by Briar, Robin
Her. That’s when the feeling I’ve been having starts to make sense. The sense of familiarity when we pulled up. I don’t have time to explain.
“I need you to wait here,” I tell him.
He looks at me like I’ve lost my mind.
“That’s not going to happen.”
The look on Mason’s face is stern, primal, and protective. Utterly unyielding.
“Fine, but let me go first,” I say.
“You’re in no shape to—”
“Let me go first,” I repeat.
I use my authoritative voice. I’ve never used it on Mason before. It’s not a spell, but a practiced way of speaking. It lets Mason know that he can’t rationalize with me.
After a second of studying my face, he nods.
We walk up the stairs together. He’s practically hovering behind me the whole time. Every muscle in his body is tensed and ready to pounce.
The front door of my apartment is ajar. I push it open. That’s when I see her standing in the center of my living room. No guile. No subterfuge. She’s waiting for us to arrive, utterly confident in herself, just like always. Her eyes lock on mine.
“Hello, Jessica,” Candice says. “Sorry it took me so long to check on you.”
5. Mother of the Coven
I reach back and place a hand on Mason’s shoulder. His entire body is warm, ready to strike.
“Mason, this is Candice. A very good friend of mine. Candice, this is Mason.”
She lazily fixes a cool stare at Mason, challenging him with her eyes.
Candice is probably one of the tallest women I’ve ever known. Her long blonde hair is tied back in thin braids around the crown of her head. Scandinavian. All business today. Candice is not her real name, but the one she’s used for the entire time I’ve known her. She’s dressed conservatively in a full-length dress, but with a leather belt.
“Do your friends always invite themselves into your place?” Mason asks.
I turn around and face him defiantly.
“My very good friends do, yes. Especially when they’re concerned about me. That’s why we all have keys to each other’s places,” I say firmly.
Mason has no idea how much danger he is in right now. This woman has fought trolls with little more than a sword and shield.
Mason looks at me, then back at Candice, then back at me. I want him to calm down, but it’s not going well. He’s breathing heavily, ready for a fight. He senses the threat that Candice represents.
I touch the front of his heaving chest. Something’s missing. He’s not wearing the pendant. I am.
His eyes are beginning to turn canine, which isn’t good. Not even remotely good.
I look at Mason with the most disarming smile I can muster. I need to distract him, mesmerize him. I look into his eyes and hold his stare, hoping this gets his attention. It does. Mason tries to comprehend my mood.
“Maybe you can introduce yourself to my friend?” I ask him.
He doesn’t notice me lifting his pendant off my neck and placing it over his head. He’s too fixated on maintaining eye contact with me now.
It takes a moment for the magic to take effect, but I can feel Mason relax almost immediately. He closes his eyes, then gives his head a shake and opens them. They’re normal again. Human.
Mason looks over at Candice and stands up straight rather than hunched like an animal. He smiles.
“Any friend of Jess’s is a friend of mine. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“The pleasure is all mine, Mason,” Candice says. “Sorry if I startled you earlier.”
“Not at all. It’s like Jess said, you have every right to be here.”
Candice looks over at me and raises an eyebrow. It’s her I’m impressed look. Still, what just happened is going to need some explaining. She saw all of it.
“I’m sure Jess would offer you something to eat or drink, but there isn’t anything in the apartment here right now. Nothing I’d recommend eating, at any rate.”
Mason looks over at me. “Tell you what. Why don’t you two catch up while I slip out and pick up some groceries. The market in town should be opening soon.”
“You don’t have to do that. I’m sure we can manage,” I tell him.
“Not at all. You can’t offer stale crackers to a friend from out of town. I’ll be back soon.”
He kisses me on the forehead, looks back at Candice, and nods before turning on his heels and heading down the stairs. I turn back to face Candice the moment he disappears out of the room.
“The energetic boy you told us about?” Candice asks.
I place a finger over my lips and then grab Candice by the hand, leading her to the largest window of my apartment. I wave and watch Mason drive off, waiting until he rounds a corner in his car before talking to Candice.
“His ears are better than the average dog, and I didn’t want you to accidentally say something before you knew that.”
“There’s obviously a lot more to this boy that you let on.”
“And you’d be right to think that. I haven’t been completely forthcoming with you or Saffron about him. Probably because I haven’t been completely honest with myself about him either. This one has me in a tizzy, but you knew that already, didn’t you? That’s why you’re here?”
Candice palms the side of my face with genuine tenderness. I do that a lot with Mason. Maybe I get it from Candice. She has been doing that to me for years.
“You look ragged, Jessica. Sit down and tell me what’s been going on.”
Candice guides me to the couch and seats herself next to me.
“I barely know where to start. How about with the most obvious explanation? Mason is a werewolf.”
“Yes, dear, I can plainly see that much. In fact, that was quite the trick you pulled just now. Calming him with a pendant? Did you enchant that trinket yourself?”
“No. A Romanian witch. It activates when it’s close to the tattoo on his chest.”
