Casting Spells by Barbara Bretton Page A

can’t use magick?”
    “No magick, no elves, no sprites. We’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way.”
    “But that is the old-fashioned way,” Janice said.
    “The old-fashioned human way with mops and brooms and Lysol and vacuum cleaners. I can handle some of it myself and get high school kids to do the rest.”
    “Oh, honey!” Lynette’s look spoke volumes. “These kids don’t know the first thing about mops and brooms. If it’s not magick or music, they don’t want any part of it.”
    I stared at my friends in disbelief. Between them, their offspring could staff a football team. “You mean your kids wouldn’t—”
    I had never seen them laugh quite so loud or so long.
    “I’d help out,” Janice said, “but between the salon and the kids and my knitting, when would I have time?”
    “I’m heartbroken I can’t help,” Lynette said, “but we’re rehearsing Carol. We open Saturday.”
    Considering the fact that they had been performing Dickens’s A Christmas Carol every season for over fifteen years, I had trouble imagining there was anything left to rehearse.
    “Ask Gunnar,” Janice suggested. “You know he would do anything for you.”
    “You didn’t see him last night. He was pretty banged up. I don’t think he’ll be fit for manual labor anytime soon.” In typical fashion, Isadora had ignored Gunnar’s cuts and bruises and whisked Dane away to wherever faerie mothers from hell took their injured offspring.
    “What about Dane?” Lynette asked. (I had always wondered if she had a mild thing for him but never had the guts to ask.) “He’s big and strong too.”
    “Big and strong and crazy,” Janice said, and I nodded in agreement. “She’s better off doing the work herself.”
    Actually I was better off not doing the work at all but that option was now officially off the table.
    “Why did he have to show up early?” I moaned, burying my face deep into a mountain of sweet worsted weight wool. “One more day... that’s all we needed... just one more—”
    “Whoa!” Janice pointed toward the front window. “Is that him?”
    I looked up, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, and saw Luke standing out there on the sidewalk, chatting up Martha Blayney, our mail carrier. “That’s him.”
    Janice popped on her glasses for a better look. “You forgot to mention he was gorgeous.”
    “That’s because he isn’t. His hair is shaggy. He has crow’s feet. And he has a scar on his left cheek.”
    “Not that you noticed or anything,” Lynette said with a wink.
    “Green eyes,” Janice said, staring out the window. “Dark hair and green eyes. Yum!”
    “He’s not a jelly donut. Stop—”
    Except I was the one who stopped midsentence as a wave of dizziness broke over me, sending the room spinning like the minitornado in my kitchen last night.
    “Chloe?” Janice’s voice came toward me through a long tunnel. “What’s wrong?”
    It was over as quickly as it had started. “I must be coming down with something. Esther Greenberg was sneezing all over the place last night. I’ll bet she—”
    Janice kicked me hard under the table. “We have company.”
     
    LUKE
     
     
    The Julia Roberts look-alike smiled at me as I approached.
    The Catherine Zeta-Jones clone looked up and aimed a dazzling smile of her own in my direction.
    And then there was Chloe.
    She was slumped in a folding chair, her long frame folded in on itself like origami gone bad. The redhead kicked her under the table, and she muttered something I probably didn’t want to hear and turned in my direction.
    Let’s just say I’d received warmer welcomes from suspects in a lineup.
    “Door’s locked,” I said, nodding to her two friends.
    “Well, that was stupid,” she said.
    I grinned as the redhead kicked her again.
    “You didn’t lock the door?”
    “Why would I lock it?” she countered. “You only went to the hardware store.”
    I had the feeling we were on the verge of an Abbott & Costello “Who’s on