Shannon Delany - Weather Witch

“Do you think so?”

“Why yes, of course,” Jordan said, thinking sometimes they were as different as their favorite candies: he as bold as the smoky-flavored Black Jack, and she as sweet and understated as Salem’s lemon Gibraltar.

“Hmm. Well. You should know, Jordan, that I also crave attention from time to time,” he admitted, his voice going lower, softer.

Jordan picked up the fan hanging at her hip and snapped it open. The gown was far warmer than she thought it would be.

“Rowen,” Catrina warned.

Jordan turned to look at her friend. “Fetch us drinks, please?”

“What?” Catrina blinked. “Do I look the part of a servant?” she asked, rolling her hand down before her to draw attention to the finely wrought gown she also wore.

“N-no,” Jordan stammered, “but neither is there a waiter or butler here.”

“You are the hostess,” Catrina said. “Perhaps you should go and fetch drinks for Rowen and myself.”

“I am the guest of honor,” Jordan protested.

Catrina blinked again. “Fine. I will tote and carry.” With a flick of her wrist she opened her fan and traipsed off toward the fountain, glancing over her shoulder but once.

“You are far too anxious, Jordan,” Rowen whispered, his eyebrows lowered. He ran a soothing hand over her forearm and she rested her other hand atop his.

“I’m sorry. You know…”

He nodded. “I do. And you hide your nerves well from everyone but me. If they only knew that is why you act the way you do. People love you, Jordan. You are more popular than you know.”

She glanced down at the floor but something about her brightened. “At least, adorning your arm I am well presented and better loved for people’s love of you. You are so much better than me, Rowen.”

He snorted. “Sixth of the Nine here.”

“Does that truly matter?”

He looked startled. “Yes. I think it must. Our society is built around rank and order. Rank is the most important thing we have.”

She stiffened, hearing something so closely akin to her father’s justification for rejecting Rowen coming from Rowen’s own lips.

“If certain things weren’t in their place…” he continued.

“There’d be chaos.”

He nodded.

“Spoken like a true military man.”

A waiter carrying a tray full of hors d’oeuvres paused before them and Rowen took a fistful, popping them into his mouth and barely chewing between bites. “A truly hungry military man.”

Jordan was far enough into their friendship that such moves no longer stunned her. “Rowen,” she admonished softly as the servant drifted away.

Rowen blinked at her. “Did I take too many?”

She smiled. “Actually I half expected you to clear the entire tray. And lick the poor waiter’s hand for crumbs.” She winked at him and he straightened. “You’ve already been to the kitchens to see Cook, haven’t you?”

He grinned, for a moment looking all of twelve. “You are stunning,” he said, dragging her toward the broad French doors and onto the veranda that stretched along one side of the estate’s back, hemming in the gardens and ending where the property dropped suddenly away.

They walked all the way to the end of it, Rowen striding like a man on a mission.

The Below spread out at the Hill’s foot, buildings seemingly alive and creeping with flickering lights through the shadows the deepening evening threw.

Rowen interlaced his fingers with hers.

“This is—improper,” she protested.

“Improper?” He arched an eyebrow. “You’re afraid of what someone may say about being this close here—now?”

“We are—again—unchaperoned…”

“Exactly.” He leaned in, his eyes closing, and she dodged away from his willing lips, neither of them aware of Catrina standing inside the distant doors and seeing all.

Rowen caught Jordan’s wrist and drew her close, encircling her waist with his arms.

A breeze blew up from below, rattling the topiaried tree branches and bending them toward the raised veranda’s floor. Green leaves snapped off and spiraled around the pair’s feet as a storm built in the sky above.

“Come. Let’s go back inside,” Jordan said.

Rowen’s eyebrows drew together. “What is wrong?”

“You said you had a surprise for me…”

The metallic threads in her dress sparked like lightning traveled their careful stitches, and the wind tugged at her hair, pulling free one of her many curling locks.

With quick hands, Rowen caught the rogue curl and held it a moment, running his thumb along its silky length before tucking it behind her ear. “Yes.” He unfurled a smile. “I do have a surprise for you. Would you like it now or shall I draw you out more publicly for my presentation?” he asked, straightening from where he leaned against the veranda’s banister.

“No, no…” She slipped her fingers free of his and clutched his arms, standing a good distance from the French doors and the crowd surely wondering where the party’s hostess had disappeared to with her most regular gentleman caller.

He grinned. “Make up thy mind,” he whispered. “Chaperoned or…” He skimmed her lips with his thumb. “… not?”

“Not. But only for a moment longer,” she promised. “Rowen, you know I adore you.”

His back went ramrod straight at her choice of words. “Yes.”

“You are an absolutely amazing and talented man of fine breeding and nearly noble rank. Socially speaking we would make a fine pair, but…”

“I’m sorry. Are you…” His eyes searched her face, confusion plain. “Are you telling me we are … finished?”

She sighed. “Not so much finished as—”

He crossed his arms over his chest and did his best to peer down his nose at her although she was dressed in the high-heeled shoes the wealthy deemed fashionable for such parties. “It’s your seventeenth birthday and you’re ending things with me.”

“No. No. Wait!” She reached for him, grasping at his arm. She could not tug it free.

