“You’d be surprised how often the two traits are combined,” she told him, taking a bite of pie. The moment the sweet, fruity symphony of flavors hit her tongue, she reached out and grabbed Leonard’s hand for support. It was like lying on a bed made with freshly hung linen, the smell of the sun and the wind wafting up from the sheets. It was peace and pleasure all in one.

  She opened her eyes and saw she was still holding hands with Leonard across the table. She smiled sheepishly. “Sorry.”

  “It’s a fairly common response,” he assured her, though he seemed reluctant to loosen his hold on her fingers. Her hand looked so small in his, but he was cradling it like it was something delicate and precious. She could feel the magic that lived on his skin, as much a part of him as his pores, but it was unnatural and wrong. This wasn’t him. This awkward clumsiness was like a pair of shackles, holding him back. To his credit, the moment she pulled away, he let go.

  Charlotte cleared her throat. “I’ll try to keep the obscene noises to a minimum.”

  “I don’t mind so much,” he admitted, his cheeks flushing. When she giggled, he went on with his story. “Anyway, from what my grandad told me, Seamus O’Donnell just loved mocking people he didn’t consider quite up to his snuff. People who had less than him. People who weren’t as ‘polished.’ In April 1813, there was a grand party for a young lady who was ‘coming out,’ one of the other well-to-do families in the county. She tripped over the hem of her gown coming down the stairs into the ballroom, laid flat out on her face for her own party. Poor girl. Well, of course, Seamus started laughing and making stupid jokes about her tripping over her own ‘oversized feet,’ asking if the musicians had any music fit for a horse to clomp along to. For weeks afterward, he would make whickering noises if he saw her out in town. That sort of thing.”

  “What a jackass.” She sighed.

  “I know!” he exclaimed, digging into his own slice of chocolate cream pie. “Well, apparently, as rich as they were, the girl’s family kept to the old ways; leaving out milk and seeds and pretty stones on their windowsill for the fae folk, building their home with as little iron as possible, singing to the trees whenever they were outside. So their daughter was considered blessed. She had her very own self-appointed fairy godmother. And she didn’t appreciate seeing her beloved goddaughter mocked. She knew her goddaughter had only tripped because she was nervous and she wanted Seamus to know what it was like, not to be able to control your own body when your stress was high. So she came to the estate and told him all he had to do was apologize. And of course, he refused because in his opinion, the young lady in question shouldn’t take herself so seriously. The fairy was so angered by his lack of remorse that she cursed him, so that the more nervous he became, the more he fumbled. And because she wanted the whole family to know the injury Seamus had done to her goddaughter’s family, ruining what was an important social occasion for them, she cursed the entire line. Oh, and if the O’Donnells tried to do anything to remove the curse–besides Seamus sincerely apologizing–it would get three times worse.”

  “Oof, that is…incredibly clever and insidious,” Charlotte marveled, her lips pulling back in a grimace. “I mean, I don’t want to sound like I admire it. But, wow.”

  Come to think of it, she’d never heard of a curse working that way. But she wasn’t exactly an expert in this arena. She made a mental note to call her mother, who was much more knowledgeable about these things.

  “As someone who’s lived with it for years, I can assure you that it was very effective,” he told her. “But people here understand. Whenever I drop something, all I have to say is ‘fairy curse’ and they just nod and shake their heads and say nothing else. You don’t get that out in the real world. Or at least, you didn’t before the Pope Lick Monster incident. Anyway, all Seamus had to do was apologize, and the whole family would have had a different destiny. Idiot Seamus didn’t believe her, despite her explaining the how’s and the why’s in great detail in front of his entire family. At first, he wasn’t worried, after all he was so self-assured he never got nervous. It started off small, dropping something when he was talking to a pretty girl, tripping when he was walking down the street. But it was a crack in his armor and his nerves got worse and the accidents got more serious. The family fortunes waned because it takes a steady, clear mind to run a large farm and it’s hard to keep steady when anything could go wrong at any moment. Seamus never repented, even when his family begged him to–because somehow, his pride was more important than admitting that he’d done a stupid, cruel thing. Eventually, he was run over in the street by a carriage, and there was a pretty sparse crowd at his funeral.”

