Soulbound: A Lone Star Witch Novel (10 page)

I think of my mom and the belladonna—not to mention everything else that took place in the five days I was home—and feel my own smile droop a little. And now here I am, flirting with a homicide detective of all people. What does it say about me that death seems to be around every corner in my life?

“Not planning on it.” The words come out more curt than I expected.

To apologize, and because Nate is such a good guy, I walk over to the baked goods display and pull out a giant sugar cookie—his favorite treat—and slide it across the counter to him. “To balance out all that caffeine,” I tell him.

“Yeah, because loading up on huge quantities of sugar and butter is better for me,” he complains, right before he takes a big bite of the cookie.

“Hey, you’ve gotta pick your poison.”

“Can’t you tell?” he asks as he slides the five dollar bill I handed him as change into the tip jar on the counter. “I already have.”

Then, with a wink and another one of those killer smiles, he’s gone, slipping out into the twilight stillness of the streets.

“Oh my God!” Jenn says, rushing back to the cash register the second Nate is out of sight. “Did you see the way he looked at you? He was totally imagining doing you right up against the espresso machine!”

“Jenn!” Heat creeps up my cheeks until I feel like my whole face is on fire.

“Don’t even try to act innocent. He is
so
into you.” She shoots me an arch look. “And judging from the way you ran in here when you heard his voice, I’m guessing the feeling is mutual. You don’t abandon your cookie dough for much.”

“I did not abandon my dough,” I tell her. “And it most certainly is
not
mutual. Not that there’s anything to be mutual. I mean, I like him. Of course I do. He’s one of our best customers and he’s nice. Why wouldn’t I be personable to him?”

“Personable? Is that what you old people call it? Let me tell you, I wouldn’t mind being
personable
with that either.”

“Okay!” I fight the urge to clap my hands over my ears. “That’s enough. We have work to do.”

“What work are you talking about?” she demands. “I brewed the coffee while you were flirting with Mr. Wonderful. I also wiped the tables down, restocked the pastry display and got more napkins and go cups from the back. Barring the sudden onset of the apocalypse, I think we’re set.”

The front door picks that moment to chime, which is probably a good thing because I don’t think I can come up with an answer to all that. Four teenage guys walk in and it’s all I can do not to throw myself at their feet and thank them for being my salvation.

“That work,” I tell Jenn, nodding to the group with a superior smirk. “I’ll be in the back if you need me.”

I escape to the kitchen, and my unfinished cookie dough. Jenn’s set to work the rest of the evening and
Dara and Toby should be here any minute to help with the evening rush of students and couples on dates. Which means that as soon as I get the cookies done for tomorrow, I’m out of here. Considering I’ve been here since four this morning, I’m more than ready to head home and get some sleep—something else I missed out on when I was in Ipswitch.

It takes me only a couple of minutes to finish up the chocolate chip cookies and get them in the oven, and then I start on my secret recipe—the red velvet cookies that have made Beanz the busiest coffeehouse in the city.

My best friend and current roommate, Lily, thinks it’s crazy that I walked away from being a princess to run this place, but that’s because she doesn’t understand that my favorite thing about this job—the baking and coffee making—reminds me a lot of what I used to do at home. From the time I was little, my mom drummed potion making into me—the importance of it as well as the excitement of creating something from a random sample of ingredients.

Unfortunately, I can’t make a simple luck potion to save my life—let alone any of the more complex ones that Mom deals with every day. But what I can do, what I am good at, is mixing up coffee and bakery confections that literally fly out the door. It’s a kind of potion making, I tell my mom every time she complains that I’m wasting my education or that I’m not trying hard enough to overcome my handicaps.

Just not the right kind, she tells me with a roll of her eyes. Not that I care. After the week I just had, my mother’s approval is not something I plan on worrying about ever again.

Getting into the zone, I mix the batter up quickly and from memory. The dry ingredients—flour, cocoa powder, salt, baking powder and baking soda—go in one bowl. Then I cream together the butter and sugar before adding
in the rest of the wet ingredients, including the secret to my award-winning cookies—vinegar and buttermilk.

