High Jinx Read online

  Praise for Kelley Armstrong

  “Armstrong is a talented and evocative writer who knows well how to balance the elements of good, suspenseful fiction, and her stories evoke poignancy, action, humor and suspense.”

  The Globe and Mail

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  “[A] master of crime thrillers.”

  Kirkus

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  “Kelley Armstrong is one of the purest storytellers Canada has produced in a long while.”

  National Post

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  “Kelley Armstrong is one of my favorite writers.”

  Karin Slaughter

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  “Armstrong is a talented and original writer whose inventiveness and sense of the bizarre is arresting.”

  London Free Press

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  “Kelley Armstrong has long been a favorite of mine.”

  Charlaine Harris

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  “Armstrong’s name is synonymous with great storytelling.”

  Suspense Magazine

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  “Like Stephen King, who manages an under-the-covers, flashlight-in-face kind of storytelling without sounding ridiculous, Armstrong not only writes interesting page-turners, she has also achieved that unlikely goal, what all writers strive for: a genre of her own.”

  The Walrus

  High Jinx

  Kelley Armstrong

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without the written permission of the Author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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  Copyright © 2021 K.L.A. Fricke Inc.

  All rights reserved.

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  Cover Design by Cover Couture www.bookcovercouture.com

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  ISBN-13 (paperback): 978-1-989046-45-6

  ISBN-13 (hardcover): 978-1-989046-44-9

  ISBN-13 (ebook): 978-1-989046-43-2

  Also by Kelley Armstrong

  Rockton thriller series

  City of the Lost

  A Darkness Absolute

  This Fallen Prey

  Watcher in the Woods

  Alone in the Wild

  A Stranger in Town

  The Deepest of Secrets

  * * *

  A Stitch in Time time-travel gothic

  A Stitch in Time

  A Twist of Fate

  * * *

  Cursed Luck contemporary fantasy

  Cursed Luck

  * * *

  Standalone Thrillers

  Wherever She Goes

  Every Step She Takes

  * * *

  Past Series

  Cainsville paranormal mystery series

  Otherworld urban fantasy series

  Nadia Stafford mystery trilogy

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  Young Adult

  Aftermath / Missing / The Masked Truth

  Otherworld: Kate & Logan paranormal duology

  Darkest Powers paranormal trilogy

  Darkness Rising paranormal trilogy

  Age of Legends fantasy trilogy

  * * *

  Middle Grade

  A Royal Guide to Monster Slaying fantasy series

  The Blackwell Pages trilogy (with Melissa Marr)

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Goddess of Summer Love

  Goddess of Summer Love

  Chapter One

  “Ooh, this doll definitely looks cursed,” Hope says from across the shop where she’s glued to my laptop, surfing eBay.

  When I don’t respond, she turns the laptop around. “Don’t you think it looks cursed, Kennedy?”

  “Bookmark it,” I say. “Right now, I’m a little busy with this mirror, which is definitely cursed.”

  We’re in my antiques shop, which has been open for a month. It’s mid-June, and I’m madly preparing for full-blown tourist season in Unstable, the little town where Hope and I live with our older sister, Ani.

  Turani, Kennedy and Hope Bennett. Yep, our parents named us after famous curses, fitting for a family of curse weavers. At least half the items in my shop are formerly hexed objects. That’s my specialty. In Boston, I’d hidden the “formerly cursed” part. In Unstable, it’s a selling point.

  Right now, I’m trying to get this tabletop mirror uncursed before the shop opens. I’ve already had three people knock on the window. I’m considering investing in drapes. Luckily, in a town like Unstable, nothing intrigues people more than a shrouded store window.

  Hope walks up behind me and reaches for the sheet covering the mirror. I catch her hand. “Uh-uh.”

  “But I want to see.”

  “No.”

  “You looked. What did you see?”

  I don’t answer. I try to focus on the mirror again, listening for the music of the curse.

  “Kennedy?” she says. “What did you see?”

  I glower at her.

  She sets her hands on her hips. “I don’t see why you’re removing the curse. It’s a great tourist draw. A mirror that emphasizes your greatest flaw.”

  “Yeah, and only someone who looks like you wants to see that, Hopeless.”

  She rolls her eyes. “I already know what I’d see. My skin. I thought I’d stop getting zits when I turned twenty. No longer a teen, right?”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Did for you. Oh, wait. You never got zits. Anyway, if I already know my biggest flaw, what’s the big deal?”

