Chapter 7
“You don’t think we have the same nose, do you?”
Rhys studied the head of his ancestor, currently lying at the base of its statue. Whoever had sculpted the unfortunate Gryffud Penhallow had gone into a lot of detail—the curling hair over the brow, the slight frown and expression of Noble Suffering in the eyes, and an absolute beast of a nose.
The mayor, Jane, was still unspooling a line of caution tape around the broken statue with one hand, and barking into a cell phone held in the other, so she didn’t answer, and Rhys sighed, touching the bridge of his own nose.
“Bad luck, old man,” he said to Gryffud’s head, then looked back up at the top of the plinth.
The speech had been going so well, all things considered. Rhys figured the accent did most of the heavy lifting for him, plus the novelty of having an actual Penhallow, all the way from Wales. And he’d understood that this was the kind of thing people liked kept brief—let’s be honest, they were really here to buy candied apples and hand-dipped candles, not listen to him blather on about his dead ancestor.
So thanks for the warm welcome, a quick acknowledgment of the beauty of the town, a few sentences in Welsh, always a crowd-pleaser, and he’d been done, one duty discharged.
And then he’d nearly had his own head knocked off his shoulders by Gryffud’s.
As soon as he’d stepped onto the little steps leading off the stage, he’d heard the crack, then the gasp from the crowd, and had some instinct not urged him to freeze, he would’ve been directly under the plummeting stone skull of Gryffud Penhallow.
“I am so sorry,” the mayor said for what, Rhys thought, was at least the thirty-fifth time. “I don’t even know how this happened.”
She was still holding the bright yellow tape, her cell phone shoved back into a holster at her waist. In her heels, she barely came up to his chin, and even though Rhys suspected she’d replaced all of her blood with Red Bull, she was definitely attractive with her big dark eyes and flushed cheeks.
However, being nearly killed for the second time in twenty-four hours had something of a dampening effect on the libido, so he didn’t even attempt to flirt as he replied, “Hardly your fault. Probably just ol’ Gryffud letting it be known he would’ve preferred a different Penhallow, and I can’t blame him for that. I’m just glad no one else was standing nearby.”
He was smiling as he said it, but as Rhys glanced back and forth between the statue and the head on the ground, something cold settled into his chest.
Last night had been one thing—a series of mishaps that it was easy to chalk up to a strange run of bad luck, his magic thrown off by crossing an entire bloody ocean.
This? It felt . . . different.
Heads didn’t just break off statues, certainly not exactly as he was walking under them, and after assuring the mayor one more time that he was fine and didn’t plan on enacting some extravagant revenge for this insult, Rhys headed across the street to Vivienne’s family’s shop.
A chime rang as he pushed open the door, something slightly off-key and haunting, and just above him, some sort of animatronic nightmare of a raven began to squawk and flap its arms, its eyes blinking purple.
“Subtle,” he said, and from her spot at the cash register, Vivienne’s cousin, Gwyn, raised her middle finger at him.
“We’re closed.”
“You very obviously are not.”
“We’re closed to any and all exes of Vivi’s, and you qualify, sooooo . . .”
Nearby, a group of young women was looking at a display of leather journals. Rhys saw a hand-painted sign advertising them as grimoires, but he couldn’t detect even the faintest hint of magic coming off them. Probably best not to sell the real thing to tourists, though, and as Rhys looked around, he realized that very few things in the shop radiated any sort of real power except for Gwyn herself, decked out in full witchy regalia today.
He’d met her a handful of times during that summer he’d lived in Graves Glen, back when her hair had been pink. It was red now and long, hanging nearly to her waist, and while she didn’t look that much like Vivienne, there was definitely a resemblance in the look of scorn she was throwing his way.
“Did you miss my near decapitation out there?” he asked, nodding back out at the street.
Gwyn widened her eyes. “Wait, one of my dreams almost came true, and I didn’t get to see it?”
“What dreams?”
Vivienne appeared from behind a star-spangled curtain in one corner of the store, a box of what appeared to be tiny skulls in her arms, her hair gathered up in a messy bun, and as she blew a strand out of her face, Rhys’s heart kicked painfully against his chest.
If only she weren’t so damned pretty. If only he hadn’t been the biggest cock-up this side of the Atlantic nine years ago.
