A Match Made in Spell (Fate Weaver Book 1)

by ReGina Welling

  I snorted. "Unlucky in love, my left foot! You had so many women panting over you tonight I'm surprised you didn't break your neck slipping on a puddle of drool. What's that all about, anyway?"

  "Trust me, that only happens when I play. In real life, nobody ever notices me. Besides, that's infatuation, not love. You should know the difference," he challenged.

  "Touche. So what's your day job then, Mister Rockstar?"

  "I work at WKIT's studio. I write music and lyrics for advertisements. And I'm starting my own recording company; that's why I bought such a big house, so I don't have to pay for commercial space. I want to work with unsigned artists, and eventually, open my own label. But that's long-term."

  Impressive and unique. This guy just got better and better. If only I could figure out what his deal was. "Would I recognize any of your work?"

  "I did the jingle for Fleet's Treats."

  Organic dog biscuits. Catchy tune. The guy had chops. The rest of the drive was spent with me tossing out a list of imaginary products and him thinking up jingles for them.

  We pulled onto my block just as I was thinking that if I laughed any more I wouldn't be able to feel my cheeks in the morning, and I knew in a hot minute it was going to be a long night. The windows all along the right side of the house were fogged over, and 80's music--the only decade my fairy godmothers declared was worth listening to--thumped loud enough to rattle them in their frames.

  "Oh, no."

  "Looks like a party, can I come in?" Absolutely not.

  "There isn't going to be a party for much longer. They're going to wake the neighbors, and Mrs. Chatterly has the cops on speed dial. I swear, I leave for one evening and chaos ensues. I had a lot of fun, thanks for the ride home. I'll see you later!"

  Before I could open the car door, Kin reached over and caught my face in his hands, pulling me to his chest in a kiss that made my head spin. His lips were firm but gentle, and the scent of his breath trailed a chill up my spine. He smelled faintly of cinnamon and something I couldn't identify. Whatever it was, it went to my head like a fine wine.

  When the kiss ended, I felt a sense of regret.

  "I've been wanting to do that for days." He sighed and pulled me in again.

  With no warning, I lost all control, crushing my lips against his, my breath hitching in my throat. He responded in kind, and for a moment I was lost. Then I came crashing back to earth and realized what kind of freak I must seem like. The last thing I wanted was for him to think I was like one of those girls from the club, willing to give it up just because he was sexy as hell.

  "Oh my god, I'm so sorry." I scurried from his car before he could respond, cursing fae-kind all the way up the walk as the thumping music suddenly changed to "Like a Virgin"--by no accident, I was sure.

  Chapter Six

  Muttering under my breath, I took a moment to notice that the fog on the windows had blocked out what I could only describe as a faerie fireworks show, which would have been a lot more difficult to explain in the presence of a normal guy like Kin. Who probably thought I was insane, so what difference did it make, anyway?

  Inside, the sound of raised female voices signaled nothing good. There are days I wish I could just get my own place. It took me a second to realize it was laughter I was hearing, and not fighting. What does it say about my life that I didn't find this comforting?

  Before heading toward the family room and the voices, I peeked into the kitchen and found it still spotless. That which is destroyed by magic can be restored by the same. At least it hadn't been my responsibility to clean up after them for once. My breaking up the immediate fight had not resulted in a complete ceasefire, and everyone was walking on eggshells ever since the most recent battle.

  I stuck my head in the doorway to get a feel for the tone of the room before I joined my supermodel mommies. Most witches get only one faerie godmother, and then only on an as-needed basis. Depending on the day you asked, I'd tell you that my life has been both blessed and cursed by having them around every day. Of the three, Terra was the motherly one, but each came with her own brand of wisdom.

  Now I had a difficult question to ask them. One that I hoped would not institute more havoc.

  Soleil caught sight of me lingering near the doorway and said, "We've made up, and now we're celebrating. Come join us."

  Reluctantly, I went. Maybe now was the wrong time to broach the subject, but I needed answers.

