Then Matt made his unorthodox request, and I didn’t regret for one moment saying yes.
Well, maybe the couple of hours before I had the sense to accept the epidural.
The twins really were the blessing my mother had always assured me they would be, though. Even when they were fighting.
However, I seemed to be the only one comfortable with the current situation. My parents wanted me to move back home with them, give up my current job, and become a clone of my mom. Tina and Gavin wanted their dad to move in with us here. Matt had suggested the same — and there had been that kiss. I still didn’t know what to think about that.
My phone rang from the living room — still in the fancy purse from Friday night? No, I’d called both Beth and Maggie after my parents left yesterday.
Sighing, I straightened up and went to see who wanted to talk to me and whether I wanted to talk to them — ooh, Beth! I’d been a little surprised she hadn’t called me back.
“Hey! Good weekend?” I greeted her.
“Just a little slow.” She sounded groggy. I’d be willing to bet she had her K-cup brewing right now.
“Were you up late?” True, she’d still been at the reunion Friday when Matt and I had left, but dinner had been a quiet affair. Although I supposed the four of them could have gone out to hit a bar afterward.
“Mmmmm.” Very self-satisfied, that murmur. “Clay gave me a ride home Friday. And last night, too.”
“Oh.” Beth was doing the whole reunion weekend. Initially, I imagined, to spend more time with Brian. It appeared her motivation had changed.
“We must have talked until at least three this morning. Four?” She laughed. “The actual time doesn’t matter. We just clicked, and it was so amazing.”
I’d forgotten how fun it could be to hear someone who was excited about someone new, even if it was someone we both knew already. And it kept me from thinking too much about what was going on with Matt.
“I can’t believe I never realized how much I have in common with Clay. Do you know, we took a lot of the same basic courses for drafting in freshman and sophomore year? Oh, sure, I took more art and he took more math and computer drafting, but the grounding was the same. We must have spent an hour talking about one-point versus three-point perspective, and which we prefer. I don’t even think about which one I’m using a lot of the time, but Clay pointed out that I probably picked one a dozen years back and never reconsidered.”
I dimly remembered Beth talking to me about her homework on perspectives. Very dimly. Like, remembering that I remembered, but having no clue what she might have said at the time.
I settled for a neutral question. “Is that good or bad?”
“I don’t think it’s either. I mean, it’s good to develop my own personal style, and that probably includes perspective. On the other hand, if I’m going to grow as an artist so I can have another show next year, I should probably experiment a little.”
“More experimenting than you already are? And — another show? Did you get one lined up already and not tell me?”
She laughed. “I wish! But I did get some interest from a couple of gallery owners, so I’m sending them links to my digital portfolio. Not a portfolio site — I haven’t gotten that far yet — just a bunch of jpegs in a Dropbox folder.”
“Let me know if you want help cobbling together an actual website.” I wasn’t a professional, but I wanted to help Beth. I wasn’t ambitious on my own behalf, but I wanted her to go farther than just working for a paycheck. Her art deserved that.
“Maybe.” That was her ‘I’m letting you down easy’ voice. She wasn’t interested in my help, but didn’t want to tell me so directly.
“Don’t tell me — Clay’s already offered to put one together for you.”
“That would be a waste of his talent. No, a guy at work moonlights doing web design on the side. He does some wicked work, and he’s been trying to talk all of us into using him.”
“All of you? And your boss is okay with all the artists setting up shop on their own?”
“She thinks it’s a good idea if she can point clients to our sites and say, ‘This are the kinds of artists we have working for us. Imagine your company on these pages.’ So no blow-back.”
“All right, then. Sounds like things have been just moving right along for you since last week.” Since the muse showed up in her life, I didn’t say. There was lots of not saying things going on, and I wondered if she could hear the words as clearly as I did. Did she know what Haris was? It didn’t seem likely, and it wasn’t my place to tell her.
“They have been, and Clay was just the cherry on top.”
“Pretty sure he hasn’t had a cherry for a long time.”
She snorted but otherwise ignored my words. “I wish I’d spent my time with him in college instead of wasting it on Brian. But no, I had to give in to the allure of the forbidden fruit, the joy of having a secret that I could tell you at any time but didn’t have to.”
“Water under the bridge now.” Something else was bugging me. “Did you notice our waitress on Friday?”
“No, I mostly noticed that amazing dress you were wearing — Maggie has really good taste — and Clay, of course. Why, was it someone we know?”
Her tone told me she meant the question as a joke.
“Actually, yes. It was your friend Haris who you brought to the coffee shop the other day.”
She laughed. “Just because they have the same name doesn’t mean they’re the same person. Honestly, Pepper, I think your job’s getting to you.”
I was hoping maybe she had an explanation, or at least was as befuddled as I was. Instead, she didn’t even believe it had happened.
After the call with Beth, my head was spinning. Her whole proposed shopping trip on Thursday had been because of Brian. She always thought of him as the one that got away, although she’d never told me why they broke up. She didn’t like to talk to me about Brian at all, really, which I assumed was because she felt guilty about being the Other Woman.
