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Audrey

Istoodonmydeck with my hands out in front of me. A bead of sweat rolled down my spine from the strain of trying to make the golden light appear again. After the earthquake, I felt whole and right, like I’d finally been reunited with a piece of me that had previously been out of my reach. So why couldn’t I make my powers work now?

It didn’t take a lot for me to accept the extraordinary. While I’d gone into shock immediately after the earthquake, it was only because I hadn’t been expecting it. There had been no mention of the ground trembling in the legend as I knew it, and I was a lot more comfortable with Ophiuchus’s curse than I was with the wrath of Mother Nature.

A crisp morning breeze off the ocean teased a few wisps of blonde hair from my ponytail. Despite the terrifying destruction that had taken place in the forest the night before, it was a gorgeous morning on the island. Birds chirped happily from hidden branches, and the sun streamed dapples of golden green light through the trees. Not the same shade of green that had glowed from Wes’s hand last night. That had been a deep emerald color.

My skin flushed and little flutters tickled my stomach as memories of last night flooded my mind. So annoying. I’d shut down any feelings I’d had toward Wes years ago, and I didn’t need to stir them up again. Of course, I had to be with him when magic finally manifested on the island. Couldn’t have been Jason Momoa.

If I’d been born under any other sign, I probably would’ve been embarrassed about the whole writhing against Wes like a dog in heat incident, but I was a Scorpio through and through. Sexuality came as naturally to me as breathing.

Plus, it made perfect sense. Magic was energy in its purest form, and power flowed through human conduits, like water pushing against a barrier, until the pressure reached a point where it had to break free. All those molecules stacking on top of one another, rubbing against each other, and building to a release had an interesting physical side effect.

Simply put, it made us horny.

It was no surprise the golden light erupted from my hands right when I’d been on the brink of an orgasm. From dry humping my sworn enemy, who also happened to be my ex-boyfriend’s brother. But that was neither here nor there. The important thing was, now that I’d identified the source of my unusual interest in Wes, I could go back to throwing mental darts at his smug face and focus on learning how to use my gifts.

The feeling that we were on the brink of something catastrophic had been nagging me for weeks. The earthquake confirmed that my intuition had been on track, but that wasn’t the whole of it. Magic wasn’t the only thing loose on the island.

I’d always believed, as did my grandma, that the curse would return to the island one day. The birthstones couldn’t hold it forever without incident. The push and pull between the two forces must’ve put enough pressure on the stones to break them. Wes and I, and whoever else had powers, needed to learn how to wield our magic so we could repair the stones and trap the curse for good. Or at least the next three hundred years.

It would be a good idea to check out the cave, to see what kind of damage it had suffered, if any, or if it possibly even caused the earthquake. Though that would have to wait. It was a three-mile hike through the densest part of the forest, and too much could go wrong up where the trails functioned more like suggestions than actual pathways. Jocelyn Everett ran tours up there from the hotel on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Maybe I’d join one later this week if I could find the time to get away from work.

I wondered if Wes had already found some boring scientific explanation to excuse away the light and rain and whatever had sparked between his fingers. Then I wondered why I was standing around wondering anything about Wes at all when I needed to concentrate. Pushing him from my mind, I went back to attempting a repeat of the night before. I’d been at it since dawn with no luck. Tired, sweaty, and no closer to manipulating the weather than I’d been thirty minutes ago, I finally gave up and headed back inside to get ready for the day.

For eight months out of the year, I had shortened hours and closed two days a week, but during tourist season my shop was open from ten until four on Sundays, and nine to nine Monday through Saturday. The winters could be brutal. Most weeks in January and February it wasn’t worth opening my doors at all. I needed to put away every spare penny to get me through to the following Memorial Day, which meant long hours in the summer.

Despite the difficulties of running an extremely seasonal business, I was proud of what I’d built. As a consignment and new age shop, I had a little bit of everything. Most of my secondhand merchandise came from the residents in town. Sometimes I hunted estate sales for items that had an interesting history or were rumored to be associated with the zodiac. I also kept new age items on hand: crystals, incense, tarot cards. Things the tourists ate up. And I made my own candles to sell online and on my shelves as a side hustle.

While town building codes required me to keep the outside of my shop a cotton candy pink color, I painted the inside a cool blue and piped in soft love songs from a satellite station. I wanted my space to be calm and relaxing. Welcoming. A place where people felt comfortable lingering, rather than grab and go.

After I showered and shaved, I browsed through my closet and pulled out a red halter dress with a dangerously short hemline that hugged my curves and flared at the skirt. My lucky color to close out the end of the week. I paired it with wedge heels that tied at my ankles. Perhaps too fancy for six hours on my feet, but we had magic on the island for the first time in over three hundred years. That was worth a little extra effort. I certainly hadn’t taken care with my outfit, hair, and makeup on the off-chance I’d run into an arrogant Taurus.

Now that I had proof that I’d been right about the legend all along, I couldn’t wait to rub Wes’s nose in it. While I typically went out of my way to avoid him—not an easy task on an island that only had an eighteen-mile perimeter—I’d have to seek him out sometime this week for the deed to my spring. A deal was a deal.

I smoothed down my dress and tried one more time to bring the energy inside me to the surface. Closing my eyes, I tightened my core and pushed outward. Nothing.

Oh, well. I didn’t have time to experiment right now anyway. I locked up my condo and took the iron stairs on the side of my building down to my shop. None of the businesses looked like they’d taken a hit from the events of last night, but that didn’t bother me nearly as much as I was certain it would be bothering Wes. Magic followed its own rules.

After entering my shop, I flipped on the lights and yelped as I jumped back, smacking my head against the door jamb. My grandma stood behind the counter with her arms crossed over her Garfield sweatshirt. She often claimed the cartoon cat was her soulmate, because she, too, hated Mondays and loved lasagna. I could relate.

I wasn’t going to bother asking how she’d gotten in, even though I refused to give her a key. She spent nearly every day here during the tourist season. I tried to put a stop to it—she should’ve been enjoying her retirement instead of helping her grown grandchild manage her business—but she insisted she enjoyed the work. Arguing with my grandma was pointless. Once she put her mind to doing something, that was it. And I couldn’t deny it was nice to have her here when things got busy.

My grandma tilted her head and sniffed. “Did you get into trouble last night?”

She was a tiny, yet fierce, woman. With steel-gray hair pulled into a severe bun and shrewd blue eyes that could see through several layers of bullshit. Ninety percent of Zodiac Cove’s residents under the age of fifty thought of her as a second grandma, but I was the only blood she had left. Her son, my father, died when I was three. He and my mother had gone for a sail and got caught in a storm. Their boat didn’t make it back.

“How do you know that?” I held up a hand. “Never mind. You know everything.” No one was better at collecting gossip than my grandma. I was convinced even the trees whispered in her ear. “Did your little birdies also tell you I made it rain last night?”

“No birdies. I felt something here.” She tapped on her chest. “When I woke up this morning, something pushed at me to come down here. Tell me about the rain.”

I lit a stick of incense and the strong, spicy scent of sandalwood filled the air. It reminded me of Wes, which nearly made me put it out, but customers liked it. “It started with an earthquake. Did you feel the ground shaking last night?”

“No, and no one else mentioned anything like that to me this morning.”

Strange, but not unexpected. My grandma lived up on the highest point of the cliffs. If none of my neighbors felt the ground rumble from a hundred yards away, then I doubted anyone on the opposite side of the island would’ve noticed.

“I don’t think anyone felt it, to be honest. None of my neighbors seemed to notice.” I told her about the events of last night, careful to keep Wes’s name out of it.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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