Winter's Spell, page 25
Tessa’s heart sunk, and her skin was instantly covered in a cold sweat. The piles of ruined costumes represented a good chunk of the grant budget for the play. There was no way they could order these costumes again—they couldn’t afford it, aside from the fact that she doubted they could even get them made again in time.
How would she explain this to the grant committee? To her cast and crew? Her mind swirled, and just for a moment, she felt as though the world was spinning. Little dots began to appear in front of her eyes, and she felt a darkening around the edges of her sight. She was going to faint, she realized, but she was too out of it to respond. Perhaps it was better to simply embrace that darkness—
“What on earth is going on here?” Lisa’s patrician tones pierced through Tessa’s lightheadedness, and the darkness at the edges of her vision receded.
She twirled around to see Lisa, in her signature cream-colored pants and silk top, gold chain, and large cream-colored jacket standing in the doorway, taking in the sight of the ruined costumes before looking over at Tessa.
Her expression softened, and she took a step toward Tessa. Wordlessly, Tessa stepped into her arms and let Lisa hug her, holding her steady as her knees threatened to buckle beneath her. The tears were now streaming down her face, and she worried that they would stain Lisa’s shirt, before she remembered that she wasn’t wearing any makeup. She hadn’t had any time to do that after her shower with Roxy.
It was weird to be held by Lisa, and especially so after being in Roxy’s embrace for most of the afternoon, but Tessa realized, with a jolt, that it was nice, too. Comforting. Not that she wanted Lisa romantically or sexually. Not at all. But she was realizing that maybe, just maybe, she and Lisa could be friends.
It was true that Lisa had been…changing…since Mo had become her assistant. She seemed happier, more balanced, less diva-ish. She heard Lisa laughing more, and it seemed that she and Mo were developing a genuine actor-assistant relationship. Aside from that, there hadn’t been any taunts or impertinent questions from Lisa about Tessa and Roxy. Of course, they’d been trying to hide their relationship on set, keep it private and so forth, but even so. They were obviously friendly with one another, and Lisa, well, she didn’t seem to mind. Or care. And she’d been polite and courteous to Roxy the few times they’d had to share a space in the last week. Even Chayo had remarked to Tessa recently that Lisa seemed different. She’d bought the crew members lunch last week—something that she’d never done before.
“Tessa, I don’t know what happened. Joy called me just now as I was talking to Ramón, and I rushed over to see what I could do.”
“Clearly, someone from the cast or crew can’t be trusted,” interjected Barb, her voice as true to her name, her tone barbed as ever.
Tessa pulled away from Lisa slowly, pushing her tears away with the back of her hand and trying to calm herself. She saw that Joy was still upset, and even more upset at Barb’s words. She gave her a quick hug too before turning to Barb.
“Just what are you implying?”
“Either someone on the cast and crew committed sabotage, or they were negligent and left a door unlocked over the weekend,” said Barb, her eyes hooded and unreadable, her expression grim. Her tone of voice seemed to suggest that really, the fault was Tessa’s, for not being at the theater all the time to supervise everything.
“Everyone on this project is a professional,” said Tessa tartly, glad to feel an emotion other than utter despair. “Both of those options seem highly unlikely.”
Barb raised an eyebrow. “Then what do you suggest?”
Tessa leaned over and picked up one of the ripped up costumes nearest to her. It was a beautiful dress meant to have been worn by the character Perdita on her wedding day. It was one of the few items that hadn’t been ripped into tiny bits of fabric confetti. She examined it, holding it up to the light, turning it around from all angles.
“Lord, it looks like it was ripped up by a beast,” said Joy, her voice trembling. “Tessa, honey, I have no idea how this could have happened. I’m so sorry—”
Tessa realized with a jolt that Joy was worried Tessa would blame her, since she was second in command and meant to be at the theater all day that day.
“When did you get here today?” said Tessa.
“Please don’t be mad…I…I know I was supposed to be here at nine, but Bobby”—the head of the crew—“called me this morning that he had a family emergency back in Boston and he had to go see to it, so he said the crew could take the day off. I took care of some of my own errands today. I haven’t been here all day. Nobody has. I thought…” Joy’s voice trailed off.
“So you didn’t get to the theater until just before you called me?” Tessa was trying to reconstruct the events of the last twenty-four hours in her head, but it felt like walking through deep mud. Her mind felt clouded and yet…something about this whole situation felt wrong. “Joy. I’m not mad. I’m just trying to figure out what happened.”
“Yes. Indeed. You’d better figure it out fast. I’ll have to report this to the police. And the theater owner,” said Barb, poison dripping from every word. She sounded gleeful.
“Don’t speak like that to her,” interjected Lisa.
“It’s okay, Lisa. Barb is right. The owner needs to know. And there will have to be a police report since I will have to report this to the grant committee.” Tessa looked pleadingly at Barb. “But we need to know what exactly to report. Can you give us half an hour to think this through?”
Barb clearly didn’t want to grant even that much grace, but her phone buzzed and, after glancing at the screen, her entire demeanor changed.
“Fine. I’ve got to go right now anyway.” She glared at them all one more time. “I’ll be back in half an hour and I want an explanation.”