(Though frankly, when she’d first used that phrase, her voice had more than a hint of pride in it.)
And now — nothing. I didn’t get it.
The cell phone — still in my hand — rang, and I almost dropped in my startlement. I glanced at it — Carole!
“What a pleasant surprise,” I said by way of greeting. “I’ve been meaning to call you.”
“I’ve been hearing some disturbing things from Maggie and thought I’d better give you a ring.”
I could just imagine.
“Did she tell you the other witches were talking about killing me?”
“That … doesn’t sound like them.”
No, it really didn’t, not even Dorothy, who had never approved of me. We had potion witches and peace witches, witches who would make you charms for good luck, and witches who only wanted to reclaim the mantle of their ancestors. In some ways, as a group, we had a lot in common with Wiccan philosophy — “An ye harm none.” Not surprising, as there was some overlap. I’d always been the outlier, with my propensity for revenge looked down as being too negative.
But Carole hadn’t said anything more, which meant she was waiting for me to defend my original statement. Always the college professor.
“Nobody’s been acting like themselves lately.”
“Including you?”
I opened my mouth to argue. I at least knew what was going on! Anything odd I’d done wasn’t my fault. I was trying to help people!
But …
“The ghost — one of the ghosts — touched me, and now I’m seeing things I wasn’t before.”
“Seeing things doesn’t usually bode well.”
“Like trolls in the T.”
“Oh, them.” Her relieved laugh echoed oddly, and I wondered where she was. “Yes, we have ‘mythical’ creatures all over the Boston area.”
“I bumped into Professor Dimitriou at my tenth-year reunion Friday. Now I’m starting to wonder i
f there are any nonmagical people around.”
“I’m still human. So are most witches — all the ones you know, certainly. I did run into one Gorgon. He didn’t know, and I didn’t tell him.”
“How could he not know?”
“The genes aren’t active in men. And these days, with polarized contact lenses and the like, the women can live perfectly ordinary lives. Why would his mother worry him?”
It made an odd sort of sense. “But if he has kids—”
“His family will make sure he knows how to keep them safe. Until then, all it would do is worry him.”
“I suppose.”
She must have heard the doubt in my voice. “Have you told Gavin and Tina that you’re a witch and their godfather is a dragon?”
“Touché.” They did know magic existed — I didn’t want them to cause some of the problems I had when younger — but I hadn’t gone into a lot of detail. I tacked back to her original statement. “So what have you heard from Maggie that has you calling me from halfway across the globe?”
“Not quite that far.” She didn’t tell me where she was, of course. “My niece told me there are revenge vibes all over Boston, that they started near you, and that you suggested she use a ward to protect herself.”
“So she called to tell you I’ve gone over to the Dark Side?”
“If you had, you wouldn’t tell her to protect herself. She’s concerned that someone’s targeting you.”
I couldn’t help it — I laughed. “Who in the world is going to target a single mother that works at a coffee shop for revenge?”
Carole didn’t correct me; that was who I was. “It could be because you don’t appear to be anything special. Did Maggie tell you why I’m traveling?”
“She said some witches were considering going public.” I shook my head, though she couldn’t see me. “That’s never worked out well historically.”
“Some oracles have done okay, for a while, but you don’t need to tell me about the usual fate of witches.” Right. Professor of history. “That’s why, even though I couldn’t arrange a last-minute sabbatical, I’m traveling now with an emergency adjunct covering my teaching load.”
“The college agreed to that?”
“When magic comes into the open, it’s not just the witches who suffer.”
I wouldn’t have heard about that because witchcraft and witch hunts were passed off as superstition. So of course there were no centaurs pulled apart by screaming mobs or trolls dragged into the daylight to be turned to stone and broken to rubble. Or Gorgons to have their eyes gouged out. And until this weekend, I hadn’t known that there were others at the college who would care.
I felt ill, but I had to know. “What have you learned?”
I heard scratching on the other end of the call, and when Carole spoke again, her voice was oddly flat. She must have put a magical barrier around her to prevent others from eavesdropping.
“It’s worse than I thought. Communities all over who use this kind of magic — North America, Europe, some in Africa, Australia, all over — have hit crises. Each group that is considering coming out has had some form of magical catastrophe, something that tipped the balance so they believe they’re safer in the open. It’s a deliberate campaign, but I don’t know who’s behind it or what they hope to accomplish.”
“More worshippers? More power?”
I walked into the kitchen and poured coffee from my coffeepot into my half-full cup. The fresh coffee would barely warm it up, but I didn’t care. I wanted the bitter caffeine to go with the bitter truth.
“It’s not that simple. Patrons don’t usually gain power; they give it.”
“Maybe someone wants to weaken other patrons then?”
“That’s a possibility. Gods and creatures have been fighting each other for millennia. Why now, though?”
“Because they can.” Now I was on firm footing. “As they say, information wants to be free. With the Internet, anyone around the globe can learn things in minutes. If the truth breaks free anywhere, no local damage control is sufficient. Everyone knows, although not everyone will believe at first.”