  “The big deal is that there’s a difference between knowing it and seeing it magnified a hundred times. Your skin is fine. The problem is in your head. So now you want to see what’s in your head actually showing on your face? No one needs that. It’s a nasty little hex, and I’m getting rid of it.”

  She’s quiet for a moment as she leans against a butler’s desk.

  “What did you see?” she asks, her voice softer now, concerned.

  Nothing. That’s what I saw.

  I imagine telling Hope that. She’d tease me about thinking I’m perfect if I didn’t see any exaggerated flaws. It’s not that. I literally saw nothing. I looked into this cursed mirror, and there was no me, and I’m not sure how to interpret that. I’d panicked, as if I were looking into a scrying ball for my future and seeing none. That isn’t it. That can’t be it. It’s just a hex.

&nbsp
; It’s the sort of curse I specialize in—a joker’s jinx—though personally, I’d say this one edges closer to a misanthrope’s malice. I like my jinxes fun. Light-hearted pranks. This one bears the sharp teeth of cruelty, and I have no time for that bullshit.

  I keep telling myself that’s why I don’t see my reflection—as a weaver who specializes in the jinx, I see through it. Like on April Fools’ Day, I saw through other kids’ pranks and exposed the cruel ones, and the bullies who liked their jokes nasty stopped trying to play them on me. Pouted and said I was no fun, no fun at all. Which always made my friends laugh. Kennedy Bennett, no fun? There’s a reason I specialize in jinxes. I was the class clown, the carefree girl who adored a good prank, even if it was played on her. I just don’t like cruel jokes, and so maybe this mirror is like those bullies, pouting and refusing to show me anything in its reflective surface.

  A good theory. And I don’t believe it for a second.

  “I saw your chin on my face.” I shudder as I rise from crouching before the mirror. “The stuff of nightmares.”

  “We have the same chin, K.”

  “Huh. Really?” I tap mine. “Looks better on me, though.”

  She raises a middle finger.

  I lift the shrouded mirror. “Open the storage room. This hex is going to take a while to uncurse, and you are not going to let me concentrate.”

  She opens the door. “Because I want to see myself in it first.”

  I set the mirror inside and shut the door. Then I take the key ring from my pocket and wave it before locking the door. “Good luck with that, kiddo.”

  “Spoilsport.”

  “I know. I am no fun. No fun at all.” I head for the sales counter. “Now, show me this doll.”

  Hope specializes in cursed dolls the way I specialize in cursed antiques. Her actual weaver specialty is the lover’s lament, colloquially known as the ex-hex. As for the dolls, that would be my fault.

  Hope is five years younger than me, and as a proper big sister—and a proper middle child—I’d done my best to terrify her. I’d tell her stories about cursed objects, especially dolls. Contrary child that she was, she loved it and now has a room filled with formerly cursed dolls. And I have four of them in my shop.

  I’m still not quite sure how that happened. When I’d been low on stock, Hope insisted I take a few of her least favorite dolls on consignment. They’d sold within two days. I’m still half-convinced she hired the buyers. I mean, who the hell walks into an antique shop, sees a creepy old doll with glass eyes that follow you across the room, and says, “I want that in my house!” Apparently, a lot of people, at least the sort who visit Unstable.

  So I now have four truly creepy dolls whose eyes follow me everywhere. And I have a summer employee, in my sister, who somehow went from “Can you sell these old dolls of mine on consignment?” to spending her days here, which wouldn’t be so bad if she didn’t also expect a paycheck.

  When I move to the laptop, I resist the urge to pick up my phone and casually glance at my messages.

  Expecting a text, Kennedy?

  No, not at all.

  Wait, you weren’t checking to see whether Aiden read your last message, were you?

  Ha-ha, no. That’s not me. I pop off dozens of texts a day, whether to my sisters or friends or clients, and I never check to see whether they’ve been read unless it’s life-or-death urgent. Yet my fingers itch to pick up my phone, and my pride slinks down into my sneakers.

  I don’t want to be this person. Definitely don’t want to be this woman. Connolly and I aren’t dating. We’re friends. Have been for nearly a month. Would I like more? Yep, I won’t deny it. But I’m currently under an unbreakable curse, one that will visit doom and despair on any guy who falsely claims to love me.

  That should be a good thing, right? Who doesn’t want a romance lie detector? The problem is that I’m not sure that’s how the curse works. It might also hurt a guy who thinks he’s interested and later realizes otherwise. Or who says he loves me and later realizes he doesn’t. That’s not curseworthy. It’s just part of picking your way through the minefield of romantic love, making mistakes and figuring it out as you go.

