Texas Gothic (2 page)

It wasn’t that Phin wasn’t brilliant. The only thing that might keep her from getting a Nobel Prize someday was her field of study. Switzerland didn’t really recognize paranormal research. Neither did most of the world, but that never stopped a Goodnight. Except me, I suppose.

In the dim light, I could see something like electrode leads connected to the leaves of an unidentifiable potted plant. It said a lot about my sister that this was not the strangest thing I’d ever seen her do.

“I don’t think shock treatment was what Aunt Hyacinth meant when she gave you free rein over her plant life.”

“It’s a very low current,” she said. “Just enough to get a baseline.”

Part of me was tempted to ask “A baseline of what?” But the larger part knew that it would result in a half-hour lecture, at least, and I really wanted a shower more than I
wanted to know the esoteric principles of horticultural electrocution.

“Did you turn off whatever blew the fuse so I can go flip the breaker?” This was not, after all, my first time at the Goodnight Rodeo.

“Yes,” she said, removing the headlamp and shutting her laptop. “Since I’m stopped anyway, I’m going into town to pick up some supplies.” The list she recited didn’t mean anything to me until she got to “Vanilla Coke,” at which point I perked up.

“From Sonic? Will you get me a cherry limeade?”

“Sure.” She bent to rub Pumpkin’s belly. He’d followed me in and now lay panting on the cool stone floor, already missing the air-conditioning.

I did a cursory check to make sure Phin was appropriately outfitted for the bustling metropolis of Barnett, Texas. She was, in flip-flops, a UT Longhorns tank top, and a pair of baggy cargo shorts that somehow looked cute on her. Her damp, wavy ponytail said she’d already taken a shower.

“How did you have time to get clean
and
blow the fuse?” I asked, more envious than outraged. We both had, theoretically, an equal amount of work. She took the flora—overseeing the herb farm, tending the greenhouse, plus watering plants around the house—and I took the fauna. But plants were generally pretty obedient, while the livestock seemed to enjoy making my job difficult.

She picked up her wallet and sunglasses from the counter near the door. “You do everything the hard way.”

“Trust me,” I said, with a bit of an edge, “if I could use magic to shovel out the donkey pen, I would.”

“If you could do
that
,” she countered evenly, “you’d be Mary Poppins. I just meant you didn’t have to bathe the dogs.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Yes, I did.”

Opening one of the cabinets, she got down a canister and put it in my hands. In the light from the door, I read
Dry Dog Shampoo. For a mess-free mutt
. Under that was the Goodnight Farm logo and the motto
So good you’ll think it’s magic
.

Aunt Hyacinth had a sense of humor–and a healthy respect for what she could get away with saying on a product label. “This would have been nice to know about two hours ago,” I said, pretty calmly, considering how dirty and wet I was.

Phin shrugged. “Two hours ago I didn’t know you were going to do a Martha Stewart on the barn.”

Point for my sister. Besides, telling me might not have made a difference. I couldn’t get past the fact that things just didn’t
feel
clean without water. That was just me, though. If the label said something worked like magic, it did. Which was why Goodnight Farm products were so popular, even if people didn’t know
why
they worked so well.

Aunt Hyacinth had put together a binder of instructions, covering everything from what to do if the well stopped working to how to maintain the digestion spell on the septic system. I grabbed it and followed Phin out the front door.

The dogs, except Pumpkin, who hadn’t budged from the workroom floor, trailed us down the path to the wooden gate. Stepping out of the yard, I felt a subtle change in the
atmosphere—almost like a shift in air pressure, but not quite. Over the past twenty-five years, Aunt Hyacinth had woven strong protections around the house and yard, a sort of arcane security system. It wouldn’t physically stop anyone, but it did have a subconscious effect on ill-intentioned trespassers.

A lifetime of living with witches and psychics had made spells a routine part of my life. I knew they worked, but I still preferred to put my trust in a locked door. My relationship with magic was like a president’s kid’s relationship with politics: I didn’t participate, but I couldn’t quite escape it. Especially not here, in the White House of the sovereign nation of Goodnight.

