Sorcery and the Single Girl Read online

  I’d originally set the egg aside, thinking I might add it to the collection of crystals down in the basement. The more I thought about that, though, the more it seemed like a bad idea. There was something…odd about the jasper egg. Something slightly off about it.

  I shrugged. It was probably nothing more than the fact that the egg was a cheap, mass-produced souvenir, which wouldn’t mix well with the witchy treasures in the basement. “It’s yours if you want it. Just don’t say that Neko never gave you anything.”

  Melissa stuck out her tongue, but she slipped the egg into her pocket. I maneuvered our tray of drinks and glasses into the living room.

  “So? Which one was this?” I asked, folding myself onto a couch. As I poured a lime-rich cocktail into Melissa’s chilled glass, I couldn’t help but look at the giant display of flowers Graeme had sent me. They filled the coffee table, perfuming the room with the heavy scent of roses.

  Melissa grimaced in partial reply to my question, but she consoled herself with a sip of minty comfort. “Washington Today.”

  As far as I was concerned, the Washington Today want ads were the weakest link in Melissa’s dating scheme. Half of the men who advertised there were married and looking for a little action on the side. About half of those bothered to admit that level of commitment up front. Melissa had learned about the others by sad trial and error.

  “Married?” I asked, thinking that we might as well get the disaster quickly out of the way.

  “Oh no,” she said. “Not currently.”

  “Not…currently?” That reply required my taking a healthy swallow of my own drink.

  “He got married at the tender age of twenty-three. To his college sweetheart.”

  I made a face. “Let me guess. She broke his heart, and now he wishes that he had his college years back, so that he could sow those near-forgotten wild oats.”

  “Are you going to let me tell this story, or not?”

  “Sorry!” I grinned and dodged a waving lily to select one of Neko’s Marcona almonds from the pottery bowl on the table. Crunching the salty snack gave me greater satisfaction than usual. If my familiar was going to blackmail me into taking his boyfriend away from our shared premises, the least he could do was keep me from expiring from hunger.

  Melissa ran a hand through her honey-colored hair and brought her feet up on the couch, sitting cross-legged like a preschooler at reading time. Her overalls settled into place like a child’s favorite flannel nightgown, and I felt like we were staying up late at night at a slumber party. Another swallow of mojito, though, reminded me that I was a grown-up and slumber parties were a thing of the past. The distant past.

  “Okay,” Melissa said. “Washington Today. Married at twenty-three to college sweetheart. For the first time.” She held up one finger. “Divorced her at the age of twenty-five. Married—” Another finger. “A woman he met in a bar, one week after he met her, because he thought he’d found true love. Had the marriage annulled six weeks later. Married—” Another finger. “College Girl again. Divorced her one year later. Married—” Another finger. “His secretary, because she loved him, despite having heard the sordid saga of his love life thus far. And, not surprisingly, divorced her. Spent two years in litigation over the resulting sexual harassment suit.”

  As Melissa extended her thumb, I said, “Married College Girl again.”

  “Bingo! Do I need to go on?”

  “Where did the count end up?”

  “Four weddings to College Girl. Three in-between girls. I was being auditioned for the role of number four.”

  “Any possibility there’d be a decent alimony settlement when you two break up?”

  “With all those other hands in the pie? I’d probably need to sign a prenup a mile long. After all, he is a lawyer.”

  “What type of law?”

  “What else? Divorce!” We clinked glasses on that one.

  “Sorry to hear it,” I said. “Don’t you think it’s time to give the Washington Today ads a rest?”

  “And miss out on so many highly credentialed professionals? What sort of girl do you think I am?” At least she could laugh at herself. Ever a true-blue friend, she said, “But come on! Tell me about your date with Double-oh seven.”

  “Double-oh seven?”

  “That’s what I’ve been calling him in my own mind. I mean, he’s got the accent and the glamour. He’s got that slight air of mystery, luring you away from all you know and love.” She gestured toward the flowers. “And he certainly knows how to get your attention.”