  The truth is that, while the curse scares me, it’s also made me slow down, and that’s a good thing. If I have a life motto, it’s carpe diem. Looking before I leap is foreign to my DNA. When it comes to Connolly, though, I want to get this right.

  Therefore, I should be fine with him not rushing to answer—or even read—my texts, right? Take it slow. Don’t go wild. Ease in. But he didn’t ease in at first.

  Connolly is naturally reserved, with the kind of standoffishness that can be mistaken for arrogance and ego, and in Connolly’s case, that wouldn’t be entirely a mistake. Yet he was different with me. He’d send the first text of the day. He’d read my response right away. No games, and I appreciated that, but now something has changed and I’m racking my brain to figure out what.

  I only know that he’s no longer jumping at every excuse to hang out. I invited him antiquing in New Hampshire this past weekend, and he had jumped. Yes, that sounded like fun. He’d clear his schedule. He knew a great spot there for dinner. Then, three hours before he was supposed to pick me up, he texted to say he couldn’t make it. He didn’t call. He sent a vague “something came up.” Since then, he hasn’t initiated a single conversation or answered a text within thirty minutes.

  I should take the hint, right? Say screw him. If he’s backing off, that’s his loss, and it’s not as if I’m sitting at home, waiting for his call.

  That’s what I want to say. Instead, it’s like that empty mirror. I look into it, and I feel as if there’s a message I should understand, and I don’t. I know I didn’t do anything wrong, but a little voice keeps whispering that I must have. That I did something to deserve this.

  I shove my phone into my back pocket and look at the laptop screen.

  My cat, Ellie, hops onto the stool. She takes one look at the doll and hops down again.

  “Yep, Ellie, that is one ugly doll.”

  “So, cursed?” Hope says.

  “Not every ugly doll is cursed.”

  She rolls her eyes. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s cursed or not. It looks cursed. That’s what counts.”

  “It looks dead.”

  She squints at the screen. “Kind of?”

  “It looks like a dead baby.”

  “And that’s a bad thing?”

  “Yes, kiddo. It’s a bad thing.” I wave at the shop. “Our clientele is people like our parents. Middle aged. Middle class. Looking for a conversation piece.”

  “A doll that looks like a dead baby is a conversation piece.”

  “Would Mom have wanted that in our living room?”

  She sighs and slumps. As I pretend to tidy, I study her for a reaction to the mention of our parents. It’s been five years since a careless driver stole our father. Two years since cancer stole our mother. We are easing into a place where we can talk about them without diving into the tar pit of grief, and I am glad of that. I don’t want to talk around our parents. I want to talk about them. Bring them to life the only way we can.

  “Fine.” Hope flips to another browser tab. “This one?”

  “It looks possessed,” I say.

  “So, yes?”

  “Yes, but if we don’t sell it within a week, I’m turning it to face the wall for a time-out.”

  “Ooh, no. We should do that right away. Hang a sign warning that shoppers turn it around at their own risk.”

  When I don’t immediately say no, she brightens.

  I smile over at her. “Yes, that’d be fun.”

  “This is why I’m going into marketing. Ani’s the oldest twenty-seven-year-old on the planet. Like a stodgy grandma. No, Hope, you can’t run a sideline hexing exes. No, Hope, you can’t vlog a client’s cursed objects on your TikTok. No, Hope, you can’t tell people they’ll be eaten by a rabid dog if they don’t get Aunt Maude’s tea set uncursed.
”

  “Mmm, gotta agree with her on the last one.”

  “But you’d be fine with the first two, which is why you, dear sister, will be the benefactor of my upcoming college education. I’m going to run all my test cases using your shop. Right after I convert that corner”—she points—“into a cursed-doll gallery.”

  “Four dolls, kiddo. We agreed on four. No more.”

  I’m about to turn away when my gaze snags on the bottom of the webpage. It disappears as Hope closes the tab. I take the laptop from her and reopen it, zooming to the suggested listings. The one I thought I’d seen doesn’t appear.

  I type two words in the search box, and the entire page fills with results.

  “Cursed paintings?” Hope says. “New sideline, K?”

  I flip through the list, most of which is paintings of cats, which could mean the search engine thought that’s what I mistyped . . . or it could think it means the same thing. It wouldn’t be wrong. I glance at Ellie, who’s contemplating sharpening her claws on a three-hundred-year-old chair.