Fran’s eyes cut to her left and I followed her gaze. “Bunny had the feeling Luke was hiding something, but I don’t think she figured on this. We thought we’d combine some shopping with a little snooping.”
Bunny was Bernadette MacKenzie, a.k.a. Luke’s mother. The same woman he had been ducking since the plus sign appeared on the pregnancy tester. Bunny and I had spoken a few times, your basic chitchat about the weather and Luke’s whereabouts, and each time we did, I hung up feeling like a rat for not telling the woman that I was carrying her grandchild.
It seemed to me that was the kind of thing you shared with the people who loved you. The people who brought you into the world and guided you through infancy and childhood and the wild waters of adolescence.
But then, what did I know? To me, family was a mystery wrapped in an enigma buried in kettle-dyed merino. I had spent most of my childhood wishing Cliff and Clair Huxtable would adopt me. I probably stood a better chance of understanding quantum physics than the workings of your average human family.
A sixtyish blond woman of medium height was slowly making her way toward us. Her eyes swept the displays on either side of her with metronomic precision. She paused once at a gathering of lace-weight suri alpaca, dallied momentarily over a basket of angelic angora, exchanged commentary with two bodybuilder types who had been looming over some mohair for at least a half hour.
She gave off a kind of sugar-cookies-with-a-gin-chaser vibe that I could sense across the room. She wore neatly pressed jeans, Skechers, and a simple top-down raglan in teal blue. Her arms were piled high with Cascade 220 and a sprinkling of Madelinetosh and she had that
don’t mess with me
air some women grew into as they got older. Deep grooves of worry bracketed her wide mouth, but they were offset by the spray of laugh lines at the outer corners of her dark green eyes.
She scared me more than any army of Fae warriors ever had.
If I knocked Fran down, then scrambled over the worktable, I stood a fifty-fifty chance of making it out the door before she zeroed in on me. But I was eight and a half months pregnant and barely mobile, so I did the next best thing.
I set her yarn on fire.
2
I didn’t mean to do it, but I guess the shock of seeing Bunny MacKenzie in Sticks & Strings blew away the last shred of control over my magick and set the whole thing in motion.
Flames shot from my fingertips like Fourth of July fireworks gone wild and headed straight toward Luke’s mother. I shrieked. Janice knocked the yarn out of her arms and began jumping up and down on the smoldering skeins. Bless sheep and the wool they provide. Wool doesn’t burn, it only smolders, but the sight of smoke ignited hysteria just the same. Fran yanked a half-empty bottle of water from her bag, uncapped it, and flung the contents at her friend.
All in all, not the way you want to meet his mother.
The good news was that the humans among us had no idea I was the resident firebug because Aerynn’s protective charm had done its job and cloaked the source.
The bad news? The baby secret wasn’t a secret anymore.
The fire, the unexpected shower, everything fell away the moment Bunny MacKenzie’s dark green eyes settled on my big round belly. I watched in a weird combination of terror and fascination as her expression slid from shock to joy to
I’m going to kill him!
I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came out. A weird, prickly feeling exploded beneath my skin, like burning needles trying to work their way out. My lungs felt tight and I struggled to pull in a deep breath. My heart started pounding triple time, my vision tunneled down, and the next thing I knew Bunny MacKenzie was helping me over to one of the overstuffed sofas near the fireplace.
“We need more water,” Bunny barked as she settled me into the cushions. “Now!”
Janice dashed off toward the kitchen while poor Fran stared at me, eyes wide.
“Should I call 911?” she asked, rummaging through her purse again as Luke’s mother took my pulse.
Bunny met my eyes. “Anything hurt?”
I shook my head.
“Any contractions?”
I shook my head again.
“That’s what we want to hear.” She checked my pulse with sure fingers. “So far, so good.”
I found my voice. “Are you a nurse?”
“Thirty-five years. Cardiac intensive care. I retired in May.” Her tone was matter-of-fact but the look in her eyes was anything but. “When are you due?”
“January first.”
A wry smile tilted the ends of her mouth. “And when did he plan on telling us?”
I managed what I hoped was a wry smile of my own. “January second.”
She spun out a few choice phrases that made me laugh in spite of myself, the gist of it being that Luke was a stubborn know-it-all idiot who had no business locking out his family at a time like this.
I couldn’t disagree. Happily I was saved from saying anything to that effect when Janice swooped in with two more bottles of water, a banana, and a towel for a very soggy Bunny.
Some people break out in a sweat when they get nervous. These days I break out in magick. The mini firestorm was only the beginning. My entire body shook with the effort to keep more spells from exploding all over my yarn shop like the contents of a crazed piñata.
Bunny apparently noticed the tremors rocketing through me. (I had the feeling not much escaped the woman.)
“Holy Mary,” she murmured as she lifted my right wrist and took my pulse again. “Honey, your pulse is way too fast for me.”
“I’m fine,” I managed as my words swirled around her head in white-hot neon. “It’s nothing to worry about.”
“This has happened before?”
I waved my hand in what I hoped was a casually dismissive gesture and a flotilla of traveling pixies with attitude appeared on Bunny’s right shoulder. Ever get a mosquito bite in the dead of winter and wonder how in the world that happened? You have a pixie infestation. They have sharp little teeth and a wicked sense of humor that usually involves drawing blood. They also smell like a bad tomato when they’re drunk, but you didn’t hear that from me.
“Ouch!” Bunny glanced at her shoulder, then over at Fran. “I hope we didn’t pick up bedbugs at that miserable diner this morning. I told you I saw something crawling on the back of your seat.”
