Crossroads Burning

by Nash, Layla

  Ronan sucked in a breath as Lincoln finally released his hand, and the federal agent turned away as if nothing had passed between them. “I’ll make sure Mason picks up breakfast on the way back from the store. He can drive the truck into town, if you don’t mind riding with him, since there’ll be more room for groceries in the truck than in your car.”

  “You don’t need to—” Lucia started.

  But Lincoln raised an eyebrow and tilted his head at the front door. “I said I would. Don’t make a liar out of me.”

  She gave him a dirty look, the muscles in her jaw jumping, and Liv scooted forward enough to take the list out of our sister’s hands. “I’m happy to go if Nelson can drive. Do you think Nelson would go? It might take a while.”

  Lucia took the list back, pointed a finger in Liv’s face, and said in her sternest tone, “Stop it. One of you behaving like a fool over them is enough. I don’t need both of you to lose your damn minds. Keep your shit together, Liv.”

  I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing at her, or from laughing at Liv as she chased Lucia to the front door, arguing about who would be better to supervise the grocery shopping. Lincoln sighed and went to the coffee pot to check the status of the last few cups, and sent a message to someone on his phone. “Definitely need more coffee.”

  “Who are you?” Ronan managed to ask, still frozen in place near the pantry. “Where are you from? Who sent you?”

  “I’m Lincoln, as I said,” Lincoln said. He added a bit of sugar to a cup of coffee, arching an eyebrow at me in question, and I shook my head. I’d wait for the good coffee. He sipped and made a face, but didn’t stop drinking it, the fool. “Anastasia thought you might want to talk to another man about some of the circumstances that brought you here. I know something of what they are and what they can do.”

  The other Luckett eyed him with more suspicion than I’d assumed he’d have, then exhaled in irritation and went to sit at the table. “Finally. Someone reasonable. See if you can get one of them to cook a proper meal and we can converse.”

  Lincoln laughed in a “hoo boy” kind of way, though he clamped his lips shut when he caught the expression on my face. He cleared his throat and jerked his thumb in the direction of the porch. “I have a better idea. They won’t have much in the fridge, but I sent my colleague out to get breakfast and better coffee. Why don’t we sit on the porch and have a drink while the ladies deal with things in here?”

  Ronan leaned back in his chair and gestured at his clothes with a disgusted noise. “I cannot go about in public dressed like this.”

  “No one will judge,” Lincoln said. “And I’ll see if one of my friends has some spare clothes you can borrow.”

  Ronan gave me another dirty look as he pushed to his feet and strode, stiff-legged, out of the kitchen. “I want my book back, girl.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, meeting him glare for glare. “I only know where my book is, Ronan. Go sit outside with Lincoln before I forget my manners.”

  He huffed and puffed his way outside, clearly disgusted with my intransigence, and Lincoln chuckled as he shuffled a little closer to rest his forehead against mine. “I’ll see what I can get out of him. He knows I’m not human, but I don’t think he knows I’m a druid. It’ll be interesting to hear what he has to say. Confident, isn’t he?”

  “That’s one word for it,” I said under my breath. I took his cup of coffee so I could try it, then made a face at the bitter awfulness and handed it back. “I’ll wait until Lucia gets back with actual coffee.”

  “Join us on the porch in a bit,” he said. “Bring out crackers or whatever to mollify the guy’s ego. If he’s actually as old as you think he is, or that he claims, then it’s gotta be pretty damn disorienting to show up in this world.”

  I grunted and turned away. “Just when I’d started to like you, you go and say something stupid like that.”

  He swatted my ass and practically whistled as he walked away. “Something brilliant, you mean.”

  It shouldn’t have made me smile, but it did. It definitely did.

  Chapter 50

  I waited about ten minutes before I dug some stale crackers out of the back of the pantry and dumped them on a plate, along with some cheese slices that probably wouldn’t kill anyone, and carried it out to the porch. Someone had cleared away the remains of the busted chair, and my cheeks heated to wonder at who, exactly, had found the chair and what kind of activities they thought led to the breakage.

