12
Never trust a werewolf when life is on the line.
—When, What, Witch, Were, and Why?
The Five W’s of Safe Interactions with the Paranormal
Dr. Hackett took a week off to go trout fishing in Arkansas, leaving me with time to throw myself into searching Specialty Books. The solstice deadline was looming in three weeks. I tried to use the die to contact Nana Fee (without Andrea’s help), but all I managed to do was make contact with one of Jane’s former step-grandfathers. He just wanted to say hello and tell her that “Grandma Ruthie is still secured,” whatever that meant.
As I had officially scoured every inch of the shop space, including searching for the athame in the utensil drawer of the coffee bar, I called or e-mailed Mr. Wainwright’s contacts in the artifact market, anyone who might have supplied him with items for the shop, on the off chance that Mr. Wainwright had traded the athame for stock. Giving them a sob story about my grandmother accidentally selling a family heirloom to Mr. Wainwright, I asked if they would mind sending me a picture of any athames they’d bartered through the shop. If it was the item I was looking for, I offered to buy it back for fifty percent more than they’d paid for it.
A buyer in California told me to mind my own damn business and hung up on me. A buyer in Canada was only too happy to help, but the handle of his athame was blue enamel with a dark onyx stone. And the buyer in Spain . . .
“I know my Spanish is rusty, but I’m pretty sure cuadros desnudos means ‘naked pictures,’ ” Andrea said, handing me a printout as we sprawled around my living room, sorting through these e-mails. Jed, who had been spending more and more time in my half of the duplex, was perched on a ladder in the middle of the room, replacing the old globe light fixture with a ceiling fan. Because I still wasn’t ready for the whole witchcraft confession, we’d told him we were searching for some antiques to complete a collection for one of Jane’s customers.
“If you want to see what he has, he wants to see what you have. It’s your classic tit-for-athame scenario.”
“You are enjoying this far too much,” I told her.
“Yes, I am,” she said, nodding. Behind her, Jane gave me a wicked grin.
“I am not comfortable with this line of conversation,” Dick muttered, walking away. “If I see you with a camera, young lady, you’re grounded.”
Jed, who seemed wary of my protective vampire great-great-great-grandpa, raised his hand. “I’m with Mr. Cheney.”
“Yes, sir.” I sighed, tossing the e-mail in the trash.
“You don’t have to call him Mr. Cheney,” Andrea assured Jed as he made the last adjustment to the ceiling fan.
“Yes, I do,” Jed responded.
Dick nodded as Jed climbed down the ladder. “Yes, he does.”
I snorted, making a paper ball from the other e-mails and tossing them, too. Jane watched me closely as Jed climbed down the ladder.
“You’re taking this far too well,” Jane observed as Dick and Jed carried the old fixture and the ladder out of the room. “You’ve been really relaxed the past few days, despite the fact that you’ve struck out with those buyers.”
“Well, with the Earth plaque broken, it feels like the pressure is off a little bit,” I said, shrugging. “I’m going to keep looking, because it’s the right thing to do, but I don’t know if the binding will work, even if I do find all four.”
“No, that’s not it,” Jane said, her eyes narrowing. “You’ve had sex. With Jed.”
“Shh!” I hissed at her. “Dick will hear you. We haven’t actually told him that Jed and I are involved, for Jed’s sake. And we haven’t told Jed that I’m related to Dick, because explaining my whole twisted family backstory is not something I’m ready for.”
“So why is Jed all nervous and twitchy?” Jane asked, glancing out to the backyard shed, where the menfolk were putting away tools.
“Because Dick keeps glaring at him and muttering under his breath,” I told her. “And don’t poke around in my head; we’ve talked about that.”
“She doesn’t have to poke around in your head,” Andrea protested. “It’s written all over your face. You might as well get ‘recently banged’ tattooed on your forehead.”
“I don’t know if I can be friends with someone who sleeps with a ‘Jed,’ ” Jane pondered, pointing at her friend. “Andrea, you set them up on that drive to Georgia; I blame you for this. Nola was such a nice girl.”
“So Stephen is no more?” Andrea asked, slapping Jane’s accusing finger away from her face.
“Well, I didn’t murder him,” I said. “I just stopped taking his calls.”
“So what’s going to happen when you have to go back home?” Andrea asked. “Are you going to try to keep seeing him?”
“It’s not like we’ve made any big commitment to each other,” I said. “I like Jed. And he clearly likes me, or, at least, parts of me. He’s a very nice man. He’s sweet and funny and smart. And he doesn’t ask a lot of questions about the amount of time I spend with vampires in an occult bookshop.”
“And he looks good naked,” Jane added.
I sighed. “Sooo good. But there are so many things I can’t tell him. As much as I like him, how could I have a real relationship with someone I have to lie to and omit huge portions of my life? How could that ever work?”
