Secrets & Dark Magic

by Chloe Vincent

  “Yeah well, maybe you should be, huh?” The cop grumbled and stood up straight, slapping her palm on the hood. “You can go now.”

  Cole drove on, exchanging a bemused expression with Penny, wondering what the purpose of that checkpoint had been. The car was quiet, even the music was soft and acoustic, but it eased the awkwardness that Cole could feel between them. Beside him, Penny yawned and settled down in her seat, and he noticed her blinking slowly. He thought she looked cute when she was sleepy.

  “Take a nap if you’re tired,” Cole said now, turning his eyes to the road. “I got this.”

  She seemed to be fighting it but eventually, she dropped off. She rested her head on Cole’s shoulder and that made him smile as he hummed along to the music.

  Penny had not been asleep for more than five minutes, he was sure, before she started getting restless. It began with a whimper, her brows turning down as something bothered her in her dreams. Cole took notice of it and thought even that was cute. She looked like a little puppy. Then her mouth screwed up, and she started murmuring, seemingly upset.

  “No, no,” Penny said. “Please don’t…”

  “Penny, hey,” Cole said softly, hoping his voice might crack a bad dream. “You’re alright.”

  “No…” She moaned and shook her head and then she began to thrash, crying out, still dead to the world. “No! Henry, don’t! Cole!” Tears streamed down her face in her sleep.

  Cole clenched his jaw, his heart tearing at seeing her in such distress, and he pulled the car over to the side of the road before turning in his seat and taking her flailing hands in his own.

  “Penny!” Cole said, though he tried not to shout. “Penny, sweetheart, hey, hey. It’s okay. Hey, wake up! It’s alright! Shh shh.” He squeezed her hands and whispered soothing words, and she blinked, slowly waking as he moved to stroke her hair. “It’s okay, sweetheart. You’re safe, you’re safe.”

  “Cole?” Penny murmured, looking at him now. He wiped the tears from her cheeks with his thumbs. “I dreamed Henry was hunting you.” She pressed her hands to his chest and ducked her head, pulling him closer. “He wanted to kill your bear and I was trying to find you in the woods.”

  “It was just a nightmare,” Cole cooed, and he kissed her cheek, not particularly caring if it betrayed his feelings as he comforted her. “Just a nightmare. I’m right here with you.”

  “God, I wish you were always here with me,” Penny whispered, and Cole’s heart leaped even as she looked sheepish and apologetic as she spoke. “I know you probably don’t feel the same and last night was just another night for you but-”

  “It was not just another night,” Cole said, cupping her cheeks in his big hands. She rested her own hands on his wrists, holding him there. “It was special to me. You’re special to me, Penny. I can always be here with you if you let me.”

  Penny’s batted her eyes at him and he almost laughed at the sweetness of her expression when she whispered, “Really?”

  “Yes, sweetheart,” Cole said, and kissed her. “Say the word.”

  Penny smirked at him and said, “the word.”

  Cole laughed and beamed at her before kissing her again. She moaned into the kiss and wrapped her arms around him to pull him close. Their embrace became heated and they scrambled to unbuckle their seatbelts. Penny crawled into Cole’s lap, feeling like a horny teenager as she made out with her now boyfriend on the side of the road. She could feel him already hard beneath her and sighed, grinding down into him as he whispered her name. She felt sexy and a little bit trashy in the best way as she kissed her way down his throat and pulled the collar of his shirt aside to suck a kiss where his shoulder met his neck. Just the way he breathed was making her wet as he squeezed her hips.

  “Always be here with you,” Penny whispered, scrambling to unzip his fly. It was a bit clumsy but then somehow Cole managed to get Penny’s jeans down around her ankles and she was climbing back on top of him, resting her forehead against his as he entered her.

  “Yes,” Cole breathed as she moved on top of him and they found their rhythm together, rocking into each other, as close as they could possibly get.

  . “Penny...my mate…”

  She smiled against his lips then said, “Yes,” and kissed him again. “Yes, I am, baby. Your mate.”

