That Touch of Magic Read online

  “Seems like the kind of thing that would be against the rules. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to mass, but as I recall, they’ve got rules for pretty much everything. I hear they’re frowning on the whole Jesus-in-the-potato-chip thing now.”

  “Stacy.” He reached across the table, then hesitated, his fingertips close enough to mine that I could feel the warmth coming from them. That’s probably scientifically impossible, but I used to be able to feel him when he was around the corner in the high school hallway, and I could feel him now, damnit. Still.

  Then, on their own power, our fingers intertwined, so naturally, as if ten years hadn’t gone by without a word between us.

  As if none of it had ever happened.

  Leo smiled. “I had no idea it would be this good to see you again.”

  “Yeah,” I said quietly. My heart was pounding and my legs felt wobbly and I kinda wanted to throw up, but I couldn’t let go. It felt too good to be connected to him again, like water after so many years in the desert I’d forgotten what water was, let alone how much I needed it.

  “Well, don’t let it be too good to see me,” I said, trying to recover my usual swagger and succeeding only the tiniest bit. “I’m very sure that’s against the rules.”

  One side of his mouth quirked up a bit; his eyes focused on our hands. “Actually … that’s not my life anymore.”

  I didn’t feel a response to that at all, although I knew I would later. I would feel all of this later, it was going to haunt me for days if not weeks if not months if not forever, but for the moment, a strange calm was settling over me. The wave of the tsunami was huge and hovering over my head, but for the moment I was dry in the curl of it, although it was inevitably going to crash on me. The only question was when.

  “You left the priesthood?” I asked, almost choking on the words.

  “No,” he said. “I left before it got that far.”

  “You were gone ten years.”

  “I left the church before I took my vows, about three years ago. I’ve been working in construction, actually.”

  “Construction?” I nodded, trying to process it all. “Well, that explains the shoulders.”

  He gave me a confused look. “I’m sorry?”

  “You should be,” I said, the words coming out more biting than I had intended, but what the hell? Leo was back and he wasn’t a priest.

  Jesus.

  His expression softened, and he leaned forward a little, his hold on my hand tightening. “Look, Stacy—”

  I held up a hand to stop him from talking. “Not yet. Can’t do that yet. If ever.”

  He nodded, and sat back again. “Okay.”

  “So,” I said, forcing a brittle laugh. “Construction. That’s kind of a jump from being all Man of God and whatnot, huh?”

  The words were coming out. Were they making sense? I had no idea. I was holding Leo North’s hand in CCB’s. Nothing made sense.

  “I needed to do something else for a while,” he said. “I had a lot of stuff to figure out.”

  “I bet. Why’d you leave?”

  He released a breath. “It’s … complicated.”

  “Everything’s complicated,” I said. “Don’t think. Just answer. Why’d you leave?”

  He met my eyes and smiled, but it was a small, sad smile. “I guess I … kind of lost my faith.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It had been ridiculous, because I knew Leo hadn’t left me for the church. The church was just something he did after leaving me, but I’d always felt like the church was the other woman. All these years, every time I walked past St. Sebastian’s, I kind of wanted to throw a drink at it and call it a whore.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to laugh. It’s not funny.”

  “Sure it is, a little.” That was my Leo. Always kind. Always understanding. Always forgiving. Such a good man.

  The bastard.

  “Still.” I took a breath. “I’m sorry. I really am.” I meant it, mostly.

  He met my eyes, and put his other hand over our joined ones. “Stacy, the shock of this is going to wear off in a minute, and once that happens, I don’t know if we’re going to be able to speak to each other.”

  “Why wouldn’t we be able to speak to each other?”

  He shrugged. “You’re going to be mad. And you get … you know. Kind of hard to reach when you’re mad.”

  I let out the most awkward and unconvincing laugh of my twenty-nine years. “Dude, don’t flatter yourself. I’m over it. What’s your name again?”

  He kept his eyes on mine, that small, sad smile still on his face. My throat felt tight and my vision was going dark at the edges; he was the only thing in the world all of a sudden, just my Leo looking at me, and for that split second, everything was like it used to be.

