P. C. Cast - Divine By Mistake

I want to warmly thank the very vocalvery enthusiastic fans of the original Goddess by Mistake . You made my career possible. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I would also like to acknowledge the review staff at Romantic Times BOOKclub. Yall discovered me with a 4 Stars Top Pick Gold review when this was just an obscure small press book. Wow! Ill never forget the excitement of that very first review. Thank you.

Thank you to my friend and agent, Meredith Bernstein, who read this book overnight and knew we had something special.

And its with gratitude that I acknowledge the fabulous Stacy Boyd, who really gets Partholon and Shannon, which made the editorial process on this book totally unpainful.

Finally, on my way. My Mustang felt sweet as it zipped down the nearly empty highway. Why is it that cars seem to drive best when theyre freshly washed? Leaning down, I popped a CD into the player, skipped forward to track 6 and began singing at the top of my very tone-deaf lungs with Eponine about the futility of love. As the next song keyed up, I swung around a slow-moving Chevy and yelled, God, I love being a teacher!

It was the first day of June, and the summer stretched before me, pristine and virginal.

All those days of sleeping in to go!

Just saying it aloud made me happy. In my ten years of teaching Ive noticed that teachers tend to have a bad habit of talking to themselves. I hypothesize that this is because we talk for a living, and we feel safe speaking our feelings aloud. Or it could be that most of us, especially the high school teacher variety, are just weird as shit.

Only the slightly insane would choose a career teaching teenagers. I can just see my best girlfriend Suzannas face screw up and the involuntary shudder move down her spine as I relate the latest trials and tribulations of the high school English classroom.

God, Sha, theyre soso hormone filled. Eew!

Suzanna is a typical college professor snob, but I love her anyway. She just doesnt appreciate the many and varied opportunities for humorous interludes that teenagers provide on a daily basis.

Jean Valjeans dynamic tenor interrupted my musings, bringing me back to Oklahoma I44 East and June 1.

Yep, this is itthe life of a high school English teacher with a sense of humor. Doomed to having no money but plenty of comedic fodder. Oh, crap, theres my exit!

Luckily my little Mustang could take the hard, fast right onto US412. The sign said Locust Grove 22 miles. I drove half with my knee and half with my hand while I fumbled to unfold the auction flyer that held my written directions. Somewhere about midway between Locust Grove (what an awful name for a town) and Siloam Springs there should be a big sign that pointed to a side road till another sign, another side road, and so forth, until I came to the Unique Estate AuctionUnusual ItemsAll Offers ConsideredAll Must Go.

Well, I certainly like weird old stuff. And I really like weird old cheap stuff.

My students say my classroom is like a bizarre time warp. My walls and cabinets are filled with everything from prints by Waterhouse to posters of Mighty Mouse and hanging Star Trek Enterprise models, along with an almost scary number of wind chimes (theyre good chi).

And thats just my classroom. They should see my condo. Guess they really wouldnt be surprised. Except at home Im a neat freak. My classroom is always in a perpetual state of disarray. I cant seem to find anything if everything is found. Whatever the hell that means.

Ive got to stop cussing! Saying it out loud would, hopefully, reinforce the idea. Kind of a twist on the Pavlovs dog theory. I keep saying it; it will begin to happen.

I cant take you today, Javert. Flick! Off went Les Misrables. On goes the jazz station out of Tulsa. Its cool that I could pick it up way out in the boonies.

The sign read Locust Grove City Limits. So I slowed down, blinked, and the town was gone. Well, maybe it was nominally bigger than a blink. And I stayed slowed down. Time to stop and smell the green of Green Country. Oklahoma in early summer is an amazing display of color and texture. I went to college at the University of Illinois, and it always annoyed me that people talked about Oklahoma like it was a red dust bowl. Or some black-and-white scene of misery from The Grapes of Wrath. When I tried to tell the college gang that Oklahoma was really known as Green Country they would scoff and look at me as if they thought Id eaten too many tumbleweeds or punched too many cows.

I passed through the tiny town of Leach (another unfortunate name) and topped a rise in the road. Oklahoma stretched before me, suddenly looking untamed in its beauty. I like to imagine a time when these roads were just paths, and civilization hadnt been so sure of itself. It must have been exciting to be alive thennot exciting like facing the principal after he has just heard from a parent who is upset about me calling Guinevere a slutbut exciting in a rugged, perhaps-we-wont-bathe-or-brush-our-teeth and we-kill-our-own-food-and-tote-our-own-water kind of way. Ugh. On second thoughtIts delicious to dream about the days of cowboys or knights or dragons, and I will admit to an obsession with poets of the Romantic era and literature set, well, way back when (technical English teacher term). But reality reminds me that in actuality they did without penicillin and Crest. As my kids would say, Whats up with that?

There it is! Turnoff number one, as in a road sign, not to be confused with the blind date who comes to your door in navy blue double-knit trousers and a receding hairline.

UNIQUE ESTATE AUCTION AHEAD and an arrow, which pointed down a side road to my left.

This road was much less traveled (poetic pun intended). Kind of a sorry little two-laner with potholes and deep gravel shoulders. But it twisted and rolled in a pretty way, and To Grandmothers house we go hummed through my mind. I tried in vain to remember the rest of the song for the next several miles.

UNIQUE ESTATE AUCTION AHEAD and another arrow. Another side-side road. This one more gravel, less two lane, than the other. Well, maybe the out-of-the-wayness of the estate would serve to dissuade the antique dealers, whom I considered the bane of every broke auction-goer. The jazz station faded out, which was actually fine because the Grandmothers House song had also faded from my internal radioand been replaced with the theme to The Beverly Hillbillies (these words I did remember all of, which I found vaguely disturbing).

Speaking of hillbillies, I hadnt seen many houses. Hmmmmaybe the estate was really an old ranch house, smack in the middle of what used to be a real ranch owned by some Bonanzaesque rich folks. Now theyve all died off and the land would be subdivided into neat little housing divisions so upper-middle-class folks could commute towell, wherever. I call that job security for me. Upper-middle-class folks always have the prerequisite 2.5 kids, plus an additional 1.5 kid (from a previous marriage). And those kids gotta pass English to graduate from high school. God bless America.

Over a crook and a rise in the road loomed what I had been imagining as an old ranch house. Holy shit! Its the House of Usher! (Summer was definitely not the time to work on the cussing thing.) I slowed. Yepthere was another sign: UNIQUE ESTATE AUCTION, planted next to the gravel trail leading to the estate. A few cars, but mostly trucks (it is Oklahoma) were parked on what at one time was obviously a beautifully maintained frontI dont knowwhat the hell do you call something like thatit stretched on and onyard seemed too simple a word. Grounds. That sounded better. Lots of grass. The drive was lined with big trees, as in Gone with the Wind, minus the weeping moss.