Chapter 21
“This is never going to work.”
“It is absolutely going to work.”
Gwyn and Wells had been having a version of this discussion at least half a dozen times since they’d locked up their respective stores. They’d had it when they’d both driven up the mountain to their homes to get ready (“I don’t think it’s going to be nearly as simple as you think it is.” / “It is totally going to be that simple.”).
They’d had it after Wells had emerged from his house, dressed in the most formal and severe outfit he owned that wasn’t a set of robes (“It’s ridiculous to think we’ll just be able to waltz in there and do this.” / “Well, start counting in three-quarter time, Esquire, because we’re waltzing.”).
They’d had it as they’d driven back toward the college in Gwyn’s truck, Baby Witches crowded onto the bench seat in the back (“If we spent a little more time actually planning this, we might see any holes in said plan.” / “There aren’t any holes, plan is flawless.”).
And now, as Gwyn parked on a side street about a block from campus, she turned to Wells in the passenger seat. “Just channel your dad. You know. Authoritative. Snobby. Kind of a dick.”
Reaching over, she laid a hand on his shoulder. “Should be easy. That’s just you cranked up a couple of degrees.”
The Baby Witches chortled at that as Wells glared at her, but Gwyn just kept smiling, and finally, Wells rolled his eyes and she thought she might have seen the barest hint of a smirk.
“Fine. And you’ll be how far behind me?”
“Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. Depends on how quickly these guys can do their thing.” She gestured to Sam, Cait, and Parker, all of whom were practically bouncing with excitement, and while Gwyn loved that for them, she was also maybe just the teeniest bit nervous and maybe slightly less confident in The Plan than she’d insisted.
But once she and the Baby Witches had come up with it, it had seemed imperative that they put it into place right away, right that second. After all, the sooner they found out what Morgan’s big secret was, the sooner they could know if she posed a threat to Graves Glen.
And, okay, yes, maybe Gwyn had been thinking of a reason to go and talk to Wells ever since Friday night, and this had finally given her the perfect excuse, but she wasn’t going to think too much about that right now.
Just like she hadn’t been thinking about how that kiss had had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with the fact that she was very, very into Llewellyn Penhallow, Esquire, apparently.
So better to throw herself directly into this rather than look at any of that up close.
Wells reached up, adjusting his tie. He was all in black, his hair brushed back from his face, that signet ring on his finger the only bit of color besides his blue eyes.
It worked for him, this look. Stern, spare.
Sexy as hell.
Pushing that thought away with the force of a Mack truck, Gwyn checked her own reflection in the rearview mirror. She’d kept the leggings and boots she’d been wearing earlier but replaced her sweater with an oversize T-shirt that screamed FLY, MY PRETTIES! in violent green print, and over that, she’d thrown on a fuzzy cardigan in that same green, a pair of sparkly purple brooms dangling from her ears.
Even for Gwyn, it was a bit much, but like Wells, she had a role to play this afternoon.
“So I’ll just take this file out of the cabinet and hope she never notices?” Wells asked now. “Shove it inside my jacket?”
“That’s the plan,” Gwyn replied, but Parker leaned up from the back seat, something in their hand.
“Actually,” they said, “I made this.”
It looked like a coin, slightly bigger than a silver dollar, and as Wells plucked it from Parker’s hand, Gwyn caught a slight shimmer from it, like oil in water.
“Touch it to the pages, and it’ll record the information,” Parker said. “Then you just put it on another sheet of paper, and everything that was on the original paper will appear there.”
“That is . . . quite clever,” Wells said, holding the coin up to the light, and Parker beamed.
“Thanks! It’s my own creation, and I think it’ll make bank if I can make more and start . . . ”
They trailed off as Gwyn and Wells both slowly turned around to look at them, and shrunk back into their seat. “Certainly not selling them around campus,” they finished up, and Sam elbowed them hard in the side.
“Good to know,” Wells said, then sighed and opened the truck’s door.
“Ten minutes,” he said to Gwyn, and she nodded.
“Ten minutes.”
He turned then, heading in the direction of the college, and Gwyn waited a beat before throwing open her door.
“Esquire!” she called, jogging after him, and he stopped, waiting for her.
Leaves skittered down the street, the afternoon clear but turning chilly, especially here in the shade between buildings, and Gwyn tugged her cardigan closer around her, shivering a little. “I love my Baby Witches so much,” she told Wells, “but I gotta be honest with you. There’s . . . at least a thirty percent chance that thing catches fire or possibly explodes.”
Wells studied the coin in his hand. “Thirty percent?”
“Conservative estimate.”
He looked up, meeting her eyes, and now Gwyn felt shivery for a whole new reason.
“This will end in disaster,” he said, but she didn’t think he really meant it this time.
“It’s gonna end in triumph,” she retorted, and he sighed, slipping the coin into his pocket.
“I suppose we’ll see, won’t we?”
“Gloating isn’t attractive, Jones.”
Gwyn laughed, thumping her hand on the steering wheel as the truck headed back toward downtown, afternoon sliding into evening.