  Penny

  Penny found the remaining four hours of the drive back to the city much more fun than the first two. The only significant problem the two of them faced as first Cole drove and then Penny again, was the two of them keeping their hands off each other. There was also the distraction factor. Cole was ostensibly driving after they’d straightened up following their little bout of car sex. Yet he had to drive one-handed as he clasped Penny’s hand in his, occasionally kissing her knuckles as she tried to contain a dopey grin. They decided to listen to louder, happier music and then bickered over the choices and somehow Cole’s hand then found its way between Penny’s knees and rested there, one giant bear shifter palm occasionally squeezing her thigh, and she hugged his arm as they chatted about bears and forests and music and whatever came to mind.

  Closer to the city, Penny felt herself tense up again. It had been too easy to get lost in the giddiness of new love and forget the danger lying in wait back home. Henry and his little friends had a plan and they were already starting to implement it. The Reckoning was coming, and Penny wasn’t sure if they could stop it, seeing as how she knew no details. It was difficult not to constantly second guess herself. What if they should have stayed and finished the antidote? Should they have begged Cole’s wizard friends for help after all? It made her stomach nervous, her thoughts racing to no end.

  Yet, when they pulled up in front of Penny’s familiar brownstone, Cole only nodded and took a breath, as if they might not have to face the end of the world. He looked as though he were only nervous about meeting his girlfriend’s family. But then he was a bear. Penny wondered if bears were generally more laid-back than regular people and smiled to herself.

  The house was mercifully empty when Penny let them inside and she watched Cole take a look around, trying to gauge his reaction. Her own place was not as warm and welcoming as his, or at least she thought so. It was light and airy though and decorated the way young people who shopped at Urban Outfitters tended to decorate their houses in Brooklyn. She watched Cole head straight for a line of her little watercolors that were framed and hanging on the wall behind the sofa. They each depicted a different tree that she’d found in Central Park one day.

  Cole smiled at the paintings and said, “I like these.”

  “They’re from a long time ago,” Penny said quickly. “My technique’s so much better now.”

  He came around her, resting a hand at the small of her back. “Well, I think they’re good.” He kissed her neck.

  Penny had planned for them to scour Henry’s room again for clues. She regretted not attempting to get into his laptop in the first place, but she was stiff from the drive, and she couldn’t help wanting Cole to take his time inspecting her place even as it made her a little bit nervous. He was wandering around the living room, picking books up off of shelves and murmuring. She made herself useful in the kitchen instead.

  “You want a soda or something?” Penny asked, and found Cokes in the fridge.

  “Yeah,” Cole replied distractedly. “Anything’s good.”

  “I like your place,” he said when she handed him a Coke. He followed her to her room and her little insecurities welled up again. It felt too much like a girl’s room. It had changed a lot since her teen years but maybe it wasn’t adult enough with its unframed art on the walls, or sophisticated enough with its Pusheen mugs full of paintbrushes. She hovered in the doorway, sipping her Coke, as Cole took a look around, heading straight for the half-done painting on her easel by the window. It was one she’d been working on for months; a creekbed where a deer was drinking.

  “You’re underselling yourself,” Cole said, raising an eyebrow in her directio
n. “These are good. You use the most interesting colors. It’s like, uh… Well, I don’t know art but-”

  “Impressionistic,” Penny filled in for him, blushing terribly. “Or, that’s what I’m going for, anyway.”

  He walked to her, biting his lip, giving her the bedroom eyes, and she felt weak-kneed all over again. “What color would you paint my bear?”

  “Any color you like,” she murmured before he leaned down to kiss her, hot and slow.

  They got distracted and ended up making out on Penny’s too-small bed. She doubted she would ever get enough of this man and things were about to heat up further until Cole’s stomach rumbled so loudly, Penny thought for a moment that an animal had gotten into the house. She burst into giggles, laughing into his neck, and felt Cole chortle beneath her.

  “Somebody a little hungry?” Penny asked, grinning at him.

  “We didn’t stop for lunch,” Cole said, looking embarrassed.

