The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes

by Jennifer Crusie

  ‘He knows,’ Lizzie said. ‘So what are we going to do next? We’re safe for now, but sooner or later we’re going to have to confront Xan. We can’t spend our lives dealing with her like this.’

  ‘We’re not going to,’ Dee said.

  ‘I don’t know why you two are so pissed,’ Mare said. ‘She sent you your true loves. Look what I ended up with. Ribbit.’

  ‘Crash came back to town,’ Dee pointed out.

  ‘And left again. You know, maybe we should just split up, go our separate ways. You’re happy with Danny, or you will be as soon as you let him back in. Lizzie’s absolutely glowing…’ Mare’s words trailed off as she stared at Lizzie. ‘You really are glowing, aren’t you? Literally.’ She bit her lip. ‘That’s lovely. Good for you both.’

  Lizzie was still shimmering a bit. She smiled. ‘What can I say? He’s a wizard.’

  ‘I bet,’ Mare said. ‘Sometime you’ll have to tell me all about it. I’ll come visit you in Toledo.’

  ‘Wow,’ Dee said. ‘I guess I never thought of the three of us ever being apart. I think I saw us living together, sisters to the end.’

  ‘Like that cheesy television show?’ Mare said. ‘Kill me now. Even they got married. I’ll be the maiden aunt, the one everybody comes to for advice.’ The smell of burning bread rolled in from the kitchen. ‘And toast.’ She got up to save the toast and then said, ‘Oh, hell,’ and waved her hand as the newest batch of charcoal floated up out of the toaster and through the doorway on its own.

  ‘The important thing is, we’re not letting Xan get away with it this time,’ Lizzie said firmly. ‘We have to face her and tell her to stay out of our lives. Are we agreed?’

  ‘Agreed,’ Mare said, dropping the toast on the table.

  ‘Agreed,’ Dee said, and they began to talk, making and discarding plans, closer than they’d ever been before.

  * * *

  Xan stood over the silver bowl, now rimmed with smooth river rock, the see glass like mist in the center. In it, Danny James walked the streets of Salem’s Fork, Crash Duncan strapped his bags onto his motorcycle, and Elric, Elric entered a pizza parlor. A pizza parlor.

  What the hell had Lizzie done to him?

  Maxine stumbled through paneling, clutching her fists to her sweat-stained waitress uniform.

  ‘Did you get the talismans?’ Xan said.

  ‘What?’ Maxine said, gulping back tears.

  ‘The talismans,’ Xan said. ‘One piece of silver from Danny, Elric, and Crash. For my last spell,’ she said patiently, treating Maxine like the idiot she was. ‘Did you get them?’

  ‘Yes, but Xantippe, please, Jude-’

  ‘I told you,’ Xan said with no expression. ‘Jude is of no use to me. Put the silver in the bowl.’

  Maxine gulped. ‘What are you going to do? Are you going to hurt them? Are you going to change them into frogs?’

  Xan closed her eyes. ‘Maxine, I need them. They’re the men my nieces love. If I change them into frogs, then my nieces won’t recognize them, will they? Give me the talismans.’

  Maxine opened her shaking fists.

  A silver medallion. Xan remembered Danny James wearing that.

  ‘He took it off to shower,’ Maxine said as Xan took it. ‘Your spell pulled it through the window to me.’

  Xan dropped it into the bowl and the mist from the see glass curled around it, obscuring it as she looked at Maxine’s shaking hands for the next token.

  A silver stud, an earring. Xan saw it with a shock. Elric never took that off.

  ‘He gave it to Lizzie,’ Maxine said. ‘It got lost in the sheets. Your spell pulled it-’

  Xan grabbed the stud from her and felt it hum against her skin. He gave it to Lizzie? It had been in his family for centuries, the contact power in it was enormous, and he gave it to Lizzie?

  She dropped it into the bowl as if it had bitten her and the mist curled and covered it, and Maxine handed her the last piece, a silver tie tack.

  ‘He was packing-’

  ‘I don’t care.’ Xan said and threw it into the bowl where the mist covered it. Elric had given an heirloom to Lizzie, to Lizzie, she’d known the girl was his true love, but he’d given her power, he’d given her-’

  The mist rose up in arabesques, stone gray this time, and the river rock rose, too, and became the Big Bocks up on Salem’s Mountain.