When she left, they all breathed a sigh of relief.
“She is a pill,” said Lisa.
“I think you mean she’s a certified bitch,” said Tessa.
Joy laughed. “Oh God.” She rubbed her face with her hands for the umpteenth time that evening. “What are we going to do? Tell the grant committee and everyone else that a werewolf destroyed all the costumes and sets?”
“The sets?” Lisa and Tessa spoke in unison, and Tessa felt her heart sink all over again. The sets too? What had happened to the sets? What would they do? Her entire vision for an interplanetary space opera Winter’s Tale was disappearing from possibility before her very eyes.
Wordlessly, Joy gestured for them to follow her to the wood shop, where, like in the costume shop, everything was a mess. Two-by-fours were, quite literally, broken in half, large splinters of wood all over the place. It did not look like something that was humanly possible. Had a giant or ogre from a fairy tale broken into the theater?
On stage, where Chayo and Bobby had already been working on putting up the main flats for the backdrop, there was a similar mess, similar destruction. It was no longer shocking to Tessa—only heart-wrenching. The flats were all lying on the floor, similarly destroyed, ripped, and shattered in ways that made absolutely no sense.
As they surveyed the sets, Chayo showed up.
She looked as distraught as Joy, as angry as Lisa, and as disappointed as Tessa felt. They hugged for a long time, before breaking apart.
“This is my fault,” said Chayo, her voice choking up. “I think I might have left the side door unlocked last night.”
“What?” said Joy.
Chayo nodded. “I was leaving with Bobby and Sam, and we were talking, and I just…I don’t remember…I can’t remember if I locked up or not.” Her voice cracked with shame and despair, tears welling up in her eyes. Tessa’s heart squeezed. Seeing one of her oldest, toughest friends lose her cool like this made it all seem that much worse.
“It’s okay,” said Tessa. “This is not your fault. Even if you didn’t lock up.”
“Of course not,” said Lisa with some impatience.
They all looked at Lisa questioningly.
“Chayo most certainly locked up, because the theater was locked tight when I was here last night.”
They all looked at Lisa in surprise, but Lisa explained calmly that she hadn’t been able to sleep the other night because the people in the room next to hers had been, ahem, extremely noisy in their evening activities. She’d come to the theater, hoping someone was still there to let her in, but when she’d arrived, just after eleven, it was dark and locked tight. She’d gone to a nearby bar for a nightcap before going home to bed.
“See? It isn’t your fault,” said Tessa encouragingly.
Chayo heaved a sigh of relief. “That’s good to know. I got worried because the theater was already unlocked this morning.”
“You were here in the morning today?” said Joy, sounding confused.
“Yeah. Barb was here. Everything was normal. I had my key, but I didn’t need to use it. I thought it was a little weird that she’d unlocked the front of the theater and the side door when no one else was there—”
“What time was that, more or less?” asked Tessa.
“Probably around nine. I wanted to get ahead on the statue of Hermione. I stayed until about lunchtime and then called it a day. I asked Barb if I should lock the side door when I left but she said no. She said she was having a training with the crew.”
Tessa’s eyebrows knitted together in consternation. Clearly, there was no training with the crew since Bobby had told everyone to stay home that day. Clearly, Barb was doing shit behind her back, but was she also somehow connected with this sabotage?
“Why would Barb lead a training for the crew? Everything relating to the show is the purview of Tessa and Joy, and you and Bobby,” said Lisa reasonably, giving voice to Tessa’s own confused thoughts. She had her hands on her hips, looking like she was about to Sherlock Holmes the shit out of the situation, and Tessa couldn’t help but smile. Lisa did like to be in charge, after all. “It sounds like Barb owes us an explanation, not the other way around.”
Lisa looked like she was about to march out to find Barb right then and there.
“Wait,” said Tessa. “Let’s take a closer look at the sets and the wood shop first and see if we can get Sam here.” She wanted to talk to her stage manager to verify Barb’s story. Had there been a crew training planned without Bobby’s knowledge?
“I’ll text him,” volunteered Joy.
Chayo and Tessa examined the broken sets together.
“I don’t get it,” said Chayo, confused by what she was looking at. “This doesn’t make any sense. Some of this stuff looks like it was…I dunno…ripped apart. But how is that possible?”
“I don’t get it either,” said Tessa. She leaned over and touched one of the places where the wood looked as though the Hulk had ripped it.
A current of magic shocked her hand, like static discharges she’d been dodging from her car all winter.
“Ow!”
“Careful there,” said Chayo. “There’s lots of splinters.”
“Yeah,” said Tessa, massaging her hand, but knowing that this was no splinter that had stung her hand. It was magic. Magic had done this. “Why don’t you go to the wood shop and see what’s salvageable in there, okay?” She needed to be alone with this destruction to investigate further.
“Absolutely,” said Chayo.
When Tessa was alone on the stage, she got down on her knees next to the broken sets and closed her eyes. It felt wrong to call on her magic in such an open, unguarded place where anyone might come in and interrupt her and see what she was doing, but she had to confirm that there was magic here.
