by Holley Trent
Now he followed, putting about ten feet between him and her back.
“Look, I wanted to say hello because you’re a natural witch. There aren’t too many of us. Most mortal magic users get their power from practice.”
“Or making deals?” She tugged on the driver’s door and raised one well-groomed eyebrow at him.
“Yes.” He knew a little something about making deals. He’d made a few himself because he had the power to do it. He’d been born with his magic, and what he loaned out, he always got back. But when people made deals to glean magic for specific acts, the magic faded over time, and usually whatever his customers paid wasn’t worth the price.
Claude had to make a living somehow, though. It wasn’t like he could hold down a nine-to-five, not with his father on his ass nagging about incubus quotas and threatening to rend his soul from his body so Claude could witness his physical form’s obliteration.
Gentle and devoted, Papa was.
“How did you know I was a witch? And is that why you’ve been here all month? The food here is good, and I should know because I’m the one who cooks it, but there are other places around Robbins to get a fried chicken sandwich.”
“But you make it so well,” he said, deadpan. What the fuck was up with her magic? He was damned good at disguising his, and did so regularly, but he’d made himself a beacon for her. He couldn’t have been more obvious if he’d put a flashing neon sign to his head. He stopped near the left taillight and stuffed his hands into his pockets. First, a reincarnated love who’s not who I expected, and now a witch with clogged power? He looked to the heavens. Surely this is a test.
She fidgeted her key ring in her right hand and pulled her full bottom lip between her teeth. A red bloom appeared in her cheeks and she shifted her weight from foot to foot.
Suddenly shy? Why?
Fuck. He was too curious to leave her alone now. He had to at least troubleshoot why she hadn’t recognized his magic. The open-ended problem would drive a man like him nuts. Loose ends annoyed him to distraction. “Hey.”
“Hmm?”
“What do you put in the mayo?” he asked. “I couldn’t figure it out. That’s why I kept ordering the sandwich.”
Her eyes widened. “The mayo? It’s …” She groaned and shook her head.
“Tell me. It can’t be that bad. And don’t worry about me stealing your recipe. I can’t cook worth a damn, and even if I could, I’m far too lazy.” Lately, his sort-of grandmother-in-law had been providing the bulk of his sustenance.
“It’s just a little embarrassing. I graduated from cooking school, and I don’t mean community college classes. I mean a highly competitive, very expensive program that should have landed me a job where I’d wear a white chef’s coat, not a greasy apron that has Rooster’s screen-printed on it. I’m still paying off that white-coat education.”
“What are you doing working at a country-western bar, then?”
She scoffed. “This is only one of my jobs. On Sundays and Mondays, I work at a strip club out in Fayetteville.”
The grin Claude had been failing to suppress pulled in at that bit of news. He knew Fayetteville’s strip clubs.
Her laugh pealed through the night air, and the tense shoulders that had been nearly up at her ears relaxed down to their natural position. “Oh, the look on your face. What is it?” She waved her free hand over her full breasts and chuckled. “Tits not big enough for the stage?”
At his age, he knew damn well there was no good answer to that question, so he kept his mouth shut.
“Oh, your face.” She sighed and shook her head. “It’s not what you think. I’m the little worker bee that keeps those sticky tables full of hot wings and steak fries for the lechers.” She shrugged. “They’re closed for renovations right now so I haven’t been in for a few weeks. A vengeful pole dancer tampered with the sprinklers and the county shut the place down until the owner replaces the entire system.”
The thought of her on a stage, showing off what should have been his, made his blood boil. It was irrational and he knew it, because he didn’t want her as his mate. He wanted Laurette back, but rationale seemed to have flown the coop. He was acting on instinct, which sometimes fought mightily with tact and won. He took a deep, calming inhalation and let it out. “If you’ve got such good training, what are you doing working in places like these?”
“Well …” She sighed and brushed a hand over her unruly hair. It’d been in a single braid earlier that she’d had tucked beneath her hairnet, but her rubber band must have popped during their scuffle.
