This was so stupid.

  I was a High Witch, for spell’s sakes. I’d cast spells that took hours, with days of preparation. Measuring components, planning out patterns, waiting for the absolute perfect angle of the moon. So why in the world couldn’t I plan an above average date for the man I… well, for Lorcan and me?

  Part of it, I knew, was my upbringing. Witches didn’t ‘date’, so I had no background in dating and romance in general—no unit with which to measure these kinds of things. My trying to figure out dating was like plonking a toddler down in front of a piano and expecting them to be able to belt out Mozart.

  Still, people did learn to play the piano, so I knew I could learn how to be romantic. I mean, at the end of the day, wasn’t I brilliant and powerful? Yes. The leader of an up and coming, revolutionary coven? Yes. So, what in the world was getting in my way?

  You have no idea what you’re doing, I answered myself. So, you need to learn from someone who does.

  Okay, so maybe I just needed a teacher, like anyone trying to learn a foreign skill.

  I wanted to learn how to date, and I wanted to learn the art of romance. So, I needed to go to the most sentimental, saccharine, ‘cries at Hallmark commercials’ kind of sap—someone who got the fine details of loving and being loved. And, once I had that person in mind, I needed to convince them to show me their ways. At least enough that I could put my own Wanda spin on it, while also blowing Lorcan’s socks right off.

  So, the next evening as I was heading into work, I made sure to get there early enough that I could nip across the street and head for Poppy’s Potions, where I hoped my best friend and resident romantic would be able to help me. Because let’s face it, if Poppy couldn’t teach me, then maybe I couldn’t be taught.

  While Wanda’s Witchery angled for high end boutique, with swaths of sweeping fabric, and comfortable places to sit, all mirrors and rich velvets, Poppy’s store looked like an old timey apothecary shop. At least in part due to the heavy wooden shelves and glass fronted cabinets. Of course, no apothecary I remembered ever had a multitude of different colored glass bottles on every square inch of space, making the store look like a rainbow had thrown up everywhere.

  The fairy lights were cute, but I’d never tell her that. I mean, there was only so much softening I could handle about myself. And, really, I was at my limit.

  I was just about to step in through the front door—in fact, my hand was on the doorknob, ready to open it, when I looked through the glass and jerked back like I’d been shocked.

  Poppy wasn’t alone. And I didn’t mean she was helping a customer, either.

  I hadn’t been sure what to make of Alixandre Osmont when I first met him. Men with magic were rare, and mortal practitioners ever more so. Andre was both. He was a Magician, a type of magic user whose power worked best with children and his magic was one of spreading hope through the world. A little bit of light in the darkness. He was almost as insipid as Poppy, which made perfect sense since they’d discovered they were soul mates… Because, of course they were.

  I couldn’t fault Poppy’s taste in the man either. Andre was a couple inches over six feet, with dark hair and bright blue eyes. He was a bit narrower through the shoulders than Lorcan, more of a wiry swimmer’s build. But the posh British accent more than made up for it, not that I’d be telling Lorcan that anytime soon. And Andre was handsome—stunningly so. Yes, all in all, Poppy had done quite well for herself.

  More importantly, Andre made Poppy happy, if the face-splitting smile she was sporting was anything to go by. And he was good to her son. As I understood it, Andre was mentoring Finn on how to be a Magician, himself. And that kid was showing lots of magical promise, even if he got himself into trouble more times than not.

  I ducked to the side, not wanting them to see me standing there watching them be all gross and soul-matey and in love. Ugh.

  That’s the reason you came to see Poppy, I reminded myself. To learn how to be all soul-matey and in love.

  Double ugh. I was just so not cut out for this sappy stuff.

  But back to facing my current dilemma: I was torn between yanking open the door to tell them to get on with it already, or turning tail as quickly as I could to keep from retching on the sidewalk from the overwhelming sweetness I was currently witnessing.

