Søren’s piano was being delivered to his new house that day. He offered to reschedule the movers, but Nora wouldn’t let him. And it wasn’t as if Gmork could fit on the back of Søren’s bike anyway.
Once she sent Søren on his way home, Nora called Kingsley to come and pick her up at her dungeon. That was a mistake. He spent the entire ride lecturing her about letting strange women into her house in the middle of the night. He wasn’t very happy when Nora reminded him that he’d spent his entire thirties letting strange women—and men—into his house in the middle of the night and therefore he had, as they say, no room to talk.
“That’s an entirely different situation. I was fucking them,” he said.
“One of them stole your Rolex, remember?” Nora said.
“Ah, but she was good enough in bed I didn’t mind.”
Clearly, they had very different recollections of that incident.
Kingsley stood guard while Nora packed a bag at her house. She would be living with him, Juliette, and Céleste until she could get a security system installed on her house. Actually, she wasn’t allowed to handle the security system installation. Kingsley decided he would handle it since she couldn’t be trusted to make good decisions where her own safety was concerned.
“You’re being a little sexist here, King,” Nora said when he was scrolling through his phone, looking for the number of the company that installed his. “I can take care of my own house.”
“You have a thousand strings of cursed Mardi Gras beads hanging from your tree left by a witch over the course of three years trying to put a spell on you,” he said as he put the phone to his ear. “Tell me again why I should let you handle this?”
Nora opened her mouth to give him five good reasons he should back off and let her handle it.
Then he said, “I’ll pay for it.”
“All right,” Nora said. “It’s all yours.”
Kingsley ordered her to his house while he stayed at hers and waited for the installers to arrive. She was halfway out the door when she heard him on the phone with a new person now, requesting a tree trimmer come and trim her front tree and remove all the beads.
“No,” Nora said to him.
“What?” He told the person on the other end of the line to hold.
“My house. My tree. My beads. You can handle the security system, fine, but leave my tree alone.”
“A witch put them on your tree.”
“You don’t actually believe in witchcraft, do you?”
That got him. “Of course not.”
“Then no reason to have them removed, right?”
Kingsley hung up on the tree trimmer.
“Thank you,” she said although she didn’t mean it. The men in her life were getting a little overprotective for her taste. “Do I need to remind you that I am not a child? This is my house. I own it. You get an opinion,” she said, “but you do not get a vote.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay. I know you’re on edge, Edge.”
He smiled a little, but just a little.
“If anything happened you to,” he began, glancing away like he was wont to do when admitting feelings he didn’t like having. “We’re all knitted together so tightly…one thread unravels, we all fall apart.”
“I know you’re scared. You always turn into a control freak when you get scared.”
“Why aren’t you scared?” It was a good question. Why wasn’t she?
“I don’t know,” she admitted with a shrug. “I met her. You didn’t. What she did scares me. What she said scares me. But she doesn’t scare me.”
“She scares me enough for the both of us. Now go.” He opened the door and pointed in the direction of his house.
“I have to run an errand first.”
“It can wait.”
“I’ll take Gmork.”
“It can wait.”
“Until when?”
“Until I stop being terrified,” he said. He met her eyes again and she saw his fear. Kingsley was right about all of them being interlaced, but wrong about how. They weren’t knitted together like a blanket or sweater. If those unraveled, they could be fixed. They were more like a spiderweb, all of them, made of filaments so fragile and fine nothing could put them back together if one of them was torn away.
Which is why she had to do what she had to do.
She kissed his cheek. “It can’t wait that long.”
Nora whistled and Gmork followed her to her car and jumped into the backseat and lay down on his blanket. “Don’t tell on me, boy,” she said as she started her car and pulled out onto the street, “But we’re going to go have a little talk with our witch.”