by Chant, Zoe
The snake let out a resigned-sounding hiss and then slithered for the door. Everyone out on the main floor just seemed to give it space, stepping to the side to give it a more direct path.
Anita exhaled and willed the goosebumps on her arms to go away. She tried to keep her voice light. “So—you get a lot of rattlesnakes in here?”
“We try not to,” Russ said.
“Good thing you’re a snake charmer, then. It was like it was listening to you.”
She’d never seen anything like it. Generations ago, her family had obviously run into some dark magic, but whatever Russ was working obviously wasn’t anything like that. Being able to talk to animals was cool, and using that skill to protect her and everyone else in the bar was even cooler.
Russ didn’t seem to know what to tell her. He sputtered a little. “I—it—that was silly, I know, I just—”
Luann filled in for him. “He scolds the cash register when it’s acting up on him, too. Russ just spent so much time being lonely that he talks to everything that’ll listen and even a couple of things that won’t.”
If anything was going to distract her from SNAKE MAGIC, that was. Her heart melted for him. “You were really that lonely?”
His eyes looked especially dark and bottomless just then. “Yeah, I think so. I didn’t know it back then, though.”
“I know what you mean.” She hadn’t really understood exactly how much her old life sucked until she had found herself here. All she had known was that she’d wanted to leave.
She hadn’t known it was possible to get this far away—to a place that seemed like it could be another world completely.
Another world completely.
She forgot all about snakes and loneliness for the rest of the night. Or, at least, she forgot to worry about either of them. She moved through the roadhouse on autopilot, pouring drinks and taking orders and totaling up bills with her mind completely elsewhere. She was starting to put together a whole bunch of different observations about the town of Heaven’s Limits, and two plus two weren’t adding up to the usual four.
She could understand being lonely enough to talk to snakes. But that didn’t explain why the snakes would listen. And it didn’t explain why a whole town would be so unfazed by a poisonous one gliding through their midst that nobody would even yell.
And everything here was just so cozy—cozy enough that Emily had been surprised that a stranger could possibly come to town without already knowing someone there.
And tonight, the questions everyone had asked her had all been gently but strangely prodding.
And Russ, who had said he knew she was a keeper, couldn’t seem to stand to have her anywhere near him.
Something was going on here, and she was going to find out what it was.
9
George and Luann left together again, this time with George’s hand tentatively sneaking around Lu’s waist, but as happy as Russ was for them, he could still barely think about anything but Anita.
Something in her demeanor had changed in the last few hours. Unsurprisingly, he was pretty sure he could peg just when it had happened, too.
A rattlesnake slithering over your foot could really ruin your night. Having your boss tell the snake to come back when it was twenty-one could make you wonder if you needed to get a new job.
He didn’t want her to want to get a new job.
If only Stevie Clausen hadn’t picked tonight of all nights to try to sneak back into the bar. Every few weeks, like clockwork, the kid decided that his relatively small, low-to-the-ground shift form would come in handy for wiggling his way into Russ’s back room and—
Well, he had never gotten all the way there. Russ remained a little confused on the kid’s plan. Did he just hope to chug a few beers before Russ inevitably found him? It wasn’t like he could go out the way he had come in, with his snake tail coiled around the neck of a bottle of beer.
So Stevie wasn’t even destined for success, and he should have known that by now. Why couldn’t he have waited for Anita to get settled in before he had crawled over her boot, for God’s sake? When he’d done that to Suzy Lynn, she’d screamed the house down, and she’d been a lion shifter. How could Stevie expect a human to react?
He flipped the sign on the door to closed and tried to ignore the sinking feeling in his gut.
Maybe it would be a good thing if she did leave. He wouldn’t be able to hurt her if she wasn’t here.
Except he couldn’t shake how she had sounded when she’d said, “I know what you mean.” Her voice had been soft, like she was talking to herself. She knew what it was like to be lonely.
Russ knew from experience that sometimes it was better to deal with trouble than with insolation. He couldn’t make that choice for her.
He had no idea what to do.
To his surprise, his hellhound nosed at him a little, almost like a real dog would, and Russ was startled into scratching it behind its ears. It was all in his head, of course, but he really did have a sense of it moving around, like sometimes they were standing together inside his mind. Inside his soul.
Maybe George was right and he needed to find a way to make things work with his inner animal. Maybe that was possible. But he couldn’t take the risk of letting it out now, not when Anita was around. He had to remember the kind of chaos it had left behind it last time.
He pulled away from it—from the darkness and fiery certainty—and came back to Anita.
He could hear her bustling behind him, wiping down tables with incredible efficiency. When he turned around to look at her, though, he saw that her expression was still distant. Her face was still, like all her emotions were bottled up, but he could tell by the look in her eyes that she was really a thousand miles away.
It scared him a little.
She’s going to leave.
Wasn’t that supposed to be what he wanted?