In my opinion, most red velvet cakes and cookies have a cloying sweetness to them, which I definitely don’t like. But I am in the South and velvet cake so red it looks like congealed blood is a way of life down here, so I use the vinegar to cut that sweetness and the buttermilk to give the dough just a little kick. It might sound strange, but don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it. I’ve got customers beating down my door every day trying to get their hands on them. God help us all if we ever run out—which is why I’m staying late to make eight dozen of the saucer-sized cookies.

Forty-five minutes later, I pull the last batches out of my huge double ovens. I know I should stay an extra hour, make the double chocolate muffins and sugar cookies for the morning rush, but I’m beat. I’ll come in an hour early tomorrow to work on them.

After getting everything washed up and the cookies stored in the fridge, I wave good-bye to my evening crew and start the fifteen minute walk back to the house I share with Lily. I’m about halfway there when I get a text from her demanding to know where I am.

I dash off an answer, then shove my phone deep into my jeans pocket and just enjoy the rest of my walk. It’s the first really cold day here in Austin—the temperature hovering in the mid-thirties—and I pull my scarf a little closer around my neck and chin. A lot of my customers came in complaining about it, but I love the chill in the air and the bite of the wind as it whistles through the branches. Six months of the year it’s so hot here that my walk home is a misery, so this is a nice change of pace. One I’m definitely not going to complain about.

As I wind my way through the complicated maze of downtown, leaves crunch beneath my boots. Yes, in most places in the country, if leaves are going to hit the ground,
they do it in October. But it was a hundred and three degrees here in October, so the trees have just now gotten around to shedding their leaves. I go out of my way to step on them as I walk—I love the happy sound they make.

Deciding the last thing I want to worry about doing tonight is making dinner, I stop at Whole Foods and pick up a couple of salads and some crusty bread. They’ll go nicely with the sack of cookies I tucked into my purse for Lily. Then I turn the corner and duck into my favorite little boutique and pick up a new blackberry-scented candle. Its scent will blend well with the new bath oil Rachael made me for Christmas—and that I hope to try out as soon as I get home. If things go as planned, languishing in the bathtub will be the most strenuous thing I do tonight.

But the second I open the door to the spacious, two-bedroom house I share with Lily, I can tell that my evening isn’t going to go quite the way I planned. My roommate is sitting cross-legged on the couch in the family room, her blond hair twisted into hundreds of elaborate braids and her green eyes focused intently on the front door. In her hands are her beloved tarot cards, though she’s laid out a small spread on the coffee table in front of her.

Though the look in her eye warns me I’m in trouble, it’s the tarot cards that really tip me off. She’s chosen to lay the cards out in her own personal looking-for-love spread, a surefire clue that she’s got a date with a new guy. I’m not certain where I fit into that equation, but I know that I do.

Sure enough, the second the door closes behind me, she pounces.

“There you are! I’ve been waiting for you to get home for hours!”

“Sorry. We had a run at the coffeehouse today, probably
because of the cold. I had to make a few extra batches of cookies—”

She waves off my explanation, the fifty or so bracelets she wears clinking on her wrists as she starts dragging me toward the couch. “You’ll never guess what happened to me today!”

“You met a new guy?”

“Even better!
Brandon
asked me on a date.”

I drop the Whole Foods bag on the coffee table, but keep the cookies. Something tells me I’ll need them before too much longer. “Which one is Brandon again?”

“Seriously? How can you not know? I’ve only been lusting after him for a year.”

“Oh, right. He’s the Rasta guy.”

“No.”

“The singer?”

“No. That was Braden. And he was a narcissistic moron, remember? We went out around Thanksgiving.”

I don’t actually remember—living with Lily means putting up with a never-ending parade of hot, but very often vacuous men. She’s a Ph.D. candidate in Egyptian history at the University of Texas and one of the smartest witches I know, but her number one weakness is guys with smoking hot bodies and IQs lower than my bra size. Which is saying something since I’m not exactly gifted in that area.

“Is Brandon the swimmer?”

She rolls her eyes. “No. That’s Brad.”

