by A. W. Exley
You’re welcome to try, Elijah thought as he stared at the man who had ordered his father killed. He wanted to step towards him and say, My name is Elijah Seton. You killed my father. Prepare to die. But this wasn’t the time. He was outnumbered and he wouldn’t risk Hector.
He had taken stock of his enemy and now he would formulate his plan.
The butler moved forward and gestured to the door.
Elijah nodded to Beatrice and then followed Hector from the room. They were silent all the way through the servants’ hallways. They were halfway along the road back to the cottage before Hector broke the silence.
“I don’t know about you, lad, but the whole time I was staring at his throat, wondering if I was strong enough to snap his bloody neck.” He kept his tone low in case seekers were following them home.
“I had a similar thought,” Elijah replied, although he had been conflicted between lunging for Hamilton or thumping Lawson. “We can’t openly attack him, as there are too many of them. We need to find another way, like Aunt Lettie did in Whiterock.”
Hector grunted. “Samuel Thorn spent forty years setting the groundwork for that. You’re a smart lad. Come up with something that doesn’t take that long. I want to see the smug look wiped off that bastard’s face for what he did.”
“I’ll come up with something, Hector. I promise.” He just didn’t know what. His aunt Lettie had channeled her rage to summon the ocean to destroy the Ocram Soarer mansion. While using his element to rattle the Hamilton house off its hillside would be satisfying, he didn’t think it would redress the balance. He needed to do something bigger that would utterly destroy the Hamilton clan.
Then he remembered Beatrice jumping to his defence, and guilt knotted in his gut. What was he going to do?
The next day, as he entered the mill building and turned towards his usual destination, Mr Baxter called out to him.
“Yes, sir?” Elijah said.
“There’s a change of work for today and you will not be assisting Miss Hamilton. Mr Hamilton has said you are to report to the storeroom.” He waved his pencil to the room beyond the warehouse.
Elijah rooted himself to the spot. Last night, Hamilton had confirmed that Elijah was to assist Beatrice with her little hobby. What events had unfolded after he’d left that had changed that? “But I have not finished weaving silk for Miss Hamilton’s project.”
The pencil pointed back to him. “You have been reassigned, unless you want to anger Mr Hamilton.”
“No, sir.” Elijah suspected he already had angered him.
Work in the storeroom was repetitive and boring. Unlike watching the loom, where he had to pay attention, restocking all the bolts and spools gave him plenty of time to formulate, and then abandon, plans. He needed a way to bring down the family without affecting all the innocent people who relied on the mill for employment.
By late afternoon, he had the perfect idea: kill their phoenix. With the life and symbol of their clan gone, they would crumble. All he needed now was to figure out how to gain access to the highly guarded and secretive chamber that held the fiery bird.
There was the slight problem of how you killed a bird who supposedly could regenerate itself and was a symbol of immortality. It must be possible, since history said that after the Warders thwarted the plot against Elizabeth I, the monarch had the responsible Soarer family’s phoenix killed and baked into a pie. If only history had also passed down how she had done that, along with the recipe.
The whistle blew knockoff time and he laboured on, under strict instructions to finish unpacking all the crates before he could go. The mill had an eerie stillness about it by the time he put the last spool on a shelf. A glance at his pocket watch told him it was approaching 9:00 p.m.
As he walked through the empty warehouse, he contemplated his next course of action. He needed to find some calm in his mind before he walked back to the village. It would be unfair on Hector and Marjory to vent his frustration on them. Elijah stepped into the dark and walked around the side of the mill, moving towards the river.
The moonlight played with the rushing water and dotted sparkling gems along the surface. The peaceful gurgle of the river over rocks soothed his mind. He wasn’t an undine, but rivers and lakes did more to organise his thoughts than any field or hill.
He would prevail in Kessel. He had vowed to his family that he would. But each day it seemed harder to achieve, and his attempts to find the Esmeralda were going nowhere.
