by Nova Nelson
“Is that what friendship is? Mutually assured destruction? Makes sense. Go on.”
“We often lose original documents,” he explained. “And all we can find are the cheap duplicates and triplicates. They don’t look anything like the magically notarized ones, which can’t be perfectly duplicated or tampered with. When that happens, they bring the duplicates to me and I create a fresh original which is then notarized in sector twenty-nine of the catacombs.”
“Wow,” I said, trying to realign my image of Landon. “You’re telling me the Parchment Catacombs have entire jobs created just to cover up their own incompetence?”
He nodded.
“And you’re a professional crook.”
“Nora, I work for the government; I can’t be a crook. I’m sanctioned to do this.”
“I’m not sure I agree with that logic, but okay.” I looked back down at the letter in my hand. “Either way, it’s working out for us, so I’m not complaining.” I handed it back to him.
“I’ll send this to Hunter once I’m done eating, and you send one to Donovan and Eva, giving them the bare bones until we can meet tonight and discuss the rest.”
“Roger that.”
“Who?”
I shook my head. “Never mind. Sounds like a plan.”
Later, as I finished up the letters in the manager’s office, trying to decide if “I need your help and it will be dangerous, but it could stop a werewolf-witch war” was too dramatic, the door opened behind me abruptly. I jumped and whirled around. “Tanner! Geez! Why are you sneaking up like that?”
“Sorry, I didn’t know you were in here.” His gaze jumped down to the letters. “What’s that?”
“None of your business.” I stood from the chair and made to leave, but he grabbed my arm as I was about to pass him.
“Hey,” he said softly. “Hold up.”
I turned toward him, both of us squeezed into the space of the doorframe. When I looked down at his hand on my arm, he let go.
“Is everything okay, Nora?”
Was everything okay? How could he seriously ask that? He broke up with me! He was going to abandon Medium Rare to work for Bloom! It was like he was doing everything in his power to make things not okay, and then he wanted me to say, “Oh sure. Everything’s fine. You’re off the hook.”
But at the same time, I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing he was hurting me. “Yeah,” I lied, meeting his eyes. “Why?”
“You were running two hours late to work today without an explanation. Grim beat you here, for fang’s sake. It’s something more to do with Grace, isn’t it?”
“I can’t tell you,” I said.
The hurt in his face was undeniable. “Why not?”
“Because we don’t want law enforcement involved.”
“You don’t …” His mouth fell open as his attention wandered toward the ceiling and he leaned back against the doorframe, sighing. “Who’s ‘we’?”
“Why do you want to know?”
He stood upright again and moved an inch closer to me. “You need me to say it?”
Instantly, I knew I did not. I looked down at the floor. “It’s just Landon.”
“You think he can keep you safe?”
“Yes.”
“If he can’t—”
“I’ll be fine. Please, don’t worry about it.” I tried to move past him again, but he grabbed my wrist—not aggressively, just to get my attention.
“Nora, I can’t keep on this way with—” When his voice stopped abruptly, I followed his gaze and realized what was the matter.
The wrist he’d grabbed was the same one whose hand held the two letters I was about to send. And just my luck which one I’d stacked on top.
For fang’s sake, could I have written Donovan’s name any bigger?
“Ah,” he said, letting go of his grasp. “I’m glad to know at least one of us is keeping busy.”
“No! It’s not about that, it’s—” He was already gone, though, down the hall, through the kitchen, and out into the dining room.
Fang and claws! I let loose a string of curse words from my old world that I’d all but forgotten, kicked the door frame, and then went out back to the owl perch to send off the letters.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I kept an eye on the cuckoo clock on the wall of Ruby’s parlor as I ran through the levitation spell again. The feather wobbled precariously as I tried not to breathe and accidentally send it off course.
“Good,” Oliver encouraged from a few yards behind me. “Now if you can just move it a couple inches off the table, we’re in good shape.”
Ruby rolled her eyes from her armchair in the corner, directly in my line of sight.
“I’m so lucky to have a mentor who believes in me,” I said sarcastically.
“Oh psh,” she said, waving me off. “I believe in you just fine. But hoping you’ll someday master levitation and airscribing and whatever other wandwork nonsense the Coven thinks you should do is about as useful as hoping Grim will start squatting to pee rather than spraying acid all over my garden—don’t deny it!” She addressed the last bit to my familiar, who lay by the fireplace pretending to be asleep. He perked his head up only minimally at the accusation.
“I don’t know how I got dragged into this,” he said.
“He doesn’t deny it,” I assured her. “But still, it would be nice if I could do all these things. You can do them.”
“Of course,” she said with a slight shrug. “As we’ve established before, though, I’m a better witch than you. Sure, you can master these things over time, inch by inch, but quite frankly, I’m not sure you have the grit. And I’m not sure the rest of Eastwind has the time to spare waiting for you to control your natural abilities.”
Oliver shuffled uncomfortably next to me then said, “I think we’re done for the night anyway, Nora.”
I nodded to him, giving him permission to scram. He was never very good at handling Ruby’s moods, and she was in one tonight. I wasn’t sure why, but it was best if I waited until Oliver was gone before digging into it.