“Okay, then. I give up. I have no idea who Brandon is.”

“Yes, you do. He’s the wizard. The one I met in my Egyptian symbology class last year. He’s getting his doctorate in religious iconography. I told you all about him. Remember? He’s the one with the dreamy blue eyes—”

“And the smooth pickup line.” She’s right. I do remember him, largely because she spent most of summer
semester rhapsodizing about him. “He’s the one who told you he liked the way you laughed, isn’t he?”

“He is!” She bounces a little in her seat.

“I thought you’d given up on him when he started dating the med student last semester.”

“It turns out that was just a big misunderstanding. They were only friends.”

“Really?” Since it seems that I’ve misread the situation—since she’s obviously going out, my plans for the evening are in absolutely no danger—I settle down on the couch and pull out a cookie.

Her tarot spread looks pretty good. The lovers in the first spot is promising, as is the magician and the ace of cups in the last two spots. Maybe she’s finally found a keeper. Good for her. I lift the cookie to my mouth, but before I can take a bite, Lily slaps it out of my hand. I watch in astonishment as it careens halfway across the room, lands on the edge of the entertainment center and spins like a top for at least fifteen seconds.

“What the hell was that?” I demand. “Since when do you have something against chocolate chips?”

“You know very well that I have nothing against chocolate chips. I do, however, have something against you stuffing your face with a thousand calories right before our date tonight.”

“
Our
date? I thought you said
you
were going out with Brandon.”

“I am. But his brother’s in town—”

“No.”

“Come on, Xandra. It will be fun.”

“No way.” I reach into the bag, pull out another cookie and take a very defiant bite out of it. “I am
not
getting all dressed up just to watch you make goo-goo eyes at some Craft nerd all night.”

“He’s not a Craft nerd—he’s just interested in the history
of Heka, like I am. Besides, you’ll really like Kyle. He’s cool.”

“Yeah, I bet. That’s why he needs his brother to get a date for him.” I shove half the cookie in my mouth, just to annoy her. Childish, yes? But the absolute last thing I want to do tonight is make awkward conversation with some strange guy on a blind date.

“It’s not like that. He was with Brandon when I ran into him today and we just got to talking. They have tickets to a show tonight and the couple they were supposed to go with had to cancel, so they thought it’d be fun if we went with them. And it will be. Brandon’s amazing, so I’m sure Kyle’s pretty cool too. I know he’s smart and cute
and
he’s spent the last three years working in Europe for the ACW, so you totally have that in common.”

“He works for the Council?” I ask, intrigued despite myself.

It’s not very often that you meet someone who works for the Arcadian Council of Witches, Wizards and Warlocks. It’s even more rare to find someone who actually admits to it. A group of twelve magical beings, they’re the governing body that rules all of the covens—including mine.

In fact, they’re the only people my mom and dad actually have to answer to. Usually, a member of our family sits on the Council, but when my uncle died ten years ago, my dad turned down appointment to the Council because he wasn’t happy with their politics. My brother tried to convince him that that was the best reason to take a seat on the Council—so he could have some influence over the way things were going—but my dad wasn’t interested. Doing his duty by taking care of his people is one thing, but playing witch politics is another thing altogether—and someplace he just won’t go.

“He does. For seven years now. Pretty cool, right?”

“Or pretty scary. With the Council, you never really
know which until it’s too late. What’s he do for them anyway?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugs, then reaches for a cookie herself. Although she has a lot more self-control than I do, since she breaks off only a small piece to nibble on. “Something research related—he says it’s not very exciting, but still. I think it sounds fascinating.”

She picks up the cards again, starts to shuffle them. “Come on, Xandra. It’ll be fun. Dinner, a show at the Paramount, drinks on Sixth Street afterward. What’s not to like?”

“The fact that we probably won’t get home before two in the morning? I have to be at Beanz by four, and after the week I had at home, I’m really looking forward to a little downtime.”

“Downtime?” she asks incredulously. “What are you, ninety? Come on, live a little. We’re only young once.” She holds the tarot cards out, waits for me to cut them.