That Touch of Magic (19 page)

I shook my head. Me, Deidre, and Clementine, all brought down by men. I had to give my mother that, at least: She loved no one more than herself, but at least she wasn’t a damn cliché.

“Okay, then. My guess is, Henry’s your trigger. That means you need to quit your job at Treacher’s. Plus, Bill Treacher is an ass. He docked Henry’s pay for that watermelon.”

She looked up at me in shock. “No! He docked
my
pay for it, too!”

“See? Ass. Quit the job.”

She shook her head. “I can’t. I need the money. I got accepted to Cornell. I’ve got scholarships for the tuition, but I have to pay for room and board and everything else myself. I’ve saved up all my babysitting money for three years, and everything I made at Treacher’s this last year, but that’s only going to get me through part of the first semester. I can get a job once I get there, but…”

I put my hand on her shoulder. “No, that’s fine. You can work at CCB’s. You know Olivia Kiskey? And Betty? And Tobias?”

She nodded. “Yeah. I mean, I know of them. Why?”

“All magic.”

She stared at me, her face blank. “I think it might take me a little while to get used to all this.”

“Join the club, kid. Anyway, they’ll watch over you and cover for you if anything weird happens. I’ll talk to Betty about it tomorrow and she’ll let you know when you can start. You can get tips there, too, so it’ll probably pay even better than Treacher’s.”

Her face brightened. “Oh, that’d be great.”

“Don’t get too excited,” I said. “It’s lots of hard work and people are jerks to waitresses, but that will teach you to stand up for yourself, so it sounds like a win to me.”

She nodded emphatically. “Yes.”

“All right, then,” I said, and started for the door, but before I left, I turned around and looked at her. “You remember what I told you the other day? About not falling in love right now, and all that?”

Clementine nodded.

“Yeah, well…” I sighed, staring at her. Loving Leo had nearly torn me to pieces, but even with all the pain and torment, I still wouldn’t trade a second of it. As much as I didn’t want her to end up like me, I didn’t want her to miss out, either. “Forget what I said. When all this is over, you should tell Henry how you feel about him.”

Her face broke out in a mix of elation and nerves. “Really?”

“Yeah,” I said, and opened the door. “What the hell, right?”

Chapter 11

I went home and immediately went out to my garden shed to look at the purple vials I had left from the stash that Desmond had given me. It was hard to see much through the purple glass, but even shining a flashlight into the vials, I couldn’t see anything. I ran a Q-tip inside, but there wasn’t anything I could see on it, and I didn’t have the equipment to run any serious diagnostics on it.

“Damnit.” I put everything away to head back to the ’Bago. I had half a mind to go over to Grace and Addie’s B&B and rip Desmond a new one that minute, but I also had a strong feeling that I needed to know more before I took him on. He was smart, and he’d caught me by surprise. I wasn’t going to let that happen again. I went into the ’Bago, sat at my dinette table, and stared at Nemo swimming back and forth in his little bowl.

What the hell was Desmond’s game, anyway? Why would he want a small town to start spitting magic? Was it coincidence or design that he’d magicized only women? I had to figure out what was happening; of all the powers Desmond had unleashed, only mine was truly dangerous, and the sun was setting quickly. I’d managed to get through the night before without incident, but avoidance didn’t solve this problem.

I needed to take action. What that action should be, however … well, that’s what I needed more time to figure out.

The powers had first sparked in response to intense emotion, but I had no idea how they would evolve.
If
they would evolve. Maybe the powers would wear off after a couple of days, and that would be that. I could run Desmond out of town on a rail, and life would go back to normal. When Peach and I had our powers last summer, courtesy of Liv being dosed by a magic potion without her consent, that was what had happened. They’d just faded after a while.

But we’d been conduits, non-magicals temporarily given power through a magical source. This was different: Desmond wasn’t magical, and we weren’t conduits. This was a potion giving real magic to non-magical people, and I’d never even heard of that, let alone had any experience with it. The only thing I could look to as any sort of prediction of what might happen was my mother, whose powers
had
evolved. She’d found so much narcissistic supply that she’d been able to wield the power, rather than be wielded by it. The smart thing to do would be to go find her, make sure she wasn’t getting into any more trouble, and talk to her about it. Feed her ego, and have her show me how she controlled it.