  Plunking down on the edge of the chair closest to the fireplace, I dispensed with the preamble and said, "Why didn't you tell me there was a narrowing window of opportunity for me to Awaken?" As soon I heard them, I realized the words sounded like an accusation. Faeries take great offense to being unjustly accused. Offended faeries tend to toss around magic. I might have started Fae War #2,357. Well, if I had, I'd own it. I lifted my chin to show them the sadness in my eyes.

  "Oh, honey," Terra's sympathetic drawl let me know I was off the hook. With her anyway. "None of us had the heart to cause you more pain."

  "We planned to tell you...after." Soleil chimed in.

  "You knew the Balefire would pass on to Serena?"

  "Oh no, we would never let that happen. Technically it would pass to the next nearest witch, and as long as there was someone else closer than that silly little girl, we thought..." In her haste to reassure me, Evian had let something else slip.

  "So you planned to bring in someone you thought was better qualified and you weren't going to tip me off at all?"

  Three shamefaced faeries found somewhere else to look, rather than meet my gaze head-on. Vaeta's countenance remained carefully blank.

  "We had our reasons." And that was the only defense Terra allowed. "There's still time before Beltane, and I have a good feeling about it. I think this is your year. Now, we're celebrating, and you are woefully behind. Have a drink and tell us about the man in the car."

  I recognized the bottle she waved around and then passed to Evian--moss green cut glass that sparkled in the firelight. The lower half of the decanter was wrapped in leather and copper wire: twinkleberry wine. Sounds like it ought to be made from sugarplums, right?

  Well, it isn't. One sip of that stuff can send a mortal off to La La Land for a couple of days. My half-witch heritage means I can handle a glassful. One. Don't ask me how I learned two was over my limit. That's a story I prefer to forget. Suffice it to say that coming to in the middle of the backyard, three days later, without a stitch of clothing on hadn't been my finest moment. I have a fever dream memory of pledging my love to the full moon.

  The far corner of our backyard housed Terra's secret stash of whatever otherworldly fruit she blended into the wine--I was almost sure there were no actual twinkleberries. The spot lived inside a faerie glamour that deflected prying eyes--even mine, and that's saying something.

  A slightly tipsy Evian splashed the rest of the bottle into the delicate bowl of a crystal wine glass and handed it to me. More for form than anything else, I raised the glass to my lips for a small sip. It tasted like liquid sunlight and wiped out the memory of my long day. Settling into my chair, I prepared to listen to the sisters catch each other up on the last hundred years.

  Soleil uncorked a second bottle, most of which she served to Vaeta, I noticed. I also noticed the sidelong glance she paid to Terra. Maybe there was an ulterior motive to getting Vaeta well and truly plastered. With a second sip inside me, I decided I didn't really care.

  I felt like I was sitting in the exotic bird cage at the zoo when the four of them dropped their glamour. Evian looked like she had been born of the water that was her element. Hair the color of a tropical sea tumbling almost to her waist; eyes the angry white of a whitecap wave; and lips of blue set off an arresting face. In stark contrast, Soleil's short cap of fiery hair whipped around her head like the flame that provided her life force. Dark eyes and ebony lips were embers on her ivory face.

  Terra's coloring changed with the seasons. Today, she sported her spring look. Mahog
any hair streaked in shades of earth tones swirled around a stunning face. Lips of apple red smiled easily and often. The ultimate earth mother, Terra protected and nurtured the soil and all the creatures who lived upon it. Of the four, her appearance was closest to human form. Only eyes the color of pink marble required glamour in order for her to pass among mortals without detection.

  "What this party needs is a hot tub. Shall we?" Terra jumped up from her chair.

  Evian dragged me out of mine just in time. Vaeta drew a breath and not-so-gently blew the furniture away from the center of the room. Terra waggled two fingers toward the floor, which rearranged itself into a shallow depression that Evian filled with water. Soleil provided heat, and Vaeta added bubbles. Some days living with faeries is just plain awesome.

  Garments shifting to bands that barely qualified as coverings--we'd had many a discussion about modesty and propriety in this house, me lecturing them, not the other way around--the four of them descended into the heated water. I debated going upstairs for my suit, then decided my underwear would do and followed suit. Delicious, fragrant heat soaked into my bones. Heaven.

