“You should thank your lucky stars Luke isn’t a mama’s boy,” Lilith said as she nibbled the edges of a cranberry muffin. “Archie doesn’t change his socks without consulting his mother.”
“Get out! That’s impossible. Archie’s way too—” I stopped midsentence before I insulted the woman’s husband.
“Oh, go ahead,” Lilith said with a good-natured chuckle. “He’s a troll. I know he’s a troll. You know he’s a troll. We all know he’s a troll.” Her smile widened. “And I don’t just mean his lineage.”
The thought of the gruff, disagreeable TV/electronics repair shop owner calling mommy before he made a wardrobe decision had the group of us giggling like schoolgirls.
“Here’s my rule of thumb,” Verna Griggs said as she rounded the corner of her afghan. “The louder the husband, the more powerful the mother-in-law.”
“Don’t let the quiet ones fool you,” Midge said. “My George makes our customers sound noisy, but when she was here, his mama ruled the roost.”
“You’ve been lucky up until now,” Bettina said to me. “You and Luke have been living in fantasyland.”
“We have a three-hundred-year-old houseguest who has been living with us since April. If that’s your idea of fantasyland—”
“She’s not his mother,” Rosie said. “That makes all the difference.”
“Remind me next time I bump into her in the hallway at three in the morning.”
“What were you doing in the hallway at three in the morning?” Lynette asked.
I pointed toward my belly. “Take a guess.”
“Family changes everything,” Janice said. “Mostly in a good way, but it takes time to claim your turf and learn how to hold on to it. A man’s family is a force to be reckoned with.”
“You make it sound like a war council,” I said, my knitting forgotten. “So maybe Bunny was pissed off with Luke for not telling her about the baby, but that’s understandable. She has every right to be pissed off. I would be, too.”
“This is just the start,” Rosie predicted. “Mark my word, Bunny is setting her trap right this very minute.”
“Totally,” Lynette agreed. “Before the weekend is over, Big Mama is going to call and invite you to a command performance.”
“Attendance mandatory,” Janice confirmed.
Attendance mandatory? Here I was, about to be handed the family I’d always wanted, and I felt like throwing up for the first time that trimester. “Maybe I should’ve watched less Cosby and more Desperate Housewives.”
“Screw the housewives,” Janice said to general hilarity. “You need to borrow my copy of The Art of War.”
“What I need is an unlisted phone number.” Evil Fae warriors, kidnapped souls, disappearing towns—those I could handle. But the thought of dealing with a real live human family instead of the fantasy one I’d imagined was enough to send me into a serious tailspin. “I don’t think I’m ready for all this drama.”
A simple beginner’s spell and Bunny’s phone calls would go bouncing back like a boomerang. Luke had wanted to keep his family at a distance and this would be the perfect way to grant his heart’s desire a little while longer.
But I couldn’t do it.
“I’m disappointed in you, honey,” Midge said as I tamped down the magick. “You waited all your life to get your powers and really be one of us and now you’re siding with your human bloodline again.”
“I’m not siding with the humans,” I protested, “I’m doing what’s right for my daughter.”
“What’s right for your daughter is making sure the truth about Sugar Maple stays hidden.”
“I know that.”
“So why are you hesitating? Grandparents come for visits, Chloe. Long visits. Are you sure you’re ready for that?”
“I’m not even ready for the baby,” I said in a surprising burst of candor. The past year had been one life-changing event after another. I was exhausted! “All I know is that the MacKenzies are her family and I’m not going to do anything that will keep her from knowing and loving them.”
And although I didn’t say it out loud, maybe I wanted to get to know and love them, too. Although I had embraced my hard-won magick and all it entailed, my blood was still half human and that fact wouldn’t be denied.
For all that I loved my adopted family of friends in Sugar Maple, there had always been an empty space inside me that they couldn’t fill. It wasn’t until I met Luke and found myself drawn to his very human warmth that I began to understand what was missing.