She felt the familiar glow of it pooling deep within her, and she urged it to spool out into her hands and fingers, welcoming the warmth of it, like gold, heated up to liquid, slowly filling her. It took all her concentration to call it up at a moment’s notice like this—she was out of practice.
Tessa held her hands close, palms facing one another, just inches apart, until she felt a concentration of magic between them, before holding her hands out, palms down, next to one another, over the broken pieces of the sets.
She had a vision of the sets breaking before her eyes. Magic always left its traces, and even though this sorcery was of a different quality and type than what Tessa summoned in her hedgecraft, it was still somehow legible to her. She marveled at the watery vision in her mind of the wood and canvas ripping apart—but she could not see who was behind it. She tried concentrating harder, focusing on what was behind the set, zoning in on the gray background of the vision.
For a moment, she was able to see past the destruction of the sets, and she saw not one but three vague shapes in the background. It was fuzzy at best, and she couldn’t tell if they were women or men, or even see their faces at all, but they were the magicians who had wreaked this destruction. Their magic felt wrong to Tessa, aside from it being used to destroy her sets and props and costumes…it was dark and somehow slimy. She shuddered, and the vision crackled and frayed at the edges.
“No, not yet,” she said under her breath, breathing deeply to steady the vision. If she concentrated just a tiny bit more, she would be able to see their faces, she just knew it.
Just like that, the vision disappeared.
“No!” cried Tessa, louder than she meant to. Luckily, she was still alone in the theater, and her cry disappeared into the ether. She groaned in frustration. She’d been this close to seeing the faces of one of the sorcerers or magicians behind this. She was sure of it. If only she was more powerful.
She went to stand up, only then realizing just how much energy she’d used to conjure up the vision. The world tilted around her and spun for a moment.
Tessa sat back down on the stage, clutching her head. Why oh why, hadn’t she kept up with her magic practice? She’d been taking it for granted for far too long.
She closed her eyes and steadied herself until the dizziness passed. She would have to be careful with how she expended her energy for the rest of the evening.
Energy. Of course. Her wards. She’d hung her wards in the theater to catch negative energy, and they hadn’t gone off. Was that another mistake she’d made because she wasn’t practicing magic regularly?
Tessa glanced upward to the catwalks and her heart jumped into her throat.
All her wards were gone.
What did this mean?
Her mind raced, but really, there was only one conclusion—something she should have realized sooner. Bells had been going off in her mind as soon as she’d stepped into the theater.
Someone had done this purposefully, to sabotage the play—and they’d gone to the trouble of removing the wards first.
And what was her hedge witch’s instinct telling her?
This had something to do with Madame Clerval. With Mo’s and Roxy’s suspicions. With whatever evil was lurking on Cape Cod that winter. And maybe with Barb, too. There’d been three people in her vision. Could it be Madame Clerval, Barb, and…someone else? There was a name at the edge of her consciousness, but she couldn’t think of it. She groaned in frustration again. Why couldn’t she think of the third person…a third person who would make up a powerful triumvirate—so powerful they could remove her wards and her senses didn’t pick it up. So powerful they could destroy her sets and costumes and turn them into unsalvageable shreds.
Tessa realized with a lurch that she hadn’t checked her phone since she’d left the house and, according to her watch, it was well over an hour since Roxy had gone home to check on Mo.
Oh God. Roxy would be shivering outside her apartment by now, or maybe she’d even gone back home, thinking that Tessa was a complete flake.
She’d left her phone in her bag by the side entrance, which meant passing by the wood shop and the costume areas, checking in with Joy and Chayo again, and trying to listen politely as they reported that literally nothing could be salvaged. Finally, she excused herself and ran to her phone, where she found a message from Roxy—a voice message no less, which was weird, because honestly, who left voice messages anymore?
When she heard Roxy’s message that Mo was unwell, her mind began to race again. Her instincts were in tune now and she realized that Mo had to be somehow connected to everything that was happening. This couldn’t be a coincidence….could it?
She began getting dressed to go out, only to realize that she literally had no way of knowing where Roxy and Mo were at that moment. How on earth would she find them?
Tessa called Roxy—but it rang and rang and finally went to voice mail.
“Roxy, it’s Tessa. I got your message. Something bad happened at the theater. I’m worried it’s related to…a mutual acquaintance. Where are you? I need to find you.”
She hung up, not sure what to do next.
Breathe. Take a minute.
Tessa tried to calm herself, calling to mind all that she’d learned not just as a hedge witch, but also in therapy. Deep breaths. Reminding herself that her thoughts were hers to control. That panic was not useful and not necessary.
The photo. Roxy’s photo. She had a photo of Roxy in her wallet that she took out and held in her hand—she’d never discarded it after all, and even though it was old, she could use it to locate Roxy. She smiled at the image of her and Roxy as college freshmen, momentarily lost in nostalgic reflection, before remembering about the task at hand.
She had to find Roxy and Mo. This was not the time for reminiscing.
And yet, Tessa hesitated. She was still tired from the magic she’d called up to use in the theater; using still more deep, powerful magic to try to locate Roxy could be dangerous.