If only he didn’t suspect, just the littlest bit, that she might be behind his sudden rush of ill-fortune.
He didn’t want to think that, but for the past few minutes, ever since he’d looked up to see Gryffud’s nose careening toward his, it had been there, muttering away in the back of his mind.
It seemed a little too much of a coincidence that the second he arrived back in Graves Glen after nine years away, everything went completely sideways, and while Vivienne had never struck him as all that vindictive, she had left him to be killed or eaten or run over yet again last night.
All of which he probably deserved, but that was not the point.
Now, he looked at her and asked, “Do you sell a scrying mirror in this store by any chance?”
From behind the counter, Gwyn snorted. “Yeah, right behind our jars of eye of newt. What are you, a thousand years old?”
Scrying mirrors were a little old-fashioned, even for witches, but so was Rhys’s father, which meant that they were one of the better ways to communicate with him.
“I think there actually might be one in the back,” Vivienne said, setting down her box of skulls. As she did, several of them opened their jaws, letting out a sort of creaking groan that made the girls over by the grimoires jump then burst into giggles.
“Seriously?” Gwyn asked, leaning on the counter. “We have a scrying mirror and I didn’t even know it?”
“I found it in some antique store in Atlanta,” Vivienne replied before glancing over at the customers, then back at Rhys.
Moving a little closer, she lowered her voice and said, “You can’t use it in here.”
Mimicking her whisper, Rhys replied, “Wasn’t going to.”
She frowned a little, a wrinkle appearing between her brows, and Rhys’s fingers itched to reach out and touch it, smooth it away with his fingers.
As that was a terrible idea, he kept his hands firmly in his pockets.
“You good out here?” Vivienne asked Gwyn, who gave her a thumbs-up.
“Now that I have more noisy skulls to sell to noisy kids, I am set.”
Folding her arms over her chest, Vivienne looked at him, and after a moment, jerked her head at the curtain in the corner. “Come on.”
Rhys followed, and when she pulled back the curtain, he expected to step into a storeroom of some kind, some dusty shelving, a bunch of cardboard boxes, much like the back room at Llewellyn’s pub.
Instead, he immediately found himself in a circular chamber, the walls a warm, honey-colored wood. Heavy iron chandeliers held fat candles that cast the entire place in a sort of cozy glow, as did a series of stained-glass globes affixed to the walls, spilling colored light onto the comfortably shabby rugs on the floor.
All around the room were a series of beautifully carved wardrobes, and Vivienne walked to the nearest one now, opening it and muttering to herself.
“This is . . . quite something,” Rhys said, looking around, and when Vivienne looked back over her shoulder at him, her expression was a little softer, a little more familiar.
“Aunt Elaine likes things to feel homey,” she said. “Why have a boring, depressing stockroom when you could have this?”
Then she looked around. “I mean, it does sometimes make me feel like I’m in a video game of The Hobbit, but still.”
Rhys huffed out a laugh, and she smiled at him.
Just for a second.
One of her front teeth had the tiniest chip in it. He’d forgotten that. He’d loved that. That little imperfection in that sunny smile.
Then she turned back to the wardrobe and Rhys cleared his throat, moving back slightly.
“And if customers come back here?”
Vivienne reached farther into the wardrobe, digging in its contents. “They don’t,” she said. “Slight repelling spell on this part of the store. Elaine tweaked it so that they don’t feel uncomfortable or scared, they just . . . don’t want to walk in.”
“That’s rather genius, actually,” Rhys said, impressed. It was one thing to cast a spell, but tailoring it to your specific needs took a fair amount of skill.
Turning back to him, mirror in hand, Vivienne raised her eyebrows. “Yeah, well, we don’t all have to be fancy Welsh witches to know some kick-ass magic.”
“Well, as this particular fancy Welsh witch is currently getting his ass kicked by magic, I cannot disagree with you there.”
He reached for the mirror, but Vivienne didn’t offer it, watching him with another one of those little frowns. “What do you mean?”
Sighing, Rhys dropped his hand and rocked back on his heels. “Just that when a man nearly meets his death twice in less than two days, he begins to think something may be afoot.”
She was still frowning and had gone very still, and Rhys watched her carefully, looking for some sign . . . of what, guilt? Did he really believe that Vivienne was out to get revenge after all this time? Over a relationship that hadn’t even survived an entire summer?