  “It feels mean to say ‘good.’ And yet…” Charlotte noted.

  “Well, the curse didn’t end with him, obviously. The family lost the farm, well before the Great Famine set in. We moved to America, hoping that maybe distance from the fae would weaken the curse. Well, it took a couple of tries for us to move to America. One of my great-great-uncles fell off the gangway of a steamer ship to Boston, and drowned, and the rest of the family chickened out and went back to Galway for a few years. We managed to eke out a life here, but we’ve suffered a lot of tragedy along the way. A lot of us end up single because no one wants to date the guy who dumps half a punchbowl on them at the school dance. I guess that’s another added smack from the curse. If the bloodline isn’t ended by accidental death, we’ll blunder our way right out of the gene pool,” Leonard said.

  He was saying it with a light-hearted tone, like he was joking, but she could feel the helpless grief in him. She took his hand again. The static electricity of their touching had been replaced by a pleasant, warm thrum, like the echo of a bell. She very much doubted that Leonard deserved the curse that had been leveled on him, for his empathy alone. But she supposed that was the point of the curse, to teach the O’Donnell line a little compassion for people who were struggling. The curse had done its work. She only wished the original cursing fairy had added a loophole to let more deserving generations out of it.

  Suddenly, the echo of the bell wasn’t just a feeling throughout her body, but a noise coming from her purse. Her phone was chiming. She shot him an apologetic look, but then his phone buzzed as well. He took the phone out of his pocket while she reached for her bag. Her screen showed an email from the League office stating that the department head meeting scheduled for the next day had been moved to that afternoon–in fact, it was scheduled to start in twenty minutes.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he grumbled.

  “Watch your language in my restaurant, young man!” Bathtilda warned him sharply.

  “What is happening?” Charlotte asked.

  “Jessica, my archnemesis, has moved the department head meeting.”

  Charlotte snickered. “You have an archnemesis?”

  “Yeah, I know that sounds weird,” he said, pulling a few bills out of his wallet and tucking it under the napkin dispenser.

  “No, not really. I mean, I think most people have an archnemesis, real or imagined. They just don’t come out and admit it,” Charlotte said.

  “Well, I do, and she just moved the department head meeting up twenty-four hours, which means she’s up to something,” he grumbled. “Either she’s counting on me not having the necessary paperwork and agendas prepped so she can embarrass me or she’s planning to have prepped everything herself so she can come out looking like a hero; which is unlikely, because I password protected all of the agendas on the shared server. And she doesn’t have the information necessary to create her own. And she doesn’t know that I prepped and printed everything yesterday and locked the copies in my desk drawer.”

  Leonard shrugged. She noted that he sprang to his feet, offering his hand, without moving in his usual, stiff manner. Charlotte lifted a brow as he went to the counter to tell Siobhan that the meeting had been moved and they would need “the usual order” that afternoon instead. Siobhan only gave him a befuddled look as he dashed out of the shop.

  “I think he’s confused,” Siobhan told Charlotte.

  Charlotte dropped some bills in the tip jar, smiling apologetically. “Administrative work involves more espionage activities than I expected.”

  4

  Leonard

  Sometimes, it paid to be highly organized.

  The moment he walked into his office and found the meeting agendas still locked in his desk, he knew that Jessica’s attempt at a meeting coup failed. Within seconds of his butt hitting his desk chair, she was standing in front of him, seething. “Where are the agendas for today’s meeting, Leonard?’

  “You mean tomorrow’s meeting?” Leonard asked.

  Jessica sniffed. “It was moved to this afternoon because of a conflict in Mr. Lancaster’s schedule.”

  “That you arranged?” Leonard deadpanned.

  “It’s not my fault that you can’t keep up with a fast-paced office environment.” Jessica smirked at him and Leonard itched to do something really awful to her desk.

