Magical Weddings (16 page)

The other two wandered away, reexamining the ballroom they hadn’t visited in years, its cream and gold wallpaper murals depicting breathtaking far away sites, a sapphire cove bobbing with wooden yachts on the Côte d'Azur, Russian soldiers marching past Peter The Great’s relatively humble Summer Palace on the Fontanka River, a concubine playing a thin, flute-like instrument, sitting alone in a windowless chamber of China’s Forbidden City. As the witches neared or walked by them, the scenes woke and became animated, cherry blossoms tumbling from branches, ocean waves thrashing themselves against rocks, 19 century carriages rumbling along a boulevard in Paris as a photographer captured the view in daguerreotype for posterity. Twelve-foot mirrors separating each scene reflected light into the room, a dire necessity in a climate like Oregon’s where the sky rarely showed its blue.

“It’ll be a beautiful ceremony,” Mia said from across the room, trying her best to buoy Colleen’s spirits. “I’d forgotten how gorgeous this room is. We should have …should have had more indoor weddings here. I mean...” Her sentiments trailed off.

“I’m sorry.” Lysée commiserated quietly with Colleen. “Besides, it’s not like Drayhome doesn’t host other events. I know how much the weddings mean to you, but also think how much work they are. Won’t it be a relief to see someone else have to handle that headache for a change?”

No
.

“Yes,” she whispered. “I suppose.”

****

Colleen stomped along the garden path lined with peonies and oriental lilies, listening to something that sounded like a battle cry mixed with the resounding grunt a Scotsman emitted in the midst of a caber toss.

“
Rrrrhhhg!
” came the inarticulate shout ahead.

She rounded the side of the carriage house toward the front of the building and found Ax literally encased in wood.

Rationally, it made no sense. Both halves of the carriage house doors rolled on one track, not two. Yet inexplicably, they’d slid past one another and stopped, sandwiching Ax between them, trapping him. Making even less visual sense, the wood actually bulged around his body, acting more like thick slabs of rubber than solid Douglas fir.

Ax huffed and grunted, struggling with the doors, which pressed him as flat as a warlock of his size could be flattened without killing him. Drayhome’s attack must have been stealthy. His clóca only partially surrounded his body, having had barely enough time to unfurl and protect his body’s core and head. Even so, his face was pinned comically to the side, cheeks squished between the wood, while his left arm and leg were the only parts sticking out, free to move.

How long had this struggle been going on and she’d not picked up on it? Had she been that pre-occupied by bad news she hadn’t felt Drayhome quietly attempting to smother him?

Ax closed his eyes in concentration. Gathering himself like a warrior wrestling a giant, and pinned under the larger foe’s hold, Ax used his free leg to ground himself. He gripped one of the doors in his fist, flexed his great shoulders and, face growing beet red with the effort, sounded another battle cry.

Crack!

Wood split, the sound echoing through the surrounding trees with the force of a gunshot.

“Stop it!” Colleen shouted at Ax, and then spun around to include all of the estate with her temper. “Both of you stop it!

Drayhome did not listen or let him go. Ax continued to fight. He’d rip the track right off the building in another second if she gave him the chance.

“Now!”

Ax opened his eyes, and finally noticed her standing there, while at the same time, the doors released their grip, dropping him in a gasping heap to the cement floor. Moving of their own accord, they slid back primly into place along opposite walls of the carriage house.

“Colleen!” Ax said. “What in the freaking hell? Your house just tried to kill–”

“Don’t
Colleen
me, Terry Paxton,” she said. “I’m about ready to tell it to go at it again.”

“What?”

“You knew!”

“Knew?”

“Stop the parrot routine. You know what I’m talking about,” she said. “You knew before you showed up this morning, you’re in The Priest’s confidence, after all.”

Ax rose to his feet, sparing a moment to glower first left, then right at the carriage house doors. Wisely, he took two steps forward, out of the doorway and onto the pea gravel drive.

“His confidence? Hardly,” he said. “I’m told what I’m told.”

“And yet, you didn’t think to share this very vital information with me?” Colleen’s irritation and anxiety spiked.