But she might go back to being lonely. Maybe she wouldn’t, of course: Anita was sweet and funny and stunning, and how hard could it possibly be for someone like that to quickly make new friends in another place? But that place wouldn’t be Heaven’s Limits, and Russ had to admit that he was biased enough to think that meant it wouldn’t be as good. This town had helped heal him, and he had the feeling it could help heal her.
Besides, she belonged here. Tonight had driven that home. He’d seen it as plain as day in the way she flitted around the bar, offering a genuine and warm smile to people as she took their order. He saw the way they all, even the most curmudgeonly of them, wound up smiling back.
“She said if she were an animal, she’d be a horse,” George had reported to him. “Horses and dogs get along. I’ve seen internet videos of them all trotting along together.”
“Good to know,” Russ had said, distracted.
Now he clung to that. Horses and dogs did get along. He’d seen those videos too.
He cleared his throat. “So how was your first night?”
Anita turned around to face him, and he saw her weighing her options. His heart sank.
Even when she answered, he still wasn’t sure what she’d decided.
“It was great,” she said, and she sounded like she was telling the truth. “My napkin trick paid off in tips. Where do I put those, by the way?”
“You can keep them. Put them towards the car.”
She shook her head. “You were doing just as much work as I was. It’s only fair that you get a share. You can’t give me a free ride on everything, as much as I appreciate you trying.”
Yes, I can. I can give you anything you want, anything you need.
Except he couldn’t, and he needed to accept that. Besides, her voice was firm: she knew what she wanted.
He had to trust her to know what she wanted and needed in other ways, too. He needed to stop playing games in his own head—playing fetch with his hellhound?—and talk to her, because it wasn’t his job to decide what risks she would take. He would help her out wherever and however he coul
d, but... there was a difference between giving her an apartment and making her stay in it. Or making her leave.
He had loved her the moment their eyes had met, and he now he knew her so thoroughly that he had a better idea how to do right by her. And he wouldn’t let himself do anything else.
And then, like she’d heard what he was thinking, she said, “Russ... what’s up with Heaven’s Limits? Why was everybody so unfazed by that snake? How did you know how to talk to it to get it to leave? You know, Emily tried telling me that it’s just that it’s a small, out-of-the-way town that not a lot of people visit, and that that’s why she was asking if I knew anyone here. But this place really isn’t like anywhere else I’ve ever been. And Emily did sound like she was hiding something. Not even something bad! Just... something.”
Well, he’d wanted to tell her the truth. This was his chance.
What she was sensing was real, and if she had good instincts, he didn’t want to encourage her to doubt them. The only real question was whether it was his secret to give up.
And he thought it was his as much as it was anyone’s. He was a shifter, even if he’d come to it late in life and very, very unwillingly.
He took a deep breath. “What I’m going to tell you is going to sound kind of crazy at first.”
“Don’t worry about that. I have a lot of experience with crazy.”
“Heaven’s Limits is a refuge for a... certain kind of person. For people who are a little out of the ordinary.”
He could only dance around it for so long. Right now, it sounded like he could mean anything. They were a town of governmentally created super-geniuses! They were all superheroes! Anita was just waiting, her face still open and curious, free of judgment. She wasn’t rushing him.
“It’s a shifter haven,” Russ said. “Shifters are people who can turn into animals.”
Anita looked at him, wide-eyed. He waited for her to burst out laughing. Or at least roll her eyes and tell him to stop messing around.
“Oh,” she said. “So that’s why Emily said she was an owl.”
“What?”
“She dozed off in the car while I was talking to the mechanic, and she said she was sorry, she was just an owl. I thought she meant a night owl and she just misspoke. Can she turn into a literal owl?”
He loved her sense of priorities. He loved her.
He couldn’t stop grinning. “Yeah, she can. And it does make her a little nocturnal.”
“That’s so cool. I wish I could turn into an owl.”
“I gotta say, this isn’t how I thought this conversation would go. You’re really taking this in stride.”
She bit her lower lip for a second, distracting him by making him notice how lush her mouth looked. Some of the bubbliness dropped out of her expression, and he could have hit himself for making that joy go away.
She said, “Will you believe my crazy thing, since I believed yours?” Even though they had been chatting easily just a second ago, she sounded shy now, and she was looking up at him through the dark fringe of her eyelashes.
“Of course,” Russ said, hoping she’d hear how much he meant it. He would believe anything she told him. “And you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
That made her look up more and meet his gaze straight on, and now he could see a welcome glint of humor in her eyes. Humor and—a kind of wonderment that was all too familiar to him, since it was what he felt about her, what he felt more and more with each passing second. The air between them seemed to crackle, making him sensitive to how close she was standing to him.
“I want to tell you,” Anita said quietly. “I haven’t told anyone in a long time, but I want to tell you.” Her hands curled into loose fists as she seemed to be gathering her courage. “I’m cursed.”
She said it so plainly that he knew she didn’t mean metaphorically. He doubted she even meant anything as amorphous as his own persistent run of bad luck and hellhound chaos.
He said, “Who cursed you?” A dark anger, pitch-black and billowing like the plumes of ember-filled smoke that surrounded his hellhound, filled him up. He couldn’t imagine anyone choosing to hurt her, but he could imagine what he would like to do to them.
