“It’ll be okay, girl.”
She pressed her wet nose against my arm in response, and finally after several minutes, we rounded a grove of trees and saw orbs.
There must have been hundreds of them—all different colors and sizes. The spells in the forest had been more similar in size, but these were not. Some looked to be the size of dimes while others were as big as peaches.
And in the middle of them all stood Rufus, his back to me once again. I could just see the smirk on his face as he realized that I had come to fetch him.
Or help him, I supposed.
After killing the engine, I scooped up Lady, and the two of us approached.
Rufus slowly turned around. I had switched my beams to low and they illuminated him. I had to suck in my breath. In the lights he cut a distinctive figure. The first night I saw him, I noticed how broad his shoulders were, but now I noticed how they narrowed into his tapered waist and strong thighs. The jeans he wore helped, too. They fit him perfectly.
I found myself barely able to speak above a whisper. “You got new clothes.”
He smiled, his gaze darting to the ground in embarrassment. “Julie Bender found them for me in her husband’s old things.”
Julie had kept her husband’s clothes when he died a few years ago. She told me that she didn’t have the heart to get rid of them. I could understand.
“They fit you well.”
We stared at each other a moment as a spell floated up to me and bounced against my forehead before bobbing away. The magic reminded me of lightning bugs on a humid summer’s night.
“How did you get out here?” I asked.
“Uber,” he replied.
Yep, even in small towns we had Uber.
“Would you like to help me?”
“I—I came to keep you from getting your rear end full of buckshot.”
“I see.” He opened his palm, and a red spell fell onto it. Deciding it wasn’t the one, he dropped his hand away. “So only you and I can see them.”
He referenced what Willard Gandy had said earlier today. “Malene told me that she and some of her friends used to be spell hunters. They caught spells and sold them to witches, maybe humans.”
“The good kind, I imagine,” Rufus murmured.
“I guess.” Grass crunched under my feet as I approached. Lady jumped around, snapping at spells as if they were butterflies. “Lady, stop. I don’t want you eating one of those. They’re bad for you.”
She sulked away.
I took a spot off from Rufus and started inspecting the orbs. “But now even Malene and her spell hunters can’t see them anymore. No one can. Hannah, Sadie’s mom, hid all the spells from everyone.”
“So it’s just you and me. Is that right?”
“It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe it’s not supposed to,” he murmured.
I glanced over and found Rufus studying me. Heat flared in my cheeks, and I turned away. There wasn’t supposed to be some sort of weird chemistry between us.
I hated him.
Right. Didn’t I?
While he quietly studied spell after spell and released them back into the atmosphere, I realized that there wasn’t much to hate.
