Magical Weddings (17 page)

Colleen smiled back at Lysée’s mirror reflection.

“Did your mother let you play dress up with her things?” Lysée asked.

“My mother? My mother was a very, um, practical woman,” Colleen said.

“I see. She’s gone?”

“Yes.”

“Do you miss her?”

“Very much.”

“As I do mine.”

“I think yours would be proud of you,” Colleen said. “Considering all you do for those getting married here in Breens.”

“You think so?” Lysée asked. “She loved celebrations. I believe, though, she would have been angry with me I never gave her grandchildren. Or even married for that matter.”

“It could be you taking the big leap this time, you know,” Shelley said, reminding her.

“God forbid,” Lysée said. “I don’t want to be paired up with someone just because the place magic decrees it. A near stranger? Or what if it was someone I can’t stand?”

Mia, who had drifted further into the morass to dig through piles, poke into trunks, said, “You don’t get a choice, unfortunately. None of us do.”

“Who do you think is going to be taking the walk this time?” Shelley asked.

“I’m voting for Jerry and Anne,” Lysée said.

“Breens Mist’s starstruck lovers,” Mia said, and held up an item she plucked from a box. The device had a four-pronged spike at one end, rusty gears in the middle, and a crank handle at the other end. She tried, but couldn’t get the crank to turn. “Is this one of the old wedding magicks?”

“No,” Colleen said. “It’s an apple peeler.”

“Seriously, Mia?” Shelley said.

“I wish she was right,” Lysée said. “Not about the peeler. About Jerry and Anne. Every time we get the spell and another wedding is on the way I think this time
must
be their time.”

“I don’t think so,” Shelley said. “If the place magic was going to make the most contentious couple in Breens Mist history tie the knot, it would have already done it.” She grabbed a satchel perched atop an iron filigree plant stand and upended its contents into a box on the floor, causing the box to overflow with various historic detritus.

Colleen scowled.
Gee, thanks, Shelley
.

Satchel for the dress now freed up, Shelley carefully eased the skirt’s shimmering teal bulk into the bag. “No,” she said. “I’ll tell you who I think it is who’s getting married this time.”

“Who?” Mia said.

Shelley made a sly face at Mia. “You and Reggie.”

“Who?” Colleen asked.

“The records warlock in the library basement,” Shelley said.

“Please,” Mia said. “He’s gay.”

“You think he’s cute,” Shelley said. “Besides, do you think the place magic cares?”

“If it doesn’t, it should,” Mia said. “I’m not interested in marriage and it would be one in name only, so it wouldn’t mean much to me, but it wouldn’t be fair to him. I think he’s in love with a human.”

“A human?” Colleen said. “How does that even work?”

“Don’t know, but I don’t think it will in the long run. Poor Reggie.” Mia fiddled with another oddity. Pulled from a cabinet drawer, it resembled a frightening amalgamation of a cake knife with a chain saw. It, too, had a crank handle, as well as an intricate series of mechanisms where the blade would have been on a normal knife. “What about this?” she asked. “Magick?”

Shelley spotted what Mia held in her hand and grimaced in distaste. “God, no. Put that thing down.”

“What is it?”

“An osteotome.”

“A what?”

“Surgeons used it when I was a child to cut off people’s legs.”

With a soft shriek, Mia threw the antique medical device back where she’d found it and slammed the drawer shut.

“Why do any of us have to marry when the place magic says so?” Colleen asked. Of the four of them in the attic, she was the youngest, the newest to Breens. “No one has ever explained that to me so that I understand it.”

“You’re not alone,” Shelley said. “One of the great mysteries in Breens. I don’t think we’ll ever get an answer to that one.”

What about Candy and Randy?” Mia suggested the names of a witch and warlock Colleen barely knew.

“Or Vinnie and Minnie,” Shelley said, adding to the rhyming theme.

“Jade and Wade,” Mia said.

“Uriel and Muriel.”

“Gerk and Kirk!”

“Or…” Shelley paused dramatically. “Ly
sée
and Ram
say
.”

Colleen saw Lysée’s face go pale in the mirror at the mention of The Priest’s given name, her body rigid.

Is that fear?

For several seconds, no one reacted, not even Shelley, who immediately realized her teasing had gone too far.

