Hex, A Witch and Angel Tale Page 4

  Ryder vamoosed back to his desk, providing me with all the privacy I could use to bite my nails and scratch my head in peace. Needless to say, that didn’t accomplish much. I was at a loss about what had just happened. Intent on questioning Ryder about it as soon as the bell rang, I was, however, forced to see my plans come to naught. Mr. Evans’s request that I stay after class to discuss my latest paper saw to that. And, by the time I was done, neither Ryder nor the puzzling Lucian Bell were anywhere to be found on the school grounds. Fantastic!

  Chapter: Four

  The rest of the school day was one big bundle of fun, if your idea of fun involves, say, living through an endless Brazilian wax. Between J’s questions, “Do you think they know each other? Why would Ryder take him on like that? What do you mean, the whole class looked like mummified living statues?”, and the time I’d wasted uselessly searching every square inch of the school for Ryder, the day really, really sucked. I also managed to screw up the algebra test, for which I’d almost killed myself studying for days, and inflame Señor Garcia’s wrath, again, with my apparent lack of interest in his ... whatever it was that he was talking about at that moment. All in all, people roasting in the flaming pits of hell fared better than I did today.

  Ditching the day’s altogether jolly vibe didn’t seem possible once school was over, either. What was meant to be a brief stop at J’s place on the way to my house revealed that Delilah Archer, her mother, was passed out on the couch, drunk, and, therefore, little disposed to do anything about the mess in the house. Or the lack of food in the kitchen. Or the laundry still waiting to be dealt with.

  Despite being a smart, reasonably educated woman who came from a solid middle-class background, Delilah had always been a mess. A disaster waiting to happen, only growing worse with age. Exactly where she and J would’ve been without the small fortune inherited after the death of her father was anyone’s scary guess. My BFF blamed the absentee father, who had run out on them when J was still a baby, but my own suspicion was that the poor bastard hadn’t so much run as been driven out by good ol’ Delilah. Sadly, his leaving hadn’t cured the woman’s longing for male companionship; men still came and went from the Archer household with a frequency reminiscent of the rush-hour traffi c in any metropolis.

  So instead of spending the afternoon studying, arguing about normal things like Bright Eyes or Dashboard Confessional, and trying to solve the new Ryder mystery on our hands, what did we do? House chores. At least Delilah’s conscious self didn’t join us until we were done, dinner ready to be popped in the oven and everything. Her slurred excuse to J was promptly followed by a half-hour rant about her latest boyfriend, who apparently had up and left her in the morning. Shocker!

  Eventually J talked her into taking a long bath, at which point, after giving my friend a quick but heartfelt hug, I left their house feeling more grateful than ever for my mom. So grateful, in fact, that I decided to pay a visit to The Enchanted Forest Occult Emporium.

  She was just finishing a tarot reading.

  “Lillian Marie,” she more or less sang my name. “What a pleasant surprise.”

  Draped in a colorful sari, her long blonde hair fixed in intricate braids, Mom was a breath of fresh air, especially as the image of bloodshot-eyed, wild-haired Delilah still burned the inside of my retinas. To go with the outfit, she’d chosen a number of clunky bracelets, which, together with a couple of leather cuffs, covered both her forearms. The result was kind of flower child meets edgy Indian goddess … so, awesome. The incense burning inside the shop couldn’t mask her own scent; she always smelled like the forest.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  More curious than worried, she studied me discreetly.The physical likeness between us was striking; well, except for the hair and those fine crinkles around her eyes. While she boasted a head of straight golden tresses — think Reese Witherspoon — I, on the other hand, was the proud owner of a mane of loose red ringlets. Strange, too; apparently, nobody in our family had had red hair before.

  It didn’t take long before she had me all figured out.

  “Honey, what’s wrong?”