Her unrestrained tresses lent a certain wildness to her that balanced a pretty face that might have almost been too sweet—too young for her years. Maybe she was thirty, but her soul felt ancient. He could feel it in his bones that she’d been around before, and not just this last time. Some people kept coming back that way, returning until they got what they were looking for. Whatever she was looking for—whatever lesson she needed to learn—she obviously hadn’t found it.
“My father got sick,” she said. “Right after I graduated. He was uninsured and the medical bills piled up. My mother had two choices, really. Bankruptcy or selling the house to cover the expenses. My sister and I decided that neither were good options, so we both came home and pitched in. Finally got it all paid off, but now, well, there aren’t a whole lot of four- and five-star restaurants in North Carolina. I’ve been offered a few jobs, but I’d have to pay my own relocation expenses. I’m still saving up, and … I have no idea why I’m telling you this. Seems like once people get me started, I can’t shut my damned mouth.”
That didn’t surprise him. She kept to herself. He never saw her interacting with her coworkers other than sharing a few words here and there. She’d just kept her head down and did her job, and when it was time to leave, she didn’t linger. She went home to her apartment, and stayed there until work the next day. If she were anything like Claude, she probably felt a desperate craving for companionship, but was picky about whom she gave it to.
It wasn’t that Claude was ever truly lonely. He really wasn’t. His merry band of supernatural rebels, including his favorite half-demon half-siblings, never let him go into isolation for too long. That made doing some of his jobs that required long trances and astral projection difficult, though he’d never had the heart to ask them to leave him alone. What’d they think he’d do to himself, anyway? Sure, he got lonely, but he liked life too much to end it.
He slipped a soft pack of cigarettes out of his back pocket and tapped it against his palm.
He’d been a part of this ragtag family for less than two years, just since his brother John—a brand-new incubus at the time—had reached out to him. John had been the linchpin. The snowflake to cause the avalanche. He’d defied their father and chosen love over power. That act of naive bravery made others defect from the Hellish ranks, too. Some quietly, some kicking and screaming. Now John and their brother Charles were married to a pair of sisters, and try as they might to make Claude feel included, he knew he was the odd man out.
He wanted more than massive family dinners on Sundays and supernatural adventuring with his brothers. That camaraderie was nice, but it was nothing like being one half of a pair.
He missed belonging to someone, and wanted another chance with his girl. But this wasn’t her.
“Well, I guess I’ll get on home,” she said, jostling him from his thoughts. “I’ve got a ton of laundry to catch up on. My entire closet smells like a deep-fryer.”
“Oh.” Claude pulled the plastic tab around the cigarette pack and crumpled the wrapper in his palm. “You didn’t tell me what you put in the mayo, though.”
“And you didn’t tell me how you knew I was a witch when I couldn’t tell you were, so we’re even.”
He clamped a cigarette between his teeth and patted his pockets for his lighter. Maybe having something between his lips would keep his mouth from running in the wrong direction. Now that he understood wh
y she’d been so quick to fight him, he could hardly be angry. She wasn’t his mate, but he didn’t wish to offend her. He owed her a professional courtesy as a witch, even if she was a clueless one.
She cocked her head to the side and tapped her index finger to her chin. “Where are you from?”
“Everywhere and nowhere.”
Her lips sputtered and eyes rolled. “Ask a simple question, get a riddle for an answer.”
He curled his fingers around his metal lighter and pulled it free of his back pocket, smiling at her.
She smiled back and he nearly dropped the lighter. He’d never seen her smile. It reached her eyes and lent a familiarity to her face that temporarily froze him in place. She didn’t look like Laurette, but for the first time, he saw the proof that she was still in there. In this woman named Gail.
“What’s your name, guy?” She swatted a hand in front of her face as his cigarette smoke wafted on the wind. “You know about half of my deepest, darkest secrets, so you could at least tell me your name.”
