Alex pulled his hoodie over his head. “You can what?”
“We can see each other’s houses. It’s like he’s on the hill just over from mine. I’ve got, like, four hills. I’m on one, and he’s on the one I don’t have and… anyway. I can see him.”
“He has ten acres,” Alex said, his mind doing something Simon didn’t understand.
“Yeah, so?”
“So together that’s ninety-nine acres.”
“Yeah, so?”
“And you just described a valley inside a five-pointed star.”
“Yeah,” Simon reiterated. “So?”
“Why did you buy so much property?” Alex asked, and Simon frowned.
“I wish I knew. I let most of it grow wild, only clearing it to prevent a fire hazard in the summer and make way for new growth over winter. There’s a big clearing in the center for bonfires and such. I mean—” He shrugged self-deprecatingly. “—I was thinking of asking the groundskeeping guys to set us up to have one on Halloween. That would be pretty awesome, wouldn’t—”
“Oh my God,” Alex muttered.
“—it?” Simon finished, feeling a little lost. “Does this have anything to do with—”
“With a giant pentagram and a bonfire on one of a witch’s holiest days of the year and a spell that’s completely out of our control and maybe some extra oomph to set things right?” Alex filled in excitedly.
“No,” Simon said, putting the brakes on. “I mean, maybe. But you and your friends need to hear me out when you all get here. I’ll burn down all of my acreage and maybe my house to pull your two buddies out of transdimensional limbo. I get it. But I need your friends to hear me out.”
Alex blinked at him, his eyes suddenly tired. “Okay,” he said. “We’re… I mean, we… we’re at a loss right now. Any help you could give us, I guess.”
Simon gave him his best, most brilliant smile. “C’mon, Alex. Have a little faith. There’s a reason your little dog friend ended up at my door—twice—and I don’t think it was just so you could get laid!”
The Reasons Why
THERE was a knock at the door right then—unusual in its own right because most of the time, the people Alex knew just sort of barged into Alex and Bartholomew’s place with the assumption that anything the two of them wanted kept private would take place in the dark of night.
It wasn’t until Alex opened the door—barefoot, damp hair drying as he’d combed it—and saw Bartholomew standing there with two pink flags of color in his cheeks that he realized his friend probably had some suspicions about what he and Simon had been doing during the afternoon.
“Move, Tolly,” Lachlan said, right behind Bartholomew. “My hands are full of food.”
Alex got out of the way, and Bartholomew, showing that he’d gotten a little bit braver over the last two weeks, leaned into Alex’s space and murmured, “Yeah?”
Alex bit his lip and was suddenly so appreciative of his shy friend, who would understand the significance of what he and Simon had done that afternoon.
“Yeah,” he murmured as Lachlan rustled by, wielding big bags of takeout food. Enough for seven.
“Good,” Bartholomew said softly, giving Alex a shoulder bump.
At that moment Simon emerged from the bedroom, wearing his own clothes now that they’d been washed and dried, looking like sex personified.
“Great,” Alex said, waggling his eyebrows suggestively.
Bartholomew laughed and then moved to help Lachlan pull a bunch of Chinese-food takeout boxes out of the bags. In another minute or so, Kate and Josh came in bearing quarts of ice cream, and Jordan followed with wine.
Ten minutes later they were all gathered around the table, eating and talking about their day—Kate and Josh had cleaned house, Jordan had been studying spells, Lachlan and Bartholomew had sold well, and Alex and Simon had—well, the part they talked about was the part where they went to Dante and Cully’s house.
“Different?” Jordan asked, and the entire table focused on them with hungry eyes.
“A little,” Alex told them. “They actually interacted together—just not in the same room. So Cully would stick his head through the wall—”
“Bwah!” Simon shuddered next to him, and the table laughed uneasily.
“Yeah. It was freaky,” Alex agreed. “But Dante would disappear when he did it. They’d be having the same conversation when we were all in the same room, but they weren’t there when the other one spoke.”
“Were they wearing the necklaces?” Jordan asked, hope in his eyes.
“Dante was,” Alex remembered. “We didn’t really see Cully’s neck. Just his… you know. Face.”
“Augh!” Jordan tilted his head back and studied the figurative heavens. “God, this is killing me. I… there is a bigger pattern here, but I can’t see it!”
Simon cleared his throat, and Alex looked at him, both afraid and hopeful. Simon tilted his head, and Alex could read his expression, plain as day. Put me in, Coach. I’ve got this.
“Simon has some ideas,” Alex said. “And so do I. We talked about it today. Simon thinks he knows why the dog kept coming to him.”
“Because you were in love with him,” Jordan said, like he wasn’t blurting something out that might have been a secret. Of course, maybe they were all past secrets, weren’t they?
“That’s lovely, and I’m really glad it happened,” Simon interjected smoothly, “but no. I don’t think that’s why the dog kept showing up at my house.”
“Then why?” Bartholomew asked. “I don’t understand.”
“Well, two reasons.” Simon gave Alex a quick look, and Alex nodded. “But one of the first is that I’m Alex’s boss. I’m a leader. I look at all of the separate parts and needs of my company and I come up with goals, and my people implement them. You guys keep saying the magic has ideas of its own. What if it knows that’s what you need? Someone who can step back and look at things with a clear-eyed view. I mean, I know you all are really worried about your friends, and I love Alex, so I want his friends to be okay, but until two days ago, I had no way to be invested. So I think you guys need sort of a bigger approach to this. What’s going on in your neighborhood—” He gave a sudden, convulsive look at the clock on the microwave.
“Twenty minutes,” Josh said. “We have twenty minutes until sunset—we should be out there in fifteen.”
They all nodded, their faces tense, and Alex remembered his own teary-eyed frustration. They were exhausted and frazzled, and maybe Simon was right.
“Yes,” Simon said. “Look at yourselves. Fifteen minutes to sunset and you’re all strung out like tortured cats. You’ve been terrified for weeks now—and you’re fraying at the edges. If this was a project and you were my people, I’d tell you all to go home. Sleep it off. Spend a day or two wandering around your apartments or doing something to clear your head. But you can’t, clearly, because you are trying really hard not to let your neighborhood become a horror movie, and I respect that. But you can’t keep doing this, and you can’t find a solution the way you’re going now.”