“Sorry,” Shelley said, “I wasn’t thinking–”

Lysée cut in with a breezy laugh she summoned from a store of personal bravado Colleen wouldn’t have guessed her to possess. “Ugh. Don’t even joke,” she said. Tossing her hair, she pretended sudden interest in modeling a new hairstyle for herself in the mirror.

“How
can
you joke?” Colleen said. “How can you all act so sanguine about any of this?”

“What else are we supposed to do?” Shelley asked. “This is what life has turned out to be. For all of us. And we’re stuck with it. If you don’t make a joke or two–”

“You go insane,” Mia said. She continued rummaging around, searching for forgotten wedding magicks. Pouncing on a ratty, threadbare parasol embroidered with rabbits, she held it up for consideration. “Do you think maybe–”

“No,” the three others said in unison.

“Here, Mia,” Colleen said, starting toward a mountain of boxes shutting out the light from a dormer. “Let me show you where I saw some of the old wedding magicks.”

“What about Colleen and Ax?”

Lysée’s words stopped Colleen short. She met the witch’s quietly speculative gaze in the mirror. “What?”

“You and Ax,” Lysée said.

Colleen’s stomach clenched and fluttered. So intense was her physical reaction to Lysée’s suggestion, she expected the floor to shimmy beneath her feet, doors and windows to rattle in sympathy. Strangely, Drayhome stayed mute, allowing her to experience privately the perverse mix of fear and surprise longing that roiled up inside her at the thought of Breens place magic marrying her off to the tall warlock. Her skin flushed, and not entirely from the abrupt, unaccustomed spotlight shone on her.

“Me and–?”

“–Ax. Yes,” Lysée said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Colleen said.

Lysée cocked an eyebrow. “Am I being ridiculous? I don’t think so. What was it exactly we walked in on the other morning between you two in the kitchen?”

“That…was…”

“Yes?”

“Nothing.”

“A lot of power-laced pheromones swirling around in the air then for it to have been nothing,” Mia said.

Colleen’s eyes almost shuttered in bliss as the recollection of that power, his power, reawakened inside her.

“There!” Shelley said. “There it is again.”

Embarrassment ruthlessly grabbed hold.

Control, Colleen
.

“Spare me,” she said. “For one thing, he’s The Priest’s lackey.”

“A pretty sexy lackey, if you ask me,” Shelley said.

“A coward. He didn’t tell me about this being the last wedding here. I had to find it out from you three.”

“Still pissed at him?”

You think?

Stair treads groaned and creaked behind them. All four witches jumped at the noise.

Ax finished climbing the stairs to the attic, face rising up into view. Cool eyes focused on Colleen.

“It’s only me,” he said, “the lackey.”

He’d heard. Colleen’s throat closed tight.
You didn’t warn me?
she asked the house. For the first time, Drayhome had betrayed her.
How could you not show me he was coming?

“I thought I told you to stay–”

“I’m not a dog, Colleen,” Ax said. “I don’t heel.”

“–away…” Her voice trailed off.

She felt like a fool. A callous one.

“Ax–” she began, but wasn’t sure what to say.

Ax simultaneously ignored and spoke directly to her. Quiet dignity held his back straight.

“I came up here to see if you needed help carrying anything downstairs,” he said. “I can see you don’t.” He turned and started down the stairs again. “Call me if that changes.”

Ax, the lackey, loaded banquet tables from the storage barn at the back of the property onto a flat bed truck. While the attics held the things Drayhome supposedly no longer needed, the stuff used on a regular basis was housed in the barn, more of a warehouse, actually, since it was watertight and vermin proof. Though they had four days yet to go before the ceremony and reception, his wasn’t the only work to be done in the ballroom and conservatory. Others would come in behind him, adding décor and no doubt other structures on top of the base he provided. After he finished moving the ten rectangular tables, carved from western red cedar in a style that married Queen Anne to Pacific Northwest nativism in an oddly successful union, he would return for the one hundred matching chairs, a 1920s era wet bar, and assorted other pieces for holding serving dishes, gifts, the cake and more.

Originally preferring the conservatory for the reception, Lysée had switched room functions and decided on the ballroom as party space, with the ceremony shifting to the large glass walled room where Mia feverishly worked her plant magic. Only Ax was to be allowed inside, bringing with him a hundred more chairs, folding ones this time—
thank the wedding gods
—plus the altar, of course. A quick spell and she temporary tinted every glass surface to let in the light, but keep her wedding designs under wraps. So far, it didn’t look like much to him in there, rows of biodegradable wood pulp planters from the local garden center, a few sprouting sparse trunks and spindly shrubs, but Mia assured him everything was well in hand.