He left and I put on some tea. Not only did I need to soothe my nerves after a lot of trying and not much success in the magic department, but I had a long night ahead of me. And now I had to deal with Ruby before I could even get to it.
I brought her a cup, which she set on the table next to her chair, and I pulled over one of her wooden chairs from the parlor table, making myself as comfortable as I could as I held my teacup, waiting for it to be cool enough to drink. “What is it?” I asked.
Her answer was already in the chamber, and all she had to do was pull the trigger. “Halloween is just around the corner. You’re not even close to ready for it. The more you begin to believe you have wand magic on your side, the bigger your false sense of security. We opened the door to your past lives, and you fell headfirst through them, but that doesn’t mean you’ve mastered them. No, you’ve just brushed the surface. We have so much more work to do, and quite frankly, I believe the Coven is requiring Oliver to tutor you solely to slow your progress in developing your true talents. They want you focused on your weaknesses. That’s not how anyone becomes great.”
“You think Oliver is working against me?”
“No, no, no. Oliver is a good boy, if a little tightly wound. At worst he’s a pawn in their plan.”
I sipped my tea. “You know, I think I’m starting to understand your disdain for the Coven.”
“New case?”
“Same one they visited about. But before I waste my breath catching you up on what I’ve worked so hard to figure out, why don’t you go ahead and tell me how much you’ve already surmised?”
Ruby grinned. “So, you are learning something after all.” She sipped her tea then said, “The girl is missing, not murdered. If she’d been murdered, I would have sensed her around here at some point. When was the last time someone died in Eastwind and didn’t pay us a visit for last-minute housekee
ping before moving on?”
She had a point. I couldn’t think of even a natural death in Eastwind since I’d arrived, and there had been a couple, where we didn’t speak with the deceased to pass on a few last “I love yous” and “tell them where they can stick their wands.”
Ruby went on with her explanation. “Because the High Priestess and the mayor made Grace’s disappearance their concern, that means they knew from the start that it was a complicated matter that could either get them something they want or ruin their opportunity for more power. A simple disappearance of a witch wouldn’t have warranted their personal attention otherwise.
“However, if they had played some part in the girl’s death, they would want you nowhere near the situation, since you’d be able to figure it out as soon as she showed up to rat them out. Or perhaps it would take a bit of sleuthing on your part, based on Grace’s information, but you would arrive at the truth all the same.” She paused to sip her tea again. “Given those logical premises, I can conclude she’s not dead, and they know it.
“Next, I’ve heard that her body was discovered—I may be a bit of a hermit, but I’m not dead; Eastwind gossip still finds me on my daily errands. Since I know she’s alive, it means the death was staged. Now who would stage her death and pin it on a werewolf? That’s not so hard to figure out. I can, with some certainty, conclude that the Coven reaps the benefits through its ability to advance its anti-werewolf agenda by rallying community support.”
I sighed. “You sure you don’t want to come out of retirement? It would save me a lot of trouble.”
She beamed warmly, which I saw right through. “And it would cost me a lot of trouble. No, I think I’ll stay retired. Or semi-retired. I still have to train your reckless hide.”
“It’s called onboarding.”
“One thing I do not believe I have enough information to conclude is who did it?” she said. “Who did the Coven get to do its dirty work?”
“We’re pretty sure it’s Grace’s circle. They’re … kind of the worst.”
Ruby nodded. “And who is this ‘we’? I assume it consists, at the very least, of you and some handsome young man.”
“It’s just Landon,” I said. “Well, and Eva and Donovan now.”
“Ah, there it is. Two handsome young men. You must be really serious about it then.”
I sighed exasperatedly. “It’s not like that with Landon, thank you very much.”
“Implying, of course, that it is like that with Donovan.”
Dang. “No, it’s not … that’s not how it is.”
She arched a brow at me. “And what about that magnificently beautiful ghost that watches you sleep? Tanner know about him?”
“Tanner?” I hadn’t told her. Holy smokes. “Oh, Tanner and I broke up.”
She chuckled and shook her head softly. “Sure.”
“No, we did. I told him about what happened with Donovan, and he did exactly what I thought he would and broke up with me.”
“That won’t last.”
I thought about the encounter we’d had in the doorway of the manager’s office earlier that day. For a moment, I thought we might reconnect. Then the bitterness when he saw Donovan’s name …
I’d been through this before. Maybe not with someone I cared so much about, but the pattern was the same. Just because two people cared about each other didn’t mean there was a time or place left for a romance to rekindle. We may have had a deep desire for things to go back to the way they were before, but the initial hurt followed by one painful reminder after another could leave both hearts with too many scars to be vulnerable with each other again. Had we started down that spiral? It sure felt like it.
I said, “I think it will last, actually.”
“Is that because you don’t want to get back together with him?”
“What? No. I do. I love him.”
“So, you believe he doesn’t want to get back together with you?”
I didn’t have to think about it. “Right.”
