Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
So far, this has been a year of firsts. First ancestor ritual, first fight in a library, first time getting it on with a guy from another realm. And tonight, for the first time in my life, I’m going to a fire hall to play bingo.
Fortunately, Liv is meeting with her lab partner this evening and won’t be back until I’m gone. I know I’ll eventually run out of excuses, and honestly, I’m tempted to tell her everything—the whole shebang. But I don’t want to burden her. She has more than enough on her plate right now.
After dinner, I head out to the west parking lot to find Avery and Leo’s cars parked side by side.
Avery rolls down her window. “Hop in, witchling.” Beside her, in the passenger seat, lounges Rime.
As I round the car to climb in behind him, Aaron waves to me from the backseat of Leo’s car.
Topaz sits in front of him, arms folded like a pouty teen, and Leo stares stubbornly out the windshield, offering me nothing but his profile.
His absolutely perfect profile.
Fortunately, on the quick trip to the other side of town, Avery and Rime distract me with their speculations about what I felt at the river.
“That’s gotta be the old settlement,” Avery says.
“It could be anything,” I argue. We shouldn’t get our hopes up or jump to conclusions.
“With musket fire?”
“They were still using muskets in the Civil War.”
“When was that?” asks Rime.
“Eighteen sixty-one to sixty-five,” I tell him. “Two hundred years after Browne.”
Avery points out, “But muskets were quicker and more efficient by then. And you said you think people were killed there. If that happened in the late 1800s, it would be in the books, but Leo says it’s not.”
Rime agrees. “He couldn’t find anything about it.”
So, no massacres, slave revolts, or skirmishes along the French Broad in Alderford.
At least none on record.
We turn at the station and follow the line of cars parading past the fire engine garages. Around back, people trickle from the parking lot to the building’s double metal doors. Avery pulls into a space and waits for Leo to come to a stop beside us.
“Y’all ready?” she asks as we emerge from our cars.
Topaz rolls her eyes. “Let’s just get this over with.” She’s dressed in skinny jeans and a hoodie, but she still looks like a mythical creature. A goddess of the dark.
“Everybody got cash?” Aaron asks.
At our nods, he claps his hands. “Alright then, let’s do this.”
“Team up!” Avery commands.
With a grin, Rime jumps to my side—Rime, my Irish boyfriend.
“Come ‘ere, ah grawl.” He threads an arm around my waist and pulls me tight to his side.
“What did you call me?”
“A ghrá,” he answers, close to my ear. “It means ‘my love.’”
Leo’s hands curl into fists. “We’ll go in first,” he blurts, even though he doesn’t move.
Avery spins him toward the doors, but his head lags, his eyes locked on Rime’s hand on my hip.
Before the door slams behind him, he turns back again, his gaze holding mine, and suddenly nothing makes sense anymore.
Why am I on one side of the door and Leo on the other?
Why am I standing here with Rime? He’s too big, and he doesn’t smell like books and trees.
A gentle understanding flows from him as I shelter under his arm.
We wait another minute, then head inside just in time to see Avery and Topaz leave the pay line with their bags of cards and daubers.
Meanwhile, at a table in the center of the vast room, Leo and Aaron unpack their supplies.
They’ve strategically placed themselves between a pair of middle-aged women on one side and an elderly couple on the other. Our target demographics.
When Rime and I step up to pay, the heads of the two women collecting cash tilt slowly up, and their mouths part in wonder.
The Rime Effect.
Stifling a giggle, I request two beginner’s packages.
“You each get two daubers with that,” says the woman handing out the cards, a forty-something with frosted tips and inordinately long fingernails. She tosses two dauber bottles into my bag and shoves it at me, not even looking in my direction.
“And you, young man?” She bats her lashes at Rime. “Do you have a color preference? Yellow?”
“Yellow’s grand,” he answers with a smile. “And perhaps green?” His perfectly rolled R’s have every woman within hearing distance fanning herself.
It’s going to be an interesting night.
At his urging, I scan the hall for a good place to set up camp.
Since Leo and Aaron are in the middle, I steer my ‘boyfriend’ to the side furthest from the entryway.
The tables are quickly filling, but I spot two seats together at a table already occupied by four women.
I’m guessing their ages range from fifty-five to seventy-five, and they each seem to be here alone.
As we approach, I sense their loneliness and their eagerness to connect and interact. Perfect.
Rime and I seat ourselves at the far end of the table, across from a lady wearing a mauve sweatshirt that says Grandma’s Garden.
Underneath the phrase, embroidered flowers each bear the name of one of her six grandchildren.
She’s busy arranging Beanie Babies, a pink rabbit’s foot, and several Troll dolls around her game cards.
The oldest woman, who sits beside me, does the same.
