Alexandra's Riddle (Northwest Magic Book 1) Read online

  She took a bite out of the peanut butter-and-jelly (jam, rather—she’d found a jar of Alexandra’s homemade blackberry jam in the pantry this morning, still sealed from the last time Alexandra had canned, which, according to the label on the jar, had been last summer) sandwich she’d made this morning. The jam tasted good, fresh and sweet. She took another bite, chewing thoughtfully as she fumbled to pull the crumpled drawing out of her pocket with her right hand while holding the sandwich in her left. As she smoothed the drawing out on her lap, she heard the sound of approaching footsteps accompanied by the sound of jingling tags. Just someone walking their dog. She paid no attention, looking instead down at the paper in her lap. Lily was a good artist for her age. And this drawing—she definitely hadn’t imagined it earlier. It really did look like the green thing she’d been seeing all around Alexandra’s property. The fae creature that somehow, impossibly, had been able to talk to her…

  “No MoonPies today?” a voice asked.

  Cass’s head jerked up at the sound. The dog-walker had stopped about five feet away from her, and she realized with a start that it was none other than the honey-haired man from the grocery store. He was wearing a gray cotton T-shirt and jeans. Beside him on a leash, a red Doberman with floppy ears wagged its stub of a tail.

  She felt her face start to blaze at the sight of him, but she tried to play it off cool. “Oh, uh, no,” she said after a moment, once her brain caught up with her and she realized he’d asked her a question. “Not today. Just a boring old peanut butter sandwich.” She smiled with her mouth closed, surreptitiously running her tongue over her teeth and hoping that she hadn’t flashed him a chunk of blackberry when she’d spoken.

  “Nothing wrong with the classics,” he said with a grin. “I wasn’t sure if I’d run into you again. Are you new in town?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Cass responded once her innards had finished melting at the sight of that grin. Honestly, Cass, will you get it together? “Well, sort of. My great-aunt lived here and she recently passed, so I’m staying at her place for the time being while I sort out her affairs.”

  His grin faded at her words. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” he said sincerely.

  “Thank you,” said Cass.

  “I’m Matthew, by the way. Matthew McCarthy.” He gestured to the Doberman, who had come up to Cass and was staring intently at the crust of her sandwich. “And this idiot is Tucker.”

  Cass let out a little gasp of mock offense. “Who are you calling an idiot?” she said, reaching out to stroke the dog’s ears. They were soft and silky. Tucker, for his part, looked at her with mournful brown eyes, the disappointment that she was merely offering him pets and not her sandwich written all over his face.

  “I call him what I know him to be,” Matthew said solemnly. At Cass’s snort, he grinned and added, “Most people are afraid of Dobermans because of their size, but I learned a while ago that most of them don’t realize just how big they are. This guy seems to believe he’s approximately the size of a Dachshund, which means that he cowers before animals half his size and thinks he should be allowed to sit in my lap.” Cass laughed, and Tucker’s stub tail began to wag even harder.

  “Quite the masterpiece you have there,” Matthew said after a moment. Cass looked at him in confusion before realizing that he was staring at Lily’s drawing, which she’d set down on the bench in order to pet Tucker. “Did you draw it yourself?”

  Cass laughed. “I’m not half so talented. No, Lily Kowalski—uh, that is, a little girl at the library drew it. That’s where I work, for now,” she explained, her face flushing again at his warm brown eyes on hers. “She threw it away, but it seemed like a shame.”

  “Lily Kowalski, huh?” He looked down at the drawing again. “Good to know I’ll have at least one talented artist. That’ll make projects fun. I’m a fourth grade teacher and she’s going to be in my class starting next week,” he explained.

  “Oh,” Cass said. So he was a schoolteacher. For some reason, this made her remember her dream, in which he’d been reading, and her face grew hot again. “How long have you taught at Riddle Elementary?”

  “This is going to be my first year. Yup,” he said, grinning at her expression, “you’re not the only newcomer in town. I was with 4J—uh, Eugene School District, that is—for a few years, but I decided it was time for a change.”