  Shrugging my bag off, I sank into an orange-cushioned chair and began telling her all about my strange day, careful to leave out the part about how scared I had been of the whole Ryder-Lucian duel and the entire class turning into inanimate objects for the duration of it. I’d long since spilled my beans to her about Ryder, or, most of my beans, anyway. I may have left out how I’d made it my mission to watch him like a hawk and the subsequent ridiculous amounts of time I wasted effectively obsessing over him. Mom was cool enough; she’d reacted to the news about his asking me to prom with whoops of joy and even a few “hallelujahs” in the mix. She thought he was “awfully cute” and obviously “a responsible kid,” seeing as, even without a family to guide him through, he was still in school, while also holding down a job. But I was reluctant to admit just how much I agreed with her. As far as mother-daughter relationships go, ours was super-duper. We didn’t swap clothes or go to Pilates classes together, since Rosemound was light years away from discovering the aforesaid exercise system, but we spoke each other’s language. Still, I wasn’t ready to come clean about losing sleep over a guy, no matter how cute and responsible he might have been. Call me crazy, call me cautious, but my feeling was that Mom wouldn’t appreciate that.

  Anyway, between the burning incense, the Celtic folk music playing softly in the background, and Mom’s rare and mostly innocent comments, I felt much better by the time we left the shop. Not George-Bailey-realizingIt’s-A-Wonderful-Life-after-all better, but on the road to getting there.

  We got home just before eight. Our house was a testimony to how you can take the girl out of the South, Carrollton, Georgia, being where Grandma Charlotte had first unleashed Mom upon the unsuspecting world, but you can’t take the South out of the girl, hence the Southern feel of our humble abode, built in agreement to Mom’s every wish. Enfolded in tall ferns, silver lace and climbing trumpet vines, it melted naturally into the surrounding forest. A sweeping covered front porch rested on white columns, the three dormers on the upper level were evenly aligned above the central entry, and everything was crowned by the gabled roof, partially swallowed up by green vines. A crazy-monk-retreat or a green-thumbed-hardcore-environmentalist deal, but stamped “country living” by Mom’s touch. Once a Southern girl, always a great homemaker, was her mantra.

  While she started dinner, I went up to my room and delved into my homework assignments with all the enthusiasm that made snails seem fast by comparison. Raisin, my sometimes-senile black cat, kept me company, for some reason acting just as wiped out as I felt.

  But, as the poet confesses, there were still “promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.” Tonight was a full moon, so I had plans to sally forth into the woods later on. As usual, my job involved finding and bagging certain plants while whispering in a language I never understood, but somehow always spoke. It was weird stuff, sure, but also liberating. For once, I could bask in my weirdness and be as happy as a pig in mud, away from any condemning eyes. Tapped out or not, I couldn’t put it off; the candle stock at the store was very low and I was expected to replenish it. Besides, the timing didn’t really suck, all things considered. Molding the candles worked better than deep breathing for me, calmed me down. It was too bad that I could only work at night, but luckily I was just enough of a freak to survive on as little as a few hours’ sleep each night without a problem. Just as well. With all the time I spent forgoing my beauty sleep in favor of either fashioning the candles or haunting the woods gathering supplies, the sleep deprivation should’ve killed me a long time ago. Yet here I was.

  But if my sleeping habits varied widely, Mom’s, on the other hand, were basically written in stone. So she was pretty much comatose by the time, scourge of homework finally crushed, I set off through the back door.

  The full moon provided plenty of light and I knew the paths like the back of my hand, so carryin
g a flashlight was pointless. It wasn’t easy, but I did my best to stay focused on the task; that is, collecting the plants and not straying toward the dirt road that went past the McArthur cabin. And, boy, did I struggle to force my legs to move away from and not to it. Because the fact was that I had questions — not to mention raging hormones, but that’s another story — and the person who could answer them all, Ryder, lived only a short walk away. There wasn’t anything I wanted more than to take that cabin by storm and pluck my answers, and possibly other pluck-able items, too, by way of peaceful conversation or not. At this point, I was just about ready to beat the truth out of Ryder.

  But little by little, the familiar routine crept back into me and I into it … find, choose, snip … like a lullaby drowning my thoughts, calming my nerves … find, choose, snip. By the time my bag was half full of greenery, I was relaxed. Breathing in when the forest breathed out. Whispering words with meanings I’d never known, in a voice too sweet to be mine, my magic humming melodiously. When …

  “Isn’t it kind of late to be out here all alone?”