  Somehow the talk turned to me and my love life, or lack thereof.

  "It always goes wrong somewhere around the third date. That's when I find out the thing."

  "The thing?" Vaeta lounged in the bubbling froth. Like the others, her beauty could steal the breath. Vaeta's look was never static. It shifted from palest gray to the blue of a winter shadow and back. Hair, eyes, and lips all a perfect match against skin so pale it was almost translucent. Watching the slow shift of color was all the more mesmerizing under the effects of faerie wine.

  "Yeah, the thing. The reason I have to break it off. Nine times out of ten, I get the matchmaker vibe. You know, the little whatsit that says he's fated for someone else."

  "And the tenth?"

  "The tenth is when everything is going along fine and out of nowhere comes the and there it is moment. Like when he shows me one of those tacky photos of him against the black background looking contemplatively up at a double exposure of his cat, proving he's already in a co-dependent relationship. You know what I mean."

  A chorus of faerie snorts met that comment.

  "I know they get the same thing with me. You can see it when a guy asks what I do for a living. The word matchmaker comes out of my mouth and all they hear is evil, scheming destroyer of freedom. They start looking for the door and you can clock it from there. Before you know it, my date is hightailing it away from me like I set his pants on fire. Half an hour is all they can manage--tops."

  "Oh, darling, half an hour isn't nearly long enough. You need a man with some staying power."

  Drat my ivory skin, it blushes at the drop of a...well, a sexual innuendo for one thing. Asking the faeries about their love lives fell deep into the icky, too much information about your pseudo-parents territory. Not least because, from what I could tell, most faeries don't mate for life. There's enough love-the-one-you're-with mentality to make all of their dating advice suspect at best, and flat-out disastrous at worst.

  Don't get me wrong, I'm not a prude or anything. I've had my fair share of men to help me pass the time, but you don't work with seekers of love every day without catching a case of the happily-ever-after bug yourself. The heat and excitement of a fling were fun and all, but I was beginning to want something a little deeper. Providing, of course, there was a man out there who rated high enough on the not-a-frog scale to qualify for the job.

  Who am I kidding?

  Imagine this. I find a man who isn't intimidated by The Job, and then I bring him home. The recent disco swampfest was not even the worst thing I've ever walked in on. We get a lot of interesting visitors at our house. You try hiding four faeries playing host to a gaggle of cavorting mermaids or a nymph on a unicorn from a man. The way I see it is that if he's dumb enough to accept any explanation I might muster up, he's too dumb for me to want to date. I guess that leaves me in a weird place.

  Now I'm actively trying to bring on my latent witchiness, and if I'm successful, that's going to add a whole other dimension to the situation. I've seen Bewitched. I don't want to marry a Darrin. Honestly, the way that man tried to keep a witch down just makes my blood boil--and all under the guise of being protective. Bah.

  Faerie wine buzzed through my head and stole all my angsty thoughts away while my family managed to spend a pleasant hour getting giddy with each other.

  "What about tonight?" Evian waggled blue-green eyebrows at me. "Looked like you were getting cozy with the guy in the hot car."

  "Kin? Nope. That's not going to be a thing. Not my type at all."

  "Then why were you playing dueling tongues with him? Looked pretty hot to me." Soleil would be the best judge of hot, I suppose.

  "Things aren't always what they seem." Already heated from the steaming water, there was no red left to blush my cheeks, and I could see Soleil wasn't buying my weak protest.

  "What's wrong with him? If he's good enough for a game of tonsil hockey, why not try a second date?"

  Because I didn't hang around long enough for him to ask for one was the correct response, but not the one I gave.

  ***

  The next morning brought a dozen men fully equipped with strobe lights and jackhammers to take up residence in my head. Navigating the stairs with one eye slitted open and the other squeezed shut, I oozed into the hall leading to the kitchen. History with that particular brew proved the aspirin clutched in my hand would be of limited use in warding off a twinkleberry wine hangover. Food would help, even if the thought of it made my stomach flip over like a seal chasing a ball in a water tank. I knew without looking that my hair was standing up every which way--because I could feel every strand--and I probably had bags under my eyes drooping clear down to my chin.