  And then Liv showed up and refilled my coffee mug and Leo released my hand and a brick wall of pain hit me hard. It was almost funny. I hadn’t seen him in ten years, and suddenly not touching him hurt. What the hell was that about?

  “Hey,” Liv said, watching me carefully. “I’m sorry. It’s been really busy. Is your coffee cold?”

  I didn’t say anything. My heart had stopped dead in my chest, and I couldn’t breathe, and I had maybe thirty seconds before I passed out.

  “Leo, so good to see you again,” Liv said quickly. “I think maybe you should go now.”

  Liv’s protectiveness was so stark, it almost made me laugh. Of course she would be protective; she had been the one to peel me up off the floor when Leo left, and she’d had to practically nurse me through that first year. She had invested a lot of energy in gluing me back together, and there was no way in hell she was going to let Leo North shatter me into a million jagged pieces again. She stood at my side of the booth, her arms crossed and her stance wide, her long dark curls flowing over her shoulders, making her look like a warrior goddess, and her message was clear: Get out or die trying to stay.

  “Okay,” Leo said, and he seemed barely able to get the word out. “I’ll, um … I’ll see you guys later.”

  A few moments, and the bells on the door chimed; he was gone. I tried to take in a deep breath, but I couldn’t. My heart was beating again, though, so that was good.

  Leo North. Leo goddamned North.

  Liv slid into the seat he’d vacated and leaned over the table. “I called Brenda. She’ll be here to cover for me in fifteen minutes, then I’m taking you home and we’ll talk, okay?” She reached out and touched my hands. “Are you okay?”

  “What?” I made a dismissive gesture with one numbed arm. “I’m fine.” I felt my left eyelid twitch, but Liv didn’t seem to see it; she was glancing at her watch.

  She turned back to face me. “Fifteen minutes. I swear, and then I’m coming for you.”

  “Sure, great,” I said.

  The bells on the front door chimed again, followed by some gasps in the dining room, so I looked up. Peach was in her wedding dress, looking like Bridezilla Barbie, down to the platinum-blond hair and the blue eye shadow. Eleanor Cotton, Nodaway Falls’s seamstress laureate, trailed behind Peach, cursing and holding up armfuls of tulle and satin as best she could. Peach glanced around, one hand holding her veil to her poufy coif, the other clutched around her phone. She saw us, and headed over, dragging Eleanor in her wake.

  “Oh, thank God!” Peach said. “I was at my fitting when I got a text from Nick!”

  “No kidding,” Liv said flatly, and I would have laughed if I had it in me. I was still, for the moment, huddled up dry in the curl of a tsunami wave, awaiting the moment when it would inevitably crash down on me.

  Peach put her hand flat on the table, leaned over toward me, and stage-whispered, “Leo’s in town!”

  “We know,” Liv said, but Peach didn’t acknowledge her. It was a dramatic moment, and those didn’t happen too often around here. This was Peach’s horse, and she was gonna goddamn ride it.

  Peach stood up straight and put her hand to her foreh
ead. “He just showed up. He RSVP’d that he wasn’t coming, then he called Nick this morning from the airport. Totally out of the blue. I swear, I didn’t know until just now, or I would have told you.”

  “Fuck!” Eleanor stuck her thumb in her mouth, apparently bitten by one of the thousand pins in Peach’s dress. She glared at Peach. “I’m adding hazard pay to your invoice,” she said around her thumb.

  Peach pulled Eleanor’s hand out, looked at the thumb, and gave it back. “Oh, please. I’m an obstetrics nurse. Don’t complain to me until you’re seven centimeters dilated.” She turned to me. “Did you hear me? Leo’s in town.”

  “We know,” Liv said again, a little louder this time. “He was just here.”

  Peach’s eyes locked on me in alarm. “Oh. God. Stace! Are you okay? Do you need a drink? Happy Larry’s opens at noon.”

  “I’m fine.” I forced a laugh that sounded hollow even to my own ears.

  Liv pushed up from the table, looking wretched. “I really have to go. Brenda will be here soon and we’ll go back to my place, okay?”

  “No, guys, really. I think I just want to be alone,” I said, but no one was listening.