A column of dancing sprites was spiraling down from the ceiling, bouncing off her head, tugging on her ears, waltzing across the bridge of her nose. A second column spiraled down and wreathed Fran’s forehead.
Fran started scratching her temples. “I wish you hadn’t said that.”
The two women started swatting the air and scratching their heads in an attempt to dislodge the unwelcome visitors, who were now eyeballing each other as they assumed battle positions.
A turf war over Bunny MacKenzie? I don’t think so. But my magick was running amok and I was afraid I might sneeze a call to battle. I flashed Janice a
help me
look and curled my hands under my butt, praying I didn’t singe anything vital.
I’d heard the stories about the great pixie wars of the last century. First the pixies, then the sprites, and if you didn’t broker a peace between them quickly the trolls would step in and try to take over. If that happened, we’d all be in big trouble because nobody can tell trolls anything. Trust me. Not even trolls want to live with another troll. We’d been living with Elspeth for eight months now and had the battle scars to prove it.
Janice made a show of rubbing my hands. “You’re freezing!” she said, flashing me a covert wink. She whisked a huge big-needle afghan from the back of one of the hearthside sofas and draped it across my shoulders. Bless friends with wicked good powers. She had infused the afghan with spell-retardant properties that instantly cooled my fingertips and sent my magick into a low-energy rest period.
Janice then turned her attention to the pixie-sprite battle brewing on Bunny MacKenzie’s left shoulder.
“I can’t believe this!” Bunny was saying as she knocked a pixie into a pile of Malabrigo. “I don’t know why they call them bedbugs when they’re everywhere.”
Poor Fran was practically dancing a jig as sprites tumbled to the ground at her feet.
“Let me take a look,” Janice said. “I have five kids. I’ve pretty much seen everything.”
“Janice is an herbalist,” I offered. “She knows all sorts of natural remedies for things like this.”
Bunny wasn’t impressed, but Fran looked like she would try just about anything at this point.
Me? I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience as I watched my closest friend paw through Bunny’s hair like a chimpanzee grooming her mate.
“Nothing there,” Janice said in a casual tone of voice. She checked Fran out next. “You’re fine, too.”
“Nothing?” Bunny shot her a look. “I felt like I had an entire community running around on me. There had to be something.”
“There was, but not the way you think,” Janice said, gesturing toward a towering pile of roving in a basket next to Fran. “Cochineal dye. Sixty-three percent of fair-skinned females have a negative response the first time they’re exposed to it.” She sounded so convincing I almost believed her. “Fortunately it’s a one-time reaction and it won’t happen again.”
I’m not sure if Bunny actually believed the explanation or had other things on her mind, but either way I decided it was time to make an exit. I slid the afghan from my shoulders and stood up. “I need to—”
“Sit down,” she ordered. “We’re not finished here.”
Another woman might have balked at her
I’m the boss
motherly command, but to me it felt like a hug. My parents died when I was very little and sometimes I think I’ve spent my entire life looking to replace what I lost.
I sat back down on the sofa and motioned for Bunny to sit next to me. Janice, being Janice, instantly saw what was happening and whisked Fran off in search of coffee and doughnuts so we could talk.
“Sorry we can’t use my office, but I need to keep my eye on things out here.” I gestured toward the thick crowd of customers shopping, laughing, and comparing pattern ideas.
She leaned over and took my left hand in hers. “Let’s see how you’re doing.”
“I’m fine,” I protested, “really, I—”
She raised a brow and I fell into silence as she checked my pulse against her watch. “Much better, but still a little fast.” She patted my hand then released it. “Let’s phone your doctor just to be on the safe side.”
How many roadblocks could a fifteen-minute relationship encounter anyway? I didn’t have a doctor. At least, not the kind of doctor recognized by the AMA. I posed special problems that a nonmagick doctor would be helpless to handle. (I tried not to think about the special human problems a magick practitioner might find beyond her powers.)
In this Twitter/Facebook/YouTube world you couldn’t be too careful. I’ve had more than my share of nightmares about what could happen if Sugar Maple’s story ever spilled out into the world of humans. Although I was half human, I had opted to follow the same basic path that my mother and all the other Hobbs women had followed. A Quebec healer/ midwife named Brianne was working in tandem with Lilith to see me safely through my pregnancy and delivery.
And how could I forget Elspeth? I still wasn’t sure what her role was in the journey, but there was no denying the fact that she was definitely on board for the duration.
“I appreciate your concern, Mrs. MacKenzie, but—”
“Bunny.”
“Bunny,” I repeated, “but I’m fine. I’ll tell the doctor about it next week at my regular appointment.” It was a lie but a necessary one.
She whipped out her phone. “Give me his number,” she ordered. “I’ll call and fill him in.”
“No, really. I swear to you everything is totally fine.”
“Are you on any medications?”
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
“And you’re taking prenatal vitamins.”
“I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do, Bunny.” I sounded defensive and I guess I was. The things I was doing hadn’t been covered in her nurse training.
“I’m sure you are, honey. I always push too hard.” She smiled and my remaining defenses began to crumble. “My kids say I’m a pain in the ass.”
“I’d say you’re concerned.”
“A concerned pain in the ass.” She placed a hand on my bump. I’m not usually big on strangers feeling up my occupied uterus, but to the baby, she was family. “A girl?”
And here I was supposed to be the one with powers. “How did you know?”
“I was hoping.” A shadow crossed her face and I knew she was thinking about the daughter Luke and his ex-wife had lost a few years ago. “Do you have the sonogram handy? I’d love to see her.”
We don’t do sonograms in Sugar Maple, but I couldn’t tell Bunny that. Instead I babbled on about spilling a cup of coffee on my copy and needing to ask my doctor for a new one.