Magic Before Mischief (The Magic Before Mysteries Book 1) Page 6

  Oaken had been a junior when Jinx and I were freshmen. He stared at the picture while Levi and Jinx grabbed plates and argued about the glasses for the beer. While they fought, Oaken finally said, “Sort of. Maybe. If I could see her eyes, I might be able to say for sure.”

  I nodded. We’d been graduated for a while, so it wasn’t like we knew anyone. Maybe we could find her though. If that memory was right. Or I could. Jinx probably had to work. I opened the pizza box and picked off one of the jalapeños while Jinx and Levi finally came back to the kitchen.

  “Why don’t you two just sleep together and get it over with?” Oaken asked.

  I gasped and stared at my friend and my brother. “Are you blushing?” I demanded.

  “Not all of us are easy like you Oaken.”

  “You’ve had a crush on him since 7th grade,” Oaken said.

  “But he’s younger than us.”

  “By ten months,” Levi shot out. I supposed that was true, but…this couldn’t be true, could it?

  “You like Jinx?” I asked Levi. “What am I asking? Of course, you do.”

  He didn’t answer, but I knew my brother’s expressions well enough to know he did. Jinx was a catch and I’d seen guys chase her time and again.

  The confusing part was that she never gave in. What if it wasn’t because people were failing some sort of internal rating system but was because she was really interested in someone else? My hippie brother and my serious best friend. She could do magic, but she did taxes.

  OMG, OMG, OMG, OMG! I opened a beer, handed it to her, and then asked Oaken, “So what about you and Mary Michelle. She’s single.”

  Jinx snorted back a laugh. She knew me well enough to know I’d turned the tables on Oaken on purpose. And also that I hadn’t targeted her yet. That was for a moment when it was just us and I could torture her at my leisure.

  Chapter 8

  When I woke up, I found Jinx had taken my extra bed and she was already up, dressed, and making coffee. I scowled when I noticed Levi on the couch. I crossed my living room and kicked his feet.

  “Hey what?”

  “Get up ya lazy bum,” I said idly. “You can’t stay here when I leave.”

  “Why are you leaving? It’s Monday? You should be working right? Delivering papers? You don’t have the paper route.”

  I didn’t answer him since I’d emailed my boss the night before and told him I was done. I wasn’t ready to admit that yet, so I left him and joined Jinx in the kitchen. She had toasted one of the last bagels from my mom and was slathering it with cream cheese. I ignored her sensibility of not eating pizza—like any normal person—and opened the fridge for the spicy pizza. I yawned as I stole her coffee and had a sip.

  “Why is that black? What’s wrong with you? Where are your taste buds?”

  “Calories. My pants are tight.”

  I yawned and then rose to get my own coffee. It took me too long to answer, but I finally said, “You’re beautiful.”

  “Shut up,” she told me.

  I laughed and then sat down with my own coffee. I had added Reese’s peanut butter coffee creamer. Jinx examined me, picking up the creamer, sniffing it, and then said, “Why aren’t you sleeping off delivering papers?”

  I shrugged and took another bite.

  “You’re in a mood. You’re cagey.”

  “You have a crush on my little brother.”

  “You’re dressed. You have understated makeup on, jeans, and boots. That’s you’re normal gear. You even French braided your hair. Where are your wild, hippy curls?”

  I scowled at her and then said, “Have you always had a thing for Levi?”

  Her gaze narrowed on me.

  “Is that why you dumped Paul Green? He was kind of a catch. He’d have been perfect for you. You both like La Crosse. He cooks and sings. I mean…he was basically hot too. I’m not sure he was even real.”

  Jinx crossed her legs and then said, “Shut up.”

  “Listen, Buttercup,” I said.

  She threw her bagel at me. It landed cream cheese down on my sweater, and I flicked a pepperoni her way. It landed on her blouse and her gaze narrowed.

  “Now you’re gonna have to wear one of my shirts,” I told her.

  “Then I’ll have big gaping droop spots where my girls go,” Jinx said through gritted teeth as she through tossed the pepperoni on the table.

  “Oh…” I cooed. “Poor slender Jinx. She’s barely gained half an ounce and now she has to drink black coffee. It’s almost like she’s considering getting nakey with someone.”

  “Did you just use the word ‘nakey?”

  I grinned around a bite of pizza.

  “I hate you. Why are you up?”

  “I’m going to go find the chick from that lit class.”

  Jinx slowly put down her coffee and stared at me. I waited to see if she’d think I was crazy. If Jinx wasn’t behind me, I could be sure that no one would ever be.

  “You want to know if she knew who the photographer was?”

  I nodded.

  “And why he took pictures of both of you?”

  I nodded.

  “That…” She licked her lips, her gaze skipping over my face and then she pulled out her phone and made a call.

  “What the heck?” I demanded, but she shot me a nasty look and put her finger over her lips.

  “Yeah, Megan, it’s Jen.”

  I gasped. I had no idea she’d picked up a fake work name. My Jinx was a minx!

  “I can’t make it in today.”

  She didn’t offer excuses and I grinned, shocked, sensible Jinx with her black coffee and her bagel for breakfast when pizza was an option just called-in to work? What in the magic?