A rustle from the trees made him peer into the dark. Had he disturbed a fox? A shape stood and brushed out heavy skirts. No fox, but a vixen.
“I’m sorry. I thought I was alone out here,” he said. He should head home. Marjory would be watching the minutes pass by on the clock over the mantel and he didn’t want to cause her to worry.
“As did I,” came the voice of Beatrice Hamilton. Moonlight caressed her face as she moved from under the shadow of the tree’s canopy. The sharp planes of her face cast shadows of their own and made her seem otherworldly. Her hair was pulled free of its bun and cascaded down her back in curls and ringlets.
“I’ll leave you in peace.” He turned to go, not wanting to add to whatever trouble she was already in.
“Wait. Don’t go. I missed you today.” Her words curled around him and held him tight.
“I missed you, too,” he whispered in response. “I assume moving me to the stockroom was a punitive measure. What happened after I left last night?”
“Uncle was unhappy with me. Apparently I shouldn’t defy him in front of a common labourer. As punishment, he took my toys away from me for the day.” She tried to laugh, but it was a sad and forced thing.
She stood next to him, and they watched the river flow towards the mill. The dark stripped away who they were in the harsh light. They were no longer Warder and Soarer on opposing sides of a divide. Under the velvet sky, they were simply a boy and a girl who were drawn to one another.
His breathing seemed too loud in the silence while he racked his brain for something to say. Talking about her family was too fraught and opened up old wounds. He needed a different topic. Perhaps he could ask her view on Cicero’s canons of rhetoric? Or seek her opinion on Darwin’s evolutionary theory?
What he really wanted to do was discover what her lips tasted like.
“Do you ever wish you lived a different life?” Her voice was a soft whisper from beside him.
“Yes.” He imagined one in which his father lived and his mother was a woman with a gentle heart, not one consumed by greed. He dreamed of a life where the woman standing next to him wasn’t a Soarer, but someone he could freely love.
Beatrice reached out and laced her fingers with his. Her skin was dry heat against his. The spark ignited, and a soft orange glow encompassed their hands as the Cor-vitis wound tendrils around their knuckles.
“If we met in a dream, what would you do?” she asked.
“I would ask you to dance.” He turned and put a hand on her waist and drew her closer to him, lifting their clasped hands as though he were waiting for music to start. They waltzed a few steps over the grass to the music of the gushing river. Beatrice laughed, and this time it sounded genuine. Elijah halted, wrapped his arms around her, and pulled her tight to his chest.
She sighed as she rested her head on his chest, their clasped hands caught between the two of them. The glowing plant sent out gossamer-thin tendrils to explore their skin.
“What do you dream about?” he asked, curious what a woman who had everything would change about her life.
She looked up, and her eyes were a luminescent amber in the moonlight. “I wonder about many things, and it is only in my dreams that I can explore all the possibilities that the world holds.”
His heart tightened in his chest as the moment stretched between them. “If this were a dream, what possibility would you explore to satisfy your curiosity?”
A smile touched her lush lips as she tilted her chin upwards. “I would kiss
a man to see if he ignited the fire within me.”
Elijah slid his hand up her back until he swept aside the weight of her auburn tresses to rest his hand at her nape. He leaned down and brushed his lips against hers. Softly, he teased her, wondering if she would kiss him back or set fire to him. Another part of his mind touched his element, in case he needed to envelop his body with rock if she blasted him.
Beatrice parted her lips and her tongue licked at his. Heat jolted through Elijah. She most definitely set him on fire, and he wanted to burn with her. He buried his hands in her silken locks. The Cor-vitis twined around his fingers and then twisted into her hair, creating a fiery tiara of living jewels. As Elijah held her head captive, he deepened the kiss. His tongue danced with hers as they explored one another.
She made soft gasps that made him think of the tart flavour hit from biting into ripe cherries. The sound was a jolt to his consciousness. He swallowed each noise and sought more. She was delicious and intoxicating, and he didn’t want to stop.
