Bargained magic, p.1
Bargained Magic, page 1
Haven Price
Bargained Magic
Copyright © 2023 by Haven Price
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
1. Chapter One
2. Chapter Two
3. Chapter Three
4. Chapter Four
5. Chapter Five
6. Chapter Six
7. Chapter Seven
8. Chapter Eight
9. Chapter Nine
10. Chapter Ten
11. Chapter Eleven
12. Chapter Twelve
13. Chapter Thirteen
14. Chapter Fourteen
15. Chapter Fifteen
16. Chapter Sixteen
17. Chapter Seventeen
18. Chapter Eighteen
19. Chapter Nineteen
20. Chapter Twenty
21. Chapter Twenty-One
22. Chapter Twenty-Two
Acknowledgements
Also By Haven Price
About the Author
1
Chapter One
There was a water stain on the ceiling. My head pounded, and I didn’t recognize that water stain on the ceiling.
I sat up on an unfamiliar couch and looked around the room. There were things strewn around everywhere: clothes heaped on furniture, empty soda cans, a guitar in the corner. Half of the stuff was in boxes, as if someone was moving in or moving out. Where was I?
“Morning, Trouble.”
I whipped around so fast that my head throbbed again, and braced one arm on the back of the couch. Adrian stood in the doorway to what must be the bathroom, wearing only a towel. Droplets of water ran down his neck from his wet hair and dripped over his tattoos, which flexed and shifted as he moved. He smirked at me.
“Why am I here?” I must have been in his house, but I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten there.
“You got wasted last night,” he said. “You said you didn’t want to go home, so I let you snore on the couch all night. Your sister would kill me if I let you do anything stupid while you were blacked out.”
“I do not snore!” He laughed at me, and as his hips shifted, the towel slid lower on one side. I covered my eyes with my hand. “Oh my God, put some clothes on!” He chuckled again and I didn’t lower my hand until I heard the bathroom door close.
Blacked out. I was drinking. Oh God, Quin. The night before came back to me like a truck slamming into my chest—the argument, his marriage proposal, leaving. He’d asked me to marry him and I ran. I went to Goblin’s Grog and had a few drinks. A lot of drinks, if my headache and full body nausea were any indication.
I dug my phone out of my purse and turned it back on. Lucy had called me twenty times. I scrolled through the missed calls. Quin’s name came up underneath them, but he had stopped trying to track me down long before my sister.
I dialed Lucy’s number.
“Vivian!” She said my name like a sigh of relief. “Where are you? Are you okay?”
I glanced back at the bathroom door. I thought I heard a blow dryer running. “I’m…safe.”
“I was so worried. Quin called me. We didn’t know where you went.”
“What did he say?” My panic spiraled, and I had to remind myself to breathe a few times before I could talk again. What had I done? “I didn’t mean…I need to talk to him.”
“Vivian…”
“I can fix this,” I said. “There has to be a way to fix this.” I tried to think through the pain in my head. There had to be a way to apologize, to make him understand. My brain picked out the words that made me reject him. Unfinished. Caged. More to do. No, there had to be some way to make him understand. This wasn’t the end.
“Vivian,” she said again, and the utter pity in her voice stopped me. “Quin’s gone.”
I inhaled sharply. “What do you mean?”
“He stopped answering his phone. I went to your apartment. All his clothes and everything…he’s gone.”
No. It wouldn’t end like this. I went to the window and drew back the curtains so I could see out into the street, figure out where I was. Some of the buildings were familiar. I wasn’t too far from home.
“Meet me at my apartment in twenty minutes,” I said. “I have to go. I have to call him.” I already had my purse in my hand when I hung up. I could hear Adrian moving around in the bathroom, but I rushed out the door and jogged toward my apartment. There was still time to fix this.
I called Quin three times between Adrian’s place and mine. Ours, I kept reminding myself. He wasn’t gone, not forever. I could bring him back.
His phone went to voicemail.
The messages I left him were desperate, bordering on begging him to come back so I could explain myself.
Lucy came out the door of our building when I arrived. Sickness roiled in my stomach like a nest of snakes writhing over one another. She shook her head.
Some part of me had hoped he would change his mind. When I got there, he would be waiting for me. He wasn’t answering his phone because he was angry—of course he was—but he would be waiting there so we could talk. I would apologize. It would be fine.
Lucy squeezed my hand, then released it. “Do you want to go up?”
My fantasy of forgiveness poofed out of existence. He wasn’t there. I walked inside and up the stairs with my sister in tow.
Lucy had left the door unlocked, but I rested my hand against the knob for a full minute before I gathered the courage to turn it and open the door. I stepped through the threshold, and our apartment looked mostly the same.
A few pieces of junk mail, some papers, and the TV remote sat on the coffee table. Two unwashed coffee mugs were left in the sink. The chairs were pushed neatly under the kitchen table.