  “What do you mean?” A defensive edge sawed into my voice.

  “Oh, don’t worry. I totally understand,” Melissa said, in a tone that implied she might not understand anything at all. “He’s swept you off your feet. How could you possibly find time for a girlfriend, when you have Graeme waiting in the wings.”

  I started to protest, but then I realized she was right. I hadn’t stopped by Cake Walk in over two weeks. Was that possible? Even when I stopped to think about everything that had been going on—Graeme, the Coven, Family-Togetherness brunch with Gran and Clara—I was surprised at how much time had slipped away. Especially since I usually dropped in for at least one sugar fix a day. Graeme might be poison to my friendship, but he was working wonders on my waistline.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and I let real remorse color my words. “I won’t let it happen again.”

  “If you do, I’ll have to cut you off. You know, never let you work the counter again. Never let you have first dibs on eligible bachelors looking for Lust.”

  I heard the tremor beneath her words, and I leaned forward to clink my glass against hers one more time. “That’s a deal. Hey, are we all right about this?”

  “Are we all right about your meeting Mr. Perfect while I’m left with the dating dregs?” For just a moment, her face looked pinched.

  “Forget about Graeme for a moment,” I said, wishing that I hadn’t set my flowers right smack in the middle of the living room. “Are you and I all right? I mean, if neither of us ever saw another man for the rest of our lives, are we still going to be friends?”

  Her laugh was more bitter than I expected. “We’ll always be friends.”

  I needed to say something. Do something. Break the mood. “Rock, scissors, paper, for getting Neko’s olives out of the kitchen.”

  It took her a moment, but then she counted to three, tapping her right fist against her left palm. I chose paper, and she chose scissors. I was glad to let her win.

  By the time I’d brought in the olives and refilled our glasses, Melissa had obviously decided to let her dark mood pass. “So,” she said. “Tell me about your date. I really do want to know.”

  I wasted a minute, weighing whether she wanted me to tell the truth. What the hell, I decided. She was my best friend. I’d never lied to her before, and I certainly wasn’t going to start now. Popping a stolen olive into my mouth, I launched into the sordid tale. By the time I got to the mosquito repellant, she was grinning, and when I described the obnoxious policeman, she was laughing out loud.

  “I do not believe you!” she said. “You are such a skank!”

  “It wasn’t my fault!”

  “And I’m sure that Neko totally agreed, when you dragged your sorry self home.”

  “I didn’t tell Neko.”

  “What? You didn’t tell His Nosy Highness?”

  “I promised you that I wouldn’t. Friendship Test, right?” The Friendship Test had become so automatic that I’d invented my long-lost high school love without blinking. Ah, the power of girlfriends…“Graeme’s a secret, between the two of us.”

  She flashed me a grateful smile. “I wasn’t sure that you remembered.”

  “I’ve got a crush,” I said. “Not amnesia. I did have to invent a boyfriend, though—Nate Poindexter. How’s that for romantic happily-ever-after?”

  She laughed for real, then, and I knew that everything would be all right between us. Before we could s
ay another word, there was a knock at the door. Melissa looked at me curiously, but I shrugged. I wasn’t expecting anyone.

  Anyone but my warder. I opened the door to a rather agitated David Montrose. “I don’t know what they think they’re doing—” he started, and then he realized Melissa was sitting on the couch.

  “Hello there,” she said wryly, saluting him with her mojito glass.

  I knew my warder well enough to tell that he was silently counting to ten. Not because he had a problem with Melissa—they actually got along quite well. Rather, he’d clearly been expecting us to work together, to polish up some witchy routine, something he’d suddenly realized I needed to know about the centerstone. I could tell from the way his shoulders were set, from the way his jaw tightened when he looked at the fish-chased pitcher of drinks. Or maybe that was merely his taking in the floral display. “Who sent those?” he asked.