“Really?” Candice says as she looks off into the distance. “I think I’ve heard about that witch. Still, not what I was getting at exactly. You’ve taken up with a werewolf. A protective one at that. That comes with a host of complications. You don’t sleep with a wolf unless you’re prepared to be possessed by one.”
“So I’ve learned.”
“I hope so,” Candice says, leveling a stare at me. “A werewolf is no trifling matter. We’ll come back to this Mason in a moment. But no, that’s not what I meant. What I’m curious about is what you’ve been doing here in this apartment.”
“Um, well, I’m not sure what to tell you that you don’t already know. Surely our shared connection to the quicksilver pool—”
“Yes, I know about that part. You are a Maiden, after all. No, silly, I’m more interested in all the spellcasting you’ve been doing.”
I look at Candice, confused.
“What? Lately? There was a spell of protection and a spell of siphoning, but that was over a week ago.”
“That was two weeks ago, Jessica. No, I mean recently.”
I have to shake my head. Two weeks. Woof. That is long time.
“I’ve been pretty out of it, Candice. I haven’t been spellcasting at all.”
“Oh dear,” she says.
“What? What is it?” I ask.
“Tell me honestly. What have you been doing in that time?”
“I’ve been painting. A lot. Mason and I, we… kind of had a falling out. I drove him away. Right after finding out he was a shifter, actually. That wasn’t the reason. There was… another reason. I got kind of intense. Covetous might be a better word. Anyway, I didn’t mean to scare him off, but I did. I’ve been kind of obsessed with painting ever since.”
“Tell me about this painting,” Candice says. She reaches over for the closest canvas and brings it in front of herself. “One of these?”
“Yes, but no one canvas in particular.”
I take the canvas from her hands to examine
it more closely.
“This was one of my first attempts.”
“Tell me more,” Candice says. “Why this painting over and over again?”
“Well, it’s a painting that Mason loves. I’ve been trying to recreate it. In fact, I’ve been obsessed with it. I got it into my head that if I… no, it’s silly.”
Candice pulls the painting away from me and puts it aside. Then she clutches both of my hands in her grip.
“Tell me,” she says earnestly.
“All right, but you’re going to think I’m even more ridiculous than you already do. I thought that if I could recreate that painting, perfectly, he would come back to me.”
Candice brings a hand up, presses two fingers between her eyes, and takes a deep breath.
“I was afraid of something like that.” She drops her hand and looks at me again. “You love him, don’t you?”
I look at Candice, search for some way to squirm out of this conversation. There’s no escape from me. She isn’t going to let me dodge the question now. Not in person.
I nod.
“Of course. And with a werewolf, no less. One of the strongest male archetypes you can find. You would have been a moth to his flame. Especially when he marked you.”
“I feel like I’m missing something,” I say.
Candice closes her eyes to collect her thoughts. She takes a deep breath and then opens them again, addressing me directly.
“Jessica, you’re not just a Maiden. You’re a natural Maiden. That’s why Saffron recruited you. The perfect complement to our triptych. It’s what makes us such a powerful coven of witches.
“Well, this is one of the… let’s call it a drawback. When you fall in love, you in particular, a natural Maiden, spellcasting as you know it, the words… well, they become unnecessary. You can cast spells without even thinking about it. If I’m not mistaken, that’s what you’ve been doing… continuously… for the past week.”
A blink at Candice, more than a little stunned by what she is telling me.
“But there were none of the usual signs. I didn’t feel tapped into the quicksilver pool at all.”
“You don’t have to be. The pool taps into you. It would have been imperceptible, to you and us. You see, the pool was overflowing thanks to you and that energetic boy who just left. Thanks for that, by the way. It needed a topping up.”
I nod, but I’m more interested in where Candice is going with this.
“Well, Saffron and I haven’t been doing that much spellcasting lately. In fact, we haven’t been doing much spellcasting at all since you left on this trip. Conserving the quicksilver pool until you return.”
Okay, I was expecting at least one dig at my extended stay. That was it.
“It wasn’t until you hadn’t called for two weeks that we noticed anything. Also, you weren’t answering your phone. So Saffron and I tried connecting to you through the pool. That’s when we discovered two things. You were unconscious and the quicksilver pool was half empty.”
I place a hand over my mouth in shock. It dawns on me what happened.
“I’ve been casting a summoning spell.”
Candice nods. “That would be my guess too.”
“I’ve been casting a summoning spell over and over again, each time I started a new painting.”
Candice glances around the room. “Can I gather that each one of these canvases represents another attempt to recreate Mason’s favorite painting?”
I nod again.
“Oh, Candice,” I finally say after finding my voice again, “I’ve been so wasteful!”
This is bad. Really bad. I’ve been such a fool. It feels like I’ve broken one of the unspoken rules of our pact. I try to stifle the tears, but they’re determined to make an appearance now.
Candice reaches out and clasps both sides of my face.
“Jessica. It’s not your fault. You had no idea what you were doing. It’s not in your nature to be wasteful. This isn’t something you did on purpose; Saffron and I both know that. The fact that you’re even prone to such emotional magic is what makes you such a powerful Maiden. We’ve just never told as much. I’m thinking now that we should have.”