Anita didn’t answer right away, though. “You just... believe me. Just like that?”
“We were just talking about how the town’s only cab driver can turn into an owl,” Russ pointed out. “The world is a weird place, especially in Heaven’s Limits.”
“It didn’t seem weird where I grew up,” Anita said softly. “I was the only one there who seemed weird. I stuck out like a sore thumb, and everybody in my family knew it. Knows it, actually, since it’s not like anything has changed.” She let out a short, bitter laugh. It was especially painful to hear when he knew how warm and upbeat she tried to be even when her car was breaking down and her plans were falling apart.
He tried to give her the same courtesy she’d given him. Just wait. Wait and let her explain at her own pace.
“No one cursed me, exactly,” Anita said. “A long, long time ago, one of my ancestors offended a witch. Trust me, I realize how absurd this sounds, but it’s true. My great-great-great-you-get-the-point grandmother was the village beauty, and she knew it. Everybody spoiled her. And one day she had a tryst with the boy next door and rolled around in some wildflowers—which turned out to be the witch’s private garden, all full of now-smushed magical herbs.”
“Not good.”
“Not good at all. The witch screamed herself hoarse at them, and the boy was very apologetic, but great-grandmother wasn’t, because she was so used to getting her own way. She just stooped down and plucked a bunch of the flowers right in front of the witch, braided them into a crown, and put it on her head.”
Russ winced.
“Exactly. The witch really lost it then. She cursed every first-born daughter of our family line. The latest example being me.” She swallowed. “It hits when we turn thirteen. I can’t touch anyone. It burns... I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s like a million hot blades cutting into me, whenever I so much as brush up against someone. So, you know: no trysts for the first-born daughters, not anymore. And no going through life all arrogant and unafraid.”
Russ couldn’t even imagine it. He thought it would take a lifetime to really understand how much the curse had hurt Anita.
No hugs, no kisses. No way to hold hands or sling her arm over a friend’s shoulder. No way to even bump into someone without blinding pain.
And even with all of that, Anita didn’t move through the world like she was afraid of some kind of collision. For her, walking near someone must have been like letting her hand hover over a red-hot stove, but she still seemed friendly and calm and sure of herself. It must take so much courage for her to just navigate through the world, day after day, surrounded by people who couldn’t understand just how much reason she had to be afraid.
And—
And he had kept shaking her hand. He’d kept initiating handshakes—on some level, probably just because he wanted to touch her!
All he’d wanted was to keep from hurting her, and he’d hurt her already, without even knowing it.
“That’s awful,” Russ said. “I can’t even imagine—I mean, I’ve never thought of myself as huggy or anything, but to not get to touch people at all, for all those years...”
She had a bright smile that couldn’t completely disguise the tears in her eyes. “Oh, I still touch people. Sometimes, anyway. I can’t stand not letting people know how I feel about them, at least a little. It just—hurts.”
“And I realized a second ago that I shook your hand. Three times.”
He realized, a second after he said it, that it might not be exactly normal to remember precisely how many times he’d shaken someone’s hand.
But Anita said, “You’ve never hurt me.”
“I touched you—”
“I know. Trust me, I remember—I remember because you didn’t hurt me.”
“But—”
She leaned up on her toes and pressed her mouth to his.
Her lips were smooth, soft, and glossy; her touch was hot and incredible, waking him up in a way that let him know he’d been asleep his whole life. Her hands had come up to frame his face, her fingers stroking against his cheeks and back into his hair. It seemed like his whole life had narrowed down to how he wanted more of her, how he wanted her to fill up his world. He wanted to bury himself in her. He touched her hair, sinking his hands into the silky thickness of it and feeling it cascade over him.
Burn.
The word flickered through his mind, there and gone almost too quick for him to grasp it. Thinking wasn’t exactly his strong suit at the moment.
He pulled away from her, even though it went against all his instincts. “Anita—”
“You don’t hurt me.” Her voice was low and intense, like this time, she was going to make him hear her. He did. “Everyone else has, ever since I got cursed. But you don’t. You feel like heaven. I don’t know why, but you do.”
Russ felt time stand still. He had to tell her.
“I know why,” he said.
10
“I know why.”
Russ had handled every curveball she had thrown at him in the last few minutes, and this was the only moment where he sounded like he was rocked back on his heels. Whatever he was about to tell her was somehow a bigger deal than curses or shapeshifting or even how she could touch him without her nerve endings catching on fire.
Anita said, “Why?” There was a slight fracture in her voice, like it was splintering under the pressure.
Until she heard that, she hadn’t realized that she wanted to believe he was her exception because...
Because he was Russ. Because he had seen her in a dark parking lot and had stepped under the light so she could see him better. Because he was kind and generous and good and didn’t even seem to recognize how extraordinary that made him.
Because he was a long, tall drink of water in faded jeans and a cowboy shirt. Because when he kissed her, she felt like she was in the middle of the sweetest dream of her life.