Fire Raiser Read Online Free Page B

the singing happened almost every night did nothing to lessen his delight in them, a kind of half-surprised wonder that such good things could happen again and again with only slight variations. It was as if he expected but never took for granted the security of his father’s arms and the beauty of his mother’s voice, greeting each night’s repetition with renewed pleasure and gratitude.
    As for Bella—she was an even more unlikely child for a cop and a writer to have produced. Her hands and pockets were always stuffed with one thing or another—from smooth creek stones to mostly dead bugs, all sorts of feathers to samplings of different grasses. A scrap of broken eggshell meant to be compared with a similar souvenir earned equal reverence with the four types of pine cones (and matching needle clusters) conscientiously laid out on a shelf. That she could not yet pronounce the scientific names of things in all their polysyllabic splendor was an inconvenience of youth that frustrated her terribly. It was as if she found nature so compelling that she had to have it with her at all times, so fascinated by the world that she couldn’t bear to let go of even its smallest manifestations. Evan called it collecting evidence ; Cousin Clary Sage avowed that it was the mark of an Apothecary. It would be many years before they’d find out if either prediction was true.
    Evan was content to have it so. In spite of all he’d seen and done—and had had done to him—before his marriage, there had yet been a portion of his mind that didn’t quite wrap around the magical aspects of his life with Holly. She was a Witch from a long line of Witches, but she had no magic other than her Spellbinding blood. His experiences of magic had not been of the everyday kind. In truth, some of them had been horrific. But then he’d come to live at Woodhush Farm, where Lulah McClure would flick a finger to keep a spoon stirring the spaghetti sauce (always clockwise), or murmur a few words to activate a spell that whisked the dust from the paintings hung along the staircase. All Holly ever did was light a candle or the hearth fire.
    So when he contemplated his children, Lachlan felt himself torn. Magic was part of their heritage, and if they were gifted with it, they would have excellent teachers and role models. But magic was also a dangerous thing that could threaten and even kill. So he was never quite sure whether he wanted Kirby and Bella to be Witches or not.
    “I’m not walking down to Lulah’s in these,” Holly warned as she descended the stairs. Evan spared a moment, then a few more, appreciating hair, makeup, dress, and especially shoes; it wasn’t often these days that he saw her all put together the way she’d always appeared for a night out in New York.
    Not that he was complaining. Nope, not him. He gave her a courtly bow from the waist to make her laugh, then escorted her out the door, down the front steps, and into the dark green Chevy SUV with a five-pointed gold star and Pocahontas County Sheriff painted on its doors.
    Renovation of the overseer’s house at Woodhush should have been easy. Clear out the accumulated junk, have somebody inspect it from shingles to foundation, get the hardwood floors sanded and polyurethaned, paint it inside and out, and hang new curtains. What no one had counted on was that the laws of physics were about to take their revenge for having been toyed with for so many years. Unused since the late 1930s except for storage, the house turned out to be held together with hundred-year-old plumbing, two-hundred-year-old beams, and magic.
    Research done during the winter of 2004 had yielded fresh magic that kept the old place upright long enough to fix it. Concoctions, decoctions, gemstones, Holly’s blood, and some plain old crossed-fingers wishing were employed throughout the spring and part of the summer as workmen virtually gutted the place. The huge stone sink in the kitchen and the graceful oak