Page 15 of A Spell for Midwinter’s Heart

The Second Day of Yule

The sky was blue and cloudless, no trace of coming storms. Rowan shivered, her hands plunged into the pockets of her borrowed parka.

It’s cold enough to snow. Now, where’s the water?

It was Friday, the second day of Yule, three days before Christmas, and there had been a slight uptick in the crowds that filtered down the sidewalk hunting for breakfast. But they were still nothing compared to the usual press of bodies as the town filled with last-minute gift shoppers and merrymakers.

She manned a wassail table in front of the Magick Cabinet, passing out free treats to tourists and members of the community as they passed by.

Wooden platters offered an array of Solstice shortbread, cardamom orange sugar cookies, rosemary goat cheese quick bread, and more. All infused with hearth magic.

Magic.

Memories of how it had felt coursing through her the night before warmed her, and she opened her awareness, conscious of the many vibrations all around. Rowan grounded, pulling energy up from the earth beneath her feet and sending her own back in a rhythm of give and take.

The exchange was good. Natural. More than that—it was righting something that had been wrong for a very long time.

Rowan settled her elbows against the table and picked up a piece of goat cheese bread, tearing a big piece free with her teeth.

“Hearth magic,” she said with a pleased moan.

An unexpected face chose that exact moment to appear in her field of view.

“Hearth magic?” asked Gavin, his voice amused.

“Gavin!” she blurted, spitting out bread in a spray. She held up a finger and took a long drink of cider to wash the rest down, noticing then that her snack had splattered his jacket.

“Oh, goddess,” she gasped when her mouth cleared. “Let me clean that up.”

Scrambling to the other side of the table to wipe it off, she realized too late that she’d used the same towel to clean up a spill of coffee earlier. Rowan stared at the cloth pressed against his chest, uselessly.

“I think I just made that worse.”

A cool smile pulled back his mouth and eyes ever so slightly. As his chest rose and fell beneath her palm, she was tempted to slip her hands through the opened zipper flap of his jacket and warm them up inside.

Stop it. Don’t you remember what happened last time you did that? As she took a hurried step back away, her eyes scanned for any signs of unintended magic.

“No harm done,” said Gavin. “It was already dirty.”

“Dirty by Gavin standards, and Gavin standards alone. Consider this my apology.” She dispensed a cup of wassail and handed it his way.

He narrowed his eyes in mock suspicion. “Wait, aren’t you giving this to everyone ?”

“You got me.”

He huffed the cider, eyes half-lidded in pleasure. “Is this mulled cider?”

“No, it’s wassail, which is mulled cider plus Paganism.”

“Does that make it witchcraft of some kind?”

She tapped a finger on the side of her lips with a faux look of concentration. “I mean, if by ‘witchcraft’ you mean ‘a series of actions taken to please the gods and ensure a good harvest’…”

“That kind of sounds like witchcraft, yeah.” He took a sip, and his gaze swept across the front of the shop. A few tourists were visible through the windows, all of them holding cups of cider and napkins full of treats. “Though it seems more like a spell to bring in customers.”

“Well, if you think of magic as sending energy out into the world that returns to you, bringing back what you hoped to receive in kind…then yes, giving away something in the hopes that gratitude drives someone to look at what you have for sale sounds like the foundation of an effective spell.”

“When you put it that way, it sounds like any sufficiently strong intention could be called magic.” His dark eyes were delightfully challenging.

“Not anything, but sometimes the line is blurry.” She settled back onto the table and plucked up one of the sugar cookies, toying with it for a moment before looking his way.

Rowan ran a finger over the rough edge of the cookie as she spoke.

“Say, for example, I had my eye on someone, and say I decided to learn how to make his favorite cookie and, once I’d mastered the recipe, use them as the foundation of a love spell.

” She rolled the cookie around in her hands, feeling his eyes follow her every movement.

“Say it worked. Was it witchcraft? Or was it just that I took the time to learn what made him happy and put in the work?”

She finished talking and looked down to where his hand rested on the cookie still in her possession. Hot skin warmed her much colder hands, and fingertips brushed the sensitive interior of her palm, sending a ripple of pleasure up her arm.

He snatched up the cookie with a clearing of his throat, conspicuously studying it. Then he looked her in the eye, and there was the sense of something hovering on the edge of perception, but it blew away before she could catch it.

“These are my favorite,” he said in a quiet voice.

