by Kathryn Moon
The first wave of pleasure was slow, had overtaken me before I realized I was under it. I pulled free of Callum’s lips to cry out as the crashing warm feeling buried me, catching my breath. The second, as Isaac’s rhythm turned erratic and desperate inside me, was sharp and sudden, a stab of pleasure bolted through me leaving me tense, squirming away from the touch. There was wet splash, hot and sticky, against my belly and then Callum was panting on my throat. Aiden’s arms wrapped around us both, tight, as he shouted.
The four of us were limp on the bed, hiccuping breaths punctuating the air. I felt like a sticky, stretched out mess but a giggling bubbly feeling was rising up in my chest.
“Someone grab that towel for Joanna,” Callum grumbled, face pressed into my neck.
Isaac’s hand slid up my leg, making it twitch, and dipped into the fluid cooling on my stomach. “I’ll get it,” he murmured, kissing behind my ear.
I hissed as he pulled out of me and he kissed my hip, stretching to the edge of the bed and digging on the floor for the towel.
“Remind me why we took the bath first,” Isaac mumbled after cleaning away our mess and passing the towel to Aiden.
“We were too cold for blood flow,” Callum said. He hadn’t moved an inch yet, but he reached up and grabbed at Isaac’s shoulder drawing him back down to the mattress, and tight to my back.
“Are you alright?” Isaac asked me.
One of the giggles broke free, and then a second, until they were all loose and I was shaking between him and Callum. Aiden sat up, eyes soft on me and smile only a little concerned looking.
“I’m fine,” I assured them when I caught my breath again. “I’m perfect. Exhausted and possibly bow-legged, but perfect.”
There was a collection of kisses laid over my skin where they could reach, Callum pressing several to the bridge of my nose, and then we were all settling. Someone found the edge of the blanket to draw over us. Having them all around me as I fell asleep was like being nested, and it was a feeling I was coming to crave. My skin was still tingling, and I was a pleasant kind of sore but relaxed and drowsy.
I drifted down to a chorus of breaths in my ear, eyes blinking slowly up at ceiling of my bedroom.
Callum was waiting for me as I got out of the shower the next morning. Out of my shower. That felt like warm rainfall and was the size of the entire bathroom in the little campus house.
There was a stack of clothes on the bed next to him.
“Aiden went to the library to get your case,” he said. “And they sent me up with these in case you objected.”
I scrubbed a small towel through my hair and flipped through the clothes. It looked like they had come from Hildy and my only real question was when. How long ago had Aiden started picking out new clothes for me? But they were only nicer versions of what I usually wore, things I had already been saving up for.
“What were you supposed to do?” I asked, passing him my towel and slipping into the underclothes. “Wrestle me into them?
“I will if you need me to,” Callum said, watching my skin vanish. “But it’s that they think we match for stubbornness.”
“Well then we better tell them I was extremely uncooperative,” I said. I slid the new slip, heavier and softer, over my skin.
Callum laughed and lifted the dress, a rusty orange with longer sleeves and a full skirt, up from the bed and held it up for me to step into.
“I came to talk to you,” he said, quieter than before. “About the Hollow. And Cecil and Isaac.”
I froze in place and Callum finished dressing me, drawing the zipper up my back, fingers gentle over the nape of my neck.
“I know you want to tell me not to feel guilty or-” I started.
“I only want to tell you the facts, I promise,” he said, kissing where his fingers lingered before going back to the bed. He moved to sit against the headboard and patted the spot next to him.
I crawled in slowly as if it were a trap. Callum waited, an arm held out for me to fit against his side. It was an easy trap to fall into when presented that way. His hand wrapped over my shoulder and we sat together in quiet for a moment.
“I know better than anyone how impossible it is to let go of guilt for responsibility,” he said and I turned into him to see his face better. His focus was distant and his free hand reached out to fiddle with mine over my lap. “I’ll get to that later. I just want you to know I’m not trying to talk you out of your feelings. But there are things you should know.”
He glanced at me and I nodded for him to continue. “Gatekeepers was taken off campus for a reason. I wasn’t aware, no one was. But the magic used to write it seems to contain some kind of…preservation of the beings it describes. And in the case of the Hollow, the proximity of the book works like an echo. Or a microphone, even. And if you hadn’t been the one influenced, I might have been.”
“Or the student who requested it,” I said, thinking of the younger girl looking for research materials for a paper.