I moved through the hallway like a ghost, quiet and slow and feeling strangely translucent, each step wearing me thinner, as though I might disappear.
The bathroom door stood ajar. I poked my head in and glanced at the sink, where there was only one toothbrush and the tube of toothpaste was gone. A few towels were missing from the shelves on the wall. One drawer on the vanity was half-open.
I turned away from it and swept my eyes over our bedroom. There were dirty clothes on the floor. How many times had Quin bitched at me for tossing them around instead of putting them in the hamper? The bed was unmade. Through the open closet door, I saw his clothes were gone and some plastic hangers had fallen to the floor, like he had pulled everything out in a rush. I flicked on the light switch and saw the black ring box sitting on the bedside table.
As my vision narrowed and the rest of the room fell away, a tiny, determined flame burning inside me died.
Lucy’s arms were around me in an instant. I fell to the floor, pulling her with me, and my tears gushed out all at once. My whole body shook. Everything inside me rattled with the force of my sobs.
“Vivian.” My name was an apology that didn’t soothe my loss.
My breath left me. I pulled and sucked at the air around me, but none of it got in. I was suffocating, and Quin wasn’t there to remind me to breathe slowly. I was going to drown in my tears. I laid down on my side, curled into a ball, and managed one tiny, insufficient gasp.
“That’s it,” Lucy said. “You have to breathe.” She rested her hand on my forearm.
Another gasp. “My chest hurts,” I cried.
“I know.”
“I ruined everything.” My heart had been sliced by sorrow and put back together so many times that it was an ugly, glued-together mess, but this time the heartbreak was so final that the glass-like shattering of it rang in my ears.
“I don’t know everything that happened,” Lucy said, “but you can tell me when you’re ready. Do you want to come stay with me and Colin?”
“I want to go to bed,” I said, pulling air more deeply now. “I just want to lie down.”
Lucy followed me to the bedroom and tucked me in like a child.
“Call me if you need anything,” she said. “I’ll come right over.”
When she left, I glanced at the clock on the nightstand. It was 10:00 in the morning, but I closed my eyes and sank into the sanctuary of sleep. I went in and out of sleep all day. Each time I woke, I faced my sadness and closed my eyes to hide from it again. The bed was cold, the mattress empty and light without the weight of him next to me, and in sleep, I could disappear.
2
Chapter Two
There is a point at which a person’s body is so rested, it won’t grant them more sleep. That’s where I found myself late the next morning. I stared at the ceiling, watching light from outside dance across the white paint. There was a hollowness in my chest, like what was left of my heart had disintegrated overnight.
I threw back the covers and dragged myself to the bathroom. I took a scalding shower and scrubbed at my skin like abrasion could clear away the past few days, but it didn’t change rea lity: he was gone and I was here. So what the hell was I going to do now?
I wiped my hand over the mirror, clearing a space on the glass to see my reflection, and took a good look at myself. My face looked back at me without emotion. I searched my reflection for pain or grief or anger, but she just stared back blankly.
I went through the motions of brushing my teeth, unknotting the tangles in my wet hair, and dressing in sweatpants and a t-shirt. It was a series of mundane routines, stale and scripted. I found my purse where Lucy had laid it neatly on the coffee table before she left and rummaged around for my phone.
I called Quin.
The number you are trying to reach has been disconnected.
I ended the call and my phone slipped from my grasp. In less than 24 hours, he had vanished, like he had never existed at all.
There was never closure for me. Not with Seth or my mom or Quin. Everyone in my life left in a hurry without saying goodbye, burdening me with things unfinished, unsaid. When I couldn’t summon any more tears to wash the emptiness away, I grabbed my purse and left.
I stopped back at my apartment long enough to drop off a bottle of whisky from the liquor store. I’d already relapsed, right? So fuck it. It wasn’t like Quin was there to be disappointed in me. I thought about getting drunk and going back to bed. My hangover from the day before had subsided, and the longer I sat in the paralyzing silence of our apartment, the more getting drunk again appealed to me. But I couldn’t keep lying in our bed alone, so I changed my clothes, grabbed a travel mug, and walked to the shop.
Lucy and Adrian stood at the counter, and when the customer she’d been ringing up left, they resumed whatever conversation they were having. They both looked surprised to see me when I joined them.
“You don’t have to be here today,” Lucy said.
I took a sip out of my mug and shook my head. “I’d rather not be at home right now.”
“We were just talking about the last message from your father,” Adrian told me. “Lucy and I are going to check out that cemetery after she closes tonight.” He leaned across the counter and sniffed, then pried the travel mug out of my hands. “Spike your coffee this morning?”
Lucy started to say something, but we both watched Adrian take a long sip from the mug and grimace.
“Skipped the coffee part completely.”
“Oh, Vivian…” Lucy said.
“Give it back,” I growled, reaching for the mug, but Adrian lifted it above his head, so high I couldn’t reach it.