“You think they will, then? That this won’t be dismissed as an Internet hoax?”
“The ones who matter will believe — and they’ll feel pressured to go public in their own communities, with varying rates of success. And then—”
“And then?”
“All hell breaks loose.” I drained my cup to the dregs.
Chapter 13
The first morning rush was almost entirely double caf drinks for people on their way into the office, not that they needed the extra edginess this morning. I was ready to choke someone, and I tried very hard to remain laid back. This wasn’t going to be a fun Monday for anybody except maybe the twins, who I’d kept home from school today. The restaurant was closed on Mondays, so they would have the whole day with their grandparents inside a warded building. I was glad someone would. The rest of us were going to be miserable.
That impression was confirmed when Ximena walked in, bedraggled and weary. At least she hadn’t been crying this time.
“More troubles?” I sympathized.
“Missy decided we should fix the sink since the asshole won’t call someone to do it unless he actually sees it dripping.” She shoved her hair back, and I winced in sympathy at the small bruise on her cheek. “I went under the sink to turn off the water so we could work on it, and the pipe wrench slipped and hit me in the face. Then she pushed me out of the way because she didn’t want me to hurt myself any more, but the wrench caught in my hair and yanked on the pipe and now the kitchen’s flooded.” Her shoulders drooped. “And the asshole says we have to pay for the plumber to come because if we hadn’t touched it, it would have been fine.”
I grimaced. Her landlord had a point; they had made it worse. On the other hand, if he had listened to them in the first place, this never would have happened.
“Are you feeling up to working today?”
“I have to. Got to pay for the plumber somehow.” She headed back to tie up her hair and clock in.
After the crowd petered out, I took the time to restock the pastry case. I had trays of blueberry muffins cooling in the back that I’d started when I first arrived, but what we really wanted was more of those cinnamon chip scones I’d asked Kendall to order. She hadn’t, of course — it was one of the things she’d fobbed off onto Rich — so I had to make do with some danishes.
One of the other things Rich had done — and one of the main reasons he wanted someone else to help him with close, since for most places it was a morning task rather than a night one — was to mix up the cookie dough and freeze sheets of cookies that needed to be baked today. While I stocked the case, I sent Ximena back to the kitchen to bake some cookies. In just a few minutes, lemon and chocolate perfumed the air.
A hipster walked in, waving a free drink card. “I’m back for that drink you owe me. Assuming that the espresso machine isn’t going to explode again today.”
Ah, yes, our old friend Kyle. I wrote his name on a cup and waited expectantly for him to tell me what he wanted. His order was disappointingly mundane — regular caf, shot of almond, double foam, caramel syrup — and I set about making the drink.
Power prickled up and down my arms, ants marching in electric lines, and I rushed to get Kyle’s drink done. This wasn’t the warmth of the muse’s magic — it was witches, familiar witches, getting closer. Tension built up in my shoulders, but I gave no sign of it as I handed Kyle his drink and forced a smile. “Do come again.”
“That depends on how good the drink is. The service is awful.”
I resisted the urge to stick my tongue out at his back, which was just as well, as the door opened to admit Dorothy, Carlos, and Lashonda, three of the other witches in the “no, we’re not a coven” group. In some cities, the three of them walking together might look odd, but around here, there was enough variety that no one looked twice. Dorothy, who thought of hers
elf as the high priestess of Hekate, looked more like Miss Marple, if Miss Marple had taken up bodybuilding. Carlos wore the same black T-shirt and jeans he always did, as if he’d forgotten to purge his closet when he outgrew the goth eyeliner and studded collars. And Lashonda wore her hair in long cornrows with wild colored beads at the end that clashed with her sensible blue suit and white blouse.
My forced smile faltered, but I asked, “What can I get you three today?”
Dorothy snapped, “You know what you can get us. Stop playing these stupid power games.”
Kyle hesitated, glancing back at me, as if trying to figure out what kind of power games a barista could possibly be engaged in. Maybe he thought we were in an undercover war with Dunkin Donuts.
I waved at him and waited until he left before I answered. “As I told Maggie already, it’s not me. I’ve got more sense than this.”
“We heard her excuses for you,” Carlos sneered. “We all know that she’s got a soft spot for you because you’re her aunt’s favorite. That doesn’t make us blind.”
“So what’s it going to take for you to believe me?”
“We won’t,” Lashonda said simply. “It’s revenge magic, and we all know you do revenge magic and no one else does.”
“Just because you don’t know anyone else who has doesn’t mean that someone couldn’t start.”
She wasn’t impressed by my logic. “Fix it. Whatever you screwed up, make it right, or we’ll have to.”
They weren’t going to believe me, but I said it again. “I didn’t do it.”
Why tell them that I was already trying to fix it, that I wanted more information on ghosts, that I was encouraging others to use wards — something I noticed Maggie had not passed on to them?
“Hekate doesn’t care for liars,” Dorothy said.
“I wouldn’t have thought she cared for idiots, either. If you’re not going to purchase anything, get out of the shop. You’re interfering with my work.”
Ghost Garages_A Boston Technowitch Novel Page 9