  Slumping onto a stool, I clapped hands over my ears to dim down the apocalyptic echo of Vaeta's cheerful voice.

  "Here, drink this." She slid a glass of green goo in front of me. If I didn't think the act of heaving would kill me, I would have tossed my cookies right on the table. "My patented hangover cure."

  I shot her a murderous glare that failed to leave her bleeding on the floor. Almost took me out, though.

  "Drink it." Hating her for looking daisy fresh when I felt like a bag of week-old garbage, I did as she bade me. The goo smelled worse than it looked and tasted like something scraped off a frog's butt. I gagged it down as fast as I could.

  Have you ever seen one of those stop-action movie clips in reverse? Picture a piece of paper going from crumpled to smooth. That's about how I felt during the next thirty seconds.

  By the time it was over, I felt normal. No, better than normal, and I swear my skin was clearer. Vaeta could make an absolute fortune selling that stuff on the late-night shopping channels.

  "Better?"

  "Like new. What was in that?" I rested my chin in my hands and watched Vaeta wave her fingers in a circular motion over a bowl of eggs that looked like they were whipping themselves. Interesting talent to have.

  "Trade secret," she chirped. I nearly died. Vaeta was a morning faerie. Even hopped up on her kill-the-hangover juice, I wasn't wild about the way her fluttering around the kitchen made me feel like a slug. "If I told you what was in it, you wouldn't have taken it." She was preaching to the converted.

  I lost a couple minutes in silent contemplation that involved trying to remember a portion of time the night before, beginning with my joining in a rousing chorus of "Don't Stop Believin'" and the moment the sun fell on my face this morning with a thud. Total blank. That didn't bode well for me.

  "Did I do anything weird last night?" Asking one of the fae to define weird probably wasn't my finest moment. Vaeta treated me to an eloquently-arched eyebrow of foggy blue over an eye that gleamed with purple fire. On second thought, I'd rather not know. "Never mind."

  A steaming plate of fluffy eggs dotted with bits of veggies and ham landed in front of me. Vaeta poured coffee before
tucking into her own breakfast and eying me with interest. This was the first time since she had come back from the underworld that we had been in a room alone together. I had a thousand questions I wanted to ask, but none of them seemed appropriate, so I waited for her to break the ice.

  "What have my sisters told you about me?" She opened right up with a conversational minefield and played right into my curiosity.

  "Not a lot. Nothing bad, I mean," I assured her when her face darkened. "I think it was too painful for them." Probably true. It's hard to tell with faeries sometimes. They either keep their emotions under wraps or spew them out all over the place--often in physical form. There's not a lot of middle ground. The truth was that until Vaeta dropped back into our lives, I hadn't known she even existed, but that probably wasn't what she wanted to hear.

  Vaeta snorted. "A diplomatic answer, how sweet. They've taught you well, little fate weaver."

  It was my turn to snort. "Fate weaver? You mean my matchmaking work? I wouldn't call it anything quite that dramatic. I bring people together, the rest is up to them. It's a step up from a dating service, but not by much. I have no control over what happens after they ride off into the sunset."

  Of all the possible responses to that statement, a hoot of laughter was the last I expected from her.

  "A dating service? You can't be that naive." The laughing stopped abruptly. "Or maybe you can. I see my sisters have kept you somewhat in the dark, and far be it from me to shatter your illusions." The next words she spoke in a contemplative voice, "Is that why you haven't claimed your birthright?"

  I assumed she meant the full measure of my magic. "Oh, I've tried. Believe me. I'm beginning to think there's nothing to claim. Why else would I be little better than a null after all this time? The ritual doesn't work for me because I don't even have enough magic to complete it."

  Another peal of laughter grated on my nerves. My last nerve, actually, if you want to know the truth. "Poor little fate weaver." I couldn't tell by her tone if I was being condescended, but I suspected I was. "Tell Auntie Vaeta the whole sordid story. Who knows, a fresh eye just might see a clear resolution to your little problem."