  Still, it was so much better seeing her with Andre than it had been when she’d been in that ridiculous relationship with Marty, the dull. Er, I mean ‘null’. If a Golden Retriever suddenly stood up one day and decided to be human, you’d have Marty Zach. I still couldn’t believe he was Taliyah’s adopted cousin, and related to our late Chief of Police, Cain Morgan, who’d been an enormous hard ass.

  I knew Poppy had felt a lot of guilt and she’d wrestled with her decision to break up with Marty, but really. Did she think it was kinder to what, pity date him? Was she going to pity marry him, too? They weren’t a good match, and that was evident by seeing her here with Andre—practically eating each other’s faces off.

  As to that topic? Well, asking Poppy’s advice was going to have to wait. There was no way I was subjecting myself to getting in the middle of whatever was happening in there. Two supposedly grown people mooning over each other like lovesick teenagers.

  Mortifying.

  I definitely was not smiling as I slipped back across Main Street and headed into my own shop. Once I walked in, I noticed Maverick bent over the front counter and picking out surprisingly delicate embroidery stitches on a piece of mulberry silk that was destined to become a blouse. But not just any blouse. Oh, no—this one would imbue the wearer with more confidence than an entire truckload of nineteen-eighties shoulder pads.

  Maverick glanced up as I walked in and, seeing that I wasn’t a customer, immediately looked back down at what he was doing.

  “Nice to see you too, Maverick,” I said sarcastically. “My night is going great, thank you for asking.”

  He didn’t rise to the bait, which was happening more and more lately. Taliyah was a terrible influence on him.

  “What were you dithering over at the Gypsy’s store for?”

  He didn’t even lift his head when he asked the question, so at least he didn’t see me freeze for a second. It figured he would have seen me loitering in front of Poppy’s store. The front of my store was a huge window, and Poppy’s was right across the road.

  “I wanted to ask Poppy’s opinion about something, but she was busy.” I tried to keep my voice casual, just this side of annoyed, so he didn’t get suspicious.

  The ghost of one of Maverick’s old scowls crossed his face. The new version looked more sulky than furious. “I’m every bit as talented a potion brewer. If you need advice, you should come to me.”

  I laughed, a sharp, surprised sound. I’d just about sworn off making potions after the last one that had ended in disaster. It was cheaper to buy from Poppy, anyway.

  At the sound of me laughing, Maverick did look up, clearly offended, and I realized he’d taken the laugh the wrong way. We’d come a long way from when we were back at the Crescent Circle Coven, but the scars still lingered, and any hint that Maverick was ‘less than’ would send him into a tizzy. And I really didn’t feel like dealing with one of Maverick’s tizzies, at the moment. So, I waved a hand, like I was shooing away the snorting laugh that had slipped out of my mouth.

  “I wasn’t going to ask her about potions,” I offered.

  Maverick didn’t look convinced. “Oh, what were you going to ask her about, then?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Mm hmm.”

  He dropped his attention back to his work, too prickly to acknowledge my partial apology. After a long moment of silence, I was going to drift into the back, assuming the conversation was over, when Maverick spoke up again.

  “Whatever is on your mind… you could still ask me.”

  There was something weird in his tone that had me actually considering it. I’d asked almost every other adult in the coven about the whole date thing… Surely Maverick couldn’t do worse than bayou mishaps and purple prose given physical form?

  Every instinct told me to say something scathing and head into the backroom. Fighting those instincts left me tapping my foot and staring down at the floor blankly. I raked a hand back through my hair as I further considered it.

  What the spell. If Maverick made fun of me, I could set his hair on fire.

  Right. I could.

  So?

  It helped that he wasn’t looking at me.

  I studied the scuff on the toe of my boot, turning it back and forth under the lights. “Okay, fine, I’ll ask you.”

  Then I paused as I further argued with myself over whether this was a huge mistake.

  “So, ask,” Maverik said after another few beats of silence.

  I took a deep breath. “Let’s say… you wanted to do something special for someone.”

  “What sort of special?”

  “Like take them out on a date, that kind of thing.”

  “Okay.”

  “What would you do?”

