by D. D. Chance
“Well, don’t hang around long on these streets, especially this time of night.”
He snorted, but threaded his fingers gingerly through his hair. “That’s probably good advice.”
We walked to the front of the Crane, and I steeled myself, mentally reinforcing the wards as I unlocked the heavy door, then opened it.
The young magician held out his hand. “I’m Marcus, by the way. Marcus Winter,” he informed me. “And I’m serious. If you ever need help from Twyst Academy, ask for me. They’ll know who you mean.”
“Thanks for that, Marcus. I’m Belle.” Trying hard not to smile, I shook his hand, once again sensing the magic deep within him, a magic recently sharpened to a fine edge. Once again, that curious allure of persuasion swirled around him in a mist of temptation. He was punching a little bit above his weight, sparring with me, but I still enjoyed it. I didn’t want to see him hurt.
“Off you go, then.” I hustled him out the door and closed it sharply behind him before he could begin to ask all the questions that were emerging in his mind now that his brains were sorted out. He would think of those questions on his way home in sharper clarity, but by then, it would be too late. He wouldn’t double back or even remember the White Crane existed. I at least had enough Hogan magic to ensure that.
I turned back to the bar, toying briefly with opening up again to at least the members of the community who could see its flickering lights. But I treasured the silence, and in truth, I was tired. Practicing magic should have been a boon to me. That’s how it was supposed to work—it grew by that which it fed upon. But in practice, that hadn’t been the case for me. I wasn’t sure about my ma. We hadn’t talked about magic. There hadn’t been much point.
I grimaced. She had wanted me to find love. To live a life of my choosing. And even her saying that implied she hadn’t, right? Hers had been another life lost to the shadow of the High King. Such a waste.
I sat down heavily at the table, lifting the bottle of wine to test it. It had only been half full at the start of the evening, so I wasn’t surprised to see it empty. There’d been barely enough for me to dip my fingers into to help heal the boy.
Boy. The word made me smirk. He wasn’t that much younger than I was, but as the saying went, it wasn’t the years, it was the mileage.
I glanced toward the bar. I had plenty of decent bottles of wine behind the counter, and probably a few exceptional ones. I also had the herbal mixtures my grandmother so favored to refortify herself after using magic. A combination of the two might be just the thing…
The sound was quiet, subtle. Barely a burbling.
I slanted a glance down to my empty cup and watched it slowly fill with a richly hued liquid that was nowhere near dark enough to be red wine. The scent wafted up, sweet as death.
Honey mead.
My blood turned to ice.
“Bellllllle…” The word was barely audible, but chilled me further and sent my stomach spinning.
“You’re not welcome here.” I spoke the ancient words in the Fae language with little hope, my gaze remaining on the table just beyond the ancient cup. So many things were old and established in this place, but I and my magic were not one of them. I felt as ignorant as a newborn foal as the figure shifted in the shadows. Was he even really here, or was this yet again an illusion?
“We thought you were dead.” The disembodied voice was louder now, but cold and flat, the energy of it blunted because I refused to look over to where the Fae was speaking. It brimmed over with disdain, though, that much was clear.
“We are dead to you. You don’t control us anymore.”
“You signed a contract.” These words were even more distinct, the accent crisper. Dammit. Still, I couldn’t ignore his taunt, though I kept my gaze angled away.
“A contract that benefited only you. That’s no contract.”
The Fae’s sneer was unmistakable, and so was his improved diction. “We could get the matter adjudicated by your precious high council if that would make you feel better.”
“What would make me feel better is if you left.”
With that jab, I lifted my gaze toward where the voice was coming from and realized my mistake. By responding to the bastard’s voice, I had given him form. I was no longer alone in my own bar. An immense warrior stood in front of the counter, his elbows propped back on its gleaming surface, his long, hard body stretched out at his ease.
And dear gods, what a warrior he was. From the top of his thick, jet-black pile of hair, whipped back into a heavy braid, to his fiercely focused blue eyes, his exquisite cheekbones and rock-set jaw, to the powerfully built body beneath. The guy could have been Thor’s dark-haired twin. He exuded heat and vitality and a hard, decisive purpose. His arms were jacked with muscles, his heavy legs were crossed at the ankles, and his feet were stuffed into scuffed boots that were large and well broken in. He had run in those boots, I decided, surprised at the odd thought. Everything about this Fae spoke of a man of action—not the glittering, beautiful trappings of a king, but the hard-bitten, vaguely desperate air of a warrior who had seen more losses than wins.
None of that mattered to me, though. Not my battle, not my elves.
“You don’t belong here,” I tried again.
The Fae leaned forward, his harshly beautiful face arrested with focus, his ice-blue gaze sliding down my body and up again. He pulled something out of his pocket and dangled it in front of me, making my breath freeze in my throat.
It was a blood-red ruby pendant, exactly the size of the hole cut into the cushion of my great-grandmother’s jewelry box. He swung the pendant back and forth, and it burned with a spectral light.
“That may be,” he murmured, his satisfaction as thick as syrup as he watched me follow the movement of the pendant. “But then again, neither do you.”