  From the way Hazel grinned at me as she sauntered up from the yard, I thought maybe she’d been the one. Or at least could hazard a guess at what busted the chair in the first place.

  Lincoln and Ronan both sat near the low table where I put the crackers and cheese, and both had a glass of whiskey to go along with their complete lack of breakfast. Despite Ronan shooting dirty looks at us, as if to shoo the womenfolk away from their clearly more important man business, Hazel and I dragged chairs up to join their little circle. Liv wandered around in the rain after Nelson as he pointed out tracks and other things, and I opened my mouth to shout at her to stop bothering him when Hazel caught my eye and gave just the tiniest shake of her head.

  It made me nervous, since I knew Liv hadn’t ever had her heart seriously broken before, but I sat back and didn’t interrupt their moment. I couldn’t judge her, since I hadn’t even taken my own advice when it came to Lincoln. As Ronan pontificated at Lincoln about some random point of history, Hazel leaned over and smiled with all her teeth. “So. How ya doin’?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Great. Had a great chat with your boss last night. I think we’ve got a plan.”

  “Oh?” Hazel didn’t even blink, her smile fixed and unflagging. “A great chat? Is that what kids are calling it these days?”

  “Don’t judge anyone, witch,” I said.

  “Never.” She definitely looked smug as she crossed her arms and leaned back. She also ignored the sideways look she got from Lincoln, so I wondered how much grief he’d already caught via phone and text message before Hazel cornered me. “What’s the plan?”

  I flicked a glance at Ronan and she started to frown. “Cousin Frank?”

  He was too focused on his own opinion and the sound of his own voice to listen to the cackling of the womenfolk, or so I assumed, which made it easier to lean over to her and whisper that he was actually Ronan Luckett and a druid besides. She blinked at me a few times, at a loss, then sighed and scrubbed her hands over her face. “Okay, so maybe you guys actually talked some last night. Boy oh boy. How does this affect... the rest of our little problem? Does it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Although Lincoln mentioned you could explain to me how witches layer curses. What ended up working on him might have been part of a curse, or two curses instead of one, or something like that. I’m trying to think my way through it based on very limited information.”

  Hazel studied the way Nelson made another, wider circuit of the yard, the rain still drizzling down. “Where is your information coming from? That can make a hell of a difference. And where is the witch from? Where are the curses from? All of it works together, but unless you know all of that, the likelihood of removing a curse—of truly removing it and not just making it worse—is slim to nonexistent.”

  “But I did it already,” I said. I didn’t want to shake the book in her face, in case Ronan got froggy and decided to snatch it out of my hands or throw it into the rain, so I couldn’t tell her exactly where the curse was from, but still. “I already took the curse off him.”

  “You took a curse off him,” she said. “Was it the right one?”

  “How many could he have possibly had?” I asked, staring at her.

  Hazel rolled her eyes in his direction just as Ronan said, “Yes, but the Irish couldn’t possibly have the knowledge or strength of character to—” before she looked back at me. “Because he strikes you as the kind of guy who makes friends wherever he goes?”

&n
bsp; I didn’t want to smile but couldn’t help it, even if the thought of having more than one curse on Ronan made my chest hurt. “Fair point. But let’s assume the biggest curse was the one that turned him into a werewolf. I don’t even know how we’d go about seeing whether he had other curses on him.”

  “We’d have to get a hell of a lot closer than he’d let us get,” she said under her breath. “Although... can you see auras? Squint a little and see if there’s anything around him that looks a bit off or discolored, or maybe... not in harmony.”

  “Olivia is the one who’s good at this,” I said. But I gave it a shot anyway, trying not to look like I was squinting at him. Ronan seemed oblivious, though, since Lincoln was the first sympathetic—and male—ear he’d had at his disposal in what sounded like centuries. I’d succeeded only in giving myself a headache by the time I sat back and exhaled in frustration. “I don’t see anything.”

  Hazel stretched, glancing at her watch. “Neither do I. So there’s either nothing there, or there is and someone was very good at hiding it.”