  Xan shook her head and waved her hand through the mist, curling her fingers in a summoning gesture until the arabesques coiled about her hand in response. ‘Like to like, silver draws you,’ she whispered, ‘like to like, silver keeps you, there to stay, till I release you, so I say, so be it.’ She blew on the mist and there below in the see glass she saw Danny James stumble into the circle and look around confused, and then Elric appear and look up at her, enraged, and then…

  Nothing.

  Where the hell was Crash Duncan?

  ‘Oh,’ Maxine said, looking into the glass. ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘Maxine?’

  Maxine stepped back, visibly upset. ‘Well, I’ll just be going then.’

  Xan narrowed her eyes.

  ‘Lunchtime,’ Maxine said, sidling toward the paneling.

  ‘Maxine, that tie tack you gave me. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen Mr Duncan wearing a tie.’

  Maxine froze. ‘Just give Jude one more chance,’ she whispered.

  Xan looked down at the stone circle more closely. Danny James, Elric, and… ‘Oh, for the love of-’ She put her head in her hands. ‘Now I have to get this Crash lout out of town before I can get this charade over with since he’s not in the circle, is he, Maxine?’

  ‘No,’ Maxine cried. ‘But I love Jude, Xantippe. I had to save him.’

  Xan turned cold eyes on her. ‘You love him, do you?’ Maxine lifted her chin. ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Then you should be with him,’ Xan said, and waited for hope to dawn in Maxine’s eyes before she waved her hand.

  A minute later, a frog croaked its distress behind the Dumpster of the Greasy Fork. And then sneezed.

  ‘I should have done that a long time ago,’ Xan said and then made her plans. She had the men, or most of them, now all she had to do was get rid of the loose ends – Maxine was gone, Crash Duncan would be soon – invite the girls to the mountain, take their powers, leave them to their tawdry true loves – Mare would need an aquarium – and everybody would be happy.

  Unless they resisted and she had to kill them.

  ‘Well, they were the ones who made this difficult,’ she said to the figures in the see glass and went to change for her last trip to Salem’s Fork.

  The wind was growing stronger outside the house, and Lizzie could hear the sound of their neighbor’s garbage cans being tossed down the street. All the lights were on in the house, but an odd shadow remained, maybe just the manifestation of Mare’s unhappiness. The computer in the corner was in sleep mode, and Lizzie was half tempted to give it a knock so that the flying toasters on the screensaver would vanish, but she left it alone. She needed food.

  ‘That computer is taunting me,’ Mare said, watching the toast on the screen.

  Dee glanced at her watch again, and frowned. ‘I thought Danny would be back by now.’

  ‘Danny? What about Elric and the pizza?’ Mare said. ‘I’m starving.’

  The shadows gnawing away at Lizzie weren’t from Mare’s grief after all, she realized suddenly. Things weren’t right. Elric should have been back, even if he’d allowed them a little extra time for the sake of delicacy. Not that Elric was particularly delicate, though he could be, in the most delicious ways. And he could be quite indelicate, as well…

  The sudden beep of the computer stopped her cold as the screen came to life. No flying toasters, no welcome screen. It was black, not the usual steel gray of a hibernating monitor, dead black, and then a cream colored dot spun itself into a square-shaped invitation with a sepia-toned script font:

  You are cordially invited to

  a Fortune Family Reu
nion

  on the Mountaintop at Twilight

  at the Great Big Rock

  to meet your lovers or lose them forever…

  ‘She’s got Danny!’ Dee said, furious.

  ‘She’s got Elric,’ Lizzie said, astonished.

  ‘She’s got Crash,’ Mare said, panicked, and then she stopped and scowled. ‘Oh, hell, no she doesn’t, she’s probably got the frog. Well, she can have him. Maybe she likes frogs’ legs.’ She realized her sisters were looking at her. ‘Kidding. I’ll save the frog. What are we going to do?’

  ‘Whatever it is, we’re doing it together,’ Lizzie said firmly. ‘We’ve got five hours to come up with a plan.’

  ‘Xan’s very powerful,’ Dee warned. ‘We can’t underestimate her’

  ‘She’s powerful on her own,’ Lizzie said. ‘But she’s nothing compared to the three of us put together. This time she’s gone too far’

  ‘Yeah,’ Mare said. ‘Who steals my frog steals trash.’