“I know,” she said, her voice soft.

“Rowan! Look!” Rowan snapped out of her haze and spun.

Zaide stood in the doorway of the magic shop, finger jabbing at the sky in excitement.

Something cold landed on her nose, and she blinked.

Clouds had gathered, thick overhead, and despite a clear weather report, big fat snowflakes fell to the ground.

“No way,” Rowan murmured.

“Fucking way,” said Zaide.

“It’s snowing?” Gavin stared skyward and unlocked his phone with a furious swipe. He tilted the screen Rowan’s way, showing that his weather app still showed a zero percent chance of precipitation for the rest of the week.

As if in response, the snow came down in earnest, swiftly accumulating in a thin layer across every surface. People emerged from doors up and down the road, each one reacting with the same awe and excitement.

Zaide danced to the sidewalk and spun as flakes of snow snagged in her dark hair. “It’s really snowing!” She threw her arms around Rowan and swept her into a circle. “It worked!”

“It worked,” gasped Rowan, returning the hug and laughing herself into the spin.

I didn’t screw it up.

“Wait, what worked?” The two women paused, remembering that Gavin was standing right there. “Did you two…do a snow dance or something?”

“Or something,” said Zaide. She swiped a thin handful of loose snow and tossed it at Rowan, who, laughing, scrambled to retaliate. At the last moment, she pivoted to throw it at Gavin instead, catching him square in the chest.

He looked down at the diffused splash of white flakes clinging to the wool of his coat and then back up with a half grin.

“Oh, it’s on, Midwinter.” He scooped some up and pounced her way, dropping it right on her head.

The cold flakes tumbled down her face and through the opening of her parka, all the way into her oversized red sweater.

She laughed in delight at the shock of it.

Tracing the path the snow had taken down her body, Gavin’s eyes widened, and he started to say, “Sorry!” but she scooped up more snow and moved to shove it right in his face.

He caught her by both arms, his firm grip holding her fast, and they both stilled, inches away from one another, tangled in a near embrace.

At this distance, she could appreciate the fine details of his face—like the tiny white slit of a scar below his chin, and the dimple beneath his full lower lip.

She had to resist the urge to reach out and touch it.

“Gavin! So that’s where you ran off to!”

A group dressed in business attire rounded the corner of the low brick commercial building in which the Magick Cabinet occupied a suite. Among the group’s members was Hayleigh, but she wasn’t the one who had shouted, though she was eyeing Gavin and Rowan—hard.

No, that voice had belonged to Patriarch McCreery.

Dennis looked much the same as the last time Rowan had seen him, though his full head of hair had finally gone grayer than his son’s.

Otherwise, age had mostly left him be. He still had the same stalwart mountaineer frame and outdoorsy glow.

She’d heard rumors he cross-country skied to the office every day when there was snow and hiked when there wasn’t.

Three other men rounded out the group. Two of them wore sweater vests emblazoned with the symbol of the Goshen Group, while the final one carried himself more casually, equipped with a clipboard and a belt from which various tools dangled.

He was inspecting the Magick Cabinet’s building and scribbling down notes—what was that about?

Gavin and Rowan disentangled in a flush, and she scrambled back to her spot behind the wassail table. The group came to stand in a semicircle around the table, leaving her distinctly surrounded. Zaide had already vanished, slipping back inside to attend to a customer.

“Rowan!” said Dennis. “Gavin mentioned you were home for a visit.”

“Yep, here I am,” she said, glancing at Gavin. He’d talked about her with his dad?

Of course he did. You drove all the way from SeaTac together. It would have been weird not to mention it.

“Can you believe this snow?” asked Mr. McCreery. “Came out of nowhere!” Rowan worked to suppress a creeping smile of pride. “Inspector’s almost finished—thank God! Because no one dressed for this. Some even less than others.” He directed a significant look Hayleigh’s way.

She did her best not to enjoy how miserable Hayleigh looked in the cold. For once, Rowan was not the most underdressed.

“What’s all this, then?” asked one of the Goshen Group reps, leaning in close to examine the food.

“I recommend the cookies,” said Gavin, taking a bite. “Rowan made them.”

The suits eyed the table. Hayleigh waved away the offer, but everyone else grabbed something. The inspector and the other two reps walked away with their treats, moving to the front of the building to speak in hushed tones.

“Can’t level it,” said one, “but a retrofit’s not out of the question.”