For Love or Magic (2 page)

I turned away from Judd, focusing my attention on the place. It really wasn't that bad. To my right was the living room; it was small, but it had a woodstove in the center of the far wall and what looked like usable, if old, hardwood floors.

“You just buff those up, stain 'em, seal 'em, they're good as new,” Judd said.

“Where did you even get that money?” I asked. “You paid a hundred thousand dollars in cash for this place, but can't buy a decent truck. What the hell is that about, Judd?”

He grinned at me, and dodged the question. “I'm a man of mystery, baby.”

“Shut up,” I said absently as I surveyed the place. To one side of the woodstove was an overstuffed chair next to a standing lamp; a reading area. To the other side was a writing desk. In front was a beige La-Z-Boy that had seen better days, and a floral Victorian couch that made your back hurt just to look at it. No television, but that didn't matter much. As soon as I got the wi-fi hooked up, I could watch movies on my laptop.

“What do you think, Seamus?” I asked the dog. “You think it'll work?”

He ignored me.

I looked to the left; there was an eat-in kitchen, also small, but kind of quaint, separated from the cooking area by a peninsula counter that cut the space in half. The dining half had a small farmhouse table with four wooden chairs, no seat cushions. Lace curtains hung over the windows, unmoving in the stilted summer air. I walked to the window, and with a significant amount of effort and cursing, got it open. It didn't let much fresh air in, but it was a start.

I moved farther into the kitchen. The lumbering yellow appliances looked like they were straight off the set of
I Love Lucy,
with a big double-oven gas stove, and a yellow refrigerator with soft, rounded edges.

“Coldspot,” I said, reading the script logo written in metal on the door, and noticed that Seamus was suddenly at my heels. Of course he'd be here now; I was about to open a fridge, and the opportunity to eat more of my food was apparently too big to resist.

“It's an antique,” Judd said, leaning one ghostly hip against the counter. “I bet it even works. Go on, open it.”

I pulled the large silver lever, half expecting it to fall off in my hand, but the door opened easily. I stuck my hand inside the fridge; it was legitimately cold in there. The freezer chest—I knew what to call it because it had
FREEZER CHEST
written in scripty metallic lettering on the plastic door—was a separate compartment tucked away up top, but when I pulled the plastic door down and peered inside, I saw that someone had put in modern ice cube trays, and the cubes were frozen solid.

Huh,
I thought, closing the fridge. Must have been the cleaning service. My eyes teared up suddenly, and my throat tightened with emotion. It was a small kindness, but when things were bad, it was the small kindnesses that did you in.

“A little work,” Judd said, moving into the living room, “a little elbow grease, a little TLC, and this place is going to be our dream, Ellie.”

I wiped my eyes, leaned against the oven, and looked out the front windows. In my imagination, I saw pale yellow curtains flowing in the breeze, and fresh cushions on the chairs.

Yeah, maybe,
I thought.

I headed down the hallway. The bathroom had mint-green walls with white ceramic tile halfway up, and was oddly large considering the dimensions of the rest of the house. The floor had white honeycomb tiles with dark blue ones marking out little daisy shapes at regular intervals, and I'll admit it; my breath caught in my throat a little bit.

“Look at that,” Judd said over my shoulder. “A claw-foot tub. Just like you always wanted. Do I know you or do I know you, huh?”

Seamus pushed himself past me into the bathroom, hitting the backs of my knees and making them buckle a bit. I checked the faucet and the handheld showerhead that was attached to the side of the tub; they were old, but they worked. It took the hot water a little while to come to the party, but hell, I was grateful there was hot water at all. There was no standing shower, but I liked baths well enough.

I could work with this.

I poked my head into the tiny back bedroom, which was empty except for the built-in bookshelves and the plain metal radiator under the window. I could paint the radiator white, and strip the faded pink floral wallpaper, and it would make a decent office. Emotion bloomed in my chest, so powerful and unfamiliar that I had to lean against the wall to hold myself up as it rippled through my being. I recognized the emotion, but just barely.

It was hope
.

