Ash and Ember: Book 2 of the Scorched Trilogy

by Lizzy Prince

  “I just thought it might be easier to connect to the magic if we were touching. But we don’t have to.”

  “No, it’s okay. I’m sorry, I’m just jumpy I guess,” I said with an apologetic shrug.

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” Munro said, looking at me like I was something precious.

  I held out my hand, and he clasped it gently in his, giving me ample time to pull away as he slowly closed his fingers around mine. I closed my eyes before he even had to ask and started to take deep breaths, trying to find the magic. I could feel the beat of my heart thrumming through my veins, and I concentrated on that feeling.

  Pushing out my senses, I searched for the golden sparks that I knew were out there. Only to find darkness. I took another deep breath and imagined my magic was fluid like water and tried to pour it outside of me to connect to the magic in the air, the earth. And nothing happened.

  A frustrated breath huffed from my nose as Munro’s warm fingers twitched beneath mine at the sound. He swept his thumb across the top of my hand, attempting to soothe and calm me. But it didn’t work. I was frustrated that our spark was weak, and I wasn’t able to sense any magic around me.

  Taking one more deep breath, this time I reached out to try to find Munro’s magic instead and almost cried in relief when I sensed it. The deep forest on the verge of a storm. It felt like comfort and home, and I wanted to weep because I’d missed it so much.

  Opening my eyes I saw Munro looking at me with a frown on his face. Like a rubber band snapping, I pulled my senses away from his magic, afraid that I’d violated him in some way. Maybe I intruded into a space that I wasn’t welcome.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, trying to tug my hand from his. But Munro didn’t release it, he just held it a little tighter.

  “No, Annie. It’s okay.”

  “I can feel your magic, but I can’t get to mine,” Frustration making my skin itch.

  Munro nodded. “I know. I felt when you connected with my magic, but I couldn’t feel yours either. It’s like it’s locked behind a wall of ice.”

  Neither of us spoke, and I realized that the fire had gone out behind Munro. The sky was starting to darken, and I wondered how long we’d been sitting there in the cold pavilion. It only felt like a few moments but considering how frozen my hands were and how chilled the rest of my body was, we must have been there a lot longer than it seemed.

  Munro stood up, my hand still enclosed in his, pulling me to my feet. “We should probably get going. We’ve been gone a while. Hopefully, Mari will be back tomorrow. I think you should try this with her.”

  I nodded in agreement but felt disappointed by the prospect. We’re headed back to the car when a few snowflakes started to float to the ground. I wondered if I still had the power to affect the weather with my locked-up magic, or if nature just happened to be matching my current mood.

  Munro blasted the heat as soon as we got into his Ranger, and I was grateful for the small cab which heated quickly. I didn’t want to think about my failure to find my magic or Hattie being tied up in Munro’s den. I wanted to be distracted by Munro.

  “Tell me about your grandma,” I said, hoping he’d indulge me with some stories about her. He’d spoken fondly about her when he’d told me stories about her in the past.

  A little smile tipped the edges of his lips, and I had the sudden desire to place a kiss right there on the corner.

  “My gran is barely five foot tall but fierce as a giant. She’s feisty and mean as a snake if she doesn't like you but sweet as a lamb if she does.”

  “She’s your dad’s mother?” I asked, and he nodded, turning down the radio so it was only a low murmur in the background.

  “Yeah, Ryan and I lived with her once he moved us back to Ireland. She sort of adopted Ryan even though technically they aren’t related. She lives outside of Dublin in a little cottage on the edge of a wood. It’s beautiful.”

  Munro looked lost in the memory of his home and it’s no secret he missed it.

  “It sounds lovely,” I said, and I could see from the longing on his face that it was a special place for him.

  “It’s magical,” he replied.

  “As in real magic? Or are you using that as a euphemism?”

  Munro chuckled. “Well, I guess I’m just sprinkling some fairy dust on my description, but don’t tell my Gran that. She claims it is magical.”

  “Really?” I asked, intrigued. “How so?”

