Read Casting Spells for Free Online

being into another one. I had been present at the moment she left us, and while I had been unable to actually see her pierce the veil, there was no denying the fact that in the blink of an eye, her physical self was gone.
    That was how it was with most of the villagers. When they moved into another realm, their physical selves moved with them, and there was nothing for the Stallworth Funeral Home to do but organize a gathering in their name.
    Maybe one of those businessmen I had seen choking down porterhouses the size of my Buick had keeled over at the table after Gunnar and I left. It could be anything, I told myself as I turned into the circular driveway and glided to a stop behind our only school bus.
    Janice, wearing a plaid flannel nightgown and Uggs, was waiting for me at the door. “The blond woman who bought your Orenburg is dead.”
    I stopped unbuttoning my coat. “What?”
    “She’s dead.” A blaze of color stained her cheeks. “Paul Griggs and his sons were coming out of the woods on the north side of the skating pond and they saw something on the ice—”
    Janice kept talking but her words were lost to me. I felt like the oxygen had been sucked out of my lungs. “It’s a mistake,” I said. “You saw her: she was meeting her boyfriend for dinner at the Inn. She wasn’t exactly dressed for ice skating.” The skinny heels. The naked dress. That beautiful, vibrant woman ...
    “Colm said she waited two hours for the guy to show up but he never did. She paid her bar tab then left around nine o’clock. That was the last time anyone saw her alive.”
    “You don’t know that. You’re guessing. You don’t know anything.”
    “She’s here, honey. She’s in the—” She stopped and looked away, clearly searching for the right words, but there weren’t any.
    Slowly the rest of the room came into focus. Paul and his sons Jeremy and Johnny were slumped on the sofa against the far wall. They still bore the marks of Transformation on their forearms and along their jaw lines, dark wiry tufts of gray-brown fur that always reminded me of steel wool. His normally rambunctious sons stared down at their bare feet. The powerful claws were almost fully retracted, but what remained glittered brightly in the overhead lights. All three were swaddled in huge white blankets with bright yellow daisies embroidered in each corner. I had tried repeatedly to woo Midge Stallworth over to knitting, but she was staunchly in the embroidery camp, as evidenced by the profusion of daisies on every textile she owned.
    “What are we going to do?” Midge cried the second she saw me. She was a small, round, motherly woman whose high color was the result of a recent feeding and not blusher. “We haven’t ordered supplies in at least ten years. By the time we get a delivery, she’ll be so stiff we won’t be able to—”
    The next thing I knew, I was looking up at the ceiling through a grayish mist. The voices were familiar—Janice and Paul and Jeremy’s croaking adolescent tenor—but the faces weren’t. I closed my eyes again, willing myself to pull the disparate images back into focus. When I opened them this time, everything was as it should be.
    Except for the fainting part, that is.
    “It’s her blood sugar,” Midge was saying as she drizzled Dr Pepper into my mouth. “They’re always having trouble with their blood sugar.” Midge blamed all my problems on being a nonmagick human.
    “It’s not my blood sugar.” I pushed the soft drink away. “And don’t talk about Suzanne like that. She’s not even cold yet.”
    “Oh, she’s cold,” Paul volunteered from the sofa. “She was near frozen when we pulled her out of the water.”
    The room started to spin again, but this time I managed to keep myself from fading.
    “I want to see her.”
    They exchanged looks.
    “I want to see her,” I repeated, rising to my feet. “We can’t just leave her alone in that room while we try to figure out what to do