Sweetly, I ask Grandma, “Are those good luck charms?”
“Sure are,” she says with a denture-y smile. She lays out a glittery purple barrette that I’m guessing once belonged to Madison, the yellow tulip on her sweatshirt. “You ain’t got any?”
I shake my head. “No. I didn’t know we could bring them. This is my first time.”
“First time, eh? Hope you can keep up.”
“Yeah, me too,” I say honestly. “I’m Betts, by the way.”
“Linda.”
I watch, speechless, as she opens a cardboard necklace box and produces a potato chip. She smirks when she catches my expression. “From the bag I was eatin’ that time I won twelve hundred dollars.”
“Oh. Well then…” Well, then, if she’s superstitious enough to have a stale potato chip for a good luck charm, then there’s a decent chance she’s well-versed in local legends and hauntings.
The elderly woman beside me leans in close and asks me, her poor, cloudy eyes on Rime, “And who’s this fella?”
“My boyfriend, Ryan.”
He wraps an arm around my back and squeezes as he bends past me to greet her. “Pleasure to meet you, ma’am.”
She waves off his politeness. “Call me Barbara.”
When he does, rolling those two R’s, she grins. “You Irish?”
“That I am.”
“So’s my whole line. My granda came over in nineteen-fourteen.”
Hence, another reason Rime is pretending to be Irish. A shared heritage makes for an immediate connection, and this area of North Carolina is positively overflowing with descendants of the Scots-Irish.
While Rime and our new friends discuss Irish family names, I search the crowd for Avery and Topaz, finally spotting them on the opposite side of the hall at a table full of church ladies. Avery’s going to have too much fun with this. And with torturing Topaz.
My eyes continue to roam about the room—until they crash into Leo’s. Beside him Aaron chatters, pointing to the game sheets, but Leo isn’t paying attention. He’s watching me.
I attempt a smile and a wave, but they’re as hesitant and awkward as I feel. Like a bingo hall Mr. Darcy, he nods without returning the smile, his expression unreadable. But his warm, dark eyes linger on mine another second before he looks away.
Next to me Barbara dumps six—no, eight—daubers from her tote bag, and across from us, Linda secures three game sheets to the table with blue painter’s tape. She holds the roll out. “Here, dear. Tape your green sheet down. We always start with green.”
I’m not sure what the point of taping is; it’s not like it’s windy in here. But I say, “Okay,” and begin sticking my game sheet to the plastic tabletop.
When I’m finished, I hand the tape to Rime and ask her, “So you really won twelve hundred dollars? Here, at bingo?”
“Sure did.”
“Wow. I’ve never met anyone who’s won that much money. This girl I know won five hundred in the lottery once. She says it’s because she had a psychic pick out her numbers.”
“You don’t believe her?” asks Barbara, who, thankfully, considers herself part of the conversation.
I turn to her and declare, “I don’t believe in psychics.”
Behind me, Rime chuckles, “But you believe in ghosts.”
“No, I don’t,” I protest, throwing in a flirtatious giggle.
He loops an arm around my shoulders. “Then why wouldn’t you go up in the attic in my parents’ house?”
“Because it’s old, and in Ireland. Everybody knows there’re no ghosts in North Carolina.” I hate that I’m so good at pretending to be a dumb blonde.
Barbara smiles at me charitably. “You ain’t from these parts, are you, dear?”
“Pennsylvania,” Rime says, pronouncing the I as an E and not a Y. I’m pretty sure that, until recently, it’s the only state the fae knew existed.
I hold my breath as Barbara tells us, “There’s spirits in these mountains. If you’ve been around as long as I have, you’d know it.” She couldn’t be taking our bait any better than if she were reading a script.
With a nervous laugh, I accuse her and Rime, “Oh, you two are just trying to scare me.”
“No, it’s true,” says Linda.
I lay an affectionate hand on Rime’s knee. “Ryan says there’re faeries in Ireland, but I didn’t see any.”
“Because, a ghrá, you didn’t know where to look.”
“There’s faeries here, too,” Barbara states matter-of-factly. “Where there’s the Irish, there’s the she.”
“She?” I know she can’t possibly mean the feminine personal pronoun.
“Ask your fella there,” she says with a grin.
“She,” Rime says. “Spelled S-I-D-H-E. The Irish word for faerie.”
I’ve seen that word before, in my frenzied googling after I first found out Leo was fae. I whisper in Rime’s ear, “Is that what you are?”
“Yes,” he murmurs back. “To the Irish, we’re the Aos Sí, the descendants of the Tuatha dé Danann.”
Barbara takes a sip of her diet sprite. “My mam used to carry an iron nail with her everywhere she went. Always in her left pocket.”