Chapter 24
“So that’s a Eurydice Candle.”
Vivi hid a yawn behind her coffee mug as she nodded at Gwyn. “Mmm-hmm.”
They were sitting around the big table in the back of the storage room at Something Wicked, the three of them taking in the silver candle lying among Elaine’s piles of herbs and wicks for her own candles. In the daylight, in this cozy and comfy little room, it didn’t seem like something that had a ghost lurking inside it.
But Vivi could still remember watching Piper McBride’s ghost vanishing inside it, and shivered a little. The sooner Amanda picked this thing up and took it off her hands, the better. She was supposed to come by Vivi’s office later that afternoon, but Vivi had wanted to show the candle to her aunt and cousin first, hence the impromptu meeting in the storage room.
As they studied the candle, Vivi focused very hard on not letting her gaze slide over to the sofa against the far wall. Even though it had just been hours ago, last night—well, early this morning—it almost felt like something out of a dream.
A really fantastic, really dirty dream.
But it had been all too real, and at some point today, she was going to have to deal with what had happened.
What it meant.
It meant that you’d had a rough night and deserved that orgasm, a part of her brain that sounded suspiciously like Gwyn said, and Vivi was inclined to agree. For all that she was exhausted and running on about three hours of sleep, she felt . . . good this morning. Better than good. Better than she’d felt in a long time, and even as she searched herself for that sinking sensation that she’d made a huge mistake, she knew she wouldn’t find it.
Because it hadn’t been a mistake. It had been fun. And wasn’t that enough?
Frowning, Aunt Elaine leaned in even closer, pushing her glasses back up the bridge of her nose. “It’s not like the college witches to use something like this,” she murmured. One hand hovered over the candle like she might pick it up.
“The witch who came to talk to me was different,” Vivi said with a shrug. “I think they might actually be modernizing over there a little bit.”
Gwyn made a rude noise at that, drawing up one knee and wrapping an arm around it. “That’ll be the day. I think they just wanted you to do their dirty work for them.”
“Maybe,” Vivi acknowledged. “But honestly, it wasn’t that bad.”
Off Elaine and Gwyn’s look, she amended, “Okay, it was very scary and I never want to go back to that cabin again, but it could’ve been a lot worse.”
“Ghosts can be dangerous,” Elaine said, still frowning. “You should’ve come to me first.”
“Rhys and I had it handled.”
Gwyn’s eyes sparked, and she opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, Vivi held up a finger. “No. No ‘I’ll bet Rhys handled it,’ or whatever filthy thing you were gonna say.”
“You’re no fun at all,” Gwyn replied. “And my joke was going to be a little more sophisticated than that, I promise.”
“Sure it was.”
Vivi reached across the table to pick up the candle, but before she could, Aunt Elaine laid a hand on hers.
“Is that all you wanted to tell us? You caught a ghost in a Eurydice Candle?”
For a moment, Vivi had the horrifying idea that Elaine knew what had happened back here last night, that there was, like, the magical equivalent of security cameras, and Elaine had gotten quite the show, in which case, Vivi hoped there was some kind of “disappearing into the floor” spell.
But Aunt Elaine wasn’t giving her any kind of knowing look. She was genuinely asking, and Vivi realized there was something else she needed to tell them both.
“The ghost said some stuff before the candle got her,” Vivi said, adjusting her bag on her shoulder. “About ‘cursed Penhallow,’ and taking something that didn’t belong to him. But I don’t think it was about Rhys specifically. I think it might have been about Gryffud, or some other ancestor.”
“Could be worth looking into,” Gwyn mused, resting her chin on her knee.
“I’ll do a little research,” Aunt Elaine said, then nodded at Vivi’s bag.
“And you go give that foul thing to its rightful owner.”
“Will do,” Vivi said with a little salute.
And then Aunt Elaine smiled at her, her eyes bright behind her glasses. “I’m proud of you, Vivi. A Eurydice Candle is serious magic.”
Vivi waved her off. “I didn’t do much, really. I just lit it. Not exactly next-level sorcery.”
“Still,” Aunt Elaine insisted, covering Vivi’s hand with her own. “You’re a witch who won’t even use magic to clean her apartment, and now look at you go!”