  Leonard glanced around the empty lobby, where the most active object was a ficus leaf bobbing in a gust of air-conditioning. Even in the midst of his confrontation with Jessica, regret and resentment gnawed at his belly. It was Jessica’s fault his conversation with Charlotte had been cut short. Despite the otherworldly nature that, frankly, set him on edge, he found he liked the midwife quite a bit. He liked how efficient she was, how she cut to the heart of the matter at hand, how quickly the people he admired trusted her with the most important things in their lives. She had a competence about her that made people want to hand her those things. And if Jessica could just calm the hell down, he might have been able to build a better understanding with her.

  “It is against League policy to password protect documents on a shared server. You don’t have the authorization to hide information from me,” Jessica said.

  Leonard unlocked the drawer and piled the agendas onto his desk. Then he reached into the top drawer and pulled out a sheet of paper signed by Sonja. “Authorization from the director of operations, to use my discretion to protect information as long as I share it to her private server.”

  Jessica snatched the paper out of his hand and tossed it in the garbage. He rolled his eyes and pulled out another copy, which was laminated. “I also have a digital version saved on my phone.”

  “I’ll carry those into the meeting room, thank you,” she said, holding her gloved hand out expectantly as he locked the drawers again. It was sad that he had to lock them, but obviously it was the right choice.

  “You are really choosing some weird ways to try to make a good impression,” he told Jessica, stepping around her and walking out of the door towards the conference trailer. Part of him felt bad for Jessica, because obviously she was more than just “a little distressed” about her changing role. But there was more than enough work to go around in the Bayou. She could thrive if she wasn’t trying to swipe what she saw as the “highest profile” tasks. He was going to have to have another conversation with Sonja because Jessica was coming across as a little unhinged–and unhinged administrative assistants left unsupervised was a bad thing in the Bayou.

  Leonard walked into the conference room to find Zed studying a poster sized chart pinned to the walls. Leonard had spent the better part of a day getting those printed and arranging them just so. Things were changing fast in the Bayou and he wondered if Zed, whose family had lived here for centuries, resented the League and its impact on his home. Jillian had originally been welcomed into the town because cooperation with the League meant much-needed resources, like funding for the clinic and new roads. Were those things worth potential exposure to the outside world?

  “Zed, what are you doing here?” Leonard asked.

  “Hey, bud. Just looking at a chart of our population forecasts. Jillian asked me to join tomorrow’s meeting about the issues facing the town post-Pope Lick Monster,” Zed replied. Zed gave Jessica a disapproving look as she walked through the door. She scowled when she saw Leonard was placing agendas in front of each seat.

  Alex, Jillian, Sonja, Dani, Rob, Adam, and the other department heads filed in, each giving Leonard a friendly wave. Will walked in with Charlotte and sent Sonja a very “professional” eyebrow wiggle from across the room. Sonja rolled her eyes as she took her seat near Alex, but she was grinning. Zed was far less professional, sweeping Dani into a kiss that belonged on the front of a romance novel. Probably involving an MMA fighter. Bael had no role in this meeting whatsoever, but was hovering behind Jillian as if she could collapse or burst into flames any minute. Either one was possible, but she’d done the flame thing before and it was always a crowd-pleaser.

  This was one of the things he liked best about working in the Bayou, the people. (Well, except for Jessica, who was the worst.) He had friends here, something he’d never quite managed in his hometown in Ohio. He was contributing, making the world a better place for people–something that would have been more difficult in his original field as a geologist. Unless you managed to find an enormous secret volcano and stop it from erupting, there weren’t a lot of “save the world” opportunities in geology. He’d already had at least two in this job.

  “Well, glad to have you here,” Leonard told Zed. “Siobhan should be delivering the pies any minute.”

  Leonard checked the time on his phone. Frankly, it was strange that the pies weren’t there already. Even with the late notice, Siobhan always had a reserve of pies in case of a rush.