Ax frowned. “How did you find out?”

“How does anyone find out anything in Breens?” she said. “Rumors.”

“Already?”

“To not only be blindsided by the news,” she said, “but to have to hear about it from the wedding planner? I’m the one supposedly in charge here. Do you have any idea how mortifying it was for me–?”

“Wait,” he said, talking over her. “The tremor? That was you?”

“
God
, I am so tired of people making assumptions.”

He stepped closer, pity for her in his eyes.

“Look, Colleen, I know you have to be upset. I know how much you–”

“You don’t know anything about me, Ax. Not. A. Thing.” She turned away. “I’m going back to the house now. I’ll thank you to do your work. I don’t want to see or hear from you at all this week. Stay out of my way. You got that?”

While never an outgoing personality, Colleen hadn’t always been one to shrink from dealing with others. As a child growing up in South Dayton, New York, she’d endured living in the shadow of her legendary suffragist mother. She’d been a post-war baby, post World War I, that was, born on June 4, 1919, the same day Congress passed the 19 Amendment granting women the right to vote. Her mother, who was two weeks past her due date when she went into labor, claimed Colleen refused to emerge until she could be certain she wouldn’t be born a second-class citizen.

Colleen had a different explanation. Even in the womb, she’d looked ahead and dreaded being forced to emulate her mother’s extreme social life, cajoled into hosting fundraisers and leading political rallies at Bridget McColly’s side.

Colleen had grown up determined to help others, but she preferred to do it quietly, behind the scenes instead of out in the middle of the street marching and waving banners. Community service inspired her, finding ways to bring disparate residents of upstate New York together, rich and poor, young and old, educated and not. She’d always believed in the ability of a group of people, strangers to each other at first, to transcend their differences and achieve great things beneficial to the majority.

Her family’s move cross-country to Oregon when she turned twenty and the U.S. entered World War II not only uprooted her life’s purpose, but forever altered her future when she encountered the witches and warlocks of Breens Mist. She should have been happy to discover she was special, always meant to be one of them, but having her true destiny suddenly thrust upon her and acquiring her gifts, had robbed her of much more than anyone could have foreseen, the retiring life of a woman who rarely spoke in private company, let alone publicly.

Colleen wasn’t just a hearth witch as Mia had suggested, she was
the
hearth witch of Breens Mist. Her talent had fused her to Drayhome to become its voice, the psychic conduit between the estate and all her fellow witches and warlocks.

Without her, the house couldn’t express what it needed to express as Spirit had intended. The house sat directly atop the deepest well of place magic in Breens. Spirit had built Drayhome to function as a living reminder to each witch and warlock of their collective duty to Breens Mist, humans, too, not just their own. No other place they inhabited was out there in plain view like this house. Every other home or apartment, office, studio, workshop or place of study remained hidden from the non-magically gifted. Drayhome was their one link with the human world. Some, she would guess The Priest to be among them, didn’t like the reason for Drayhome’s continued existence, preferring to cut themselves off from humankind, but the house was what it was and would not be shrouded in glamours.

As caretaker of Drayhome, Colleen knew she sucked. She wasn’t an elemental and couldn’t begin to relate to the house the way its creator once had. Spirit’s magic had designed it to be a helpmate to their people, a place of protection, welcome, and when required, the door to the vast reserves of power beneath it. She couldn’t even properly manage the welcome part.

Lysée was partially right when she suggested Colleen brought the house to life, but it was only a half-life. Rather than connecting the community to Drayhome as intended, her talent, stretched vapor thin, merely granted it higher awareness and precious little strength to do anything else. Generally, Drayhome wanted to help those who entered it. She hadn’t a clue why it did the things it did to Ax, but unfortunately a little mischief was about the extent of its abilities without the proper elemental living here.

Daily life for Colleen at Drayhome was hell, taxing her to the point of exhaustion. She felt what the house felt, while lacking the ability to focus or turn down the volume on those sensations, existing in a constant state of overexcitement and sensitivity. Add the psychic noise of nearly a hundred witches and warlocks tromping around and getting drunk on wedding day and it was all she could do to keep from screaming like someone in the midst of a psychotic break or, alternatively, passing out in agony.