“Okay, that’s just because I use that time to catch up on listening to podcasts, plus I watched that Mickey Mouse cartoon with the devil brooms as a kid and it freaked me out.”
“I loved that cartoon,” Gwyn said, propping her chin in her hand, her silver earrings winking.
“Of course you did.”
“But Mom is right,” Gwyn went on, nudging Vivi. “Very baller magic.”
“I don’t really know what that means,” Aunt Elaine replied, “but I suspect it means ‘impressive,’ and it was. Your mother would have been proud, too.”
Surprised, Vivi glanced at Elaine. “Except that Mom hated magic?”
Aunt Elaine shook her head, leaning back in her chair. “It scared her. She felt like being a witch was . . . I don’t know, something that happened to her, not something she chose. But she was good. Really good when she wanted to be. She just chose another path.”
Vivi had spent so long with this idea of her mom as firmly in camp Magic Is Bad that she didn’t really know what to say to that.
Standing up, Vivi moved to the curtain sectioning off the storage room from the rest of the store, and came up short as she stared at the girl standing there, her eyes wide.
“Oh, wow,” she breathed. “I’ve never seen this part of the store before.”
Gwyn leapt up from the table as Aunt Elaine turned around.
“Hey, Ashley,” Gwyn said, coming over and putting an arm around the girl’s shoulders as she began leading her back into the store, and throwing a look back at Vivi and Elaine. “That’s just the back room, nothing that interesting, but we do have some really cool wands in if you want to check those out . . .”
Gwyn’s voice faded as she walked deeper into the store, and Aunt Elaine stood up, sighing, hands on her hips.
“Well, guess we know that spell isn’t working as it should right now, either.”
It wasn’t exactly a surprise, but it was a reminder that this thing had to get sorted out, and fast. And that’s where Vivi’s focus needed to be.
Which is why she only glanced at the couch once before she hurried out of the storage room.
The drive to campus was uneventful, and Vivi was just locking her car when she heard someone calling her name.
It was Amanda, jogging over to her, a bright smile on her face. “How did it go?”
Relieved, Vivi reached into her bag for the candle. “Great! But now please take this because having a ghost in my purse is creeping me out.”
Amanda’s smile brightened as she wrapped her fingers around the Eurydice Candle. “Not a problem. I’ll get this back to our side of campus, and you can go on about your day.”
Since she had a class to teach in five minutes, Vivi was grateful to do just that, and with a wave, she turned toward Chalmers Hall, the building where her class met.
Clouds were thick in the sky today, leaves skittering across the brick walkways, and Vivi shivered a little, tugging her scarf a bit tighter around her neck. As she did, she glanced back over her shoulder and spotted Amanda walking across the parking lot. She turned left, disappearing behind a row of trees, and Vivi frowned as she turned back around.
That’s not the way to get to the witch side of campus.
But maybe Amanda knew a shortcut, or was getting something out of her car.
That had to be it.
Vivi taught her first class, then her second, forgetting all about Amanda and the Eurydice Candle as she enlightened a hundred freshmen about the Magna Carta, even forgetting about Rhys for a little while, and by the time she got back to her office late that afternoon, she was actually starting to feel a bit . . . okay, “normal” would’ve been too strong a word, but at least more settled, more sure of herself.
Sure, they still had to deal with the curse, but they’d fixed the potion issue at the Coffee Cauldron, and now they no longer had an angry ghost roaming around campus.
She was actually on top of all this.
Smiling, pleased with herself, Vivi settled behind her desk and tugged a stack of grading to her, flipping on her kettle as she did.
She’d just gotten through the first three essays when there was a knock at her door. “Come in,” she called without looking up.
As soon as the door opened, magic rippled over her skin, so thick and heavy she had to take a second to catch her breath, and when she looked up, Dr. Arbuthnot stood in the doorway.
“Ms. Jones?” she intoned, her voice like thunder. “I believe we need to speak.”
Rhys had been thinking about Vivienne all day, so in a way, he wasn’t surprised when she turned up on his doorstep that evening. In fact, when he first opened the door, he wondered if he was having a particularly vivid hallucination.