“But it feels like I’ve let you both down,” I say tearfully.
“Did you tell Mason that you’re a witch?” Candice asks.
“No,” I say, shaking my head.
“Does he suspect that there’s more to you than meets the eye?”
“No more than any man thinks that about any woman.”
“Then you haven’t let us down. We have some damage control to do, but nothing that can’t be fixed.”
I wipe the tears from eyes.
“Speaking of which, did you fix the doors? Mason was convinced he destroyed them breaking in here last night. He thought I was in trouble at the time.”
“Well, you were in trouble, so there’s that to like about him. And to answer your question, yes I did. A mending spell. Your neighbors would have called the police otherwise.”
“That may need some explaining when Mason gets back. He knows that witches exist, after all. He might suspect something magical.”
“What happened, anyways?” Candice says. “Why were you unconscious?”
“That’s hard to say. I’m still piecing it together in my head as well. The painting was a continuous marathon. I was pretty out of it by the end. I slept very little and even stopped eating. That’s probably why I look so haggard. I wasn’t even sure how much time had passed until you told me it was two weeks. All I cared about was finishing the painting.”
I stand up and start looking at the canvases around the room for the first time.
“I don’t even remember painting half of these.”
Candice walks over to my easel on the ground and sets it upright. The canvas is still bound to the frame with clamps.
“Was this the last painting you were working on?”
I walk over and look at the painting. What I see is impossible, as if I haven’t already received enough jolts to my system. I simply can’t believe what I’m seeing in front of me.
It’s The Vision of Endymion. Exactly as Edward Poynter painted it.
I look around for the reference book, find it on the ground, and bring it back to my easel, comparing the full-color plate to my painting.
My trained eyes scan back and forth, but near as I can tell, it’s an exact duplicate. Right down to the smallest detail. Including his signature.
“This isn’t merely a duplicate,” I tell Candice. “It’s an exact copy. I must have been drawing on the quicksilver pool pretty heavily by the end. This could pass for the original under intense scrutiny.”
Candice looks at the reference book, then at the painting, but doesn’t really see what I’m talking about. It’s my specialty, after all, not hers. Still, Candice trusts me to know what I’m talking about where paintings are concerned.
“Would Mason be able to tell?”
“Actually, he probably could. His parents are art appraisers. That’s why he even has an interest in painting. And this is his favorite one.”
“Has he seen it yet?”
“No. I don’t think so. Not based on what he was telling me earlier. He headed straight for me. There was a full moon last night and he was on the verge of changing. If what he told me is true, and I’m sure it is, Mason picked me up and carried me out of here. We haven’t been back to my apartment until just now.”
Candice brings a hand up to her chin and weighs everything I’ve just said before speaking.
“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. Hide this painting before he comes back. He can’t see it. You could destroy it, but that would be a shame. Not because it’s a perfect copy, but because you could use it summon him again. It could be useful. At least then, all the magic you used to create it would count for something. Instead, show him one of these other paintings. One that isn’t a perfect replica, but close. You decide. That’s your wheelhouse, after all. Sound good
?”
I nod. This mess is all my fault. I hate creating problems for Candice and Saffron. I haven’t for years. And now to do this after I made such a fuss about spending time on my own. They must think I’m the worst kind of handful.
Candice places a hand on my neck.
“Don’t beat yourself up, okay, Jessica? You couldn’t have known this was going to happen, or was even possible, for that matter. Saffron and I didn’t tell you, and we knew it was a possibility. If anything, it means you’re an even better choice of Maiden than we first thought. Still, if you can do us one favor in the future…”
“Anything. Name it.”
“The next time you fall in love with somebody, give us a heads-up beforehand, okay? Preferably before you even know it yourself,” she says with a smile.
“I’ll do my best,” I reply, fighting the tears back again.
Candice always knows how to make me feel better.
6. Topping up the Tank
Candice and I manage to straighten up my place before Mason returns. The perfect copy has been wrapped up in a drop cloth and stashed behind the headboard of my bed.
I do as Candice suggests and pick out the next best painting. It’s close, but not perfect. I didn’t layer the oil paint correctly. It’s not obvious, but wouldn’t stand up to the scrutiny of somebody familiar with the piece.
I fill Candice in on all the details about Mason while we’re working. The story of how he was turned into a werewolf rather than being born as one, how he and Sylvia are fraternal twins, the nature of their special bond, how they feel everything from each other, regardless of distance.
It’s breaking confidence with Mason, but I’m not in a position to hold back any more. My first loyalty is to Candice and Saffron. Our pact trumps all secrets. Especially after draining half of the quicksilver reservoir. Candice takes it all in stride, then tells me to wash up. I still smell like sex, apparently.
I manage to jump in and out of the shower before Mason walks through the door. I want to be there when he arrives. I’m out of the bathroom and dressed just as he walks up the stairs with two bags of groceries.
The easel is positioned for him to spot right away. Predictably, Mason is completely floored. His reaction is even more powerful than I thought it would be, which is a good sign.
