Forgotten Magic

by Eden Butler

  “A…death.” I shook my head, realizing how wrong that sounded. “No. That’s not…” His hand was hot against my skin and I couldn’t find it in me to tell him to back up. Just then, I’d take the small comfort he offered. “Murder,” I continued, finally looking up at him. “I can still taste their fear and hear the…creature.”

  Bane’s expression shifted from worried to surprised with that one word. “An animal?”

  “No. Couldn’t have been. Magical. I…felt its signature. I felt its…power.”

  He nodded, his expression softening, mouth moving into a frown when the tears I tried suppressing escaped my lashes. Bane always took control. He always knew how to command. But I’d never seen tenderness from him. Not like he was then. He moved closer and held my face in his large hands, his gaze working over my features. His expression was rigid, like he didn’t know what to do and didn’t like that sensation. I couldn’t help myself, needed the calm he offered when he pulled me closer and rested my forehead against his.

  “Take ease, Janvier…take comfort,” he whispered, muttering something I recognized as a spell under his breath. It was meant to calm me. It was meant to dry my tears. But all there was then was Bane, everywhere, in my head, beating back the taste of blood and the vision of that vicious attack. “Jani…” he finally said when my heartbeat returned to normal and the screams I heard inside my head lowered to a soft moan. “Do you know who…”

  But there was no answer I needed to give him. Of course I knew. He did too. Everyone in that house did when my Mai’s cry echoed through the hallways and she thundered into the kitchen, her face red and her expression horrified.

  After all, Mai had loved her too. We’d never been alone out on that roof drinking that wine. Mai had always been with us.

  Every single time.

  Eight

  The moon was waxing.

  The faint glow glinted over the slow lake and flickers of golden light shined against each rustle of water as it slapped against the bedrock near Bane’s back deck. The fireflies were flickering in the black sky, zipping along the bank and between the tall grass, but I could not make out anything beyond their peripheral image as my vision unfocused.

  Whiskey had been the balm I used to distract myself this past week. It numbed me. Kept me silent. It kept me from raging and screaming and hexing the lot of the town.

  “You can’t be here.” My father had thought to actually stop me. He was the town’s fixer. He cleaned the messes, and something had made a mess of Freya. “Mon petite, she wouldn’t want…”

  “You don’t know what she would want. You never bothered to know anything about her, Papa.”

  It was cruel to lash out at him. But my father had only been kind when it served the higher covens. I was his daughter, but I was still lower coven, just like him.

  I’d wanted to see her. I’d wanted to see what it had done to her.

  There hadn’t been much left.

  Papa hadn’t done much to hide what happened. To Ivy, the mortal chief of police, his deputy would have appeared to be attacked by some sort of wild animal while she walked the main road leading out of town into Grant territory. Bane’s driver hadn’t waited for her. No one knew why or could ask the wizard since he and his car were missing.

  Papa had covered the tire tracks and Bane hadn’t mentioned her getting a ride from his driver. Ivy would wonder why she was walking instead of driving toward Grant territory, and Papa had fixed that too. With the help of her family, Freya’s Nissan had been brought onto the main road and one of the tires deflated, and the town’s surveillance cameras spelled to alter any appearances of Freya’s car that night. The rest was made to appear like a horrible accident of nature. Black bears had been known to frequent the area and huge bobcats had been spotted in the marshy lands around Manchac. It would not be much of a stretch. But my father had collected hair and a claw, things that would enable him to work a spell to find what sort of creature had done this.

  But it wouldn’t matter.

  It wouldn’t bring her back.

  “Someone summoned it. It had to be a rougarou!” Selene, Freya’s younger sister insisted. Of all the Douglas sisters, Selene had taken her death the hardest. They were close and a cloud had come over the entire family. A dark wave blanketed much of the town, in fact, but the emotion Selene seemed to feel most deeply, like me, was close to blinding rage.