  Her gaze met mine and I winked.

  We finished eating, and I had to literally drag my brother off the couch to get him out of my house. I locked up, avoided Mrs. Brightly, and got Jinx to join me in my truck. I had a rush of energy, but that sense of something around the bend warned me that the torpor was coming. It didn’t feel quite like normal.

  Did that mean that there was something else ahead? Some horror? Or was it just that things were so off because of this guy who’d been killed. Could I even trust this witchy intuition? It hadn’t saved me from being stalked. Was it even worth listening to? But it was that sense of awareness that helped me to keep the hummingbird syndrome in better control.

  I drove into Savannah with the music up high and the windows down low. About halfway there, I said, “If you want to be with Levi, I’m not going to give you crap.”

  “Levi is a mess,” Jinx said.

  I wasn’t going to argue with her. They did have fun together. I’d seen it time and again, but Jinx was upstanding and normal. She had a mortgage, a job that made her good money, a 401k, and she took a freaking multi-vitamin every single day.

  “He’s very different than you.”

  He was a mess though. He didn’t work, he mooched. He could do any number of side hustle jobs as I did, but he didn’t. I wasn’t even sure what he did. Did he have some secret passion that he was pursuing or was this all just Netflix binging?

  “You’d have to push him through supporting himself or decide you were ok with supporting him.”

  She took in a deep breath and then said, “I like so much about Levi, but the idea of taking care of him because he won’t take care of himself is not sexy, it’s not appealing, and it gives me a headache.”

  I could see that. I didn’t want to take care of him either. But, I got where he was coming from too. The thing about being a Crowe was that we were constantly compared to each other. We were loved and we had an army of people who were behind us, but there was this affliction of our moms getting together and talking. They’d end up saying something like, “Oh Levi, have you noticed how well Theo is doing with his restaurant? You should talk to him about how he did it. I bet you’d be great.”

  Jinx glanced over and said, “I get not wanting to go to college. He hated school from kindergarten on. I get hating an office job. But you do all kinds of stuff. And I am not comparing you to Levi. I’m just saying, there are options. Fishing jobs. Those are good jobs.”

  I listened while Jinx listed out option after option of things he could do that would be respectable and I finally asked, “Have you ever said that to him?”

  She looked over and then she bit her lip as she admitted, “I’m afraid to tell him that. I think he can slide into my life, make himself important and then…later…it would be too hard to let him go. Even if he was making me crazy. It would be different, if him being not working were a decision we came to together, like to take care of a kid or because he got sick or injured. But…to just not work?”

  I wasn’t going to interfere, I told myself, and then I asked, “Do you love him? Or do you just think you might love him?”

  She cleared her throat and then said, “I’ve never not loved him.”

  “Are you happy without him?” I changed lanes and slowed down a little. Getting to the college campus seemed far less important than it had been when we left.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What would be different in your life if he was a part of it right now?”

  She glanced over and then asked, “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, your mortgage payment isn’t going to change, you aren’t going to stop going to work. You aren’t going to buy him a car. Maybe you’ll be warmer at night. But you might be happier? Even if you aren’t, at least you won’t wonder anymore.”

  “So you think I should take him on?”

  “No,” I said quickly, “I think you should decide what would be different, what would bother you, and then I think you should be straight with Levi. For all his faults, he’s got a lot of perks.”


  I was parking when I said that, “You’d never need to care for your car again. He’d feed you because he loves to cook. He’d keep your yard nice which I know you hate. I’m not saying you support him, but you might tell him what you want.”

  “You mean like if we’re dating, I’ll buy food if he cooks, but he has to pay half if we go out?”

  I nodded and then said, “If that’s important to you. The perk of being Levi Mother-magicking Crowe is that he can get a job when he wants one. If you tell him he needs to pay half utilities if he moves in, he’ll either not move in, or he’ll move in and do it.”

  We parked and walked past our old dorm room.

  “I missed him a lot the year we were here and he wasn’t,” Jinx told me.

  “You know that this means our whole lives you were lying to me.”

  “What if what I want is to be able to tell my mom that my boyfriend is a lawyer?”

  I glanced over at her. That would never be Levi, and Jinx knew it. Her mom, however, was as big a magic-loving hippie as you could be.

  “Ok, not my mom. But everyone.”

  “Then you need to date someone else and give yourself some kind of shock therapy every time you wonder about him.”

  We’d reached that literature building and had to debate which of the names were the right literature professor. We went to her office, but she was out. We then tracked her secretary down and I told her straight out what was going on.

  “So this guy was following you around?” The secretary asked with raised brows.

  I pulled out the picture that had been crumpled into the trash and showed her the picture of the girl in sunglasses and the one of me leaning over in my bra.

  “This one of you is…”

  “It’s nasty and it makes me want to puke. I want to know why this guy was following me and if there was a reason behind the fact that I have boobs.”

  “Professor Lang is out for the day. She never comes back after her morning class on Mondays.”

  I glanced at Jinx who looked as irritated as I was and then Jinx said, “But you have access to files right? Can you give us the names of people who were in our class?”