“Claude.” He returned his lighter to its pocket and extended his right hand. “Claude Fortier.”
She stared at the hand for a few seconds, then took it. “Fort-yay, and not four-tee-ur, huh? You must be French-Canadian. No, Haitian.”
About half, but he’d never seen Haiti, and his Haitian maternal grandparents had fled to New Orleans years before the revolution.
“You interested in names?” he asked, not letting go of her hand.
“I’m a bit of a genealogist and I encounter a lot of French-sounding names in my family tree. My family name was Colvert before it somehow got bastardized into Colvard.”
It’d been Brouard before, Laurette Brouard.
“I’m Gail,” she said, crinkling her nose at the second-hand smoke enfolding them. She coughed. “Sorry. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, given where I work.”
“I apologize. It’s a vice I’ve had too long and can’t break. Sometimes I don’t even realize I’ve lit one. My family is trying to get me to quit. My grandmother-in-law won’t let me into the house if she smells it on my clothes.”
Gail laughed and sank onto the driver’s seat, her hand still clenched in his. “That’s hardcore, but I don’t blame her. I had the displeasure of kissing a man who smoked, and that, amongst other reasons, contributed to our very messy divorce.”
Claude let go of her hand. “You’ve been married?” He’d gone into the search for her knowing very little—only her name and that she was in his area. One of his brother Charles’s gifts was having a direct line to The Fates when it came to matters of love. He played Cupid and made matches. He’d told Claude that Laurette was back now as Gail, and he’d cautioned him that she might be a very different woman. He’d told him to approach her with no expectations.
Claude hadn’t listened. And obviously, he hadn’t done enough research. He’d been keeping an eye on her for the past few weeks, but he hadn’t thought to check into her past. He’d been so expectant and eager that the only past worth considering was her past with him.
She nodded in response to his question, smiled serenely, and pulled her seatbelt across her torso. “Married and divorced. The relationship was a short three years and messy, and all I got out of that unholy union was this car. One of these days, I’ll sell it and get something respectable.”
“Like a minivan?” he asked through clamped teeth.
“No, like a Harley. I gotta run, but listen. The secret to the sauce is pickle juice. My signature dish is due to a dill pickle juice spill. Humiliating, given my education. I should be more intentional, right?”
“Nothing wrong with accidents, assuming you learn from them.” He counted her marriage as one of those accidents. He felt like she’d cheated, but that wasn’t fair. For starters, he wanted Laurette, and Gail wasn’t her. Second, she didn’t remember him, and it wasn’t like Claude had been completely chaste in all those years. His job description required the exact opposite, though he had ways of skirting those rules when he wanted to.
“You’re right. So, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow? I’ll have a sandwich ready for you.”
He didn’t know what he wanted from her, but felt their night together hadn’t quite started yet. He just couldn’t let her go so soon. He’d waited so long for her to come back. What was a little while longer? He needed proof it was time to move on from Laurette. Gail was the best person to dispense it.
“Don’t you want to know how I knew you were a witch, yet you couldn’t tell I was one?”
Her mouth opened, closed, and her forehead furrowed. “I assumed it’s because I’m not particularly powerful.”
Bullshit. He somehow managed to keep his incredulity from registering in his expression. He’d pat himself on the back later. “I’ll tell you over drinks. Got anything good at your place?”
“Cute.” She stabbed her key into the ignition. “You’ve got huge balls, don’t you?”
“Lots of huge things.”
Her eyes widened again, and she pressed a hand to her chest before the guffaw escaped. “You are a hot mess.”
It wasn’t a lie, so he just shrugged. “Drinks?”
“I’ve got bottled water, skim milk, and Cheerwine.” She said “Cheerwine” with a devilish grin as if she thought the offering would be an absolute deal breaker. For some people, it might have been. That stuff could put a lesser man into a coma in two liters or less.
He smiled right back. “I may have a bottle of gin in my Jeep. It’d cut the sweetness of that stuff.”
