Shortbread and Shadows - Amy Lane Page 0,12

what went wrong? I forgot to ask.”

Bartholomew grimaced. “We… well, we sort of… not lied exactly, but we cast a wishing spell, and not one of us planned to ask for what it was we really wanted.”

Sheila and Gretel both did a slow blink. “Not one?”

Oh, how embarrassing. “No, ma’am.”

“What did you ask for instead?” Gretel asked, dreamy eyes unusually sharp.

“What we thought we were supposed to want.” Bartholomew had figured that out on his very own.

Both women let out inelegant snorts. “Jesus, Gretel—only when you’re young.”

“Right? Unbelievable. Well, young virginal Bartholomew, you and your friends are going to have to come clean before this is righted—you know that, don’t you?”

Bartholomew refrained from looking behind him, but Lachlan’s arms tightened around his shoulders as Lachlan protected him from more jostling. “Yeah,” he said in a small voice. “We got that feeling.”

“Well, run along, boys,” Gretel said kindly. “Lachlan, you come to us if you need anything, yes?”

“Ma’am, I don’t know anything about spellcasting,” Lachlan apologized. “I just didn’t want Bartholomew to be alone.”

And with that, he took Bartholomew by the shoulders and guided him back out on the floor.

Another group was coming toward them, comprised of four people cosplaying various Naruto characters. One of them had a paper bag with Bartholomew’s little logo sticker on it, and Naruto and Kakashi were reaching over Sasuke’s shoulder.

“C’mon, Jessie,” Naruto begged. “We can smell it from here. We don’t need to wait until lunch, right?”

“I bought them,” Jessie/Sasuke said. “I was going to bring them to my sister, since she missed out on the con!”

“We can go back and get more!” the kid dressed as Kakashi begged. “The line has to be down by now!”

Suddenly Jessie/Sasuke looked up, directly at Bartholomew as he and Lachlan watched their exchange. She closed her eyes and pulled the cookie bag up close to her nose and then inhaled sharply, almost like the cookies were a drug.

“Mmmm, you guys,” she said dreamily. “Maybe we should all go divvy this up. It’s like… calling to me, you know.” She gave Bartholomew a heavy-lidded look, and Bartholomew turned away and started heading down the aisle in panic.

“Oh, this is not good,” he muttered.

“What?” Lachlan asked. “What did you see?”

“There is something odd,” he replied. “People are way too excited about my cookies. We gotta go check on the oth—” The rest of the word died in his mouth as he and Lachlan rounded the corner and saw that the booth, which normally did a decent amount of business but was by no means the biggest deal ever, was mobbed.

The throng that surrounded Kate, Josh, Jordan, and Alex wasn’t pushing or impatient. They were just… persistent, and everybody holding out their hands, smiling in a uniform way that was really starting to creep Bartholomew out, looked more than hungry.

They looked blindly, fanatically, strangely in love.

“That doesn’t happen every con,” Lachlan said in surprise.

“No no no no no,” Bartholomew mumbled. He scanned the booths and saw that Lachlan had set up his usual shelves against a backdrop of black velvet draperies. This was good. This meant Bartholomew could sneak in through Lachlan’s booth and get around to his own booth through the back.

“Okay,” he muttered. “Lachlan, I’m going to sneak through your booth, and once I disappear out the back, you should be fine.”

“Wait,” Lachlan said, obviously confused. “Fine? What sort of fine? What are you going to do?”

“Well, I’m going to try to set up around….” He swallowed convulsively as one of the customers bumped his table and some of Kate’s soaps fell down. “Shit.”

“Here. You sneak in through the back and talk to Jordan,” Lachlan said grimly. “I’ll try to help sell stock. You don’t go anywhere without me, okay, Tolly? I don’t trust this group alone with you.”

“When did I get to be Tolly?” He had to ask. God, he just had to.

Lachlan blew his mind by stroking his lower lip with a rough woodworker’s thumb, and Bartholomew realized they were standing that close—had been for much of the morning.

“You’ve always been Tolly. I just… just really wanted an excuse to be close to you,” he confessed with a grin. “Haven’t you wanted to be close to me?”

Oh, yes. God, yes. But…. “Not like this,” Bartholomew protested. “Not when everything’s going wrong and the world’s upside down.”

And it was Lachlan’s turn to grimace. “Well, fine, Tolly, but it’s not like you were going to talk to me without some supernatural intervention, was it? I mean, I’ve been waiting

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