Scuto circumdabit te de lumine…” She repeated the spell in Latin, letting her power flow into the cauldron, bathing the salt and earth, coating and imbuing the triskelion with a force-field-like shield of energy.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she sensed someone enter the workshop, waiting off to one side as still as one of her sculptures. Peregrine? Devlin? Lionel, maybe? She wasn’t sure. But their energy felt familiar and right now she couldn’t afford to pay attention to them, not with the triskelion nearing completion and her wavering between consciousness and the euphoria of a peaking spell.
A glow radiated up from the cauldron. Bright gold explosions flashed. Once. Twice. Three times. Light as bright as the eyes of the red dragon in her vision. The glow fizzled downward, sucking into the earth and salt, then vanishing.
Chandler bowed her head. “Thank you, Great Salamander, Serpent of the Embers. Blessed be your wisdom and strength,” she prayed. Then she turned to see who was watching.
Lionel stood next to the oil drum with one hand resting on the flying monkey’s shoulder. His gaze shifted abruptly to the workbench, like he didn’t want her to know just how intently he’d been looking at her. His smile turned playful and he nodded at the monkey heart. “Um—I hope charm making didn’t interrupt vital surgery?”
She laughed. “It’s for the monkey. But I need to find the perfect veins and arteries before I can contemplate surgery. However, your charm’s all set.” She smiled to herself. His personal charm certainly was all set, and working overtime to make her heart stumble. She took a deep breath and turned back to the workbench. Using the end of a screwdriver, she pushed aside the incense ash, salt, and earth, then retrieved the still-steaming charm with a pair of pliers. She waved it in the air for a moment to cool it down. “Hold out your hand. The protection magic will bond with you even better if you’re the first one to touch it.”
As she placed the triskelion on his outstretched palm, the witch in her took note of what lay before her eyes. His fate line was unusually distinct, with a hard break above his heart line. Palm reading was only a passing interest of hers, something that came with a general artist’s awareness of anatomy. Still, she felt drawn to comment. “You had a difficult childhood.”
He shrugged. “No more so than most.” His expression closed off. Then his dark eyes opened wider, their depths welcoming her in with unabashed candidness. “I never knew my birth parents, at least I don’t remember them. I was adopted by an amazing woman when I was five.”
His mention of being happily adopted sent a warm feeling of connection flickering through her. She smiled. “I was raised by an amazing adoptive mom, too.”
His fingers folded around the charm, squeezing it tight. “Um—I actually came to Burlington because of my adoptive mom. But I’m glad I did. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have met any of you.”
As he opened his hand and looked at the charm, her thoughts returned to the job at hand. “Why don’t you give that back to me? I’ll fix it so you can wear it around your neck. Is leather cord okay or would you prefer hemp?”
“Leather would be great, thank you.”
She opened a drawer in her workbench and took out a precut length of deerskin cord. As she started to attach the charm to it, she returned to their previous conversation. “So, your mom lives in Burlington? I assumed you weren’t local, since you’re staying in a motel.”
“My—my mom’s in Massachusetts. I came here because of the ferries—ferryboats, that is.”
“Really?” She stopped threading the cord through the charm to look at him. There were several ferries on Lake Champlain, the lake that stretched between Vermont and Upstate New York, and up to Canada. She and Peregrine often walked to Oakledge Park to watch the ferries cross. She could think of only one reason someone would come to Burlington because of the ferries. “You work on one of the boats? I thought you were a full-time journalist?”
“I am a journalist, freelance. I grew up in Boston.” He hesitated, jiggling his fingers at his side as he thought through what to say next. “My adoptive mom claimed she found me on a ferry. Wh-when I was little, I thought it was a made-up story like parents saying they found a baby under a cabbage leaf. Except, I wasn’t a baby when she found me. Later, I realized her story was true.”
For a long moment, Chandler was too stunned to speak. “You’re kidding? On a ferryboat in Burlington?”
He nodded. “She’s never actually told me it was here. But I know it’s true.” He looked down. “When I was a kid, I liked to pretend my adoptive mom worked for the FBI, that I was a famous child who got handed off to her on a boat and sent into hiding. Or, I was an alien child, a black Superman.”
Chandler would have laughed, except Lionel’s tone was dead serious. Besides, maybe he wasn’t a witch and didn’t have magic in his blood, but this foundling story was strange. In fact, it qualified as uncanny, especially when combined with him developing the sight from being bespelled by Rhianna. “What makes you so sure it’s true?”
“I vaguely remember the ferry,” he said. “For a long time, I thought it came from hearing my mom repeatedly tell the story of finding me on the wet deck and hiding me under a blanket.” He stared past her toward the monkey heart. His voice quieted, barely above a whisper. “In my heart, I always knew the memory of the ferry was real. Um—I lived a lot of places, but that ferry was always in the back of my mind. Finally, I decided to write a travel article to justify searching for it. “Car Ferries of New England.” I thought, if I visited all the ferries in New England, I might recognize one. If that didn’t work, then I’d expand my search westward until I found the boat.”
“But aren’t all ferries pretty much identical—other than size?”
“Some are on fresh water. Some ocean… Different smells. Different vibes.”
Different vibes. Chandler rubbed the triskelion’s cord between her fingers. Now he was sounding like a witch. “And you found the ferry. Here. In Burlington?”
He nodded. “My birth certificate says Boston, Massachusetts. I started my search there, then I went to Connecticut and Maine.”
Chandler thought for a second. “Does your mom know you’re here now?”
“She thinks I’m in Stowe working on an article about tourism.” He hesitated. “But there’s something about Burlington that speaks to me, beyond the ferries…”
She handed Lionel the necklace. “Like black dogs?” she said it jokingly, to clear the tension from the air. But she’d noticed something else. His speech was smoother, and his thought process faster than it had been earlier. “Are you feeling better?”
“Very much so. It’s from being around all of you. I felt this way with the goth, too. And when I came here to the complex last night, and the other time, before the high priestess—I mean, before Rhianna put the spell on me.”
Before she put the spell on him? “I didn’t think you had a hard time putting your thoughts together until after the spell?”
“I didn’t. But I’ve always daydreamed a lot, zoned out. But not with the goth or here.” He slipped the leather cord over his neck and tucked the triskelion under his shirt. “It’s the magic. It keeps me in the moment. Totally present.” He rested his hand against his chest, pressing the triskelion over his heart. “This feels wonderful, like the chime of grasshoppers on my skin and in my head. It is like yoga without the work.”
She did laugh at that. “That’s the strangest way anyone’s ever described my energy.”
His eyes met hers. And in the soft light of the workshop, she could see what a truly beautiful man he was. Everything about him was long and narrow, but all the proportions worked. The smoothness and tone of his skin was more stunning than the darkest brushed bronze she’d ever seen. His lips were satiny. If she’d drawn a likeness of his face in college, her art professors would have criticized the bone structure for being too