That would be the smart thing to do.

“But you know what, Nemo? I really don’t wanna.” I leaned on my counter and rested my chin on my folded arms as I watched the weird little magical fish scoot around in my glass water bowl. Unlike real fish, which usually had the good sense to up and die right away rather than go through the bother of waiting for me to forget to feed them, Nemo seemed to be doing all right. He didn’t need care; he was plastic. He just zipped from side to side of the bowl, seemingly happy, showing me, Millie, Liv, and Peach grinning one way, and then suddenly our head angles would flip and we’d be grinning in the other direction. I stared at him, trying to wrap my mind around the fact of his existence, and it was disquietingly easy. It was weird how quickly you could get used to this kind of thing: the new normal. Even stuff that blows your mind at first becomes humdrum after a while.

Like having a glowing mother.

I wanted to just dive under the covers and hide from it all, but I couldn’t. If the Widow had an intense dream, she might glow in a room by herself. No big deal. I was apt to set my bed on fire, and there was no way I was going to let myself char before I made Desmond Lamb pay a stiff fine for screwing with my life, my family, and my town. The only thing that outranked my stubbornness was my vengeance, and my sense of self-preservation.

It was time to make some concessions.

I zipped Nemo up into a plastic baggie filled with water, and got in my car. I chatted at Nemo as I drove, glancing at the smiling picture of the four of us whenever I started getting tense so I wouldn’t accidentally melt the Bug’s steering wheel while I drove through town, getting closer and closer to my own personal O’Leary’s cow.

“This may be a stupid idea, Nemo,” I said as I turned down Zipser Lane, “but it’s the only idea I have, and I’m desperate.”

I pulled over in front of Peach and Nick’s house. The lights were off, and it was quiet and still, but Nick’s truck was in the driveway. If Leo had gone to the airport, he would have left the truck there for Nick and Peach to grab when they came back from their honeymoon. He was either in the house and asleep at ten o’clock at night, or …

I let my eyes drift next door, to Liv’s house. The lights were on downstairs, but between the angle I was at on the street and the curtains in Liv’s living room, I couldn’t see if Leo was over there. If I knocked on the door to find out, Liv would insist I come in, and if Leo was there, I could end up burning down the whole place. Liv always hated how big her house was; she’d even put it on the market for a little while last year. But before too long, she and Tobias would be filling it up with little magical babies. Besides, it was all she had left of her mother. I wasn’t going in there at night until this whole thing was over, and that was that.

I sat in the car for a little while longer, lost in my own thoughts until my body reacted to something I hadn’t even processed consciously.
Leo.
I don’t know how I knew he was near, but I felt him the way you feel a rumble in the ground when a plane is going overhead. It was always one of the things about our relationship that I’d found incredibly romantic when we were younger. Now it just seemed achingly sad.

I hopped out of my car and glanced down both sides of the street. A moment later, he came jogging around the corner, moving through the pool of light that came from the streetlamp. I took a deep breath to calm my heart rate; somehow, just the expectation that he would make me start a fire made it worse. I reached in through my open window, pulled out Nemo, and set his baggie on top of the Bug. I focused on him, on the four of us smiling as we zipped from side to side of the plastic baggie, and my heart rate calmed.

I could feel Leo moving closer, his jog slowing to a walk as he saw me, but I kept my eye on my magi-fish.

“Stacy?”

“I see you didn’t go away.”

He didn’t say anything, just stood there looking at me.

“Good.” I turned to face him. “I need your help.”

“You got it,” he said, without hesitation.

“I need to try something, and I need you to help me. That’s all this is, okay? Just a test.”

His brows knit. “What’s going on?”

I stole one last look at Nemo.
Smiling faces. Happier times.
Then I took a deep breath and led Leo back behind the house where Nick kept the wood and kindling for the fireplace in a small shed in the corner of Peach’s garden. I opened the door to the shed, grabbed two strips of kindling, then walked back toward Leo to stand over the slate patio. I held my arms out, each fist wrapped around some kindling.

“Kiss me,” I said.

“What?”