Shelley took charge of sorting through the old wedding magicks in the attic, selecting the best ones, those that were still in decent shape, along with others they could renew and get working again. Though, he suspected, she spent more time clothes shopping through old trunks and armoires than assisting the others in wedding prep. She was a baffling one, that witch. He had no idea what really made her tick. More power to the warlock brave enough to take on that riddle and work his way past the impenetrable walls she’d built around herself.

Lysée, the wedding general, kept everyone hopping. Meetings with witches and warlocks assigned to catering, cake designer, music, booze, and a dozen other details he was too busy—read:
didn’t care enough
—to track, often went till midnight.

Colleen, as far as he could see, had the worst of it, tasked with pulling table linens and 18-piece place settings for a hundred out of storage, the various components requiring washing, ironing or polishing. The whatever-she-called-it lace presented special difficulties, he would guess, judging by the amount of swearing he’d heard coming from the laundry room in the basement when he’d passed that door the next morning. In addition, she was expected to ready every bedroom in the house for overnight guests, with special attention paid to Spirit’s old suite of rooms, which The Priest always appropriated for himself, and the slightly less grand honeymoon quarters, which mercifully for the happy couple-to-be, were housed in the opposite wing. During all of this, Colleen baked, cooked, and served meals to the hoards of wedding types who came and went, this last duty visibly tiring her most.

She needs help. Why doesn’t she ask for it?

He knew enough not to offer and stuck strictly to the list she’d provided, plus the umpteen jobs Lysée had cobbled onto the bottom. After the humiliating encounter in the attic, he had no trouble staying away and keeping to himself. Colleen had tried backpedaling over the last couple of days, attempting to soften the blow her words landed to his ego. She initiated idle conversations he didn’t want to have. Praised his competence to others with each job he finished. When selecting the various menus to serve at Drayhome for the day, she picked items she knew were his favorites, cherry praline fritters made from fresh Raniers, bacon corn chowder, cedar planked portobello mushroom burgers with Walla Walla sweet onions, shepherd’s pie.

Nice, but he wasn’t in the mood. He was, in fact, depressed. It was one thing to understand his place in the Breens Mist pecking order, quite another to hear it from someone else’s lips. Yet, what about Colleen calling him lackey wasn’t true? He’d been sent here to separate her from Drayhome, forcibly if necessary, all because Ramsay Wise decreed it, and no one, Ax included, dared contradict him.

He applauded Colleen’s relative composure, knowing these were her last few days as caretaker. An uncertain future followed. Other than some mild hysterics out at the carriage house, he wasn’t sure if he should count the doors that nearly ate him alive, her calm was superhuman. He’d anticipated Vesuvius and gotten Old Faithful, a bit of steam and verbal gas and not much else.

Is she in denial?

It had to be. It disappointed him to think Colleen could be a witch who would just roll over and die like that, not want to fight.

Oh, really?
Like you are?

Colleen closed the lid on the toilet in the third floor maid’s bathroom, and sat, confident she’d found the one forgotten space in the house where she could expect to be left alone and take a breather.

Maybe Lysée is right
.

Maybe having the weddings taken away was a blessing in disguise. One less duty to sap her already seriously depleted energies.

Why do we have a third floor maid’s room anyway? It’s not like Drayhome has ever had maids.

Since she couldn’t envision a gifted witch in the position of a house servant, such a maid would have to be human.

It would be nice to have some help around here.

Colleen was bone tired, dead tired.

Not gonna happen
.

Not when such a human would forget everything about Colleen five minutes after they parted. Everything included
everything
, Colleen’s name, face, anything they might have discussed or agreed upon, her entire existence, all courtesy of the place magic. As natural defenses went, it was fairly effective. In Breens they had a saying,
you can’t hunt down and kill what you can’t remember.
It made interacting with the human world tricky, however, frustrating and largely impractical, especially since records tended to disappear along with human memories. Working a normal job or owning a business operated in the human world was out of the question for her kind. In order for any of them to own a car, a human home, or open a bank account was outrageously expensive. You needed a witch or warlock with a specific talent for creating paperwork that didn’t “slip away” or get permanently lost in the system. Want to make sure a human didn’t forget something? Like perhaps reporting to work at Drayhome? For that, the services of a separate memory talent were required.