by Bella Klaus
“Thanks.” After shouldering on my leather jacket, I looped my arm through Beatrice’s, and strode out into Upper Brook Street and rounded the corner to Grosvenor Square.
Beatrice glanced over her shoulder. “I booked us a table at Gordon Ramsay’s Bar—”
“Sorry, Bea,” I said with a groan. “Can we eat at mine? I’m having a bit of a problem.”
Her steps faltered. “What’s wrong?”
I pulled up my sleeve. “This bracelet won’t come off.”
“Try warm water and lots of soap.” She reached into the pocket of her jacket and extracted her smartphone. “Let me cancel the reservation and get us something out of Deliveroo. Is Thai okay?”
I inhaled a deep breath, my heart melting with gratitude. Beatrice and I were so different. While she was an extraverted tax specialist who loved taking risks, I was an introverted shop assistant who liked to play things safe.
Maybe it was because of our differences that we got along. She was generous, exciting, and always willing to show me new things and places around London. I thought she liked my stabilizing influence, and knew she loved being my guinea pig for herbs and crystals and healing techniques. Whatever it was between us, we worked to create a balanced friendship.
We were about to cross the road to cut through Grosvenor Square, but I steered her alongside the Georgian houses that bordered the square, saying I wanted to take the long route.
Each of the buildings bordering the huge garden was pretty much the same: seven-stories tall, brick townhouses that contained offices, embassies, and those wealthy enough to afford an apartment in Mayfair.
Istabelle was fortunate enough to have purchased an entire floor between World Wars One and Two and had paid off the mortgage decades ago. I still couldn’t believe my luck.
“Christian’s been texting all morning,” Beatrice said with a sigh.
“Christian Gray?” I gave her a playful bump on the shoulder.
She chuckled. “He may as well have been last night.”
A giggle bubbled up in the back of my throat. “No mere man could be that good.”
“He’s better,” she said with a grin. “No hang-ups, no contracts, just a night of pure pleasure.”
I thought Beatrice would divulge why he was better than the Fifty Shades hero and talk about his toned pecs, six-pack abs, and other salacious delights. Instead, she described how handsome he looked across the table in the restaurant, his impeccable manners, dress sense, and witty conversation.
My brows drew into a frown. Beatrice was the Queen of Juicy Details. I lived for her stories because of how she would bring them to life, making me feel like I was the one enjoying her exciting adventures.
All this talk of his personality made me think he’d already burrowed under her skin and was making his way to her heart.
As we reached the end of the road and rounded the corner, I asked, “Are you planning on seeing him again?”
“We’re meeting again,” she said with a happy sigh. “He’s been sending me texts the entire morning and wants me to go to his work’s Halloween bash next weekend.”
Beatrice had had several casual relationships of varying lengths and with some of the most exciting-sounding men in London. There was the independent filmmaker we met at the iMax cinema cafe, who had approached us with his photographer friend, the footballer who took her to New York for Valentine’s day, and the bass guitarist who was now on tour with Elton John.
She always played it cool, never getting attached, but this was the first time she’d ever agreed to see one so soon after the first date.
I bit down on my lip, listening to her rave about Christian, wondering if it was wise to jump into things with a guy so quickly.
My only relationship, we took things slowly and even then—I shook off those thoughts. That man didn’t belong anywhere in my head.
As we reached my building on the corner, something small and warm brushed against my leg. I glanced down to find Macavity trotting toward the communal front door with his tail in the air.
Macavity’s fur was a perfect leopard skin, with circular and U-shaped black spots filled with brown. He had either run away from home or was cheating on me with his true owner.
He certainly wasn’t a stray because Bengal cats like him could cost up to five thousand pounds in London. Also, he wore a collar around his neck engraved with his name. This cat was exceptionally gorgeous, and for some reason, he chose to spend his time with me.
I placed the key in the front door, and Macavity bolted down the black-and-white-tiled hallway and up the marble stairs.
Beatrice chuckled. “Somehow, he always manages to beat the elevator.”
While we walked down the end of the hall and waited for it to arrive, Beatrice fired up her Deliveroo app and checked on the delivery. According to the GPS display, the driver had already picked up the meal and was ten minutes away.
My apartment was one of several studios that took up the attic space of our Georgian building. Istabelle called it compact and bijou, but I called it home.
The first time I stepped into the apartment, I fell in love with the quartet of tall windows overlooking the leafy square. Daylight flooded the studio’s ivory walls, making it look larger than its twenty-by-thirty-foot size.
On the right was my sofa bed, which still lay in its unfolded state with two dressers on either side that doubled as coffee tables.
On the left, a huge unit of closets took up the entire wall, arranged around a dressing table alcove where I’d placed a flatscreen TV and DVD player. There was even enough space for a tiny glass-top table with two dining chairs.
Beatrice headed for the kitchen at the back wall, which was a row of slate-gray units with a built-in oven, microwave, and fridge. She picked up the kettle and filled it up at the sink.
“Green tea?” She opened the top cupboard and rifled through my shelf of herbal brew.
