Cully wouldn’t forget about Glinda. Where was she?
“Dante!” he called, his sewing machine pausing for a moment. “Dante! Where’s Glinda? I… have I seen her lately?”
“Uhm,” Jordan said, his face all razor cheekbones and compressed white lips as he stuck his head into Cully’s room. “We’ve got her,” he said. “Don’t worry about Glinda. You and Dante seem, uhm, busy. So, uhm, we’ll watch her.”
Cully’s relief hit him so hard he realized his hands were shaking. When was the last time he’d eaten? “Oh, would you, J? Thank you. I… you’re right. I’m not sure when we got so busy. It seemed to sneak up on us, you know?”
“Yeah,” Jordan said, and as they did sometimes, his ice-blue eyes relaxed a little in gentleness. “I know.”
“Is Dante even here?” Cully asked, feeling a little forlorn. “I feel like I haven’t seen him since we came back from Barty’s house this morning.”
Jordan sucked in a breath, like Cully’d said something off, but he answered fairly steadily. “No, no. I saw him in the living room before I came in. He’s working on… something. A story, I guess. On his computer. There’s, uh, takeout on the table.”
Cully smiled at him gratefully. “Oh, awesome. Thanks, J. I’ll go get some of that in a minute. Just as soon as….” He found his attention turning to his sewing again, the yearning for the fabric under his fingers palpable and addictive. But something was niggling at his consciousness, and he managed to resist the tug for a moment. “Hey, that spell we cast last night. Did we ever figure out how to fix that?”
Jordan’s eyes grew red-rimmed, and the breath he hauled into his lungs sounded painful, almost like a sob. Was he okay? He looked… well, wrecked. Exhausted and sad and really freaked-out.
“No,” he said gruffly. “We’re still working on it.”
Oh dear. Cully managed to keep his attention on Jordan for another few moments. “Well, let Dante and me know if you need us. And, you know, you can use my thread any time.” He frowned and looked at his bed. There was a brown cardboard box there from his sewing distributors. A big one. “Speaking of—what’s that?”
“Thread,” Jordan said. “I, uh, brought it in off the porch.”
Cully lit up. “Oh, great. I really was running out. And colored tape—that too.”
“You ordered triple,” Jordan said soberly. “Kate asked you to two days ago.”
Cully frowned. “I… I don’t remember that. But I must have done it if the case is here.” He shook his head in bemusement. “Well, definitely make sure you let us know if you need more.”
“We will,” Jordan said hoarsely. “And we always need you and Dante with us. Always.”
“Mm….” But Cully was being pulled back to his sewing machine again, and when he thought about asking Jordan why or when Cully and Dante wouldn’t be there, he was gone.
Spinning through the Vortex
DANTE sat at his laptop at the kitchen table and stared outside—the birds were still batshit, but the light…. Something was weird with the light. The shadows stretched long, like the light was coming in on the bias, as Cully would say, and it had a peculiar goldness to it, while the sky beyond—the little sliver Dante could see—was an azure so pure it almost broke his heart.
In fact, the light, the sky… well, it looked like the light would toward the middle of October, but… well, they’d done the spell on the twenty-third of September, and that was the last time he remembered looking at a calendar. But that was stupid. It was two days after, right? Alex had come by the day before to get Glinda for a walk, but something had come up.
Dante couldn’t remember what it had been, but he remembered feeling bad that he’d missed out on the walk.
His computer pinged, and he checked his email. Oh. Hey. He’d turned in that story on careers in the arts, and, hey, hello, there was his commission, and he could pay rent. Fantastic!
He frowned. He’d been working on that story the night they’d done the spell—he remembered that. He didn’t remember finishing the story or submitting it. Or the other two stories he just got paid for.
The hell?
Oh, that was so weird. Good, though. Apparently he was set up to pay rent through December with some left over for food, utilities, and maybe even Thanksgiving, which was great, particularly since he had more assignments in his inbox.
But… weird. He liked his job, mostly. He submitted stories to editors of a number of local publications. Freelance was scary, but he’d made the contacts in college and had always made good.
He wished for something creative, though. His friends and their small businesses they ran along with Barty’s baked goods company were so impressive. Moodily he stared at the bright tapestry on their wall. Cully had created it for his senior project in college. Flowers, trees, small animals—all of them twined together abstractly, including birds, even owls and turkeys. Some of them were upside down, some of them were sideways, but all of them were gathered around a unicorn in the center.
A unicorn that even Dante had noticed had Cully’s big blue eyes.
He sat for a moment, mesmerized by those eyes, and wished Cully was sitting at the table with him, as he sometimes did when Dante was paying bills or trying to work.
Even since the dorms, Dante would pause what he was doing and devote his entire attention to Cully to hear his take on… well, anything.
“WHY do you come out here to work?” Cully asked one morning, only a few months after they’d moved to the cul-de-sac. Dante could remember the moment so clearly, could hear Cully’s voice—tenor, the kind of voice that could belt out Broadway but sucked at R&B—and see the dust motes in his longer-than-usual blond eyelashes.
He’d looked ethereal in that place under the kitchen window: almost transparent, like Dante had wished him there, hands on the black tabletop, as pretty a boy as Dante had ever seen, from the upturned nose to the sharp little chin.
“My bedroom’s in the back, with the smaller window,” Dante answered, smiling to show he didn’t begrudge Cully the room with the bigger window. Cully’s wild sense of color had transformed the bedroom/workroom into a tropical paradise with a sewing machine. “You needed the light to work. This way I get the light to remind me that I’m not chained to my desk.”
Cully’s smile was relieved, which was funny because Dante hadn’t begrudged him light or windows since college. Four dorm rooms, and four times they’d completely staged their beds and their belongings around Cully having to use a sewing machine five days a week, minimum. The need had been so pervasive that Jordan’s dads had set up the room he and Dante used when they were visiting so Cully could do his homework while looking out over the hillside below the house, the morning sun bright in the room.
But Cully’s smile turned into a frown. “Do you really feel chained to your desk?”
“Naw.” Dante gave him another smile—but not one he felt. “I mean, yeah, I’d rather be looking for bugs with J, or, you know, out taking notes or talking to people. I don’t think I get the joy out of my computer that you get out of your Baby Lock Jazz II.” Cully had arrived at school with a very basic knock-off brand machine and had promptly burned out the motor. For Christmas that first year, everybody had pitched in, and one of Jordan’s dads had researched wholesalers so Cully could have a machine that wouldn’t cough, die, and go out in a puff of smoke and melted plastic. The selling points had been the table extensions that had made the relatively small machine much more stable on a large surface.