Sympathetic Magic

1





Margot Emory slunk out of the wedding reception and negotiated the rocky half-paved parking lot as best she could in her high-heeled sandals. All right, “slunk” probably wasn’t the best word for it. Anyone looking at her would have probably said she was walking normally enough, aside from the occasional bobble when she hit a rock. No, it was more that she wished she could have crawled away, slithered out of there like the lizards that clung to the walls of her garden, because after that serious lapse in judgment, she didn’t know if she could ever look any of the other McAllister witches in the face again.

What the hell were you thinking? she asked herself, sliding in behind the wheel of her Subaru, glad that at least it was dark so no one could see how her cheeks were burning. The proper response when a warlock from the Wilcox clan asked you to dance was, Thank you, but no.

That wasn’t what had happened, though. When Lucas Wilcox approached her and extended a hand, she’d taken it like some simple-minded teenager dazzled that the popular boy had asked her to dance. And afterward, instead of coldly thanking him and marching off, dignity intact, she’d stammered some inane excuse about having to talk to the other McAllister elders and then had bolted like a frightened rabbit.

She rolled down the windows, wanting the fresh night breeze to blow through the car and help settle her roiling thoughts. Thank the Goddess that at least now, in mid-September, the evenings were cooling off enough that it made sense to rely on outdoor air rather than the A/C. Her cheeks still felt far too heated, though.

It must have been the champagne. She’d thought she’d been careful, had only drunk two narrow flutes’ worth, but obviously that was too much for her to handle. Better to blame it on that than…well, on just about anything else.

All the way back to Jerome from the reception site in Sedona, Margot went over the scene in her mind, trying to decide if there really were a way she could have shot Lucas Wilcox down without making a scene. At the time she hadn’t wanted to appear rude, not at Angela’s wedding reception, not after everything the girl had gone through to get to her happy ending. Even after all that had happened, and so much had changed, Margot wasn’t quite ready to accept the apparent truce that now existed between the two witch clans, no matter what the events of the past few months might have done to prove otherwise. When he approached her, she’d told herself that enduring a dance with Lucas Wilcox was better than refusing him and possibly causing him to press the issue.

And maybe he wouldn’t have, she told herself. Maybe he would’ve just accepted your refusal and gone to ask someone else to dance.

Possibly, although even during their brief acquaintance, she’d learned he generally got his own way. Not rudely, not by forcing things, but somehow just…making them happen.

Which made sense, as that was his gift, after all. Lucky Lucas. The man for whom everything always magically went right. It was, as Angela had once remarked with a grin, a pretty damn good gift to have.

Except, of course, when it was working its magic on you. Then it didn’t look like such a great gift after all.

Margot turned off 89A, using the shortcut through old town Cottonwood and and into Clarkdale before getting back on the highway just as it curved around to head to Jerome, and up and over the mountain. By now it was getting late, almost eleven o’clock, although it appeared that she’d been one of the first to leave the reception.

Of course she had. Most of the clan members would stick around as long as the drink was flowing at the open bar…even Bryce, one of the other two elders. You’d think he’d know better. But the man had never met a whiskey on the rocks that he didn’t like. Allegra Moss, the third clan elder, wasn’t much of a drinker, but she also wouldn’t pass up the chance to talk shop, as it were, with some of the Wilcox witches. Allegra always did like to pick people’s brains.

The house felt empty, silent, when Margot entered and shut the front door behind her. No surprise there. Her mother had finally moved out a year earlier, declaring that she was tired of tripping over her daughter and wanted someplace where they wouldn’t be in each other’s laps. So she went down the hill to a “community for active seniors,” to a house right on the fourteenth green of the golf course there.

“You don’t play golf,” Margot had pointed out, whereupon her mother grinned and said,

“No, but I like the green grass, and it’s nice to have a house with a real right angle in it.”

There wasn’t much arguing with that point; buildings in Jerome had a tendency to sink and settle and shift in strange places, and the three-bedroom Victorian cottage where Margot had spent her entire life was no different. She couldn’t even protest that a retirement community was no place for a self-respecting witch, not when a baker’s dozen of McAllister witches and warlocks lived in the same development. In a way it made sense, as tiny Jerome couldn’t really sustain the growing McAllister population, and so there were clan members down the hill in Clarkdale and Cottonwood, and over in Page Springs and Cornville, all the way down to Camp Verde by the freeway.