Chapter 10
She’d fucking cursed him.
As Vivi sped back toward Graves Glen, Rhys sat in the passenger seat, staring out into the dark, still trying to wrap his mind around it.
“So you took a bath,” he said slowly, and next to him, Vivi made a frustrated sound.
“I told you,” she said. “I took a bath, lit some candles, and then Gwyn and I said a whole bunch of silly stuff about your hair and clitorises that was obviously not a real curse—your hair looks really good, by the way, and I don’t actually want to know about the rest of it—but at one point, there was, like, this whoosh of flame, and I might have said, ‘I curse you, Rhys Penhallow,’ but I didn’t mean it.”
Vivi’s hands were gripped tight around the wheel, her eyes wide, and Rhys looked at her. “You . . . literally said, ‘I curse you, Rhys Penhallow,’ and now you’re surprised that I, Rhys Penhallow, am cursed? Also, I’m sorry, what was that about clitorises?”
Vivi rolled her eyes as she turned back onto the highway. “The point is, we were just being drunk and stupid. No attempt at actual magic was being made.”
“And yet actual magic has been done,” Rhys muttered, settling back into his seat.
His skin still itched from the aftereffects of charging the lines, fingers tingling, and there was a strange cold sensation at the back of his neck. Was that normal, or was it part of whatever had just gone so spectacularly wrong back there?
Narrowing his eyes, Rhys peered into the darkness as though he might be able to see that racing spark of magic still making its way down the mountain. All he could see, though, was the ribbon of road unfurling in front of them, and for a second, just the barest of moments, Rhys let himself believe that nothing bad had actually happened. His father had seemed so confident he hadn’t been cursed, after all, and when was Simon Penhallow ever wrong? Maybe this is what it was always like, charging the lines.
And then Vivi’s phone rang.
Sang, actually. The Eagles’ “Witchy Woman” wailed from Vivi’s purse, shoved between the front seats, and Vivi barely glanced at it, her fingers tightening on the steering wheel.
“Gwyn,” she said, but didn’t reach for her bag. “It’s probably nothing.”
“No doubt,” Rhys said, hoping more than he’d ever hoped for anything in his life that she was right.
“Wanting you to pick up pizza and cheeseburgers for dinner,” he added, and Vivi looked over at him.
“What?” he asked to her look, shrugging. “America.”
The phone went silent, and Rhys sensed that Vivi was holding her breath.
Fuck, he was holding his.
And then the song started up again.
Fumbling in her bag, Vivi pulled out her phone, sliding a thumb across the screen, and before she even had the phone up to her ear, Rhys could hear chaos. People shouting, someone screaming, and Gwyn yelling Vivi’s name, and Rhys sank back in his seat, covering his eyes with one hand.
“Gwyn, calm down!” Vivi was saying. “I can’t understand you—”
The phone was firmly pressed against her ear now, and Rhys watched her, actually saw the blood drain from her face as she said, “We’ll be there in two minutes.”
She let the phone slide from between her cheek and her shoulder, and gripped the wheel even tighter.
“What is it?” Rhys asked, but Vivi only shook her head and said, “Your seatbelt is buckled, right?”
“Obviously, I’m not an idiot, Vivienne,” he said, sitting up slightly only to immediately be thrown back against his seat as Vivi pressed the gas pedal to the floor.
“That bad, then?” he asked grimly.
Vivi was equally grim as she answered, “Worse.”
Vivienne had not exaggerated the speed with which they got back to Graves Glen. By Rhys’s count, it was only ninety-something seconds after Gwyn’s phone call that they were pulling up in front of Something Wicked.
Vivienne barely put the car in park before rushing out onto the sidewalk.
Rhys was a little slower, his hand resting on the top of the open car door as he tried to take in what was happening in the front window of the shop.
He spotted Gwyn easily enough, standing on top of the counter, a broom raised in her hands, and there in the back corner was a trio of girls, crouched down against the wall, their faces pale, their eyes huge.
And all over the floor between them and Gwyn were . . . skulls.
Small ones, about the size of a baseball.
Vivienne was already in the shop, and he saw her pull up short with a shriek as all the skulls turned toward her almost as one, their mouths opening and closing.
Rhys heard Gwyn shout something, but he was already moving into the shop, that absurd raven croaking at him as he threw the door open.
Magic lay heavily over the shop, so thick it made his teeth ache, his skin humming with its power, but there was something underneath all that power. Something dark and rank, a powerful sense of wrongness hanging over the whole shop.
Rhys had never felt anything like it before.
The skulls skittered across the floor, their jaws opening and closing and propelling them around the hardwood at a surprising speed. The eyes were lit up, too, but instead of the purple Rhys remembered from earlier, they were red now, bright red, and there were so bloody many of them.
Something thumped against his ankle, and Rhys looked down to see one of the plastic skulls grinning up at him.
“Steady on, mate,” he muttered, wondering if he was talking to the skull or to himself.
And then the skull’s teeth closed around the leg of his pants.
Rhys was not proud of the sound that came out of his mouth as he jerked his leg back, kicking out in an attempt at flinging the thing off.