  She climbed off of him and held out her hand which he took as he rolled off the bed. “There’s a great gyro place down the street. Why don’t you go pick up lunch? I’m just going to freshen up and take a look at Henry’s room.”

  “Hey, be careful in there,” Cole said, frowning at her, and wrapping his arms around her waist. “Maybe you should wait for me?”

  “It’s just his room,” Penny said, rolling his eyes. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those really protective types, Cole.”

  “Oh baby,” Cole said, chortling as he laid a kiss on her cheek. “You don’t know much about shifters.”

  “I’ll be careful,” she insisted before kissing him just once, and then twice more before pushing him out of the bedroom. Or rather, he let himself be pushed. He was a brick house of a man and if she was moving him, he was letting her.

  “What do you want from the gyro place?” He asked, reluctantly heading for the front door as she playfully pushed at him.

  “A gyro,” Penny said. “Call me crazy.”

  “Okay okay, smartass,” Cole said, laughing. “Be back in a minute.”

  She opened the front door for him and stood on her tiptoes to kiss his chin. “That’s Miss Smartass to you.”

  “Noted.” He kissed her lips and they got caught up again before she laughed and pushed him out the door. “Alright, alright. I’m going!”

  Penny turned on some music that was both loud and cheerful, and despite the fear of coming danger, she couldn’t help but hum to herself as she changed out of the clothes she’d worn the day before, still caked with mud. She’d showered at Cole’s place but now she took a little time in the bathroom to put on some lip gloss and just a little bit of eye makeup because Cole already seemed to get lost in her eyes and she was nothing if not amenable to it. She dabbed a little perfume that smelled like lavender and fixed her hair.

  When she had no more excuses to avoid it, she stood in front of Henry’s door and sighed.

  Penny had never been very close to her brother and it was not for lack of trying. But he had been a real jerk of a kid and then a deliberate loner, seemingly happy to find his own family away from Penny, and rejecting her when she did attempt to reach out. Before her parents had died, she’d felt used to that. But when Henry seemed to react to their deaths with indifference, Penny had been more than a little creeped out. Sure, they weren’t always the coziest family, but the deaths of her parents had wrecked her world. Henry had seemed to shrug it off and go on without losing a step. So while she was shocked that he was able to use magic to attempt to bring about the end of the human world, the fact that he wanted to hurt people...was not so surprising.

  There was a goat head on the door, smeared with red paint. So much of Henry’s evil wizard esthetic just made her want to roll her eyes and she almost wondered if that was a part of it too. If he was an adult and truly able and desiring to harm people yet appeared to be just some ridiculous young person going through a silly phrase, nobody would take him seriously.

  Penny was able again to crack the lock with a bobby pin yet something was blocking the door and she had to put some real elbow grease into getting inside the dim room. Once inside, she found that the heavy thing blocking the door was...a canon? It was small and old looking and it was definitely a canon. There was more junk cluttering up the room. Henry had been busy. She saw jugs of mysterious liquid and more glass jars of generally gross substances lining his shelf; more teeth, rat tails, fingernail shavings, blood and other generally disgusting things. For the first time since he’d exploded their light bulbs using magic, Penny found herself mortally afraid of her own brother. All along she’d been afraid mostly for others, scared that Henry was going to hurt people even as Cole insisted she wasn’t herself safe either. But now she remembered again the way her brother had coldly stared at her and told her she was “unsalvageable.”

  Penny took a deep breath, feeling a little disgusting merely being in the room. She half wished she’d waited for Cole to come back, but she didn’t want to appear helpless either and she willed herself to shove the faintly grimy piles of clothes, animal skins and bones atop Henry’s desk away to get to his laptop. She opened it to a password prompt and grunted in frustration.

  Penny chewed on her lip and tried to think of the most obvious password Henry would use if his whole goth kid routine wasn’t just a facade. She knew his favorite band and she knew he thought himself an evil wizard.

  She typed in: GerardWay666.

