“Where in the bloody hell are you? Is that . . . some sort of theater? A fortune-teller’s wagon?”
His father’s face loomed closer in the mirror. “Rhys Maredudd Penhallow, if you are consorting with fortune-tellers—”
“Da, I only have you for a tick, can I tell you why I’m calling?”
Simon’s expression cleared slightly and he leaned back, waiting.
As quickly as he could, Rhys told his father everything that had happened to him since arriving in Graves Glen, from the car trouble to the near-miss accident to the statue. He left out the bit about not having hot water for his shower this morning as he was fairly certain it didn’t help his case, but by the time he was finished, his father looked almost . . . amused.
What a terrifying prospect.
“You’re not cursed, lad,” Simon assured him. “Penhallow men cannot be cursed. Not in over a thousand years has one of us fallen victim to any sort of hex.”
Amusement gave way to smugness as he added, “All of this is no doubt a direct result of your decision to travel like a human rather than via the Traveling Stone, as I suggested.”
“A head fell clean off a statue because I decided to fly commercial and rent a car? Is that what you’re saying, Da? Because I’m not sure I see the correlation.”
Now the scowl was back. That was actually a bit comforting.
“Have you charged the ley lines yet?”
“Not yet, no. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? What if I am cursed and that . . . I don’t know, buggers up the ley lines or some such?”
“While I do not doubt your ability to, as you say, ‘bugger up’ most anything, Rhys, I am telling you, there is no possibility you are cursed, and even if there were, some girl who barely qualifies as a hedge witch could not have done such a thing. Not to you. Not to any of us.”
“She’s more than a hedge witch,” Rhys said, his fingers tightening around the mirror’s handle, but his father waved a hand.
“Whatever she is, I’m telling you there is no way she could’ve placed a hex on you. It’s . . . ridiculous. Preposterous.”
“Bit like talking to people through mirrors, really,” Rhys replied, and his father’s gaze sharpened.
“Do the job I sent you there to do, boy, come home and don’t ever let me hear the word ‘cursed’ leave your lips again.”
Chapter 8
“So I think maybe we cursed Rhys.”
Vivi kept her voice low as she said it, glancing back over her shoulder toward the curtain in the corner of the room. He’d been back there for a while now, and she wondered what he and his dad were talking about. Could his dad do some kind of long-distance spell and find out that yes, Vivi and Gwyn had laid a curse on Rhys all those years ago? Would he declare Witchy War on them? Pull the magic from Graves Glen? Would he—
“Vivi, if we could actually place curses on people, that bitch who always gives me whole milk when I ask for soy at Coffee Cauldron would be a dead woman by now,” Gwyn said, placing another one of the chattering plastic skulls on the display table in the middle of the store. They went through thousands of the things this time of year, parents happy to have something cheap and spooky to buy their kids, kids delighted to chase their siblings around downtown with a cackling head.
Vivi picked up a stray one from the counter now, tapping her fingernails against its teeth as she fretted. “Okay, but doesn’t it seem like a lot? The car thing, that might be nothing, but the statue?”
“That thing has been there forever,” Gwyn said, turning to face Vivi, her witch’s hat slightly askew. “And maybe when they were setting up the stage, they bumped it or something. Look, if anyone should be freaked out about that statue, it’s Jane. And trust me, she will be. It’s gonna take, like, at least two bottles of wine to get her to chill out tonight.”