Wish Hunter (The Savannah River Series Book 1)

by Hero Bowen

That was all he’d get out of her. The rest belonged in a keepsake box inside her chest, the lid lifted only when she could bear to look inside. She rallied quickly. “Well, Dr. Fitzpatrick, that brings us to the end of our hour.”

  He unleashed a sigh, stretching out his arms. “Time flies, eh?”

  “Nevertheless, I hope it helped.”

  He stood to leave, but when he was almost at the door, Nadia called him back with one final piece of advice: “Life goes on after divorce. Remember that.”

  He gave a silent nod and exited the office. With any luck, he wouldn’t be back. She’d attained all three of his wishes, her first trifecta in years. It didn’t really matter to her that they were the only three he’d ever get in his lifetime. But despite everything, she had wanted him to leave with a grain of advice that would actually help him, or at least inspire him to have another honest conversation with his wife.

  Nadia sat back with a relieved sigh and toyed with the silver chain around her neck, coaxing the rings out from the neckline of her blouse, the gold stark against the silver. Wedding bands—hers and Nick’s—side by side, warmed by her skin, always lying as close to her heart as possible. Even now, she regretted not taking his last name of Landa, although she’d wanted to. As always, her family had successfully pressured her into doing what they wanted her to do.

  Shaking her head to dispel the creeping sadness, she picked up the wishing box. The rusty red heartwood was almost uncomfortably hot to the touch, signaling that the trapped wish was stowed safely inside. As for the slip of paper, that would remain a secret. She made it a point to never read a word; it was the least she owed her clients for their unintentional sacrifices.

  If the unusual glimmer coming off the box was any indication, it was a reasonably potent wish. But who was she kidding? No matter what she brought home, it was never enough.

  Chapter Two

  Nadia steered her beloved, burnt-orange Chevy Nova toward home. Regardless of how the day’s marriage wrangling or wish hunting went, the scenic route past Forsyth Park always blanketed her with a temporary serenity like no other. Spanish moss draped over the scarecrow limbs of live oaks that never lost their air of magic, with clusters of magnolias and dogwoods completing the canopy over the walkways that spilled toward the crystalline central fountain. Imposing houses lined the boulevard: a blend of Italianate beauties of red brick, Colonial mansions with gleaming white colonnades, and mystical Victorian-style buildings that looked as though they’d been plucked from England.

  “Next up we have ‘Rest Awhile’ by Savannah’s own Miles Hunter,” the radio DJ crooned through the tinny speakers. Nadia switched it off, not wanting to be reminded of Dr. Fitzpatrick and his wife’s divisive artwork.

  But Dr. Fitzpatrick’s question about Nadia’s naked wedding finger had reawakened the stab of loss it represented. She had the ring still, but no husband. The house they’d lived in was long sold. Even though Nadia knew all of this, every day for the past year she tricked herself into believing that she was going home to him, and that he would be there, instead of under a tombstone at Laurel Grove.

  Her hand fell onto the warm wishing box on the passenger seat next to her. Theft number fifty, basically halfway to the end of their debt. Maybe that significant milestone meant Nadia could ask to spend one wish of her own, especially considering what day it was—the one-year anniversary of the worst day of her life. A day that would be forever burned into her memory. She hadn’t even taken off work today in hopes that the hours would fly past and she wouldn’t have time to think about what had happened.

  Her fingers absently trailed the line where the box lid sealed. It taunted her just how easy it would be to open. To take that wish for herself. Ask for forgiveness, not permission, right? All she’d have to do was put her hand in the box, feel the wish settle in the middle of her palm, and then press her hand to her heart. After that, she’d only need to find a candle and blow out the flame as she thought of her wish. But if the Wishmaster ever found out that Nadia had spent a wish meant to go toward the family debt . . .

  Best not to chance it. Her grandmother would never approve of the wish she wanted to make, debt or no debt. In the months after the funeral, Nadia had begged and begged her grandmother, then her mother, to make this one exception, to help make her heart whole again. But the Wishmaster tracked every single wish that came through Nadia’s counseling office, and her grandmother had once ranted, “You ever take such risk in using wish without permission, Wishmaster will know and then we lose all. You want your babcia and mama to be left powerless? Homeless? I cannot have you in my house if you do such thing.”

