by Nova Nelson
Not that I had much hope of it while I continued to spend every day at Medium Rare. But still. There were moments here and there where I could think of other things. After all, it’d been two months since Tanner jumped through that portal and this wasn’t my first rodeo when it came to losing someone.
After refilling James’s coffee and dodging another conversational engagement with Hyacinth, I made the rounds for refills, starting at the very back corner booth.
“Top off, Ted?”
“Certainly, thanks.” The reaper held up his mug.
As I poured, I asked, “Have you considered my offer any more?”
He cleared his dry throat and sat up a little straighter. “Sorry, but my answer hasn’t changed. You know that if I’d do it for anyone, it would be you, but I think we had a front row seat to what happens when people mess with that sort of magic.”
I leaned close enough to whisper, “I just want to know how to do it. That doesn’t mean I would necessarily go through with it. I just want to know that I could.”
He shook his head mechanically, his hood swirling around it. “No. I don’t think it would do you any good. How are you going to move on when you know he’s only a dark spell away?”
I bit back the harsh retort that jumped up my throat, and instead replied, “Why don’t you let me worry about myself? Believe me when I say I’m a pro at moving on. Don’t believe me? Just watch.” I turned my back to him and walked away.
Ted had a point, obviously. If he translated the Enochian spell for me to open up a portal to my old world, track down my boyfriend, and bring him back, the probability that I wouldn’t actually go through with it the next time a wave of sadness hit me like a freight train was incredibly slim. And the probability that doing so would upset the balance all over again and send more nightmarish monsters into the heart of town was incredibly high.
No, I probably couldn’t trust myself with that knowledge. Even still, I decided to nurse a minor grudge against the reaper. How dare he know what’s good for me better than I do!
Stupid immortal beings with all their wisdom and insight. What help were they?
After I started brewing a fresh pot of coffee, Deputy Manchester sauntered in, slid onto his preferred stool at the counter, and adjusted his duty belt with a grunt. “Morning, Ms. Ashcroft.”
“Morning, Deputy. The usual?”
“You got it.” I poured him his coffee and put the food order in with Anton.
I didn’t miss the forlorn look he gave the corner of the countertop where the glass pie stands used to be.
The diner hadn’t served a single slice since it’d opened back up. I had never actually gotten Tanner to teach me the trick to his recipes, and my feeble attempts at recreating his decadent cherry and blueberry pies fell so short of the mark, trying to sell them would have felt like disrespect.
When Stu’s order was up a few minutes later, I brought out his stack of pancakes and sides and refilled his coffee before grabbing a syrup bottle and setting it in front of him. He took his first bite and moaned. “You do something different with these today?” he said around a full mouth, motioning toward the short stack with his fork.
“We ran out of strawberries, so I used fresh cherries instead.”
He stuffed another large bite into his mouth. “Oosha do-is ery-day.”
“Come again?”
He finished chewing. “You should do this every day. It’s much better with cherries.”
I knew he was just jonesing for the pie. “I’ll consider it. Maybe I’ll add it as an option.”
I left him in peace to indulge after his shift, and when I returned, he was sopping up the last of the syrup on his plate with his side of sausage. “You know, Ms. Ashcroft,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“I’m proud of what you’ve done here.”
The comment caught me off guard, and I chuckled. “You don’t say.”
He nodded and I ignored the crumbs stuck in his mustache. (Don’t worry, I’d point them out before he left if they were still there.) “Yeah, I do say. I… well, I wonder sometimes how you do it. Especially after… You know.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You solved a case that had haunted me for years. You put everything on the line. You lost, well, quite a lot, and here you are, keeping all the wheels turning.”
“Didn’t you know that’s part of being a Fifth Wind?”
His eyebrows crept up his forehead.
I explained, “We can make any outward signs of unhappiness magically disappear. Terrible tragedy? Poof! No one can tell. Everything falling apart in your personal life? Voila! Not a single visible hint. It’s about the only magic I know how to do.”
“I’m not sure that’s a Fifth Wind power so much as a survival instinct. And one I can relate to. Especially that bit about your personal life.”
“Dating isn’t going so well, I take it?”
“You take it correctly. Especially now that we’re down a deputy and I have to work my old hours of all day every day.” He paused. “Well, I suppose you don’t have much sympathy for me on that front. We’re down a deputy, but you’re down a—”
“I get it. It’s fine.”
“He meant a lot to me, too, you know.”
After two months of dancing around this conversation with Stu, now wasn’t the time to dive right in. So I just said, “Yeah, I know.”
“Wish I could have spoken with her while she was here.”
“Who?”
“Aria.”
I searched his face for any tells of what he was truly feeling, and I found plenty. “I think she would have liked that, for what it’s worth.”
Apparently, it was worth a lot, because the deputy cleared his throat and turned his eyes toward his empty plate before taking a long sip of coffee and continuing to avoid looking at me directly.
“There are other women, Stu. Lots of them. And I think they’d be incredibly lucky to date the town’s brave deputy.”
He rolled his eyes. “I think I ought to finish healing up before I go chasing after women again.”
