Page 4 of A Spell for Midwinter’s Heart

As the rented car sped east down the freeway, the lights of Seattle gave way to thickly forested foothills.

High enough to be called mountains anywhere east of the Rockies, but only the craggy toes of the mountains ranging ahead.

Rowan watched their approach with mounting dread, scanning for where the snowline should be and most certainly was not.

She pulled out a crochet project—an amigurumi otter—hoping it might distract her. But she dropped into an unconscious rhythm, and one glance at the driver’s seat, at Gavin commanding the wheel, was all it took to move her thoughts back to the strangeness of the situation.

The years had brought his features into definition, filling out his once boyishly handsome face with a strong jaw, prominent brow, and definition in the cheekbones.

His dark brown eyes, fringed by enviably long lashes, were familiar, as was his quietly guarded look.

Whenever they had paired up for group work in school, she’d relished the challenge to change his expression—a laugh, a smile, a scandalized widening of the eyes.

He had been an inordinately serious child and teenager. Though maybe not always. Rowan briefly recalled a twinkling-eyed boy. But his mother had died when he was eleven, and the melancholy of grief settled into a permanent feature.

Were he endowed with fewer of life’s advantages, that sullen demeanor might have left him as much of a social outcast as Rowan had been, but between money and looks, he’d never had that problem, even if his own “friends” ribbed him for his standoffishness.

He’d never lacked for dates either, but then Rowan supposed girls lined up for quiet boys with soulful eyes because they could imagine their minds exempt from the kinds of thoughts the loud ones advertised.

Not her, of course, but others.

He’d rolled up his sleeves, revealing forearms with thick, dark hair.

Ridges of muscle cut channels from elbow to wrist where his hands wrapped firmly around the wheel.

His eyes might have been the same, but those were certainly new.

His thumbs idly stroked circles along the nibs of raised stitching in the steering wheel cover, and she forced herself to look away, cheeks flushing at less innocent thoughts of thumbs stroking.

Her gaze landed on his hair, and the heat in her cheeks shifted from embarrassment to shame. She double-checked the position of the stocking cap on her head, hoping it would hide any early signs that her hair was changing back to white.

Gavin’s eyes darted over, catching her staring. Desperate to explain herself, she said, “You started going gray in high school, right?”

“I’m surprised you remember.”

“Well, it was pretty weird…Um, not that you should be self-conscious about it. It looks good. You look good.”

If there were any moment to dissolve into a puddle and ooze into the cracks between the seats, this was it. “I mean—you pull it off,” she added.

“Thanks,” he said with an amused twitch of the lips.

She dropped her crocheting and made a great show of focusing on retrieving a cup of hot chocolate from the central console to avoid speaking again.

The luxury car service had provided the good stuff—drinking chocolate, rich and bitter, but it had long since gone cold.

She idly ran a finger along the paper rim of the cup as she looked out the window and considered the dark hills ahead.

Did the lack of snow have anything to do with the pressure of this visit?

Her mother had insisted she return by the Solstice, which was a potent night to attempt big magic.

The coven had been down a member since her grandmother had died, and the spell would be much less likely to succeed with only seven witches.

If she were still practicing, Rowan would make eight.

They weren’t going to try to convince her to take part in some kind of spell, were they? A spell to bring back the snow?

Under normal circumstances, Elk Ridge was a popular spot during the winter holidays.

Tourists from all over the Pacific Northwest flocked into town to attend their multi-tradition festival, Elk Ridge Winter Fest, and the town’s snowy locale was a significant factor in its success.

She blamed Charles Dickens, whose vision of a white Christmas had become a fixture of cultural imagination.

Without piles of fluffy white transforming the world, the attraction of Elk Ridge just wouldn’t be the same.

Not to mention the impact on the ecosystem if they didn’t have sufficient snowpack for the spring runoff. The amount of snowfall in a given winter naturally varied, but they’d never had none at this time of year.

It was just cause for big magic, but that didn’t mean it was a good idea for Rowan to take part. Quite the opposite, in fact. She’d just mess this up too.

