by Eden Butler
“Isn’t that the case with everyone they don’t know? Blood or not?” I ignored the snort Cari released at my small dig and walked forward.
“True enough,” Bane answered, shooting a glare to his fiancée. She stepped back, pausing near a clearing to dig water from one of the guard’s packs as we moved on. Bane continued, “But this sort,” he nodded at the faint rush of water up ahead, “they are odd to say the least.”
“Maybe they just like keeping to themselves.” Bane grinned as though he’d half-expected my reaction. And when he kept smiling I stopped walking. “What?”
“You, Jani.” The laughter held just a second longer and then Bane sighed, giving up the idea about keeping things to himself. “Never once have I heard you say something hostile about anyone. Well, except Cari for being rude to you, and Ronan, but even his mother talks shit about him.” That grin moved a little but didn’t disappear when he glanced back at me. “How is it you’ve lived for ten years in the city, with mortals, no less, and you still don’t speak ill of folk?”
I shrugged. “What good is ill speak? Isn’t there enough wrong in this world? Why add to it?” The smile left his lips and they went soft, easy. Not quite a grin, nowhere near to a frown. And then came that long, aching look of his again. There’d never be a time when that look was usual to me. “Come on, Bane. We’re getting close.”
“Jani Benoit,” he started, ignoring my little demand as I passed him. Bane didn’t move, but I heard his words as he watched me walking away. “Jani Benoit and that sweet, sweet tongue.”
“What?” I stopped, scared that he might try to pick up where things had come too close to losing control in the kitchen. Surely he couldn’t remember what had really happened ten years ago. My block had worked. I knew it. But that didn’t keep the worry from my mind or ease the burn of anxiety in my gut.
“You think I’ve forgotten the last I saw you?” The familiar teasing glint came back into his eyes and some of my worry lessened to see him lighten up.
When I remained silent, shooting a glance to the group behind us, my brother and Cari among them, who had stopped in the clearing to rest, Bane’s gaze followed mine. Then he stood, facing the woods, his back to the group, face forward, but his attention was on me. He didn’t seem to hold a shred of hesitation when he spoke. “I meant the day in Matthews’ class when you came at me like you wanted to climb inside.” My eyes widened and he laughed. “Didn’t think you had it in you, Jani, but one minute I’m standing there watching Matthews talking to you about some mortal career advice, and the next thing I know you’re all around me with your mouth on mine.” Bane was large, primal, and it took only his approach and that smooth, slick look in his eyes to have me retreat, looking for some purchase that would keep us from touching. How was it he was remembering even this much?
I walked further up the trail, moving away from the wizard and the crowd, and deposited my pack against a pine tree among a small cluster to distract myself. But Bane seemed intent on following, intent on not keeping to any agreements we made about sticking to the job at hand. What was it? Why did he seem capable of maintaining any professionalism with everyone but me?
Pulling out my water bottle, I downed what remained, doing my best to ignore the man when he squatted next to where I’d sat against a thick pine tree. Suddenly, I didn’t feel anything but his signature and that low, earthly whisper of the lines singing to me.
“Funny how I didn’t mind you clearly subduing me with a spell, but damn if I didn’t care.” He looked at me like he’d never seen my equal. “For the life of me, I don’t know what it is about you.” His gaze lifted along with his fingers, skimming along my forehead. “Anytime you’re around me I go a little stupid.” He narrowed his eyes, dropping his hand as though something had just occurred to him. “You twisting a hex on me?”
My small laugh took the glare from his expression. “After all this time? Really?”
“Hmm.” There was the slow, cautious rake of his gaze down my body, the hesitation of that look over my chest, to the small curve of flesh barely visible beneath my thin shirt and heavy scarf. Still, Bane looked as though it was his right to take whatever he wanted. And exactly like he wanted every square inch of what he saw.
“You know, Mr. Iles, when a man looks at me the way you are now, I generally ask that he buy me dinner first, at least say please.”