  A strange shiver chose that moment to stalk my spine—once again the proverbial “someone walking across my grave.” After the quickest of glances at Melissa, I said, “Nate. Nate Poindexter.”

  “Nate Poindexter?” David asked incredulously.

  “He’s a guy I went to high school with.” I waved toward my best friend, expansive with the secret she and I were keeping. “We went to school with. He just moved back from Silicon Valley.”

  Melissa wiped her smirk clear before David turned on her. “Do you know this Nate? Does he send flowers to all his high school classmates?”

  “I haven’t seen him in years,” Melissa said sweetly. “I hear that he’s changed a lot in the last few years.” She gave me a blatant wink.

  I don’t know if David accepted our ad lib, but he seemed unable to think of another probing question. “Mojito?” I asked.

  “Might as well.”

  Well. That was interesting. David never joined my decompression sessions with Melissa. I felt a wave of foreboding as I wondered just what news he bore. Something bad enough to drive a warder to drink? I’d better make mine a double.

  I caught Melissa’s eye and then glanced toward the kitchen. “I’ll get you a glass,” Melissa said obediently, unfolding her legs from her half-lotus position.

  “I’m sorry,” I called after her retreating form. “There aren’t any clean ones, so you’ll have to rinse one from the counter.” I knew Melissa would glance at my well-stocked cupboards, that she couldn’t miss the glistening glassware. I also knew that she’d give David and me a chance to whisper a hurried conversation.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  He ran both hands through his hair, making the silver at his temples stand out more than usual. “The Coven wants to see you tomorrow.”

  A shard of ice shot through my belly, colder than any mojito in the world. “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” he snapped. Before I could take offense, he sighed deeply and then repeated in a drawn-out voice, “I don’t know.”

  “But I haven’t done anything wrong!”

  He must have heard the panic in my voice—I wasn’t exactly subtle. I was running over everything I could remember from my other encounter with the witches. The man with the sword, the horrible feeling that I was back in high school, the desire to be friends with the women, and the fear that they would never accept me….

  My apprehension broke David out of his own dark mood. “It’ll be fine,” he said. If I hadn’t spent hours working with him, days, weeks, months learning everything that I could about witchcraft, I might have been fooled by the sudden steadiness of his words. He nodded once, as if cementing his certainty. “You have nothing to worry about.”

  “But—”

  Uncharacteristically, he cut me off. “This is actually a good thing. The more that you get to know the Coven before you’re tested, the better. We need to start focusing on setting the centerstone anyway. This will give you a chance to build allies, make friends.”

  As if on cue, Melissa returned with a suspiciously dry glass, which she hurriedly filled for David. “The almonds are great,” she said, nodding toward the bowl. “And the olives are wonderful.” David started to decline, and then she added, “They’re Neko’s, but we’ve appropriated them for tonight.”

  David shrugged and helped himself to a handful of nuts. Before I could pretend we had just been discussing something innocuous, the phone rang. I crossed the living room to answer it, taking a healthy swallow of my mojito along the way. “Hello?”

  “Are there any policemen in the vicinity?”

  “Oh!” Graeme.

  Did David count? After all, he was my astral policeman. At least, he was my astral protector. I half turned toward the wall, as if David and Melissa might forget that I was present. I wondered if there was some way I could drop the name “Nate” into the conversation, without making Graeme think I’d gone nuts. Nothing came to mind. Realizing that approximately three centuries had passed since my startled exclamation, I painted a smile into my voice and said, “None in my current line of sight.”

  “Perfect.” Graeme’s voice was as smooth as the rose petals in the bouquet on the coffee table. “I should come over to visit, then. We could continue the conversation we started in the park, before your jackbooted thug interrupted.”

  “He wasn’t mine!” I heard the giggle behind my voice, and I wondered what I must sound like to David and Melissa. I lowered my voice into a more austere register, and offered a silent prayer that the two of them would start to talk to each other, to cover my conversation with their own noise. “You must be mistaken, sir,” I whispered.