But no, if he were conjuring up Vivienne, he definitely would not have made her look this sad.
Not just sad. Defeated. Her shoulders were slumped, hair straggling out of her loose bun. Even the little cherries marching along the hem of her skirt seemed to be drooping.
“You were right,” she said as soon as he ushered her inside, and as he locked the door behind them, he raised his eyebrows.
“First off, can I record you saying that? Secondly, right about what?”
Sighing, Vivienne threw her hands out to the sides. “We can’t just keep putting out the fires this curse causes. Especially since it turns out that in trying to put them out, we might just be starting more, and . . . your house is weird.”
She’d moved into the living room, and was looking around with a confused expression, no doubt taking in the heavy iron chandelier, the oxblood leather furniture, the genuine Gothic nightmare of the whole place. “How do you sleep here?” she asked, then pointed at a painting on the wall. “I mean, I may never sleep again just from seeing that.”
“That is my great-great-aunt Agatha, but fair point.”
Moving into the kitchen, Rhys called over his shoulder, “Is this a conversation that requires wine?”
He heard Vivienne sigh again, then the squeaking of the leather as she flopped onto the couch. “Yes.”
When he emerged with a bottle and two glasses, she was leaning back, studying the ceiling, and it was the strangest thing, seeing her in this setting, her and her polka dots in his father’s lair. And he didn’t like the way it made him feel . . . better.
Happier.
Those are lingering sex hormones from last night, mate, he told himself, but he knew it was more than that.
Problem was, he didn’t know what the fuck to actually do with any of that. What had happened at the store had been a one-off, needed to be a one-off, because all of this was entirely too mad to add shagging back into the equation.
Much as he’d like to.
Crossing the room, Rhys handed her a glass of wine, and she took it gratefully, taking a deep sip before sitting up a little and saying, “We fucked up.”
Rhys perched against the arm of the wingback chair next to the couch, crossing one ankle over the other. “Is this about last night?”
“Obviously,” she said with a little scowl, and then her expression cleared. “Oh. You’re asking about the . . .”
Cheeks coloring, she took another sip of wine. “No, I didn’t mean that. That’s a whole other fuckup.”
The words shouldn’t sting. Lord knew, he’d just been thinking the exact same thing, so it was ridiculous to feel hurt.
But he’d made a habit of being ridiculous where Vivienne was concerned.
“Remember how one of the witches from the college gave us the Eurydice Candle to capture Piper McBride’s spirit?”
“Given that that was literally yesterday, I do recall it. Fairly vividly, actually.”
Vivienne rolled her eyes and drank more of her wine. “Well, turns out ‘Amanda Carter’ doesn’t work for the college. In fact, she’s not even a witch, which I should’ve been able to pick up on, but I was so relieved to have help with all of this that I ignored it.”
Shaking her head, she looked darkly into her glass. “The jeans should’ve given it away.”
Bracing one hand on the chair’s arm, Rhys looked at her, sitting there nearly swallowed up by his father’s insane couch. “What do you mean she wasn’t a witch? How on earth did she have a Eurydice Candle, then?”
Vivienne raised her head, soft blue shadows under her pretty hazel eyes. “She’s a con artist. A famous one, apparently. Her real name is Tamsyn Bligh. She deals in magical artifacts, and had been sniffing around Graves Glen for a while. The college witches were keeping an eye on her, but she somehow slipped past them and made a beeline straight for me.”
Flattening her palm, Vivienne thrust her hand out in front of her, then shook her head. “Anyway, we captured the ghost of a very powerful, very scary witch, and then gave it to someone who’ll sell it to the highest bidder all because I am a trusting dumbass.”
“You’re not,” Rhys automatically objected, and when she only looked at him, he rolled his shoulders. “Well, you’re trusting, but you’re not a dumbass. Not by a mile.”
Groaning, Vivienne set her glass on the coffee table and buried her head in her hands. “It’s like it all just keeps getting worse. Just when I think I have a handle on it, or am actually doing something good, I do something like this.”
Lifting her head again, she rested her hands on the back of her neck and took a deep breath. “So now the college witches are pissed, plus they know about the curse, and they’re also pissed off about this, and I just . . .”