“You were doing so well,” Lucy said with a frown.
“It’s none of your business.” I crossed my arms and glared at Adrian, but he stuck my travel mug under the counter. I hated this man from the second I found out he was looking for our father, but I’d come up with lots of reasons to despise him since then. He was cocky and obnoxious. He could crush boulders with the weight of his gigantic ego. I added “meddling thief” to my list.
“Regardless of what you choose, you can’t drink here,” Lucy said, her disappointment smoothing away. I hated that, the way she could pull from some endless well of inner peace when she needed to stay calm. “If you need to go home, that’s fine, but if you’re at work, you’re working.”
I huffed. “Fine. What are we looking for at this cemetery?”
Adrian tapped his ballpoint pen against a piece of paper on the counter, where he’d written the GPS coordinates from the last letter from our dad. He’d written Stone angel at the bottom and circled it.
“What do you think it means?” I asked. “Like one of those creepy statues they always have in graveyards?”
“It sounds like it,” Lucy said, “but I don’t understand. Why would he want us to find a statue?”
Adrian clicked his pen a couple of times. “I guess we’ll see tonight.”
The light was fading when we crossed through the wrought iron cemetery gates, and the chill of twilight cut straight through my jacket. The air carried the damp autumn smell of decay and the leaves on the trees hung in shades of crimson and gold. Stone mausoleums stood proudly among lines of headstones. I looked over the rows of the dead.
“Guys?” Adrian and Lucy both turned to look at me. “This might be harder than we thought.” As their expressions turned questioning, I pointed out into the large cemetery, where a dozen or so stone angels nestled among the graves. They were creepy, watching beatifically over the dead or clasping hands in prayer. I shuddered. They were so eerie I was almost afraid to blink, as if they might come to life when I wasn’t looking.
“We’ll just have to check them all,” Adrian said.
“We don’t even know what we’re looking for,” I grumbled, but he and Lucy were already walking out into the lines of graves, and I fell into step behind them. When we came upon the first angel, Adrian tossed each of us a flashlight to better examine the statue in the light that grew fainter each minute. We clicked them on and circled the angel, shining the beams into the curves and crevices of its carved body.
Its long wings extended toward the sky, its face serene as it watched over the headstones, as if channeling some comfort to the people who visited their dead. We searched its limbs and robe for anything unusual, but it was just a statue. The pedestal it stood on was solid and unremarkable.
“Not this one,” said Adrian. Lucy’s flashlight hand hung at her side and she sighed. “It’s okay,” he told her. “We have all night to keep looking.”
I was not impressed with the idea of spending the entire night hanging out in a graveyard.
We split off after that, each of us heading toward a different statue to maximize our time. I stopped and examined another angel draped over a massive headstone, its face hidden as if in grief. I didn’t recognize the name on the stone, and I found nothing else significant.
“Nothing here,” Lucy called after a while. She was a dim shadow in the twilight and I watched her move on to another area of the cemetery, further into the sea of graves. I turned off to the right, down a small hill, and tried not to think about how I was walking on top of dead people.
An angel sat on a bench outside a mausoleum with its wings tucked close to its body. It rested its head in one hand, almost like it was bored, and its other hand curled loosely into a fist in its lap, resting atop the sculpted folds of its gown.
The mausoleum piqued my curiosity. I had never seen one in person before. It was bigger than I thought, although I guess that made sense if there were several bodies entombed inside. It was old, I thought, judging by how worn it was and the moss growing in the cracks between the stones. At the front, an ornate door sat just behind two pillars. I took a step back and checked out the entire thing, taking in the grand appearance.
Then my eyes fell upon the name etched in bold, gothic letters underneath the tomb’s roof. Stone.
“Lucy!” I yelled.
Lucy and Adrian hurried over, their flashlight beams marking their movement across the grass. I pointed my light up at the engraved name above us, and Lucy gasped. I moved the light to the side of the mausoleum, flashing it over the bored angel.
“We had it wrong,” Adrian said. “Stone with a capital ‘S.’ Your family, Lucy?”
“I guess? Maybe.” She stepped closer to the mausoleum. “You said there were magical families buried here.” While she checked the stone structure, Adrian and I moved to the angel and inspected the statue and bench. I felt along the edges of the bench for a crack, somewhere something could be hidden, while Adrian moved his light over the angel’s body.
“Got it!” Adrian said. He reached two fingers into the angel’s half-closed fist, trying to fish out something inside. It took him a few tries, but he scraped a rolled piece of paper from its hand and unwound it for us to look at. He read it out loud for my sister and me.
Three riddles will arrive.
Solve them and you’ll find
Three objects to collect,
Things of the magic kind.
A coin that fills the poor man’s pockets,
A lock to stop secrets from leaking,
A ring that charms the world around you,
They’ll lead you to what you’re seeking.
