Macklin looked at Jordan with his heart in his eyes. “And he cleans up pretty good,” he teased, but then, they both did. With Jordan’s tanned skin and arctic-blue eyes, and Macklin’s fair skin and dark blue eyes, they looked almost uncanny together, like complementing druids. Dante remembered the noise and the lights, and he could well believe the house had to pull out all the stops to keep Macklin from breaking through its power.
“Our boy always has,” Dante said, grinning at Cully. Cully grinned back, the ruffles at his collar making him look impish and adorable.
“Yeah, but you’re the handsomest,” he said, and this time Dante saw hearts in his eyes, and that pretty much tied up his speech box for the trip across the property.
Ninety-nine acres sounded like a lot—and compared to the four houses on one-eighth-acre lots that they’d come from, it was. Jordan drove them the long way around the perimeter, which was about a mile and a half, to show them where everybody lived. Jordan and Macklin were next to them in a double-wide trailer, a couple hundred yards down a dirt track that Jordan said his dad was having paved in the next week. Another three or four hundred yards away sat another trailer that had Kate’s frilly curtains in the windows already, as well as a happy little flag announcing Thanksgiving was coming soon. A few more football fields and they passed an actual mansion, with two different wings, a swimming pool, and a four-car garage.
“Holy shit,” Dante whistled. “Who lives there?”
Jordan half laughed. “Alex and Simon. And Simon’s roommate, Audra, and her brother, at the moment, and sometimes their business partner Gabby, who mostly likes to hang out. You’ll meet them later. They’re Simon’s equivalent of us, and they’re great.”
“Simon?” Cully said, sounding horrified. “The Simon who made us dinner last night and listened to us babble and ask a thousand questions and—”
“That’s the guy,” Jordan said. “And he is exactly as good as you think he is. Remember, Alex has been crushing on him for years.”
“Holy mackerel,” Cully breathed. “That guy washed my dishes. Him and Alex—wow. It’s like proof that fairy tales can come true.”
“I thought that was Barty and Lachlan,” Dante said. “Because that was an epic story.”
“That’s funny,” Macklin murmured. “I thought that was Josh and Kate. You didn’t see Josh brave the flight of a thousand starlings with only an umbrella to get to her so he could calm her down.”
“I thought it was us,” Jordan said softly. “Because I was the least likely guy in the world to fall in love in two weeks.”
Macklin, who was sitting in the front as Jordan drove what Dante assumed was Macklin’s SUV, looked away shyly.
“So what you’re saying,” Dante said, “is we’re all epic love stories.”
Cully made a little squeeing sound. “You are so in luck,” he told Dante, leaning his head on Dante’s shoulder.
“What does he mean?” Jordan asked.
Dante kissed Cully’s head and nodded, and Cully spilled the beans about the great suburban romance book, and Dante’s last secret of doubt began its rapid progression through the people who would care and love and support him.
LACHLAN’S house was… sublime, was the only word for it. It looked like a standard two-story prefab home on the outside, with a nicely manicured lawn that bled into the oak and straw scrub of the area. There was a smaller mother-in-law style place sitting to the side of the long driveway they pulled into. Jordan told them the building would be Bartholomew’s new catering kitchen, as soon as Lachlan and Jordan’s father could put the finishing touches on the specs, but the bigger house, the average-looking house, was the real prize.
Because inside it wasn’t average-looking at all.
The house opened up into a natural wood vault, practically magical in its use of space. The second-story bedroom was a loft, with an enclosed bathroom right behind the bed itself, and the guest room was the nook underneath the loft staircase. There was a mudroom with the washer and dryer on one side of the house, a bathroom on the other, and a kitchen hugging one wall.
And everything in the center—the dining room table, the couches and love seat, sat in space, glorious space, surrounded by stained wood and windows.
It was practically a gateway to the cosmos, and Dante couldn’t help but whistle as they walked in.
“This is like magic,” Cully said. “Like real magic. Like… like Aladdin’s cave or Harry Potter magic!”
Everybody else was already there—and dressed nicely, right down to Simon’s sport coat and crisply pressed white shirt. They all nodded and laughed and then showed the two of them to one of the most magical parts.
The table, the seven-sided table of the many spells, was everything they’d built it up to be.
Sanded and polished, the glowing pine tabletop featured a… picture? Was that what it was?
A starburst of rainbow colors radiated outward from the massive center of the table—and the center contained the cosmos itself, a thick scattering of bright diamond stars in constellations Dante had only seen as he and Cully had been pulled through the void of space to their own time.
He stared at the table in fascination, a visceral shiver passing through his body.
Cully—always tactile—reached out to rub his fingers along the top of the table, but then Kate stopped him by clasping his wrist.
“You guys, be careful. Lachlan made this table before he realized he had power, and he was mad at all of us for not telling the truth. If you lie while touching the table, anybody else sitting there gets a really unpleasant shock. So, you know, truth telling only.”
Cully regarded her thoughtfully and then grabbed Dante’s hand. “Tell-the-truth table?” he said, as though finally getting it.
And then he placed Dante’s hand, palm down, on the table and his own next to it.
“I, Thomas Cully Cromwell,” he said softly, “wanted Dante Francis Vianelli more than anything in the world. And the night of the heart’s desire spell, I tried to lie, but I said Dante’s name instead.”
There was a shimmer along the top of the table, but Dante felt nothing but a warmth and a sweetness emanating from the tabletop. He opened his mouth to speak and saw that the others—even Simon, Lachlan, and Mack—had gathered around the table, and while there were ten people instead of seven, they managed to space themselves evenly, with ten right palms laid flat, a pledge to their coven, to their family and friends, that nobody would be hurt here, that everybody would tell the truth.
“I, Dante Francis Vianelli, have been in love with Cully Cromwell from the first moment I saw him. I was afraid to reach for him, because I wanted him so badly I didn’t think I deserved him. And on the night of the heart’s desire spell, I tried to lie, but I said Cully’s name instead.”
Barty was next to Dante, hand down, and he said, “I, Bartholomew Baker, wanted Lachlan more than anything else in the world. But I knew it was wrong to make him fall in love with me, so I lied and tried to say I wanted my business instead. I ended up saying Lachlan’s name, and I don’t regret it for a minute.”
“I, Lachlan Stephens, was so in love with Bartholomew Baker, but I was vain and spoiled, and too used to my lovers coming to me, so I kept hoping he would. I wasn’t part of the original spell, but those were my flaws, and I’m sorry.” The two of them leaned into each other, much as Cully and Dante were leaning, and the confessions went on.