Chapter 4
After she’d found the lump on Red, she’d gone running to Gordon, who’d reassured her he would do everything to get her horse the care he needed.
But medical help had felt pointless so long as the curse hung overhead. The only way to save Red was to hunt down the little witch responsible and convince her to lift the spell before it snuffed the only good thing from her life.
She would not rest until she found Rowan Midwinter.
A river traveled in slow channels within chunks of volcanic and igneous rock below the bridge.
In the summer, it would swell many times over with snow runoff and become the staple of Elk Ridge tourism, hosting rafters and tubers and swimmers where bends and eddies created slow-moving pools.
On the other side, a familiar banner dangled over the entrance to downtown.
Only instead of Elk Ridge Winter Fest, it read Elk Ridge All Year.
Hayleigh hissed through her teeth—that had been her name.
The witches had wanted to call it something silly, like the “Elk Ridge Year Wheel.” It didn’t roll off the tongue like Elk Ridge All Year, which they’d apparently realized.
Her initial annoyance gave way to the rosy glow that came with knowing you’d been right all along.
A few of the previously empty commercial spaces hosted new tenants, and they’d built a massive solar grid just outside town in an open field.
Many of the rooftops featured matching blue-and-silver panels.
Delivering the solar partnership had been quite an ace in the hole for Rowan Midwinter.
The grid featured a sign advertising the clean energy nonprofit the witch worked for when she wasn’t busy “saving Yule” and ruining Hayleigh’s life.
“Must be nice to live in a world where success is measured in virtue signaled rather than value created,” Hayleigh muttered.
Her continued monitoring of the festival’s social media had given her a peek into how they’d been doing, and from the looks of it, their new spring, summer, and fall festivals hadn’t exactly been smash hits.
Oh, they’d certainly attempted to make them look well put together and equally well-attended, but Hayleigh knew trick angles when she saw them. The strain was obvious in their subject and framing choices. Even their fall festival had seemed a bit, well, shoddy.
How did you mess up a fall festival? Any idiot with acreage could throw a few pumpkins on the ground, fill a fryer with apple cider donuts, and city folk would go feral.
It looked as though they simply hadn’t had the resources to invest in getting the events up and running properly, which was not a problem Goshen would have had.
Goshen had capital—the witches of Elk Ridge didn’t.
She’d explained this many times to Dennis McCreery, the owner of the festival grounds, in their negotiations to buy him out, and he had seemed to agree.
But then his son had gone and threatened to cut off contact if he sold to Goshen, and he’d folded like an underfunded startup.
She wondered if he was regretting it yet.
Unlike the other events, the winter festival was back in full form, and its crowds had thickened substantially since last year.
They’d swapped out their street lighting for antique Victorian-style lamps, festooned with heavy garlands.
Skinny trees lined the sidewalks, lit by hot white globe lights that cast a dull orange glow over mounds of fluffy snow that rounded rooftops and smoothing down the crags of mountain peaks overhead.
Hayleigh shivered, remembering in a flash how she’d ended up completely covered in snow after a poorly thought-out kiss with the festival owner’s son, Gavin McCreery.
Gavin. What a painful memory. She’d thrown herself at him, and as soon as it was all over, she wasn’t entirely sure why she’d bothered.
Maybe it was simply that he hadn’t been Grayson.
She’d mustered the courage to break up with her fiancé the first time just before leaving for Elk Ridge, and a part of her must have known that as soon as she returned home and fell back into her normal routine, she would fall back into him.
Which was exactly what happened, and it had taken another ten months for her to work up the courage to break it off again.
Gavin McCreery had been handsome and wealthy enough that her family probably would have approved, and after so many years of men like Grayson, and Jack, and her father, it had been nice that he was, well, nice, and didn’t seem to want to manage her.
And the way he’d looked at Rowan Midwinter—like she was the air he needed to breathe—well, Hayleigh had jumped at the possibility he might look at her that way instead, because Grayson certainly never had.
But the fact was, Gavin had never been her type. The man was far too quiet and, frankly, a bit boring. He’d tried to tell her about pens on their dinner date—pens, for God’s sake! Who wanted to hear about pens?
Her car glaciated through congested streets. Parking was bleak. Every lot, even those at the far edges of downtown, was blocked with signs reading FULL. After three loops around downtown, she spotted a loading zone near the back of the festival grounds and pulled in with a lurch.
As she sprinted toward the gates, she was almost run down by a polished red mahogany sleigh pulled by prancing caramel-colored Belgian draft horses.