When that didn’t work, he didn’t even think. He pulled a thread of magic up from the soles of his feet to the tips of his fingers and blasted the damn thing to little plastic confetti.
“Rhys!”
He looked over to see Vivienne still standing with her cousin, armed now with one of the heavy crystal balls he’d spotted earlier.
She was glaring at him, and then gave a significant look to the group of tourists huddled in the corner, now watching him with wide eyes, and Rhys just barely kept from scoffing as he replied, “What was I meant to do, Vivienne?”
There was a singed smell, the slightest hint of burning hair, and Rhys saw he’d burned a hole in his trousers—and nearly his leg—with that little spell. Cursing, he patted at the smoldering hole even as he kicked another of the little plastic bastards away from him.
“Fucking ridiculous,” he muttered, stomping on one of the skulls, then another, before holding out his hand to Gwyn.
“The broom,” he called, and she tossed it to him.
Catching it easily, Rhys swung the broom back down toward the floor and, in what was perhaps one of the most satisfying moments of his life, swept the skulls directly in front of him in a wide arc toward the wall.
None of them broke, but they skittered drunkenly, bumping into each other, spinning around, and Rhys kept moving forward, sweeping the broom back and forth, clearing a path to the three girls in the corner.
“Ladies,” he said with a smile when he reached them, “hopefully we’ve all learned a valuable lesson about ordering things off dodgy websites!”
He kept grinning at them even as they stared at him. He saw one glance down at the hole in his pants, and directing them to follow him said, “Lucky thing I had a lighter on me.”
Given that he was currently cursed, Rhys knew using magic on them was dangerous, but charm, he’d found, was a sort of spell all its own. As he moved the girls toward the door, sweeping skulls all the while, he kept up a sort of inane chatter about checking the batteries in things before you put them out on the store floor, on the strongly worded email he was going to write to the manufacturer and on the discount Something Wicked would be sure to give them the next time they came in.
By the time he got them to the door, he was sick of his own voice, but the girls seemed less freaked out, one of them turning around to offer, “I once ordered an iPod off the Internet, but, like, some random website? Not Apple? And it, like, totally started smoking in my pocket.”
“Even so,” Rhys said, ushering them out onto the sidewalk. “Thank you for shopping at Something Wicked, please come again!”
The raven over the door shrieked as Rhys closed the door with a decisive bang and reached up to pull down the little shade over the window.
Once the door was firmly locked, he looked over at Gwyn and Vivienne.
Gwyn was still on the counter, her hands close together as a greenish light sparked back and forth between her fingers.
“Nicely done, dickbag,” she said, and before Rhys could object to that—which he wanted to, vociferously—she nodded at Vivienne.
Nodding back, Vivienne moved to the front window, dodging the skulls with surprising grace.
Do not notice how nice her legs look as she’s stepping over possessed pieces of plastic, you absolute pervert, Rhys thought to himself, but it was no use. Vivienne may have cursed him, may have been the cause of every bad thing that had happened to him since he set foot in this town, but his cock had clearly not gotten the message.
Stepping to the window, Vivi lifted one hand, white light glowing there. She was using magic to close the massive velvet drapes bracketing the shop’s front window, Rhys realized, and before he could call out a warning, the light jumped from her hand to the curtain.
And promptly set it on fire.
Vivienne shrieked as one of the skulls snapped at the toe of her shoe, and Rhys crossed the store, kicking the skull even as he reached up with the broom in an attempt to bat out the flames.
The smell of burned plastic filled the room as the bristles kindled, and out of the corner of his eye Rhys could make out Gwyn directing her magic toward the window.
“Don’t!” he shouted, and to his immense relief, he saw her drop her hands.
He was slightly less relieved to realize there was now a small crowd growing outside the window, which was very much open to reveal both the utter chaos inside and all the magic they were doing to try to stop it.
Wonderful.
All around them, the skulls were still moving, jaws opening and closing, and Rhys reached for Vivienne’s hand. “The storeroom!” he shouted over all that chittering, and Vivienne nodded, taking his hand.
Up on the counter, Gwyn looked from the window to the pair of them, then back again. “So what?” she asked. “We just hide from Night of the Living Tchotchkes and hope for the best?”
“Do you have a better idea?” Vivienne asked, but before Gwyn could reply, the door to the shop blew open, slamming hard against the wall.
Rhys turned slightly to see who had managed to come in—he was sure he’d locked the damn thing—but before he could, there was a nearly deafening blast and a flash of blue light that had him throwing his free hand up against the glare.
When he lowered it, he saw that there was nothing left of the skulls save for a few stray pits of smoking plastic and one red blinking eye that flashed off and on a few more times before slowly dying out.
In the silence that followed, Rhys was very aware of the smoky haze still lingering over the store, the scorch mark now scarring the floor in front of him and the fact that Vivienne was holding his hand.
He looked at their interlocked fingers, her palm almost hot against his, and then up at her face. Her cheeks were pink, eyes wide, and when she sensed him looking at her, her gaze shot to their hands.
Flustered, she dropped hers, stepping away from him as her aunt moved farther into the store.
“What,” Vivienne’s aunt said, her chest moving up and down with the force of her breathing, “have you two done now?”