There was a tingling in her palm, and then the cup in her hand was steaming.

Wait. The cup in her hand was steaming?

With a jerk of surprise, she scrambled to put it back into the cupholder. Snatching her hand away, she stared at the cup before stretching out an uncertain finger to dimple its side.

Yes, it was hot all right.

There was only one explanation—she’d magicked it.

Spells became instinctual with practice, and when she’d sworn off spellcasting, it had been a monumental effort to unlearn a lifetime’s worth of magical habits. But Rowan had put in the work, because dealing in any sort of magic had felt like walking along the edge of a precipitous slope.

One that threatened to send her straight back to the worst night of her life, and to the person she never wanted to be.

“Everything all right over there?”

Gavin met her eyes briefly with a concerned knit of dark brows before returning his gaze back to the road where it belonged. Her mouth flapped, and she struggled to form an explanation.

“Oh, just stressing about the snow.”

He accepted the half-truth with a nod. “Ski season only opened last week. Slopes are high enough to have some accumulation, but conditions are not great.” Among the many pieces of real estate the McCreerys owned around Elk Ridge was a ski area half an hour up the highway.

“That’s not good,” said Rowan.

“That’s putting it mildly.” He cleared his throat, shifting in his seat and seeming to search for a way to change the subject. His lips twitched as he noted her book on the dash. “ A Mistletoe Murder, huh? Let me guess—poisoning? A literal mistletoe murder?”

Rowan furrowed her brow. “Predictability is the point!”

“Of a mystery ?”

“There’s still plenty else to figure out,” she muttered, crossing her arms over her chest and scrunching her nose in his direction. “I suppose you spent your flight reading something ‘enriching.’ Business Insider, maybe?”

He chuckled. “I watched a movie.”

“Mmm—something with Matt Damon?”

“Close. Muppets.”

That gave her pause. “Huh. The Muppet Christmas Carol? ”

He shook his head. “ Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas. ”

She couldn’t decide if he was pulling her leg, but if there was any word she associated with Gavin, it was honest. Sometimes painfully so. In her less generous moments, she would say he lacked the imagination to lie.

“The choice of a true Jim Henson die-hard,” she said. “Respect.”

He shrugged. “There’s something about its simplicity, and the way it comes down to…being willing to take chances for the people you love. At least, that’s how my mother always…”

His voice faded out as his face clouded over, lost in a memory. Finally, he muttered, “Maybe it’s just that I saw it first. Christmas Carol ’s good too…”

When it was clear that was all he was going to say on the subject, she came away curiously disappointed.

Pushing away feelings, she reminded herself again that this was Gavin McCreery, and that she had no reason to concern herself with his feelings about family, the holidays, and what one did for people you loved.

No reason at all.

Desperate to fill the silence, she said, “So, where did you come in from?”

“The Bay Area.”

“You moved there for school, right?” She vaguely recalled he had gone to Stanford to study business, like his father had planned for him.

He nodded. “And got a job in the area after graduation.”

“Doing what?”

“I’m a financial consultant for nonprofits.”

That gave her pause. “What? Really?”

He chuckled. “Yes, really. We help them with financial resilience.”

“So, is that for real, or is it a tagline?”

His reply was serious, even though Rowan had intended to tease. “Very real. Most people who get into that line of work aren’t exactly business savvy. We help them make a plan. So that they can keep doing what they do for years to come.”

“Before capitalism catches up.”

She’d half expected him to roll his eyes, but he chuckled instead. “Exactly.”

Well, then—he might have gotten the degree his father had pushed him toward, but she doubted it was how the old man planned for him to use it. Maybe there was hope for him yet.

“How about you?” he asked. “Engineering, right? Build a better solar panel yet?”

The question threw her right back into a low period of her past, where she had cracked under the weight of upper-level engineering courses.

They would have been a challenge even if she’d been able to use the spells for focus she’d had in high school, but without them, it had been a complete disaster.