  My mystical communion with Mother Nature was abruptly butted in on. Instead of breathing in concert with the forest, I found myself almost panting in shock at someone’s sudden materialization. Ryder was standing right in front of me. Through some miracle, I did not, in fact, yelp in alarm.

  “What are you doing here?”

  However, my manners appeared to have succumbed to the scare. He crept closer, seeming almost unreal in the light of the moon, beautiful and cold.

  “Just making sure you’re okay. The forest can be a dangerous place at night,” he taunted, as if intentionally trying to spook me.

  Frowning, I snapped, “I don’t need babysitting!”

  “Of course not.”

  The next step he took put him close enough to touch. Close enough to smell. Close enough to reach out and … Down, Lily. Down, girl. Focus.

  “I have questions,” I informed him, with all the oomph my wobbly body could muster. And it wasn’t much to speak of; Mickey Mouse’s buddy Goofy, during his goofiest moment, probably scored more poise than I did right then. But being so close to him continued to work against me.

  Shadows flitted across his face and his shoulders went stiff. “I’ll tell you what I can.”

  That was hardly what I wanted to hear! Grimacing, I made an effort to collect my thoughts, which was about as easy as shooting pool blindfolded. One year of relentless gaping plus another two weeks of obsessing over whether or not we should date was more than enough to render talking to him ridiculously problematic.

  “Who’s this Lucian guy?”

  His shoulders moved slightly. Ah, the great, evasive shrug, the one that meant he’d already brushed my words aside, but gently.

  “The new kid at school?” he asked innocently.

  But playing this game wasn’t going to do the trick tonight. “And…? You two know each other?”

  One last step and he was standing so close that our bodies almost touched. His lips curved into another über-confident smile. The kind of smile that reduced everything else in the world to background noise. The kind of smile that went straight to your knees. The kind of smile you could swoon over.

  “Are you trying to make me jealous?” he asked in a dangerously soft voice.

  With just the tips of his fingers, he began to trace the strap of my bag, starting at the neck, across my chest, coming to the place where my fingers clutched it. So slow, so light, so careful not to touch me. I watched in fascination, my pulse speeding up at the thought of those long fingers brushing mine, when … he stopped. He let his hand drop, and when I glanced up, he was licking his lips. So close; he was so close I could smell the leather of his jacket.

  “You’ll find I’m very possessive about the things I want.”

  “You don’t say.”

  Ignoring my mumbling, he leaned in closer, still carefully avoiding actual contact. Eyes fastened on my face, lips almost on mine, he whispered, “And I want you, Lily. Bad.”

  His breath flared in my nostrils, fresh mint, but hot, and my bones liquefied. My eyelids fluttered and closed. I swayed on my feet. Next, his mouth hovered over my ear, still only shy of touching me.

  “Question is,” he went on softly, searing breath caressing my neck, “what do you want?”

  Maybe because of my senses whirling out of control, I hesitated. But he lowered his mouth to mine anyway, close enough that our lips almost brushed for a millisecond before his glided across my cheek, his breath laying a fiery trail from the corner of my mouth to my ear.

  “I’m not going to kiss you, Lily,” he whispered. “I’m patient. I’ll wait until you want it bad enough.”

  Before I could protest, he’d already put some distance between us. A teasing smile played on his mouth again, curving that yummy lower lip, and laughter filled his eyes.

  “You’ll be asking for it soon,” he added. “No hesitation.”

  His overall amused expression, not to mention the cocky attitude, was my wake-up call. In the blink of an eye, I went from having my hormones performing a high-speed rumba inside me to being submersed in a tubful of ice. He was toying with me, the arrogant creep!

  “What game is this, Ryder?” I asked frostily. “What are we playing at here?”

  Shrugging, he replied, “It’s not me who’s playing. I’m not the one who’s wasted the last two weeks trying to make up her mind. Not the one who’s asking about other people or has second thoughts about something as innocent as a kiss. If you want to know what we’re playing at, I suggest you ask yourself.”

