“Physically?” Gabriel leaned forward, feeling himself shift to ready stance, not that there was jack shit he could do to help her. “Were you hurt in the crash?”
“No, it’s that I haven’t been able to move lest I touch metal. My legs are painfully asleep. My bladder is full to bursting—sorry for the TMI. My blood sugar is crashing, and my mouth feels like the Sahara. Distraction is the only thing that will make this any better.”
“Alright. Sommer and Sloane seem like names from novels I might read in a 19th-century lit class in the sense of conjuring images of wind-swept moors or women wrapped in warm wool shawls as they stand at the cliff’s edge.”
“Our grandmother on my dad’s side, where the twins gene comes from, thought twin names needed to rhyme or start with the same letter. As the story is told, grandma was quite the bully about it. But we escaped without being called Etta and Gretta, which she fiercely advocated for.”
“Dodged the bullet. Daniel and Gabriel, now I understand why you thought we might be twins. So Etta and Gretta, had it come to that, which would you have preferred?”
“Gretta. But I was first out. I’d be Etta. Grandma also liked Molly and Polly. So I would have been Etta, or Molly, had Mom not put her foot down. The same beginning letter was the compromise that kept family harmony.”
“Molly’s not bad, but it’s a more domestic name.”
“How so?”
“A name that has four walls. That’s not bad. Four walls with a cozy fire, a comfy chair, and an excellent book.”
“Or a witch’s cottage in the woods.”
“I was envisioning an apartment building downtown,” Gabriel said. “Sommer is more expansive, and that cottage in the woods shows just that. There are woods behind to explore, flower fences that bloom, animals running around. I grew up living around the corner from you. I’ve always thought of that house as magical. I imagined the stories come to life of a lost princess who goes out and whistles a tune, and all the critters come flitting in to help with the chores.”
“If only.” Sommer winced, then closed her eyes.
Gabriel tried to put himself in her shoes, and it was a miserable place to be.
When Sommer opened her eyes again, she panted, “I have that picture you drew in my mind’s eye. And I love every little bit of the lost princess story. I wish it were true. Except, perhaps, the idea of some evil person seeking my ruin with poison and spells. I do sing my songs, but alas and alack, no chores are done.” She turned her head toward the street, then back. “I hope Sloane was checking on my cats while she was there or at least having her husband drive by.”
“You don’t live with anyone else in your cottage? Husband? Boyfriend?”
“I have dear friends, and cats who are also my friends. Abbie—Marna and Abbie are my friends at the summit—Abbiecalls my cats my familiars.” Sommer laughed, and it sounded as if it was fueled by nervous energy.
“Familiars,” Gabriel shifted his tone to the one he used pre-battle when anxiety was high amongst his team, “that sounds witchy.”
“Meh, maybe a little. Abbie likes to look up spells on the Internet and stir her pots clockwise. She, for example, was trying to figure out how to keep the graveyard ghouls from haunting my house on full moons.”
“Ring of salt?” Gabriel asked, thinking about finding the white substance across her threshold.
“You know your stuff.”
“Not really, I think I read that in a novel when I was a kid and tucked it in my back pocket in case it ever came in handy. So how much salt did you use to ring your house?”
“None. And in fact she mentioned the salt, then went and looked it up, and came back with an idea for witch pots.”
“Pots. And what is that exactly?” he asked.
“Different people make them in different ways. Mostly you put sharp things in a little jar: broken glass, rusty razor blades, nails. Some people pee in the jar. Just things that are unpleasant, I think. I don’t know if there are any hard-and-fast rules. Abbie likes to interpret things in her own way.”
“Okay.”
“Then you bury them on the edges of the property.”
“Like an etheric fence?” he asked.
“Exactly.”
“And you did this?” He chuckled at the absurdity. “Peed in a jar of rusty blades?”
“I can neither confirm nor deny. But what I can tell you is that my cats have never given me any sign that there were things in the room that would go bump in the night.”
