Chapter 25
I walk around for half an hour trying to find my grandmother, but she has truly flown the coop.
Thank goodness the alley is relatively private, as I mutter quite a few expletives trying to find some way past that wooden fence, which I’m assuming is Hunter’s handiwork.
It’s annoyingly sturdy, so I finally have to give up and leave my stupid grandmother to suffer the consequences of her own actions.
As angry as I am, I don’t want her to get captured by an alley cat or trapped in a thorn bush. Even if she deserves it. A little.
I’d love to go to the grocery store, but I want to stay close to downtown in case she turns up or flies back home to peck miserably at my door and beg for forgiveness.
I walk down the street for a slice of pizza and settle in for a sulky soak in Maggie’s tub—no.
My tub. Normally, I’d be totally absorbed in a book, but instead I’m catastrophizing about the many horrible things that can happen to a rogue parrot.
I give up on reading and work on the grocery list on my phone.
It takes forever to fall asleep, and then my phone alarm is going off, and then I’m staring up into the trees as I walk down the street, hunting for a flash of pink, and then I’m accepting a hazelnut latte from Nathan and making my biscuit, and then I hear Hunter’s footsteps on the stairs outside my apartment.
As usual, he looks annoyed. “I thought we were working on the video store.”
“Oh. Sorry.” I look at my phone. “You’re ten minutes early.”
His face might as well be made of granite. “My grandmother taught me that on time is late.”
I gaze wistfully at the empty bird cage. “I have two messy sisters and a pet parrot, and I used to get pulled over at least once a week by my ex-boyfriend’s grudge-holding brother, so I haven’t developed that kind of discipline. I won’t be late on you again, though.”
He tries not to smile, his jaw gone tight; I’m getting accustomed to this look on him.
“I have some prices on the wood for your shelves, if you’d like to get down to business.
” He gestures to the open doorway, and we head downstairs.
I turn on the lights, and he lays out his notebook.
It’s covered in tidy rows of numbers. I didn’t realize before now that good handwriting is apparently one of my turn-ons.
“Here’s the cost of the wood.” He points at a number that frightens me.
“This lumberyard is usually cheapest, but I can call around if you want to try something else. Now, that’s for the cheapest option, as bare-bones as I can build your shelves.
Here’s the Full Beast Library option.” The number he points to gives me heart palpitations, and my dream bookshelves have never been so far away.
The dictionary sits heavily in my pocket, but it can’t offer the help I need. It’s odd—I don’t actually know the shape and parameters of my magic yet, but I feel a pull to use it.
Like it wants to be used, an itch waiting to be scratched.
“Let’s try something.” I poke around under the cabinet until I find what I’m looking for.
A phone book.
I know they don’t even make them in more cosmopolitan parts of the world nowadays, but I had a hunch that Arcadia Falls was still a Yellow Pages kind of place. I drop the heavy old book on the cabinet, noting that it’s six years old.
Hunter can no longer contain his amusement. “Of all the ways people respond to high quotes, I have never seen someone whip out a phone book like that. You’re not going to hit me with it, are you? I’m just the messenger here.”
I close my eyes, flip through the pages until I’m compelled to stop, and put my finger down. When I open my eyes, I’m not surprised to see that I’ve selected a lumberyard. “Is this place still open?”
Hunter squints at the tiny words. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard of them. But if you think it’s worth a quote, I’ll give them a call.” He eyes me with curiosity. “What’s your knack?”
“Books. They help me figure things out. They kind of did, even before”—I gesture wildly—“all this.”
He chuckles as he dials his phone. “No wonder you dream of shelves. I’ve never heard of that one before, but let’s see how it plays out.”
Someone answers, and Hunter’s voice goes into Classic Good Ol’ Boy mode as he asks questions that make no sense to me.
Needing something to keep me busy as he writes new rows of sexy figures in his notebook, I go through the shelves under the counter, hunting for things I can throw away.
There’s a stack of mail dating back so far that they’ve changed the stamps.
I think about going through every envelope, but why?
If it’s important, they’ll resend it. Out with the old, in with the new and clean.
“Okay, thanks. Yeah, please hold it for me. I’ll be by this afternoon.”
The look on Hunter’s face as he hangs up is one I haven’t yet seen.
