” she said, never taking her eyes off of Jamie. “I’d say Annabelle has said it all. I’ve never heard her so fierce,” she went on, deceptively conversationally. “If anyone was thinking of making up of for being such an asshole, they’d have a lot — a lot — of work to do.”

  Lorna tried to get at Jamie, practically swiping her nails at him, but Maria Grazia increased the pressure of her arm around her friend’s waist, and dragged her out of the room.

  Jamie followed them out after decent interval and glanced in at the main party. Annabelle danced with two set builders and one wiry mime, and it was the image he carried with him on his lonely, rain-drenched walk home.

  • • •

  Annabelle locked the door behind her, and gratefully kicked off her shoes. It was only midnight, and there she was, back home, the dregs of her excited grooming littering the apartment. She began clearing up, half-heartedly, and stopped. She’d have plenty of time tomorrow. She sat down on one of her ‘dining room’ chairs, and drooped. The fun had gone out of the night fairly rapidly, and dancing with a series of burly techies and gay mimes had been only slightly entertaining. Lorna and Maria Grazia had given her space, after she’d asked for it, and she got the idea that they somehow knew what had transpired.

  “I didn’t want things to move so fast either, you know!” All the things she could have said to Jamie, all the rational things that she’d been saying all along had gone right out of her head, and she’d thrown a major tantrum instead. Friends fight all the time, he’d said — she had hoped they were getting to be friends …

  “So.” Callie materialised in the middle of the room. Annabelle was shocked by her Pooka’s appearance: she seemed aged and bent, wizened and crushed, her voice a pained rasp. “No kissing, I take it.”

  “No. He figured out his part in the scheme, and he, he’s not interested.”

  “Is that how easily you give up?” Callie croaked. “No wonder you needed me to get you on your path, no wonder you didn’t have any career to speak of, if it wasn’t for me, you’d still be moonin’ over that rotter of a banker — ”

  Annabelle rose, angry all over again. “You said it yourself, ‘magic isn’t magic’! Time healed my broken heart, not all that hocus-pocus, and all those people called me for work because I am good at what I do, and I have a meeting with an agent because she saw my work and liked it, not because — ” She hesitated, unsure. “Not because you had anything to do with it. Right?”

  Callie began to fade from sight. “You are on your path, and I seem to be on mine.” The Pooka’s voice became as faint as her presence. “If I had any power at all, it was only for the good. And I have no idea where it is that I am headed. I wanted only the best for you, Annabelle, my charge, my responsibility … my girl. And now … “ Her voice trailed off almost completely. “If you could find it in your heart to do me a good turn, there are seven days left. One week to save me from a fate over which I have no control. Annabelle!” Callie raised her voice in a plea. “Please! You’re the only one who can — ”

  And she disappeared. Annabelle stood, useless, alone in her living room, a lump in her throat, guilt building in her heart.

  Dammit. She might have to talk that Irishman again after all.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  That ought to cover it. Callie rolled onto her back, a sleek, healthy panther, and licked her paws smugly. Controlling humans of this soft-hearted sort was almost too easy for a Pooka of such infinite talents.

  Any day now … any day …

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Standing on the sidewalk in front of the building on West Thirtieth, Annabelle was about to shut the flip case for her phone and put it in her pocket; after two gleeful phone calls to Maria Grazia and Lorna, she was fighting the urge to make a third. She compromised, snapping the cover shut, but keeping it in her hand. She looked up at the facade behind her and smiled. What a difference, she thought, a little over sixty days can make.

  She turned east down Thirtieth, and slowed a bit as she looked up toward the post office. Less than two months ago, she’d sent off yet another manuscript to yet another disinterested party; today, she turned away, head held high, the newest client of one of the city’s best agencies, officially on the working roster for Image/A
rt International. And, might she add, in the possession of a contract, which she would, after a considered perusal, sign, and in doing so take on an enormous and enormously exciting blog/book project.

  The subject of which, coincidentally, was documenting Dan Minnehan and his farewell tour, which was taking place in Ireland.

  She wouldn’t have to come across for a ticket after all — she had to leave on Saturday.

  The second to last day of her Pooka’s free existence.

  Damn it, thought Annabelle. I really am going to have to call Jamie.

  • • •

  I am really going to have call Annabelle, thought Jamie, as he hung up the phone. It hadn’t sunk in, the content of his recently finished call, and he tossed the portable handset onto a pile of newspapers.

  Wasn’t it lunchtime? Why not eat some lunch? He opened the refrigerator and was greeted with an unusual sight. Neither hide nor hair of an edible object. He must be tragically distracted, he brooded, and he slammed the door shut. Slightly moldy bread and the dregs of some jam would have to do for now. He had, it appeared, exactly sixteen coffee beans, enough to make half a shot of black espresso. He turned the bean grinder on full throttle, and succeeded in drowning out his thoughts for a moment.

  He should call Maeve, except she’d probably figure out that he’d blown it with the girl. Give the mother a ring, let her get down to the business of ringing half the country.

  He’d gotten the funding. He’d gotten the funding! No, he was too preoccupied by the other business to really give a healthy whoop and holler.

  Maybe all she’d wanted was a bit of a snog. But Jamie knew, in his heart of hearts, that it wasn’t going to be possible to stop there.

  • • •

  Annabelle paused to withdraw a small note pad from her purse. There was a lot to do in the ensuing days, and mental notes were not going to cut. I, thought Annabelle, love making lists.

  Especially lists that have to do with travel and preparing to work on an international gig.