by Eva Chase
“I always do,” I said breezily, but as I stepped out of the house, my pulse was racing again.
“Well,” Philomena said, appearing on the lawn, “if there’s more where that came from, I’ll be first on board.”
I rolled my eyes at her. “Let’s go get those decorations.”
Coming up on the estate’s front gate, my legs balked. I hadn’t been gone that long, but the thought of Celestine catching me and deciding she wanted a little more information about my whereabouts made my gut clench. Especially after the stories I’d just heard from Seth.
Well, there were easy ways to avoid notice. When we were kids, the boys had shown me the spots it was easiest to scramble over the wall. Once I was on the grounds, she’d have no way of knowing when I’d returned.
I circled the estate to the east, following the wall. There. The old hawthorn tree was still hunched where it’d always been, one of its lower branches brushing the stones. I tucked my purse securely behind me and clambered up.
As I reached for the top of the wall to haul myself up and over, that unwanted voice again reached ears. Damn. By trying to avoid Celestine I’d run right into her.
I set my hand against the hawthorn’s trunk to catch my balance, planning on dashing back to the gate. Then the words her cool voice was saying made me hesitate.
“But it can be done? A binding component can be incorporated in a subtle enough way?”
I froze, perched on the branch. The voice that answered my stepmother was familiar too. I’d know that rough and raspy tone anywhere—Master Cortland, one of my former tutors.
“It will take some more research before I can answer definitively. But yes, I believe it should be possible.”
“Excellent. Then get to work on it, and report back to me as soon as you have those answers.”
“I’ll attempt to be prompt, Lady Hallowell.”
Their footsteps faded away. My fingers curled against the gritty stone.
A binding component? Incorporated into what? She was talking about a magicking, obviously, but for what use?
An icy shiver ran down my back. I hadn’t even known how hard she’d worked to control my life back when I was a teenager. I’d thought she’d eased off when we arrived in Portland, but clearly that wasn’t completely true.
So maybe a better question right now was, a magicking to use on whom? And what were the chances it wasn’t me?
Chapter Six
Rose
I grimaced, bracing my elbows against the top of the picnic table on the Bluebell Café’s back patio. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be coming to you with this. But you’re the only people I could come to that my stepmother has no influence over.”
“It’s fine, Rose,” Kyler said. “Of course we want to help, any way we can.”
He, Seth, and Jin were sitting around the table in much the same positions we’d all taken that first reunion. But the tone of this get-together felt much more serious. And I was pretty sure Damon wasn’t joining us even for a brief appearance. He hadn’t bothered to answer my text.
“It could have nothing to do with you, or your fiancé, or your father, right?” Jin said in a soothing voice. “Maybe she wants to, I don’t know, bind the drapes or the hedges or something. She wouldn’t really tie one of you up, right?”
I wet my lips. I was already skirting the line of what I should and shouldn’t tell these guys. But Celestine’s magic had bound them once, if only in a literal sense for a minute or two. They knew she had power.
“Maybe,” I said. “But I think she’d know how to do something that simple on her own. This sounded like it has to be a more complicated… scheme. More of a metaphorical binding? Or she wouldn’t need outside advice.”
“If you don’t think you’re safe there, Rose—” Seth started, and then hesitated. Because what could he suggest? That I run off to their house and hide away there? Leave my father and Derek wondering where the hell I was? If my stepmother meant me harm, trying to hide wasn’t going to work. She could track me down with her magic if it came to that. She’d reminded me of that just yesterday.
“I hope I’m just being paranoid,” I said. “It just was too much to try to think through on my own.”
Philomena was hovering behind the twins, her expression more solemn than usual too. Even she could tell this wasn’t the situation for jokes. And as much as I liked to pretend, I wasn’t really any less alone with her company.
“What would you like us to do?” Jin said.
I dragged in a breath. “Nothing—nothing big. But she was talking to James Cortland, who lives in that property on the edge of town? If you could just… happen to swing by there, whenever it’s not too inconvenient, to keep an eye on what he’s doing. And keep an ear out for anyone talking about what he’s doing. If you see my stepmother visiting him or get the idea he’s up to anything that seems strange, even if it’s small, just text me. I can take things from there.”
“That sounds easy enough,” Kyler said. “I can set up some spiders to watch for any online activity too. We’ll keep watch.”
Seth and Jin nodded too. I smiled at them, but the gesture felt weak. “Thank you. So much. I wish I didn’t have to ask you for anything.”
“Hey,” Seth said firmly. “Ky is right. We’re happy to be here for you.”
We all got up. The guys headed back to the hardware store’s back entrance. Philomena sashayed closer to me as I ducked through the café.
“Three heroes, all looking out for you,” she said, attempting a cheerful tone. “You’ve come a long way from the Portland wallflower.”
“It’s not like that,” I said. But it wasn’t her comment that had brought an ache into my chest. I crossed my arms, rubbing them in the April damp outside. The churn of gray clouds overhead suggested it was going to rain again soon.
There wasn’t meant to be only four of us. The ache was the hollowness of something missing. Someone. Damon had drifted away. Gabriel was who-knew-where.