  The secretary hesitated but my crumpled up picture seemed to convince her.

  “I didn’t do this.”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  It took a few minutes for her to find the file, but she printed out the name and then Jinx and I searched it over. “Becca Wright.”

  The secretary said, “Never, ever tell anyone what I’m about to do.”

  She took the name from us and printed out another sheet.

  “Open that far from here.”

  I winked at her and took her card. On our way out, I ordered her an edible arrangement of chocolate covered fruit and Jinx and I found our way to the coffee cart for our favorite drinks from our college days and those oversized cookies that had been our breakfast for far too many days.

  Chapter 9

  Becca Wright lived on a quiet street across Savanah. Her quaint brick apartment building looked as if it had been built in the 1940s and been lovingly cared for ever since. There were magnolia trees blossoming nearby and the flowerbeds were packed with a riot of flowers despite the coming fall. Becca looked the same when I saw her again. Once you took away the sunglasses and put her in jeans and a t-shirt, she was immediately recognizable. A slow look of recognition crossed her face as she stared at us.

  “Hey.” I tried a winning grin, but she seemed unimpressed. “English Literature 101.”

  Jinx shook her head at me and elbowed me to the side as she said, “We were in college together. Professor Lang’s class? A few years ago?”

  Becca stared at us like we were totally insane. It was a justifiable reaction, I thought.

  “Ok?”

  I sighed and glanced at Jinx who shot me a look as if to say I was stupid and took the picture from my purse, flip through the three to show Becca the one of her. Her expression froze as she recognized her face. It was so unexpected to see something like that—a feeling I knew all too well that she seemed almost confused by her image.

  Finally, she glanced back up at us. I noticed the goosebumps on her flesh. I’d been getting them regularly whenever I thought about someone following me and taking pictures. Becca’s picture was just her getting into a car. Mine had been so much worse.

  Jinx took the picture of me, the one with me leaning over, the way the light reflected on both my breasts and my butt, and showed it to Becca.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s me. It came from the same person who took the one of you,” I said.

  “What? Why?” Becca gasped.

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” I told her.

  “Oh my magic!” Becca muttered.

  While she was freaking out, I said, “We were hoping we could talk to you about what we might have in common. And why the same guy would be taking pictures of both of us?”

  “This is bad,” Becca said tapping on the picture of me. I could see that she was glad it wasn’t her. It was as though we had been in the same car accident, and she walked away while I ended in an ambulance. The empathy was combined with relief that it was worse for the other one.

  I didn’t disagree. Of the two of us, I was definitely the one who’d been more victimized but that didn’t mean she wasn’t also a victim. She stepped back, slowly, and let us in. She seemed to be one breath from asking us to leave when she asked, “How’d you find me?”

  “It took a while,” I lied, adjusting my French braid on my neck. “We obviously went to school together. That helped though it took me a while to remember where I knew you from. I was wondering if we could figure out anything else that might have led to the same guy taking pictures of both of us.”

  Once we were sitting at her table with cold cokes, she said, “I didn’t graduate college. Did you?”

  I nodded and then said, “Have you always lived in Savannah?”

  She shook her head and then said, “I moved from Tallahassee. My cousin was going to school here. I wanted to go somewhere new, so I came up here instead of staying closer.”

  Well, that didn’t narrow it down at all. I hadn’t seen her since that freshman lit class. I rubbed my brow and wondered what we could possibly have in common. The other girl had definitely not been in my was definitely not in my literature class. I was certain if I’d seen her around campus that I’d have remembered her because I envied people with those lithe lines. I’d have noticed, envied, and remembered.

  “Show her the picture of the other girl,” Jinx said.

  I pulled it out and set it on the table between Becca and me, and she looked at it for a minute and then said, “I know her. Her name is…Kendra Jenkins. We met in an HS support group.”

  I choked and then said, “HS? You have HS?”

  What were the chances that the three chicks on the camera all had hummingbird syndrome?

  Becca nodded, “HS is why I didn’t graduate. I got my first bout that year, and it took me a while to get diagnosed and stop sleeping all the time. It was terrible. I was like a cracked out energizer bunny and then a sloth who couldn’t move.”

  I leaned back and stared. Why would anyone take pictures of the three of us because we all had HS?

  “How did you meet Kendra then? A support group?”

  Becca tucked her hair behind her ear as she said, “Like I said, we met at the same support group for HS. She had just been diagnosed. I’d known for a while that I had it at that point, and I had just lost another job over it, and I was so angry. My mom bribed me to go.”

  Becca explained Kendra’s backstory while my mind raced around. HS was rare if you compared it to the general population of all humans. Only supernaturals were susceptible to it, but ten percent of us had HS to a degree. Hummingbird syndrome was, however, on a spectrum so those of us who had more difficult cases were even rarer.

  “Are you an extreme case?” I asked her. “You lost your job and flunked out. You must be?”

  “I’m in the top ten percent of something,” Becca said, voice dry, but she wasn’t amused. You could see banked anger in her expression.

  “Kendra too?”

  Becca nodded and said, “She was a doctor. She was good at everything. She was one of those type-A, always working types. When the HS hit her, she looked at all the options. But…”