“Actually, I’m going to try out your suggestion. Back in a second.” I padded to the right of the studio and into the bathroom.
It was more of a wet room than anything else, with a sunflower showerhead at the very end of the narrow room, a mirror unit, and a generous sink considering its size.
Macavity already sat perched on the counter by the sink, lounging on his haunches as though readying himself for a show.
“Hungry?” I asked.
He glanced down at the crystals encasing my wrist.
“Yeah.” I turned on the tap, dispensed a generous dollop of liquid soap, and then murmured what happened to Macavity under the sound of the running water.
Beatrice was a great friend, but I couldn’t confide in her about the Supernatural World. Besides, the conversation never came up. She knew I grew up on the other side of the River Thames, which was sort-of true because Logris was all the way in South London.
The supernaturals who established it in the seventeenth century carved out a chunk of Richmond Park and sectioned it into areas for vampires, witches, shifters, and elemental mages. Angels, demons and faeries also occupied the space, but they mostly lived in different realms.
Beatrice also knew I’d had my heart broken by an older man, but that was the most I could tell her without arousing suspicion.
The water warmed my skin, and I ran my soapy fingers over the stones embedded in my flesh. They seemed darker than they had been in the shop, and cloudier, as though their clarity had downgraded from triple-A to A.
“It’s not working,” I muttered.
Macavity tilted his head to the side. “Meow?”
“Soap and water mixed together can dislodge tight jewelry,” I said. “Humans use it—”
The cat recoiled as though I was suggesting I give him a bath.
“Alright, I’ll shut up, then.”
Macavity gave me an approving nod.
After rinsing off the soap, I opened the mirror cabinet and extracted a glass jar of Dharma salt. If it was powerful enough to suck out corrupted magic from a pr
eternatural vampire, it would surely remove the curse keeping those wretched stones attached to my skin.
After scooping up a generous amount with my fingers, I set to work trying to ease the melting salt beneath the crystals. The firestone darkened even further to a deep orange and then to a henna brown.
“Bloody hell,” I snarled.
Macavity jumped down from the counter, bolted to the door, and tapped on it in a demand to be let out.
With a frustrated breath, I trudged across the bathroom and opened the door. It looked like I was on my own.
When I glanced down at my wrist, there was no sign of the bracelet. In its place was a tattooed ring of hearts.
Chapter Three
A week later, I was still saddled with the tattoo, and nothing could get rid of it. Istabelle couldn’t fathom how firestone could have transformed itself from crystal to ink, and she concluded that it must have dissolved with the Dharma salt.
That sounded a little bogus, but I had to admit that I hadn’t kept my eyes on the bracelet the entire time it had been on my wrist.
I left messages on Aunt Arianna’s phone, asking her if she knew anything about firestone. As a witch, she might know more about the crystal’s properties, but I didn’t hear back from my aunt and decided that reaching her so close to Samhain would be futile.
Samhain was one of the nine significant festivals in a witch’s calendar. Each year, the coven spent weeks preparing for the great Sabbat. This particular one was about communing with the dead, as the veil between our world and the afterlife was at its thinnest.
I’d missed the last few, but every night on the thirty-first of October, I would think about the mother I’d never met and wonder if she would return to us as a spirit or reincarnate. This year, I just wanted the Sabbat to be over, so Aunt Arianna could help me figure out what was happening with this firestone.
I sat at the glass dining table with a bowl of hot chocolate I’d made from melting down an entire bar of Green & Black’s dark chocolate with eighty-five percent cocoa solids.
The rich scent of cocoa beans and vanilla filled my nostrils, and I dipped a freshly baked croissant into the delicious drink. Maybe calling it hot chocolate was a stretch, seeing as it was thicker than cream, as dark as coffee, and contained just enough milk to make it liquid.
Macavity perched on the other side of the table, engrossed with his plate of tuna.
My phone rang, and I put Beatrice on speakerphone.
“Mera.” What she said was a garbled sob of words tumbling into each other to form a continuous wail.
A fist of shock hit me in the gut, and I dropped my croissant into the hot chocolate. Beatrice sounded hurt—more than hurt. She sounded worse than she did when her dad had died.
“Slow down.” I picked up the phone and placed it to my ear. “What’s happened?”
“Christian,” she cried. “He’s ghosted me.”
I locked gazes with Macavity, not sure what on earth this meant. The cat blinked, his green irises narrowing.
“Start from the beginning,” I said. “Where are you?”
She hiccuped. “Home.”
I pulled back the phone and checked the time. Eight-thirty. If Beatrice wasn’t on the train, whatever happened had to be bad. “What did Christian say?”
“I went to his flat, thinking we would go out for dinner,” she said through sobs. “He let me in, saying he’d already eaten.”
My brow furrowed. “Okay, so you got a takeaway?”
She made a spluttering sound. “He told me to order something for myself and didn’t even offer me his Deliveroo app!”
I chewed the inside of my cheek, wondering why a guy would invite a girl to his home and make her buy her own food. “What happened next?”
“I couldn’t just get something for myself, so I ordered for both of us. He wolfed his down in front of the TV and didn’t even offer to pay his share.”