“My mother’s gaining control, and her trigger is attention. She got lots of it last night, and it fed the magic. Or it fed her, and it gave her control.… I’m not really sure how it works.” I hesitated, fighting against myself to get the words out. “You’re my trigger.”

I couldn’t see much more than the outline of his body in the moonlight, but I could tell by the set of his shoulders that he was unsure.

“Oh, come on, you big baby. You’ve kissed me a thousand times.”

He let out a rough sigh. “Stacy…”

“You kissed me yesterday. I know you can do it.”

“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that all day,” he said, his voice hesitant. “I’m sorry about that. I shouldn’t have … It was a mistake.”

I felt the stab of rejection, and glanced at my hands. No glowing smoke. I mentally checked
pain
off the list of possible sparking emotions, but it didn’t make me feel much better about the fact that Leo’s feelings about me had changed. Of course, the effect had been exactly what I told myself I’d been going for: He knew about the other men, he was disgusted, he didn’t want me anymore. It was exactly what my plan had been. I just hadn’t expected it to take such a chunk out of me. Why hadn’t I seen that coming?

Because you’re an idiot,
I thought, but then shook the thought. This wasn’t about love, or even us, really. He was just a catalyst, the chemical that activated the formula, and I needed that chemical in order to get myself out of trouble.

That was all this was.

“Leo, it doesn’t have to mean anything. As a matter of fact, it’s better if it doesn’t. I just need your help. I can’t control it if I can’t test it, and I can’t test it unless you kiss me. So just get over yourself and kiss me.” I swallowed, almost unable to get the next word out.
“Please.”

He moved slowly, inching closer, and the anticipation and anxiety were torture. My body felt unhinged, like every part had its own individual opinion on the matter. My legs wanted to run, and my lower abdomen ached for him, wanting to take him inside with an unfamiliar desperation. My lips felt puffy and warm, and my arms were starting to get weak and trembly, claiming they were tired from holding out the kindling, but I knew better: They wanted to drop everything, pull him close, and never let him go again.

I stayed still, even as he moved closer, as his palms caressed my face. I closed my eyes and his breath fell warm on my face as he whispered, “Stacy.”

His lips melded into mine softly, and chastely at first, but he kept the contact going. Slowly, he increased the pressure, his lips gently easing mine open. I dipped my tongue into his mouth, tasting him, and he groaned deep in his throat. I could feel his body grow hard against me, and as his arms wrapped tight around my waist I had to fight the instinct to run, to push him away, to protect myself. Instead, I let myself feel it, all of it. How deeply I loved him, how badly I wanted him, how achingly I missed him. I let the part of myself that he had taken with him find me again and settle back inside, comforting like hot cocoa on a cold night …

And that’s when he let me go, so fast my head spun. My senses, which had all split, came to me in a quick succession, as though from unrelated sources. First, the pain of separation, then the smell of wood smoke. I felt a firm grip around my wrist as my fingers were pried open while Leo cursed. I opened my eyes to see one bundle of sticks in flames on the ground under my hand, which was covered with little glowing ropes of reddish smoke. It was almost pretty, the way it glowed, like the heart of a piece of charcoal on a dark night. Leo dashed to my other side, where I was still tightly clenching the other bit of kindling, ablaze in my hand. He tried to pry my fingers off it, and it took me another moment but finally I let go, and the burning wood fell to the ground. He stomped it out with his feet, then put his arm around me and led me through the back door, into the kitchen.

He flicked on the light, sat me down at the table, and went into the pantry, which was where Peach kept her first-aid kit. I watched him move, still a little stunned. He brought the kit over to the table and grabbed for my hands.

The smoke was gone, and there wasn’t a mark on them. He raised his eyes to mine.

“What the hell is going on here, Stacy?” he said, his voice shaky and weak. That’s when I noticed that while my hands were fine, his were charred and red.

“Jesus,” I said, and snapped out of it. I stood up and pushed his shoulders down until he was sitting in the other chair, then went to work. I wet some gauze and cleaned his hands. His fingertips had taken the worst of it, probably from when he’d tried to pry my hands open, but the burns didn’t seem too bad once the char had been cleared off. I put some burn cream on the worst of it and then reached for the gauze, but he said, “No, that’s okay.”