  Lizzie turned steely eyes on her and Mare said, ‘Hey, I’m on it. This bitch screwed up my life forever, and for that alone I’d go after her, but she’s taken the two men who made my sisters happy, so this chick is toast.’ She held up the charcoal square on her plate. ‘And we all know what happens to toast in this house.’

  Lizzie nodded solemnly. ‘So we get the toaster from hell…’

  Mare started to laugh, and Lizzie did, too, and then Dee got a gleam in her eye, and leaned forward.

  ‘Maybe not toast,’ she said. ‘But I like the ‘kitchen from hell’ part. Let’s put that bitch where she belongs.’

  Crash took the after noon to finish up the last of his American business, pack, and talk to his partner about the

  Annapolis delivery for the Moto Guzzi, but when it came time to go, he couldn’t leave Salem’s Fork, not without Mare. All right, so there were some new wrinkles in the relationship, the magic thing was still giving him headaches, he’d been a frog, for Christ’s sake, and there was that love spell mess, but at the end of the day, she was Mare, and he loved her, and he’d sworn to never leave her again, and he wasn’t going to. So he’d spend the extra week and she’d see he still loved her…

  What if he spent the extra week and he didn’t love her? It had taken him five years to come back for her. What if she was right?

  Clueless about what to do next, he went to the Greasy Fork. It was packed because the service was slow – one of the waitresses had disappeared and the place was buzzing with gossip about it – but then a booth miraculously opened up even though the people had just sat down – ‘Forgot my wallet,’ the guy told Crash, bemused – and Crash told Pauline to bring him the usual.

  ‘Could you be more specific?’ she said, and he looked up in surprise, but when she glared back, he told her.

  Fuck, not even Pauline could remember him.

  When his burger and fries were gone, and he was trying to drown his sorrows in his milkshake, Pauline came back with the check.

  ‘So what’s with you?’ she said, cracking her gum.

  ‘What’s with you and the gum?’ he said, feeling hostile. ‘You never did that before.’

  Pauline stopped cracking. ‘You look like you lost your best friend.’

  ‘I did. Mare dumped me.’

  Pauline nodded. ‘Eh, it’s for the best. She really wasn’t the Italian type. Good-looking guy like you, it’s too soon for you to settle down. Go back to Italy. Play the field. I hear they got a lot of fields there.’

  ‘No, it’s not for the best,’ Crash said, annoyed. ‘I’m ready to settle down and I always knew I’d settle down with Mare. And she’d have loved Italy. And Italy would have loved her’ And what the fuck’s with you, Pauline?

  ‘You’re telling me you’re ready to get married. Ha.’ Pauline cracked her gum again. ‘With all the lookers in the world, you’re gonna give all that up for one woman you probably haven’t even thought about for five years.’

  ‘The hell I haven’t,’ Crash said.

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter,’ Pauline said. ‘She doesn’t want you. You think she hasn’t been dating and screwing around? I can tell you, she has.’

  Crash winced. Then something bumped into the window and he saw a butterfly fluttering there, a big blue one with round wings, staring back at him. Belligerent, aren’t you? he thought. It looked like the kind of butterfly that probably beat up the other butterflies. In fact, it looked exactly like Mare’s butch butterfly, tilted above Mare’s beautiful round butt. ‘Well, why shouldn’t she have?’ he told Pauline, as the butterfly shoved off and disappeared. ‘I did, too. We lived our lives. We learned things. Now we’re going to learn things with each other. We’re ready. No regrets.’

  Pauline cracked her gum. ‘Yeah, you look ready.’

  ‘She wants me.’ Crash pushed the milkshake away. I’m the one she loves, damn it, she said so.’

  ‘You just don’t love her,’ Pauline said. ‘Well, them’s the breaks. You should go back to Italy.’

  ‘Not without Mare.’

  ‘You’re just being stubborn.’ Pauline began to clear the table as Crash got out his wallet to pay the check. ‘You haven’t thought about her in five years, so why-’

  The picture of Mare’s Florett fluttered out of his wallet, looped a loop, and landed face up on the table.

  ‘The hell I haven’t.’ Crash picked up the picture. ‘Look at this. I’ve been looking for the parts for this bike for three years…’

  He stopped, realizing what he was saying.