“All I said was that I wanted you to admit that I was right, and also to take out an ad in the paper saying that I was right, and then to make yourself some kind of social media page and have your first post say, ‘Gwyn Jones was right, and I, Llewellyn Penhallow, Esquire, was wrong.’”
She thought Wells might be trying to glare at her, but it was a struggle given that he was clearly just as pleased the plan had worked as she was.
If anything, it had worked even better than she’d hoped.
Wells had indeed been able to meet with Dr. Arbuthnot in her office, giving her some story about his family and wanting to be more involved in the college now that he was back in town.
When Gwyn had burst in ten—okay, nearly twenty—minutes later, with her frantic story about seeing some of the college witches practicing a spell that looked like it had gotten out of hand, she’d almost believed the haughty scowl Wells had thrown her way.
It had actually been kind of hot, especially the way his eyes had moved over her, clearly meaning to convey his disdain at her aggressive outfit but carrying enough warmth that Gwyn was glad Dr. Arbuthnot had been distracted.
Dr. Arbuthnot had, as hoped, followed Gwyn out of the room and to the quad, a space that was glamoured so that the regular students only ever saw what looked to be other kids, reading, studying, throwing a Frisbee.
The Baby Witches had done their job a little too well, but once the gaping crack in the ground was closed and the trees went back to normal, they’d gotten off with a fairly light punishment (two weeks of volunteering in the dining hall), and Gwyn had been left alone with Dr. Arbuthnot.
“Thank you,” her former teacher had said before narrowing her eyes. “Why were you on campus anyway?”
“I was picking up something in Vivi’s office,” Gwyn said, holding up the Welsh history book she’d actually snagged from the cabin earlier. Some of Vivi’s stuff was still up there, and Gwyn had known the perfect prop when she’d seen it. “She needed it for the research she’s doing in Wales right now.”
Dr. Arbuthnot would probably be suspicious of Gwyn until one or both of them died, but she liked and respected Vivi, so she’d bought that excuse, and within minutes, Gwyn was back in her truck, waiting for Wells.
She waited awhile.
It was almost half an hour later before he came hurrying up the street, and when he’d gotten in the truck and pulled the file folder out of his suit jacket (he’d clearly taken her advice about Parker’s coin), Gwyn had officially begun The Gloating.
Now, as she turned to head back to Main Street, she nodded at the folder still sitting in Wells’s lap. “Have you looked at it?”
“No, I was just happy to find it, honestly. Do you know how many Howells have gone to Penhaven through the years? Didn’t want to risk her coming back and catching me with it, so I just shoved it in my jacket. And then I had to sit there and keep up the ruse after she was done with whatever it was those three did.”
He glanced toward the back seat now. “Speaking of, where are they?”
“They stayed on campus to do some studying,” she said, and he nodded, looking back at the file.
“So shall I open it now, or do you want to save it for when we can look at it properly?”
Shaking her head, Gwyn rolled up her window. “Go ahead and check it out.”
Wells flipped the file open, his eyes scanning the page. “You were right about her major being Ritual Witchcraft. She was a good student, too. Almost all A’s, commendations from her professors . . . ”
Gwyn snorted. “I don’t ever want to look at my file,” she said. “Probably has ‘HERE THERE BE DRAGONS’ stamped on it and that’s it.”
Wells smiled at that, his eyes still on Morgan’s record. “And mine no doubt says, ‘FUCKED OFF,’ so no real desire to look at that, either. Ah!” He tapped the page. “Here we go. ‘Student advised to withdraw before graduation due to inappropriate and unseemly magical practices.’”
Wells looked up, a trio of wrinkles appearing between his brows. “And that’s it.”
“That could be anything,” Gwyn said, and Wells sat back, thinking.
“Anything bad,” he said. “So at least we know that whatever it was, it wasn’t good.”
Gwyn nodded, but she couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed. “This honestly feels like a waste of a very excellent plan,” she told Wells, and he made that “Hmm” noise again, that thing he did when he didn’t know what else to say.
And it bugged her, just a bit, that she was already starting to recognize his sounds. The faces he made. The way he rubbed his beard when he was thinking hard about something.
Now he reached up and loosened his tie, unbuttoning the top few buttons of his shirt, and Gwyn fought very hard to keep her eyes on the road. “So I’ll drop you off at yours?”
He’d taken his car from the store earlier, but they’d left it back at his house before heading to the college. Twilight had fully fallen, and Gwyn didn’t feel like opening the shop back up just for a couple of hours.
But she didn’t really want to go home, either, the excitement and adrenaline still coursing through her, no matter what a letdown the actual file was.
She rolled down the window again, letting in the cool evening air, the smell of woodsmoke and leaves. Nights like this in Graves Glen were magical in every sense of that word, and as Gwyn’s truck made its slow way down Main Street, the lights strung up along the sidewalks lit up, reflecting off the windshield.
Next to her, Wells rolled down his own window, leaning back in his seat. “What a gorgeous night,” he said, his voice soft, and Gwyn suddenly knew exactly where she wanted to go.