  “Okay,” Peach said to Liv. “I’ll stay here with you until Liv’s ready, and we’ll all go.”

  “You’re not going anywhere in that goddamned dress,” Eleanor said, amping up the Brooklyn in her accent.

  Peach turned on her. “Can’t you see we’re in crisis here?”

  Eleanor narrowed her eyes. For a seamstress, she was pretty scary. “You wanna be in crisis? Try going somewhere in that dress.”

  “Really,” I said. “Guys, I’m fine. It was ten years ago. Stop making such a big deal out of it.”

  Liv looked at me, nibbling her lip, and Peach crossed her arms over her middle. They glanced at each other doubtfully, and I managed to get up from the table all by myself, which I thought was pretty impressive.

  “I have a load of work to do,” I said, stepping around Peach’s huge dress. “And I’m tired. I think I might nap.”

  I kissed Peach on the cheek. “Thanks for coming so fast.”

  I patted Eleanor on the shoulder. “Sorry for the inconvenience.”

  I reached out and squeezed Liv’s hand, pressing the money from Deidre Troudt into her palm. It was a hell of a tip, but I didn’t care. I just needed to get out of there, fast. I didn’t have time to do the math on two cups of coffee and personal bodyguard services. “I’ll call you later.”

  They might have responded to me; I don’t know. As I walked out of Crazy Cousin Betty’s, I couldn’t hear anything but a big, crashing wave.

  Chapter 2

  I drove home on autopilot, finding my way to my trusty Winnebago on the dusty outskirts of town without realizing I had done it until I was pulling the rickety screen door away from the rickety regular door. It wasn’t much, but it was mine, and it had been free; my aunt Ruthie had given it to me before she ran off to South America with husband number four.

  “I think you might need a place to get away from your mother sometimes,” she’d said, stuffing the keys and the papers at me with one hand while the other lifted a frozen margarita. I was only twenty at the time, but even then I knew how right she was. The ’Bago didn’t drive; Ruthie had blown a gasket on it while driving it around town for her fourth bachelorette party. I’d had it towed to the four-acre lot I’d purchased with the intent of building a real house someday. The thing was, someday never came, because I never wanted a real house. The permanency of a real house gave me the twitches, whereas the ’Bago always felt comfortably temporary, even after nine years of sitting in the same spot.

  I crawled inside, lay down flat on the bed, and stared at my ceiling. Ceilings in general are boring things to stare at, but try staring at the ceiling in a Winnebago for three hours. It’ll make you want to stick a fork in your eye, just for the variety. Of course, if I closed my eyes, all I saw was Leo’s expression of mixed shock and elation when he first saw me, and I felt all over again that wonderful, terrifying happiness quickening in my chest, only to be beaten to death by the How stupid are you? two-by-four.

  “Arrrrgh!” I yelled finally, grabbing a pillow and pressing it over my face before tossing it aside and sitting up. This was no way to spend my time. I had to do something, distract myself, think about something else for a while.

  I stuffed my feet into my work boots and headed outside into sunlight that was a little too bright for my taste. I mentally cursed it and squinted, trudging my way down the path through the woods to my sanctuary.

  It was just an old garden shed, but it was one of the few things in the world I loved. It had been on Millie Banning’s grandmother’s farm outside of town, and when we were kids, she, Liv, Peach, and I used to have sleepovers in that old shed. It was pretty big, even for a shed, and we pretended it was our apartment and that we lived there together while we each pursued our dreams. Liv wanted to be a television journalist, tracking down bad guys and getting them to confess on tape; Peach wanted to be a fashion model; Millie wanted to be an astrophysicist; and I wanted to be independently wealthy. The three of them would run around, pursuing their dreams, and I would laze on the sofa (a big piece of foam we’d covered with sleeping bags) and eat Doritos while watching Liv pretend to interview someone while hunched inside the huge fake television we’d made out of the box her mom’s new oven had come in.

  I never expressed to any of them how much I loved that shed. Sometimes I would go visit Millie just so we could sit together in the doorway of the shed, drinking Diet Cokes and singing bad duets. We were too old to pretend by then, but I still would. I’d pretend that Millie and I were sisters, and that I had also been raised by someone who baked cookies and showed up for school plays and high school graduations.