I never met my human father’s family. I’m not even sure he had any at the time I was born. All I knew about him was that he was young and handsome and worked with his hands and that he loved Guinevere Hobbs. His life before he met my mother, the family he left behind to be with her, had all disappeared into oblivion, never acknowledged by Sorcha the Healer, who had raised me after my parents’ deaths.
That wasn’t what I wanted for Luke and our daughter.
Sorcha had believed that interaction with humans could only lead to disaster, and the death of Guinevere was proof of that fact. Although my powers didn’t kick in until I was almost thirty, I had been raised according to my heritage as one of Aerynn’s descendants with the expectation that I would be the one who took Sugar Maple well into the twenty-first century and beyond.
“It could be worse,” I said, shaking off the bittersweet sense of longing that thoughts of my parents always evoked.
“Darn right,” said Lilith. “If you’d fallen for Gunnar or Dane, you would’ve ended up with Isadora as your mother-in-law.”
Janice shivered dramatically. “There’s a scary thought.”
Isadora was the banished leader of the Fae warrior faction that had been dedicated to pulling Sugar Maple and all its residents beyond the mists into a different dimension. She had been the cause of every terrible thing that had ever happened in my life and not a day went by when I didn’t reinforce the spell I’d cast to keep her far away from us.
Gunnar and Dane were her twin sons. Dane was his mother’s child, a beautiful creature with a twisted soul, while Gunnar’s beauty manifested itself inside and out. We had all pretty much grown up together and once upon a time I had come close to falling under Dane’s dark spell. When Fae turned their sexual magick on someone, especially someone with human blood, the game was over. Outrageous beauty combined with otherworldly magnetism made for a dangerously irresistible lover. Danger, of course, being the operative word. Sex was only part of the agenda.
Thankfully reason had prevailed before I succumbed to Dane’s advances, but the experience had turned him into a formidable enemy. Like I said, not many females said no to him. He was gone now to whatever hell existed for all things evil, but the memory of danger would be a long time fading.
Gunnar had been sunshine to his shadow, a spirit of pure light. For a time Sugar Maple had lobbied for a match between my dear friend Gunnar and me, but that wasn’t meant to be. In the end Gunnar had sacrificed his life to make my life with Luke possible.
I had loved Gunnar as a friend, but my heart belonged to Luke and Luke alone and always would. Hobbs women fell in love just once during their lifetime and they bore only one child: a daughter who, as a descendant of Aerynn and Samuel, would continue to keep Sugar Maple safe from danger.
But I would be lying if I said Gunnar wasn’t in my thoughts every single day. I missed his laughter, his warmth, his steadfast friendship. This probably sounds crazy, but I missed all the things we would never share. I never once imagined that he wouldn’t be here with me to celebrate the birth of my daughter, but the fates had had other plans.
I couldn’t change our daughter’s future—it had been preordained by magick far greater than mine—but I could make sure she didn’t walk this world alone. She needed to know her place in the world. Both worlds.
She needed to know her family.
5
LUKE
My cell phone drowned. That was the bad news.
The good news? My cell phone drowned.
Somewhere out there my mother was leaving endless voice mails threatening me with everything from disinheritance to eternal damnation if I didn’t call her back immediately, but thanks to the Atlantic Ocean only Verizon knew for sure.
Unfortunately somewhere out there Chloe was taking the hit for me.
Damn. Why didn’t I listen to her and spill the beans months ago? The shock of finding out I was going to be a father again had knocked me back for a while. The memory of my daughter Steffie’s death overshadowed the joy and I had to fight hard to let go of my fears and believe that this time would be different.
Of course, there was the Chloe problem to contend with. She was smart and funny and kind and talented and beautiful and a sorceress. A flames-shooting-from-her-fingertips, sparks-flying-from-her-eyes, turn-you-into-a-newt sorceress who lived in a town crammed with vampires, werewolves, trolls, ghosts, sprites, and a sleeping giant.
