I knew my face was already prepping a reaction.
“I was passing by Piers and his friend Ram, and Piers said something like, ‘I don’t really want her but I’d tame that little bitch.’”
And…my facial expression was unleashed. “Ugh.”
“I remember Ram said, ‘Jeez, man’ or something, and he amended it like, I want her power. I knew just who he was talking about. They ended up breaking off that engagement, and he broke off another one later. I don’t know if he’s power hungry or just a creep. Probably both.”
“What about your illustrious bloodline?” I asked, just being a pest, as I slowly ate the new wholesome cuisine. So many stewed bitter greens and boiled things. I had never seen the new chef but I was betting he was a century old and maybe British, except I wasn’t sure the Edwardians ate this many vegetables.
“There are great heroes in my bloodline,” Harris said. “The Nicolescus have slain vampires, no offense to Monty, but those vampires had killed hundreds of people.”
“None taken,” Montague said glumly as he was pouring a medical pouch of blood into a wine glass. “I’m definitely not killing hundreds of people.”
“I intend to live up to that,” Harris said. “If Piers is the sort of person who would hurt a woman, then I would rather take him out as well.”
“Piers Nicolescu is a cool name,” I said. “What a waste.”
“So when I kill him, I’ll take his name too, and wipe it from the record,” Harris said with a cold look.
I suppressed a smile because something about this was weirdly attractive to me. “We can’t let Daisy marry that guy, then. It’s as simple as that. She’s my friend too. We need to talk to Stu.”
We couldn’t safely leave school grounds. Piers always seemed to be everywhere. That was the worst part. I swear, if we started whispering about him, he was suddenly behind us, saying, “Good afternoon, gentlemen, and lady.”
It made my skin crawl.
And I have to come back to spend a whole year here with the new rules in full steam…
However, we were almost at the end of the school year, so he couldn’t keep us there much longer, and on the last day of school while guys were lugging their bags of clothes down the stairs, slapping each other on the back, and getting in their chauffeured cars, we stuffed food in our backpacks, walked right out the gates and made our way around the mountaintop.
That was when I called Firian’s name.
He had stayed away since he was trapped as a fox. Alec’s familiar went to check on him just to make sure he was okay.
My poor Firian. I knew he must feel helpless, because I felt helpless. Sure, he used to turn into a fox just to curl up on my twin bed at night, but mostly I knew him as a man. Tall. Handsome. Funny. Golden eyes. Hands that were strong with long nimble fingers. Wrinkled clothes and often rumpled hair too. Confident in the way he touched and held me. My gaming partner and best friend.
He wants me to remember him that way and not start to think of him as a pet, I thought, a sick feeling descending on me when I considered it. But I would never forget that he wasn’t my pet.
“Firian—I just…miss your voice…please!”
He shimmered into existence on the path ahead.
“Firian!”
I started running toward him, and he ran too. He led me down the path and didn’t stop. Like he was a mirage. I don’t think he wanted to talk. But at least he was letting me see him.
Soon I was panting and struggling over the rocks while he leapt down them with unnatural strength. I half-climbed down, half-fell, and scraped my knee. Crap. It was actually bleeding.
Firian finally looked back at me and said, “For crying out loud, Char.”
I started sniffling.
“I just miss you, Firian. I miss you so much.”
“But I’m just a stupid fox now. A really stupid fox. I led the council to Master Blair’s familiar and I told that faery girl I’d kissed you. My own tricksy world tricked me instead.”
I flung my arms around his fur. “No way. None of this was your fault. It seems like the council was already looking for confirmation.”
“And I gave them proof.”
“Anyone could have made that mistake,” Harris said, climbing down the rocks behind us.
“Are you dating him now?” Firian asked.
“Uh…no. No. Stop it. He’s just here.” My cheeks flamed as Firian looked at my hands to count the rings. The creepy new dean still had failed to dampen my enthusiasm entirely.
