“Oh please. How can you tell?” Mike said to Cassie, his eyes gleaming with mischief. “All I did was roll the dice.”
“And then used mag—” Cassie hesitated, her hand flying to her mouth as her eyes widened. She turned to her mother in fear.
“It’s okay, honey.” Pamela smiled, but sadness kept it from reaching her eyes. “But only talk about it here with our friends.”
What had our country’s latest civil war done to kids like Cassie? How long would it take before they learned to feel safe again? Months? Years?
“Anyways, you can’t tell I used magic just now,” Mike teased the little girl. “Everyone’s using magic around here.”
“So? I can tell it was you who did it just now,” Cassie insisted. “I can smell it.” She tapped her tiny button nose.
I burst out laughing. “Mike, she says your magic stinks!”
“Shut up,” he muttered, punching my shoulder. He turned back to the little girl. “Oh yeah? What does it smell like?”
“Oranges and sunshine,” she chirped with a giggle.
Mike grinned. “Ha! See? She says my magic smells good.”
Tarah rolled the dice then asked, “And what does Hayden’s magic smell like?”
Cassie frowned. “Hmm. Do something, Hay-Hay.”
“Hay-Hay!” Mike fell over sideways laughing.
Hay-Hay? Couldn’t Cassie pick a different nickname for me?
I tried to forget about my new nickname and focus on doing something magical on a small scale. But what?
Then I had it. I held out a finger a few inches from Tarah’s neck and blew softly, pushing a tiny bit of my will into the breath of air. The breeze lifted a strand of Tarah’s hair and coaxed it to wrap around my finger several times. As Tarah’s cheeks turned a light shade of pink, Cassie giggled and clapped her hands.
“Blankets!” she cried out. “It smells like the blankets after Mommy washes them.”
“I think she means the fresh breeze scented laundry detergent we used to use,” Pamela explained with a grin.
My magic smelled like laundry soap. Great.
Steve walked into the room, joining us from the master suite his family had claimed, his face clouded. He added a log to the fireplace, jabbing it way harder than needed with the poker before jerking the metal safety chain curtain back across the opening. Muttering about how we’d all die of the cold, he stomped back to his family’s bedroom. Either they had taken the master suite, or everyone else had assigned it to them so we wouldn’t have to see Steve every time he needed to visit a bathroom. But apparently the compromise was that his end of the house wasn’t getting much heat from the fireplace. Probably because he insisted on keeping their bedroom door shut.
That reminded me. “Hey, Tarah, want to help me bring in more firewood?”
“Sure.”
As we pulled on our coats and boots at the door, Mike waggled his eyebrows suggestively. “Keep her out there a while, would you? I need to get past her Boardwalk and Park Place in a few turns, and I’m running short on cash.”
“Cassie, you keep an eye and a nose on him for me, okay?” Tarah said, tapping the side of her nose. “Play my turns for me till I get back. And don’t let him cheat anymore.”
Cassie nodded solemnly.
As I held the glass and metal storm door open for Tarah, I heard Cassie howl, “Mikey, you heard Tarah. Quit cheating!”
Chuckling, I followed Tarah down the steps, pulling her in against my side as we strolled along the houses. We’d chopped up and piled firewood behind every house earlier so no one had to go too far, and taking a shortcut in between the houses would have been quicker. But I wanted time alone to talk with her, so we walked past the shortcut and took the long way around instead.
As we crunched along on the snow, carefully avoiding the tree stumps everywhere, I told her about the argument I’d overheard between Pamela and Steve. “So we might want to keep an eye on at least Cassie when we can.”
“You don’t think Steve would really try to take her away, do you?”
“He killed that cop in Oklahoma without even blinking an eye. I don’t think there’s anything he wouldn’t do for his family.”
“Well, what if he uses magic on them to make them agree to go with him? How would we know if they’d really changed their minds or not?”
Good point. I sighed. “I guess we’ll have to deal with that possibility if it comes up. Maybe some of the others have a way to break another's spell?”
Tarah shrugged. “I know as much as you do about what Clann people can and can’t do.”
A breeze stirred through the pines, making them sigh and sway. As the breeze passed us, it brought with it the scent of the freshly cut firewood and pine sap.
Tarah shivered. I threw an arm around her shoulders and grinned. “You’re getting cold. Let’s grab some firewood and get back inside before you turn into a human popsicle. I don’t want a girlfriend with ugly, frostbitten toes.”
She gasped and whapped my shoulder. “You’d just have to learn to like me anyway. ‘Cause I don’t want a boyfriend who’s too shallow to like a girl with frostbitten toes.”
“I would not like you with frostbitten toes.” At the firewood stack now, I loaded her arms with a small pile of wood then filled mine with chopped logs up to my chin.
“You really wouldn’t?” Her eyebrows drew together.
“Nope.” Leading the way back towards our house, I added in a murmur, “I’d love you. Even with fugly toes.”
Grinning, she pushed me away with her shoulder. “You’d better.”
“Think we’ll ever get everyone out of the living room so we can get some sleep tonight?” she whispered as we awkwardly navigated our house’s stairs and storm door. The scent of pine from the fresh cut logs inches from our faces was nearly overwhelming now.
I managed a shrug without dropping any of the firewood. “Eventually.”
Once inside, we toed off our snow boots then dumped the logs by the fireplace and shucked our coats.
Cassie sniffed the air. “Mmm, pine trees! Smells like Christmas.”
Which had been a touchy group subject at Grandma Letty’s. Our group’s religious preferences were too diverse for it to be a good idea to have Christmas trees in the main areas of any of the temporary homes, even though Christmas was just two days away now. But each family was welcome to decorate their bedrooms if they wanted to. I’d spotted a couple of fathers cutting baby pine trees earlier this evening. The sight of those puny trees had reminded me of the Charlie Brown Christmas movie Damon used to insist we watch on DVD every Christmas Eve.