  “You’re just full of helpful insights today,” I said.

  Her smile broadened into a grin. “You’re welcome.”

  It didn’t take much longer for Nelson and Olivia to step onto the porch to get out of the rain, shedding the raincoats and boots and everything in a corner. Liv retrieved more towels from the mudroom so she could help Nelson dry off, and I had to hide my smile in a cup of water so I wouldn’t start teasing her just as much as she would have teased me. Nelson looked at Lincoln for direction, still casual, and Lincoln pushed a chair toward him with his foot, right next to him and Ronan.

  Olivia looked crestfallen, but Hazel motioned for her to join our side of the circle so she could whisper that it was part of the plan.

  She didn’t look convinced. Still, she played along while mooning over the handsome, albeit rather sheepish, shifter. From the look on Hazel’s face, Nelson had also gotten an earful that morning over Olivia’s starry eyes.

  I checked my watch to figure out when Lucia might get back, although the odds were pretty good that Mason would piss her off and she’d murder him in the produce aisle and then we’d have to bail her out of jail. Before I could ask, though, Hazel cleared her throat. “They’re on their way back.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Mason told Nelson, and he signaled me from the yard. We have a whole system worked out.”

  I nodded and gazed out at the yard. Maybe Nona wouldn’t come back. She was unpredictable on the best days, as she spent more time in her coyote skin than her human one. I would have loved to have her advice, since my own grandmother wasn’t around, but maybe she wanted to teach me a lesson about standing on my own two feet and standing in my power as well. It would have been just like her.

  Hazel tapped her fingers on her chin, studying me more than anything else, and I got that shivery feeling that she was measuring how much information she could get out of me before I noticed she was trying. “What’s this book he talked about?”

  Liv rolled her eyes and put her feet up, ignoring the dark look Ronan gave her. “She found it in the Crossroads. Some spell book from long ago.”

  “I’d love to see it,” Hazel said, all smooth and indifferent even though her eyes blazed with interest and tension coiled through her until she almost vibrated with it.

  I smiled and deliberately didn’t look at her. “It’s kinda fragile. Probably better if we don’t handle it much.”

  “It’s in your back pocket,” Liv said. “It can’t be that fragile.”

  All of Hazel’s teeth showed as she smiled, and for once she looked like more of a predator than her shifter colleagues. “Let me take a peek, Luckett. Maybe I can tell something about your little problem.” She canted her head in Ronan’s direction.

  I hesitated, even though I didn’t know precisely why. It was bad enough that Lincoln had touched the book, but the Luckett magic screamed at me that the witch shouldn’t touch it. Something would happen and it wouldn’t be good, and maybe the book wouldn’t show me anything ever again. The writings on the werewolf curse inside its pages were the only clue I had for fixing Ronan and the other shit going down in the Crossroads. I couldn’t risk it. Especially with what the ghost said in my dream. Maybe Lincoln wasn’t the one I needed to fear; maybe it was Hazel, or the witches she could bring back with her.

  So I shook my head and drummed my fingers on my thigh. “I can’t. It doesn’t…want you to see it.”

  “The book has feelings?” She snorted and shook her head, clearly scoffing, and I traded a look with Olivia.

  Liv rolled her eyes. “That’s why it doesn’t want you to see it.”

  Hazel sat up and stared at us, her eyes narrowed. “You’ve got to be shitting me. You’re serious? The book doesn’t want me to touch it? How the hell would you know that?”

  “Just a feeling I get when I think about it,” I said. I shrugged and decided to fish for my own information. “Don’t you witches have grimoires? Wouldn’t those get imbued with a little magic and start to have their own... gravity?”

  Hazel’s brows drew together. “Well, I dunno. Some of the old ones, maybe, before they started making rules about how to bind spells and things before putting them on paper. Charms and curses, at least certain ones, could be worked just by the reading, and even putting them down on paper risked passing them on to whoever touched the book. Now we only transmit spells by having someone with no magic at all write them down. That guarantees that no magic is transferred along with the words. It renders them safe, so the books couldn’t possibly develop that kind of connection.”

