Page 3 of Silk Skullduggery (Haven Hollow #40)

Of course, on the evening I was eager to get to the store and get back to work, it seemed like Haven Hollow itself was conspiring against me.

The night had started out badly with me sleeping through my alarm clock. I’d been so keyed up the night before, almost giddy with the feeling of creation, I’d had trouble falling asleep. It hadn’t helped when Lorcan had finally come to bed. A few kisses hard turned into more, and, well, suffice to say, it had been the sun rising that had cut off our fun, not any self control on our part.

The café mocha I’d managed to make on the ridiculously fancy machine Lorcan had bought was doing quite a bit to wake me up, at least. But then more nonsense had started as I’d gotten into my car. And that nonsense was in the form of a crowd of late-night cyclists taking up the road, after which a particularly stupid little troop of skunks meandered along the back road I’d just turned down to get away from the cyclists. Then there was a moving truck that tried to turn around and ended up wedged in the ditch on both sides of the road at once. At the rate I was going, I was going to have to circle around the entire town and head to my store from the opposite direction.

Finally, the road opened up and I gave the car a little gas. Not too much juice, I was in a suburb, after all, and while there didn’t appear to be any children running around in the road, I didn’t want to risk it.

When flashing lights appeared on the horizon ahead of me, I was doubly glad for that decision. You’d have thought that by the fact that my cousin and coven member was married to the Chief of Police that I’d be immune to speeding tickets, but no. Taliyah was a real stickler for things like speed limits and laws. It was annoying, to say the least.

As I got closer, I realized it wasn’t police cars at all, but an ambulance that was parked in front of a little bungalow, with carefully arranged flower beds, and grass that looked like someone had used a ruler to cut it. There was a small crowd of people milling around outside on the sidewalk, neighbors I assumed.

I almost drove past. I wanted to get to my store, and whatever was going on here—well, it wasn’t any of my business. But then that little voice piped up, the one that was starting to sound more and more like Poppy, wondering if maybe something had happened that I could do something about. That maybe it was my business.

I should have never let Poppy convince me to join the Haven Hollow Council. Sure, I liked having a say in all the things going on in town, but it was hardly the power grab I’d been hoping for. There were no kickbacks, no bribes, barely any perks at all, and I kept getting dragged into all the ridiculousness that went on in Haven Hollow at any time.

It was always, ‘Wanda, there’s a curse we need you to break’. Or ‘Wanda, some monster is eating citizens’. Or even better, ‘Wanda, someone messed up and we need you to alter their memories with your incredible and amazing magic’. I might have been paraphrasing the last one, but the point still remained. The Council was a lot of work, and it pulled me away from my store, my hobbies, and my husband’s bed far too often, and it was all Poppy’s fault. Well, mostly anyway.

With a muttered curse, I pulled over at the curb and stepped out of the car.

I tried to school my face into some kind of concerned expression as I sidled up and past the crowd. Everyone was murmuring, something about ‘old man George’, but they readily made space for one more nosy onlooker.

At least I had a tiny sliver of information from eavesdropping. Forcing my face into the kind of pinch-browed expression of compassion Poppy could slap on like she was born with it, I turned to a man standing next to me. He looked like he was about forty, maybe a year or two older, and was currently talking softly with the others.

“Oh, my goodness,” I said, blinking my eyes in a way that almost made me sick. “What happened to George? Is he okay?”

Ugh.

Whatever my face was actually doing, it seemed to fool my would-be informant. He gave me what I was sure he thought was a reassuring smile, but it was condescending enough to make me grit my teeth against a hex.

“I don’t know. They won’t tell us anything.” He reached out, like he was going to pat my shoulder, but then must have seen my scowl and thought better of it. Good. It would have ruined the vibe if I had to bite him.

An older lady, her hair all done up in curlers like what you’d see in a sitcom, started nodding effusively. “Oh, I knew something was wrong when he wasn’t outside in his garden all day. I called the police and asked them to check on him. Like I said—George is always out in his garden. So I just knew something wasn’t right.”

A murmur ran through the crowd, and from it I picked up that apparently ‘old George’ was a bit of a curmudgeon, but a harmless one. He also had a schedule that someone could set their watch to, and he didn’t veer from it.

Any thoughts I had of the mob overreacting, of them making something out of nothing, that all went away when the paramedics came out of the house wheeling a stretcher between them. It was the black zippered coroner’s bag that landed like a fist in my stomach, though.

