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He arched a sleek sandy eyebrow. “I’m sorry?”
I cleared my throat, barely concealing a giggle. “No, I’m sorry. I’ve never met a Jed before.”
He chuckled. “I’d imagine not, with that accent and all.”
Now it was my turn to raise the bitch-brow, a super-extension of the eyebrow combined with one’s best frosty expression. He of the sultry backwoods drawl was mocking my accent? That was disappointing. Since landing in New York, I’d worked hard to control whatever lilt I’d picked up in the fifteen years I’d lived with Nana Fee. It wouldn’t do for the locals to know where I was from.
“Your accent,” he said, his forehead creasing. “Boston, right? ‘Pahk the cah in the yahd’?”
I blushed a little and regretted the bitch-brow. I’d forgotten how muddled my manner of speaking was, compared with my new neighbor’s Southern twang. My accent was vaguely Boston, vaguely Irish. Nana Fee had tried to correct my lack of Rs in general and attempted to teach me Gaelic, but the most I picked up were some of the more interesting expressions my aunts and uncles used. Mostly the dirty ones. So I spoke in a bizarre mishmash of dialects and colloquialisms, which led to awkward conversations over what to call chips, elevators, and bathrooms.
“Oh, right,” I said, laughing lightly. “Boston—born and raised.”
Technically, it wasn’t a lie.
Jed looked at me expectantly. I looked down to make sure I hadn’t forgotten some important article of clothing. “If you don’t give me your name, I’m just gonna make one up,” he said, leaning against the counter. “And fair warnin’, you look like a Judith.”
“I do not!” I exclaimed.
“Half-dressed girls who climb me like a tree are usually named Judith,” he told me solemnly.
“This happens to you often?” I deadpanned.
He shrugged. “You’d be surprised.”
“It’s Nola,” I told him. “Nola Leary.”
“Jed Trudeau,” he said, shaking my outstretched hand. “If you don’t mind me sayin’, you look beat. Must’ve been a long flight.”
“It was,” I said, nodding. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll just go back to bed.”
There was a spark of mischief in his eyes, but I think he picked up on the fact that I was in no mood for saucy talk. His full lips twitched, but he clamped them together. He held up one large, work-roughened hand. “Hold on.”
He disappeared out the back door, and I could hear his boot steps on the other side of my kitchen wall. He returned a few moments later, having donned a light cotton work shirt, still unbuttoned. He placed a large, cold, foil-wrapped package in my hands. “Chicken and rice casserole. One of the ladies down at the Baptist church made it for me. Well, several of the church ladies made casseroles for me, so I have more than I can eat. Just pop a plateful in the microwave for three minutes.”
I stared at the dish for a long while before he took it out of my hands and placed it in my icebox. “Do local church ladies often cater your meals?”
“I don’t go to Sunday services, so they’re very concerned about my soul. I can’t cook to save my life. They’re afraid I’m just wasting away to nothing,” he said, shaking his head in shame, but there was that glint of trouble in his eyes again. He gave me a long, speculative look. “Well, I’ll let you get back to sleep. Welcome to the neighborhood.”
“Thanks,” I said as he moved toward the door. I locked it behind him, then turned and sagged against the dusty sheers covering the window in the door. “If there are any greater powers up there—stop laughing.”
I massaged my temples and set about making my tea. Jed seemed nice, if unfortunately named. And it was very kind of him to give a complete stranger a meal when he knew she had nothing but angry forest creatures in her cupboards. But I couldn’t afford this sort of distraction. I’d come to the Hollow for a purpose, not for friendships and flirtations with smoldering, half-dressed neighbors.
Just as I managed to locate a chipped mug in the spice drawer, a loud, angry screech sounded from somewhere to the left of my stove. I turned and fumbled with the locked kitchen door, yelling, “Jed!”
2
Love affairs between the human and the nonhuman rarely end well for the human.
—Love Spells: A Witch’s Guide to Maintaining Healthy Relationships
By the time Jed had reunited the mama possum and her young, I determined I was far too awake to go to bed. I went through the house making lists of everything I would need to survive here, things such as food, sheets, towels, and mousetraps. Big ones.
I needed to go shopping, but I didn’t have a car, and I thought it would be pushing already-fragile “good neighbor” impressions by asking to borrow Jed’s. And now that I was able to recall more clearly moments from Dwayne-Lee’s drive to the house, I wasn’t about to take the cab service. Iris Scanlon proved that my love for her was not in vain. All it took was one phone call for her to send “more discreet transport” right to my doorstep.
Miranda Puckett was a slender thing, with long dark hair and keen green eyes. What she lacked in size she made up for with the obscenely large black SUV she maneuvered from my driveway to the gravel road with considerably fewer bumps than Dwayne-Lee. Aside from knowing where the all-night grocers were, Miranda was also a veritable font of information about the locals. She’d grown up in the Hollow and was happy to share what she knew of local history and gossip.
For instance, Miranda’s boss was not a freelance miracle worker but ran a concierge service for vampires called Beeline. The special arrangements Iris had been making for me were on behalf of my landlord, a vampire named—of all things—Dick Cheney. Miranda admitted to having a “soft spot” for Dick since he’d served as her knight in shining armor months earlier when she’d had car trouble.