She set her tea to the side to free up her hands, which she used to push herself out of her chair. The she grabbed her cup and stared down at me where I sat. “If I were you, I would stay open to the possibility that you’re absolutely, positively wrong.” With a quick pat on my shoulder, she turned and headed upstairs. I watched her go, Clifford padding up after her.
What would make her think I wasn’t open to the possibility that Tanner might want to get back together? If he asked, I would say yes in a heartbeat.
Wouldn’t I?
Swirls! Now she had me doubting myself.
And that was not where my head needed to be. I had important things to do tonight.
I gasped, remembering the time, and looked to see that I should have been walking out of the house two minutes before.
“Sphinx’s riddle!” I cursed, looking around for my jacket.
I found it, slipped it on, then remembered my teacup on the table. Grabbing it, I carried it over to the kitchen sink, and that’s when I heard the knock on the front door.
Once, twice, thrice.
I froze.
Then quickly there was a fourth knock, and I relaxed and went to see who it was. The plan wasn’t to meet here to head to the Catacombs, but maybe the plan had changed or someone was confused.
I opened the door and gasped.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Tanner,” I said, “what are you doing here?”
He looked almost as surprised as I was. “You going somewhere?” Standing on the doorstep, he blinked and scanned me up and down, his lips pressed together tight.
“Yes.”
“Sheehan’s?” he asked, grinning awkwardly. “I was thinking about going there, too, so maybe we could—”
“Not tonight,” I said quickly. “Why are you here?”
He stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans and shuffled anxiously on his feet, staring at the blue boards of Ruby’s porch before saying, “I think we should talk.”
Oh lord, right now? “I really can’t,” I said. “I have to get going. I’m … expected somewhere.”
“Ah. Keeping it cryptic.”
I groaned. “No, not intentionally, but, well, okay intentionally, but not for the sake of seeming mysterious.”
He took a step back, slipping one of his hands from his pockets and holding it palm-out in front of him. “It’s fine. None of my business. I get it.”
“I do want to talk,” I added hastily. “I mean, we should. Just to clear the air and get some closure, I guess. Especially since you’re leaving Medium Rare.”
“Closure?” he asked. The light from inside glinted off his hazel eyes as he stared down at me.
“Yeah. I mean, we both own the diner. We have to sort through all the legal stuff if you’re not going to work there anymore, right? Or did you still want to own it?” I caught myself. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to jump into all this right now. I really have to go.” I felt my pockets to make sure I had my wand, then I called for Grim over my shoulder. Once he padded past, whining about his involvement in this “dumb suicide mission,” I stepped forward, shutting the door behind me.
Tanner remained planted on the porch, staring at me, a deep crease between his brows. “Oh, um. Okay. We’ll talk later, then,” he said.
“Yeah, totally. I’ll see you at work tomorrow and we can hash it out then.”
I could feel his eyes on me as I passed. “Hash it out. Sure,” he echoed.
I didn’t look back as we walked up the street toward Donovan’s house. I considered taking an alternate route so Tanner didn’t see the direction I was heading and suspect I was going to see Donovan. But I decided against it because I was going to see Donovan, and I didn’t have to hide that from him.
A giant thunderhead in the distant sky began putting on a show, and I considered going back for an umbrella, but there wasn’t time for that.
“You’re about as thick as they come, woman.”
I glared down
at Grim. “What are you talking about?”
“No one shows up to their ex’s house at night to talk business.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“You sure didn’t act like it.”
“We’re running late. And besides, seeing him there, I just …”
“I’m gonna stop you there. I could smell the pheromones. I know.”
“I needed to keep my mind on the task at hand,” I explained. “And I needed him to go home and not try to come along.”
“Cold-hearted witch.”
“Oh please, you’re still Team Tanner?”
“You say ‘still’ like I stopped being at some point.”
“Makes sense. He thinks you’re quite the good boy.”
As Donovan’s house came into view ahead of us, I paused, suddenly unsure if I wanted to go inside.
That was stupid. Eva would probably be there already, and, after all, Donovan and I were just friends, now. We’d established that at Fulcrum Fountain and slowly built on it since.
I knocked on the door and waited as the wind began to kick up, swirling leaves across the walkway leading up from the road to Donovan’s front porch.
“Good golem. Gustav is going to be here. I forgot about that.” Gustav, Donovan’s familiar, was not a favorite of Grim, who much preferred Monster, Tanner’s munchkin cat. But that wasn’t how this had played out, and Grim needed to get over it.
“He’s not coming with us, though. And you are. You can tolerate him for a couple minutes.”
“I miss Monster.”
The door opened and Donovan leaned against the frame, taking us in. “We actually gonna do this nonsense?”
“Why, is it not dangerous enough for your taste?”
He stepped to the side to let us in, and as I passed, he replied, “One of these days I’m going to learn to say no to you.”
“Good luck,” I said, entering and looking around for signs of Eva.
“Gustav decided to hide underneath my bed until the canine death omen left. Hope Grim isn’t offended.”
“I think he’ll survive.”
Donovan shut the door and followed us into his poshly decorated living room. My eyes fell to the low table where he and I had performed the connection ritual that I was A-OK with blaming for starting this whole mess with Tanner.