  And then last year happened. Magic came to town in the form of a badass conjurer named Davina Granville, who had set her sights on taking Liv’s power. Millie, easily the most fragile out of the four of us, had stupidly let Davina use her to get to Liv, all in an attempt to steal my brother from Peach. Just thinking about it made me furious, even now. Millie had loved Nick for all those years, but had never said a thing, and then when Peach and Nick got together, instead of turning to us and letting us help her, she lost her shit and gave herself over to the most dangerous person who’d ever stepped foot in Nodaway. In the end, Liv had survived, but Millie had not. Our foursome was cut down to three, and I still hadn’t forgiven Millie for letting that happen.

  Anyway, when the bank sold off Millie’s property, I bought the shed from the new owners. I didn’t have any particular plans for it at the time, but then the county library downsized and I got laid off and it turned out to be damn near perfect for my new career making magical potions. I wasn’t sure if Millie would be happy about me finally having a direction in life, or sad that I was profiting from the very thing that killed her. I liked to believe she was happy for me, and if she wasn’t, then it was her own stupid fault. If she hadn’t gotten herself killed she could yell at me.

  I continued down the wooded path, the sunshine a little more bearable now that I was shaded partially by the trees. I followed the bend in the path to the small clearing where I’d placed the shed. The trees were full with summer leaves, dappling the sunlight into the open space, making it feel more magical than anything I’d ever accomplished with potions. This was the magic of hope, of potential, of dreams. The regular world was no place for that kind of nonsense, but here, in this one space, I could believe in that kind of magic again.

  I went around to the side of the shed and yanked the generator cord one, two, three times … and it finally took. I’d need to get a new one before winter hit, but that wasn’t today’s problem, so I wasn’t going to worry about it.

  I took my keys out of my pocket, popped open the padlock, and stepped inside, feeling peace wash over me as I did. The floor was packed dirt, which gave it a wonderful, earthy smell; clear Christmas string lights lined the doorway and the wind
ows, as well as the ceiling and some of the shelves. I’d painted the wooden walls a bright yellow; the shelves, cloud white. My workbench, which lined the back wall, I’d painted a periwinkle blue. Holding up either side of the workbench were a series of shallow drawers, each with a ceramic drawer pull on it, all of them bright, cheerful, and mismatched. Mason jars in varied sizes lined the shelves, all containing the magical herbs I’d collected over the last year. I’d printed out pretty, swirly labels for the jars in cheerful pastels, and tied ribbons around the mouths of the jars to color-code them by intention. Most ribbons were blue, indicating perception magic, but a few were in dangerous red, indicating some of the rarer and more interesting samples I’d gotten my hands on and set aside for the days to come when I’d be able to do more hard-core stuff. It was my haven, my happy place, and my secret shame. If anyone knew I had gone all Martha Stewart out here, I’d never be able to hold my head up in town again.

  I sat on one of the pair of leather-cushioned, twirly bar stools I’d appropriated from Happy Larry’s, started up my little MacBook, and got to work.

  * * *

  I don’t know how long I’d been working in my garden shed, but by the time I looked up from my workbench, the sun was close to setting and with a sudden whap! of consciousness, I realized I was starving. It was like that sometimes. They say you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing when you lose time like that, when the world spins quickly around you and you stay in one space. If that’s true, then I’m supposed to be making magical potions, I guess. Or maybe it was just how much I loved the shed. Either way, happy was happy, and I wasn’t looking a gift horse in the mouth. It wasn’t going to last, I knew. Even in that flash of reconnection to the world at large, I could feel the reality of Leo’s return like a punch to the gut.

  I pushed him away and focused on the work.

  I glanced at the Erlenmeyer flask full of steaming amber liquid over the Bunsen burner and checked my watch. Three hours and forty-five minutes; it was almost done. I had no real hopes of success. Most of my work had been perception magic, beginner stuff. Creating something physical with potions was varsity-level shit even for the most highly trained conjurers. For a rogue conjurer like myself, who didn’t have any official training, it was both stupid and improbable. Which, of course, was exactly why I was trying it.