Bane licked his lips, the bottom of his mouth twitching between a smile and the fight to hold it back. “I’m not a man, Miss Benoit.” He moved closer, close enough to kiss me, fast enough to make it a threat. “And I damn well don’t say please.”
Behind him Wyatt cleared his throat and I offered the were a relieved smile, but Bane didn’t let me pass when I stood, grabbing my pack. He treated me to another of those long, dark looks, this one promising how eager he was not to say please.
“It’s higher coven blood that maintains the balance,” Cari told Bane, who seemed to not be listening to her. He nodded intermittently as we moved through the trail, his attention on the woods and the movement through them as his fiancée droned on. “It’s why we are left unaffected by the lines, don’t you agree, my love?”
Next to me, Sam threw me a look, complete with an eye roll at the asinine witch’s droning voice. For his part, Bane didn’t seem inclined to agree.
“No, Cari, I don’t agree.” He nodded toward another path leading to the left and we followed.
“There? You’re sure?” For all her flaws, Cari wasn’t useless. She held him back, her hand against his chest before any of us followed him toward another trail. “Something…just around that bend.”
He paused, shooting me a look, and Sam and I both moved to flank him. Wyatt led the weres, each crouching, not transforming, but on alert as Bane’s guards pulled Cari back and we readied ourselves for whatever lay hidden in the brush.
Sam nodded to the far right, twisting his hand to bring forth a hex, and I followed with my left, drawing on the lines to pull in the smallest sliver of raw magic to strengthen the hex just as Bane drew in a long inhale, squaring his shoulders. He was a brute, letting the lines fill him, the visible runes on his arms glowing as he lifted his hands over his shoulders.
“Ionsaí,” Bane said, and a burst of light shot from his hands, circling the brush and the saplings around it. Sam and I moved, flanking the wizard as he charged forward and met the biggest bobcat I’d ever seen, scared and crouching in the center of the now open woods.
I thought of Freya, my sweet friend and what that creature had done to her. My heart could not stand it. My rage would not be tamed.
The animal pounced. Its loud scream cracking like a whip across the forest, it lunged at Wyatt, catching the were across the arm before the animal went still, as though suspended in amber, frozen by the charm I threw at its chest. With a thump, it hit the ground, sagging, unmovable.
“You’ve…killed it…” Sam said, grabbing my still-charged and tingling hands. He covered them, face tight as the raw magic coursed through me, pulling at me like an electric current. “Is it…Jani, is this the one…”
“No…no,” I told my brother, tightening my eyes when Bane knelt at my side, looking over the fallen animal. “This isn’t a magical creature.”
One look at his face told me my brother was right. I’d let the lines bleed too much magic into my hex. An innocent animal was dead by my hands because I’d let it rule me and hadn’t controlled myself.
“You see, Bane?” Cari said, approaching the dead bobcat, her gaze shooting to me and my shaking hands still covered in my brother’s grip. “This wouldn’t have happened to a higher coven witch.”
I stood, ready to charge at her, but Sam held me back just as Bane took Cari’s arm and led her toward the trail.
An hour later, Cari slept, aided by whatever potion it was I’d smelled her brewing—lavender and valerian root from the scent of it—in a tent on the opposite side of the encampment with her own fire and two guards watching over her. Wyatt
sported a make-shift bandage I’d fashioned from one of my scarves, staying the bleeding from his wound. He, Sam, and Joe moved around the woods with Bane’s remaining guards to scout for any lingering predators or the creature that had killed Freya. I was left with Bane and Hamill, trying to focus on centering myself and controlling my magic. I couldn’t let the lines overtake me again.
Lost in my failure, my thoughts, Cari’s words hung in my mind, teasing, taunting, each one a bitter rake against my self-confidence.
“This wouldn’t have happened to a higher coven witch.”
Was she right? Was there some innate power gifted to the higher covens I’d never understand? Is that why Carter and my father had been so insistent about keeping me away from Bane?
A chill worked up my spine at the thought and I lowered my forehead against my arms, thinking how close I’d come to destroying everything. What if that had been a magical creature I killed?