“He sounds like a dick.” I stuck my finger in the warm chocolate and placed it in my mouth, barely tasting its rich flavour.
“The worst part was that after we had sex missionary style, he turned away and asked me to leave.”
All the chocolate lodged in my windpipe, and I lurched forward, croaking worse than a psychotic toad. “What?”
“His eyes were so cold,” she said, her voice trembling. “At first, I thought something was troubling him, and I asked if he was alright.”
My fists thumped at my chest, King-Kong style. “What did he say?”
Beatrice let out a shuddering sob. “That not everything was about me.”
A bitter taste formed in the back of my throat, and I stared down at Macavity, whose face remained buried in his plate of tuna.
What Beatrice described reminded me a little of my own experience, although my relationship unfolded over years and culminated in cold eyes and a frosty dismissal.
“Christian sounds fickle.” I cleared my throat. “Sorry you had to go through that.”
“He didn’t even walk me out to my Uber,” she said.
I shook my head, my heart sinking at the notion that that men everywhere were the same. In the past three years of living vicariously through Beatrice, I’d thought that human men were kinder than supernatural males since neither party was magical or could treat the other as lesser because of a lack of status.
It looked like things were the same everywhere.
“Have you spoken to him since?” I asked.
“I texted to ask how his meeting went. Just to give him the benefit of the doubt.” She paused to blow her nose.
Holding my breath, I waited for her to continue. This had to be where he either called or texted back to say it was over.
“Do you know what he said?” Beatrice asked.
“No?”
“That one date doesn’t make a relationship, and I should stop bothering him.”
I stared down at the phone. “What?”
She laughed. “Psycho, right?”
“At least you got to see his awful personality before you could fall in love.” I cringed as I said the words. They seemed so clinical and callous given that Beatrice was still crying about Christian, but I meant what I’d said.
She’d been seeing this guy for less than a week, and he’d pursued her every day with a fervor that had swept her off her feet. My relationship had extended for years. Years of courtship, years of getting to know each other, and years of sweet promises.
He had promised me everything—marriage, children, his crown, and even given me a ring he claimed had belonged to his mother.
For the time we’d been together, his personality had intertwined with mine because we’d met while I was young and still impressionable. We even shared similar tastes in food and coffee and wine because he was the one who introduced me to fine cuisine.
Hearing Beatrice explain how Christian denied they’d even had a relationship was an echo from my past. Christian had pursued Beatrice and made plans for Halloween and Christmas.
He’d even invited her to his apartment, just like how that vampire had bought me the gown, dressed me in jewels, only so I could look like an overdressed clown and get rejected in front of Logris high society.
“How could I have been so stupid?” she asked.
I exhaled a long breath. “Did he give you any indication he was lying?”
“No.”
“From everything you told me, he was pursuing you,” I said. “He sounds like a man with a sadistic streak and a short attention span.”
She sniffed. “On some level, I knew he was too good to be true. A sexy banker who wasn’t boring?”
“Some people would say that about tax accountants,” I said.
Beatrice chuckled. “I probably dodged a bullet. Imagine getting a shitty text like that after being with him for months.”
My chest tightened, and I lowered my gaze to the bowl of hot chocolate. There was no need for me to picture a situation like that because I’d lived it. Lived it fo
r the past three years, endured the betrayal, recurring memories, and bouts of fury that arouse from those harsh words. If it hadn’t been for Istabelle, I might never have survived it.
“That would be devastating.” I picked up the croissant, letting a trail of chocolate seep back into the bowl.
Just as I was about to place it in my mouth, Macavity raced across the table, snatched the pastry, and jumped down to the wood floor.
I glowered at his retreating back as he darted into the bathroom. What the hell was his problem?
“Why don’t we meet for lunch?” I said. “While the food’s cooking, I can perform a sound bath and wash that man out of your aura.”
Beatrice let out a pleasured groan. “That sounds heavenly. Can we move it to dinner instead? I don’t want to sleep alone tonight.”
I inhaled a deep breath, my spirits lifting with the hope that this time next month, Beatrice would have written Christian off as a loser who couldn’t be honest about his intentions. “Sure.”
“Thanks, Mera,” she murmured. “I really needed that. The next time someone acts so keen, I’ll slow things down and take time to get to know them.”
My face broke out into a grin. “Brilliant.”
Beatrice sighed. “I wish I could be as strong as you.”
After she said goodbye and hung up, I couldn’t help but think she was wrong. True strength was about taking chances, even though the price of that might be getting hurt.
Beatrice embodied that sense of courage. Me? I was too busy trying not to dwell on past hurts to give myself the opportunity for new love.
I dipped my finger in the hot chocolate and took a long suck of the sweet, velvety liquid. It was rich and sensual and bittersweet, reminding me of romance.
The next time we went out together and were approached by two men, I would make an effort to be friendlier to the other guy. Maybe the way to get over a broken heart was to move on and rebuild it with exciting experiences instead of living through someone else.
By loving with all her heart and never holding back, and by learning lessons along the way, Beatrice was giving herself the best chance of finding happiness and love.
