That Touch of Magic
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Authors: Lucy March
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For Alastair
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Mary Stella, Eileen Cook, Sue Danic, and Toni McGee Causey for running this book through the grinder and making it better than I ever could have on my own.
Thanks to my incredible agent, Stephanie Kip Rostan, and my legendary editor, Jennifer Enderlin, for their patience, support, and brilliance at what they do. I’m the luckiest writer in the world, and I know it.
Contents
Praise for A LITTLE NIGHT MAGIC
Chapter 1
“Magic’s kind of high-maintenance,” I said in low tones to Deidre Troudt as we huddled over the tiny purple potion vial that sat between us on the booth table in Crazy Cousin Betty’s Waffle House. “If you don’t want this to bite you in the ass, you’ve gotta follow a few rules.”
Ms. Troudt waved her hand at me impatiently. “Give me the disclaimers, Easter, but be quick about it. My lunch hour’s only an hour.”
“Okay. Well, one, you’ve gotta really believe in one true love.”
Ms. Troudt had been lifting her coffee cup, and halted it in midair to stare at me with those piercing brown eyes, and in a heartbeat, I felt like I was back in her high school English class. Her anger issues were legendary, but she was smart and kickass and she’d had all us kids in her class scared to death of her, which made me kind of love her. I almost started spouting a stream of crap about the themes of passion and transgression in
Ethan Frome.
“Of course I do,” she said. “Why? Don’t you?”
I gave her a flat look. “I don’t see how that’s relevant.”
She lowered her coffee cup and tilted her head to the side a bit. “But you made the potion—”
“Homeopathic solution,”
I said over her, raising my voice just enough to drown her out as I glanced at the tables around us. While the magic element in Nodaway Falls was fairly mundane, we made an effort to keep it under wraps as much as possible. No need spooking the locals.
To the untrained eye, Nodaway seemed like any other small, backward, and economically failing upstate New York town, and I guessed in most respects it was. We had a small grocery, a waffle house/diner, and a bed-and-breakfast. The magic, in all honesty, wasn’t that big a deal most of the time. Power in most magicals manifested as quirks more than serious mojo. Take Betty, for instance, the septuagenarian owner of CCB’s: She could make baked goods out of thin air. It was kinda neat when you really needed a brownie, but it wasn’t anything truly mind-blowing. Olivia Kiskey, one of my best friends and a waitress at CCB’s, could make living creatures out of random household objects. Her boyfriend, Tobias Shoop, had some darker powers, but he never used them if he could avoid it.
And then there was me. I’d taken up conjuring to keep the lights on when I got laid off from my job as a county librarian last fall. For the most part, even when the magic got hot, most of the people in town tended to accept our rational explanations, like when I insisted in public that the low-level magical potions I made were homeopathic solutions. Honestly, I didn’t care what we called it, so long as I got my bills paid.
“No, wait a minute.” Ms. Troudt set her cup down, her expression a mix of annoyance and confusion. “How can you make the po—I mean,
solution—
if you don’t believe in it yourself?”
“My job is to mix the stuff,” I said, keeping my voice low. “It’s perception magic, so it’s about
your
perception. It really has nothing to do with me.”
“Oh.” She shrugged. “I still don’t get it, but if you say so, I guess I’ll take your word on it.”
That was as big a gesture of trust as Ms. Troudt ever gave, so I took it. “What’s important is that
you
believe in one true love. Do you?”
She nudged her glasses up on the bridge of her nose. “Absolutely.”
I sighed, a little disappointed. No one in the free world had been dumped on by love more than Deidre Troudt. She’d been left at the altar three times, two of those times by the same guy. If I was a better person, I’d talk her out of spending her hard-earned money on a potion that would only confirm that yet another man wasn’t worthy of her time.
But I wasn’t a better person, and I had car payments.
“The other thing,” I went on. “No messing with free will.”
She gave me a surprised look. “How would I mess with free will?”
“You can’t dump this in anyone’s coffee and make him love you. Doesn’t work like that, and there are consequences for using magic to manipulate people.”
“Consequences?” Her brows quirked under her wild fringe of mud-brown hair, a non-style she’d been using to telegraph that she didn’t give a crap since as far back as I could remember. “What kind of consequences?”
I hesitated. The truth was … I wasn’t sure. It was just what I’d been told, and it meshed well with my personal sense of right and wrong, so I made sure all my clients were clear that they were not to dump potions intended for them into someone else’s drink.
I met Ms. Troudt’s eye, gave her a dark look, and lowered my voice. “You don’t want to know. Just don’t do it.”
Whatever foreboding I’d put into my voice seemed to miss the target, because Ms. Troudt waved a hand in the air. “Fine. Whatever.”