It was Gabriel we really needed. Gabriel would know how to make any challenge feel conquerable. He’d smooth whatever chip Damon had on his shoulder with a few perfectly modulated remarks and the unshakeable confidence he’d brought to everything.
But we didn’t have him, and I had no way to reach him, not with my spark unlit. When we’d been forced to part ways, when the boys had given me those woven ribbons, I’d given them a gift too. Pages torn from the book that had been my childhood favorite, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Pages I’d thought would keep me connected to them in some way. But not with no magic at my disposal. I scowled at the concrete sidewalk.
When I reached the estate, Meredith was out in the front yard, talking to one of the garage staff. Maybe the man who’d taken Mr. Lorde’s place. My lungs tightened for a totally different reason. I still had one very important question to ask our estate manager.
I dawdled by the front garden until Meredith finished her conversation. She started toward the manor, and I moved to intercept her. She stopped before I reached her, folding her worn hands in front of her.
“Rose,” she said. “You look like you need something from me.”
Her smooth face was as calm as always. My gaze twitched to one side and then the other to make sure no one else was close enough to hear our conversation. “Meredith, I want to know—right after we left here, eleven years ago, you were instructed to fire certain members of the staff. Who gave you those orders—who picked the names?”
The manager’s thin eyebrows arched. The wind ruffled the white and gray strands of her hair. “Your father told me as he was packing up that we’d need to reduce staff. But the list of names, those I was specifically requested to let go, those came from your stepmother. I assumed with his approval.”
One of the knots in my stomach released. It hadn’t been Dad then. Celestine had wormed her way in there too, carried out her bizarre vengeance without him realizing. But the pain in my chest sharpened at the same time.
> If she could do that, ruin five people’s livelihoods and one person’s entire life over their children playing in the forest with me… What else would she be willing to do just to get her way when it came to my life?
A rush of hopelessness swept through me. I clenched my jaw against it.
“Rose?” Meredith said softly. “Is this about—”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.” The less I told her, the less chance Celestine would see our long-time manager as some kind of threat too.
I pushed forward, past the house, through the back gardens, into the forest that sprawled across most of our tens of thousands of acres. My legs moved of their own accord, drawn by some internal pull that I couldn’t explain.
Twigs crackled under my feet. Bushes rasped against my jeans. I kept going, and going, at a relentless pace, until a clot of trees and vines filled the space in front of me.
I stopped with a gut-punch of recognition. Then I stepped closer, easing aside the swaths of hanging vines. Beneath them were stones—old stones, but still solid. The stones of twin towers that stood with an arch between them, like some sort of ancient gate.
Stones carved with witching glyphs.
Gabriel had found this place just a week or two before I’d been torn away from the estate. He hadn’t understood the towers’ magic, but I thought he’d felt their power all the same. Even the birds quieted their song near this structure. The wind dipped as if bowing in respect.
I closed my eyes, letting the quiet stillness settle over me. My body began to move into the forms it knew by heart. The calling of power, the casting of power. The gestures that should have channeled the energy of my spark through my limbs and out to do my bidding.
Except I didn’t have the light of my spark yet. I only had my ordinary self and a piercing ache of hope. So it was the hope I grasped and pushed out into the universe with every curve of my arm, every shift of my feet.
Somewhere out there was a young man. A young man with dark red hair and bright blue eyes and an air of assurance I’d never seen anyone or anything disturb. Maybe after all this time he’d held onto the token I’d given him. Maybe someday I could trace my way back to him, now that we’d lost him.
Let him hear this. Let him feel this call, somehow, through that little gift that had meant so much to me. By the spark that wasn’t yet mine, please, let him.
Chapter Seven
Damon
Intimidating the people around this town was so easy it was almost painful. Seriously. Get a few guys together wearing slightly scruffy-looking clothes, hang out on a street corner just shooting the breeze, send one glance at a straight-laced jerk passing by, and he’s scurrying over to the other side of the street in two seconds flat.
So easy it was almost painful, yeah, but I did get a kick out of it at the same time.
“Pathetic, right?” Brad said with a scoffing sound. He rubbed the side of his partly shaved head. His leather jacket clinked with the various chains he had hanging off of it. He’d gotten the jacket after eyeballing mine. I was pretty sure he’d added the chains as some kind of a statement that he was even tougher. As if what you wore had anything to do with that.
“They wouldn’t have a clue what to do if we tried anything really scary,” George said, scratching the scruffy beard on his knobby chin. “Walk through their neighborhoods swinging some pipes around, they’d all be pissing their pants.”
“That’d be quite the sight.” I grinned, imagining it.
Brad stuffed his hands into his pockets and sighed. “I need some more smokes. When’s the next shipment coming by, Damon? I could really use a cash top-up.”
“Silvio said soon,” I said. “But it’s supposed to be a big one. They’ll need us for a few days to get all the sorting done. How much do you need until then?”
He shrugged. “I guess I’ve got some KD at home to eat. Mostly I just want the smokes.”
