by E. M. Moore
“Right now?” Gabe asked.
I nodded. “Right now. Please?”
He nodded, then threw down a ten to cover what the waitress had done for us already before getting up and holding his hand out to me. I took it, and he pulled me close. “Whatever you need, Norah. Always.”
2
Gabe side-eyed me as we pulled up to what looked like a vacant building on the wharf. “I don’t know why you seem so giddy. I don’t think I’ve seen Travis and Randy talk to one another since that night other than to make sure everyone was okay.”
I shrugged. I really didn’t care what they wanted at the moment. We all had to grow up. “Too bad.”
“Sometimes forcing it isn’t good.”
Even though he still had his sexy accent, Gabe’s words were grating on me. “Look where that’s gotten us in the past. Travis couldn’t even talk to me without saying something nasty.”
“But he figured his stuff out…in time.”
“Listen, Brit,” I said, glaring at him from the passenger seat as he pulled the car to a stop in front of the side door. “I think this is a fantastic idea. And I’m sick and tired of everyone acting like the other doesn’t exist. It’s time for a change.”
I threw the door open and unlatched my seatbelt. Next to me, I heard him take in a deep breath. He wasn’t going to discourage me though. I knew what I was doing in my heart. I didn’t even need Granny’s next life knowledge to understand that staying quiet about all this wasn’t good for us. Especially since we knew that Jax wasn’t done with us. He certainly wasn’t going to let it go, and we needed to be ready…as a team…when that happened.
I yanked open the side door and waltzed right up the stairway next to it. Up there were offices that we’d turned into makeshift bedrooms. Sure, we were all pretty much sleeping on couches or pull-out couches, but it was what we had at the moment. Because this was a sacred place to the Order, our magic was stronger here. It just made sense to stay here while there was a demon inside Jax. Call me crazy, but I liked the idea of having any help we could get.
Besides, Liam promised that when we got to move back into his parents’ house, he’d buy me a hot tub. I could put up with this until I got my hot tub.
Gabe was behind me as I ran up the stairs. Like usual, all the offices/bedrooms were closed. Maybe that was part of the problem. This place wasn’t set up like a house. There were no communal areas that we could all hang out in unless we wanted to go downstairs and hang out in the big room where the Order determined Travis wasn’t a bad witch. We’d all pass on that.
I walked down the hallway, knocking on each of their doors. It was a Saturday evening, so I knew they were all in. “Get up. Get out here. Coven meeting.”
Gabe snickered behind me.
When I got to Randy’s room, I kept going. I went all the way down to the very end of the building and opened that door. The room was dingy, but I went over to the window and looked outside. It had a view of the ocean at least. This was now going to be the temporary living room.
Down the hall, I heard doors open. Gabe leaned against the doorjamb to the temporary living room smirking at all the guys. “Yes, Mates. You heard that right. Norah wants a coven meeting.”
As each of them walked in, my heart lurched. Liam looked as if he’d had his nose stuck in a web page for hours. The back of his hair stood straight up. Travis moped in. His eyes were far away, as if his mind was displaced from his body. Randy…. well, Randy had a sneer on his face that immediately raised my hackles. “What’s this about, Norah?”
“Coven meeting.”
“Did you guys find something out about Jax?” Liam asked.
Travis immediately perked up.
“No, nothing like that.”
Randy rolled his eyes.
“Simmer down, big boy,” I said. “This is all more important than that. This is about all of us getting our shit together.”
Gabe stood in the back, his eyebrows raised high over his eyes. “Um, Norah?” Liam said. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about how the last week or so we haven’t done one thing together. We may as well be living in an apartment building where each of us don’t know the other. All we do is say hi when we pass in the hall.”
“I think everyone’s had their mind on different stuff,” Liam said. He came forward. Out of all of them, I expected that he would be worried. That somehow me getting mad about this meant that our relationship was in jeopardy.
I smiled at him and squeezed his hand to let him know it wasn’t personal. But then I turned toward all of them. “So, hey, how did we figure out how to take out Dupre at the sorority house?”
“We didn’t take him out. We put the Akashic cell on him and then he just disappeared.”
“Then how did we put the Akashic cell on him?”
They all just stared at me.
“The answer you’re all looking for is ‘together’. We did it together.”
“How did we save Liam from the Familiar and Randy from the Liderc?”
Travis folded his arms in front of his chest. “We’re not not working together, Norah.”
“Speak for yourself, Shaw.”
All eyes turned to Randy. I knew as soon as he walked in that he was itching for a fight. This could be a good thing. This was what I saw at the restaurant. The father got angry, let it out, and then everything was better again.
Travis looked bored. “What’s that, Randy? Is there something you’d like to say?”
Randy’s hands turned to fists. Gabe’s eyes turned to me, then went right back to the pair of them. “We could’ve been done with all this. We had the chance to grab Jax, but you interfered. We could’ve been done. Our lives could’ve been normal by now, but we’re living in fucking Order headquarters.”
Travis’s jaw tensed. “That’s not Jax.”
