“I’ll see you later.” Gideon grinned at me as he reached over and adjusted my glasses, which had been knocked askew during our kiss. “I’ll call everyone together for a misfits’ meeting tonight. We can go over what we learned.”
“Right. Yes. Tonight.” I sounded ridiculous, but I was surprised I managed to even say that much when my head kept circling back to Gideon kissing me. The kiss had been surprisingly chaste, but it left me wanting more. A lot more.
I stared at the pub door for a long moment after Gideon disappeared through it. My brain took an embarrassingly long time to kick into gear again. I sucked in a couple of deep breaths to steady my racing pulse before carrying on toward The Mystic Menagerie.
As soon as I opened the door to the shop, I was hit with the familiar earthy scent of burning sage. I walked in and found Elwood in the far corner. He was standing barefoot on top of a stepladder, waving a bundle of smoldering sage through the air. His toes curled over the top rung as he leaned precariously toward one of the corners, but given the depth of his displays, he was still several feet away from reaching it.
“What are you doing?” I demanded as I dashed over to steady the ladder.
“Too much negative energy around here lately. The murder was next door and…” Elwood scowled. “I just needed to clear it out.”
“Now? By yourself?”
“Yes,” Elwood said as he climbed down. “There. I’m done. It feels better in here already, doesn’t it?” He eyed me speculatively.
Oh, was this a magical test? I closed my eyes and tried to sense the energy. Maybe my magic was defective.
“Sure.”
“Lying doesn’t help.”
“Fine,” I mumbled. “I don’t feel anything different.”
Elwood clapped me on the shoulder. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Magic manifests itself differently for everyone.”
Then he took the still-smoking smudge and fanned it toward me, starting at my head. I coughed and waved my hand in front of my face. I didn’t think smudging was going to be my kind of magic, but I waited in place as he moved the cleansing smoke down my body.
“Don’t you need to do that to yourself, too?” I asked when he set the remaining stub of the smudge stick on a ceramic tray on his counter.
“I started by cleansing myself,” he explained as he watched the smoke curl through the air for a moment as the last of the stick turned to ash. “Excellent.”
He picked up the tray with the ashes and started walking toward the back door.
“Wait. Where are you going?”
“I have to bury the ashes now.”
“A lot of vendors have set up already,” I said before he could disappear outside to dig a hole in the small garden behind his store. Most people used that narrow stretch of land between the alley and the building for parking, but not Elwood. He had a lush but disorderly herb garden. The disorderly part always made my dad’s eye twitch.
“This can’t wait,” Elwood said, not even slowing his steps.
“So why don’t you put me to work while you’re out there? I’ll help.”
Elwood didn’t answer.
He returned a few minutes later. I hadn’t done anything while he was outside because I didn’t know what his plan was for the festival.
“You were gone for quite a while with Gideon,” Elwood said as soon as he returned. “Did you figure out who did it?”
Huh? Oh! Right! The murder. Oops.For the last hour or so while I ate lunch with Gideon, I’d almost forgotten about the murder.
I’d never connected so easily or quickly with someone as I had with Gideon. I’d shared things with him I hadn’t told anyone, at least not for years. I’d even confided in him about wanting to be a baker. That had felt like such a dirty little secret for so long because it wasn’t something Josh or my parents had wanted to talk about. They thought it was silly, particularly after I’d spent so much money and time on my university degree.But Gideon hadn’t dismissed my idea. In fact, he’d sounded supportive.
And then there was that kiss…
“Uh, no.” I shook my head. “We have some ideas, but…”
Okay. That was a lie. I totally thought Jim did it, but it seemed wrong to throw around that accusation, even to Elwood, without more evidence.
