Chapter 12
Vivi woke up to find Sir Purrcival staring at her.
That wasn’t all that unusual—he’d always liked to find whoever the last person in bed was in the mornings and snuggle in, and since Gwyn and Aunt Elaine were both early risers, that had almost always been Vivi back when she’d lived here.
What was unusual was that he blinked his yellow-green eyes at her, yawned and then said, “Treats.”
Now it was Vivi’s turn to blink.
“Dreaming,” she muttered to herself. Last night had been awfully traumatic, after all. Made sense she’d have a really vivid, really bizarre dream that felt real but wasn’t.
“Treats,” Sir Purrcival said again, butting his head against Vivi’s arm, and okay, no, this was real.
They had a talking cat.
“Gwyn!” Vivi called, scooting back a little bit in her bed, and Sir Purrcival continued to pace and turn in circles, a constant refrain of “Treats, treats, treats!” spilling from his whiskered lips.
Vivi heard footsteps on the stairs, and then Gwyn was there, still in her pajamas, her hair pushed back from her face with a brightly colored headband.
“What is it?” Gwyn asked, and Vivi nodded at Sir Purrcival.
“He talks now.”
Gwyn blinked at her, then looked back to Sir Purrcival before giving a shriek of delight and clapping her hands. “He does?”
Rushing into the room, she scooped up her cat, holding him in front of her face. “What did he say?” she asked. “Because I’ve always wanted a talking cat, and I think if any cat is going to be a stimulating conversationalist, it’s—”
“Treeeeaaaaaats,” Sir Purrcival croaked again, and then began wiggling in Gwyn’s arms. “Treatstreatstreatstreatsfoodtreats.”
“He mostly says that,” Vivi said, pushing back the covers, and Gwyn frowned at her cat.
“Okay, but maybe once he gets treats he’ll have more to say.” With that, she set him back on the bed and rushed out of the room, returning a few seconds later with the bag of cat treats. Shaking out a few in her hand, she offered them to Sir Purrcival, who gobbled them up. “Now say ‘thank you,’ buddy,” Gwyn coached.
Purrcival licked his chops and headbutted her hand. “Treatstreatstreats,” he began again.
“I think maybe that’s all he can say?” Vivi offered.
“TreatstreatstreatsTREATSTREATSTREATS!”
“I changed my mind,” Gwyn said, scrambling to give Purrcival more treats. “Talking cats are bad. I see that now.”
Then she looked up at Vivi, who was getting out of bed. “This is because of what Rhys did to the ley lines, isn’t it? Like the skulls last night.”
“It’s because of what I did to Rhys,” Vivi corrected on a sigh, her eyes falling on the duffel bag she’d hastily packed at her place last night. She couldn’t quite say why she’d decided to spend the night at Elaine’s, just that the idea of going to sleep in her apartment above the store had definitely not appealed. Now, as Gwyn muttered to Purrcival, Vivi took out the skirt and blouse she’d delicately folded into her bag last night.
“Which means that we were right—there’s a lot more bad shit to come.”
Gwyn shot her a look as she tucked Purrcival underneath her chin. “This is not bad shit,” she argued, then, when Purrcival continued to ask for treats, shrugged. “Okay, it’s not the best shit, but I still don’t think it’s evidence of a horrible curse.”
She gave Vivi another smile before carrying Purrcival to the door. “I told you, Vivi. We’re gonna fix this.”
Vivi wished she felt that confident.
She also wished she didn’t feel so damn . . . embarrassed about the whole thing. Because that’s what had kept her awake last night, staring at the ceiling until well past two in the morning. There was guilt and fear and worry, of course, all that was mixed up in there, but overriding all of it was, Rhys knows he broke my heart.
Not only that, Rhys knew he’d broken it so badly that she’d done magic over it.
And clearly he hadn’t felt the same way back then since it had never even occurred to him that she’d actually been that sad over it.
Which proved, as she’d always suspected, their fling had meant a lot more to her than it had to him. He’d probably barely thought of her over the past nine years, had certainly never googled her while kind of wine-drunk, and while there was no doubt they were still attracted to each other, Vivi was older now.
Wiser.
And the last thing she was going to do was fall for Rhys Penhallow all over again.