Drayhome had transformed Colleen from someone who loved the company of others into a social phobic, an introvert on overdrive out of pure self-defense.

This didn’t mean she didn’t try her best to enjoy the expedition to the attic with Lysée, Shelley and Mia two days later. Extending the full width of the house minus its north and south wings, the attic encompassed over 3,000 square feet of storage, all of it insanely packed to the rafters. Every spare inch of available space overflowed with precarious towers of boxes, walls of furniture pieces fitted into one another like Chinese puzzles, thickets of lamps, mazes of cheval mirrors, and at least a dozen chifforobes toward which Shelley ran squealing in delight, most crammed with clothing.

Colleen, standing amidst the clutter, had never seen the world-weary Shelley lose it before, so it was quite the experience.

“You expected Ax to go through this in time for the wedding?” Lysée asked, her skepticism plain.

Biding by her wishes, Ax had stayed out of Colleen’s way these last two days, always careful to chose a task located in an area of Drayhome where she was not, but the absence hadn’t settled or diminished her irritation with him. How could he not have told her this was the last wedding the moment he’d shown up on Drayhome’s doorstep? How could he go along with what The Priest wanted?

Grudgingly, however, she had to admit, “Ax works quickly. He’s incredibly efficient.”

“I would say he’d have to be,” Lysée said and gave her a pointed look Colleen was at a loss to interpret. “For me, a year, let alone a week, wouldn’t be enough.”

What did Lysée imply? That the speed with which Ax could accomplish something was somehow related to his major talent as a warlock?

Colleen didn’t know what Ax’s gift might be. He’d never offered that information, nor had she ever inquired. Intruding on others to ask personal questions made her squirm only slightly less than being the one questioned. Other than providing non-magical services to the conclave as a warlock who faithfully served the Breens establishment, the only other notable thing she’d witnessed him do on a regular basis was fix fences. He spent a lot of time mending fences for humans in Breens Mist, elderly low-income humans who required help keeping deer out of gardens, young families who needed a secure yard to keep their children safely out of the streets, even one young woman Colleen remembered, who had a stalker and needed a gate that locked tight. Whatever else motivated him to perform this menial labor for others, she’d seen how much pleasure it gave him to do it.

Ax did use magic occasionally when working through the lists of chores she gave him, but it was the type of general, all-purpose magic any one of them could summon. She suspected he might be one of the less fortunate among The Rede, whose gifts weren’t of much use to his fellow witches or warlocks, or even humans. Thus, they rarely got used or put on exhibit. She lumped Shelley in that category with him. If you had a gift, why not use it, unless it either caused you more grief than it was worth, or worse, opened you to ridicule?

“Oh! Oh! Look!” Shelley said. “An English fan bodice!”

Colleen watched the witch almost yank an antique silk dress out of a wardrobe in her excitement. Just in time she caught and schooled herself, gently freeing the elaborate century-plus-old garment from the tangle of other clothing inside. Though sewn during the pre-hoop era, the dress nonetheless featured a full skirt that would require layer after layer of petticoat to fill out. Its most defining feature, however, were the dozens of thin pleats, gathered close at the tiny waist and fanning up and out toward the shoulders, each of them edged in handmade lace.

“I haven’t seen one of these since 1842. Or maybe ‘43?”

Colleen smiled at Shelley’s uncharacteristic excitement. “I don’t think anyone would care if you took it.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“How is it Drayhome hasn’t collapsed under the weight of all this?” Lysée asked, when suddenly something in the morass of items distracted her.

“It’s a strong house. It can take a lot,” Colleen said.

“Yes,” Lysée whispered, no longer really listening. Her quick steps led her to a walnut Louis XV vanity from the 1800s, where she pulled out the tiny matching stool and sat. Gazing into the vanity’s triptych of mirrors, her eyes soon took on a faraway sheen. She smiled into the glass.

“My mother had a vanity like this,” she said and looked for Colleen in the mirrors, speaking to her through their reflections. “
Quand je étais une petite fille
…when I was a little girl, I remember making such a mess of everything on it. Playing.”