Callum paled a little at that. “Probably the student. Either way the Hollow would have found a target.”
“You are trying to talk me out of my responsibility,” I said. Because there was a tangled knot loosening in my chest and a part of me—the stubborn part—did want to hang onto it.
“You are no more responsible for Cecil Pincombe’s death than I or Isaac are,” Callum whispered, hands tightening around mine. “We were on the ground floor with him. And he did what he could to protect a student but nothing and no one was going to be fast enough to protect him. You saved dozens of lives that night.”
“Isaac,” I said.
“Isaac is fine. He has a little scar and a few gray hairs now. Honestly, he could do with being a little less handsome,” Callum said, trying to stifle a grin.
I pushed at him. “He is not less handsome. It isn’t funny!”
Callum sobered with only a small roll of his eyes. “I know. I do.”
“I got him hurt,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m doing and I can do…”
“So much?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “With just one word.”
“And that was the wrong word.”
“We don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t written it, though,” Callum said. “What if Bryce and Tatsuo and I had tried to battle the Hollow then? I didn’t know half of what I know now. It might have gone better and it might have gone worse. But Isaac is safe. And you should speak to him.”
I winced. Trying to abandon three lovers meant owing three lovers a sincere apology when you’d realized your own stupid mistake. And while Isaac seemed to accept that I was here now that didn’t keep my actions from being hurtful. He and I had been closest from the beginning with how much we had in common.
“There’s something else I need to tell you,” Callum said after a stretch.
His arms and hands and chest were tense all around me. I twisted in my spot to sit close, facing him and keeping our hands tangled together.
“About the war,” I said.
He nodded, eyes fixed to were my thumbs were stroking the backs of his hands. “You’ve heard about the Toy Soldier?” he asked.
“The general on the front lines at the end of the war,” I said. Callum looked up, his eyes going flat with anxious lines appearing between his brows. It sank in slowly. “But…Callum you were…you can’t have been. You were so young.”
“Sixteen,” he said.
“How on earth?” I murmured.
“My father, he was- is a general,” Callum said, taking a deep breath. “His older sons, my half-brothers, are all in the army. And we’re from northern parts so he was home a lot during the war. And at the time I was his last son. He brought me into his office, tried to teach me about war. But I was…I was already learning about it. I’d been listening to him talk about it my entire life, that was all we had to read about and I was…”
“Natural,” I said, thinking of what Aiden had mentioned.
“My strategi
es were crude but effective,” Callum said darkly. “He took them with him to the fronts and won battles. So then he took me too. I think it was meant to be a bit of a joke at first. A way to show off to the other officials. They ended up being impressed. And I was an idiot and thought I was a genius. I wasn’t seeing the results of my plans, I only heard the news. Battles won, armies defeated. It sounded like a game.”
It had sounded like a game in the south too. I was younger and by the time I really knew what was happening, we were winning. There was no chance of the war coming to Bridgeston.
“My mother had died and the others in the coven…it was different than ours is. And I was making my father proud which was all he or I cared about the time.” Callum grimaced and then shrugged. “No. I cared about winning. I was proud of myself.”
“You were too young,” I said.
“I was. They gave me a brigade and advisors and put me in a tent on battlefields and I…I devised the strategies that would win fastest and by the largest numbers. And they kept bringing me more men because…because I was…” he went quiet and I held my breath, already knowing what would come. “I was having them slaughtered. Just a fraction less than the enemy. I saw it at the end. What I had done to them. And they sent me back home because by then…”
“You’d won the war for them,” I said. It was what we had heard at home. The Toy Soldier had won the war. I wondered how many people had known that the Toy Soldier was a boy.
Callum nodded faintly. My hands rose up from our laps, wrapping over his cheeks and his eyes met mine, dull and exhausted and wary. Everything I thought to say I threw out again. I could not say that I was sorry, or that it wasn’t his fault, because they were true but they weren’t enough. And they wouldn’t change anything. So I kissed him, pressing my lips gently to his and holding us there as his hands clutched at my back.
“You said your mother was from the north,” he said as I leaned back. “She’ll know what I did to her people.”
I blinked at that. “My mother died a few years ago,” I said. “And she was Vermenian.” Callum’s eyes widened. “My father met her while he was in the army in the north. And they said that was where she was from, like it would explain the accent. I don’t know how she felt about the war, not really. But she talked about it like everyone else in town. Saying nasty things about her own people. Praising our soldiers, you. So my brother and I did too. Even though we knew. She spoke Vermenian when she was angry, if we were alone.”