Pure delight.
“That’s one helpful goddamn knack you’ve got there,” he says.
My smile reflects his. “Oh?”
“Well, it turns out someone ordered a very specific load of wood, gave a down payment, and decided not to pick it up. They need it out of the yard, so it’s crazy cheap. Look at this number.”
I do.
It is a very, very good number.
I am not scared of this number.
“So this will make my Beast Bookshelves?”
He nods, grinning. “And I have to admit, it’s going to be a lot more fun for me. How about this for the total?”
He writes down another number.
“That’s not enough,” I say.
“I told you, the wood is cheap. And you already have all the fittings I need in the hardware store. Provided you don’t want a bunch of really intricate molding—”
“I don’t.”
“Then it’s honestly a pretty simple job. Although there won’t be enough for the center rolling shelves…” He trails off, and his eyes fly wide. His teeth flash in a feral grin. “Hot damn! It just occurred to me—the antiques market already has them!”
“Has what?”
Hunter pumps his fist. “Grab your big key ring and come on. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before.”
Once I’ve got the keys, we exit out the front door and head to the antiques market.
There’s plywood completely covering the glass storefront, so I have no idea what’s in there, but now I’m starting to get excited.
It takes me several tries to find the right key, and then I’m smacked in the face with the smell of old mothballs and something animalistic and musky.
In the darkness behind the plywood, everything is a monstrous jumble, and something furtively skitters in the back corner.
“Raccoons,” Hunter says. “I think. Not a bear, though.”
“As long as it’s not turkeys.”
The air is dead and still, and a thick layer of dust shifts under my shoes. When Hunter finds the switch, the old fluorescents flicker to life, and the penny pincher in me wonders how much I’m paying to keep the electricity running here. Once I can see, however, my tune changes. This place is…
The most glorious trash heap I’ve ever seen.
The space is bigger than the video store.
There are tables and chairs, armoires, saddles, chandeliers, glassware galore, some weird mannequins, a dress form, a carousel horse, several moth-eaten deer heads, and one very perky taxidermy squirrel staring down at me from the cobwebbed walls—and that’s just what I can see on this side of several dividers.
“How?” I mumble.
“The little old lady who rented the building used it as a front for selling the meth her grandsons made in her barn. They all went to jail and quit paying. Maggie was too old and tired to do much by then, so she had me put the plywood over the glass and just let it sit. But look!” The space is chopped up into booths, and he leads me around a corner.
There are two rolling shelves, double-sided, filled with old books.
“So that’s two shelves. I think there’s another one somewhere… .”
“There’s got to be two hundred books here,” I say, carefully and lovingly picking up a yellowed Terry Brooks paperback.
“We’re not done.”
My heart lifting, I keep walking, seeing more possibilities with every step. I find lamps, tables, lots of smaller shelves, and a wooden bench painted with flowers that would be great for a children’s corner.
Hunter points at a huge chandelier. Most of the bulbs on it are glowing, and the area around it smells of singed moth. “How about that one?”
“It’s perfect,” I say, followed by a sneeze. “Or it will be, after a good dusting.” I point to a smaller chandelier. “That one, too. It just needs a coat of spray paint. I can pretty much decorate the entire bookstore this way, can’t I?”
Hunter chuckles and leads me to another freestanding shelf crammed with books. “Are you sure your knack isn’t luck?”
“If it was, would you chop off my foot and make a keychain out of it?”
“Too big for my pocket.”
“Well, if it should come to that, please take the left. I’m a righty.”
“That would be quite the—”
He stops himself and looks away. I know this look now. He’s caught himself flirting with me when he’s actually angry with me for some reason that has nothing to do with me.
And I’m sick of it.
“What is this?” I ask. “You’re running hot and cold. Did I do something wrong?”
He squats and fiddles with the casters on a rolling bookshelf, avoiding my eyes. “No.”
“Then why do I feel like we’re dancing around something? Sometimes you flirt with me, and then you go quiet. Your jaw gets all tight. I’m worried you’re going to break a filling.”
At that, he looks up, his jaw tighter than ever. “I’m allowed to be quiet.”