  “What did you do with all the old books?” Liv asked, leaning forward.

  “They’re locked up,” Hazel said. She glanced over her shoulder as the fancy SUV rumbled back into the yard, splashing through the puddles and mud in the drive, and slowly got to her feet. “And warded, just in case. We can’t risk the wrong people getting them, since most of the old spells are very, very dangerous. Blood rites and sacrifices and killing curses, grimoires bound in skin, all kinds of shit. I guess we should help them with bringing the food inside.”

  “It’s raining,” I muttered, then sighed as she gestured for me to get off my ass.

  Liv handed me a raincoat and paused next to the guys, her eyebrows arched in challenge. Lincoln grinned and swirled the whiskey in his glass. “Ladies.”

  I wanted to kick the legs out from his chair. “Help bring in the groceries.”

  Ronan straightened up, indignant as always. “That is women’s work. You can hardly expect us to engage in menial labor and kitchen drudgery.”

  “You’re goin’ the right way for an ass-kicking,” Nelson said under his breath. He, at least, heaved to his feet. Liv beamed at him and swirled the raincoat around her shoulders.

  “And you’re not going to get any breakfast unless you help,” she said. She marched into the rain and stomped through a few puddles on her way to the SUV, though Mason parked as close as possible to the house without backing into the rose bushes.

  I sighed and followed after her, not bothering with a raincoat or umbrella. Being a little drenched and muddy would match the rest of the morning completely.

  Chapter 51

  The menial drudgery of bringing in and then putting away groceries gave me time to ponder what Hazel said and compare it to what the ghost revealed in my dream. I wanted to talk to Lucia about it, but she was still in a foul temper and Hazel lingered close enough that she would have overheard anything I said. So I had to mull it over myself.

  Ronan had had at least one curse on him, although Hazel was right that he might have had more. It didn’t feel like he had more on him, but I wasn’t particularly gifted when it came to that kind of Seeing. Liv hadn’t mentioned it after we pulled off the first curse, so maybe she couldn’t see it, either.

  Which made me think there wasn’t another curse. Still, it could have been possible.

  I pulled some ice
blocks out of the freezer and tossed them in the sink. They’d been frozen veggies at one point, but we’d used them as ice packs so long they probably weren’t edible. Mason smiled as he brought in a dozen plastic bags all by himself and cluttered up the kitchen island. I blinked and looked into one. “Did you leave anything in the store?”

  “Not much,” he said, cheerful as always. He retrieved eggs and deli ham and cheese and some pre-diced onions and peppers, and searched under the cooktop for a skillet. “Ham and eggs, Luckett?”

  I traded looks with Hazel and Olivia, then shrugged and handed him the other carton of eggs. “You sure you want to engage in kitchen drudgery like the womenfolk?”

  He made a funny face as he cracked a dozen eggs into a bowl, splashing some milk and pepper into it before scrambling the mix with a fork. “What the hell is kitchen drudgery?”

  “The druids on the porch were discussing it,” Hazel said under her breath. “Is there anything else in the car?”

  “Nah, but it looks like Nelson could use some help out there.” He didn’t elaborate, so I started to crane my neck to try and see what was going on, but I couldn’t see shit through the closed door.

  Hazel brushed her hands off and put a carton of fruit punch and a jug of iced tea on the tray, along with a bunch of glasses, and sashayed her way to the door while rolling her eyes at me.

  I smiled a bit and went back to restocking the pantry. They really had bought pretty much everything in the grocery store, which would no doubt start some new rumors around town. Lucia almost never had boyfriends, and never went around in public with them. So her going shopping with some handsome stranger—who had money—could kick up the same kind of gossip that my relationship with Alex had created. The perils of living in a small town.

  “You look tired, Luckett,” Mason said, innocent as a church mouse. “Were you up late or something?”

  Lucia snorted and I shot her a dirty look. I figured I could play dumb, just like he and Nelson did when they thought we didn’t know any better. “Had a couple of bad dreams, so yeah.”