by Amy Lane
Bartholomew’s entire world went uncomfortably sweaty and red.
Gretel patted his cheek. “Oh, honey, don’t worry. It’s never as scary as we think. Now you two go cast your spell around the booth. I think that’s a very good idea. And let us know if you need any help in your neighborhood. I don’t know what your coven leader was thinking, letting you leave the premises with that much magic on the loose.”
“Well, we don’t really have one,” Bartholomew said. “I mean, Jordan’s our leader—he’s the one who decides which spells we’re going to cast, but the rest of us all pitch in.” He smiled weakly, glad he couldn’t see Lachlan’s face. “I do potions.”
“Figures,” Lachlan rasped in his ear, and he sort of yearned to lean back against that lovely chest and feel Lachlan’s tough-as-tree-root arms around him.
“Well, that is your gift, isn’t it?” Gretel said sweetly. “Just as distilling the truth is Jordan’s, and making the world homey is Kate and Josh’s, and imagining other worlds is Cully’s.”
Bartholomew frowned, feeling as though two of his friends had been left out. “But Alex and Dante—”
“Alex’s gift is order,” Sheila said with a sober nod. “And Dante’s….” They both met eyes and shrugged. “Well, we’ll figure it out when he does.”
Well, that alone pretty much proved they were on point. Poor Dante—he was decent but bored at his day job at the local newspaper, and he tried desperately to have a hobby like the others. Unfortunately the only thing he seemed really suited for was keeping Cully from losing his nut.
“He’ll find it,” Bartholomew said loyally, and Lachlan grunted as someone else bumped into him. “And in the meantime, we need to get back to my booth. Thank you both so much. It’s been a—”
“Wait,” Gretel said. “Do you know what went wrong? I forgot to ask.”
Bartholomew grimaced. “We… well, we sort of… not lied exactly, but we cast a wishing spell, and not one of us planned to ask for what it was we really wanted.”
Sheila and Gretel both did a slow blink. “Not one?”
Oh, how embarrassing. “No, ma’am.”
“What did you ask for instead?” Gretel asked, dreamy eyes unusually sharp.
“What we thought we were supposed to want.” Bartholomew had figured that out on his very own.
Both women let out inelegant snorts. “Jesus, Gretel—only when you’re young.”
“Right? Unbelievable. Well, young virginal Bartholomew, you and your friends are going to have to come clean before this is righted—you know that, don’t you?”
Bartholomew refrained from looking behind him, but Lachlan’s arms tightened around his shoulders as Lachlan protected him from more jostling. “Yeah,” he said in a small voice. “We got that feeling.”
“Well, run along, boys,” Gretel said kindly. “Lachlan, you come to us if you need anything, yes?”
“Ma’am, I don’t know anything about spellcasting,” Lachlan apologized. “I just didn’t want Bartholomew to be alone.”
And with that, he took Bartholomew by the shoulders and guided him back out on the floor.
Another group was coming toward them, comprised of four people cosplaying various Naruto characters. One of them had a paper bag with Bartholomew’s little logo sticker on it, and Naruto and Kakashi were reaching over Sasuke’s shoulder.
“C’mon, Jessie,” Naruto begged. “We can smell it from here. We don’t need to wait until lunch, right?”
“I bought them,” Jessie/Sasuke said. “I was going to bring them to my sister, since she missed out on the con!”
“We can go back and get more!” the kid dressed as Kakashi begged. “The line has to be down by now!”
Suddenly Jessie/Sasuke looked up, directly at Bartholomew as he and Lachlan watched their exchange. She closed her eyes and pulled the cookie bag up close to her nose and then inhaled sharply, almost like the cookies were a drug.
“Mmmm, you guys,” she said dreamily. “Maybe we should all go divvy this up. It’s like… calling to me, you know.” She gave Bartholomew a heavy-lidded look, and Bartholomew turned away and started heading down the aisle in panic.
“Oh, this is not good,” he muttered.
“What?” Lachlan asked. “What did you see?”