“You don’t like sweet things?”
“I prefer them, but I seem to be barking up your tree, anyway.” That elbow of hers had probably left a nasty knot on his back.
Her grin broadened. Evil little witch.
“Should I get the gin?”
“Hmm.” She tapped that index finger some more. “Okay. How about you follow me home? I’m actually looking forward to that gin. It’ll make doing laundry that much more exciting.” She closed the door and winked at him.
He didn’t wait around for her to change her mind.
CHAPTER TWO
Letting a stranger follow her home probably wasn’t the safest thing Gail had done in her eleven years as a legal adult, but Claude had been right. She so rarely ever encountered natural-born witches outside of her small circle, and especially not male ones. He’d obviously had formal training of some sort for him to have been able to deflect her magic so easily. The last time she’d tried that little electric shock trick had been at a moment of true desperation. Her ex-husband had a temper when he drank, and he drank when he was frustrated. Toward the end, he’d seemed frustrated all the fucking time, and she’d gotten tired of cowering.
He’d advanced on her, barking about how nothing ever went right and how she needed to help him more. “That’s your job!” he kept screaming.
One day she’d snapped, and he hadn’t known what hit him. She’d drawn on all the “wild” magic she could grab and sent enough electricity at him that he’d wet his pants.
He’d passed out long enough for her to grab her vital records, pack a small bag, and flee their home.
She never told anyone except her sister, Ellery—who shared her witch predisposition as they’d inherited the trait from both sides of the family tree—what had happened. None of her friends would have believed it, anyway. She’d ended up telling them all a series of half-truths about the breakup—that she and Shaun were incompatible and she didn’t like the person she was around him. Hell. She couldn’t even remember much of the time they were together. It was all a fog with the occasional clearing of why-did-I-marry-him? confusion.
She cut her gaze to the rearview mirror and saw Claude following close to her bumper as she approached her apartment complex. She could still drive past, circle around, and stop at some well-lit gas station—tell him she’d changed her mind and that it’d be best if she went home alone.
“What to do?”
Sighing
, she patted the center console blindly as she turned into the development and wrapped her fingers around her phone when she found it. “Call Ellery’s cell,” she told the phone, and slowed as she rounded the complex’s small pond.
She drummed her fingertips atop the steering wheel and drew her bottom lip between her teeth, watching him. He was looking down and to his right at something inside the Jeep, and she caught a glimpse of that perfect profile she’d been covertly eyeing for weeks. Yeah, she’d been looking, but that didn’t mean she’d been interested. She knew a hustler when she saw one, and saw men practice every night at the bar. Women fell hard for smooth-talking country boys. They always talked up how good they’d make a lady feel, how they’d take care of her and all that bullshit. And then after the wedding they showed their true colors. Little men got angry and took things out on their wives.
If she didn’t have such a strong yearning to talk about magic with someone who seemed to have a vastly different perception of it than she did, she’d ditch the bozo. The beautiful bozo with all that dark, curly hair and startling contrast: bright eyes, dark olive skin.
She bopped the heel of her hand against her forehead. “I bet he’s married.” She thought she’d been looking for a way out, but now she could blow steam from her ears. She could, too. It was one of her mostly useless witch tricks, and even that one she could only do a quarter of the times she tried.
Ellery answered. “Heifer, I just clocked in at the hospital and am shutting off my phone. What took you so long to check in?”
Gail blew a raspberry. “Heifer” and “Strumpet.” They’d learned those words from the Bible as children and somehow they’d become nicknames. They didn’t make a lick of sense, but neither did Gail or Ellery, usually.
Ellery, younger by not quite a year, had always been exceptionally paranoid, even for a witch. Apparently, she’d been that child who’d taken warnings about “stranger danger” to heart a bit too thoroughly. There was a long vetting process involved in gaining her confidence, and few people were up to the task. Checking in with her after work each night was more for Ellery’s peace of mind than Gail’s.