Table of Contents
Sneak Peek
Blurb
Dedication
Time is a Yawing Vessel
Buttonholed
Spinning through the Vortex
I Feel the Earth Move
Holding On
Breadcrumbs
But What Does It Mean?
May it Be?
The Goodest Witch
Culmination
Thou Shalt Not Might’ve Been
Revelations
The Open Door
Pieces Like Falling Leaves
Hedge Witches Unite
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About the Author / By Amy Lane
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Copyright
And with that, Dante kissed Cully for real, his tongue invading, becoming a part of Cully, their mouths fusing together even as his body grew thinner and less substantial in Cully’s arms. A violent wind whirled around them, twisting the moonlight, consuming the stars, and Cully closed his eyes, holding on to the last of Dante’s heat, of his reality, needing every last moment of skin on skin, of the warm smell of him, of the rasp of his body hair, to sustain him.
He kept his eyes closed as Dante’s heat faded and the whirlwind whipped him away.
Heartbeats in a Haunted House
By Amy Lane
Hedge Witches Lonely Hearts Club: Book Four
Dante Vianelli and Cully Cromwell have been in love since college, when Dante saved Cully from the world’s worst roommate and introduced him to his friends. Seven years later, they’re still roommates and they’re still in love… but they’ve never become lovers.
Now a catastrophic spell gone wrong has cut them off from their coven. Wandering their suburban prison alone, separated by the walls of their own minds and gaps in the space-time continuum, Cully and Dante are as stuck as they have been for the past seven years.
And they’ll remain lost in their memories—unless they confront the truths that kept them from taking the step from friends to lovers and trust their friends and coven to get them out. But it’s easier said than done. Those walls didn’t build themselves. Dante’s great at denial, and Cully’s short on trust. Can they do the work it will take to get into each other’s arms and back to the sunlight where they belong?
To Mate—and to anybody out there who had a vision of things to come with their lover and their family and all they wanted in the world and worked hard to make come true. And to friends who witness and family who support and small dogs who lick everybody’s ankles while they make it so.
Time is a Yawing Vessel
DANTE Francis Vianelli and Thomas Cully Cromwell had been inseparable since their first day at California State University, Sacramento. Cully had been assigned to a dorm with a seven-foot redneck, who had taken one look at him and said, “Wait, I got a girl?”
Dante had been passing by, and he’d seen Cully’s ginormous eyes, bright blue, grow red-rimmed and shiny, and had stuck his head in the room and said, “No, he’s with me.” Then he’d walked into the room, grabbed Cully’s stuff, and gone to find the little drone in charge of dorm assignments, because those eyes. Cully had followed him, carrying a box of fabric that was trailing pink plaid and gazing up at Dante like he’d hung the moon.
God no. Nobody was going to make those eyes well up with tears.
Seven years they’d known each other. They’d gotten through school together, they’d moved out and roomed together—they hadn’t been lovers, but they’d been inseparable.
But they’d never experienced anything like the night before.
“Dante?” Cully said, frowning and disentangling himself from Dante’s protective arm as they huddled under the garage. “Did that really happen?”
Dante turned and waved at Bartholomew’s van as it carted their friends downtown to a convention, where they would sell Barty’s baked goods and an assortment of other items that the lot of them had created or assembled. All of them—Dante, Cully, and their friends, Jordan, Bartholomew, Alex, Josh, and Kate—lived in one of the four houses in a little cul-de-sac. They’d rented the three newer ones cheap from Jordan’s dads, which was pretty funny, because Jordan had ended up in the witch’s cottage at the end by the corner. The witch had simply walked up to Jordan one day and said, “Take care of my stuff but don’t use my distilled oils,” and then had taken off. The place turned out to be a treasure trove of magic: crystals, spell books, tarot decks, enchanted objects. It was like a library for the magic user, and Jordan had embraced the arts with all the intensity he’d shown for entomology in college, and his friends, Dante and Cully included, had thrown themselves in after him.
Dante had turned out to be pretty good at magic—he’d been surprised. Cully had always been the creative one of the two of them, but something about Dante’s focus made him surprisingly good at the words. If magic was direction plus intention plus elements, Dante was good at finding the words for the intention. What did they want the spell to do? Well then, what elements did it need? Barty was good at combining elements, because hello, baker! and while Jordan was their scientist and good at distilling oils and potions, as he had been all through school and beyond, his true strength was direction.
It was a good system, and Dante, for once, was glad to have something creative he could stick his name to.
But the night before had been….
“I don’t even remember what happened,” Dante lied, and then scowled as his mouth filled up with spit like it was trying to ward off an acrid taste. Above him the damned birds who had been acting up all morning squawked menacingly, and he glared at them and brandished the umbrella Jordan had broken out for the sole purpose of keeping them away from the baked goods.
“Me neither,” Cully said, but his voice wobbled, and Dante could hear him gulp like the same thing had happened to him. The birds squawked again, and Dante thought, How long are we going to keep lying to each other?
Dante remembered all right. How was he supposed to forget? Jordan had gotten home that Friday, tired and disheartened, a romantic setback having taken the wind out of his usually full sails. Of course his friends had gathered round him—it was just something they did. And then Josh—a giant of a man, cheerfully dim and unashamed of it—had broken out the good alcohol. A lucky spell had landed him a dream job as an alcohol distributor—his good alcohol was pretty damned awesome for a bunch of twentysomethings still getting used to having paychecks.
So the seven of them, working on altruism and too much wine, had come up with the harebrained idea of casting a heart’s desire spell. Each of them had contributed something to the spell according to their skills, but the direction of the spell had been Jordan’s, and the words that had gotten them there had been Dante’s.
Well, not all the words. Everybody had done their part, and written a little verse describing the thing they wanted most in the world.
Sort of.
Dante wasn’t sure about the others, but he knew he’d lied his ass off, at least on paper. And the magic seemed to know it, because Barty—poor, shy, timid Barty—had barely gotten his own personal verse out when the magic had gotten big and bright and showy in the center of them, and then it had exploded, ripping one word from everybody all at the same time and knocking them on their ass.