“True. How’s that going?”
He patted his middle, right where the monstrous horn had skewered him two months ago. “Moving along nicely. Stella says I’m supposed to stay away from caffeine and sugar until my spleen is completely healed.”
I glanced down at his coffee cup and empty plate. “You’re doing a great job.”
“Eh, I’m not dead yet, am I?” He held up his mug. “Speaking of which, I could use another top up.”
I hesitated, but Stu was a grown man. Definitely not my job to keep him on track.
As I poured, he said softly, “You know, Nora,”—I nearly sloshed the coffee all over the counter at his use of my first name—“Tanner was a good man. Is a good man, wherever he is. But I have a feeling he’s not the only one who could make you happy.”
I froze, the coffee pot hanging in midair, and shot Stu some serious side eye. “Uhhh… are you—”
“Huh? Oh!” He jerked his head back. “Oh, no. I didn’t mean—”
“Because it sounded like—”
“No, no. You’re far too young for me.”
“I’m not that much younger.”
“But you’re… I don’t feel that about you, Ms. Ashcroft. No offense. You’re a beautiful woman, but… I wasn’t talking about me.”
“Right. Good.”
“I’m talking about Mr. Stringfellow.”
I set the coffee pot onto the counter just a little too hard and pointed a warning finger at him. “Stu. No.”
“Why not?” he asked shamelessly, before adding quietly, “I know you two have a history.”
“That’s exactly why not. We have a history. And we both decided it wasn’t right.”
He scoffed. “I’ve been in law enforcement a while, Ms. Ashcroft, and it’s taught me a thing or two about reading body language. And if I’m not mistaken, you decided it wasn’t right. I’ve never seen
a thing from that poor boy to indicate he agrees with your assessment.”
“Be that as it may, how could either of us ever be sure it wasn’t just a situation for two brokenhearted people to avoid feeling so brokenhearted?”
Stu squinted at me. “What’s wrong with that if it is? Seems to me being brokenhearted isn’t a state anyone would choose to remain in if they had another option.”
“And how would it look to the rest of Eastwind? We both lose our significant others only two months before and we’ve already moved on?”
Stu arched an amused brow. “Ms. Ashcroft, you’ve never struck me as the type to give two licks about what anyone in this town thinks. It’s one of your better qualities. So, what you just said sounds like a conjured up excuse if I ever heard one. Perhaps you ought to consider getting out of your own way.”
I opened my mouth to respond, but the deputy raised his hands in surrender and cut me off with, “But then again, what do I know? I’m not the one to go handing out dating advice. However, I will say this: it’s New Year’s Eve. If ever there was a time to allow yourself to let go and start fresh…”
“It’s just an arbitrary date,” I grumbled, grabbing a rag and scrubbing at a stain on the countertop.
“Does that mean you’re not coming to the feast this evening?”
“No, I’m coming to the feast.”
“It’s important, you know. I think all of Eastwind could use a do-over after the year we’ve had.”
That was true enough, so I nodded and Stu downed the rest of his coffee, threw a few coins on the counter, and made for the door. But he paused with his hand on the door handle and hollered back to me, “I always get there early to get a good seat. I’ll save two more for you and… whoever else.”
I unclenched my jaw and felt my shoulders sag as my resolve gave out.
Then I said, “Deal.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The crate full of chips and queso floated just ahead of me up the hill toward the Eastwind Emporium. The New Year’s Eve celebration was a potluck, encouraging local businesses to bring whatever they could to feed the town. Apparently, it was a bit of a competition to see who could be the most generous.
You know, because generosity goes best with competition.
Bringing chips and queso was a no-brainer. After all, it was officially an award-winning appetizer. Sure, the last time I’d brought it to a town festival it had accidentally made everyone on the High Council see their nagging ancestors’ spirits. But that wouldn’t happen again. I’d double-checked that no one had tampered with it this time (by feeding some to Grim first).
I was happy to say that it had become a favorite at Medium Rare, and quite a few customers in the week leading up had asked if I’d be bringing it.
So here I was.
The crate was rented. That’s right, I still hadn’t mastered the magic of levitation, and I wasn’t sure if I ever would. So I had to settle for renting an enchanted crate that worked, I assumed, similarly to how the floating police wagon did, since Stu’s were-elk lineage didn’t bless him with any especially magical abilities.
Maybe I was part were-elk.
Because Ruby sure had a few tricks up her sleeve that I didn’t know Fifth Winds were capable of. Meaning, of course, that I didn’t know I was capable of doing them, and she and I were the only Fifth Winds I knew.
She’d been incredibly tight-lipped about the powers she’d employed at the battle in the Emporium on Halloween, which was a shame. Maybe it was just my survival instinct that drove me to want to understand the full range of magic possessed by the woman I shared a house with.
I reached the Emporium. If I hadn’t known that a portal had opened up in the center of it, expelling all kinds of nasty things, I wouldn’t have guessed it. Eastwind had come together beautifully to both manually and magically repair the place so that it was actually better than before. A few of the aging buildings had finally gotten the structural repairs they needed, and the fresh cobblestones were nicely aligned, a brighter ruddy color than before, and lacking any tufts of grass growing up between them.