Someone gasped, someone cried out in thin voiced denial. People were clinging to each other, and others watched solemnly as the stretcher was brought to the ambulance. I strained my ears to catch the conversation between the paramedics, but I couldn’t catch much over the noise the crowd was making. Something about bed and pajamas. It seemed that the old man had gone in his sleep the night before. With the ambulance’s cargo loaded, the crew cut the lights, and they drove away in silence.

It was sad. Very sad. The people around me seemed to be taking it hard, and I felt for them, I did. But, from what I’d overheard, old George was in his nineties, and that age was respectable for a human’s passing. The point was, an old man dying in his bed wasn’t a sign of supernatural tampering, or some dark conspiracy. It was just a regular human affair, not Council business.

I spoke a few useless platitudes—I mean, they didn’t help the living, and the dead obviously didn’t care, before getting back into my car and making my painfully slow way into work.

***

I knew my day was only going to go from bad to worse when I stepped into my store, and Maverick greeted me with his hands raised like he was fending off a grizzly bear.

“Don’t freak out.”

If that wasn’t a guarantee that I would soon absolutely freak out, then I didn’t know what was.

“Why?” My voice came out low and dangerous, like a rattle snake’s warning before it struck.

Maverick hesitated, which only drove the anxiety spike higher. In general, Maverick did not hesitate. Maverick had faced down a murderous vampire without flinching. So I had to wonder: what had him side-eying all the various exits in the room?

He raked a hand back through his shoulder length hair. “So. You know that dress you were working on in the back room?”

My heart dropped, my stomach shot up into my throat, and my entire body went into a confused panic. “What. Did you. Do?”

That spurred him into giving me an annoyed look. “Give me some credit. I didn’t touch your ridiculously expensive fabric. But when I went into the back earlier to check on something, well.” He sighed and scratched at the closely cropped beard on his jaw. “You should probably look for yourself.”

I was already brushing past him before he’d finished the sentence, my heels clacking angrily against the floor like a war drum. If this was some elaborate prank, I was going to set Maverick on fire .

I flipped on the lights as I stepped into the storeroom, and Maverick, the coward, stayed out on the shop floor. Everything was exactly the way I’d left it that morning when I went home, except for one thing.

I’d braced myself for that familiar lightning prickle of years of enchantment woven into the fabric, but there was nothing but cool, dry air, and a few hints of magic slowly fading like mist on a summer morning.

My jaw hung open as I staggered over to the worktable, but my magical senses weren’t lying to me. The enchantment on the silk was already fading, and not just that. The silk itself was in rough shape. Each of the pieces I’d so carefully laid out and cut were showing signs of age. A fraying edge here, a worn thin hole there. Patches of the fabric were now discolored, taking on an almost yellowish tint. It was like the whole piece was doing its best to catch up to its proper age all at once. I lifted one of the smaller pieces for the bodice inlay, and the silk crumbled under my touch, dry and brittle, like centuries-old parchment.

Fury swelled in my throat, like I’d swallowed a cup of boiling liquid. What a garbage piece of craftsmanship! Who the spell enchanted fabric so it couldn’t be cut? It had been sold for garment work, sold for a truly ridiculous amount of money, I might add, and yet it fell apart after being cut to size? Absolutely absurd.

My own work was leagues above that, and I didn’t tout myself as a ‘master’ of my craft. But you could bet your broom and cauldron that if I’d enchanted a piece of fabric, it would damn well stay enchanted, no matter if it was cut. I lifted another piece of the silk, the part that would have been the train of my gorgeous gown, and some of the strands peeled away from the edge, clinging to my fingers like spider webs.

I dropped it back to the table in disgust.

One thing was sure, I was going to tell (in exceedingly scathing words) that hack of an auction house exactly what I thought about their shoddy merchandise, and I’d demand Lorcan’s money back. I might send a hex or two their way, too, if they weren’t sorry enough.

With jerky motions I dragged off my coat and purse and stuffed them into the little cubby by my notion’s dresser. Well, there went my plans for the evening. At least I could tell Maverick to head out. He was probably itching to flee, like a rat off a sinking ship.

I cast one last glance back at the pile of useless, fading silk. And if my eyes were a little bright when I stepped back onto the shop floor, it was only because I was so incandescently angry.