  “Don’t put this on me!”

  “Oh, no?” He was still relaxed, almost as if he was enjoying this. “Who should I blame it on, then?”

  Actual smoke was coming out of my ears, I was so mad. At him, because he was right; at me, because I couldn’t get into the reasons I had stalled. And because I was losing sleep over him. But most of all because he was, bit by bit, luring me out of my safe-zone, which was more terrifying than dying in the coils of a boa constrictor.

  I bit back. “You want to blame someone? Blame yourself. It’s not my fault that you live like a monk. That nobody knows anything about you. You want to point the finger at me for being cautious? Fine, but you’re not exactly Mr. Transparent, either. For all I know, you could be a lunatic. So excuse me if I’m not rushing headlong into something that might well lead to my own untimely death,” I finished lamely, failing to admit to a single relevant fact.

  He threw his head back and laughed. Wholeheartedly. Which, not surprisingly, didn’t make me fume any less.

  “What would you have me do, Lily? Hang out with a certain crowd? Start a blog detailing my everyday life? Waste my time on pointless things and people so I can look more like a regular Joe? Would that do it? Would that

  suddenly fill you with enough confidence to give me a chance?”

  “That’s not —”

  “Because you’re not exactly a regular girl, either,” he went on, smiling no more. “Here I was, thinking that you’d be interested in someone who shared a certain uniqueness. Someone that didn’t belong, like you. But I guess I’ve been mistaken.”

  Did he actually think that pointing out my freak condition was a turn-on? I was quivering with nerves.

  “You’re nothing like me!”

  He met my anger with a frustrated groan. A storm was brewing in his eyes, and they kept changing from silver to lavender and gold at blinding speed.

  “How would you know?”

  His own anger surpassed mine by far. I wanted to answer, but my mouth opened for only a second before snapping shut again. My annoyance changed to surprise and that quickly became exasperation because, once again, he was right. I didn’t know. He had given me the chance to find out, but I’d chosen not to take it. Because I was that brave.

  “One date, Lily,” he said, switching to a gentle, pleading tone, “one date is all I’m asking for.”

  He was a
chameleon, I concluded. In a few short minutes he’d gone from teasing to arrogant, from seducing to arguing with me, from furious to bone-meltingly gentle. How was I supposed to keep up with all that? More importantly, which one was the real Ryder?

  I looked at him, tall and sheathed in black leather, his dark hair swaying gently in the breeze and catching the moonlight. My eyes lingered on that absurdly appealing mouth. Would he kiss me if we went out? Would I surviveit?

  There was only one way to find out. So, pulse booming in my throat, I gave in. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  He tilted his head, almost amused by my making such a big deal out of it, and then smiled rascally. “Are you finished? I want to walk you home.”

  Was I finished? Not really. But did it come up? Not exactly. We walked silently, side by side, just us and the moon. Over and over, I told myself that, as long as I was careful, it would be okay. I could do this. At least, I had to try.

  The questions I’d been dying to ask him lay forgotten in some faraway corner of my mind. But it didn’t matter. It was as if his being there, strolling next to me, held the answer to everything. It wasn’t until later, while mixing a few drops of my blood with the cinnamon, deer tongue leaves, raspberries, and hot wax, and pouring it into the seven-knob candle molds, that it occurred to me I still had no idea who Lucian Bell was.

  It was the love-attracting mix I used for that batch of candles, or maybe the seven-knob shape, the burn-one-every-day-for-a-week-to-haveyour-heart’s-desire-come-true concept that did the trick. If I should keep one of the candles for myself, what would I wish for? The answer hit me like a jab to the stomach. A kiss. What I wanted more than anything was for him to kiss me. It had to be the worst idea since 1912, when the fi rst fast-food restaurant opened in New York, not to mention dangerous. So why was I dying for it? Simple.

  I was in love with Ryder Kingscott.

  Hmm! Why did it feel like a big “duh” was in order?

  Chapter: Five