“There is something odd,” he replied. “People are way too excited about my cookies. We gotta go check on the oth—” The rest of the word died in his mouth as he and Lachlan rounded the corner and saw that the booth, which normally did a decent amount of business but was by no means the biggest deal ever, was mobbed.
The throng that surrounded Kate, Josh, Jordan, and Alex wasn’t pushing or impatient. They were just… persistent, and everybody holding out their hands, smiling in a uniform way that was really starting to creep Bartholomew out, looked more than hungry.
They looked blindly, fanatically, strangely in love.
“That doesn’t happen every con,” Lachlan said in surprise.
“No no no no no,” Bartholomew mumbled. He scanned the booths and saw that Lachlan had set up his usual shelves against a backdrop of black velvet draperies. This was good. This meant Bartholomew could sneak in through Lachlan’s booth and get around to his own booth through the back.
“Okay,” he muttered. “Lachlan, I’m going to sneak through your booth, and once I disappear out the back, you should be fine.”
“Wait,” Lachlan said, obviously confused. “Fine? What sort of fine? What are you going to do?”
“Well, I’m going to try to set up around….” He swallowed convulsively as one of the customers bumped his table and some of Kate’s soaps fell down. “Shit.”
“Here. You sneak in through the back and talk to Jordan,” Lachlan said grimly. “I’ll try to help sell stock. You don’t go anywhere without me, okay, Tolly? I don’t trust this group alone with you.”
“When did I get to be Tolly?” He had to ask. God, he just had to.
Lachlan blew his mind by stroking his lower lip with a rough woodworker’s thumb, and Bartholomew realized they were standing that close—had been for much of the morning.
“You’ve always been Tolly. I just… just really wanted an excuse to be close to you,” he confessed with a grin. “Haven’t you wanted to be close to me?”
Oh, yes. God, yes. But…. “Not like this,” Bartholomew protested. “Not when everything’s going wrong and the world’s upside down.”
And it was Lachlan’s turn to grimace. “Well, fine, Tolly, but it’s not like you were going to talk to me without some supernatural intervention, was it? I mean, I’ve been waiting to learn about you for a year and a half!”
Really? “I’m an IT worker,” Bartholomew told him. “How interesting can I be?”
“You’re an IT worker who wants to be a baker and apparently can’t cast a spell for shit!” The throng grew even as they watched, and someone caught a glimpse of Bartholomew from the corner of their eyes and started to turn fully around to stare. Before that happened, though, Lachlan interposed himself bodily and shoved Bartholomew behind his booth, sliding in smoothly to greet customers.
Help Me If You Can
JOSH was still in Lachlan’s booth, looking alarmed as the traffic in front of the bakery booth got more and more out of control.
“Thank God you’re here,” Josh told him. “Did Bartholomew get the stuff?”
Lachlan nodded and gestured with his chin to the space behind the booths. “He’s back there. I think he’s going to try to set the spell up on the ground in the corners of the booth—he really wants to protect you guys. I’d say the best way to protect you is to send you all away, but that….”
Boy, that crowd was a surprise.
“Yeah, I’m not sure what happened,” Josh told him. “It was like we were selling a little bit here and there, like you do, and then the first person actually opened the plastic wrap and took a bite.” He grimaced. “I’m not gifted—I mean, not like Jordan and Bartholomew and Cully. But it was like thi
s whisper went through the crowd, and suddenly people were closing their eyes and scenting the air. And it built from there. You guys were gone, what? Half an hour? This is nuts!”
Lachlan abruptly forgave the guy for being big and buff and having pretty dark brown eyes and so much chest it shortchanged his neck. Yeah, Lachlan tended to be a little jealous of Bartholomew’s friends, because they seemed so tight, and Lachlan wanted in. But maybe if he’d been nicer to someone besides Bartholomew, he might have found the key a little easier.
Besides, they were all going to need to think to figure out how to disperse this crowd.
“How much stock do you all have?” he asked, because at this point running out could be the best thing or the worst thing for all of them.
Josh groaned. “More than I fucking remember baking last night! God, it was all so fucked-up. We… we had a… well, we—”
Lachlan rolled his eyes. “You cast a bad spell that made the starlings fly upside down and squirrels do the rumba, and then you all helped him prepare for this morning. I got that part.”
