all … pardoning my French, Miss Emily.”
Emily didn’t give a damn about Nate’s French. Her skin crawled with foreboding. The icy unpleasant feeling only became stronger when she and Nate finally arrived in Lost Pine about a half hour later and found a small crowd of worried onlookers gathered to watch Dag Hansen. He was working furiously on his timber shed—but he was not adding to it. He was using a hammer to methodically knock it apart, board by board.
“Dag?” Emily pushed her way through to him. “Dag, what are you doing?”
“I won’t have it.” His voice was carefully restrained—the kind of restraint that hinted at fury smoldering beneath. “I won’t have anything on my land that reminds me of you.”
Emily’s brow knit, but she made her voice calm and reasonable. “This shed is for your timber. For your business. For the town. It’s not—”
“I built this all for you!” He shouted, waving his muscular arm in a gesture that encompassed all of Lost Pine. “All of it was supposed to be for you. The rail line, everything! But I don’t want any of it anymore.”
“Dag, it wasn’t for me,” Emily said. At least it wasn’t before last night.
“Why would I care about growing this town unless it was to make it a better place for my wife? For the family I wanted to have?”
She started to say something, but then he looked at her, and she couldn’t remember what she was going to say. She couldn’t remember what words were at all for a moment. His eyes were belligerent, pleading, furious. In them, hatred and love tumbled, slippery and shining, like oil and rainwater shaken in a jar.
“You made a fool of me last night, Emily.” His voice was low and brutal. “To think that I was strutting around, telling everyone that you and I—” He stopped short, closing his eyes and opening them again, as if that might make the world look right again. “I wanted you to be my wife. I wanted to … give you things. Mahogany furniture and … I would have made you the queen of Lost Pine. But you snuck off last night with that … that …”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Fear made heat creep into her voice. “We only went to the mine, and the only reason he came was because Besim said the zombies had gotten loose. And they were loose, and if he hadn’t been there—”
“Stop it!” Dag roared, throwing down the hammer with a shed-rattling crash. “I don’t want to hear another word about how wonderful your Warlock is. I don’t care if zombies stampeded through Sacramento! We would have had our walk!”
Emily let out a long, tremulous breath. Stanton said she’d made the love spell too strong, but she was sure she hadn’t made it this strong. How could the spell have miscarried so completely?
This was not love. This was misery and anguish and despair. And it would rankle Dag until there was nothing left of him—nothing but bitter, unalloyed hate. If the hatred were directed at her and her alone, she deserved that. But it would pollute him, poison his life, his business, the town …
She had to get the love spell off him. No one else could. She had bound him, and she had to release him. And it wouldn’t be hard. A little backpedaling under a full moon, some rhymes of regret and dismissal …
… but she couldn’t do even that.
With the stone in her hand, she couldn’t do magic at all.
But the stone could draw off magic. It had with the miners, anyway. Moving closer to him, she raised a desperate hand to touch his face, to touch the stone against his cheek …
Dag saw her movement, grabbed her wrist, wrenched it painfully aside. He thrust his face close to hers.
“If that’s all I wanted,” he growled, “I would have gotten myself a whore.”
She swallowed hard, willing herself not to tremble.
“Let go of my hand, Dag,” she whispered.
Dag clenched his teeth, and squeezed harder. Emily gasped in pain, wondering if he would break the bone. Fear gave way to real anger and she bared her teeth in a fierce snarl.
“I said, let go!”
The words were like a slap; Dag pulled back, blinking surprise. The edge of murder in his eyes dulled. He released her then, shoving her backward. She fell, landing hard on the sawdust-strewn ground.
“Get out of my sight.” Dag turned away from her. Bending to pick up his hammer, he clenched it in