Summerween

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Eight skeletons, five in brightly colored Hawaiian shirts, two in bikinis, and one sporting sunglasses. Twenty-something pink flamingos.

Wren Dunlop had stopped counting the jack-o’-lantern watermelons ages ago—real, fake, carved, or just painted with a smile and a prayer. Solstice Springs had a way of taking things too far.

Though, without the over-the-top Summerween decorations, her hometown would’ve been just another pretty place in western Massachusetts—nestled under the Berkshire Mountains, stretched along a glittering lake, its edges swallowed by forest. The vast, wooded park running parallel to the lake was where she’d played as a child and hung out as a teenager.

Returning in early June meant she was back in the place best described as pure mischief wrapped in sunshine, and nostalgia-tinged warmth smacked her in the chest.

Wren pulled in a deep breath of fresh air, a unique combo of lake water and a sweet hint of wildflowers.

Here, at the park’s lower end, on the edge of the main business center, sat a wide grassy meadow, perfect for lazy picnics, impromptu baseball games, and throwing a frisbee.

At its edge was an old-fashioned white bandstand where she’d had her first kiss when she was …

she counted back … fourteen? How could fifteen years have passed so quickly?

Not wanting to think of the swift passage of time, Wren took in the tall trees edging the meadow, scanning for anyone she might recognize sitting on the benches beneath them.

It was a perfect viewing spot, where residents and tourists—because, God, who could forget the ever-present tourists?

—could watch joggers and walkers as they used the winding paths through the park.

But no one looked familiar, and Wren felt the usual twinge of longing for the town she remembered from her childhood: a town free of Halloween.

Wren had been slipping in and out of her hometown for years now, returning for vacations and weekends and whenever her schedule offered her a break.

She’d watched how, over the past decade, Solstice Springs’s obsession with all things spooky had ballooned past October, living up to its nickname as Halloween Town.

The locals simply called it H?Town. Because …

why not? When your town’s main selling point was weird, you might as well make it weirder.

She shook her head. Her godmother, Luna, was the mayor of H-Town, and she and the rest of her council had a massive hard-on for anything Halloween-related.

The madness initially started with a Halloween festival, which happened to coincide with the anniversary of the founding of the town by a bunch of eccentric Puritans who’d been kicked out of Salem for being “too theatrical.”

The Halloween festival was now H-Town’s biggest drawcard in October, but the council had found a way to celebrate the holiday every month of the year, including February’s Love Potion Singles Weekend, April’s “Spring Cleanse” mini-festival—an opportunity to sweep away any “bad energy”—and August’s Hexes Heartbreak Market.

But this July, they—and by “they” she really meant Luna—were launching their second biggest event to date, a month-long festival called Summerween, culminating on July 31st. Basically, as Wren understood it, it was a summer version of October’s festival, but with tropical colors, skeletons in beach party mode wearing bikinis and boardshorts, and too many maniacal watermelons.

But for the Pagans and Wiccans in town, it all built toward Lammas—a celebration of the early grain harvest and that golden halfway point between the solstice and the equinox.

Underneath the garish decorations and the Summerween crazy, was the ritual of baking breads and gratitude, a reminder that summer—and life—didn’t run at full tilt forever.

Wren thought it was a sensible way to approach life.

Eat the bread. Say thank you. Don’t pretend summer lasts.

She pushed her sunglasses up into her hair and cruised to a stop behind Magda’s Marvelous Magic Medicine delivery truck. Tipping her head to the side, Wren read:

Magicky medicines for everything, from melancholia, to mumps, to mood swings. We deliver!

God, this town. It was mad. Wren rested her arms on the steering wheel, waiting for the light to change.

She looked to her right, and there on the corner sat The Bar, with its plain, square, undecorated windows and faded sign.

Jasper, she was happy to see, was still flying the flag as one of H-Town’s skeptics.

Ever since the H-Town makeover, the residents and shop owners had been firmly divided into two camps, the “True Believers” and the skeptics.

The skeptics were a grumpy brigade who protested anything Halloween-related, which in this town was pretty much everything, while the True Believers proudly and loudly promoted the existence of witches, ghosts, and everything paranormal.