6
Aiden
I couldn’t believe my good luck, or the witch’s bad luck, either way. It was all the same to me. I stuffed the ruby pendant back into my shirt as she barely kept from diving for it, then contemplated my next move.
Getting to this point had been…interesting. I needed to handle this carefully.
Barely containing my impatience, I’d watched Belle Hogan send the boy she’d aided on his merry way. He was lucky that he’d expressed not even a shred of desire for the witch, or things might have changed abruptly for him. But he didn’t. In fact, not three feet from her tavern, he seemed to forget about the incident altogether, his chin lifting, his gaze darting around in apparent confusion, as if he wasn’t quite sure how he’d gotten to this particular street. I’d sensed the magic in him, more powerful than I would ordinarily have expected in a human, but he wasn’t the quarry here, and I let him go. Besides, I was already inside the tavern by then.
But when the Hogan witch had closed the door this second time, everything had changed. I couldn’t materialize from my hidden state. I could move and speak, but I had no form here. I’d been rootless, at risk of floating upward and out some crack unseen, until I’d noticed the artifacts of the witch’s instruction. There were easily a dozen paintings of that cup throughout my father’s castle—my castle now, I supposed, though I hadn’t stepped foot in it in years. I’d figured out early on that war would be an easier upbringing than sharing a household with my father.
But seeing the cup there on the table had struck me as awkward and wrong because of the bottle of vile human wine beside it. That was not what the Fae toasted with, and I was pretty sure the witch knew it. As she’d seen the cup fill, she’d reacted with disgust and maybe a little fear, but she was drawn to it as well. Exactly the way she looked at me. I could live with that. It had taken all my strength to get my words heard over the howling winds that filled the room. But she’d heard me all right, and even better, she’d responded.
That had been the greatest luck of all. With every begrudging ounce of her attention, I could feel myself getting stronger, my body occupying the space more clearly. She was ri
ght in that this place did not welcome me, but by speaking to me, she welcomed me, whether she liked the truth of that or not.
Now we stared at each other, and I knew she saw me, could feel the quickening of her heart even over the raging wind as she struggled not to focus on the pocket where I’d hidden the ruby pendant away. She recognized the necklace, without question. Which meant I had her.
“Of course I belong here. I’ve been here all my life,” she blustered anyway, with the air of a woman trying to remember what lies she’d woven for who. What stories did the humans believe about the Hogan witches? There probably were a pile of them. “It’s my home.”
I blinked. It took me a second to realize what she was responding to. I had been throwing out any challenge to get her to react, to force her to keep talking to me, and one had struck gold.
“The place of the Hogan witch is with the king, until the king says otherwise,” I countered.
She jerked upright. “Then let us go,” she demanded, with a force that gripped me by the throat. For a moment, I couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe, and I struggled to hide my disadvantage.
It was clear the witch had no idea of her effect on me, because she balled up her fists, clearly wanting to strike out at something, but not knowing what to hit. “You guys have tormented my family for generations,” Belle argued. “Whatever contract we signed, we didn’t understand what we were signing—because why would we have willingly made ourselves your servants? A contract implies there are benefits to both sides, even the typical Fae contract that takes far more than it gives at least gives something. But not this one. There’s no record of any compensation for the work that my family has done for yours over the centuries. And a slave contract is no contract at all.”
I bristled in indignation that she would dare accuse a high Fae of dishonor, but even as I moved to lash back at her, I stopped. What did the Hogan witches get out of their contract with the king? It had to be something. I went with the easiest option.
“Riches,” I growled.
“Oh, right.” She laughed bitterly and gestured around the bar. “You really think we would have left behind piles of gold that could have legitimately helped people in exchange for running a bar? It’s a great life, but it would have been a lot easier if we’d had a stockpile of riches to tide us over. And don’t try to tell me that the gold was taken from us because we stopped being your slaves.”
There was that word again, anathema to a Fae. We had no need to bend anyone to our will to serve us. They begged for the chance. For this angry little witch to assert otherwise was deeply offensive—and I could only assume she exaggerated about her financial state. The Fae honored their debts.
“I can’t help what your ancestors did to squander the value we brought them,” I said. “It’s not my concern.”
“Well, it’s my concern.” The witch squared her shoulders, her hair shading more thoroughly gray, the lines bracketing her eyes and mouth going deeper. She didn’t know that I’d already seen her in her true form, but she also didn’t know that if this was the way she aged, which it almost certainly would be, she was doing herself no service by showing it to me.
I had never seen a woman lovelier than this sprite of a witch attempting to show me herself at her most decrepit. No makeup marred her lined face. Her weathered skin, her chin and cheekbones were slightly fuller than I knew them to be, her eyes still bright and sharp despite the shadows at their corners. It was the face of a woman who had seen much, learned much, and lived fully. And it stirred me so deeply that I thought when she finally capitulated and revealed the young woman within, I would glory in taking her all the more—both the woman she was now, and the woman she’d become.
