and he’s super progressive and everything and it just… just hurt that he couldn’t open his mind to this.”
“Hm,” Kate said, and her heart-eyes were coming back.
“Oh God,” Josh said. “Here it comes again.”
“I don’t want to know,” Alex said to Jordan, but Jordan was looking at Kate in curiosity.
“I think we have to,” he said. “C’mon, Kate, what’s your verdict here?”
“Alex likes him too,” Kate said, practically dancing with smugness.
“Oh God,” Josh muttered again.
“This is a nightmare,” Alex said with no irony whatsoever.
“It’s beautiful,” Kate said, holding both hands to her chest this time.
“No.” Alex shook his head. “No. No no no. Simon just didn’t want me to leave the firm is all. I’d put in for a transfer for the one in Orangevale and he wanted to talk me out of it, and, you know, it sort of worked—”
“Wait,” Jordan said, and Alex wanted to clap his hand to his mouth. “You put in for a transfer to Orangevale? Alex, that location is, what? Five, six miles farther away! Do you have any idea how long you’d be on the road?”
Alex let out a pathetic little whine. “Yeah,” he said. “It was a bad idea. Stupid. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“But why?” Jordan asked.
Alex shook his head, but Jordan had that look in his eye, that scientist look that said he wasn’t about to drop this.
“Alex?” he asked, his voice deceptively mild, and Alex pretended that all of his attention was sucked up by the perfectly normal suburban neighborhood they were now walking through. All the landscaping here was gorgeous and understated—topiaries, rock gardens, flower beds, a lot of it professionally done. And if the topiaries had gotten a little gothic recently, a little bit along the lines of bushes being guillotined and rosebush gargoyles, well, it could just be fobbed off as an excess of Halloween spirit. All-Hallows Eve was in, what? About two weeks?
Sure, they could say that. The truth was, besides wanting to comfort the dog and maintain some contact with Dante and Cully through caring for her, part of the reason Glinda’s walk had become such a community event was to check on the surrounding neighborhoods and see how much of the strange magic that was threatening their little cul-de-sac was also threatening to take over the entire development.
Every creepy topiary, every bed of bloodred or poisonous-green flowers, every statue that seemed to be morphing into something strange and misshapen, went on their mental list for things that needed to be watched.
“Alex!” Jordan repeated, obviously tired of waiting for Alex to answer.
“What?”
“Are you looking around here?”
“God, I wish I wasn’t!” That one rosebush had been pruned—or pruned itself—to look like a live enactment of the Headless Horseman. The magic forces at work obviously had an English degree and a sense of humor.
“Yeah, well, it scares the shit out of me too!” Jordan told him. “And you know why it hasn’t taken over the entire ten block settlement?”
Alex let out a grunt. He knew this one. “Because one of us was actually upfront about what we said during the spell?” he replied. It was true. Bartholomew, for all his shyness, had the courage to tell everyone what he’d really wanted—Lachlan—as opposed to what he’d written down when they were all formulating their incantations, which was to have his business thrive.
“Three of us,” Kate said, and Jordan looked at her and Josh in surprise.
“Three of us?”
Kate shrugged at the same time Josh let out a cheek-splitting grin. “Yup,” Josh said smugly, and his arm slid around Kate’s waist.
“So, uh, what did two of us actually wish for?” Alex asked. What they’d put down on paper was for their planned wedding to go off without a hitch, but what had come out of their mouths….
“Well,” Josh said, grinning, “it didn’t have a damned thing to do with the wedding.”
Kate giggled. “Well, maybe a little bit to do with the wedding, but seriously, mostly to do with the life we want to build whether or not there’s a wedding.”
Jordan cocked his head. “And that would be…?”
Kate’s giggle turned into a full-blown laugh, and she buried her face against Josh’s enormous bicep while he dropped a kiss on her hair.
“Should we tell them?” she asked.
“They’ll figure it out soon enough,” Josh said, and he sounded so smug, so happy, Alex—who claimed no prescience, clairvoyance, or actual gift whatsoever—suddenly knew.
“Seriously?” he asked, his heart leaping for the two of them.
Josh’s smile was so wide his cheeks probably impaired his vision.