The covens came from every region within a thousand miles. Some from even further away. As we’d ventured through the forest, bypassing small encampments made up of tidy cottages and solitary cabins barely noticeable if you weren’t really looking for them, the realization had hit that Bane’s coven and the influence it held stretched throughout most of the Gulf Coast region. Possibly, all states south of the Mason-Dixon line.
There had always been this unspoken knowledge about the Grants: of the fifty or so covens in Crimson Cove, theirs was the oldest. They held the deciding vote when the board could not reach a unanimous decision. They sorted out the most delicate squabbles among the lower covens. They oversaw but didn’t judge—supposedly. They counseled, not controlled, and if the vast acreage and reach of the neighboring covens was anything to go by, the Grants were wealthier, more powerful, more important than I had ever understood.
This stuck in my mind as we settled for the night near a small pecan grove. The trees had begun to lose their drying leaves and most of the nuts had been gathered or eaten by the squirrels who jumped from limb to limb above us.
“Feel anything yet?”
That was the third time Hamill Donaldson had asked me that question within an hour. He was a tall, lanky wolf shifter from Birmingham, a third or fourth cousin, I’d gathered, to Wyatt. He, like Joe, had been added to the group when a warring pack from Memphis decided they didn’t want Wyatt’s kin near their daughters. Not surprising. Those wolves were a cagey sort.
Hamill had the look of a man not well suited for company, someone who wasn’t altogether unpleasant looking, but he frowned just enough to seem unapproachable. Where Wyatt was friendly, maybe a tad too flirty, Hamill was distant and kept glancing at me as though I didn’t warrant much more than a passing thought.
“No,” I told him yet again, settling closer toward the fire on my side of the encampment. There were several pallets of sleeping bags and small, flat pillows made up beyond the tree line. Bane had kept Cari away from me, thank the gods, especially since she’d taken great pleasure in my failure. Her insults hadn’t ended when I killed the animal. But at least Bane knew my nerves had been tested.
Hamill stood across the fire, looking as though he expected me to elaborate why I couldn’t feel the Elam yet, and when I only sipped from the thermos of warm Yorkshire tea, spiked with whiskey that burned just a bit, the shifter made a small noise that I supposed might have been a threat.
“Is there a problem?”
He didn’t answer and rocked on his heels, looking as though he might strip and shift into his wolf right then and there. But I wasn’t some simpering coward completely neutralized by a decade in the big city. I knew who I was, what I was capable of doing.
His low warning growl deepened as my gaze swept over his face, to the tight snarl of his top lip and the twitch that moved his cheek just below his eye. In the breath I took, there was a hint of his pheromones, thick and earthy, but I knew they had not been released to entice me. Any witch with half a brain knew that shifters, and even some wizards, let arguments and certainly violence wake some primal beast within. Just then it seemed that Hamill wanted to fight or fuck, and only one of those options were open for me, as far as he was concerned. There was definitely no “let me have you” vibe coming from the shifter.
He stretched his neck, that growl muting his words when he spoke. “Hadn’t you best do your job?”
Another sip of tea and my gaze stayed right on his face. The warning was still there, and I got the feeling that whatever it was that had made the shifter irrationally angry had little to do with me. At least, I hoped that was the case. Still, I wouldn’t sit around waiting for him to strike.
“Back off.”
But my anger only induced a deeper growl from the shifter, and as he began to transform—the crackle of bone twisting and the smooth, fine sheen of fur emerging from his skin—my thermos hit the ground and I absorbed a touch of the lines in the distance. It took little effort, barely a call to the lines at all, for the funnel of strength, of blind, raw magic to come right at me.
Big damn mistake.
I was too near them. There was no buffer, and my anger, my fear bubbled up and shot out of me, made my body a conductor, feeding on emotion as I lifted my arms, fingers pointed right at Hamill’s morphing chest. A blinding, swift flash of light, a swirl of heat, and the shifter yelped, a wolfish squeal of pain, and then I heard the familiar rumble of a curse behind me and someone or something clamped down against my arms, taking me to the cold ground with a thud.