“Sure you are. But you’re not allowed to be secretly angry at me. We just met. You seem really nice. I know I’m nice. We even made tentative plans to go out. But then you found out I’m a Kirkwood—which is not my choice!—and now you’re mad. What’s the real problem?”
He doesn’t answer; he’s back at it with that caster.
I squat down next to him and flick the switch that gets it moving.
“There. Now you can’t pretend you don’t know how casters work.
Stop avoiding me. Tell me what’s going on.
Either we like each other, and something is standing between us, or maybe we just have to figure out how to get along while you fix my building.
But I prefer honesty to shuffling around a big ol’ invisible elephant in the room. ”
Hunter stands and takes a few steps away. He’s taut as a hunting dog, and I can tell he’d love nothing more than to hightail it out of here and away from me and my questions. But I’m also guessing he’s not a coward, and he knows that only cowards run.
“Is it because I’m a Kirkwood?” I ask again.
“Yes!” he practically shouts before reining himself back in.
He paces back and forth, runs his hands through his hair.
“I didn’t know the full story about what happened between our families, so I asked my grandmother.
She and my grandfather raised me—because my mother is dead.
” He looks up, his eyes piercing my heart with their anguish.
“My mother died trying to fix your grandmother’s spell.
She died because she tried to return the magic. ”
The air goes still and cold. I glance up toward the apartment as if Maggie is still there and I can go ask her if this is true. But she’s gone, and even if she weren’t, she hasn’t exactly been forthcoming on topics related to her past crimes.
I’m beginning to see why.
“Your mom died because of my grandmother?”
He nods slowly. “That’s the story. Apparently, after the potluck and the destroyed grimoires, people were still trying to remember the spells they knew best. If they worked, they wrote them down in new grimoires, but those spells were few and far between.
There was a lot of distrust, and nobody shared those spells, sometimes even within families.
All that experimentation caused some damage.
We were in our first drought in ages, and the littlest part of a spell going wrong could start a fire or an explosion.
That’s what happened to my mom. She was good at coming up with spells, which is a very rare talent, and she was trying to restore her grimoire.
Something went wrong, and she died. Burned down the barn, too.
I was maybe two, and my sister, Edie, was still a baby.
I—” His voice breaks. “I remember the flames, but I don’t even remember my mom.
And she would still be here if not for Maggie. ”
The unfairness of it rises in my throat, but I swallow it down. Defensiveness isn’t going to get me anywhere right now. This man has lost his mother. That’s a tragedy I understand all too well.
I move toward him slowly, put a hand on his arm. “I’m so sorry, Hunter.” When he doesn’t pull away, I edge closer, like I’m approaching a wild dog. I slide my arms around his sides and pull him close into a hug. “I’m so sorry. No one deserves that.”
At first, he holds himself stiffly, but then I feel him soften, almost melt into me. His head falls, his cheek against my hair.
“You’re very small,” he says, his voice soft and husky.
“ ‘And though she be but little, she is fierce,’ ” I whisper back.
“Do you have a book quote or pun for everything?”
“Pretty much. It makes me good at party games.”
We go quiet, and I rub his back like I used to do for Cait and Jemma when they were young and crying. In between sisters and parrots I have gotten very good at calming down upset creatures.
“It’s not your fault.” Hunter’s voice is soft.
“I know it’s not your fault. You didn’t even know Maggie.
I’ve been so mad for so long, but my grandma didn’t tell me the full story about my mom’s death until recently.
I knew Maggie was the enemy and that I was supposed to stay away from you, but I didn’t know the full extent of it.
I guess with Maggie gone, my anger transferred to you.
” He pulls away a little and looks down at me.
His arms are around me now. “But you didn’t do anything wrong.
And you’re impossible to hate. You’ve got this…
unsinkable optimism.” He shakes his head and dashes at his eyes with one hand.
“I was not expecting to have emotions today.”
“Me neither. I’m all out of ice cream and tissues.”
He chuckles, and I feel it pleasantly against my chest.
“Anything else you want to get out? Old grudges? New complaints? Are you actually going to text me now?”
“Just one thing.”
I look up.
He looks down.
I’ve only known this man for a few days, but there’s just something so comfortable about him, so competent and kind. And his lips are just so kissable. They curl up at the corners. He leans in.
And then—