  Munro turned to smile at me before moving his eyes back to the road. I wanted to reach out and hold his hand again, but we just weren’t there yet. Instead, I let Munro continue with his story uninterrupted.

  “She always claimed there were fairy mounds in the woods behind her house.”

  “Fairy mounds?”

  Munro laughed again, and it was a good sound to hear, throaty and masculine. “I forget you don’t know all the legends of our people.”

  By people, I wasn’t sure if he meant witches or the Irish. Since technically I was both I didn’t bother to ask which he meant. Either way, I was ignorant of the stories.

  “The legend is that fairy mounds were gateways from fairy to Earth. These fairy mounds are caol áit or thin places,” he pronounced the words keel atch with a thicker than usual accent.

  “There are these hills in her wood that are bare of trees and have these gentle swells of lush green grass. She always swore they were ancient doorways for the fae, and she'd tell me off when I would play there. But I used to love laying on those small hills.” He smiled at the memory, then shrugged. “Maybe they were magical because they always felt special to me.”

  I smiled at the fondness he obviously had for his gran and the happy memories from growing up there, even if his life had started off horribly. “It sounds amazing.”

  “I hope you’ll see it someday,” he said softly.

  “Me too,” I whispered.

  Chapter 13

  I knew something was wrong the moment I entered the clearing. My sister’s magic permeated the air, but it was thick and cloying and smelled wrong. Tainted. There was a lingering scent that was not her natural magic, it was syrupy and sickly sweet. I had to try not to gag as it invaded my nose.

  It took me a moment, but my eyes finally found her standing in a copse of trees. Her back was to me as she plucked a piece of the bark off a large oak and crumbled it in her fingers. What took me a few more moments to realize was that there was a body lying at her feet, the debris from the crushed bark falling carelessly over his prone form.

  “Cailleach! What have you done?” I cried and ran the distance between us, falling to my knees beside Connall.

  Cailleach turned slowly and glared down at me, looking disgusted. “You kneel for a man.”

  “I kneel for love.” I looked up at her, anger snapping in my eyes. “I would kneel for you too, sister. What have you done to him?”

  I looked back down at Connall and was relieved to see he was still breathing. Placing my hands gently on his face, I pushed my magic into him, searching for injuries to heal, but found nothing.

  “What is this?” My heart started to beat a rapid tattoo in my chest as fear shivered down my spine in an icy caress. I couldn’t sense him, and my magic couldn’t find his essence.

  “This is a warning. This is your chance to say goodbye. He’ll wake from the potion soon, but next time I won’t be so kind.” Cailleach looked down at me as if she were granting a boon. As though she hadn’t nearly poisoned the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.

  She turned and walked away from us like we weren’t even worth the time she’d invested in this mad charade. As soon as she was gone from the clearing, I gathered Connall’s head in my lap. I rested one hand on his chest, taking some small comfort in the rise and fall with each of his breaths. The fingers of my other hand ran through the dark strands of his hair, threading through the short, soft locks over and over again until he finally woke.

  Connall’s eyes opened slowly as
if they were weighted. His hand came to rest on top of my hand that rested over his heart. The heart that belonged to me.

  “Áine?” The question as he spoke my name was implicit. What happened?

  “It was Cailleach. She’s no longer in balance and we have to stop her.”

  I slowly became aware of the warmth surrounding me. The urge to lean into it and wrap my arms around it was so strong, it jarred something into place inside of my mind. Opening my eyes with a quick inhale, I found myself standing in Munro’s arms, with my hand pressed against the naked flesh of his chest.

  Memories from my dream began to trickle back in my waking state, and there was a close correlation to our position and the lovers in my dream. Only Munro wasn’t lying with his head in my lap. No, he was standing in front of me with one arm holding me tightly, while his other hand covered the one of mine that was over his heart. On his shirtless chest. The one with lean muscle and not one hint of fat. The same chest that was warm and smelled like my own personal addiction, sandalwood, and rain.

