“One of today’s best women’s fiction authors.”
—The Romance Reader
“Honest, witty ... absolutely unforgettable.”
—Rendezvous
“A classic adult fairy tale.”
—Affaire de Cœur
“Dialogue flows easily and characters spring quickly to life.”
—Rocky Mountain News
Titles by Barbara Bretton
SPELLS AND STITCHES
SPUN BY SORCERY
LACED WITH MAGIC
CASTING SPELLS
JUST DESSERTS
JUST LIKE HEAVEN
SOMEONE LIKE YOU
CHANCES ARE
GIRLS OF SUMMER
SHORE LIGHTS
A SOFT PLACE TO FALL
AT LAST
THE DAY WE MET
ONCE AROUND
SLEEPING ALONE
MAYBE THIS TIMES
ONE AND ONLY
Anthologies
THE CHRISTMAS CAT
(with Julie Beard, Jo Beverly, and Lynn Kurland)
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley trade paperback edition / December 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bretton, Barbara.
Spells & stitches / Barbara Bretton.—1st Berkeley trade pbk. ed.
p. cm.—(A knitting mystery ; 4)
ISBN : 978-1-101-55275-9
1. Women merchants—Fiction. 2. Mother and child—Fiction. 3. Knitting shops—Fiction. 4. Magic—Fiction. 5. Vermont—Fiction. I. Title. II. Title: Spells and stitches.
PS3552.R435S67 2011
813’.54—dc22
2011026867
http://us.penguingroup.com
For my husband, Roy.
For everything. Forever.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks (and much love) to Angela Cairns Bretton, R.N., for her help.
SUGAR MAPLE, VERMONT—STICKS & STRINGS
Do you know the recipe for crazy?
Take one picture-postcard New England town with a magickal secret, add busloads of crazed yarnaholics on a mission from Elizabeth Zimmermann, fold in a steady stream of walk-in knitting groupies seduced by the “30% Off” sign in the window of the most popular knit shop in the Northeast, then mix them all together with a hormonal sorceress-in-training, and trust me when I say that anything can happen.
I’m Chloe Hobbs, the very pregnant owner of Sticks & Strings, and, believe me, I was knee-deep in crazy and we were still five hours away from closing. I’d been up since the crack of dawn, rearranging stock, fixing displays of knitted garments, entering new prices into the computer, and riding herd on runaway magick. In the old days, before magick and pregnancy took over my life, I looked forward to our Black Friday sale the way a kid looked forward to Christmas. With nothing but Red Bull and Chips Ahoy, I juggled runaway yarn and crazed customers from all points on the compass, and still managed to keep Sugar Maple’s secrets safe from prying eyes.
Who knew that pregnancy and magick would be such a volatile combination? My half-human hormones were running amok while my sorceress-in-training magick followed right behind. I cried crystals during an episode of
Mad Men.
I hiccuped soap bubbles. I accidentally locked a platoon of pixies in the freezer and had to warm them up in a nest of orphaned toe-up socks. And there was the time I broke out in spells and sent two customers from Idaho on a wild ride up the Green Mountains clinging to a giant yarn swift. I won’t tell you how many favors I had to call in that night to undo the mess, but the ladies went home to Boise with nothing more than a slight headache and five pounds of six-ply cashmere.
The trick today was to stay calm and count on my inner Zen master to get me through the chaos of our Black Friday sale without sending any more customers on unscheduled sightseeing trips.
But after eight months of putting out magickal fires I was exhausted and the urge to curl up in the corner, any corner, and catch forty (or four hundred) winks was downright irresistible.
“Don’t even think about it,” my friend Lynette Pendragon said as she bustled past with an armload of swirly-soft angora in saturated Easter egg pastels. “You can nap later.”
I shot her a fierce look. “I thought you were a shapeshifter, not a mind reader.”
“Honey, you know your face gives you away every time. You were looking at that sofa the same way you looked at Luke when he first came to town.”
Luke was the man responsible for the baby girl due to join our family on January first. He was not only the love of my life, he was also our chief of police and only resident full-blood human, a fact that still kept some of our villagers looking over their collective shoulder.
Over three hundred years ago my ancestor Aerynn had led the exodus of magickal creatures from Salem to Sugar Maple to escape the all-too-human devastation caused by the infamous Witch Trials. Before she pierced the veil many years later, she cast a protective spell around her beloved town that would shield it from human mischief as long as one of her descendants walked the earth.
This time last year it had looked like that moment was about to arrive. Without a daughter to continue the Hobbs lineage, the buck stopped with me and so would our one-of-a-kind security system. Sugar Maple’s true nature would be revealed for the entire world to see and we all knew that would be the end of us.
Let me spell it out for you: I was a tall, skinny, single, half-human, half-magick cat lover who hadn’t been on a second date since high school. Grim didn’t begin to cover my prospects.