  With a conscious effort, Nadia pulled her hand back from the box and squeezed the sun-warm steering wheel. After a couple more turns, she reached the home straight, her car rattling up to the curb a few minutes later. With the box in hand, she got out and put the sound of the still-ticking engine behind her.

  She wedged the wish trap under her arm as the shadow of the tall iron gates fell across her. Gold adornments twisted into the black, echoing the design that patterned the box in her possession.

  Beyond the gates lay the Kaminski Mansion, a jaw-dropping Georgian Revival, with Ionic columns and a swan’s neck pediment bordering the front door like a picture frame. Twin colonnades acted as proud wings on either side of the gray-painted brickwork of the main body, while ominous black shutters butterflied at every long window. A slate roof stood proudly above it all, having sheltered generations during notoriously fickle Georgia rainstorms.

  The suffocating humidity painted Nadia in an unwelcome sheen as she pushed through the gate and along the garden path to the front door. The fountain of a winged messenger, which hadn’t spewed anything in her lifetime, silently judged her as she passed, its chipped right wing a testament to her reckless childhood. She doubted it would ever fan its water into the sky again. Hell, it probably wasn’t even plugged into anything. Now, it was just a place for pigeons to roost and get shooed away, sometimes with her grandma’s potato artillery.

  As she stepped through the front door, a familiar, gentle pull tugged at the elastic band of her nerves. It didn’t concern her. The house was only making sure she was a permitted occupant.

  “Mom!” Nadia called out. “You home?”

  Newcomers usually needed a minute or two in the foyer to absorb the opulent interior, where a massive, gilt-framed oil painting of an ancient tree took pride of place in the center of the wall dead ahead. Nadia figured it was the closest she’d ever come to seeing the real Wishing Tree it represented. The Polish-made cabinets were inundated with plates of blue and white with miniature blue flowers in the middle. For Nadia, however, this was just home. She’d seen every ceramic, every painting, every silkscreen sheet of embossed wallpaper a million times.

  A stifled giggle chirped through the labyrinth of corridors. Ears primed, Nadia followed the sound to the kitchen at the back of the house, which looked out over the terra-cotta patio and wildflower gardens beyond.

  She stalled to a disgusted but unsurprised halt on the kitchen threshold. Pressed nearly diagonal against the central island, her mother was making out with some muscled slab of prime Georgia beefcake. And the poor soul looked hungry, judging by the way he was devouring her mom’s lips. He stood a good foot taller than Nadia’s mother, with floppy, sand-colored hair and busted Levi’s. The cliché leather jacket was on the back of a kitchen stool, rounding out the sordid visual.

  “Mom,” Nadia said with a resigned air. If her mother wasn’t careful, Nadia was going to start demanding a ribbon on the front door or something so she wouldn’t have to walk in on these gross playdates.

  Grace squealed and planted one last kiss on the guy’s lips before playfully smacking him assward to the door. “I’ll see you later.”

  “You bet you will,” the guy replied as he grabbed his jacket off the stool’s back. He slung it over his shoulder with a hooked finger and gave Nadia a maybe-I’ll-see-you-too look as he sauntered out.<
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  He wasn’t even out the door before Nadia started in on her mom. She didn’t care if he overheard. Maybe she even wanted him to. “Do you have to let all your boy toys inside the house? You realize there are perfectly good hotels all over Savannah, right?” Nadia crossed to the island and hopped up on a barstool, intentionally choosing one that hadn’t been used as a coatrack. “What if one of these guys turns out to be something other than a cure for your boredom? I’m guessing you don’t do background checks first.”

  Grace Kaminski brushed her daughter off with an irreverent wink. “Love is a game, honey, and I’ll never stop playing it—because I’m a winner.”

  “Stretching it a bit, aren’t you, Mom?” Nadia took a clean glass from beside the sink in the middle of the kitchen island and filled it to the brim.

