Page 3 of Death and Divination
Chapter 2
Two Years Later - Ophelia
“Cassie!” I shouted, walking into my sister’s house.
Home. This place would always be home to me. I remembered my grandmother, the witch who’d run things in Accident until her death. I remembered my mother, the woman who’d left when I was nine for parts unknown. What I remembered the most, though, was Cassie. When mom took off after Grandma’s death, Cassie at thirteen had muscled her way to the front, protecting and caring for the six of us girls until we were grown and on our own. She’d been an immovable power, an irresistible force, using her witch magic to convince a judge to emancipate her at thirteen and to grant her guardianship over six younger sisters.
She was the most powerful witch I’d ever known—and that included my grandmother. I admired her more than I ever wanted to admit. I downright worshipped her. If only I had half of her skill…
But I didn’t. Where Cassie could perform a wide range of magic and cast a spell on the fly, I was specialized. Divination. And my divination most of the time was about as useful as a freezer at the North Pole. Sometimes the future was a sharp clear line. Sometimes it was an incomprehensible blur. Sometimes I interpreted that blur in a way that was absolutely wrong. It made me feel like a fool, like an inept amateur. It made me almost want to quit doing magic sometimes.
As if. Magic was like the breath in my lungs. An accurate divination usually required a ritual and certain focus objects and chants, but sometimes it happened like a flash without any effort at all. I could no sooner give it up than give up breathing.
“Cassie!” I shouted, making my way to the kitchen. It had become important to loudly announce your arrival at my family home. Now that my sister’s demon mate had moved in…well, none of us wanted to walk in on the two of them doing it up against the kitchen counters.
Well, no one except my twin sister Sylvie, who would probably critique their performance and give them pointers and some accessories, all to keep their relationship sexually healthy.
How could identical twin sisters be so different? We both looked the same but around age five, we’d each gone in opposite directions, proving that identical DNA didn’t necessarily mean identical people.
“Here! In the attic!” Cassie’s voice filtered down from the top reaches of the house.
I climbed the stairs heading to the back room were the attic ladder was located. The house had been originally built a few hundred years ago, a one room house with a loft. Over the centuries, various additions had meant bedrooms, a kitchen, indoor plumbing, and an attic which housed furniture that was too dated to live downstairs but too sentimental to take to the dump, as well as boxes of belongings from our ancestors.
And the diaries. And the spell books.
Our witch ancestor, Temperance Perkins, had escaped the burning times and headed south and west, establishing our town as a haven for those of her kind. It had quickly become a haven for the supernatural, with Perkins witches as the caretakers throughout the centuries. Recently, Cassie had finally taken her place as head witch of the town.
And me? My job was to support her any way she needed. Well, that and my non-witch job as a paramedic for the Accident Fire Department. Most of our calls were for issues related to the supernatural residents, but we also served sections of the county that lay outside of our town’s wards, so I found myself providing emergency medical attention to not only mermaids, fairies, werewolves, and trolls, but humans who were within our areas of service.
Which was what had happened tonight. Just thinking about that wreck tonight set my hair on end.
That woman had almost died. In fact, for a moment there, it had been touch and go. I was surprised she’d lived. What I hadn’t been surprised about was the presence of the man who seemed to be at every serious call I’d been on. The man who I’d begun to think put his finger on the scale and occasionally allowed someone to live when they probably shouldn’t have.
Don’t get me wrong—there were still those who died either before I got there, during our assistance, or later at the hospital. But too many times when someone’s life hung precariously in the balance, I got the impression fate, or something else, was giving things a little nudge in my favor.
I found Cassie on the attic floor, surrounded by books and what looked to be a cheese and summer sausage platter. No doubt her demon, Lucien, had brought it up to her. He was trying to do that delicate dance of giving Cassie her space and being caring. Personally, I think he could be glued to her side twenty-four-seven and she’d be thrilled. She’d complain, but she’d be thrilled. Her previous relationship had been with a panther shifter who’d cheated on her left and right, all while proclaiming devoted love. I was pretty sure Marcus had meant the devoted love thing, but a panther shifter had a different idea of fidelity than a human witch. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Cassie’s demon was physically and emotionally faithful. It warmed my heart to see them together. Lucien’s attentiveness gave Cassie a pampered feeling she hadn’t had since my grandmother had died.
“How are things going?” I asked.
Cassie rolled her eyes. “Oh, the usual. The gnomes tunneled through the west end, stole Emma’s lawn flamingos, and refused to give them back. Instead of going to the sheriff, Emma went over and burned down their vegetable garden. Thegnomeshad enough sense to go to the sheriff, and when he found out it was Emma, he came to me.”
I grimaced. Sheriff Oakes was a dryad and was perfectly capable of handling conflict and crime among most of our supernatural community. Most of them. Emma, however, was a chimera with an incredible sense of self-worth. In her eyes, there was a strict hierarchy of beings in the town of Accident, and a dryad was pretty far down on her registry of who’s who. She hadn’t considered witches to be much higher than dryads until an incident a few weeks ago when Cassie had magically levitated her and refused to let her down until she apologized to Fernando for calling him a rot-scaled gecko with creosote breath.
Fernando was a dragon. Dragons take insults very seriously. And nobody wants a pouty, offended dragon in their town.
Emma had floated in the air for a few hours before she finally gave in and offered Fernando a grudging apology which he accepted with surprising speed. Cassie had been amazed.
I hadn’t been amazed. The pair would be doing it by next Tuesday, married by October, and hatching a little chimera-dragon baby before the buds bloomed on the cherry trees next year. And I was keeping totally mum about that vision because that was one future I didn’t want to mess up.
A little chimera-dragon. Ooh, I couldn’t wait for the baby shower. Hopefully Emma would let me babysit occasionally, although if Fernando treated his kid at all like he treated his treasure, no one in town would get within a hundred feet of the baby until it was legally able to vote.
“So, does Emma have her lawn flamingos back?” I asked.
Cassie nodded. “And the gnomes have to come by each night for the next month to bestow luck on her yard. Emma has to replant the burned garden at her cost, down to every last veggie plant.”
“She doesn’t have hands,” I pointed out, wondering how the chimera was going to replant a garden with goat feet. Or a lion head. Or a serpent tail.
My sister shrugged. “Not my problem. She can dig, put the plant in with her mouth, then tamp it down with those cloven hooves. She’s gotta learn that if you’re going to burn something, you’re gonna have to pay for it.”