  My eyes blurred with confusion and fatigue as I realized that I was in his room once again. Ryan and Munro had pleaded with me to stay at their house again, claiming they’d feel safer with me close by. I’d agreed to stay again mostly because I wanted to be there as soon as Mari returned, so it hadn’t taken much convincing on my part. But when I’d gone to bed, I’d most definitely been in my own room and not in Munro’s.

  “Annie?” Munro’s deep voice was gruff with sleep, but he still spoke with a gentle lilt. “Are you okay?”

  I tipped my head back to look up at him, his gray eyes appearing much darker in the dim light of the room. There was only a bit of moonlight streaming in through the window, providing the barest hint of illumination. I wondered if I was still dreaming or if this was reality because Munro looked like he could be part of my dream. Just one that had morphed from one set of lovers to another set of… whatever we were.

  “Why do I keep ending up in here?” I said, more to myself than Munro, but I saw his lips tilt up even though he tried to contain his smile.

  I huffed out a frustrated breath. “It’s not on purpose,” I responded to his look because he hadn’t actually said anything.

  Munro squeezed the fingers of my hand which still rested over his heart. A heart that was beating rapidly beneath my touch. “I know, Annie. Were you dreaming?”

  My own heartbeat sped up, and an uncomfortable shudder snaked down my spine. The heat from Munro’s body didn’t seem like enough all of a sudden, and my bare feet felt like icicles on the hardwood of the floor.

  “I think I was dreaming about the sisters.”

  Foggy glimpses of the dream were trickling into my memory. The feel of my fingers running through Connall’s hair was especially vivid, and it almost felt like I’d been unfaithful to Munro in some way. Which was absurd for so many reasons. But in my dream, I’d felt a love for the man in my arms that eclipsed almost anything I’d ever felt in my own life. The one exception was the man standing in front of me. Still, my feelings for him were so fragile and had barely bloomed before they’d been assaulted with a storm that nearly ripped them from existence. Those feelings were still there, but they were closed off and protected because I couldn’t risk getting shredded again.

  And yet, once again, I was in Munro’s room. Somehow I’d ended up in his arms like my body was unconsciously demanding I touch him, be with him. It was a bit of a mind fuck.

  Munro moved the hand that was covering mine and brushed back the strands of hair that had fallen over my face, tucking them behind my ear.

  “What happened in the dream?” he asked quietly like we were in church and it was a sin to speak too loudly.

  I felt like I should move my hands from his chest and waist, but that would only bring more attention to the fact that I was touching so much of his bare skin.

  “I can’t remember all of it, but the sisters were fighting. The one didn’t like that her sister had found love. She’d poisoned him and threatened to kill him if her sister didn’t leave him.”

  Pain pierced my heart like I’d been the one who had to make the choice between my sister and the man I loved. It was as if the dream had put me into her body so clearly that I could feel her emotions as if they were my own. Munro studied my face, looking concerned by whatever he saw there.

  “Hey. It’s just a dream. With all of the craziness going on lately, it’s only normal that your brain would turn some of what you’ve learned into dreams.”

  I frowned as I thought over his explanation. It did make sense in some way. How many times had I had a dream about something I’d been worrying and thinking about constantly? One time, for a solid week, I’d dreamt our entire neighborhood was underwater, and I had to travel by kayak to get to school. I’d had that recurring dream after our basement had flooded and caused a huge mess that required ripping up all of the carpet and tossing out every paper product that had been stored in our back room.

  The mind was a funny thing, and I couldn’t discount the fact that this was its way of interpreting and coming to terms with everything that had happened over the last few months. But there was a lot of magical shit that had been revealed over the last few months as well, and I’d be a fool to think that magic couldn’t also have a hand in my dreams.

  I was sure my internal thought process played out over my face because Munro tipped his head and looked down at me in understanding. “Tell me if you have more dreams, okay? We’ll see if we can find anything out.”

  “Okay,” I said quietly.