Fifteen minutes later, she was heading downstairs, her still-damp hair twisted up in a bun, her jacket hanging off her shoulders, and she was so focused on getting out the door that it took her a second to realize she heard voices in the kitchen.
And not just any voices.
Turning the corner, she looked at her aunt’s cozy kitchen table, the table around which she’d made candles and plucked flower petals for bath salts and never, ever eaten breakfast, and there was Rhys, coffee mug at his elbow, sticky bun in hand, smiling at her aunt.
Who was smiling back almost . . . affectionately. Indulgently.
And then Vivi realized the kitchen didn’t smell like its usual mix of herbs and smoke, but of sugar and cinnamon.
“Aunt Elaine,” she asked, firmly ignoring Rhys, “did you . . . bake?”
Her aunt’s cheeks actually turned a little pink. “You don’t have to sound so scandalized, Vivi,” she said, waving one hand as she got up from the table and crossed the kitchen to the coffeepot. “I can cook, you know. I’ve just usually chosen not to.”
“Which is a crime and a sin,” Rhys said, licking a stray bit of icing off his thumb, a gesture that made Vivi’s own face suddenly feel a little pink. How did he look so good after the night they’d all had? Vivi felt like the circles under her eyes deserved their own zip code, and when she glanced down, she noticed that her blouse was misbuttoned. And there he sat, wearing dark jeans and a charcoal sweater, his hair still very much doing The Thing despite the curse that was evidently real, and for just a second, Vivi gave some serious thought to cursing him again.
Instead, she also made her way to the coffeepot, grabbing a mug from the shelf above it. It was one of the ones they sold in the shop, white with a purple silhouette of a witch zooming away on a broomstick, the words Life’s a Witch, Then You Fly! in curling script below the rim.
“What are you doing here, Rhys?” she asked once she was a little more caffeinated. She wanted to resist the sticky buns on principle, but they smelled too good to pass up, so Vivi grabbed one still warm from the pan, careful not to let it drip on her skirt as she sat at the table.
Leaning back, Rhys folded his hands on his stomach and studied her. “Well, Vivienne, I don’t know if you remember, but it turns out I was horribly cursed, so . . .”
Rolling her eyes, Vivi held up the hand still holding the sticky bun. “Yes, I know, we can skip the sarcasm. I mean, why are you in my aunt’s kitchen right now?”
“We’re looking into curses,” Aunt Elaine said, rejoining them at the table. She nodded toward a yellow legal pad and a large open book Vivi had somehow missed, and now Vivi licked her own fingers before reaching over for it.
The book was heavy, the binding ancient and cracked, and Vivi could barely make out the letters stamped in gold foil on its spine. And even once she could, they didn’t spell any words she recognized.
“I guess it’s too much to hope that there was a really clear and easy-to-do anti-curse ritual in this, huh?” Vivi asked, carefully turning the pages. The paper was so thick that it crackled slightly, the illustrations painted and lurid.
Vivi paused on one that showed a man hanging from a tree branch by his ankles, all his insides on the outside.
“Ew,” she muttered, and suddenly Rhys was there, leaning over her shoulder to look.
“Ah, yes, the ‘Trial of Ghent,’” he said. “We had an ancestor that attempted that. Didn’t end well. You basically take your own entrails out and then—”
“Do not want to know,” Vivi said, quickly turning the page and also trying to ignore how good Rhys smelled.
You’re not allowed to feel turned on when the word “entrails” was just bandied about, she told herself.
“So far, we haven’t had much luck,” Elaine said, “but one bright spot. Thanks to Rhys using his magic to fuel the ley lines, most of the curse has probably drained off of him.”
She tapped the cover of another book. “The law of transmutation. Rhys was cursed, but in funneling his magic into another power source—”
“I passed on some of the curse to the ley lines instead,” Rhys finished. “So still cursed, but diluted. Maybe. Half of that particular page was ripped out, so we’re really just spitballing here.”
“Great,” Vivi replied weakly. And it was great that maybe Rhys could walk through town without being a disaster magnet, but she still felt guilt sitting like a rock in her stomach.
“One question,” Gwyn said, coming into the kitchen. She was still in her pajamas, her long red hair in a braid over one shoulder.
