Enchantment Emporium

“David’s not ready for what?” her mother repeated.

As the inevitable argument began, Katie sidled closer and murmured, “You okay?”

Given the concern in Katie’s low voice, Allie figured that sudden flash of fear had shown on her face.

“Don’t worry,” her cousin continued. “Even if David does take over from Granddad, he’s young. Really young. It’ll be years, decades, before…”

“Don’t.” The flour slipped through her fingers like silk. Impossible to hold.

“He gets tied down, it’ll keep him from going all darkside,” Maria said quietly, pulling a stalk of rhubarb from her mouth, the plump curve of her lower lip stained pink.

“He’s not going darkside!”

“He’s powerful.” Maria flipped up a finger as she counted off the points Allie had just made to herself. “He’s a loner…”

“So what? So’s Gran. So’s Charlie more often than not.”

“He’s a male.”

And there was yet another inarguable point. There were times Allie wished she could argue with her family a little more. Of course, right at the moment, they wouldn’t be able to hear her over her mother and Auntie Jane.

“My son is not hoarding power!”

“Oh, and that’s an unbiased opinion, is it?”

“Don’t be ridiculous! How could it be unbiased, I’m his mother!”

“Don’t talk to me about mothers! Not when your own mother is careening about the world like a tetherball!”

“What does my mother have to do with my son?”

“Nothing at all.” Bits of dough flew off her fingers, spattering the kitchen like a soft hail as Auntie Jane spread her arms. Those not involved in the argument ducked. “For pity’s sake, Mary, keep up. We’ve moved on.”

A sudden shadow flickering past the window over the sink cut off a response Allie suspected would be memorable.

Muttering how no one should be worried about what the girls were going to add to the pies, Aunt Ruth leaned forward to check it out.

“It’s Auntie Ruby,” she sighed, head twisted to one side so she could see past the upper edge of the window. “She’s found a broom.”

“I told you she was senile!” More dough spattered as Auntie Jane punched the air in triumph. Allie brushed a bit off Katie’s cheek.

Aunt Ruth sighed again. “And she’s cackling.”

Charlie moved through the Wood along the path of Roland’s song. Most days she’d have been there by now—in the Wood, the actual distance between Aunt Mary’s porch and Cincinnati was irrelevant. But today…

The path kept skirting the edges of the dark places beneath the oldest trees. Places Charlie’d just as soon not have to cross. Places she shouldn’t have had to go near. Not for Roland.

Reaching back, she tugged her guitar around and strummed a questing chord.

The path shifted onto higher ground.

She picked up her pace and, when her shoulders brushed between the smooth trunks of young aspens, turned to look back the way she’d come.

Shadows had already claimed the path although, in all honesty, she couldn’t say if it was a mulitude of smaller shadows or one large one.

Either way, it wasn’t good.

The clerk at the front desk tracked her disapprovingly as she crossed the lobby and Charlie only just barely managed to keep from flipping her the bird. The shadows had dogged her footsteps for the rest of the trip, and all the clichéd lurking had pissed her right off.

She walked on to the elevator and, as the door closed behind her, swung her guitar back around to the front and began to pick a discordant pattern, trying to give the shadows form now she was out of the Wood. There’d been something almost familiar about them—or it—but she just couldn’t…

“So, uh, what floor did you need?”

Startled, she glanced over at the man standing beside the controls, had a vague memory of him being there when she’d entered, and said, “Ten.”

He gave her a smile that said, Well here we are, stuck together in a small space, and nodded down at the place where her hand remained curled protectively over the strings. “Do you play?”

“No,” she told him as the almost familiar slipped away, “I just like to carry a guitar around with me.”

“Right. Stupid question.” Smile faltering slightly, his gesture drew her attention to her reflection in the stainless steel walls. “You know, you look more like the electric than acoustic type.”

She tossed a strand of her blue, chin-length hair back off her face and growled, “Do you have any idea what a battery pack for an amp weighs?”

“Uh… No.”

“Well, there you go then.”

He shuffled back a step and raised his eyes to the numbers flicking by as though seven, eight, nine had suddenly become the most interesting things in his world. Out the door on nine, he turned, opened his mouth, and closed it again as the elevator door slid shut between them.

The fluorescent lights banished all shadows from the elevator.

Charlie kept an eye on the corners anyway.