“I think we can manage that.” I tipped my head and sauntered down the street, glancing through the windows of the parked cars as I went. The town was small and quiet enough that hardly anyone except the occasional tourists locked their doors. I wasn’t going to shake up the status quo by outright taking off with one—that would just be dumb. But a quick dip into someone’s change stash was no big deal.
There. “Cover me,” I said. Brad and George shuffled closer to obscure the view from the laundromat we were outside. I tugged the door open, dug into the mess of quarters and dollar bills some sap had left in the cup holder, and shoved the door shut again. As we hustled off, I handed the cash to Brad. “Enjoy yourself.”
“Smooth, man,” George said. He never bothered trying to one-up me. The awe got on my nerves sometimes, though.
“Soon as we get that next paycheck, I’m swooping in on that Melinda girl,” Brad said. “Just you wait.”
I snorted. Melinda was a clean-cut girl who worked at the dentist’s office. “Like she’s ever going to go for a guy like you.”
“One night. You’ll see.”
“Sure. Well, I’ve got a thing. I’ll catch you two bozos later.”
I gave them a wave. Brad offered his middle finger in return.
I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell those idiots where I was going, which was to check in on Mom. I didn’t care about much around here, but I’d be damned if I was going to turn my back on the woman who’d raised me.
I climbed up the rickety back stairs to her apartment on the second floor of the divided townhouse. After a quick knock of warning, I pushed open the door. “Hey, Mom, I brought some—”
My mouth snapped shut in shock. It wasn’t just Mom sitting at the formica table that marked the division between the tiny kitchen and the almost-as-tiny living room. Rose was perched across from her. Rose Hallowell with her pert little ass in that nicked chair, her dainty feet on the cracked linoleum tiles.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I demanded.
“Damon!” my mother said, her face blanching.
“It’s okay, Mrs. Scarsi,” Rose said. She pushed back her chair and stood up. “You just think about what I said and let me know, whenever.”
She turned that angelic face of hers toward me. Jin always liked to call her Briar Rose, but if we were talking fairy tales, Rose was all Snow White. Ebony hair, pale skin, ruddy lips. Lips she was biting right now, sending a rush of heat I didn’t like at all through me. And those dark green eyes, holding my gaze, cautious but not even slightly apologetic.
“Come on,” I said brusquely. “We’ll talk outside.”
Rose followed me down the steps onto the patchy back lawn. Such a far cry from her family’s perfect gardens the sight of her standing on it made me grit my teeth.
“I’d have told you I was coming if you’d been answering any of my texts,” she said. “I got the impression you didn’t want to hear from me.”
“I don’t,” I said. “And that includes not wanting to see you in my mother’s apartment.”
Rose crossed her arms over her chest. Which of course emphasized the curves of her breasts in a way it was very difficult to ignore. My hands balled at my sides.
She tossed back her hair. “It is your mom’s home. She didn’t mind me coming.”
“I don’t care. There’s no reason for you to be here.”
“I think I had a pretty good reason.”
“I don’t think you’re really in a place to judge.”
Rose sighed, her expression softening. “And I don’t really want to fight. Damon, you’re obviously mad at me. I don’t even really know why. But if it’s about your mom getting fired—which I know was completely unfair—I’m trying to make that right by coming here.”
“It isn’t your problem anymore, angel,” I said with an edge of sarcasm. “You have no idea how things have been since you’ve been gone. You’ve got no business interfering.”
Couldn’t she see how little she belonged here? Couldn’t she see how little she mattered to me
? I wasn’t some dumbass thirteen-year-old chasing along at her heels anymore. I could be fucking dangerous if I needed to be. I drew myself up taller, letting the muscles in my arms flex.
Rose didn’t look remotely impressed. She just looked sad. “I’m trying,” she said. “That’s all. And…” She ducked her head before meeting my eyes again. “I missed all of you, all those years I couldn’t be here. I missed you, okay? You can act like a jerk as much as you want, but that’s still true.”
My heart squeezed despite myself. I kept my voice gruff. “Well, great. Don’t expect me to return the sentiment.”
“I didn’t.” Her shoulders drew up. For a second she looked almost breakable. Our Rose had never really been fragile. But suddenly the question was spilling out.
“That thing you were worried about, when you wanted us all to meet up the other day—did you and the rest of the crew get it sorted out?” I wasn’t going to admit how often I’d wondered about that since I’d seen the text.
“Not exactly. But it’s okay if you don’t want to get involved.” Rose sucked in a breath. “Look, Damon… We don’t have to be friends again, but I hate feeling like you see me as an enemy. If there’s any way we can talk it out, or I can make things up to you, just tell me. I wouldn’t ask for anything more than that.”
Friends. Friends. When she looked at me like that, all I could see was the girl I’d been in love with back then in the woman I couldn’t help wanting—wanting her mouth against mine, our limbs tangled together, her voice moaning as I made her feel more than I’d bet that fiancé of hers ever had.
But she hadn’t been mine back then, not really, and she sure as hell wasn’t now.
“Good,” I made myself say. “Because I’ve got nothing to give.”
“Okay. I’m sorry.” She offered me a small smile. “You know how to get in touch if you change your mind.”
