“Thank you,” Abbi said quietly.
I grunted.
“I’ll give you my free scoop. The first one anyway.” I knew she was apologizing, or maybe just acknowledging that I was in a mood.
It was hard to think of her as a conniving little deity sometimes, especially when she delighted in being a child most of the time.
But it was easy to remember she was our friend and had wriggled her way into my heart. She meant well. Even when ice cream was on the line.
“I’ll let you pick the second scoop,” she said, squeezing my hand.
I squeezed hers back. “You’d better.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Somehow, Abbi wheedled her way into getting ice cream before seeing the Blarney Stone.
Oddly, the ice cream was found in a restaurant, and it wasn’t the same shop as the one listed on the flyer.
The woman who took our order wasn’t named Billy. Her name was Stephanie, and she looked like a bored high-schooler.
Because she was a bored high-schooler.
Franny chatted her up, explained the sister-town agreement between the two ice cream shops, which, according to her, were owned by the same partners.
Somehow the coupons got involved and by the time it was over, I had a double scoop cone, Abbi had a bowl with three scoops, and Franny had a single scoop.
Franny sat across from Abbi, and I split the difference between them, taking up a lot of space, facing the window.
It wasn’t hot in the place, but it wasn’t cold enough to keep the ice cream from melting either. We all set to getting the creamy sweets under control, and after a couple bites, I realized I should have gotten a bowl instead of a cone.
I wiped out the top scoop and had the second whittled down low enough it wasn’t dripping over my fingers when I tuned back into the conversation.
“Road trip. That sounds exciting.” Franny ate her ice cream in half-spoon bites, like she wanted to make it last twice as long.
“It is! We were in Missouri, that’s where I’m from, and then we went to Oklahoma and Kansas, well, Kansas and Oklahoma, and now we’re here. I want to see all the sights up close. Really close.”
Abbi squirmed around and produced the brochure with the information about the Blarney Stone.
“See?” She spread it on the table and pointed. “Someone buried a lot of cars. I want to see that. And that tower is leaning. And there’s the Blarney Stone.”
“Route 66.” Franny reassessed me. “You’re taking her on a road trip down Route 66?”
“What’s wrong with Route 66?”
“Nothing. I just...” She paused, and the air shifted, almost as if a window had been opened, allowing in a cooler breeze.
It wasn’t uncomfortable. But it was most definitely magic.
“So, what, exactly are you, and what, exactly do you want from us?” I licked the edge of the cone and took a bite. I liked to get cone and ice cream in each bite once I got down to this point.
“Do I need to be anything other than what you see?” she asked.
“When someone uses magic,” I said, crunching to the cone point, then popping it in my mouth, “it’s pretty hard to ignore.”
Her eyebrows arched, and her eyes, a pretty hazel threaded with brown, locked onto me.
“You really should come to the bar,” she said.
