The Ex Hex (Ex Hex #1)(16)

So thanks for the warm welcome, a quick acknowledgment of the beauty of the town, a few sentences in Welsh, always a crowd-pleaser, and he’d been done, one duty discharged.

And then he’d nearly had his own head knocked off his shoulders by Gryffud’s.

As soon as he’d stepped onto the little steps leading off the stage, he’d heard the crack, then the gasp from the crowd, and had some instinct not urged him to freeze, he would’ve been directly under the plummeting stone skull of Gryffud Penhallow.

“I am so sorry,” the mayor said for what, Rhys thought, was at least the thirty-fifth time. “I don’t even know how this happened.”

She was still holding the bright yellow tape, her cell phone shoved back into a holster at her waist. In her heels, she barely came up to his chin, and even though Rhys suspected she’d replaced all of her blood with Red Bull, she was definitely attractive with her big dark eyes and flushed cheeks.

However, being nearly killed for the second time in twenty-four hours had something of a dampening effect on the libido, so he didn’t even attempt to flirt as he replied, “Hardly your fault. Probably just ol’ Gryffud letting it be known he would’ve preferred a different Penhallow, and I can’t blame him for that. I’m just glad no one else was standing nearby.”

He was smiling as he said it, but as Rhys glanced back and forth between the statue and the head on the ground, something cold settled into his chest.

Last night had been one thing—a series of mishaps that it was easy to chalk up to a strange run of bad luck, his magic thrown off by crossing an entire bloody ocean.

This? It felt . . . different.

Heads didn’t just break off statues, certainly not exactly as he was walking under them, and after assuring the mayor one more time that he was fine and didn’t plan on enacting some extravagant revenge for this insult, Rhys headed across the street to Vivienne’s family’s shop.

A chime rang as he pushed open the door, something slightly off-key and haunting, and just above him, some sort of animatronic nightmare of a raven began to squawk and flap its arms, its eyes blinking purple.

“Subtle,” he said, and from her spot at the cash register, Vivienne’s cousin, Gwyn, raised her middle finger at him.

“We’re closed.”

“You very obviously are not.”

“We’re closed to any and all exes of Vivi’s, and you qualify, sooooo . . .”

Nearby, a group of young women was looking at a display of leather journals. Rhys saw a hand-painted sign advertising them as grimoires, but he couldn’t detect even the faintest hint of magic coming off them. Probably best not to sell the real thing to tourists, though, and as Rhys looked around, he realized that very few things in the shop radiated any sort of real power except for Gwyn herself, decked out in full witchy regalia today.

He’d met her a handful of times during that summer he’d lived in Graves Glen, back when her hair had been pink. It was red now and long, hanging nearly to her waist, and while she didn’t look that much like Vivienne, there was definitely a resemblance in the look of scorn she was throwing his way.

“Did you miss my near decapitation out there?” he asked, nodding back out at the street.

Gwyn widened her eyes. “Wait, one of my dreams almost came true, and I didn’t get to see it?”

“What dreams?”

Vivienne appeared from behind a star-spangled curtain in one corner of the store, a box of what appeared to be tiny skulls in her arms, her hair gathered up in a messy bun, and as she blew a strand out of her face, Rhys’s heart kicked painfully against his chest.

If only she weren’t so damned pretty. If only he hadn’t been the biggest cock-up this side of the Atlantic nine years ago.

If only he didn’t suspect, just the littlest bit, that she might be behind his sudden rush of ill-fortune.

He didn’t want to think that, but for the past few minutes, ever since he’d looked up to see Gryffud’s nose careening toward his, it had been there, muttering away in the back of his mind.

It seemed a little too much of a coincidence that the second he arrived back in Graves Glen after nine years away, everything went completely sideways, and while Vivienne had never struck him as all that vindictive, she had left him to be killed or eaten or run over yet again last night.

All of which he probably deserved, but that was not the point.

Now, he looked at her and asked, “Do you sell a scrying mirror in this store by any chance?”

From behind the counter, Gwyn snorted. “Yeah, right behind our jars of eye of newt. What are you, a thousand years old?”

Scrying mirrors were a little old-fashioned, even for witches, but so was Rhys’s father, which meant that they were one of the better ways to communicate with him.

“I think there actually might be one in the back,” Vivienne said, setting down her box of skulls. As she did, several of them opened their jaws, letting out a sort of creaking groan that made the girls over by the grimoires jump then burst into giggles.

“Seriously?” Gwyn asked, leaning on the counter. “We have a scrying mirror and I didn’t even know it?”

“I found it in some antique store in Atlanta,” Vivienne replied before glancing over at the customers, then back at Rhys.

Moving a little closer, she lowered her voice and said, “You can’t use it in here.”