  “I don’t know about a rougarou, Sele,” I’d told her, passing a flask to the woman on the back porch of her family’s home the night of Freya’s funeral, “but I can promise you whatever the hell it is, I damn well will find it.”

  I don’t think she believed me. Selene wasn’t like Freya. She didn’t have many friends. Didn’t blend into the town or covens and have drinks on Fridays at Batty’s. She’d gone off to Europe for college and came back changed, quiet, reserved, but still fiercely loyal to her sisters.

  “You do what you have to, Jani,” she’d told me. “And I’ll do the same.”

  It hadn’t been lip service I’d given her.

  I sat out on that porch watching the Cove’s magical congregation milling around the square, making polite conversation with mortals from the police force who likely had no idea they were consorting with witches and weres and a few demons and vamps for that matter. All that time, all that watching, I analyzed and listened. I marked the gaits of people’s walks and the way they conducted themselves.

  With good reason. Freya may have been taken by a creature. It may have been summoned, but my guess was it wasn’t a creature that was always a creature. And, like the good cop she’d proved herself to be, my friend had taken a bit of that bastard with her, gashing their thigh with her pocketknife, something she never went far without. It wasn’t found at the scene or in her possessions, but that much of the attack had come to me. The slash against a thick animal’s thigh and the lunge of the blade inside it. Since it wasn’t left at the scene, it had to be left inside whoever had killed her.

  I hoped it hurt like hell.

  “You cold?” I heard and glanced over my shoulder to find Bane standing behind me with a mug in his hand. When I glared at the mug, squinting, not speaking, the wizard shook his head. “Tea. Hot.” I started to shake my head, but Bane amended. “With bourbon.”

  “Hand it over.”

  He did, sitting next to me on the lowest step that stretched near the lake. Bane passed over the mug, nodding at the small tilt of thanks I gave him but, thankfully, didn’t speak until I’d gotten one long sip down. When he did, his voice was low, calm. “Your brother would bitch and moan if he knew I gave you that.” I glanced at him, not moving my head, and Bane shrugged. “You haven’t slept far as I can tell.”

  “You never sleep.”

  “There’s ten dens and four covens on my property ready to help us search for the Elam.” He pulled a flask from his inside coat pocket when I offered him my mug and pushed the silver tip to his mouth. “No one’s going to sleep with that much going on.”

  “We’ll…get started tomorrow night.” Freya’s death had delayed us. It had put a kink in everything, for everyone. Crimson Cove may have been a small town, but its reach and that of the magical community stretched wide. She may have worked with the mortal police, but she was first a witch from an old, respected family. Her death was felt across the region. “This week has been…”

  “Everyone is hurting…” Bane said, surprising me. He kept his attention on the lake, his eyes unblinking as he drank from his flask again. “She was a good witch.”

  “She was a better friend.”

  I hadn’t meant to speak so openly. Not in front of Bane. Not in front of anyone. Being this close to the lines, feeling their raw power did something to me; it heightened what I already felt and Bane seemed to sense it.

  When I dipped my head down, hiding my face with my dark hair, pretending to sip on my tea, he moved close enough to bring his shoulder next to mine. “If you want to cry…”

  “No,” I
said, cupping the mug, my body going stiff when he touched my shoulder. “Bane…”

  “She was your friend.” He pushed my hair back, his forehead wrinkling as his attention shot over my face. “Emotion doesn’t make you weak.” I wanted to shake my head, tell him to leave me to my rage and anger. It cradled me. Gave me energy to lead this search and find who did this. But there was only so much control I had whenever he was around. There were buttons I had Bane knew how to push. He had each one connected with one hand against my face and his thumb brushing over my bottom lip. “Jani…”

  I knew what he tasted like. The memory was faint, but so clear.

  Woodsmoke and whiskey.

  Home and heartache.

  That was Bane Iles.

  He leaned forward, and all around me everything coalesced—my grief, my anger, my desperate damn longing and the moments I never got and always wanted with him.

