Wild Country (The World of the Others #2)- Anne Bishop Page 0,9

but when she came back from a lunch break and didn’t find any more, she figured she’d been mistaken. Now six more candles were on the display table and they …

Damn you, Kelley. What have you done?

It was possible that Kelley had found the other candles stashed in the workroom they shared and put them out on the table before going to his meeting with Jesse Walker. It was possible he hadn’t noticed anything wrong with them.

Kelley was pretty clueless about a lot of things, taking everything and everyone at face value. How else could she have played him so well for the past three years?

She’d needed a patsy to help her get farther away from her father and the plans he’d made for her, and she had found the perfect mark. When Kelley had found her drunk in an alleyway and had paid for a room at an inn and then stayed with her through the night, listening to her tearful story about the abusive father she had run from when she was seventeen, and how she’d been on the run for the past two years, she knew she had him. He wanted to help a damsel in distress, was ready to fall in love with a sweet, simple girl who just wanted a happy life with him.

She was many things. Simple and sweet weren’t among them, but it was a persona she had perfected for her part of the cons she had played with her uncle. At fairs or outdoor markets, they would have a booth where he would swap genuine stones and replace them with glass while doing a minor repair on a piece while she distracted the mark with her sweet patter about lucky stones and how she could choose just the right one for that person. And she could choose exactly the right stone for a person. That was her particular ability. But she could, and usually did, choose a stone that created a dissonance that would bring that person just enough bad luck when they gave in to an impulse and sat down for a game of cards with her father, whose persona was a frontier gambler.

Finding out that Kelley was a goldsmith and worked around gemstones was an unexpected and unpleasant hitch in her plans since she needed to avoid any stones that might dilute the energy of the stones she kept with her to deflect bad luck and create prosperity, but when he said he loved her and wanted to get married, she’d agreed—with some conditions.

They had moved three times in the three years they were married, finally settling in Prairie Gold last summer. She’d worried about living in an Intuit town, but everyone bought into her persona because Kelley had bought into it. Sometimes she was so bored with Kelley and this life she wanted to scream, but her father would never come to a small Intuit town in the middle of nowhere, and that meant she was safe from him—and safe from the other one. So she wore the old-fashioned dresses and read tarot cards and made candles and soaps that her neighbors bought out of kindness—and avoided getting close to the stones Kelley kept in his half of their shared workroom.

But now there were these candles, this dissonance.

The door to her little shop opened.

Abigail forced herself to smile at Rachel Wolfgard. “Good morning, Rachel.”

“Good morning.” Rachel eased into the shop, each cautious step bringing her closer to the table with the defective candles. “Jesse is having a meeting at the store. She told me to take a break and visit a store I haven’t seen yet. I have not been in your store. You sell candles and soap. The terra indigene use those things when we are in human form.” She reached for one of the jar candles.

“No!” Abigail shouted, certain everything would be ruined if those candles left the shop.

Rachel leaped away, startled. “I wasn’t going to steal. I have money—wages—to buy human things.”

As soon as Rachel moved away from the display, Abigail felt she could breathe again. She raised one hand in a placating gesture. “I knew you weren’t going to just take it. But those candles are defective. They shouldn’t have been put out for anyone to buy. I can show you other candles.”

Rachel backed toward the door. “No. I don’t need one.”

Shelley Bookman, the town’s librarian, walked in. Rachel turned and fled, dashing into the street. Shouts and the squeal of brakes.

“Gods!” Shelley said, standing