Stella, my not-quite-new Mini Cooper, and Aunt Hyacinth’s antique SUV were parked just outside the board fence. “Do you have your driver’s license?” I called after Phin. “Don’t forget to close the outer gate.”

She gave a typically distracted wave of acknowledgment and climbed behind the wheel of the Trooper, looking out of place in the big, battered vehicle. Along with her fair hair and pale skin, Phin had an elfin delicacy, in the Tolkien sense. It was hard to picture Galadriel driving an SUV.

I might have worried more about her if the sun-heated flagstones weren’t scalding my bare soles. Instead, I hot-footed it over to the main breaker box to reset the fuse. Phin might have seemed otherworldly and half elvish sometimes, but I had an earthy and one-hundred-percent-human appreciation for things like electricity, satellite TV, and long, hot showers—all of which were in my immediate, blissful future.

p
hin had used the very last towel in the bathroom.

Unfortunately, I didn’t realize this until I was stripped down to my underwear, staring into the empty linen cupboard. Even more annoying, I’d done laundry yesterday, and downstairs was a dryer full of clean towels that I hadn’t yet put away. The fact that this was equally my own fault did not help the situation a bit.

Dammit
.

I closed the cupboard and took inventory. Fifteen different kinds of Goodnight Farm soap? Check. Running water,
right out of an ancient well and smelling slightly of sulfur? Check. But not so much as a washcloth.

My clothes lay in a filthy heap at my feet. I
really
didn’t want to put them back on, and I
couldn’t
put on clean ones until I had washed off the dirt and dog slobber. Opening the bathroom door, I started to holler for Phin to bring me a towel … then remembered she’d taken the Trooper into Barnett.

I drummed my fingers on the doorframe. My only choice was to walk downstairs to the laundry room in my undies. Okay, so every curtain in the house was open. But my underwear, covered in cheerful red cherries with bright green leaves, was more modest than many bathing suits. Plus, there was no one within miles of the house.

There was Uncle Burt, though he generally hung out—when I sensed him at all—downstairs, away from the guest room. Even as a ghost, he was quite polite.

Too bad he couldn’t bring me a towel. When I was a kid, I’d made a game of testing the limits of his ability to move things. He was pretty good at turning lights on and off, but I’d never seen a physical object move more than a few inches, and only out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t know if it was a universal rule or just Uncle Burt’s, but my eight-year-old self had figured out that ghosts operate best at the edges of your sight and in the space between blinks.

That was before I realized that most of the world didn’t see magic or ghosts at all. At least, not that they admitted, if they wanted people to take them seriously. I’d learned
that
lesson the hard way.

In the upstairs hall, the pine floorboards were smooth under my feet. Then down the stairs, through the living room, with its oak beams and limestone fireplace. By chance I glanced out the window to where Stella was parked just outside the wooden yard gate.

And then I stopped, because there was something next to my Mini Cooper, and it was not Aunt Hyacinth’s beat-up SUV.

It was a
cow
.

A half-grown calf, really. My aunt didn’t have cows, so this guy was trespassing, which was inconsequential next to the fact that it was also
scratching itself
on Stella’s bright blue fender. Scratching its
ass
on my graduation/early birthday present to myself, bought with years of savings from after-school jobs.

I leapt to the window and banged on the glass, scaring Pumpkin the Pomeranian, who was snoozing on the couch, half to death.

“Hey!” Bang bang bang. “Get away from my car!”

The calf didn’t move, except to keep scratching.

“Son of a—” I whirled and sprinted through the kitchen to the mudroom. Nudging dogs out of the way, I shoved my feet into the oversized Wellies and straight-armed the screen door, sending it crashing against the wall.

I clattered down the steps. The goats watched me, chewing leaves unfazed as I went flying by their pen. If the cherries on my underwear tempted them, I was too furious to notice.

Varsity soccer had made me fast on my feet, even though the too-big boots slowed me down. When I banged
open the wooden gate, the calf looked unconcerned, until it realized I was still coming.

It took off, and I took off after it, running across the pasture like William Wallace in
Braveheart
. Except in panties and a bra, which sounded like a Monty Python sketch but had become my life, thanks to my sister, who had obviously left the second gate open so the neighbors’ bovine could mosey onto Goodnight land, and don’t think I wasn’t going to let her hear about it.