  The hot breath from his full lips tickled over my mouth just as he pressed closer. I could make out that sandalwood smell, hear the low, sweet hum of his throat working before he spoke and then, just like that, I realized this was midnight and magic and the lines around us.

  “St…stop…” I said pushing away from him. “Don’t…don’t do that.”

  “This was just…”

  “I know exactly what this was. Please don’t…” I stood, leaving the cooling mug behind as I did. “What I need is for you to understand I’m here to do a job.” I took two steps down, away from him as he watched me, his hand back around that flask, elbows on his bent knees. “The job you paid me to do and the one I’ve set for myself.”

  “Which is?”

  “You’re really going to ask me that?”

  Bane exhaled, nodding once before he replaced the flask into his coat and stood but didn’t approach. “Did it ever occur to you that you aren’t the only one determined to find out what happened to her?”

  “I know what happened to her. I saw it!”

  Bane’s expression hardened, his jaws clenching as he looked out over the water. That look only ever crossed his features when he felt lost and powerless, when something was beyond his control. He had the power to dip into my mind and erase the vision. A long incantation and his fingers twisted in my hair would give him freedom to take that pain from me.

  But my pain was mine. The losses were what fueled me, and if I was going to find who did this to my friend, I needed that vision—every aching moment of it.

  Bane rubbed his mouth, smoothing his fingers through his hands as his focus shifted from the water and the humming energy of the pulsing magic that lay beyond it. “The lines…” he tried, not looking at me.

  “They’re affecting everyone. I know that.” I turned to him, curling my arms to keep myself warm. The air had turned, and the temperatures were dropping, making the night frigid. “You mentioned it. But that has nothing to do with how angry I am or the fact that I don’t want you to kiss me.”

  He watched me, eyes calm but shifting to my arms, then down my body as he moved closer, coming two steps from me. Without my asking, Bane waved his right hand, moving two long fingers as he muttered, “Éirigh te,” his gaze piercing, brightening to a sharp silver as the small spell fired and a circle of warmth surrounded me.

  The coolness dropped slowly so that I wasn’t suddenly overheated. A slow lick of warmth began at my feet and zipped around me like a wave, cradling, hugging until I dropped my hands to my side, struggling between gratitude and irritation at the wizard.

  “I can warm myself, you know.” Even I knew what a brat I sounded like.

  “I know that well, Jani.” Another step and he was in front of me, not too close, but near enough that I could make out the sharp features of his face and spot the silver from his spell dimming in his irises. “You…don’t want me to kiss you?” Just like that day in high school, Bane took the ends of my hair and smoothed them through his fingers, watching each strand as they slipped away from him. “But you kissed me first.”

  Circe…this was dangerous territory. Bane could never know what happened that day, not all of it. In his memory was my parting kiss, the forward witch saying goodbye to him because she wanted to.

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “It was a memorable kiss.”

  He reached for my hair again, but I stepped back, taking all of my hair into my hands to knot it into a bun at the top of my head. “Like you said. This, all of this, is the lines. You wouldn’t be interested if it weren’t for…”

  “Maybe.” His grin returned, the same half-smile that always came over him, but this time Bane looked away, like he tried to fight it and looking at me directly would give away how amused he was. Gods, it was my favorite expression he made. “Or maybe there’s always been something there. Maybe I’ve always been drawn to you for a reason.”

  “And that reason doesn’t matter, does it? Not when we have a job to do and a search to lead. And especially not when you are betrothed to a viciously jealous witch who will be on that search.”

  He didn’t seem to like when I leveled reality at him. He’d called me a mood spoiler the other night. I supposed I was, but then, I’d just lost my best friend. There wasn’t anything or anyone that would take the anger from me. Not even a kiss from the boy I let slip through my fingers.

  Looking down, Bane moved his fingers into his beard, rubbing it smooth before he nodded once, seeming determined when he glanced back at me. “Let me help you. You know I can. No one knows this land better than me.”