  Her mom’s first wish to “play any game and win” was exactly why Nadia hated playing video games, card games—hell, even “I spy” as a toddler—with her mother growing up, because her mom did always win. Without fail. Although Grace had never specified, Nadia assumed her mom had spent her second wish on eternally youthful hair, since she didn’t have a single gray strand on her head. All the better to entice her boy toys.

  Grace smirked. “Some wishes are like taffy—you can stretch them pretty far.” She glanced down the hall toward the now closed front door.

  “Still, you don’t have to up the ante every time a guy offers to show you his cards.” Nadia could sling around figures of speech with the best of them. She took a gulp of cool water to slough away the sticky feeling of the relentless humidity.

  Grace scooped her hand through her loose brunette hair: a carbon copy of Nadia’s, though Nadia rarely wore hers down. “How else am I going to take a peek at their stack of chips, to see if they’re worth a stake?”

  Nadia suppressed the urge to make a comment about her mother getting a different kind of stake. It was too weird. Making jokes about her mom’s famed appetite was another therapy session entirely.

  With a sudden gasp, Grace pointed at the box that Nadia had placed on the granite island. “Is that what I think it is?” She leaned over and swiped it from under her daughter’s nose, dancing a little jig.

  “Ta-da.” Nadia finished the rest of her water, her fingers itching to take the box back. But she was merely a cog in her family’s big machine. At least, that was how it felt sometimes.

  Her mother darted across to the den, just off from the kitchen. Humming to herself, Grace snatched up a stick of chalk and added a scratch to the big blackboard that hung from the wall, concealed from any part-time lovers who might smooch their way through the kitchen. The tally marks looked like a prisoner counting off their days to parole. In a way, that’s exactly what it was. Not from jail, of course, but from a punishment just as stifling.

  If they didn’t pay off their debt to the Wishmaster, Basha and Grace would have their used wishes taken from them, along with their wishing box and the house. Worse yet, since Nadia had never used a wish for herself, she’d be forced to absorb three wishes from the Wishmaster’s cellar of wish traps—and then give them all back for someone else to spend, effectively killing any chance she’d have of reviving Nick. It seemed deeply unfair that even the act of absorbing a wish into her body without spending it would count toward her lifetime total of three. But the Wishing Tree wasn’t known for being fair.

  “Lucky number fifty!” Grace cheered, setting the chalk back on its ridged, wooden plinth. At the top of the board, written in her elegant cursive and age-smudged by the last three years, were the words 101 Not Dalmatians. It was punctuated with a winky face, as if it were schoolwork and not something Nadia’s future happiness relied on.

  “Are you counting wishes or men?” Nadia asked.

  Speaking of men, her mother still hadn’t mentioned Nick’s “anniversary” once, not even over that morning’s hurried breakfast. Had she forgotten, or was she just avoiding the subject entirely?

  Grace fluttered her eyelashes. “If this was for guys, you wouldn’t be able to see the board for all the chalk.”

  Despite herself, Nadia snorted down at her empty glass. Now was her chance to ask for the wish, especially with Basha still upstairs. For all her flaws, Grace was at least more lenient.

  Nadia toyed with how to phrase the request. Guilt-tripping might work, since her blood, sweat, and tears had gone into the majority of those tallies, and today was the hardest she’d slogged through in the last 365—not including Nick’s funeral, since that had been a nightmarish blur. If today didn’t give her some leverage, she didn’t know what would, as cold as it sounded.

  Above all, she was tired of waiting. At their current pace, it’d take at least three more years to pay off their debt. If only she could leave Savannah, buy a wish somewhere else. But how could she abandon her mom and grandma to fulfill a debt that she’d indirectly caused? She wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she took such an unforgivably selfish route.

  Grace gave the board two gleeful middle fingers. “How’s that for winning?”

  Nadia had to laugh. “I wish I had half your energy. Might’ve come in handy, considering what today is.”

  “Nadia!” Grace hissed, her eyes flying wide. “Don’t bandy the ‘wish’ word around like that. You should know better!”

  Her mom refused to pick up on the second half of what Nadia had said, giving her the answer to her question: Grace was avoiding the memory of today. She hadn’t forgotten a damn thing. Worst of all, Nadia wasn’t surprised. Her family was good at pretending that people had never existed. She’d have to find another heartstring in her mother that could be tugged.