Josh gave him a sideways glance. “You got that part? Do you realize how weird that sounds? It sounds weird to me, and I was there.”
Lachlan shrugged. “Everybody’s got a little pentagram in their logo, Josh. Was the witchcraft supposed to be a secret?”
“Yeah, but half the kids on the vendor floor are wearing a pentacle. There’s a booth down there that sells nothing but Supernatural gear, and I’ve seen a shit-ton of tattoos. Not all of those people….” He shifted uncomfortably. “We built a cone of power. We’ve done it before—small ones, barely shimmery, you could write it off as the moonlight hitting the dust just right. But this one, this one was for real. This wasn’t a light effect. And then, when we were all supposed to recite our heart’s desire… it… just yanked it out of us. All the nice things I… I guess all of us were planning to say, that crumbled to ash, and what came out was….” The big man’s face went soft and a little sad. “One word.”
“What word?” Lachlan asked, fascinated.
“That depended on who said it,” Josh replied, looking away. The naked emotion on his face—wistful, yearning—made Lachlan’s heart hurt a little. Was it that hard to say the thing you really wanted? Did showing your heart really have to hurt so much?
A year and a half, an insidious voice whispered. You couldn’t have asked him out?
No. Apparently not. He’d been trying to get Bartholomew to talk to him, to seek him out, but it appeared that the thing Bartholomew was worst at in the world was reaching for the thing he really wanted.
And Lachlan was conveniently ignoring the “white-bound virgin” part of Gretel’s conversation. For… for inconvenient caveman groin-achy reasons of his own.
“So what’s the plan?” he asked Josh, not even pretending to look for customers of his own at the moment. This situation was beyond normal. He’d be lucky if he walked away with his stock intact, much less sold any today.
“I… oh shit.”
They could see Bartholomew—there was a gap in the side of Lachlan’s display, one he’d planned, all the better to talk to the cute guy next door, right? But that damned crowd of people throwing money at Jordan, Alex, and Kate—who couldn’t see Bartholomew because they were busy selling baked goods, mostly out of self-defense—was like a powder keg. One glimpse of Lachlan’s timid baker, and they’d go boom!
“Oh, he needs help,” Lachlan said. “And how is he going to light those candles with all of that commotion? We’ve all got polyester drapery all over the place—that’s a fire hazard!” Not to mention Lachlan’s entire booth was essentially kindling.
“You help him,” Josh said. “I’ll go help the others. Don’t worry about the candles. Jordan can do that.”
Lachlan wanted very badly to ask how, but the din of the crowd was getting louder. He appreciated that Josh had just been waiting for Lachlan’s clearance to abandon his booth. But Lachlan had a thriving online business, and what he didn’t make here at the convention, he’d make up in orders over the week. He could afford to invest a little time in Bartholomew and his very interesting problem.
After dropping to his hands and knees, he crawled between the two booths and caught up with Bartholomew as he taped three strands of Ellen’s best fingering-weight yarn in the corner nearest Lachlan’s setup.
“Put me in, coach,” he said into Bartholomew’s ear. “What do you want me to do?”
Bartholomew opened his mouth—probably to say, “I’m fine. It’s all good. I’m fine”—but then a particularly shrill voice screamed, “If I don’t get a cookie I’ll die!”
He snapped his mouth shut and handed Lachlan the box of candles. “I’m going to make a seven-pointed star,” he said. “You can see three of the points already. Starting with the point closest to Jordan and going down the left side and up the right side of the box, place a candle at every point, and the last two in the middle.”
“Got it,” Lachlan said, shifting his weight so he’d be out of Kate’s way as she dove for a fluttering twenty. “But Tolly, we can’t possibly light the candles here. All our stock will go up in smoke.”
Bartholomew swallowed. “Jordan can take care of it,” he said confidently. “We just have to set up the spell. Now hurry!”
Together they scrambled, dodging feet and getting reassuring taps on the head from Kate, Alex, Josh, and Jordan. At the end, Bartholomew was crawling toward the middle of the booth, and a collective moan went up from the mob.