He didn’t. Not really.
Or maybe he just didn’t want to.
“In any case, as soon as I have that,” he went on, nodding at the mirror, “I can talk to my father, and make sure my charging the ley lines is a good idea given the fact that Gryffud Penhallow attempted to kill me.”
When Vivienne just kept staring, Rhys filled her in quickly about the entire statue incident, finishing up with, “So see? If you’d stayed to watch my speech, you would’ve gotten quite the show.”
“Are you all right?” she asked, looking him up and down, her lower lip caught between her teeth. The gas lamp nearest her cast red and blue patterns over her hair, picking up the little sparkles in her purple sweater, and Rhys stepped forward, holding out one hand.
“I’m fine. Or I will be once I use that.”
He nodded at the mirror and Vivienne handed it over, the metal still warm from her hand.
“Why are you using this to talk to your father anyway?” she asked, her shoulders a little looser now, some of the tension leaving her face. “It’s for telling the future, not communicating.”
Rhys didn’t even know exactly how to explain his father or this particular eccentricity of his, so he just shrugged and said, “More fancy Welsh witch stuff.”
“Got it. So I’ll just . . . you’ll probably want some privacy,” she said, reaching up to tuck one of those loose strands of hair behind her ear.
“I mean, if you’d like to stay and meet my father . . .”
Vivienne wrinkled her nose. “From what you’ve told me about him, I think it’s best I pass on that. I’ll be out front.”
With a swish of the starry curtain, she was gone, leaving Rhys standing in the middle of the room, holding the mirror and dreading every bit of what came next.
Sighing, Rhys held up the scrying mirror and looked into it. He was scowling, an unfamiliar expression on his own face and one that, he realized with a bit of shock, made him look an awful lot like both Wells and their father.
If that’s what this place was doing to him, he definitely needed to leave as soon as possible.
But first, this.
Muttering the words under his breath, Rhys pressed his free hand to the mirror’s cool glass and felt it ripple under his fingertips.
It only took a few moments before his father’s face appeared out of the swirling gray mist in the mirror, his library clearly visible behind him.
“Rhys?” he asked, his fearsome brows drawn together in a tight V. “What is it?”
“Lovely to see you, too, Da,” Rhys muttered, and then his father’s frown somehow deepened.
“Where in the bloody hell are you? Is that . . . some sort of theater? A fortune-teller’s wagon?”
His father’s face loomed closer in the mirror. “Rhys Maredudd Penhallow, if you are consorting with fortune-tellers—”
“Da, I only have you for a tick, can I tell you why I’m calling?”
Simon’s expression cleared slightly and he leaned back, waiting.
As quickly as he could, Rhys told his father everything that had happened to him since arriving in Graves Glen, from the car trouble to the near-miss accident to the statue. He left out the bit about not having hot water for his shower this morning as he was fairly certain it didn’t help his case, but by the time he was finished, his father looked almost . . . amused.
What a terrifying prospect.
“You’re not cursed, lad,” Simon assured him. “Penhallow men cannot be cursed. Not in over a thousand years has one of us fallen victim to any sort of hex.”
Amusement gave way to smugness as he added, “All of this is no doubt a direct result of your decision to travel like a human rather than via the Traveling Stone, as I suggested.”
“A head fell clean off a statue because I decided to fly commercial and rent a car? Is that what you’re saying, Da? Because I’m not sure I see the correlation.”
Now the scowl was back. That was actually a bit comforting.
“Have you charged the ley lines yet?”
“Not yet, no. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? What if I am cursed and that . . . I don’t know, buggers up the ley lines or some such?”
“While I do not doubt your ability to, as you say, ‘bugger up’ most anything, Rhys, I am telling you, there is no possibility you are cursed, and even if there were, some girl who barely qualifies as a hedge witch could not have done such a thing. Not to you. Not to any of us.”
“She’s more than a hedge witch,” Rhys said, his fingers tightening around the mirror’s handle, but his father waved a hand.
“Whatever she is, I’m telling you there is no way she could’ve placed a hex on you. It’s . . . ridiculous. Preposterous.”
“Bit like talking to people through mirrors, really,” Rhys replied, and his father’s gaze sharpened.
“Do the job I sent you there to do, boy, come home and don’t ever let me hear the word ‘cursed’ leave your lips again.”