“See?” Judd said, grinning like a fool. “I knew you'd like it.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I crossed the hallway, put my hand on the old metal doorknob that presumably led to what the paperwork had described as “the big bedroom,” and turned. The knob rolled loosely from side to side, but didn't open.

Crap.

I jiggled it; I could hear the metal bits clinking around inside. I yanked at the doorknob, cursing and kicking at the door. No joy. Seamus sat a few feet back, watching me dispassionately. I leaned my forehead against the door and let out a breath, my entire body vibrating with nerves as the thought occurred to me.

The knob is made of metal.

A painful jolt of fear ran through me, and I stepped back from the door. My magic was gone. It was gone-gone, had been gone for sixteen years and it wasn't coming back.

“Then what's it gonna hurt to try?” Judd asked from over my shoulder.

I shot him a sideways glance. “You don't know about the magic. I never told you. So shut up.”

He grinned at me, and my heart soared a bit, but I couldn't tell whether the flutter was coming from the memory of Judd's intoxicating smile or the momentary power fantasy of having my magic back and not having to dig through the truck to find my tools.

I shook out my hands, released a sharp breath, and closed my eyes. I could feel the workings inside the knob. I'd locked up my ability to manipulate metal, but I hadn't lost my connection to the element. A piece had broken loose inside the mortise latch; I could turn that knob all day and it wouldn't do a damn thing. It happened sometimes with old lock assemblies. Most likely, the cleaning people had shut the door too hard when they'd left, and the lock had finally broken down in protest. Or maybe the house had already made up its mind about me, and the verdict wasn't good.

But either way, I was going to need my tools. I pushed up from my knees and headed out, Judd calling out after me, “What? You're not even going to try?”

“Six years trying to get the truth out of you taught me not to attempt the impossible,” I shot over my shoulder at him.

I went out to the truck, got my beat-up old toolbox from behind the driver's seat, and spent the next fifteen minutes dismantling the lock assembly while Seamus slobbered over my shoulder.

I got the door open, pushed through it, and my breath caught. The room had white beadboard wainscoting and yellow walls and gleaming wood floors and it was …

“Beautiful,” I breathed.

Right in the middle of the back wall was the refurbished white-painted cast-iron bed I'd had delivered from the local antiques shop. I'd been charmed by the picture on the website, by the shiny exposed metal springs, by the idea that I could love it even after everyone else had abandoned it. I'd spent way more money than I should have on an old-fashioned feather mattress to go with it, which had also been delivered and was leaned up against the wall, still in its plastic wrapping.

I walked over to it and ripped off the plastic in a frenzy, then hauled the mattress over and, with some effort, got it onto the bed.

“What do you think, Seamus?” I said, looking back at the dog who had finally found his way to the room. “It's okay, right?”

Seamus walked over to the bed, sniffed the mattress, and curled up on the floor next to the bed.

“I don't care what you say,” I said, “it's gonna be—”

“Great, baby,” Judd said from behind me, hijacking the last of my sentence. “You and me, on an adventure, the way it was supposed to be.”

I turned and there he was, leaning against the doorjamb, looking sexy as hell, his black hair ruffled and his smile just as crooked and bent as his soul. And stupid me, I wanted him back. I wanted his arms around me and I wanted him in my bed and I wanted to believe in the beautiful lies he spun for me, my own corrupted Rumpelstiltskin spinning gold from bullshit. I missed him so much it hurt, and I hated him so much that I wished he could come back to life just so I could kill him myself.

“You're not allowed in here,” I said, and shut the door in his face while his mouth was opening to form a reply. I kicked off my shoes, stepped over Seamus, and settled down onto my new old bed, groaning with exhausted delight before falling into a dead sleep.

*   *   *

The dream started out the way the dream always started out, just a simple reliving of the day that changed my life. I was in the basement of the First Presbyterian church in Lott's Cove, Maine, with twenty-eight other people. My mother. My best friend, Del. Del's parents. My math teacher from the seventh grade. We were packing up tool kits for the Habitat for Humanity volunteers who were taking the bus to Bangor later that day to help build houses over the summer. It was going to be the first time either Del or I had gone away from home for more than a night or two. We were going to be gone for one full week. We were insanely excited, just the way that day was in real life.