Mostly raised by the town’s most lackadaisical white witch, Luna—whose witchy beliefs and practices were a bit hit and miss and rather mood- and money-dependent—Wren knew that being Halloween-obsessed brought in the tourist bucks.

Even outside of the big festivals, the town hummed with enchanted tourists happy to step into the madness.

But Jasper, along with a few other business people, refused to bend and kept his space strictly Halloween-free.

It was where Wren escaped to when she tired of talk of ghosts and goblins and festivals and fairies.

Damn, but this traffic was taking forever to move.

Wren half-leaned out of her car window to peer around Magda’s Marvelous Magic truck, to see two women she didn’t recognize making shooing gestures with their hands, and the flash of a turkey’s tail.

She leaned out a little further and saw that Reggie, the town’s semi-feral turkey—Freedom of the City honoree two years ago and considered to be H-Town’s first citizen—sat in the middle of the intersection, uninterested in budging.

And because Reggie’s bite was far worse than his bark—or whatever turkeys did—no one was prepared to catch him and remove him forcibly.

Wren knew she’d be here for a while, so she relaxed in her seat and instructed her car’s onboard system to call Poppy. Her friend answered almost immediately.

“Bird! Have you arrived in H-Town?”

She and Poppy had spent every summer of their childhood and teens together, with Poppy only visiting for school vacations—Wren to stay with Luna, Poppy to stay with her grandparents, who’d owned and operated Solstice Deep, the Victorian lakeside inn just out of town.

When she was fourteen, two years after her mom’s death and tired of being bounced between wherever her dad was living at the time and Luna’s house, Wren moved in with Luna permanently.

Well, permanent was relative because two years later, at sixteen, she was accepted to attend the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts.

Luna, unmarried and childless, had been, still was, her anchor.

She’d been her mom, her dad, her bossy older sister, her best friend, her most trusted confidante.

Crazy and chaotic, sure, but solid and steadfast in her love for the child who’d been dropped into her life through her mom’s death and her father’s neglect.

Thirteen years later, Wren was a rolling stone; her job as a choreographer took her all over the world, but this town was, as much as it could be, home.

Wren looked around and sighed. “It’s one of those perfect, early summer days, Pops, the type we love. The sky is such a thick blue, I want to push my hand through it. The trees are bright green, and the lake looks inviting.”

“Don’t, you’re making me homesick,” Poppy replied. Was that a crack in her voice, a hint of tears?

Wren frowned. When had she last heard Poppy sounding excited about her upcoming Boston society-bash wedding?

Granted, it was all planned by her mother and future mother-in-law and was a million miles from the barefoot-in-the-grass, flowers-in-her-hair wedding Poppy wanted growing up, but surely some enthusiasm was warranted?

“How’s your gorgeous groom?” It wasn’t a lie; Benji was a good-looking guy. He just also happened to be too slick, too up-his-own-ass, too much into himself and not enough into her gorgeous, talented, artistic friend.

Poppy took a while to answer. “He’s fine. He’s busy.”

Wren let the silence turn to static until Poppy continued. “I haven’t seen much of him lately.”

“And the wedding preparations?”

During the brief silence between her question and Poppy’s answer, she could easily see Poppy’s shrug. “My mother and mother-in-law seem to have it all in hand,” she replied, her tone stilted. “I don’t have much to do.”

Or say, Wren silently added. Both Poppy’s MIL and her mother were society queens, demanding and difficult, and determined to make Poppy and Benji’s wedding the social highlight of the year.

Poor Pops was just along for the ride. And Wren had a bad feeling about all of it—the marriage, the groom, and the wedding.

Goosebumps erupted on her arms. “Pops, do you not think you should…”

Her words trailed off as she looked to her left and took in a tall guy dressed in running shorts and a sleeveless white gym shirt, exercising on the grass to the left of the bandstand.

And, holy hell, was that skeleton in a bikini lounging on the bandstand bench, its bony arm around a vampire mannequin? Seriously?

Shaking her head, she returned to Exercise Guy and noticed the group of guys in front of him, trying to keep up. The defined muscles in his thick arms and shoulders rippled, and his tanned face glistened with perspiration. Wren watched him rake a hand through his darkened-by-sweat brown hair.

Nice.

Poppy’s sigh drifted through the car. “Talking about fiancés, has your engagement fiasco blown over?” she asked.

Wren wished.