Try explaining that to a seventy-one-year-old woman who thought an Episcopalian son-in-law was a walk on the wild side.
And while you’re at it, try explaining why the town was populated with preternaturally gorgeous specimens who bore more than a passing resemblance to stars like Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Try explaining why an outsider couldn’t book a room in the seemingly empty Sugar Maple Inn or why there were no birth or death records after 1703.
And that was just for starters.
My family didn’t believe in boundaries. They dropped by without calling. They snooped in medicine cabinets. They offered opinions on everything from your sex life to how much fiber you should be eating. If my mother didn’t pick up on the Sugar Maple vibe, one of my sisters would, guaranteed.
Hell, she was probably sitting in our cottage with Fran right now, the two of them eyeballing everything from the number of litter boxes to Chloe’s naked ring finger. When it came to my mother, two plus two always equaled more than four.
The last thing we needed was more houseguests. If they were still there, I was going to offer a night’s stay, all expenses paid, at the nearest Ramada.
I rolled back into Sugar Maple a little after six o’clock, tired, hungry, and stinking from dead halibut and seaweed. The only thing on my mind as I turned down Osborne Street was a hot shower and some alone time with Chloe. Elspeth, our troll houseguest from hell, had beamed herself up to Salem to spend Thanksgiving with some of her friends, leaving us with privacy for the first time in almost eight months.
Or maybe not. The old bat could disappear at the drop of a denture, only to reappear smack in the middle of what you thought was a private moment.
Yeah, those moments.
Chloe had planned to shutter the shop around three o’clock and head home to get some rest, and the thought of crawling into bed with her made me hit the gas pedal a little harder.
Hell, I was the only cop in town and I wasn’t about to pull myself over for speeding.
By the time I showered and grabbed a bite to eat, it would be seven thirty or eight. My mother was a morning person. She usually went lights-out around nine and was up before the sun. If I played it right, I might be able to avoid saying more than “hello” and “I was going to tell you next week” before I had a chance to dream up a good story.
I was gliding to a stop at the stop sign when my eye caught a blaze of lights in the side mirror. What the hell? Unless I missed my guess, the lights were coming from Sticks & Strings.
The shop that should have been closed almost three hours ago.
I hung a U-turn and headed back up the empty street, then whipped into my spot in the alleyway between the police station and the yarn shop. Laughter blasted through the walls. Loud, raucous, the kind of uncensored female laughter men never get to hear.
How the hell many people were in there anyway? I was able to pick out at least eight separate sounds. Chloe’s full-bodied laughter rang out above the chorus. I listened more closely. My mother had a distinctive laugh, kind of a cross between a cackle and a chuckle, but I didn’t hear it or Fran’s smoker’s rumble in the mix.
The laughter got louder when I walked through the door.
“Don’t worry,” Janice said the second she saw me. “They left two hours ago.”
“Will you look at his face?” Rosie from Assisted Living cackled. “Bet you were hiding around the corner!”
“Your mama is on the warpath,” Renate Weaver said with a self-righteous shake of her head. “What were you thinking, Luke? You can’t keep secrets from family.”
“Actually you can,” Chloe said to her with a wink in my direction. “Didn’t you keep your QVC addiction secret from Colm until he found your stash in the attic?”
Renate didn’t miss a beat. “Apples and oranges. Hiding a pair of knee-high red suede boots isn’t the same as hiding a pregnancy.”
The Fae innkeeper had a point. “So how mad is she?” I asked Chloe.
“Hard to tell exactly,” Chloe said, “but I’d say your ass is grass.”
More laughter.
“You really shouldn’t have hung up on her, Luke.” Lynette made a tsk-tsk sound. “Bad move.”
“I didn’t hang up. I was being chased by a gang of sea lions and the phone went flying into the ocean.”
Janice started to laugh. “You mean the welcome party.”
“You stink,” Midge Stallworth said, holding her snub nose with two pudgy fingers.