  ‘Three years,’ he told Pauline, jabbing the photo at her. ‘I’ve been planning on coming back for her for three years. I’ve always meant to come back for her. I’m just slow.’ He looked at the bike. And stupid,’ he added to be fair. ‘But that doesn’t mean I don’t love-’ He looked up at Pauline and for the first time noticed the red glint in her eyes. And the red ring around her iris.

  Pauline did not crack gum. Pauline knew exactly what his order was. Pauline was not serving his dinner.

  ‘Of course, there’s no reason to rush into anything,’ he told Xan.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, cracking her gum.

  ‘I think I’ll go back to Italy now,’ he said, putting the photo back in his wallet. ‘Good plan.’

  He handed her a twenty. ‘Keep the change.’

  She nodded, the red glint in her eye getting brighter. ‘That’s real generous of you.’

  ‘Well, I’m leaving the country. Gotta get rid of my American money.’ Grash stood up and bumped into the woman who’d just gotten up from the booth behind his. ‘Sorry,’ he said to the top of her head, her gray razor-cut hair neatly parted.

  ‘My fault,’ the woman said, keeping her head down.

  He followed her out the door, and then got on his bike and headed for the O’Brien house to tell Mare that her aunt was at the Greasy Fork possessing waitresses.

  And that he’d loved her since the day he’d met her and would until the end of time.

  They’d almost reached the top of the mountain, Pywackt padding beside them, the Great Big Rock in view, Mare with ‘Remains of the Day’ stuck in her head, when she heard the purr of a well-tuned motorcycle.

  He’s not coming back for you, she told herself sternly, but her heart said, He’s coming back for me.

  ‘Send him away,’ Dee said. ‘This is not the time or the place for civilians,’ and Mare slowed as Crash rounded the final turn to the top, narrowly missing a frog that was hopping along the roadside. The frog sneezed.

  ‘This is so not the time for us to discuss the relationship,’ she told him as he parked his bike, but she sighed in spite of herself, he looked so good standing in front of her again.

  He took off his helmet. ‘Your aunt is at the Greasy Fork. I think she’s possessed Pauline.’

  ‘Really,’ Mare said, smiling at the thought of Xan slinging hash at the Fork. ‘Well, she hasn’t possessed Pauline. Pauline’s in Baltimore with William. They ran off together after William’s d
inner break in the middle of the libido spell. He quit his job at Value Video!! so they tried to make me manager this afternoon, but I’m busy with the whole Antichrist thing so they offered it to Dreama. She’s the youngest manager in the history of the company.’ Mare knew she was babbling, but he was right there, with her, and it was all she could do not to reach out and pat him because he was right there.

  I love you, she thought. I have to go do something horrible to my aunt and I’ll probably die, but I love you.

  ‘Okay,’ Crash said. ‘So who’s at the Greasy Fork?’

  ‘Probably Xan, shapeshifting. What did she want?’

  ‘Me, back in Italy. But I’m not going without you.’ Crash got off his bike. ‘So what are we doing here?’

  ‘Mare!’ Lizzie called from the top of the path.

  ‘Just a minute,’ she called up. ‘This is new.’ She looked back at him. ‘I can’t talk now. Xan has grabbed Danny and Elric for some kind of Evil Overlord plan and we have to turn her into a geranium. But if we survive this, her power will be broken, and then if you still love me without her spell-’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ Crash said.

  ‘Which part?’

  ‘The geranium,’ Crash said.

  ‘Oh, no, we have to turn her into something powerless, and Dee said if Xan likes red that much, she could go be a geranium on the kitchen windowsill in Hell. Dee’s really had it with Xan this time, and a geranium’s as good as anything else.’

  Crash nodded, looking lost but prepared to follow anyway. ‘You really can turn her into a geranium?’

  ‘I can’t, but Lizzie can if she has enough power, so if Dee and I channel what we’ve got into Lizzie, then Lizzie can turn Xan into a potted plant, and that should break whatever spell she has on Danny and Elric up there, and we can all go home for dinner, and then you and I can talk about living happily ever after in Italy, which we might actually have a shot at if we can turn Xan into a geranium. Or something equally nonlethal. And sedentary. And if you still love me when Xan’s power is gone.’ Mare drew in a deep breath.

  ‘Okay,’ Crash said, and she couldn’t stand it any more and leaned in and kissed him, loving the taste of him and the heat of his mouth, so glad to see him that the pebbles on the path rose up and swirled around them, and then he put his hands on her arms and kissed her back and some boulders shifted.