And that was what had been missing in my relationship with Stephen, I realized. I couldn’t share my life with him, because there was so much he couldn’t accept. He never directly asked me to give it up, but the message had been subtly clear. If I wanted Stephen, I would have to give up the connection with my family. I felt like an idiot now for not having seen that. He wouldn’t have made demands. He wouldn’t have forced me. He just wouldn’t have been happy otherwise. He wasn’t a bad man, just a “normal” one. And normal was something I was never going to be, no matter how hard I tried.
But where did that leave me with Jed?
I’d told myself I was keeping things from Stephen to keep the peace and to protect him. But that was based on that fact that I’d known he couldn’t accept the witchcraft or the weirdness. I thought perhaps Jed was just quirky enough that he could. At the very least, I could tell him about Dick. Or warn him about Dick.
“So you haven’t told him about the witchy stuff or the Elements or anything?” Andrea asked.
“It’s kind of hard to fit into a conversation,” I told her. “How did you tell people that you were a vampire?”
“I didn’t tell people, really, until I told my parents,” Jane offered.
“How’d that go?”
Jane frowned. “My mother asked me if I could try not to be a vampire anymore.”
“My parents disowned me way before I was turned,” Andrea said. “But they did get really indignant when I didn’t invite them to our wedding.”
“That’s remarkably unhelpful,” I said, covering my face with my hands. I was going to have to talk to Jed about some of these things. And the small matter of my returning to Ireland in a few weeks’ time. Otherwise, we were doomed to end up just like Stephen and me. And that wasn’t fair. If anything, I should let my personality and emotional baggage doom the relationship.
“You want to go back to talking about sending that Spanish guy the naked pictures?” Jane asked, nudging me with her elbow.
“No.”
* * *
It took a while to pry my vampire friends out of my living room. Jed had given up hours before, finding some excuse to retreat back to safe quarters on his side of the duplex. Jane and Andrea finally persuaded Dick to leave before he could try to replace other fixtures by reminding him of a Dukes of Hazzard marathon starting at midnight. I waited until I saw the taillights clear the driveway before sprinting across the porch. Before I could knock, Jed opened his door, yanked me into his foyer, and pinned me against the wall. Without saying a word, he pressed his lips against mine in a searing kiss. I moaned, twisting my fingers in the light cotton material of his long-sleeved workshirt as his hands slipped around my waist. Breathless and dizzy, I pulled away from him.
“Your family scares me,” he said.
I arched an eyebrow. “Family?”
“Well, you’re obviously not blood-related, what with the opposing accents and pulse differences, but I know family when I see it. Those people love you. They’re happy to spend time with you. And Dick spends most of his time glaring at me and making crotch-specific threats when you’re not around. That’s family.”
I frowned. Were they my family? Was I ready for any sort of family beyond the McGavocks? The clan and the clinic had been the focus of my life for so long. Did I have room for anything more in my head or my heart? I liked them all so much—Dick, Andrea, Jane, the whole company. They’d made me feel welcome and warm when I had no clue how to go about my search. They’d done all they could to help me, sometimes crossing the line of what was appropriate or sensible. I wasn’t a leader. I wasn’t expected to know what to do every moment of every day. I made an absolute fool of myself when necessary, and nobody panicked. It was lovely. If I could somehow blend the two groups—the overwhelming love of my living family with the unquestionable acceptance of my undead relatives—I might turn out to be a somewhat normal person.
Probably not.
I kissed Jed again—Jed, the man who’d done nothing but help me without demanding details or even questioning whether driving me across three states was a waste of time. And I felt a prick of guilt for keeping so much from him. How could he really like me when he only knew such a small part of me? No magic, no mission, no crazy vampire family. Maybe he would find those “quirks” charming and attractive.
Probably not.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” I said, kissing him one last time. “Several things, actually.”
He nodded, the flirty, sweet energy draining from his face. “There are some things I need to tell you, too.” He kissed me again, and there was a strange air of finality to it. As if he was bracing himself for bad news. Did he know something was “off” about me? Was he more comfortable wondering than not knowing? A buzzing noise sounded from the kitchen, making me break off the kiss.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Dinner,” he said. “I noticed you don’t eat much around the vampires, so I warmed up a chicken pot pie. We’ll eat, and then we’ll talk, all right?”
We gorged ourselves on pot pie and watched some silly Chuck Norris film Jed had insisted on, after I told him that I’d never seen The Delta Force. Apparently, this was a felony in some states.
We cleaned up the dishes, then settled in for discussion, coffee, and the most feared beard in the universe. And for about twenty minutes, I was content and relaxed. Of course, it was all downhill from there.
“Hey, could you take this into the living room for me?” he asked, handing me a bowl of rocky road ice cream. “I’m having a fistfight with the coffeemaker.”