His chin tipped up in defiance, he watched her struggle with a coolness in his gaze she had never seen before.

“Rowen, I’m confused,” she apologized, wrapping her arms around him and leaning her head on his chest. His stance softened, his arms sliding out from between them to wrap her up once more. “I was so worried you’d ask for my promise and that I wouldn’t be able to give it to you with everyone watching and…”

“Is that all this is?” he asked into the top of her head. “You were in a panic because you thought…” His arms tightened around her. “Be brave, sweetheart. I’d never embarrass you that way—no matter how much I tease,” he promised. “I do have a surprise for you, but it has nothing to do with asking for your promise. Not just yet.” He cocked his head. “I’ve brought you a fine gift…”

“Wait.” She searched his face. “So we are well?”

“Yes, darling girl, we are well. Now for your gift—”

The French doors swung open and the party burst onto the veranda, Catrina and Thomas Dorsey himself at its head, bearing drinks. “You cannot monopolize the party’s guest of honor for the entire event,” she scolded Rowen, handing them both a cup. “Things are about to become quite hot,” she promised, waving her hand so the move ended with her pointing back the way they had come. The ruby on her ring finger flashed.

Philadelphia

Entertainers streamed onto the porch, men and women in parti-colored outfits that clung to their forms in all the most interesting places. It was at once scandalous and delightful—and utterly foreign. Rowen grinned, leaning back against the porch’s railing and taking Jordan with him.

A man wearing a hat that shadowed his eyes with fat fabric tendrils topped by bells stretched into a bow so low only the most supple of dancers might do it. “My lords and my ladies, most gracious hosts and hostesses,” he said in an accent Jordan had only heard the day Rowen dragged her down to the Cutter docks to watch the men make sails and the ships go out, “tonight we will delight and astound you by setting your senses afire.” He tugged a lit torch out from behind him and the crowd jumped back.

“I assure you, though, that what we do here may look like magick, but it is merely science, spit, and spark!” He tossed the torch high into the air and tore his strange hat off, throwing it into Jordan’s astonished hands as another costumed performer tossed a second torch his way. Both torches flew into the air and tumbled down, were caught and tossed back up as another was thrown into the fray, so quickly three fiery torches flew before the gasping crowd.

Two of his compatriots jumped in with three more torches, three men juggling nine torches, each in turn thrown to the man in the middle, who then hurled them high, caught them, and spun them back to his friends. He tossed all but one of them away, the other performers extinguishing each in turn. With a fluid movement their leader caught the final torch, and, taking a swig of something from a flask that appeared in his hand, he rolled the lit torch along his open mouth.

The crowd screamed and Jordan pressed the hat close to her stomach, eyes wide.

Flame danced across his tongue and he snapped his mouth shut, snuffing the fire before taking another swig of the clear stuff in the metal flask.

He bent, leaning so far back his hair nearly brushed the veranda’s floor. He brought the flaming torch close enough to his lips he might have kissed it … but instead he sprayed liquid past its flaming head, and the crowd fell back, shrieking, as he breathed fire.

Swinging the torch, he passed it off to be snuffed and the screaming became wild clapping. With a gracious bow he grabbed his gear and he and his cohorts dodged away.

“Stunning,” Rowen murmured.

Jordan looked up at him. “It was a brilliant display.”

“I was referring to you,” he corrected.

She rolled her eyes.

His gaze drifted from her eyes to the place on the veranda occupied by a well-dressed man sporting a leather mask in the form of a fox’s face. At his side stood an attractive female assistant in a fine silk robe decorated with rolling waves. Her hair was long, straight, and as dark as ebony and her eyes were slanted in a distinctly Oriental style.

Between them rested a large and colorfully painted wooden trunk.

“So what is this, do you suppose?” Jordan asked, motioning to the man and woman. The crowd had quieted, seeming to wonder the same thing.

“Good evening, friends. I am the Wandering Wallace,” the man said, his arms sweeping wide to encompass the entire crowd as if they were all personally invited by him. “Tonight I will entertain you and challenge your senses and powers of observation with tricks that will both astonish and amuse.”

There was no response from the crowd. They withheld judgment, cautiously waiting. He looked suspiciously like something one would have seen before taking the boat to the New World. With his trunk painted brightly with stars and strange symbols and his beautiful assistant with her foreign features, he nearly stank of something they knew better than to become entangled with.

Magick.

“Let me first assure you that the tricks I perform tonight to entertain such fine folks as yourselves include no magick at all. Nothing will truly disappear and nothing will actually manifest. These things are but simple illusions brought to you as the result of years of training in sleight of hand. Can I make it appear that something has manifested out of thin air…?” He slid his hand across the empty space before them and opened it, a ball popping into existence between his finger and thumb.

A few ladies in the crowd jumped back and a few men bristled. Some even turned their faces to the rumbling sky overhead, disapproval obvious. “Yes, yes. But wait,” he instructed. “When I slow the move down…” He turned his back for a mere moment before starting all over again, hand flat and before them. “… and loosen my fingers…”

The same ladies who had gasped before gasped again, but this time in delight, as his fingers parted and they glimpsed something the color of the ball between them moments before he slipped it sloppily into his palm and showed them how it appeared in its final position. “I use no magick in my performances, merely well-practiced sleight of hand.”