Stupid cow. Waving my arms, I chased the animal almost to our barbed-wire fence, where I realized the calf wasn’t half grown at all. It was more like one-
quarter
grown, and its mother was big. Big, and also on our side of the fence, and
pissed
that I was yelling at her baby.

She lowered her head and mooed at me, a long, foghorn sound punctuated by the aggressive swish of her tail. The filed stumps of her horns were blunt but would definitely break a rib, at least, if she charged me. Or she might decide to knock me down to trample at her leisure. We’re talking a creature the size of Stella.

And I totally didn’t care.

“Don’t yell at me, you stupid cow!” I jabbed a hand toward the calf, who taunted me from behind its mother. “Keep your juvenile delinquent away from my car!”

She stamped her hoof and let out another throaty bellow.

“No.
You
shut up. This is my side of the fence.” I waved vaguely gateward. “Get your fat ass and your miscreant offspring back on your side of the barbed wire.”

“Hey! You!”

I froze, with a screech of mental tires and the bug-eyed equivalent of a cartoon spit-take. What the hell?

“You! Crazy girl over there!”

The “over there” jump-started my stalled brain and ground my gears back into motion. It wasn’t the cow talking, then. What a relief.

Slowly, I turned to see a horse, not far away from me, and a guy on the horse, sitting with one fist on the reins and one on his hip, looking down at me like I was insane.

“What the blue blazes are you doing to that cow?” he said.

“Me?” My voice went stratospheric with outrage. “That calf was
violating
my Mini Cooper.”

The cowboy turned his horse in a leisurely circle, scanning the field. I really had run quite a ways from the house. He shaded his eyes to peer in that direction. “You mean that blue toy parked in front of Ms. Goodnight’s place?”

I swatted a fly and sort of glare-squinted up at him. “Goodnight Farm. Yes.”

“I heard Ms. Hyacinth was going on a trip this summer,” he said, eyeing me and keeping his distance the way people did from lunatics. Even his horse was looking at me like I was nuts.

This was not a good time to realize that I was standing in the pasture in a state of highly questionable decency. Maybe if I pretended I
meant
to be out there half naked, he would think it was a bathing suit.

Placing a casual hand on my hip—then dropping it because the pose was ridiculous—I answered, “I’m house-sitting for her.”

Then I called myself an idiot. Like axe murderers couldn’t ride horses. Forget that he was tanned and rugged and had a sexy-young-cowboy thing going on, which I didn’t need to be invoking in my head, because he was a stranger and I was in my underwear.

“Um, not just
me
, of course.” I cleared my throat and folded my arms. Nice defensive body language. I was a National Merit Scholar, for God’s sake. Soldiering on, I said, “Me and my sister. And our pack of big, ferocious dogs.”

The guy was just close enough that I could see his brows arch, one sardonically higher than the other. “And you’re out here sunning yourself in your skivvies because … ?”

So much for that bluff. God, this bravado thing was tough. “I told you. That cow was scratching its butt on my car. I saw it from the window and ran out—”

He’d raised his chin to look past me, toward the house. “Did you by any chance leave the gate open?”

“No! That was my sister, who— Oh
hell
!” I could hear the dogs barking. Worse, I could hear bleating. Joyful goat chuckles of freedom.

“The goats!” I clutched my head, an absurdly melodramatic reaction suited to this farce. “The goats were in the tree!”

“The … Wait, what?”

I didn’t stay to enlighten him. For all my cursing Phin for leaving the outer gate ajar, I’d left the yard gate standing wide open. Running toward the house, I could see the dogs weaving mad circles around the field. Behind them were the goats, chasing them just for the hell of it, as far as I could tell.

The horse came up alongside me at a trot. Something
dropped onto my head and I screamed and batted it to the ground, then found myself staring stupidly at the cowboy’s worn denim shirt. When I looked up, he called over his shoulder, now covered by just a sweat-blotched white undershirt, “Put that on. You’re getting a sunburn.”

Then he kicked his pinto into a slow lope and directed his efforts at rounding up the goats.

Focus, Amy
. Just because he looked great in the saddle did not mean he wasn’t an axe murderer.