The residents of Sugar Maple cast a wide net that pulled in every unattached vampire and werewolf, selkie and troll in our dimension. Who would have thought there could be so many Mr. Wrongs in one little town? When my closest friends started hinting that Fae bad boy Dane might be the answer to my prayers, I was ready to join a convent. Forbes the Mountain Giant was a better choice.
Their best attempts at hooking me up with someone—anyone!—had only sent me deeper into
Top Model
reruns and embarrassing encounters with boxed wine and Cherry Garcia as the town spiraled closer to disaster.
And then Luke walked into my life and in an instant, everything changed.
I loved Luke and he loved me back. The magick I had waited my entire life to possess was growing stronger. The town I cherished was once again at peace and thriving. My baby girl shifted position inside me and I smiled. As far as I could see, our future was golden.
But that still didn’t mean I could take my eye off the ball. Magick was all well and good, but sometimes you needed a little hands-on human intervention.
“Not so fast, Lynnie.” I reached over and plucked a fluffy yellow feather from her shoulder. “Fourth time this week.”
Lynette blew out a sigh. “Now you know why I never wear black.”
Although she refused to admit it, Lynette had a slight problem with transitioning. She was a brilliant shapeshifter but not so terrific when it came to reclaiming her natural form. If I had a dollar for every time Lynette had landed on my stovetop or in my sink during the final stages of transition, I’d be driving a new Rolls-Royce instead of a last-century Buick. Her husband, Cyrus, had been trying to convince her she needed glasses but she was having none of it. I was afraid nothing less than singeing off her tail feathers in a Samhain bonfire would convince the vain shapeshifter that it might be time to embrace middle age.
At least, I thought she was approaching middle age. In Sugar Maple, age was anybody’s guess. We had adapted to the world of humans but we still weren’t part of it. Our internal clocks followed a very different schedule. In human years, one of our preschoolers might be eligible for AARP.
Poor Luke was still having trouble with that and so was I. Up until recently I had been aging on a human scale, but now that my magick had finally kicked in, my life span was anybody’s guess.
Lynette thanked me, then disappeared back into the crowd of shoppers. She and Cyrus owned the Sugar Maple Playhouse and were currently in rehearsal for their annual production of
A Christmas Carol
. The fact that she’d given up part of her holiday weekend to help out at Sticks & Strings meant the world to me.
In fact a lot of my townie friends had volunteered to lend a hand. Lilith, a gorgeous Norwegian troll with a heart of gold, helped me open before she dashed across the street to unlock the doors to the library. Paul and Verna Griggs, a long-married werewolf couple, sent their strapping teenage sons over late the previous night to move the Dumpster behind the shop in order to free up a few more parking spaces. Fae innkeeper Renate Weaver’s married daughter, Bettina, was tucked away in a corner with her glorious harp, playing music so beautiful it could charm the credit card from the tightest purse. Even vampire matriarch Midge Stallworth, who never showed her plump and rosy face before dark, promised she’d come by at four thirty to help me close.
They weren’t my family by blood but they were definitely my family of choice.
My sentimental reverie was interrupted by a piercing yelp, followed by the cry, “Put down that fleece, beyotch, or I’ll—”
If you’re a knitter, you’ll understand why I wasn’t going to wait to find out what she had planned. Even crocheters know bloodshed and fiber don’t mix.
A spinner I recognized from one of last summer’s classes was in a standoff over a scruffy but luscious Bluefaced Leicester fleece I had yet to clean or card, much less price. Unfortunately she wasn’t in that standoff with another spinner; she was going mano a mano with Elspeth, our houseguest from hell. The woman looked flushed and frantic as she clutched the filthy fleece to her capacious bosom while Elspeth tried to pry it away from her.
You remember what Benjamin Franklin said about houseguests? “Guests, like fish, begin to stink after three days.” He must have shared a house with a troll like Elspeth.
Elspeth didn’t stink in the literal sense (even though Luke said she smelled like stale waffles), but before she’d been in town a month, the aged troll had managed to alienate everyone in town and most of my customers. Believe me, I would have sent her packing from Sugar Maple if I could, but she was surrounded by some seriously powerful magick that rendered her untouchable. When Aerynn’s mate Samuel, the father of our clan, pierced the veil, his last wish had been that Elspeth see me through my pregnancy, aka the longest nine months of my life.
So Elspeth pretty much did what she wanted whenever she wanted to, with no thought for the rest of us. Mild-mannered Bettina had suggested that perhaps we could pool our magick and render Elspeth speechless for a month or two, but Samuel, my ancestor and her protector, had apparently considered the possibility of combined forces when he set the spell in motion and so we were reduced to wearing headphones and cranking up the Led Zeppelin to drown out her endless complaints.
You can imagine how much Luke enjoyed sharing our cottage with her.
“Elspeth!” I barked like a rottweiler.