“Trixie,” she murmured against his lips.
“Trixie?” Elijah tried to wrangle his brain to engage in conversation when other parts of his body wanted to take over proceedings.
A soft chuckle blew over his skin. “Beatrice is such a stuffy, old-fashioned name. In my dreams, the man I kiss, who turns me into something molten, calls me Trixie.”
“Trixie,” he said. The shortened form of her name suited her. It made him think of something small and fiery yet lush, like a shiny cherry. Then he kissed her again, trying different strokes with his tongue to make her gasp again.
Her hands curled into the collar of his jacket and she clung to him. For as long as he kissed her, the world stopped turning and nothing existed except the two of them.
“Beatrice? Stop this silly game of hide-and-seek. It’s time to return home,” a loud voice called out.
She pulled back a fraction and rested her head against his chest. “Blast. I can never escape for long before I am called back to my cage.”
Tendrils of the Cor-vitis pulled apart and dissolved into the air as they increased the distance between them. The sound of Archie’s voice forced them back into the world, and they stood apart again, on opposite sides of a divide.
Elijah drew a deep breath of cool air into his lungs. She had boiled his blood and the rock under his skin retained the heat. “I will stand here every night, dreaming under the stars and waiting for you to dance with me again.”
She kissed him quickly and then stepped away from his embrace.
“Coming, Archie! I needed to relieve myself,” she called out.
Elijah swallowed his laughter. Her reason would stop Archie from venturing further to find her.
He watched her run off into the dark and pondered how his life had changed. He’d journeyed to Kessel with the narrow focus of revenge against the Hamiltons, even if he died in the attempt. Now he had something far bigger to live for: rescuing his mate and showing her the life she deserved.
15
Dawn sat in the parlour with an open book in her lap and the obsidian egg in her palm. She struggled to believe that a fiery bird was trapped within, waiting for a heat intense enough to allow it to be born. All her life it had been a simple paperweight. Only the stories her mother had told in hushed whispers had transformed it into a magical object with a mysterious past.
Her heart ached for her mother. What she would give for just an hour to ask how she’d met Zadoc. While she would always consider James Uxbridge her father, a part of her longed to know about the man who’d helped create her. What did he believe in so passionately that he’d sent away his pregnant mate and gone to his doom?
She sighed and closed the book as Jasper entered the room.
He glanced at her hand. “You know, it won’t hatch just because you hold it tight.”
“I’m not sure what we would do with a phoenix anyway. I wonder what they eat.” She smiled up at him as he leaned down to kiss her.
Jasper sat on the sofa beside her and the cushion bounced as it compensated for his greater bulk. “You need to pack a suitcase. We have a long journey ahead of us. I have received word that the Lord High Warder will see us in Dorset.”
Dawn placed the paperweight in her apron pocket. She liked having it close, both as a reminder of her parents and because it had a soothing effect on her. “Dorset? I would have thought the council was located in London with the other heads of state and government.”
He placed a hand on her nape and rubbed a thumb against her skin. “Our head of state, as it were, has been based in Dorset for centuries.”
“Please tell me we’re not flying,” she murmured as she leaned into his touch.
Jasper barked in laughter. “No. I have booked us train passage, and as luck would have it, one arrives tomorrow that will take us on the first leg of our journey. We shouldn’t be away any longer than a week.”
“We leave our home unguarded. Lettie and Grayson have returned to Whiterock, and Elijah is in Kessel with Marjory and Hector.” Concern for the Ravensblood tree burrowed into her chest. What if their enemies planned a strike while they were absent?
“This place is never unguarded. We are surrounded by good people here. You also forget that the most important piece of this clan, our heart, will be under my personal protection.” He used his hand on her nape to pull her towards him for a deeper kiss.
For a brief moment, Dawn pondered exactly how much heat it took to hatch a phoenix egg. Her mate made her burn so hot that at times she wondered why she didn’t combust.