“I’m glad you’re okay, man,” Alec said.
“We’ve missed you,” Montague said.
“Thank you,” Firian said, actually sounding slightly touched by the acknowledgment. I remembered how no one even talked to him in the beginning.
“We’re going back to the Wyrd tree, so…lead the way,” I said. “Stuart escaped out here when the council came, apparently.”
“I sure hope this isn’t a trick,” Harris said.
I blanched. “I didn’t even think of that.”
“You aren’t naturally suspicious, Char. That’s not a bad thing. Means you’ve never been ambushed by a vampire or anything,” Montague said.
“What a diplomatic way of saying she’s still a babe in the woods,” Harris said.
“Hey—” I pointed my wand at him. “Who has the special wand? Not you.”
“We don’t have much choice but to try,” Montague said. “Stuart told us about Wyrd in the first place, and Charlotte had a real connection to the tree.”
Once again, it took all day to reach the tree. My wand started to glow when we got close to it. The eerie meadow and the blue tree were still there just as before, and I was extremely relieved. A part of me expected all of this to be gone.
The only thing that was different this time was that Stuart was standing by the tree waiting for us, wearing one of his sport coats with the patches on the elbows. Kewl. This guy was the designated survivor?
“Hey, kids,” he said. “Glad you made it. That bad, was it? Couldn’t get here until the year was over?”
“Stuart, have you just been out here for weeks?” I asked. “In that sport coat?” I looked around. “Do you have a cabin up here?”
“Is this better?” He waved a hand across his body and transformed into a beautiful faery lord.
“Ohhhhhhh,” I said. “You’re the faery lord. Ohhhhmigod, that’s why everyone thought you were so cool.”
Montague snapped his fingers. “Damn. That was good.”
The faery lord Stuart nodded a little like, yes, I am good.
“But Stuart Jablonsky?” I asked. “That was the alter ego you went with? How does a faery lord even come up with that?”
“You didn’t suspect,” he said. “You could tell something was up with me but the disconnect between Stuart and a faery lord was just too far, wasn’t it? Well, it’s too far for the council too. At least, so far.”
“Man. You and Ignatius are the masters of disguise,” Alec said.
Stuart smiled enigmatically. “But sometimes even a master’s luck runs out. Hopefully…it holds on long enough. I want you all to go have a nice normal summer, but come back a little early and see me. I’ll give you a map to take a different route so you’re less likely to be seen. We have one last hope to fix this mess, and Charlotte, that hope is you.”
No pressure or anything. A nice normal summer?
But when I looked at Firian trapped in his fox form, and when I thought of Daisy being forced into marriage with that jerk, and Master Blair being led off in disgrace, and the essay I wrote for Stuart about why my grandmother and mom rebelled against the magical world and suffered for it…
“I’ll be there,” I said, as my stomach growled, throwing off the vibes of this reunion entirely.
“In the meantime,” Stuart said. “Let me feed you dinner. I see you forgot to take enough rations once again.”
A Fine Necromance
Chapter One
Ch
arlotte
“Dad? Can I ask you something?”
“You have some follow up questions about the birds and the bees? And the…foxes and the demons?”
“Thanks for not making it weird.” I kicked him under the table.
“Oh, I made it weird?” He finished off his beer, kicking me back.
This was the proper ritual for making each other relax before we had some kind of Deep Talk. And I knew we needed to have one. We were finishing up one of the mediocre meat lovers pizza from the best pizza place in town, which wasn’t saying much, as we settled back into life together for the summer. It was hard for me, and he could tell. I just wasn’t the same person anymore, even though nothing at home had changed.
Which was partly why I was pondering this question.
I realized how much a person could change, how badly an old life could fit, no matter how much you loved it.
“If I saved Mom from the demons, like…I mean…what would happen? Would you guys just get back to normal?”
He smoothed his hand over his face. “I don’t know. How can I know? She’s the one who would have to…adjust.”