“Oh, wake the fuck up. It was Jax. He was the same overconfident prick he always was.”
“I don’t think he was that bad,” Gabe said, grimacing. “He was our friend.”
“And that’s why I can call him a prick,” Randy said. “I’d expect all of you to call me a fucking asshole if I was being one.”
“Fine,” Travis said. “You’re a fucking asshole.”
“I’m not the asshole who’s responsible for all this!”
Each of then breathed in deep, facing off from one another. Liam looked conflicted, as if he should be standing next to Randy, but let’s face it. None of us wanted to be standing next to Randy when he was like this.
“This is good,” I said. “We need to get all this out so that we can talk it through and get over it.”
Randy turned his glare on me. My stomach clenched. “You don’t get it, Norah. None of this is going to change anything.” Though his voice was much calmer, his eyes were still dark.
“Why do you say that?” I asked, feeling uncertain for the first time.
“Because faced with the same thing in the future, Travis would do the same thing. He’s not going to let us do anything to Jax.”
“Haven’t we done enough to Jax?” Travis asked.
I spun toward him, trying to read his face. The truth was evident on his face. I moved forward and grabbed his forearm. “Randy’s right, Travis. That wasn’t Jax.”
“It was,” he said, his muscles underneath my touch bunching.
“You know what he did,” I told him, speaking softly. “You know he called upon a demon to give him back his powers. There’s no other way he would be that powerful without it.”
“Travis seems to forget that Jax was the one leading Dupre on a string. That he was the reason you were taken, Norah. That a bunch of witches got drained, and some even died. He was the reason why Liam had a God damn familiar on him and we thought we were going to lose him.”
“That’s not Jax.”
“Exactly!” Randy said.
Travis moved within a split second. He shoved Randy against the wall, the smell of cinnamon sp
icing up the room. My heart fell through to my stomach as I watched them both. I went to move forward, but Liam squeezed my hand. “That wasn’t him!” Travis seethed. “That wasn’t him, but he’s in there. My friend is still in there.”
Randy was red in the face now, trying to control any reaction he might have had. Gabe put his hand on Travis’s shoulder and moved him away. “He was all our friend, Mate.”
“Not like he was with me. You guys all know it. I’m not trying to be mean, but you know how long we were friends. I can tell that the real Jax is still in there. It’s like when Liam had the familiar on him. He couldn’t control what he did, and as soon as we got the familiar off him, he was back to being Liam. It’s going to be the same way with Jax.”
Liam and I exchanged looks. What Travis was forgetting was the fact that Jax called the demon to him. Liam never asked for the familiar to jump onto him. Never. He didn’t even possess whatever quality it was that would let him do that. Maybe it was like Randy said, Jax was a prick. It was that kind of attitude, that kind of mentality, that would let someone use a demon to gain their witch powers back.
“I don’t care what you say,” Randy said, his teeth clenched. “That’s not Jax, and when the time comes, I’ll take him out myself.”
Travis staggered back a few steps. I held my hands out to steady him. When I looked around to his face, it was white as if a pale sheen had fallen over it. “You wouldn’t.”
“I have to do what’s best for everyone.”
“That’s not what’s best for everyone,” Travis said, moving forward again, this time with a hint of pleading in his voice. “It’s not what’s best for me.”
“It’s what’s best for the majority, and that’s how we always vote, remember, Travis?”
He shook his head. He looked at each of us. “You all don’t think that, do you? You all don’t think that we need to kill Jax, do you?”
He looked at me first. Even though I held his gaze, I didn’t know what to say to him. I’d been in Jax’s presence the most, and I wasn’t sure there was any good left to him. But I couldn’t tell him that. He looked so lost.
“I agree with Randy,” Liam said.
Travis looked as if shy, quiet Liam slapped him across the face.
“It’s what’s best for Norah. He wants to hurt her, Travis.”
“Because of what we did to him,” Travis said. He moved forward and grabbed both of Liam’s shoulders as if he was going to shake him. “He only wants to do that because we turned our back on him. He wants to get back at us for what we did to him.”
“I know you think that,” Liam said. He opened his mouth to say something else, but Travis had already moved to Gabe.
He walked straight up to him, causing Gabe to stand up with his shoulders back. “What about you? Do you think Jax needs to die?”
“I don’t know,” Gabe said. “We certainly can’t let him go around Salem doing what he’s been doing, that much I know. It’s safer not only for Norah, but everyone else. He has possession of a demon, Travis. That’s not something we can just look past.”
He backed up, not bothering to look twice at Randy, but his gaze roamed over Gabe, Liam, and then back to me. “Norah…”
The building shook. Puffs of dirt exploded into tiny particles away from the walls, and for the first time, I recognized it for what it was. Someone had breached the wards.
3
We sprang into action. Liam threw up a visibility spell so fast I almost got dizzy when the walls disappeared and I saw nothing but the exterior parking lot.
Travis and Randy took point in front of Liam, Gabe, and me. Travis, though, inched forward as if all he needed was a reason to run out in front of us.