  “What made you pick Riddle of all places?” Cass asked in surprise.

  Matthew shrugged, not meeting her eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just had a feeling this was where I was meant to go.”

  She quirked her head at him, but before he could elaborate, Tucker took advantage of their distraction and with one swift motion of his long snoot, grabbed the rest of her sandwich out of her hand.

  “Tucker!” Matthew scolded, pulling the dog back by his leash, but it was too late. “I am so sorry!”

  Cass just laughed, waving him off. “It’s fine. I have another half, and anyway, it was just the crust. I would have offered it to him, but I wasn’t sure if he’d be allowed to have it.”

  “He does have a weakness for peanut butter,” Matthew said in a long-suffering way. “Well, I’ll let you get back to your lunch. It was nice talking to you, uh—”

  Cass flushed as she realized she hadn’t introduced herself. Once again, she had the slightly-overwhelmed feeling of being around an insanely attractive guy and consequently making a fool out of herself. “It’s Cass,” she said, twisting the key around her neck awkwardly. “Cass Russo.”

  “Nice to meet you, Cass,” Matthew said with a warm smile. “I’ll see you around.”

  “Yeah, see you. Bye, Tucker,” she said as Matthew guided the dog away from her.

  She watched them as they started down the path that bisected the park toward the library. Her eyebrows rose as she noticed that there was a mass market paperback sticking out of the back pocket of his jeans. (Okay, yes, she was looking at his butt. She couldn’t help it! Everything about that man seemed to have been forged by the gods.)

  But it wasn’t the book or even his butt that made Cass’s eyes widen. It was the words printed on the book’s cover: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. She hadn’t remembered until that very second, seeing it again right in front of her face, but she was sure of it. She knew she was remembering right.

  That was the book he’d been reading in the dream.

  “You had a naughty dream about the guy from the grocery store?”

  Emma was laughing at her. She wasn’t even trying to conceal it. The line crackled with static from the volume of her howls.

  Cass felt her face burning all over again. “It wasn’t a naughty dream,” she said, her voice at a whisper even though she was in the privacy of her own house. Well, Aunt Alexandra’s house. Not that Alexandra was there to hear it. But Cass felt like she was, like she could hear everything, and her embarrassment was supreme.

  “It sounds like it was a naughty dream.”

  “It wasn’t!”

  “You dreamed he was in your bed.”

  “Yeah, but we weren’t doing anything. He was just… there. In my room.”

  Emma snorted again. “Why’re you so embarrassed, then? You’re thirty years old, Cass. I think I had racier dreams than that when I was twelve.”

  “Because he’s a stranger!” Cass hissed, still whispering. “And because I dreamed we were… married, I guess.”

  “Married?” Emma’s laughter stopped.

  Cass shrugged uncomfortably. “I dunno. It felt that way. Maybe because of the little girl.” And the strong maternal instincts she’d felt toward her as they’d walked through the woods together. The way she’d thought she was theirs. And those feelings hadn’t started when the girl had shown up, they’d been there through the whole dream. The dream had been more than just a make-out dream with the grocery store guy—Matthew, she remembered with another agonizing flush, Matthew McCarthy, fourth grade teacher—it had been the feelings. The familiarity. It hadn’t felt lik
e just a dream, it had been like… a glimpse into another life. A life of shared history, of memories that she couldn’t access but knew were there. Of trust built over time. That’s what had made the dream so intense. So mortifying.

  Almost worse than if it had just been a naughty dream.

  “Maybe it was a premonition,” Emma suggested, her voice suddenly serious.

  “No!” Cass cried, her voice jumping from hushed to shrill.

  “Well, it’s not like you to dream you’re married to some guy you met for thirty seconds at the grocery store. But it is like you to have dreams about the future…”

  “That’s not my future,” Cass said firmly. She knew it couldn’t be. She’d given up on that kind of future. Shoved it in a box and locked it away. A future like that could never work out, not for someone like her. She’d learned that the hard way. “Anyway, that wasn’t the part of the dream I called you about and you know it. It was that other part.”