“Wow,” someone whispered. “Look at him. Isn’t he beautiful?”
Bartholomew gave a slow horror-movie pan over his shoulder, and the speaker took an audible gulp of air. “Oh my God! I need him to love me!”
And the noise at the booth cranked up to eleven.
“Is that star done?” Jordan shouted.
“Yes!” Lachlan stood and gave Bartholomew a hand up, blocking him from the crowd’s view with his back. “The candles are in place, but I don’t know about lighting them—”
Somebody screamed, and cries of “She’s fainted!” and “Oh God, my brother did too!” went up from the crowd.
“I’ll light the candles and cast the spell,” Jordan said, and then he looked at Bartholomew and back out to the crowd. “Barty, I need you to get the fuck out of here.”
“But the booth—”
“But the crowd!” Lachlan rode over him. The booth would be fine in the hands of his friends. This crowd was going to tear Bartholomew apart.
“Once you leave, the crowd will follow,” Jordan told them. “You just need to keep ahead of them while I try to undo whatever’s going on with your goods!”
Bartholomew got an intensely uncomfortable look on his face, and he leaned in and whispered something into Jordan’s ear.
Jordan’s eyes went really frickin’ wide. “Seriously?” he asked, giving Lachlan a beleaguered look. “Seriously?”
“Well, I didn’t expect this!” Bartholomew wailed, and the crowd behind them picked up on that note in his voice and repeated it, amplified it, until it started to shake the earth under Lachlan’s feet.
“Barty, you’re going to have to suck it up,” Jordan snapped, and then he looked guilty. “Look, we all are, okay? This is everybody’s fault. But you’re the one who’s in the best position to fix shit. So I want you guys to duck around the back and make your way to the door—then call out and run like hell. Got it?”
Lachlan gaped. “You’re going to use him like a distraction?”
Jordan scowled at him. “Like you used him to feed your own ego for the last year and a half? This at least is going to give us a chance to fix things. Now go!”
Lachlan recoiled, stung. That wasn’t fair, was it? He’d been solidly interested in Bartholomew. He’d really come to depend on those dewy-eyed looks and the small smiles he’d given when Lachlan had worked for a joke.
But did you want his affection in return, or his worship?
Shit. Well, a little of both,
actually, but they were already heading toward the back of the booth while everybody else tried to control the crowd.
“Hey, I like him,” Lachlan retorted. “Why do you think I’m here?”
Jordan hit him with a hard look that made Lachlan reassess his previous opinion of Jordan as merely “pretty.” “Because you haven’t conquered him yet. He’s not a fucking citadel, Lachlan. You don’t climb him once and call it a day.”
Fire washed Lachlan’s chest, and a little bit of it was shame. Yeah, maybe, at the beginning. There was no question. But a year and a half of interest—and trying to register on Bartholomew’s radar, had changed that interest to affection. Lachlan had played the field for a while. He’d brought dates, male and female, to the vending floor. But ever since he’d started bribing Morty to put them together, he’d come exclusively stag.
Bartholomew was just really… alluring.
“It’s not like that,” he said with simple dignity. He couldn’t even be hurt or angry. Jordan was watching out for his friend.
“Guys!” Bartholomew interjected, his eye on the crowd. “It’s getting dire. I’ll get their attention. Jordan, you do the spell. Do you have it written?”
Jordan tapped his temple grimly. “All up here.”
Bartholomew’s lip twitched. “Don’t turn them into kittens,” he said and then pivoted and slid out of the booth.
Jordan put his hand on Lachlan’s wrist. “Take care of him, okay? He’s special to us.”
Lachlan nodded. “Me too,” he said simply, and then he followed Bartholomew to the space behind the booths.
Some of the tension in the room eased out, like Bartholomew was the magic ingredient that made them all a little crazy, and then, when the crowd realized he was gone, Lachlan heard—oh God. Sobbing.
“Shit,” Bartholomew muttered as they made their way toward the door. “How fast can you run?”
“College track,” Lachlan said proudly; then it hit him what Bartholomew was asking. “Why? What do you—”