The groom shook his fist her way before urging the horses to continue down a track that swooped around the festival grounds before disappearing into the snowy woods beyond.
The couple riding in the back looked down at her with frowns as matched as their tastelessly festive sweaters, and she shouted, “Nothing says romance like overpaying to freeze your butt off!”
She pressed on with a scowl, feeling decidedly humbug.
As she passed beside the massive evergreen tree that grew at the entrance to the festival, a delicate tinkle of bells swept through her, leaving a tingling in her skin.
Tart green branches at her side shivered.
She assumed that was where the sound had come from, but on closer inspection, there were no bells—only strings of multicolored lights and clear glass ball ornaments filled with assorted bric-a-brac.
Some held small toys and ribbons; others, plant matter; still others rattled with rocks and bits of crystal that caught the light.
She paused at one ball that was different than the others.
Not clear but solid and painted in delicate strokes of oil.
After a moment, she realized she was looking at a scene from Snowflake Lane.
The distinctive skybridge connecting the two halves of the Bellevue mall framed a parade of costumed figures from the exact vantage from which she’d often watched as a child.
How many times had she stared up in wonder at this exact sight? She could almost feel the brush of bubbles against her skin, hear the music overhead, feel her mother’s arms as they wrapped around her chest to hold her close and keep her warm. There was a pulse of something in her chest.
An older man had stopped to gaze at the ball as well. “Well, isn’t that something. I used to go there every year at Christmas as a kid.”
“You went to Snowflake Lane as a kid?” As far as she knew, downtown Bellevue wasn’t old enough for that—much less the event itself.
“Snowflake Lane?” The man’s face was lined with confusion. “That’s the downtown of Woodstock, Vermont.”
“But it’s…” She glanced back. Sure enough, the painting now looked like a quaint, historical New England town.
Whether the town was Woodstock, she couldn’t say, but it certainly wasn’t what she’d seen a moment ago.
All the warm fuzzies she’d been feeling dried up, leaving even more humbug in their wake.
“My mistake,” she muttered, and then thought, Midwinter magic again, with a scowl.
What right did they have to manipulate her like that?
Or any of their guests? The magic of the festival wasn’t advertised—most people wouldn’t believe it if it had been—but it was everything, on everything.
Now that she knew to look for it, she found it in the light displays that hovered overhead without any wires, and in the way the smoke of the firepits always blew away from faces, and in the giant straw goat that a sign promised would help visitors leave behind their regrets when it burned later in the season if they were left on slips of paper to add to the fire.
Nothing a visitor would notice if they, like most people, didn’t know magic was real, but there all the same.
Her stomach yowled as she approached the food court and was assaulted by the smells of fats frying and sugars caramelizing that reminded her there’d been little time to eat in her rush to get here.
She paused, pulling out her phone to check their social media in the hopes they’d posted any clues—like Rowan wearing a stupid hat and dancing around to make children laugh or something.
Her nose tickled, and she glanced up. A big clump of mistletoe dangled from a garland overhead. With a roll of her eyes, she took a few steps away.
A moment later, her nose twitched again, drawing her attention up. Somehow, she’d picked yet another spot directly below a clump of mistletoe. Again, she moved locations—double-checking that she hadn’t accidentally stumbled on more—and, finding the coast clear, resumed her search.
The last picture of Rowan had been posted on the opening day of the winter festival.
The witch was posed beneath the entrance gate, pressed into Gavin’s side, the pair of them grinning like idiots.
They could have at least done her the favor of not working out, but it seemed Hayleigh was the only one spending this Christmas single.
“Hey…” She looked up. A man with a sweep of inky hair eyed her with a smarmy grin. “Look up.”
She didn’t want to, but she did, cringing at what she knew would be there.
There had been no mistletoe when she’d stopped, but sure enough, there it hung overhead like a beacon for basic men with even more basic ideas of what made a meet-cute.
“Are you following me?”
The man startled. “Me? No, I—”
“Not you. It.” She pointed a finger at the greenery accusingly.
“I, uh, think I hear my friends,” he said as he backed away slowly.
She shot the mistletoe a glare that she hoped would pierce through the spell and hit the witch responsible. “Go away—I mean it.”
The leaves shivered and then, to her great surprise, vanished before her eyes. It was nothing more than what Hayleigh had asked for, but even so she let out a yelp and bolted from the spot.
She was so very done with reindeer games. Rowan might have been a moving target, but there was one Midwinter she knew exactly where to find.
Heading toward the entrance of the vendor market, she set her sights on Stephan Midwinter.