  “The ‘we’re all going to die’ part?” Emma asked. “Yeah, that is a little more troubling, I suppose.”

  “You think?”

  As she spoke, she heard a noise from over her head. A dull thunk, like something falling over in the room upstairs. She sighed wearily. There was a chance, she supposed, that Onyx could have knocked something over—he did seem to be the sort of cat who enjoyed the “knock everything off your nightstand and dresser at three in the morning until you wake up screaming” game—but she had a feeling that he was not the culprit.

  “Hang on,” she said to Emma. “I’m going to have to call you back.”

  “What? No!” Emma protested, but Cass barely heard her distant voice as she moved the phone away from her ear. “Don’t you dare hang up on me! I’m not done with you yet!”

  “Talk to you later,” Cass said, pressing the end button and shoving the phone into her back pocket. She looked around the kitchen for something to arm herself with. It needed to be iron, but did Alexandra have any iron in the house? Considering the brownie she’d seen inside on the first day, she was disinclined to think so. Finally, after rummaging through enough cupboards, she encountered a cast-iron skillet. Did cast-iron count? It was probably the best she was going to get. Brandishing the skillet, Cass went upstairs.

  The second-floor hallway was dim, lit only by the sunlight streaming in from the transoms and through Cass’s open bedroom door. But something about the hall looked odd to her. Finally, she realized what it was—there was light coming from the end of the hall where the door to the servants’ stairs was located. She was certain that that door had been locked when she checked it the first day she’d been in Riddle, but she hadn’t checked it again. Now the door was open. She swallowed, trying to ignore the prickles she felt running across her skin. She tightened her grip on the skillet and moved down the hall.

  Sure enough, the door to the servants’ staircase was now open. Through the door was a small landing between the steps leading down and those going up to the finished attic where the old servants’ quarters were located. If Cass remembered correctly, Aunt Alexandra had used those rooms for storage, since that floor was far too warm most of the year to be livable (unless, you know, you’re a servant; then your comfort doesn’t matter, apparently). The landing was lit by a square window with plain, clear glass. The late afternoon sunlight streamed in from the west with an odd green tint due to the leaves on the tree directly outside it.

  Cass looked around, wondering what could have caused the thump she’d heard from downstairs. She didn’t see anything that could have been knocked over; the landing was devoid of any furniture or knickknacks. Maybe the door had been stuck, and the thunk was the sound it made when… someone had managed to pry it open?

  The question was who—or what—had done it. She looked all around but didn’t see or hear anything that indicated the presence of fae in the space. But what else could it have been? There was no such thing as ghosts…

  Cass froze, thinking that over. There was no such thing as ghosts, right? She’d never seen one, and you’d think that if she could see fae, she’d be able to see ghosts. But what if she was wrong? What if her Sight was only honed to one aspect of the paranormal, but there were others she didn’t know about?

  She suddenly felt very alarmed. She started to turn to leave the landing, but two things happened to stop her: First, out of the corner of her eye, she caught a familiar flash of color. Her subconscious registered it as yet another tarot card, lying askew on one of the steps leading up to the attic.

  At the same time, there was a loud thunk against the glass of the square window. She jumped, an involuntary half-gasp, half-strangled-scream tearing out of her throat. What had that been? A bird hitting the window?

  She grabbed the tarot card off the steps, shoving it in her back pocket without looking at it, and went to the window, peering out. Then she groaned. Not a bird. That green fae thing was back, sitting in the branches of the tree just outside. When she appeared at the window, it dropped the acorn it was holding—the previous thunk must have been the sound of another acorn hitting the glass as it tried to get her attention—and waved at her.

  She shoved up the sash and stuck her head out the window. “What do you want?”

  The creature didn’t respond, but it pointed down into the side yard of the house. Cass followed its gesture with her eyes and her brows rose. Through the branches of the tree she could just see a girl sitting on the wooden bench in the small side garden. Cass recognized her immediately. It was Lily Kowalski.