“Only one?” Vivi asked, eyebrows raised.
“Okay, lots, but one for right now.” She pointed at Rhys. “His hair. It’s still doing The Thing. And it’s been doing The Thing ever since he got into town.”
Rhys frowned, reaching up to tug at his hair. “What thing?”
“Oh, like you don’t know,” Gwyn said, and Rhys’s frown deepened.
“Seriously, what—”
Aunt Elaine stopped them both with a lifted hand. “I take it the two of you specified something about Rhys’s hair during the curse?”
Now Rhys’s hand dropped from his head and he stared at Gwyn and Vivi. “You tried to attack my hair?”
“Curse magic doesn’t work like that,” Aunt Elaine went on, ignoring him. “You’ll get general bad luck or, if you go really dark, death. But nothing that small or specific.”
“Good,” Gwyn said. “Now we don’t have to feel guilty about the clitoris thing anymore.”
“Treeeeaaaaats.”
Oh, thank the goddess.
Vivi looked up to where Sir Purrcival had just strolled into the kitchen, twining himself around Elaine’s ankles as she stared at him.
“Oh, right,” Vivi said, shutting the book. “Um. He talks now. But he mostly just says that.”
Elaine and Rhys both took that in before Rhys nodded and said, “Right. Of course he does.”
Reaching down to pet the cat, Elaine looked over at Vivi.
“Why are you all dressed up?” she asked, and Vivi looked down her body, frowning, too.
“I’m not,” she said. “I’m just going to work.”
“At the college?” Aunt Elaine’s eyebrows disappeared beneath her shaggy bangs. “Today?”
“Yes, today,” Vivi said, standing up and straightening her jacket. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“We have important things to do today.” Aunt Elaine placed one hand on her hip, the other holding a wooden spoon. “Witch business.”
“And I have a nine a.m. class,” Vivi countered. “Which I can’t just cancel. We talked about this last night.”
“We talked about Gwyn reopening the store as though everything were normal,” Elaine countered, “not about you going to teach class. This”—she tapped the book in front of her—“is more important right now.”
“I can do both,” Vivi said, standing up. “Penhaven is also a witchy college, remember? I can teach class, then go to the library, see if there are any more useful books there.”
She only barely managed to keep from frowning as she said it. Vivi had worked hard to keep her work life and her witch life separate, which meant she very rarely dealt with anything involving Penhaven’s more secretive classes. But when you had a witchy problem, it seemed stupid not to use that resource.
Even if that resource tended to smell like patchouli.
Rhys was already grabbing his own jacket from the back of his chair. “I’ll come with.”
Vivi stared. “To the college?”
He gave a shrug. “Why not? I am an alum, after all.”
“You came for one summer course, which I don’t think you actually attended more than, what? Five classes of?”
Rhys winked at her. “And whose fault was that?”
Okay, they were heading into dangerous territory now, and Vivi turned away to pull her keys out of her purse, breaking eye contact before she did something embarrassing like blush.
Again.
“Besides,” Rhys said, “it’s clearly not safe for me to be out on my own now, all cursed and what have you, so might as well stick close to the one that did the cursing.”
“I am never living this down, am I?”
“It’s certainly going to be the subject of conversation for a while, yes.”
Vivi looked up at him then, scowling, and was about to remind him that there wouldn’t even be a curse had he not been such an asshole nine years ago, but before she could, she noticed the shadows underneath his own eyes, the tension in his smile even as he attempted to give her his usual rakish grin. As horrible as it sounded, that was actually kind of comforting, knowing that Rhys was freaked out about this.
All this quippiness and pastry eating were just a cover.
Had he always done that?
She couldn’t remember.
Of course, she’d only known him for a few months nearly a decade ago. Weird to think that someone who had loomed so large over her romantic life for so long was basically a stranger.
Shaking off that thought, Vivi stepped back from him. “Fine. Come with. I’ll go teach, and you can go check out the Special Collections at the college library.”
“Is that a euphemism?” Rhys asked. “I really hope it’s a euphemism.”
“Nope,” Vivi replied, already pulling out her phone to send an email to the director of Penhaven’s library. “It’s exactly what it sounds like.”