Rows and rows of long tables took up the majority of the area, and I guided my offering over to the serving tents. I was immediately swarmed by the volunteering students from Mancer Academy who would be our waiters this evening (for tips, of course). I passed off the food to a couple of the older ones who were more likely to know a proper reheating spell that wouldn’t make the cauldron of cheese explode everywhere, and then I left the tent.
I felt the excitement of the crowd like currents flowing through the ocean. Were my latent powers of empathy awakening?
And what was the anxious anticipation for, exactly?
A fresh start.
Stu was right. This town could use one. If that love spell cast by the archetype had shown me anything, it was that each person here had all sorts of complicated history with others, and in the divisive handful of months previous, some of those ties must have been strained if not cut completely.
It was time to make amends.
It’s just an arbitrary date, my brain demanded again. Putting so much stock in it, like everything will be magically washed clean, is ridiculous.
But was it? There were all kinds of strange magic happening around me all the time.
“Ms. Ashcroft!”
I looked around and found Stu standing at one of the tables near the stage. He pointed animatedly toward the two empty seats on his left.
I rolled my eyes and nodded to let him know I’d make my way over in good time. I had an overwhelming desire to make the rounds first.
“Afternoon, Nora.”
I followed the sound of the voice and smiled at Bloom. “Afternoon, Sheriff.”
She waved it off, “Oh please. Just call me Gabby when I’m not in uniform. Anyway, glad to see you here. Wasn’t sure if you’d show.”
“Really?”
“Yes, well, you know. Celebrations can feel like salt in the wound when you’re struggling with loss.”
For some reason, I didn’t mind the angel talking about it so casually. There was something in her presence that spoke of a deep, personal understanding of pain.
“How’s the department holding up without him?”
“Oh, curse the department! Who cares about that? I miss the man, not the deputy.”
I felt a lump form in my throat and I swallowed it down. I hoped she would understand how much I appreciated the sentiment without me having to say it.
“Come here,” she said.
I wasn’t sure what she meant, even as she opened her arms to me.
“This is long overdue,” she added, and then she hugged me.
I wasn’t prepared for hugging an angel, I can tell you that. It felt like…
Well, you know when you lie down in bed after a long day on your feet, and the muscles in your back release and it feels like you’re sinking deeper and deeper into the mattress?
Hugging an angel feels a little like that, but on more levels than just the physical. It felt like a full-body sigh.
“We’ll chat more soon,” she said, “but for now, I need to find Springsong and Esperia and get our opening remarks sorted.”
“Yeah, of course.” And, leaving me feeling about a thousand pounds lighter, the angel walked away.
I made my way down the rows of tables toward the one in the center where Stu was, but before I could get to it, someone else called out.
“Ah,” I said spotting the mayor first, then the High Priestess, “Bloom was just looking for you two.”
“A word?” said Mayor Esperia.
“Sure.” I followed the two women a little ways away from the crowd where we wouldn’t be overheard.
Springsong took the lead. “We’d like you to know that we appreciate your discretion.”
“About what?”
“What we told you about High Priest Clearbrook. Based on the fact that we’re not in Ironhelm, I assume you haven’t told Bloom.”
Esperia laughed nervously. “Right, right. And we will. In good time.”
Yeah, sure.
The High Priestess spoke again. “I know you lost a lot in restoring the balance, and I want to thank you for it. In fact, I’d be happy to offer you a no-strings-attached membership to the Coven to honor your sacrifice.”
Rather than laughing at the fact that she viewed that as some kind of reward, I simply said, “Thank you. That won’t be necessary. I didn’t actually do anything. If anyone deserves an honorary membership, it’s Eva.”
“And if she ever returns, I’m happy to offer her one as well.”
The unspoken but logical ending to that thought, which was that if she ever returned we might find ourselves right back in the same mess that had caused her to leave, hung heavy in the air until the mayor broke the tension.
“I hope the things you’ve learned recently shed light on some of our behavior since you first arrived in Eastwind. It was nothing personal. We just… well, we had a feeling it might be you.”
“What do you mean?”
“That you might have been the one the Culpeppers were sent to, um, see to.”
Now there was an interesting euphemism for murder.
“And you thought my arrival foretold chaos in Eastwind?”
They both nodded.
“Well, you were right. Guess I can’t hold that against you.”
The High Priestess smiled and nodded. “I admire your bravery, Nora, and now that the air has been cleared between us and you understand why we’ve done what we have, I hope we can bury our grievances and start a new year on the same team.”
Did I trust them? Nah, not so much. But there was no harm in convincing these two that I was on their side.
Their side for what? And who was on the other side? I didn’t know the answer to either of those things.
“Consider the hatchet buried,” I said.
“Hatchet?” said Esperia concernedly. “What… what hatchet?”
“Oh, it’s just a phrase from my world. It comes from… well, I don’t actually know what the origins are, but it just means we’re starting fresh.”