  She didn’t hesitate to ask why the creature wanted Cass to see her. She suspected, at this point, that she knew. But she had to make sure. She quickly shoved the window closed, twisting the brass lock into place, and hurried back into the hallway. She didn’t know whether the door at the bottom of the servants’ stairs would be locked or stuck—she knew that the door was in the kitchen, but just like with the upstairs door, she hadn’t messed around with it when it didn’t immediately open on the first day—so she ran back to the main staircase, down into the foyer, and out the front door.

  When she got down the front porch steps, she paused to catch her breath. She didn’t want to scare the girl by running up to her like a hyperventilating maniac wielding a cast-iron skillet. She set the skillet down on the bottom step and ran a hand through her dark hair to smooth it. Then she walked casually around the side of the house.

  What she saw when she made her way down the slope into the garden made her brows rise once again. Sitting beside Lily on the bench was a squat gnome, its skin mottled like bark on a tree, its head wide and flat on top like a mushroom cap. It was weaving a cat’s cradle out of a gossamer spider web. Lily sat facing the creature with her hands raised, silver webbing dangling from the tips of her two index fingers. The gnome laughed, a sound not unlike the chattering of a chipmunk, as the two of them adjusted the pattern of the cat’s cradle.

  Lily was playing with it.

  Cass exhaled. That answered that question—Lily could definitely see fae, then. Her drawing in the library hadn’t been a coincidence. So much about this enigma of a child suddenly made sense. Cass remembered the way the other kids had teased Lily for her “imaginary friends” earlier. Her parentage wasn’t the only reason the other children of Riddle were giving Lily a wide berth. Cass couldn’t blame Lily for having shared her secret, whether accidentally or by design; Cass had made the same mistake as a kid, not realizing that others couldn’t see the same things she could or that most people didn’t believe in things like faeries and magic. It had only taken a couple slip-ups to get her labeled a pariah, a reputation she hadn’t been able to shake until her parents had finally packed up and moved from that town when she was eleven, transplanting the family to Chicago, where she’d met Emma. But what Cass didn’t understand was why, after all the trouble they’d clearly caused her, Lily was still deliberately seeking the fae out rather than steering as far away from them as possible.

  Apparently seeing and having common sense
about didn’t go hand-in-hand.

  “Hey, Lily,” she said as she approached the bench. Lily looked up, and the gnome dropped the cobwebs, skittering away and chattering all the while.

  “Wait, come back!” Lily cried as the gnome disappeared into the bushes. “She’s a friend! She won’t hurt you!”

  Cass smirked to herself. I wouldn’t be so sure about that, she thought wryly. Word of her eviction of the brownie must have been going around, based on the scowl the gnome was giving her from between the curling branches of a fern.

  “So,” Cass said, sitting on the bench beside Lily in the spot vacated by the gnome. The seat was still warm, she noticed with a frown. “What are you doing here, exactly?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” Lily said, doing that thing that only kids seem to be able to accomplish, sitting up straight and slouching at the same time, with her hands on her knees and her arms ramrod straight. Her face was red, and she didn’t quite look Cass in the eye. Cass tried not to let the “ma’am” bug her. She supposed that, to a nine-year-old, all adults were ma’ams. “I know you said this was private property. I just… I didn’t know where else to go. I always used to come here in the summer, before. My friends live here.”

  “Your… friends?”

  “Yeah. Like the gnome who was just here. And Mr. Green.”

  Cass’s brow furrowed. “Who’s Mr. Green?”

  “You really don’t know?”

  The response hadn’t come from Lily, but from a familiar high-pitched voice over her left shoulder. She turned to see the green fae, who had come down from the tree’s high branches and was sitting on a paving stone at the edge of the garden, watching Cass and the girl.

  “Mr. Green!” Lily cried in delight. “There you are! I haven’t seen you in a week. I was starting to get worried!”