I craned my head to look around her, hoping Liv would be available to bring me a refresh on my coffee, but she was by the front door, talking to two men who had just come in. The first one, I could tell from the shiny back of his bald-ass head, was my older brother, Nick. I wondered what he was doing here. Bernadette Peach, the third in the best-friend triumvirate with Liv and me, had my brother running all over the place preparing for their wedding this coming Saturday. So why was he hanging out in CCB’s with some random guy? From the back, I couldn’t even recognize who the random guy was, which was weird. I’d been born and raised in Nodaway and I could identify most of our tiny population at a hundred paces. The random guy was taller than any of the guys in the wedding party, with dark brown hair that looked like it had been cut with a weed whacker. There was something familiar about him, though, and my gut did a roller-coaster lunge as if it knew something I didn’t …
“Hey. Easter.” Ms. Troudt snapped her fingers to get my attention, much as she’d done whenever I’d drifted off in English class.
“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry, what?”
She reached into her bag and pulled out her wallet. “Is that it?”
“No.” I set my cold coffee mug down and turned my attention to the matter at hand. “When you’re ready, drink it all at once, like a shot. Then you’ve got twenty-four hours to get into the same room with your guy.”
“Simple enough. Anything else?” Ms. Troudt stared at the vial with this weird look on her face. It made me uncomfortable seeing her like that, almost vulnerable and everything.
“Look, Ms. Troudt—”
“Knock it off with the
Ms. Troudt
stuff, Easter,” she said, her eyes still locked on the vial. “You’re selling me a magic potion so I can deal with my love life. Call me Deidre.”
“Fine …
Deidre.
” That felt weird. I hesitated, then pushed it. “You can call me Stacy, you know.”
She snorted rudely, but that was a big part of why I liked her so much. She’d never spent a day being polite in her life. She was my hero, and I loved her, and I didn’t want her to get hurt over some stupid guy.
“It’s not too late,” I said, annoyed with myself for being such a soft touch. Soft touches get their new yellow VW Bugs repossessed. But it was Ms. Troudt, so I forced the words out. “You can back out. I don’t have to sell this to you today.”
She shook her head, determination on her face. “Oh, no. I’m buying it.”
I leaned forward. “Look, if you don’t know if a man loves you, then your problem is the man, not the knowledge.”
She gave me the same dead-eyed look she used to save for the dumb kids. “You think I don’t know that?”
“I don’t know what you know,” I said, feeling a touch of professional indignation, “but you’re buying a potion—”
“Homeopathic solution,” she corrected automatically.
“—from me, and it’s part of my ethics to be sure you know what you’re doing before I hand it over. This is powerful stuff, and I want to know you’re going to use it right.”
I sat back, damn proud of myself. Ms. Troudt eyed me with a look of grudging respect.
“Good for you.” She hesitated a moment, then leaned forward. “Look, I believe in The One, but I don’t have the time or the energy for him. Whoever my One is, he waited too goddamned long, and now I’m forty-eight years old and I’m pissed off and I’m tired. I’ve got a few good years left to have a mediocre time in bed, and I have no intention of letting Real True Love screw with that.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not following.”
She sighed. “You know the guy I’ve been seeing? Wally Frankel?”
“Sure. The new pharmacist at the CVS, right?”
“Right. So, he’s smart. He makes me laugh. He’s above average in the sack. He has this one move where he—”
“Yeah, that’s enough.”
“People over fifty have sex. Deal with it. Anyway, it’s all starting to make me a little nervous. If he’s The One and he made me wait this long, I need to beat him to death with my Dyson, and I really like my Dyson. If I know he’s not anything too special, then I can keep him.”
“So you want him to
not
be The One?”
She grimaced. “For fuck’s sake, Easter, don’t split your infinitives.” She sipped her coffee, then sighed. “I’m sorry. That was rude. My therapist tells me I should take responsibility when I’m rude, so … I apologize. Sometimes I forget you’re an adult now. You still look like you did when you were in my class.”
“I do not,” I said. “That was ten years ago.”
“Oh, please,” she said. “You’ve got a rack that kicks ass and an ass that takes names. It’s unnatural and you know it, which is why you dress like that.”
“What’s wrong with the way I dress?” I glanced down at my outfit: jeans, a blue cotton buttondown shirt some guy had left in my dorm room back in the day, a white tank underneath, and work boots.
“You’ve always been one of
those
girls,” she went on. “The girls who roll out of bed with perfectly tousled hair and have men waiting in a line just on the slim chance you might deign to kick ’em in the balls. You’re not like the rest of us, Easter. You snap your fingers, you can have any man you want. The rest of us have to work for it, and even then, more often than not, what we work for still drips on the toilet seat.”
“They all drip,” I said.
Ms. Troudt put her hands up. “Hey, don’t get defensive.”
“Then don’t be offensive. Christ. If I had a nickel for every woman who told me I wasn’t like the rest of you, I’d have all the nickels. Speaking of which”—I nudged the vial toward her—“that’ll be fifty bucks.”
Ms. Troudt picked up her purse. “Look, I’m sorry if I was rude. Again. But women like you don’t understand what it’s like to get your heart smashed in a million pieces.”