“Started that way,” she said. “Failed…pretty hard. Switched to a general degree in sustainability. I’ve been working for environmental groups since then. Still trying to do something to get the world off fossil fuels.”

“Always trying to save the world,” he murmured in a surprising tone—affection?

“Yeah, well, turns out I’m not so good at that either. I completely messed up this huge fundraiser speech tonight.” She stuffed her face into her crochet project.

“I’m sure it wasn’t that bad.”

“Trust me,” she said, voice muffled by the yarn, “it was worse.”

“Well, if it was anything like your graduation speech, I’m sure it was memorable.”

Her face shot up. “You remember that?”

His lips quirked into a half smile. “You quoted the Sex Pistols. I’m pretty sure a few grandmothers fainted.”

She laughed at the memory and bit her lip. He kept catching her off guard with all the little things he remembered.

Gavin looked her way, and she could swear his eyes briefly darted lower than her face. “How is this the first time we’ve run into each other since high school?”

She tensed. The truth was, “needing to work” had only ever been her excuse for avoiding home.

For the witches of Elk Ridge, the holidays were full of magic.

Every day brought its own set of spells to close out the old, spread cheer, and bring on the new.

The idea of standing to the side or, worse yet, being pressured to take part had been too much to face, and so she had spent her last many holidays alone, absorbing herself in work to forget what she’d lost.

“I don’t usually come home for Yule,” she said finally, her voice low and tense. “Or if I do, it’s short.”

His voice was light with amusement as he replied, “So, you guys actually celebrate Yule, huh?”

Rowan tensed harder. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I was never sure if it was just a part of your mom’s…New Age persona.”

Her tension bubbled over at the all-too-familiar McCreery condescension.

Gavin’s dad, Dennis, owned several commercial buildings downtown.

One of them was located where a stately old Victorian had once stood.

That house had been both the home and workplace of the Midwinters for many generations.

Its upper floors contained apartments, with the magic store on the first. They’d opened a new store elsewhere after a flood of community support helped get them back on their feet, but it had never been the same.

And that wasn’t even the worst thing a McCreery had ever done to a Midwinter.

She inhaled, and when her words arrived, many generations’ worth of resentment came with them. “It’s not a ‘persona,’ and, yes, we do. How’s your dad doing, by the way? Tear down anyone’s ancestral home to build a strip mall lately?”

Gavin’s face was carefully neutral. “My father’s revitalization project saved Elk Ridge.”

“?‘Revitalization,’?” she said with air quotes. “More like commodification.”

He snorted. “I know you guys took what happened personally, but it was business. If he hadn’t bought it, someone else would’ve.”

“My grandmother was barely late.”

“Six months is ‘barely’?”

Six months? That wasn’t the number she’d heard. “It wasn’t six months.”

He waved a hand. “You can look it up. I’ve seen the records.”

She shook her head. “Whatever the exact number, they’d always given her leeway when times were thin—always. They only took it to foreclosure because your father pressured them to.”

Unbidden memories swelled up. A coven, minus one member, thrusting their arms into the sky, asking for a miracle.

While Rowan stood, terribly alone, in a field miles away.

The McCreery mansion lit up bright and unbothered on the hillside in front of her.

There had been evidence of spellwork at her feet, but she couldn’t remember what she’d been trying to do.

Only that her spell had failed, the coven’s spell had failed, and Dennis McCreery had torn her grandmother’s house to the ground.

Gavin hadn’t replied, and it was easier to direct her anger his way than to continue to sit with the unpleasant memories. “Well?” she said. “Nothing to say to that?”

He shrugged. “What’s the point? You’ve clearly made up your mind about what happened. And about him.”

“Still Daddy’s little boy, I guess.”

“And you are as self-righteous as ever.”

Rowan planted her eyes out the window and focused on her crocheting as a bitter silence filled the space between them. She made no attempt at conversation for the rest of the drive, and neither did he.

It was just as well. Silence was the proper way of things between a Midwinter and a McCreery.