They had three hundred and forty miles to travel, nearly the length of England. When Jasper had said they would only be gone a week, she hadn’t realised that most of that would be spent sitting in a train. Or worse, at a train station. However, Dawn was relieved that Jasper had no intention of picking her up and flying to Dorset. She was certain she would arrive in a horrid state if he did.
Flying in the arms of your powerful mate was romantic over short distances. But she had discovered that over longer journeys she grew numb, squirmed, and had to keep her mouth shut lest tiny insects wedge themselves between her teeth.
While the train was more civilised, that didn’t stop her mate from grumbling at every stop along the way. It was much nicer to sit and watch the scenery go by with a hot cup of tea. Flying was cold, windy, and bereft of both refreshments and convenience. Although, after eight hours, the soft padding on the seat became as hard as stone, and Dawn spent her time staring out the window and fantasising about a hot bath.
It was the twilight of the next day when they finally emerged from their last train. Thankfully, the bigger routes had allowed them to take a sleeper carriage, and she’d snatched some rest as the gentle motion had rocked her with a mother’s touch.
“We have a hotel room for tonight, and we will see the High Warder tomorrow, when you are feeling fresher,” Jasper said as he saw Dawn to a horse-drawn carriage and waved to the porter to follow with their luggage.
“I just want a bath.” She stepped up into the carriage and quietly hoped the hotel had plumbing.
Jasper winked. “I made sure the hotel had a large tub when I booked our room.”
For the sake of propriety, they were booked in as Lord and Lady Seton. Their pending marital status was a minor technicality that Jasper murmured he would remedy as soon as she said the word.
“Soon,” she replied. She wanted answers first, to understand her origins and why her parents had died, before she could start a fresh life with Jasper.
A hot bath and a lovely big bed did much to revive Dawn, and she woke the next morning in more cheerful spirits. After a large breakfast, the couple left the hotel. Dawn picked at her dress, wondering if she was appropriately clad for meeting the person who ruled over all the Warders.
Jasper caught her hand and raised it to his lips to kiss her fingertips. “Stop worrying. You look beautiful.”
“Will that make up for being the daughter of a salaman
der?” She was still so new to this world and didn’t understand how deeply their prejudices ran. Was being a salamander akin to being from America? Society carried so many layers of prejudice that affected how people interacted. The colour of your skin, your country of origin, or even what suburb you settled in were all up for inspection and judgement. Imagine how novel the world would be if people were judged on their actions instead of how they looked or sounded.
Jasper placed a crooked finger under her chin and tilted her face to him. “You are my mate and the heart of our sanctuary. That is what matters, not who gave you the spark of life.”
She managed a weak smile, but her stomach was contorted in knots. A moment of peace washed over her as she closed her eyes and looked inward, checking each strand that wove together their family. To her, they were a spider web of sparkling silver filaments. At the centre stood Dawn and the Ravensblood tree. There weren’t many strands to their web due to the small number of the family, but it was still a thing of sparse beauty, and each was precious to her.
Elijah’s thread was as strong and still as the others. At least he was safe, for now, whatever he was up to.
Jasper’s voice cut through her quiet reflection. “There is where we are going.”
Dawn peered out of the window at a mansion perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean. At high tide, waves would pound beneath its very feet, as evidenced by the rock carved away. “It looks so remote and imposing.”
Trees swept away from mansion and coastline. One or two turned into clusters, until finally a forest ran back inland. Somewhere among the greenery was the original Ravensblood tree. Dawn hoped the High Warder would let her visit the ancient sentinel.
“The High Warder has always been a saltwater undine, hence the location of the council,” Jasper murmured as the carriage travelled along the sweep of driveway.
She had never met a saltwater undine and knew only what Jasper and Samuel had told her. They were tempestuous Elementals, subject to sudden changes in mood, just like the ocean, and immensely powerful.