In the dream, though, instead of what really happened, the basement starts to fill with glowing gerbera daisies. It just fills, from bottom to top, and at first everyone thinks it's cute, that the flowers are beautiful. They all play with them, and I try to tell them not to, but no one hears me. Eventually, the flowers cover our heads. It gets dark as they press in on us and people start to panic. That's when it finally occurs to me to open the door and get everyone out, but I'm always too late. I reach for the doorknob, but just as I do, it turns into a daisy, and I touch it before I can stop myself. As soon as I do, electric-blue lightning sparks from my fingers, evaporating the flowers and hopping from person to person, killing them one by one. The door opens and there's my father, smiling wide with his arms outstretched for me, as though he hadn't just used me to kill them all.

Same dream. Every time.

“Babe.” I could feel the warmth of Judd's breath on my ear. “Babe. People in the house.”

I jolted up in the bed, my heart racing, the instinct to rush to the door setting all my nerves on fire, but then I opened my eyes and slammed back into reality. I reached instinctively for Judd before realizing with a stab of sudden understanding that he wasn't alive and warm in my bed.

He was dead.

I fell back on the pillows and breathed deep, slowly rising out of the dream and into my new reality.

Widowed, broke, and living in Nodaway Falls.

And there were voices coming from the front of the house.

I sat up, rubbing my eyes and trying to process what was happening. The voices belonged to women, and they sounded light and happy, not threatening. It was still light outside, so I hadn't been asleep for that long, but I felt like I'd been out for years.

“Hey,” I said, and nudged Seamus gently with my foot. He raised his head and looked at me.

“You hear that? People are
in the house
.” I hurled myself out of bed and tried to smooth out my T-shirt and jeans, which also happened to be covered in dog hair, a thing I'd gotten rather used to over the last eight months. “You are the worst watchdog on the planet. Surely someone has told you this.”

Seamus did the dog equivalent of rolling his eyes and lumbered up off the floor to follow me into the living room, where I found an older woman with wild, flowing gray hair showing another woman—younger, blond, and massively pregnant under a red and white polka-dotted dress—where to put the covered glass platter that held a huge chocolate cake. The older woman was wearing a flowing yellow sundress and a big floppy hat with a sunflower on the side, and was so focused on her duties ordering Polka Dots around that she didn't even notice me walking in. Polka Dots, however, saw me right away and instead of reddening with shame for breaking into my home, she grinned and waved. She was uncommonly beautiful, and I swiped at my own unkempt brown mop, hoping neither of the intruders were the judgy type.

“Hi!” she said, disappearing into the kitchen where she put the cake on the counter. “You must be Eliot!”

The woman with the gray hair turned to me, her face bright. “Eliot!” Her arms flew out and she ran to me, pulling me into a big hug.

“Oh, so … wow, you guys are huggers,” I said as she let me go.

“Such an unusual name for a woman, Eliot,” Polka Dots said. “I love it.”

“Thanks,” I said. “My mother was a George Eliot fan.”

She patted her belly. “We're having a girl. Nick—that's my husband, Nick Easter, I'm sure you'll meet him soon—wants to name her Bunny.”

“Yeah, that's a bad idea,” I said automatically.

Polka Dots made a face and laughed. “I know, right? So now I'm all obsessed with girl names. The little monkey was due three days ago, but she
refuses to come out
!” Polka Dots yelled playfully toward her stomach and laughed.

“Yeah. Good luck with that.” A weird silence followed, and I wished not for the first time that I had Judd's gift for charming strangers with meaningless chitchat. “Um, not to be rude but … who are you people?”

Polka Dots slapped her hand to her forehead and laughed. “Oh! Wow! We totally forgot to introduce ourselves! You must be like, ‘Who are these crazy people in my house?'”

“A little,” I said. “Yeah.”