“Why does everyone in this town have an adversarial relationship with coffeepots?” I muttered as I carried the ice cream into the living room, carefully balancing the bowl to keep it from sliding off onto the floor. Penny never had forgiven me for the “Christmas trifle” incident.
But the television blaring Chuck Norris’s all-around badassery was too much of a distraction, and I wasn’t watching where I was stepping. Just as I passed the farthest edge of Jed’s blue rag rug, my shoe caught on the fringe, dragging it back. I grumbled about my own clumsiness as I settled the bowl on the coffee table. I knelt to straighten the rug and noticed that one of the floorboards was loose, set slightly higher than the rest. I shot a guilty look toward the kitchen, where Jed was humming tunelessly. I hadn’t damaged the floor, had I? I didn’t remember dragging anything but the rug. I pushed on the board, trying to slide it back into place, but it listed and slid down into empty space.
“Shit!” I whispered, tilting forward as my weight shifted. I grabbed at the board, and my hand brushed against a cloth-wrapped bundle tucked away in the space underneath. “What’s this?”
There was a stack of photos under the bundle . . . and one of the buildings in the corner of the photo looked awfully familiar. I pulled on the bundle, but it wouldn’t come up without pulling up more boards. I popped another board out of place and pulled the cloth up, bringing the stack of photos with it. They showed long-range shots of me, walking away from the clinic in Kilcairy. There was another one of me out to dinner with Stephen in Dublin. And another, with Penny, just before I’d left for Kentucky.
“What?” The cloth slid out of my hand and to the floor with a dull clunk. My hands shook as I pulled the cloth loose to find the plaque—the acorn-shaped plaque I’d believed was smashed and stored in pieces in Jane’s shop.
Jed had taken it. He must have switched the bundles when he took my bag out of my truck and then “accidentally” dropped my bag to make me think the plaque was broken. I was so stupid. I knew something was off with the age of those clay bits, but I’d wanted so badly to believe that I held two of the Elements, that I could trust Jed, that I shut down any doubts I should have listened to.
“I lost the fight with the coffeemaker,” Jed said, carrying two mugs into the living room. “Just think of the loose grounds as ‘sprinkles.’ ” He saw me on my knees, with the plaque in my hand. He dropped the mugs to the floor with a clash of broken pottery. “Nola, please.”
“Don’t,” I ground out. “There’s no trying to convince me that ‘this isn’t what it looks like.’ Just explain to me, why the hell do you have this? Why would you make me think it had been destroyed? Why would you even want it?”
Jed blanched, and his gaze immediately shifted downward. “I’m so sorry.”
“I didn’t ask for an apology, I want a goddamn explanation!” I shouted. “You know why I’m here. You had pictures of me in your hidey-hole. You knew who I was as soon as you met me, didn’t you? You knew I was a McGavock, about the witchcraft, the Elements, all of it. And you’ve been pretending all this time to be this clueless, sexy, himbo neighbor man. Why? Who the hell are you, Jed? Is Jed even your real name, or did you pick it out of the Redneck Alias Handbook?”
“Nola.”
“Every word you’ve ever said to me was a lie.” I seethed. “Here I was feeling guilty for keeping things from you—my family, the vampires, my boyfriend—and you were outright lying!”
“Not every word,” he said, shaking his head. I shoved him away, cradling the bundle against my chest. “Please, Nola, you have to understand. There’s a good reason for this.”
“Fine, what’s your reason?” I growled.
“I can’t tell you right now,” he said, wincing. “There are things you need to understand first.”
“Bullshit.”
His voice was soft as a breeze as he said, “I never meant to hurt you.”
“Bullshit!” I yelled, pushing past him toward the door, the plaque pressed to my chest.
“Nola, please.” He grabbed my arm. At first, I thought he would grab for the plaque, but he was only trying to keep me from leaving. “The Kerrigans—”
Before he could finish his sentence, a rage I could only describe as volcanic bubbled up from my belly and surged through my arm to my hand. He knew the Kerrigans? Was he working for the Kerrigans?
And suddenly, Jed’s arm was on fire.
He yelped, waving his flaming sleeve back and forth, feeding the fire oxygen and making a small situation much worse.
“Stop moving!” I exclaimed, I shoved him into the kitchen and pushed his sleeve into the sink. I picked up the sprayer and shot an arc of water toward him. After briefly dousing Jed’s face, I aimed the stream at his arm and put the sleeve fire out. His face was pale and dripping wet as we stripped him out of his sodden shirt. While the flames hadn’t left a mark on his flesh, the outline of my hand was clear, as if my palm had given him a contact burn. I jerked my hand away, unable to see anything but the blistered, bright-red handprint I’d left on his arm.
Backing away, unable to take my eyes from the mark of violence I’d left on his skin, I told him, “Don’t come near me again.”
I marched out of Jed’s apartment and drove directly to the shop.