My body roared to life, rigid and unrelenting, and though I tried my best to hide my reaction, something primal and wary crept into the woman’s expression. “You need to leave,” she said.
I felt an entirely new tug, one wholly unwelcome. The tug of my own world pulling at me. Was this witch so strong that she could shove the High King out of her realm? It seemed so. I needed to double down on my offer.
My lip curled even thinking about it. I should not have to double down at all. This woman owed me her service.
But I was not my father’s son for nothing. I could be cunning.
“I tell you what, witch. Come to the realm of the high Fae, fulfill your contract and teach me the magic I need. We will find the original agreement and see what compensation was given. And you can have your chance to renegotiate.”
She barked an ugly laugh. “Only a fool tries to negotiate with the Fae.” But even as she said the words, true as they were, she faltered.
“I don’t think so.” My challenge slid through the room, binding her up with silken strength. “A Hogan witch signed that contract, and not under duress. Such contracts would not hold, you are right. There had to be something in it for her, something so strong that she committed her entire line. What witch would willingly put another witch into forced service for any amount of gold or power?”
I could see her consider the question. It struck me that there probably were witches in the human realm that would make that deal, without a shred of concern for those to come, but I knew that wasn’t the stock the Hogans came from. Say what they would about the contracts of the Fae, the High King and his court were as noble as they came. They could kill, they could rule with brutality, but they could not act without honor.
I had her neatly trapped. That thought did little to calm my excitement. I hissed out a low, steadying breath as Belle sighed.
“How long?” she finally asked. “How long will I be gone?”
Forever. The word pounded in my brain, raced through my blood, but I wasn’t so foolish as to speak it aloud. The blood red pendant warmed as I felt the power of my witch begin to shift, accepting her responsibility to me. “As long as it takes to open the Witchling Academy and teach what you have promised to teach.”
A ghost of pain slipped over her face, quickly gone. I didn’t know its cause, and her next words distracted me.
“No, I mean, how long in human time? Do I need to close the bar? Do I need to do anything? There are people I care for here. If I leave—I mean, I can’t do that to them. There’s nobody left to run this place but me.”
An ugly spurt of jealousy curled within me. People, she’d said. A man? A lover? I dismissed both before a cloud of anger could take hold of me.
“I can land you back inside your precious tavern an hour after we leave here, should you earn the right,” I said. And the words ran through the rafters and walls of the building, making them glow with white-silver promise.
She noticed it too. “You’re bound by those words,” she said thoughtfully. “That means there’s a trick in them.”
I smiled. She wasn’t wrong, but I wasn’t about to explain. “Then you’ll have to tell me what that trick is when the time comes. You’re the witch, after all.”
7
Belle
I waved off the asshole Fae’s words with as much arch unconcern as I could manage, but inside, my mind was churning.
We had talked about this, my mother, grandma, and me. We had talked about the possibility of the Fae needing us, coming back not in a position of power, but willing to negotiate. Every single time we had discounted it as being real. The Fae didn’t negotiate. They took, they squandered, they overwhelmed.
Again, I hadn’t been lying about the nature of the contract. We had never, to my knowledge, received any value from the original agreement. We had even gone to the coven of the White Mountains, the coven my family had originally called home, to try to understand what it was we had agreed to. That had been in my grandmother’s time, before the other witches had realized what we’d done.
But there had been no information, no record of the covenant. All anyone could tell us was that the document that bound us was held in the castle of the High King of the Fae. If I wanted to understand the contract, let alone break it, we had to
go there.
I grimaced, trying to work it all out. My ma hadn’t expected the cup to pass to me so quickly. She had been slowly coming to terms with taking on the challenge, maybe because she’d moved past the first bloom of youth and she had a sharper mind because of it. She had been readying herself to go—and then she’d died.
There was no denying this bastard Fae was the real deal, though. If I’d had any doubt, it had vanished with him flashing the ruby pendant. Now that was a treasure that would sustain my family for generations. Why couldn’t he simply give me the thing and be gone?
Only, he wasn’t going to leave. Not without me. The very thought made me shiver with a curious mix of dread and…anticipation I couldn’t deny. Which was ridiculous. How could I possibly feel anything but loathing for this hulking brute of a mouthwateringly gorgeous sex god?
Not helping, I informed my stunted libido. My stunted libido wasn’t listening.
Worse, as I felt the wave of heat roll across the room toward me despite my glamour, despite my comparative weakness for this giant of a Fae, something new occurred to me. For the first time, I wondered if my mother had waited so that she had lost the edge of desire, the rush and tilt of conflicting emotions and unmistakable need that flickered to life within me as the High King fixed his gaze steadily on me. Had she known the visceral power she would be confronted with, whether by this king or the one who had come before him?
Panic stirred within me. I wasn’t prepared for any of this. And I knew that this creature would simply stand there and let me sweat it out. The Fae were masters of patience. Probably not surprising since they lived so godsdamned long.
“What’s so funny?” the Fae king asked, surprising me. Maybe not so patient after all.
I raised a brow, playing for time. “Funny?”
“You smiled for the first time since you sent off that boy. Why?”