  Maverick stopped; the needle frozen in the air. When he raised his head, there wasn’t any mocking or gloating in his expression, which, lucky for him, because that meant he wasn’t going to go up in a blaze of flames anytime soon. Instead, he looked honestly baffled.

  “A… date,” he repeated slowly, like someone feeling out an unfamiliar language.

  He might as well have been. I realized with a rush that, if anything, Maverick had less experience with dating and being romantic than I did. I might not have known much about his romantic history, other than his inappropriate past fixation on me, but from what I’d gathered, he leapt from shallow affair to shallow affair, and then ended up marrying Taliyah without a single date between them.

  And that was when I realized that asking Maverik about this was probably the worst idea I’d ever had. I wanted to stomp my foot in frustration at my own idiocy.

  “Well, food is traditional,” he said slowly, like I’d asked him about some obscure ritual. Clearly, for all his obvious discomfort with the subject, Maverick was trying to be helpful. “And an activity, maybe?”

  An activity. How specific. How helpful.

  Still, any time Maverick wasn’t trying to be actively antagonistic was one I didn’t want to ruin, so I just nodded like he’d actually given me some sage advice. Just as I was about to ask him for more detail regarding said activity, the bell above the door rang. I spun around, happier than I’d ever been to have a customer.

  “Oh, it’s you,” I said as Taliyah stepped through the door and paused, her eyes sweeping between Maverick and me.

  “Everything okay?” she asked warily.

  I tried to look a little less grateful. “Of course. I’m assuming you’re not here shopping.”

  For Taliyah, Maverick put down the embroidery he was working on and straightened up. He looked much happier to see her, even had a smile on his face. Actually, he always seemed happier with Taliyah around. Yep, the fool definitely had it something bad for her. I just wondered if he’d ever let her know as much. Kind of ironically funny that they were married.

  In full Police Chief mode, Taliyah shook her head briskly. “There’s been another accident, and I’m pretty sure it’s connected to the first one.” She faced me then. “I was hoping you’d be willing to come with me, since you already know what we’re looking for.”

  I was absolutely willing. I was eager, even. Anything to get me out of the store and the chance that Maverick might forget that I’d just asked for his dating advice. And if a stranger had to get cursed in order to get me out of this awkward conversation, then that was just how it had to be.

  Sorry not sorry, stranger.

  “Of course,” I said, as Maverick sighed and shook his head. I faced Taliyah with a big grin. “Lead the way.”

  Chapter Ten

  The Victorian house that Taliyah pulled in front of was… well, it was certainly a house.

  I didn’t really have the words to describe it. It had walls, and a roof, and presumably floors inside. But none of them seemed to go with each other—it was as though various architects had worked on a section of the house and then met in the middle. For example, one of the front windows was maybe two times larger than the one just beside it. And all the curtains were drawn, giving the place a heavy, shuttered feeling.

  The lawn was studded with decorations; plastic flamingos and ducks, a few birdbaths, concrete faces hanging off every tree trunk, flags for every possible holiday all proudly displayed at once, and there were little concrete gnomes peeking out of the overgrown bushes in the garden every few paces.

  “My bad taste senses are tingling,” I said as I stared from the passenger seat of Taliyah’s car.

  She made a sound that wasn’t quite a snort but was definitely a close cousin. “Wait until you go in.”

  I had a bad feeling about this.

  We walked up the overgrown walkway, and I tried not to trip over the weeds that were growing up through the concrete path. And the front door wasn’t in much better repair—it sounded like an old, cackling witch when Taliyah pushed it open and the paint was peeling badly enough that it revealed all the previous coats of paint the door had worn in what appeared to be a very long life. And that was in the moonlight. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how bad it looked in full sunlight.

  The front hallway of the house was just as sad and dingy as the outside, without any moonlight coming in through the covered windows. Though, from the looks of things, it probably would have been sad and dingy even if there had been ten-thousand-volt halogen lamps to light the space up. There was a rickety, sagging staircase on the opposite wall, disappearing into the gloom of the upstairs hallway, and horrible flocked wallpaper lined the walls—stuff I thought had been outlawed back in the seventies.