  The hand on my lower back felt like it was growing warmer. His palm was pressed into the arch of my back, just above my butt, almost alarmingly close to touching my skin there. The tank top I’d worn to bed had shifted up, and I could feel his thumb pressing into the muscle there. Munro must have sensed where my mind had wandered because he let out a ragged breath and pulled me just a little bit closer. Neither one of us spoke, we just stared at one another like we were desperate for the other to make a move.

  A loud bang sounded from downstairs, startling us apart. My heart did a flip in my chest as I looked back at Munro only to find him staring at me with fierce desire written plainly on his face. I almost moved back into his arms but thought better of it when I heard the bang again and realized that someone had just come in the front door.

  Munro ran his hand through his hair, obviously agitated. “That might be Mari,” he said as he blew out a frustrated breath, bending to grab a shirt off his chair.

  “Yeah, we should go check,” I mumbled, feeling completely off kilter.

  Part of me was frustrated that we’d been interrupted, and the other part was relieved. I wasn’t sure we were ready for wherever that moment may have led. But I knew for certain that I was eager to see Mari and find out if there had been any word from Butch. I was anxious to see what he’d discovered and when he was planning on getting back.

  My nighttime stroll had taken me into Munro’s room in the early hours of morning. It was still early as hell, but the sun was up, and it sounded like Mari and Theo were too. I could hear them talking in the kitchen as we came down from upstairs. Walking into the kitchen, I saw an assortment of bottles and baggies full of herbs strewn over the countertop.

  “You must have been stopped by security,” I said as I looked at the supplies that must have accounted for half the inventory her shop.

  Mari turned around and smiled, looking so happy to see me. It made me feel all warm and fuzzy to think she was that happy to see me after being gone less than a day.

  “Yeah, I checked my bag. I did not want any of this to get confiscated.”

  Theo snorted next to her, crossing his arms as he towered a good foot over her. “They probably would have thrown you in airport jail thinking you were smuggling some weird designer drugs.”

  “Yes, well as it is, they still searched my bag.” She held up a square slip of paper that said her bag had been searched by TSA agents. “I’m sure th
ey’ve seen weirder stuff.” She shrugged and turned back to look at her cache of goods.

  I stood beside her while Munro wandered in and took a seat on one of the stools tucked under the counter. I could feel him assessing me, trying to figure out why I kept ending up in his bedroom in the middle of the night. All I could manage was an embarrassed half-smile loosely aimed in his direction. Mari gave me a one-armed squeeze without looking at me, and I returned it with my own one-armed hug.

  “What do we need to do with all of this?” I asked, curious how this would translate into binding Hattie’s power.

  “We’ll use it to create a binding spell. Actually, you can help with that,” Mari said as if it wasn’t a big deal. My stomach did nervous flips, and I felt anxious just thinking about it.

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea. We need this to work and I’m definitely a magical newbie. I’m happy to offer moral support,” I said with a grimace, backing away from the counter like it had turned into hot lava.

  Mari captured my arm and gently pulled me back. “I won’t let you mess anything up. Besides, if you help with the spell, and provide a drop of your blood, it will create a much more powerful binding than what the rest of us could manage.”

  Theo was yawning as if this sort of stuff was normal, and he couldn’t care less. “I’m going to go see if little Lola’s up yet,” he said with a waggle of his brows before leaving the room.

  I darted my eyes to Munro to see if he had any reaction to Theo’s pronouncement. I couldn’t quite figure out what the deal was between Munro and Lola. Maybe the attraction was all on Lola’s side or maybe they had history? Right now, he just looked amused by Theo’s declaration.

  “Let’s get started!” Mari said, clapping her hands like she was wrangling up a group of school children.

  “If you really think this is a good idea,” I said, following her around the corner of the island to watch her sort through everything.

  Just as I passed him, Munro reached out a hand to lightly grasp my arm, and I felt a little flutter of electricity. It was enough that I just stopped and stared at him dumbly because I wanted our spark back as much as I wanted to walk into his arms and hold him tightly.