His hang-ups were deeper than I thought. Maybe this hadn’t been the best of ideas since it turned out to be a rag on Travis meeting. I just really wanted us all to start thinking and planning again. I’d have to sit down and talk to him by myself to see where his head was at. Maybe he’d open up to me more about it. Maybe then I could understand it because right now, I was just trying to make sense of his words.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Randy said. “It’s the Order.”
Gabe and Liam relaxed. Gabe never liked to see them, but Liam at least was relieved to see that it wasn’t Jax, I thought.
Liam took down his invisibility spell and Travis quieted the wards. We walked down the stairwell slowly. I didn’t know how the rest of my coven felt, but just because they knew I existed now, that didn’t mean they gave me all the warm and fuzzies. And an unannounced meeting was never good.
Gabe echoed my sentiment as we walked down. None of us responded, most likely because we were all thinking the same things in our head.
We met them by the side door. They nodded at us as they moved into the main room. In front of our eyes, chairs from the surrounding seating lifted and flew through the air to the center of the pentagram. Five seats facing another five seats.
Well, that was cozy.
Walter sat in the middle, and Travis took the spot opposite him. I sat next to him with Randy to my right. Gabe and Liam flanked Travis on the other side.
“Hello,” Walter said. His gaze ran down the line until it hit me. He stared at me a few seconds longer than he did everyone else. After Travis’s ceremony, he and I sat down together many times. I was grilled and asked every question I could think of. It was a stressful time, but I hadn’t seen him in days. “Sorry to come unannounced.”
Randy bristled, no doubt thinking that it never stopped them before. Now that we had nothing to hide though, it really didn’t matter. They knew about me. Travis had been found to be true. What could possibly be wrong?
“There’s much to say, so we’ll just get right to it,” Walter said. “After many meetings with the other Orders, we’ve decided to begin a new Order decree.”
We all shifted in our seats. The air was thick, and we all waited for what felt like a bomb to drop. “What’s that?” Randy asked, his leg jumping up and down as he tried and failed to sit there calmly.
“As you know, we had to tell the other Orders about your new coven member.”
“Norah,” Gabe said.
“I know her name, Mr. MacDonnagh.” He looked away from Gabe, his expression steely. “We didn’t think it right to keep her presence a secret as you all kept it from us.”
Randy’s fingers clenched into fists.
“After much deliberation in which some Orders thought it best to disband the Salem Order, we’ve—”
“Disband the Order?” Travis argued.
Walter held up a hand. “Thankfully, it has not come to that. In order to keep the faith in your Order and for Orders to better serve their cities, we’ve decided on a ruling.”
Gooseflesh erupted over my arms. Walter wouldn’t look at me, and I knew this had not just something to do with me, but everything to do with me. The Order of the Akasha was a long-standing club. They didn’t like change. Change was their enemy.
“From now on, Order members are not to have any intimate relationships with one another further than friendship.”
A sour taste coated my throat. They’d just taken everything dear to me and threw it down and stomped on it without any thought to what it would do to us. These guys were my everything.
“You can’t do that,” Travis said.
At the same time, Randy said, “Fuck that.”
After the two outbursts, Liam said, “That seems rather harsh, don’t you think?”
Gabe leaned back, his lips pressed tightly together. For some reason, he’d always been the black sheep of this Order.
“I expected this reaction,” Walter said, “But please believe me that everyone had nothing but the best of intentions for your coven. It is our belief, however, that one cannot have a flourishing coven with the types of relationship that you all have.”
I couldn’t take it any longer. “That’s not what this is about, though, is it?” I asked. “Tell us what it’s really about.�
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Walter slowly moved his gaze toward me. His disinterested look sent me into a spiral.
“What about the rumors of the other covens? Is it true?” I asked, rising to my feet. “Is it true what we heard that adding in a female Enforcer does something to the coven?”
“We can’t substantiate those claims,” Walter said. He never rose to his feet, but his look itself said he was superior than me.
“But you might as well have,” I said. “If not, why would you even make this rule? If there was no evidence behind it, why couldn’t we continue on as we have been to see what happened?”
“It’s for your own good,” Walter said.
A shiver went up my spine. “You know, it’s been my experience that people who say, ‘It’s for your own good,’ are either copping out or lying. Which is it with you?”
Travis stood. He put a hand on my forearm to hold me back. “I’ve got news for you, Walter. Our relationship with Norah is none of your business. We’ll continue to do whatever it is we please on that level.”
“Then you will be breaking the law,” Walter said, his voice morphing from one of just generally relaying news to feeling the truth behind it.
“Then you can disband us,” Liam said.
Walter’s head reared back. “You would do that?”
“That and more,” Gabe said, his British accent thick. Whenever he was in a heightened emotion, it always seemed as if he’d just stepped out of England itself.
“This isn’t fair, and you know it, Walter. Either you have something that shows evidence of why you’re trying to enforce this law, or you’re being bullied into it by fear.”
As I’d always said, fear leads people to do crazy shit.
“Is that your answer then?” Walter asked. “Rather than do your life’s calling, you’d rather give in to your feelings?”