  He wasn’t wrong. Bane had made this land, Grant land, his playground when he was a kid. It was a running joke how often his uncle had to send out wizards and cast spells to find him when he was a kid and wanted to keep to himself. If the creature had killed Freya near Grant territory, then its scent and trail wouldn’t be far behind. I could track, but Bane had been schooled in the craft by some of the best clerics in the world. He could find this creature faster than anyone.

  “Fine,” I finally said, the word like nails in my mouth. “But understand this: whoever killed Freya doesn’t get a pass.” He watched me, the threatening smile dying the longer he kept his attention on my face. When my mouth tightened and the flash of that scream returned inside my head, I frowned, the anger surfacing again. “They’re dead and I get to do it.”

  Bane opened his mouth, posed to speak, but closed it again, moving his head to the right. “Have you ever…”

  “Promise me,” I interrupted, waving my hand to kill the warming spell he’d conjured. Depending on him to take care of me wouldn’t make watching him with Cari any easier. My defenses needed to be up, beginning now. “Or I go on my own.”

  Whatever gave Bane pause, he didn’t mention. But the look he gave me spoke volumes. Maybe there were memories, ones I hadn’t taken from him running through his mind. Maybe he was remembering us before our mothers died, before higher and lower covens meant anything at all to either of us. Maybe he remembered the girl I’d been when I doodled his initials in my notebook and erased each line the second I did, knowing he’d likely taken sneaks at the artwork on my paper. Maybe there was a repeat of my kiss moving through his head and Bane wondered what had changed that girl who poured every inch of herself into the slow, methodical ministrations of her lips and tongue against his because she wanted to make an impression. Whatever he thought in the delayed pause, he watched me, shifted his worry into something that looked a lot like resignation. Then Bane nodded, pressing his lips together like it was the only way to keep from asking why or who or how many. “I…promise you.”

  “Good,” I said, my voice breaking before I cleared it. “Now, hand me my mug and keep your lips to yourself.”

  Nine

  There was light and dark in the world. There was light and dark in the lines and we were taught from an early age that they were like a raging fire—beautiful, magnetic, something of great, shuttering power, but also deadly, destructive.

  I knew about pyros. I knew that the bend of one’s
will to the siren call of the lines was sometimes more tempting than the heat of a blaze or the destruction one single flame can cause. But until I stood on Bane’s empty porch, watching the convergence of were packs, dens, and regional covens flocking around the property, I never knew just how naive I’d been. Even the din of their voices, their laughter, their arguing, did not register above that sweet, melodic hum of the lines. That siren song was strong that night, stronger than I’d ever heard it before.

  The song was something out of a fairytale. There was light and melody, love and comfort coursing in the lines. There was truth and beauty and a dozen, a million truths I never knew I needed to know coursing between those hums. It was all that I was, all my folk would ever be, and all of it—all that truth, all the answers—was a few hundred feet away. Batty had unlocked something inside of me, something more volatile than my nex, something that opened me up completely to the raw feel of that magic and the pulse it brought to the forest around us.

  I wasn’t the only one to sense that great power. For weres, the raw song of lines unhindered by the Elam tempted them with the animalistic need to join, to meld with the earth and embrace their primal selves. For witches and wizards, the pull was not so subtle. My fingers itched to strip myself bare. My skin was tight. My pores, open. I wanted to be naked. I wanted to feel the vibration of the ley lines against my skin and bathe in the moonlight that fell brightest in the hollow of trees at the center of Bane’s property. Perhaps especially with the rage and weight of Freya’s death heavy in in my mind, I wanted to be free from the hindrance of civilized society.

  I wasn’t alone.

  Lennon kept fidgeting with his sleeves, rolling them up, untucking his shirt and casting eager glances toward the forest and the darkness that hid the lines. And when Mai walked along the riverbank, shedding her light jacket, Lennon’s baser inclinations seemed to rise to the surface. His gaze followed my twin, watching her every movement like an animal prowling, and she seemed to eat up the attention, smiling, giving him some ridiculous come-hither glance that had me blinking.