  “What, I can’t even say the word ‘wish’?” Nadia asked. “Last I checked, I haven’t saved any lives or stolen any wishes for myself.” She nodded to the box in the crook of her mom’s arm, biting down the bitterness in her voice. “And you’ve got the box. No candles around either. I think I’m good saying the W word.”

  Grace’s expression relaxed, but not by much. “Still, best not to tempt fate. Don’t want to accidentally waste this beauty.” She kissed the box. “Think of how much trouble that’d cause.”

  “You know I wouldn’t waste it if I ever got the chance to keep one.”

  Grace shot her a chiding look. “This one’s not for you.”

  “Noted.” Nadia mock-saluted, but her stomach sank at how quickly her mom had dismissed the slightest notion of giving her a wish. “But I’ll need the box back so I can get rid of that surgeon’s heart secret.”

  Grace waggled her eyebrows. “Should we have a little look? I’ve always wondered what goes on in a surgeon’s mind.”

  “Andy Warhol,” Nadia replied, beckoning for the box.

  “Huh?”

  Nadia shook her head. “Nothing. Inside joke. And don’t pretend it’s the surgeon’s mind you’re interested in.” Grace handed her the box, and Nadia wiped the kissed spot with her sleeve. “He might be divorced soon, if you want his details.”

  Grace wrinkled her nose. “Too much baggage for me, I’m afraid. I like ’em free and young, no strings attached.”

  “All right, Geppetto.”

  Nadia lifted the lid to remove the slip of paper, careful not to touch the bottom of the box and accidentally scoop out the invisible wish inside. She tore up the note and let the pieces flutter down into the garbage disposal.

  “I can’t believe you still use that silly paper trick,” Grace said with a customary tsk as she sat on the barstool opposite, but Nadia had flipped the switch to grind up the paper while Grace was mid-sentence.

  “What did you say?” Nadia shouted above the mangling trash, pretending not to hear her.

  “I said, you don’t need to have them write down their secret. Just open the box and close it once they’ve spilled their guts!” Grace yelled back.

  Nadia shook her head. “Can’t hear you!”

  “I said, you’re wasting your ti—” The crunching din cut off, leaving Grace bellowing at the top of
her lungs. She cut herself short, flashing Nadia a look that said very funny.

  Nadia forced a chuckle. Maybe she should’ve been humoring her mother more to butter her up before asking for a wish, but she had always struggled to play nice.

  “I do things my way, and it’s working pretty well so far.” Nadia thumbed at the blackboard hidden by the kitchen wall. “Paying the debt is all that matters. Not technique. Speaking of the debt, though . . . I’ve been thinking, and I had something I wanted to—” Nadia found herself cut off this time, by the creak of the serpentine staircase.

  A moment later, Basha hobbled into the kitchen with her ruby-topped cane. Well, ruby-colored glass, anyway.

  Nadia’s grandmother looked frail, her face etched with a vast map of runnels that collected in a web at the corner of each hazel eye, as though she was straining to see in harsh sunlight. Her ashy white-and-gray hair was scraped back into a plump, netted bun, and giant amber earrings dangled from her ears, adding about ten pounds to her fifty-pound frame.

  She coughed, phlegm rattling in her throat. “Leave our dziewczynka alone. She and I are not so different,” she rasped, her accent tinged with the motherland. “Back when I read tarot cards, I ask customers to write secrets on dollar bill and put it into box so I could ‘see their futures.’ Bit of money and a wish in my pocket. Never fail. The gullible are low-hanging fruit of wish-hunting world.”

  “In any world,” Grace added.

  Nadia had heard the story a dozen times, to the point where she could basically predict every phrase her grandmother would use, but she knew better than to interrupt the older woman mid-tale. Not if she wanted her knuckles un-rapped by that cane.

  Grace, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have any qualms. “It’s just theatrics. It’s not necessary.”

  “People are much more honest when they don’t have to voice their thoughts aloud,” Nadia countered. “How many of those tally marks up on that chalkboard are mine, and how many are yours and Babcia’s?” She’d always used the Polish term of endearment for “grandmother” out of habit, but the American “Mom” had stuck.