Charmed Read Free Page B

with the cop stare. I don't like the cop stare. It always makes me feel like confessing to things I hadn't done.
    "What aren't you telling me?" he demanded.
    "She told everyone I was pregnant."
    He didn't look half as upset as I'd figured he would be. "You're a sorceress," he reminded me. "Your best friends are a witch and a shapeshifter. Why would a little human ESP set off your alarm bells?"
    "Humor me," I said. "I'm in my first trimester."
    He ran her plates for me and five minutes later we had some answers.
    "She's a psychic," he said. "She's worked with the cops in New Hampshire and Massachusetts and been pretty damn successful at it."
    "They hire psychics? I thought that was a TV thing."
    "A lot of departments do but they don't exactly shout it from the rooftops." Another few clicks of the mouse. "And she was telling the truth: she has no family. They were wiped out in a fire when she was in middle school. A neighbor pulled her out and saved her life."
    I knew the rest before Luke told me. Liv had bounced from foster home to foster home until she hit eighteen and aged out of the system. When most kids were still sheltered under the family umbrella, she had been on her own in a world that sometimes ate its young for breakfast just because it could. She was too old to have benefited from the red scarf donations herself but I would bet my stash she wore that scarf in support of it.
    "So what is it you're not telling me," he said, clearly still in top cop mode. "Do you think this woman is dangerous?"
    I shook my head. "No," I said. "I don't think that at all."
    The top cop expression softened and he got up and pulled me into another embrace. "There's enough trouble out there already, Chloe. Don't go looking for more."
    He might as well have told me to quit knitting.

Chapter Four
     
    “She might be magick after all,” Janice announced when I slipped back into Sticks & Strings.
    It took a second for the words to sink in. “I thought you said that was impossible.”
    “I still think it’s impossible but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”
    “What happened?” I asked as I glanced around the shop. Liv was sitting on the sofa near the fireplace, working on the Aran sweater she had started during class while Lynette and Bettina tried to pretend nothing weird was going on. Unfortunately they weren’t doing a very good job of it and spirals of energy spun at their feet. “I was only gone twenty minutes.”
    “Well, this time it only took nine,” Janice drawled. “Sugar Maple’s been outed. Either she’s magick or we’re in big trouble.”
    Apparently Liv saw dead people. Lots and lots of dead people drifting down our streets, sitting on our front porches, wandering through the yarn shop and playing catch on the front lawn of the Sugar Maple Inn. The Inn is a major stop on the Spirit Trail which means we have a steady stream of visitors who have left the corporeal world behind. The first time Liv noticed them two years ago she figured her imagination was working overtime but the visions persisted. Then last year one of the Revolutionary War spirits broke ranks and suggested a tumble under the Toothaker Bridge.
    “That's right around when she quit coming here,” Janice noted.
    "Who could blame her," I muttered. “Does she see spirits anywhere else?”
    Janice shook her head. "Not so far. Just here.”
    “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” I didn’t really expect an answer.
    I was half-sorceress by blood but for most of my life I was fully human in all the ways that mattered. I didn’t begin to see Sugar Maple as it really was, spirits and all, until I fell in love with Luke and my powers began kicked in. Whatever she was, Liv was way ahead of the curve.
    “She’s going to stay the night,” Janice said. “The wooziness comes and goes and night driving around here is bad enough if you’re not used to it.”
    I shot her a look. “Not to mention there’s a full moon.”
    She grinned back at me. “Not