“Good grief!” Lilith delicately fanned the air around her. “You might want to consider a new aftershave, Luke.”
Rosie and Verna buried their noses in a mountain of bright green yarn.
“Thanks for the heads-up, Janice,” I said as Chloe laughingly dodged my kiss. “Your old man trashed my truck with his halibut happy meal. You could’ve told me what to expect.”
“It was trout and if I had, would you have volunteered?” Janice retorted.
I shot her my best dead-eyed cop look. “Now I know why every cat in town has tried to break into your minivan.”
Her expression softened. “Did he get off to a good start?”
I told her about the group of gigantic sea lions who’d encircled Lorcan and escorted him into the cold waters of the Atlantic.
“Was there one big guy with a gray muzzle and enormous dark eyes?”
“That’s the one who tried to kick my ass,” I said.
“He’s Lorcan’s father and he wasn’t trying to kick your ass. He was thanking you.”
Okay, I’ll admit the thought of Lorcan Meany being the son of a sea lion threw me for a second, but I reminded myself I was in Sugar Maple, where things like that made perfect sense.
“I have his stuff in the truck,” I said to Janice as she jammed her knitting into a bright red tote bag. “I was going to drop it off at the house, but since you’re here . . .”
She nodded and I saw beneath the wisecracks and the laughter to the wife who would worry all winter long until her husband came back to her. Chloe squeezed my hand and I knew she had seen it, too. Not even magick could guarantee your life would turn out exactly the way you hoped it would. In a hell of a lot of ways, we were all flying blind.
“We were taking bets on how long you’d hide out there,” Verna Griggs said as she fiddled around with the big yellow and orange blanket on her lap.
“According to my calculations, the odds were twenty-to-one you’d sleep in the truck tonight rather than face your mother,” Bettina Weaver Leonides said, needles flashing as she knitted something lacy and pink that I’d bet the shop was for my baby.
“And it was hard to get any takers,” Rosie from Sugar Maple Assisted Living informed me. “Who’d want to bet against a sure thing?”
“Thanks a lot for the vote of confidence, ladies.” I was starting to get pissed off. “I can handle my mother.”
“Honey, I’ve met your mother,” Renate said to more laughter, “and there’s no contest.”
“You might have been some muckety-muck dow
n in Boston,” Rosie elaborated just in case I didn’t get the point, “but that doesn’t butter any parsnips with your mother.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, struggling to maintain a straight face.
Chloe reached for my hand and I helped leverage her up from the sofa. “No offense, Luke,” she said, “but Midge is right: you do stink.”
CHLOE
An hour later Luke and I were home, curled up by the fire eating huge leftover turkey sandwiches with all the trimmings. Elspeth, to our mutual delight, was nowhere to be found.
“Now you smell like cranberry sauce,” I said as he leaned over to swipe one of my pickles. “Definitely an improvement.”
He smiled, but I could see his mind was somewhere else.
“Tell me,” I said.
“Tell you what?”
“Whatever it is that’s keeping you so far away.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Have you ever seen what happens when a selkie returns to the ocean?”
“I saw Lorcan dive into Snow Lake a few years ago, but there wasn’t a whole lot of drama involved.” I took a bite of my sandwich and chewed thoughtfully. “If you forget about the big seal suit, that is.”
“Gotta tell you, I wish I’d had a heads-up about that seal suit.”
“You’ve heard the selkie legends. It shouldn’t have been that big a surprise.”
“Cut the human a little slack, Hobbs. Lorcan didn’t get that at Men’s Warehouse.”
“You’re right,” I said, putting my plate down and curling up closer to his warmth. “He probably didn’t.”
We were quiet for a while, then Luke spoke again.
“How much danger is he in out there?”
“Lorcan?” I shrugged. “I never really thought about it.”
“He’s out there in the Atlantic Ocean with fishing boats and tankers and who knows what the hell else.”
Spells & Stitches Page 5