  The password was accepted and she couldn’t help but snort a laugh. She almost wondered if it had been too obvious even as she poked around on his desktop. His GoogleDrive had a lot of nonsensical documents full of ranting and gibberish and disturbing photographs. But she stumbled onto a spreadsheet saved to his document folder. The doc was titled “The Reckoning” and so caught her eye immediately. She opened it and immediately saw a date and time entered next to Henry and his friends’ names. The date was that day and the time was soon. The location was Central Park, apparently “near the Alice statue.” Whatever The Salvaged was planning, it was happening in only a few hours. Supplies and tasks were listed and estimates of the size of the population that would be affected. From what Penny could make out, The Salvaged was planning to shoot their toxin from canons, likely bigger than the one now blocking the door. They’d worked out some way of spelling their potion into a cloud that would disseminate over New York City, quickly turning any human who came into contact with it into one of those tentacled blobby monsters.

  “Shit,” Penny said, and was about to grab her phone when a voice spoke behind her.

  “Somebody’s been snooping,” Henry’s voice boomed. “Huh, sister?” Somehow he’d entered the room without her even noticing; she suspected by magical means. She jumped, too frightened to scream, and swiveled around in his chair to see Henry looming there in the middle of his mess. His face was pasty and gaunt, a trickle of blood sliding down his neck from his ear. Behind him, his friends were crowded, all in black. They looked even more identical than they had before; as if their features had actually conformed to each other. If Henry hadn’t been standing in front and called her “sister” she might not have known which one was him. She supposed that made it easier to fight him.

  “Henry,” Penny said slowly, and she clenched her fists because her hands were shaking. “Whatever you’re planning, you have to stop it right now. You’re going to hurt innocent people-”

  “NO ONE IS INNOCENT!” Henry thundered. “Humanity is a plague and we’re curing the planet!”

  His friends hooted behind him.

  All at once, Penny realized she was not going to make it out of Henry’s bedroom safely, and willing to go down fighting, she moved fast, attempting to dodge between them and get out the door. They grabbed her with ease and surprising strength and she flailed, only managing to knock some glass jars off shelves and throw some books and papers to the floor. She kicked the chair over and they grabbed her legs.

  She started to scream for Cole but was barely able to utter a
sound before there was a wet cloth covering her mouth. Terror coursed through her and she wondered if she was about to die and thought, with a terrible sense of grief, that Cole was losing another mate and that wasn’t fair at all and she wanted to wake up in his arms again. And then everything faded to black.

  Cole

  Cole considered that he felt better than he had in seven years. It served to make him realize that while he’d been satisfied, content even, he had not experienced joy since Louise. But now he felt a physical change, like shifting. He felt joy on the tips of fingers and swirling in his heart and mind. He had Penny. He felt without a doubt that Penny was his mate and she thought so too. There was nothing better.

  He was light on his feet as he made his way to the gyro stand. There was, of course, the impending doom of Henry and his sordid cult. But Cole felt strongly, perhaps due to the somewhat deceptive assurance that love gave him, that he and Penny could defeat any foe. Nobody could withstand the duo of Cole and Penny, he thought to himself. He stuck his hands in his pockets and all but skipped, fantasizing about him and Penny someday living in a house deep in the woods, a place big enough for a painting studio and a lab. He would study his potions and teach classes, maybe pull a lighter load at Bellington than he had been. And soon he would be getting tenure, that would make things easier. He imagined shifting and taking leisurely walks through the forest, his human lover by his side. She’d scratch him behind the ears and ride on his back. She’d call him her “teddy bear.” He felt dizzy with love.

  He bought them each two gyros in case Penny was especially hungry and, his mouth watering, threw in a few falafels and some stuffed grape leaves. His stomach rumbled again and he laughed at himself.

  He might have returned much quicker, but he was sidetracked by vendors on the sidewalk. He didn’t make it to the city often. He’d forgotten about the endless humming of New York, and the boho hipster circus of Brooklyn. He took his time at a table displaying watercolor postcards and wondered if the vendor was a regular in the neighborhood and if Penny knew him and what she thought of his art.