  I flinched back, one hand on my chest. “Goddess, Taliyah. Shouldn’t you have put up some police tape? Tried to cordon this off?”

  She gave me a puzzled, wary look. “The case has been ruled as an accident, so far. This isn’t a crime scene.”

  I glanced at the wallpaper again and shuddered. “So, you say.”

  Taliyah rolled her eyes at me, but the corner of her mouth jerked up into a reluctant smile.

  The living room she led me to was honestly even worse, even though I didn’t know how that was even possible. But I almost gagged when we stepped onto the dark brown shag carpet and took a look around me. The room was just… well, it was ugly. The Victorians had loved filling their parlors with shelves and shelves of decorations, statues, music boxes, knick-knacks, the list went on. And they’d done so with glee—no doubt owing to the fact that they’d never have to dust anything themselves. Well, whoever lived here had taken a page from their book, because every square inch of the room was crammed with kitsch. There were velvet paintings of sad clowns hanging on the walls, and something that looked like an elf on the shelf, but was more a valentine cherub. The whole place made my sense of style curl up and die.

  I wrapped my arms around myself tightly, hoping ‘tacky’ wasn’t contagious. “Does the police department give hazard pay? Because I might need to put in a claim.”

  Taliyah ignored me, moving to stand in front of the huge fireplace that dominated the far wall of the room. The surround was made of pink quartz that clashed hideously with the carpet, which had started out chocolate brown and ended up a burnt shade of orange. I wasn’t sure if that was owing to sun damage at some long-ago time (when the curtains were actually open) or if this carpet was patterned ombre. Just above the mantel, there was a large bare spot on the wall. It was obviously a bare spot, because just about every other inch of the wall was covered with some kind of decoration, so the chunk of three feet by two feet blank space stood out like the proverbial smoking gun.

  “I’m going to assume that spot on the wall is relevant, since we’re staring at it.”

  I didn’t know why I bothered. Taliyah so rarely rose to the bait. She never had and it didn’t seem like she ever would. Instead, she wore the detached indifference of someone who had seen it all and wasn’t impressed.

  Moving towards the wall, Taliyah grabbed the picture frame that was resting on the floor. The large frame was painted to look like distressed gold but had missed the mark completely and ended up somewhere closer to ‘chipped by being tossed in the trash’. The frame was about the right size to fit the bare spot on the wall, though, so I assumed such had been its spot of quasi honor.

  It was almost impossible to tell what the painting inside the frame depicted, since the canvas was badly ripped straight through the middle. It was a rough tear—like something had hit it, rather than someone taking a knife to it in an attempt to avenge art lovers everywhere.

  Taliyah flipped out her notebook and glanced over the page. “At roughly six-thirty this evening, Mr. Colton Bauer was in his living room admiring his recently acquired,” she grimaced at the piece of ‘art’. “Masterpiece. When the painting suddenly flung itself off the wall and… attacked him.”

  “Attacked him?” I repeated, frowning.

  She nodded. “Apparently, it landed on his head, which in turn tore the canvas and landed him in the hospital with a concussion.”

  If Taliyah hadn’t sprung me from my own terrible decision of asking Maverick for dating advice, yes I would have been irritated. But I was still a little irritated and now that irritation had nothing to do with my surly cousin. Instead, I was annoyed with the fact that I was even standing in this horrible house, on this horrible carpet, surrounded by horrible things.

  I looked at Taliyah and threw my hands on my hips. “So, some guy with the worst taste in the history of bad taste hangs up an ugly painting badly, which in turn falls off the wall and lands on him, and you think that ridiculousness is somehow connected to our very cursed shoes?”

  Taliyah cocked her head to the side as she matched the raised-brow expression I was currently giving her. “How can you even tell the painting’s ugly?”

  I gave her a look of ‘really?’ and then made an elaborate gesture around the room like I was a presenter in a game show. The evidence was damning.