“Yeah, I just wondered if you think she would.”
He sighed. “I don’t know who she is anymore.”
“Okay,” I said, a little tense.
“I wonder sometimes if I ever knew,” he continued. “I’m a pretty simple guy. I knew there was a lot going on in her head. She was angry at her parents for denying her her magical background, and she was also scared of it. She knew there was a lot of danger in being a witch. So she was always—you know—running back and forth. Switching on and off. But when we got together, I didn’t know about all that yet. And she seemed happy. I thought she’d made up her mind. I thought she chose.”
“You’re angry at her, aren’t you?” I asked.
He never said so. Dad always gave Mom a pass. I knew he loved her and missed her. He made it sound like she was gone, but I always imagined that if she ever came back, he would welcome her. As a kid I used to envision her just showing up one day, and they would kiss and she would just move back in. But I was a kid, and kids have no sense of what is actually possible. I used to imagine I would be a movie star veterinarian Olympic skater.
Of course, I turned out to be a witch, and maybe that was no less probable. But I also got a big wakeup call about how complicated life could be.
“You don’t want to hear that stuff,” he said.
“What? Dad, I’m old enough to understand that you’d be mad.”
“I forgive her,” he said. “A part of me could never believe that she was mine in the first place.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like I said, I’m a normal guy. And nothing that special. Your mom was special.”
I bristled. “You are too special!”
“I don’t need to be.”
“Are you glamorizing her?”
“She was glamorous!” he said. “You’ve worn her dress. What kind of woman wears a dress like that? She fucking blew my mind, Charlotte. She was gorgeous and well-traveled. She’d hung out with famous rock bands. She was utterly fearless. I’d never met a woman who would walk alone downtown in cities I wouldn’t even dare be caught dead in after dark. When I found out she was a witch it made more sense, but that didn’t change what I thought about her. You know that your grandpa told me she was too good for me?”
“No!” I smacked my hand on the table. “I never knew any of this, but it’s stupid. You’re a cool guy! You were a roadie for Angry Shirt!” I laughed a little, teasing him.
He laughed at that. “I’ve never really talked about her much, I know. I was protecting you from the truth, and now it’s just habit, but…I glamorized her a little, yeah. I loved her more. It was love at first sight, if something like that exists.”
“Aw. You met her at a Nine Inch Nails concert, right?”
“Yeah, but she was there for the Jesus and Mary Chain. They were the opening act, I guess. I drove down for the concert and I don’t remember any of it because I got to talking to her out front beforehand, and I was just—stupid over her. She had a faint English accent, and she had this sort of French beatnik style going on. She always looked good, your mom. She was the kid of rock stars, so…” He shrugged. “I could just tell she was somebody. But it was also February and she was shivering.”
“Did you offer her a coat?”
“Oh yeah. Oldest trick in the book.” He raised his brows. “She had to stick close to me so she could give it back later.”
“It’s weird,” I said. “I have such a hard time imagining her as glamorous. I’m not glamorous.”
“You could be,” he said. “If she’d been around to show you that stuff.” He waved a hand. “That’s my fault. Sometimes I’d think about buying you a makeup kit or her favorite perfume for Christmas, but then I thought, am I sending you a bad message? You’re not her. I just got you video games instead.”
Poor Dad. He was so cute. I could just imagine him wandering into the wilds of the makeup and perfume at the mall, picking up stuff and putting it down. I liked that, in the end, he didn’t try to fill her shoes.
“When did she tell you she was a witch? And how?”
“She was really into this hippie stuff,” he said. “That’s what I thought at first. Yoga and crystals, stuff no one I knew was into back then, not in the south anyway. She was superstitious. She talked to birds and plants when we were out. I could tell she was feeling me out to see if I thought anything she said was strange. Actually, I sensed right away that there was something that really bothered her. She was in some kind of pain. For one thing, she was just traveling around—not in school. She seemed lost. She told me her family had just moved to Australia and she wouldn’t say much more about them. It felt to me like she was looking for this place that didn’t exist.” He frowned. “But she didn’t tell me about magic until I said I wanted to have a kid.”