Breaking off, she looked at him, beseeching. “Why am I such a goddamn disaster, Rhys? I’ve never done any serious magic in my life, but the one time I did, it cursed an entire town.”
“I did that, Vivienne,” Rhys said, standing up and setting his glass down on the table next to hers before sitting at the other end of the couch, slouching against the corner, his legs stretched out in front of him.
“Okay, but that’s my point,” she replied, turning so that she could face him. More of her hair had come down, framing her face, and Rhys’s hands itched to push those strands behind her ears, to cup her face between his hands, rub his thumb over those soft pink lips. “We are a disaster. Apart, our lives run smoothly. Perfectly, even.”
“That’s a bit of an overstatement,” Rhys objected, but Vivienne was clearly on a roll now.
“And then as soon as we’re together, it all goes to shit. Even that summer. That really beautiful, perfect summer. Where did it end up? Demon plastic skulls.” She ticked it off on one finger. “Poisoned potions.” Another tick. “Library ghost.” Tick. “And now this, which . . .”
Vivienne stared at the finger she’d held up to tick off and scowled. “I don’t even know how to define this. Except disaster.”
“So you’ve said. Repeatedly.”
Picking up her wine, she drained the rest of the glass before setting it down and flopping back against the couch.
When Rhys didn’t say anything, she raised her chin slightly. “What, not gonna try to argue with me?”
Rhys shrugged. “Why should I? You’re right.”
“I am?” Then she cleared her throat, sitting up. “I mean, I am, yes. I’m right, we’re a disaster.”
“Completely,” Rhys said, lifting one hand off the back of the couch. “The proof is in the possessed candle, as the saying goes.”
Vivienne smiled a little at that. “No one says that.”
“Maybe they should.”
They were both quiet for a moment, watching each other, and Rhys waited to see if she’d leave now. She probably should, but as he looked at her there, relaxed and rumpled, he very much hoped she’d stay.
Glancing around the living room again, Vivienne reached up to tuck her hair behind her ears. “I can’t believe you live here.”
“I don’t live here,” he said, tilting his head back to look at the chandelier. “I . . . am temporarily residing here, more or less against my will. Huge difference.”
“Hmph,” she sniffed, then picked up one of the pillows on the couch. It was black, embroidered with the family crest, and Rhys wasn’t sure any literal cushion had ever looked less welcoming than that thing.
Vivienne turned the pillow over in her hands, and then looked up at him through her lashes.
“Okay, if this blows up in my face, know my intentions were good.”
Holding her hands over the cushion, Vivienne closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
As golden light began to gather between her fingertips, Rhys’s eyes widened. “Okay, Vivienne, maybe don’t—”
But then the pillow sort of shimmered, the family crest bleeding out to be replaced with a red dragon.
Specifically the red dragon of Wales, but one that was grinning, claws extended in the air and painted the same bright purple as Vivienne’s own nails.
Lifting the pillow triumphantly, she grinned. “Much better.”
And fuck.
Fuck.
She might as well have hit him with a hammer. It was like that summer evening all over again, and Rhys set his glass down on the coffee table with a decisive thunk before sliding across the sofa to her.
The pillow hit the floor, and she reached out for him just as his fingers brushed over her jaw, tilting her face so that he could look at her.
“You bloody gorgeous girl.” He sighed, and her own hands came up to his wrists, not to push him away, as she probably should have, but to pull him closer.
“I’ve run out of ways to say this is a bad idea,” Vivienne murmured against his lips, and Rhys smiled, nudging her nose with his.
“We’ve made a lot of mistakes,” he agreed. “But I don’t think this is one of them.”
And he didn’t. For whatever else had gone wrong with them—and Christ, he could fill up a ledger book at this point—this, her, here in his arms, was not one of them. He knew that as well as he knew anything.
She leaned in closer, her nails lightly scratching the backs of his hands, and if Rhys hadn’t already been so hard he ached, that would’ve done it. So would the way she just barely brushed her lips against his as she murmured, “Are you going to ask to kiss me?”
Rhys grinned. “I’m gonna ask to do a fuckload more than that if you’ll let me.”