* * *
How could I have been so stupid? How was it possible that Jed was some sort of witchcraft spy? Who was Jed, really? Was he working for the Kerrigans, or was there some new third party involved in the feud? How would the Kerrigans know someone from Tennessee? Was Jed really from Tennessee? Was the accent fake, too?
Oh, good night, I’d let that man see me naked.
I’d been had. I was the dumb henchman in the Bond movies who was distracted by female sidekicks with overtly sexual names who eventually strangled the henchman with their thighs. I’d been used. He’d never liked me. He’d never found me “adorable” or “sweet” or any of the little endearments he’d tossed about so casually. And I think that was what hurt so much. I’d really believed he liked me just for me. Not because of what I could do, because I was Nana’s heir, or because I fit conveniently into his life as his lovely normal girlfriend. For me.
I do not remember anything about the drive, other than that I skipped going to the store in favor of pulling over in the Half-Moon Hollow Baptist Church car park to scream and beat on my steering wheel. And at the BP station. And the Bait-n-Beer.
It was a long drive.
Maybe, on some level, I’d known. Maybe that was the root of whatever had kept me from telling the truth about why I was here, about the search. Some part of me must have known he wasn’t trustworthy, too good to be true.
No, that was a rationalization. I’d been completely taken in. I was a moron, a moron who would be taking a voluntary moratorium on dating for the foreseeable future.
Wherever Jed was, I hoped that burn mark on his arm really stung.
Yes, I was committed to doing no harm first, but screw it, Jed had taken advantage of me. He’d known exactly what he was doing. If anybody had some magical blistering coming, it was him. If that meant I was sending bad energy out into the universe, so be it.
* * *
I worked. I sulked. I searched. After I finally cooled off, I spilled my sorry tale of floor busting and betrayal to my vampire friends. While Jane stroked my head, Gabriel practically had to climb onto Dick’s shoulders to hold him back from marching out of the shop and “whipping that boy’s ass!” It is really difficult to explain to your vampire ancestor why it’s not OK to smash your sort-of-boyfriend’s lying face in for betraying you to another magical family. It’s even more difficult to explain that it is not a legal reason to evict someone from the house he’s renting from you.
Dick settled for showing up later at my side of the house with a copy of The Notebook, a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Phish Food, and a bottle of wine, dropping them off on my doorstep, patting me on the head, and departing without another word. I was really starting to love that man.
Jed’s proximity didn’t seem to be much of an issue, as I hadn’t seen him since the “handprint incident,” as Jane had dubbed it. His windows remained dark and the driveway empty, other than my car. The house felt empty, too, as if I could sense the absence of his energy from the other side of the walls. I tamped down the sense of loss and longing I felt. It didn’t make any sense to miss someone I barely knew, someone who had only been sent to track me. With the Kerrigans clearly close on my trail, I needed to focus on my efforts to find the athame and the bell—not tracking down my erstwhile neighbor and shaking answers out of him.
The one person who seemed thrilled with this situation was Penny, who answered the news that I’d recovered the intact Earth plaque with a whooping cry that woke up her husband, Seamus. She even took back her previous mockery. She was concerned to hear about Jed’s part in it, however, and insisted on sending some reinforcements to the Hollow.
“No, I’ve got all of the help I need here,” I told her as I parked my car in front of the house. “Indestructible vampire help that won’t end up being used against me as some sort of bargaining chip.” Over Penny’s protests, I added, “Just keep an eye on the Kerrigans still in country, let me know if they start traveling in large groups or stockpiling spell supplies. Speaking of which, how go the preparations for the binding?”
“We have everything we need except for the Elements,” she said. “Everyone here is very proud of you, Nola. I know it’s difficult, spending all of your time searching for something that you don’t believe makes a difference, but it means a lot to us that you’re trying so hard.”
I made a noncommittal noise as I walked across the yard. Could I deny the validity of the Elements or the magic my relatives practiced, now that I was creating mini–water spouts and setting sleeve fires with my mind? Something inside my head, the logical, resistant way I looked at the world, was shifting. And I wasn’t entirely sure I was comfortable with that.
“And look how far you’ve come!” Penny exclaimed. “Two down already. We know you’ll be able to find the next two before the deadline. You just need to stay focused, keep your eye on the ball, stay on target, follow through the swing.”
“That’s enough of a pep talk, Pen.”
“Oh, thank goodness. I was running out of cheerful sports metaphors.”
I bid Penny good-bye as I approached the front porch. As was usual lately, my side of the house was lit, but Jed’s half was dark. I was actually a bit nervous about walking across the darkened steps. But I made it to the front door unscathed and was in the process of unlocking the new new locks when a sleepy voice mumbled, “Nola?” from the porch swing.
I cried out at the familiar voice, turning toward the porch swing, hands raised. “Stephen? What the bloody hell are you doing here?”