“When was that?”
“Just before we got married.”
“Oh.” I didn’t expect that. They dated for six years before they got married. They were young when they met, and Dad was broke, and I knew my grandparents were a little weird about it. “So long?”
“Well, I know how it is now. It’s not that hard a secret to keep. She rarely used magic. She let the whole magical world slip away from her. But when she got pregnant, she knew her child would have a familiar. She had to tell me. I still remember her hands shaking, and her voice shaking…it came pouring out of her. The magic, the family feuding, how she had four ‘dads’ and they were all werewolves…I thought she took some bad drugs at first.”
I was quiet. I could imagine how hard it was. Mom must have felt so alone, I thought. I couldn’t blame Dad for thinking she was on something, but for her to bury all that for six years knowing she would alter his entire perspective of the world when she told him… And where were her parents during all this? I wondered. One of her werewolf dads appeared to me when I tried to summon her, and blurted out the truth about my family, but then she appeared instead, and he vanished.
Even in that brief moment, I could tell he loved his daughter.
If Master Blair was right, what destroyed her was the rules of the magical world, that banished my grandmother when she fell in love with the werewolves and led to a chain reaction that affected my mother and then me.
Can I blame it all on that? But despite everything, I don’t want to team up with a demon…
“It was so complicated,” Dad said, seeing the expression on my face. “I never wanted to tell you how difficult and confusing she could be, because I loved her anyway. I wanted you to love her like I did, more than I wanted you to be angry at her.”
“Maybe I wanted to be angry at her.”
“Yeah…” He shook his head. “Parenting is hard.”
“I know.”
“Really hard,” he added. “Don’t get pregnant.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m not ready to be pre
gnant yet, don’t worry.”
“Yet? Don’t scare me like that…”
“You don’t want incubus grandbabies?” Now I squeezed his hand. “Don’t worry,” I repeated. “Anyway…I’ve just been thinking about it. Like, if I was able to save her, would you be overjoyed, or would it mess up your life?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But when you love someone, you don’t really care. I just want to know my Emily is safe even if it messes up my life. But—at the same time—you’re even more important to me. There is nothing more important to me than you, kid. You know that, right?”
“We’ve always been there for each other,” I said. “I’ve made it halfway through school, at least.”
But man, had I left a lot out. Like…I was honest with Dad about the fact that I was dating two guys at once, and I even didn’t deny that I was dating a third. But that seemed like more than enough to dump on him, so I hadn’t mentioned that we also agreed to defeat the Withered Lord with the help of a crew of vampires, nor had I even told him that the warlock and witches’ councils stormed the school and trapped Firian in fox form. Or that Master Blair had been born a woman and was removed from the school for covering that up, which didn’t seem to bode well for my future prospects there.
Dad suddenly got up from his chair. “I’ll be right back. Feel free to start in on the ice cream.”
I opened the freezer. Ooh, sweet. He didn’t just go store brand. He bought us pints with a fudge core.
“You know, I lost seven pounds at school this year,” I yelled. “And now it’s going out the window!” I grabbed a spoon.
He walked back in holding something small between his fingers. He held it out to me, but I already knew what it was.
Mom’s silver ring, engraved with ‘Fares Wyrd as she must’ in teeny-tiny script.
“I noticed you’ve been wearing rings,” he said. “Maybe you should have this one.”
I flushed. Yeah, I definitely wasn’t going to mention those rings were how my guys communicated with each other about how often they’d had sex with me. When we said goodbye for the summer, I kept all that week’s ‘activity’ on my fingers, along with the ring Firian gave me the last time I saw him in his human form.
A Witch Among Warlocks: The Complete Series Box Set Page 50
