The Rules of Magic (Practical Magic #2)(26)

“This is dangerous,” Vincent told her. “Love is easy to find, but not so easy to get rid of.” As he well knew from his summer fling, which had soured so quickly.

Jet wandered into the room as Franny was lighting the candle. They could still find each other, no matter where they were, just as they had when they were children whose skills made it impossible to play hide-and-seek.

“If you’re so good at reading people, what was up with April?” Franny asked her sister.

Jet flushed slightly. “Don’t know.”

“Look at her!” Vincent pointed to Jet. “She can’t tell a lie for the life of her.”

“No,” Franny said warmly. “The best liar award goes to Mr. Vincent Owens, Esquire.”

“Gratefully acknowledged and accepted.” Vincent bowed deeply.

There was a knock at the front door. Without them noticing, the candle had burned down to the second pin.

“All I know is that I threw my candle away,” Vincent reminded them. “It’s for one of you.”

Franny and Jet stared at each other. “It’s probably for you,” Franny said.

“I didn’t light my candle. I can’t have Levi appearing at our door. You go,” she told her sister.

Franny went, her unwilling heart slamming against her chest. She was convinced that she was the last one love would ever come to. She wasn’t made for such things. She wanted flight and freedom and would prefer to live among the birds, pitching a tent in Central Park and having nothing to do with humankind. Surely the caller was the mailman or one of her father’s misdirected patients who had come to the wrong door.

The crow came to light on the molding of the door. “Make whoever it is go away,” Franny told the crow. The bird was supposed to be her soul mate, wasn’t he? But rather than help, he lifted off and winged to his favorite perch above the drapes, eyeing her with a knowing look.

The knock came again.

Vincent approached, carrying his guitar case. He’d begun to attend concerts at the Riverside Church on Sunday afternoons and had been caught up in folk music. He wore cowboy boots now, old dusty ones found at a secondhand store. He’d bought a fringed suede vest at some godforsaken thrift store on the Bowery.

“Don’t open the door,” Franny told him.

“I have a lesson and I’m late. This is something you’ll have to handle, kiddo.”

Vincent flashed his glorious grin, an expression that always meant trouble, either for him or for someone else. This time that someone was Franny. Vincent swung the door open before she could stop him. There was Haylin, leaning on the wall.

“You’re home,” he said. “I was about to give up. No one was answering the phone. You seem to be avoiding me.”

Indeed it was true. She had hardly seen him since their return from the summer. Now she knew why she had been keeping her distance.

She took a step away from him. She’d turned pale as paper.

“Are you okay?” Hay was carrying an armful of college catalogs. They had already decided to apply to all of the same schools. They had a bet going; the winner would be the one who got into one of their top five choices: Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, Brown, and the hometown favorite, Columbia.

“You didn’t know it was going to be him?” Vincent smirked as he headed out. He didn’t need the Clairvoyant Tea Aunt Isabelle concocted out of mugwort, thyme, yarrow, and rosemary. He didn’t need Jet’s empathy or Franny’s curiosity. This one was obvious.

“Your brother’s a funny guy,” Haylin said.

The crow flew across the living room to perch on a velvet armchair. He studied Haylin, and Haylin studied him back, duly impressed.

“You’ve got a pet?”

“You know that I don’t believe in pets.” Franny collected the crow, then opened the window and set him on the railing.

“You’re dumping him outside?” Haylin asked, bemused.

“He’s a bird,” Franny said. “It won’t hurt him.” Her heart was still pounding. This had to be wrong. Love?

Hay went to peer through the window. “Does he have a name?”

“Lewis.” Franny named him on the spot. She hadn’t thought to call him anything before, other than hers.

Haylin laughed. “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” he said, quoting Lewis Carroll’s unanswerable riddle in Wonderland.

“Because a writing desk is a rest for pens and a raven is a pest for wrens? But he’s not a raven. Corvus brachyrhynchos. The common crow.”

“He doesn’t look common.”

Lewis was tapping on the glass.

Franny couldn’t stop staring at Haylin. It had been there all along, whether she’d been aware of it or not. If she just held out it would likely pass. It had to pass. For his sake as much as for hers.



Franny had read in one of Aunt Isabelle’s books that if you lit a match to a handful of snow and it melted quickly, the snow on the ground would soon disappear. By counting the knots on a lilac bush the number of cold spells could be predicted. Though the weather was chilly, the sisters escaped the house whenever they could. They liked to walk along the bridle path in the park, wearing high boots and heavy black coats. It was the season of migration and Franny stared longingly at the huge flocks passing overhead. She wished for freedom and here she was earthbound, worried about the petty concerns of human beings.