  “Oh, I cancelled that order,” Jessica said. “Pie just seems like a heavy, messy food for an after-lunch meeting. I got a fruit plate and some gluten-free muffins instead.”

  Absolute silence.

  Every single person in the room was staring at Jessica in horror. Zed actually clutched his chest like he was having a heart attack.

  “What have you done?” Dani whispered.

  “Do you think we come to these meetings for the fruit?” Ivy Portenoy demanded. When Alex’s brows rose, she added, “OK, sure we come here to for important Bayou matters and to make the world a better place…but mostly, it’s the pie!”

  “I think it’s the gluten-free muffins that’s pushing her over the edge,” Sonja murmured.

  “It’s a healthier option!” Jessica insisted. “There’s no reason for the League to pay exorbitant prices for locally made pies. They’re not even artisanal! I think Siobhan uses lard in her crust!”

  Zed leveled a look at Alex. “We need to have a talk.”

  Jillian cleared her throat, struggling to keep a pleasant expression on her face. “Leonard, please offer Siobhan our deepest apologies and assure her that order will not be changed again in the near future.”

  “Got it,” Leonard leapt up from his chair and jogged across the street. No wonder Bathtilda was so snippy with him in the pie shoppe earlier. She’d thought he cancelled the League’s regular meeting order without explanation. Siobhan met him at the door, smirking, carrying a stack of pie boxes.

  “Siobhan, I wouldn’t have run out of here earlier if I’d known she cancelled the order. I’m so sorry,” Leonard said.

  “Sonja already texted,” she said. “Apologies accepted. Also, I had Bathtilda add a twenty percent pain-in-my-ass fee to the invoice.”

  “You text?” he asked, tilting his head as he stared at her.

  “I’m ancient, not outdated,” she replied, handing him the boxes. “Get with the times, Leonard.”

  “Make it a thirty percent pain-in-the-ass fee,” he told her, before running back across Main Street. He could hear her cackling behind him.

  He rushed into the conference room, carefully placing the boxes on the end of the table and passing out plates and napkins. Zed was midsentence, sounding much more like an elected official than he normally did, “We’re just not ready for the numbers Dr. Assf- Aspern is projecting. We already have drole living in an improvised RV park at the end of Main Street. Theresa’s been fielding calls from businesses wanting to talk to our Chamber of Commerce. We don’t have a Chamber of Commerce, less you count the Boone Family. And giving them more power is the last thing we need. No offense, Bael.”

  Bael shrugged.

  “And as much as we want to welcome anyone and everyone who wants to live in the Bayou, we’re not ready for a massive influx of new residents,” Zed lamented. “We don’t have the infrastructure, the public works, the supply chain, the stores, anything to support a population boom like this.”

  “If it helps, Bonita De Los Santos said that several tour companies have inquired about setting up post office boxes. Tourism dollars will only help local economy,” Adam noted, pulling out a chart he’d printed.

  Dani cupped her hands together, a ball of light forming between her palms. It was her usual method of dealing with Adam when he tried to take over meetings, waffling on about how he was single-handedly saving Mystic Bayou’s financial future.

  “People want to do tours?” Zed exclaimed, shaking his head. “Do they realize how insulting that is? We’re not a zoo!”

  “Maybe instead of letting people wander through the Bayou unsupervised, we arrange some sort of seminar?” Jillian suggested, laying a hand on Zed’s arm. “Guest speakers and lectures all in one contained place, like a visitor’s center? Where they can’t do any damage and it’s sort of contained?”

  “We don’t have a visitor’s center, Jillian,” Zed replied, “Or hotels or apartments to rent. And the last thing we want is for a housing development to spring up near the old rift site or something. And how do we feed all these people without running the grocery store empty every other day?”

  “What about pop up stores?” Sonja suggested. “Or helping the grocery establish delivery trucks? You know they’re a big hit in the outside world, and it would provide a much-needed service for older residents. Bael could maybe avoid pulling over poor Emily McAinsley every time she drives into town.”

 

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