Callum’s brow furrowed again and I gave him another swift kiss. “You should not have been a general,” I said, because that was simple and it was true. “And no one is their best self during a war. My mother would have forgiven you.”
He studied my face, maybe looking for the Vermenian pieces, and then nodded briefly.
“My mother would have loved you,” he said, with the trace of a smile.
His father and I would not be getting along, that much was for sure.
25. Joanna
“Here…here is something,” Hildy said, lips twisted thoughtfully as she leaned away from the book in front of her.
Midterms were put on hold, classes were canceled, and the Library was locked. Hildy and Aiden, apparently trustees of the university, had gotten access to the President’s private library. Callum had pulled all the relevant books and brought them back to join us, clustered in the sun room of Gwen’s home.
“It’s about the history of the university,” she said. “The Hand Woods, designed and cultivated to contain magical forces,” she read, “Became an ideal location to foster growth in students. In addition the University would act as a line of defense. It’s very vague but-“
“The woods is the cage,” Tatsuo said.
Callum and I glanced at each other, our expressions a mirror of puzzlement, and then it struck us both at the same time.
“The Hollow isn’t the only thing out there!” I exclaimed as Callum said, “The woods is a prison, Joanna only unlocked one cell.”
“Which is why it hasn’t left the area,” Gwen said, pulling the book to herself from Hildy’s lap. “It’s still trapped. In here, with us.”
“The cage is built of sigils, that’s easy enough,” Callum said, books open in front of him on the floor of the other coven’s sun room. “But we guessed partly right. There’s a coded melody and a swatch of color here. Pieces of the true name. But the word was never written down for safety’s sake. And we need the whole name to keep the sigils in place.”
“But I have the connection we need to get that word,” I said. “Tatsuo said-”
“It’s not safe,” Callum said without looking up from his texts.
“Neither is trying to solve this with a missing piece and if I can do it, then that’s what we have to do.” I watched Callum’s shoulders draw in as he reached up to adjust the glasses on his nose and acted as if he hadn’t heard me at all. “You’re being unreasonable,” I started again.
“I’m not sure that he is,” Gwen said from the loveseat, and Hildy was looking studiously into her own lap. “You’ve never tried trance writing, you’ve…you’re still so new, Joanna.”
My cheeks warmed and I looked at the others. Aiden was studying the page Callum had handed him with the melody and Tatsuo seemed to be avoiding my gaze. Only Bryce and Isaac were looking back at me, and both of them were too inscrutable for me to puzzle out in my embarrassment.
“I can put you in the trance,” Bryce said, words slow and cautious.
“No,” Callum snapped, looking up.
“If she practiced,” Tatsuo tried.
“With whom? Herself? It’s something entirely different,” Callum said, voice snarling on the words. “Or were you volunteering?”
Everyone stiffened at once, Gwen and Hildy staring at Tatsuo with wide eyes.
“No,” Tatsuo said slowly. “And Joanna and I don’t share the necessary connection. I was thinking of someone in her own coven.”
Callum paled at that, face dropping back down to the floor. Even Aiden’s expression became shuttered at the suggestion. Isaac was as quiet and wary as he had been since I’d tried to leave them. He didn’t withhold physical affection but the distance remained clear.
I couldn’t blame a single one of them. If it had been my choice to offer up the most vulnerable piece of myself to another person—give them power over my will—I wouldn’t volunteer either.
“I’ll do it,” Isaac said. The whole room stared at him and he stared back at me.
“You don’t have to,” I said.
“I know,” he said, and what had seemed wary now appeared steady and centered. “But I’ll do it.”
I glanced at Callum and Aiden, expecting them to argue with him. To at least warn him what a terrible idea it was. And Callum looked frustrated but he didn’t say a word. Aiden only reached out to squeeze Isaac’s hand and then turned to smile gently at me.
Isaac pushed away from the fireplace to come stand in front of my chair. “Come on, let’s talk.”
I took his hand and followed him back through the house into a small study stuffed with books and smelling faintly of tobacco.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked.
“I am,” Isaac said, facing me. “I think you’re right and that you have the best chance of finding that missing piece to the name. And I know you writing it will make it the strongest cage possible. But that’s not why I’m volunteering.”