  “Sir?” Graeme repeated. “We’re going to be formal now, are we? And here, I thought we’d moved beyond that.”

  I wanted to say something to assure him that his initial impressions were correct. I wanted to tell him that we had definitely moved, that we’d shifted light-years away from “sir.” That, in fact, I wanted to banish “sir” from our vocabulary forever.

  But I couldn’t very well say that, could I? Not with an audience, suspiciously silent in the living room behind me? Damn Melissa! Why didn’t she start some conversation? Why didn’t she distract David—after all, she was the one who had extracted the promise of secrecy from me!

  I settled for, “There’s a lot of territory to move through.” I winced. Had I ever sounded this stupid before? If only Neko were here, he’d be babbling about something behind me, keeping the conversation flowing, if only to hear the beauty of his own voice.

  God, things had gotten bad, if I was actually wishing for Neko’s interference.

  In the meantime, miraculously, Graeme was chuckling at my miserable attempt at humor. “I realized that after you spurned me—”

  “I didn’t—” I started, before I realized there was absolutely no way for me to finish that line—no way that was fit for public eavesdropping consumption. “Really. I didn’t.”

  Another chuckle. Great. He thought I was playing games. Annoyed with myself, annoyed with the situation, I said, “What did you realize?”

  “You never told me what time the play is on Saturday.”

  “Eight,” I said, thinking that answer was cryptic enough to protect me from prying ears. I gritted my teeth. He could have looked up the time on the theater’s Web site.

  “I could have looked up the time on the theater’s Web site,” he said. What? Was he reading my mind now? Did he have some secret magical powers of his own that let him reach through the phone line and divine my every thought?

  “But you didn’t because…”

  “Because I wanted to hear your voice.” I felt a twinge inside me, a swooping shudder as he purred his response. If I’d begged for a more romantic answer, I couldn’t have found one. I wanted to slump against the wall, slide down to the floor with the phone still cradled against my shoulder, the perfect picture of the lovesick teenager I’d apparently become.

  Speak, I reminded myself. Say something, before he thinks that you’ve hung up. “That’s very kind of you to say,” I finally responded, and I
winced before the words were out of my mouth. I thought Gran might have hotter conversations with eighty-year-old Uncle George. Next, I’d be putting on a fake Southern accent and telling Graeme that I’d always depended on the kindness of strangers.

  “‘Kind’ wasn’t the emotion I was reaching for.” I could picture his lips as he spoke, his strong chin, those tourmaline eyes…. I sighed. It always came back to the eyes. “Come on, Jane. Am I really not going to see you until Saturday night? Can’t we have dinner together tomorrow?”

  Was this really happening to me? Was the man of my dreams really begging me to dine with him? And what else did he have on the menu, besides food?

  Of course, I couldn’t. David was lurking right behind me. I knew that the Coven was a command performance.

  But Graeme wanted me. He really wanted me. That should count for something in the Broken Heart Recovery Sweepstakes, shouldn’t it?

  “I’d love to,” I said. Then I added hurriedly, before he could misconstrue my response, “I’d love to, but I can’t.”

  “Can’t,” he wheedled. “Or won’t?”

  I was so bad at this. Here, I’d been all concerned about protecting my conversation with Graeme from David. Now, I needed to figure out a way to beg off dinner with Graeme, without cluing him in to the whole Coven thing. I mean, it was one thing for him to know I was a witch. It was another for him to learn exactly when the Coven was meeting and why.

  It could be dangerous for the other witches. That was why we all had warders, right? To keep us safe from random madmen, and people who just hated witches for no cause? Not that Graeme was mad. Or a witch-hater. Definitely not a witch-hater, if our dates and my flowers were anything to judge by.

  “Can’t,” I said firmly.

  He sighed, and then was silent for several heartbeats. When he spoke, his voice was so low that I had to hold my breath to hear him. “I don’t know that I’ve ever anticipated a play, then, quite as much as I do this Romeo and Juliet.”