Moments passed like melting ice. I couldn’t say how long it was. But suddenly, there were a lot of voices—Wyatt’s, Joe’s, Sam’s, ones I didn’t know, and then Bane, soothing, consoling just as he held me to the ground.
“Is he dead?” Bane asked.
Bile thickened in the back of my throat.
It wasn’t me asking the question, and the fear that had me rushing to grab hold of the lines morphed into something ancient and ugly. Worry, remorse—two things that tended to control my stupider decisions—flooded me like a wave I could not swim away from.
“Wyatt, check him,” he said, my cheek against the dirt with his chest planted on my back.
I shuddered, and the air came back into my lungs, then out again with a ragged cough. “Off,” I ordered Bane and he shot up, releasing my body, but his attention remained focused on my face.
“Jani…”
“Did I kill him?” I asked, rolling onto my back, my hands scrubbing over my face. No need in delaying. If I’d let the lines consume me again and the full force of my power came out of my fingertips, then there was no way Hamill could have survived.
Bane knelt beside me as rocks and twigs from the ground bit into my back and he covered my body with his shadow, guarding me from the small crowd that hovered near Hamill’s downed body. He looked over his shoulder, seeming seeking an answer.
“Good.” Bane only spoke, only exhaled when Wyatt nodded at him, a wordless acknowledgement that I hadn’t killed the wolf. “He’s fine,” he confirmed as I sat up. My brother moved to the left, stepping as sentry, on guard as though Wyatt and Joe would want some retribution for my attack. Bane seemed to be of the same mind and didn’t move, keeping his back to me and his elbows out as if he anticipated a reaction as they carried Hamill off.
Finally, the worried conversations, the theories on how to treat a half-transformed, fully unconscious shifter died beneath the crunch of dried leaves and the faint sound of the river running past the grove returned.
Sam turned, tossing the large limb in his hand to the ground as Bane helped me to sit up. “Sè,” he said, scrubbing his face, “you cannot…”
“I know…I know this, Samedi.” I lowered my head, rubbing my neck as I tried to block out the worry I felt pulsing from both my brother and Bane.
“Hawthorn,” Sam said. “Will that help you?” When I didn’t answer, he touched the back of my head. “Near the ridge behind the camp I spotted some new blooms. I’ll fetch a few and brew it. Wi?”
I nodde
d but didn’t answer, keeping my head down until my brother’s steps and signature grew fainter.
“You going to be okay?” Bane asked, moving his hand to my back.
“I was protecting myself.” I told him, my focus still on my boots and the mound of clay dirt at my feet. There was an imagined look of disappointed I didn’t want to see from him.
“Which is why they didn’t demand any recompense from you.”
“I didn’t expect…” I jerked my head up, worry and surprise making my pulse increase.
Bane watched the fire blaze bright. “Untethered lines, unsecured lines, Jani, will kill you, take you over if you let them.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?” He spun around, expression twisted and angry. “We’ve been walking for hours, trying to get you as close to the Elam’s signature as possible. After the animal…why in Hera’s name would you tap into the damn lines?”
“It was…instinctual… Besides, you can handle it. I thought I could too.”
“You are not me.” He stared off toward Wyatt and his group, head shaking.
“Because Cari’s right? Because I’m lower coven?”
For the first time, Bane expression when he looked at me was cold. A small twitch curled the skin beneath his right eye as he turned, moving toward me like he would attack, but stopped short when I got to my feet. “You…would think that…of me?”
Unthinking, I stepped closer than I intended. I didn’t notice, until Bane’s jaw worked and he ground his teeth together, that being close to me might be too much for him to stomach. Something shifted in the air. A spark of light that pulsed and flickered but would not ignite. It didn’t come from the lines or from any magic either of us conjured. Bane watched me, his expression open, wounded, and I was powerless to do anything but stare at him, trying to organize the words and make them make any sense at all.
No, I thought. Bane had never been like any of his fold. He might have their name and their money, their power and influence, but he’d never much cared about hierarchies or social standards.
