Cash tossed grapes into Rye’s mouth.
Gray got up and got them all coffees.
Tamsin leaned hard on Rye when he sat next to her and he stroked her hair without saying anything.
They were all too tired and shook to speak. They’d been through hell and then heaven in the matter of a day.
They found comfort in each other and weren’t shy about it.
So of course half the cafeteria hated them.
A First Year boy named Freddie sauntered up. He glanced back at his table of friends who were watching him like he was about to fight a dragon.
“Can I help you?” Tamsin asked.
“How much?”
“How much what?” Tamsin asked. Beside her, Cash stilled himself like he was about to pounce.
“How much does it cost to get a turn?” The boy wagged his tongue at her and his friends exploded with laughter.
Rye and Cash jumped to their feet, but Tamsin eased them back down.
A third year girl with platinum hair done up in coiled braids walked up to their table. She was called Alessa. “You should really be ashamed of the spectacle you’re making of yourself, whoring around like this.” She lifted her nose so high in the air that Tamsin thought the girl might fall over.
“Keep walking, Alessa Rilstude,” Gray warned. “And keep a civil tongue in your mouth. This is your one warning.”
The foursome decided to take their meal elsewhere, so they chose the courtyard park. There were few students there at this time of day.
“Perhaps we should tone it down in public?” Rye said.
“Perhaps these people should mind their own fucking business,” Cash said in a voice that almost became a roar.
“Why is it acceptable to walk about with your hair shaped into two great bloody serpents or with a bone in your nose, but when a woman loves three men it’s suddenly a scandal?” Gray sighed.
“Because one of those is merely cosmetic and the other is a threat to the fabric of the wizarding world,” Tamsin said.
Cash leaned over and kissed her deeply, making her toes curl in her boots. “Here’s to being a threat, darlin’.”
32
Rye’s Terrible No-Good Very Bad Secret
As the morning turned to afternoon, the four lovers savored each other’s presence as they lounged in the little courtyard park.
Tamsin didn’t feel lonely anymore. She felt accepted, which would take some getting used to. There’d be bumps ahead, she knew. But for just one day she wanted to live in the moment and ride the afterglow as long as possible.
So of course Rye broke the mood.
“My friends, there is something I must tell you,” he said. His expression was gravely serious and very unlike him. “It is a terrible secret. The shame of it is great. I have been breaking one of the fundamental rules of the school.” His head hung low and he couldn’t meet their eyes. “Keeping this to myself has been torture. Come with me. I must show you. You must see for your own eyes. And then perhaps you can forgive me.”
Tamsin and Gray and Cash eyed each other. What could Rye be hiding? Hadn't they all seen into each other's hearts? Was there some darkness that he had kept hidden from them, sealed away by his tattoos?
They followed him out of the courtyard to the elevators.
“Did you create money?” Tamsin asked on the way.
“No,” Rye said. “It is worse than that.”
She turned to Gray. “Why is making money one of the fundamental no-nos? I never understood that. I made these clothes. What’s the difference.”
Cash chimed in. “Imagine being a store near Penrose. Imagine every night when you count up the day’s earnings that half of your currency turns into dry leaves because some jokers paid you with transfigured cash.”
Tamsin whistled. “That would be pretty bad.”
“All it takes is a few careless witches and they can ruin the local economy or wreck some poor sap’s livelihood.”
“But you didn’t make money?” she asked Rye.
“No.”
“Did you raise the dead?”
He shook his head.
“Well I know you didn’t summon a demon, so how bad could it be?”
“Very bad,” Rye said sadly. “It is why I am on academic probation.”
The group was somber on the way up to see Rye’s secret. It was nice to be away from all the staring, judgey eyes, but she already missed the comfort of the courtyard and her lovers’ arms around her.
At least she was feeling better physically. The more time that passed since the demon attack, the more her body seemed to be hers.
But Tamsin could tell something was missing inside her. Not just the door and her golden key—part of her was missing. Part of her soul was missing. She could feel it as a distant incompleteness, like a bite had been taken out of her.
They had the elevator to themselves.
The students of Penrose were subdued the day after the demon attack. Even the ones who didn’t feel it could sense the aftermath.
Once they were in and the doors closed, Cash tried to sneak a kiss. But the timing was all wrong. Tamsin couldn’t make out with Cash while Rye was in such agony. What could his terrible secret be? He refused to say until they got to the dorm room.
In the hall there didn't seem to be any real lasting damage from the demon attack. Even after all that caustic ooze and barbed tendrils nothing was broken. It was a testament to the strength of the protection spells on Bentham Hall.
But of course in the boys’ room it was a different story.
Cash growled when he saw what had happened to his part of the room. "What did the demon have against whiskey anyway?"
“I know just the spell for this.” Gray flexed his fingers and went to work casting mending charms on everything that could be mended. Tamsin binned the rest.
Rye dug through the hill of shattered canvases, hurling them behind himself in a hurry until he found the one he was looking for.
It was an oil painting, not much larger than a book. The frame was hand carved and simple but the picture within it was stunning. It was a little cottage in the woods rendered in such skillful detail that Tamsin felt like she could touch it.
“This is my secret,” Rye said.
Tamsin’s senses tingled as she examined it. There was magic in it—deep magic—but the flavor of it was unlike anything she sensed before.
“It’s lovely,” Tamsin said. “Did you paint this?”
Rye nodded.
“And how is this painting illegal?” Gray asked. He took the canvas gently from Rye’s hand and examined it.
“Please, take my hand. Join hands with each other,” Rye said.
They did so without hesitation.
With his free hand, Rye touched the picture frame and shouted a word that made Tamsin’s ears turn inside out.
And then they were in the painting.
“What the hell?” Cash said. “Warn a guy next time.”
“I apologize,” Rye said. “You ask sometimes where I go when you cannot find me. And the answer is here. I come here.”
Fields of flowers and a forest surrounded them. In front of them was the picturesque cottage. All of it was made of paint. If she looked closely, Tamsin could see the brushstrokes.
“This painted house is your dark secret?” Tamsin asked.
Gray licked the house to see what it tasted like.
Something inside the house moved on heavy feet. Claws scraped against the painted wood.
“What was that?” Gray asked.
“What is it?” Tamsin asked.
Cash tried to growl, but nothing came out. His wolf was inaccessible.
The heavy thing inside the house drew closer.
Gray searched for his wand. He held it out and tried to summon a shield. But nothing happened.
None of them could do magic in the world inside the painting.
The loud beast emerged from the house.
It was a dog.
>
Tamsin didn’t know what to expect, but an enormous chocolate brown dog with one ear sticking up and the other flopping down was not it.
“This is Crowley,” Rye said.
“Hello, you’re late,” Crowley the dog said to Rye. “I love you.” He licked Rye’s hands and feet and face and jumped all over him. The dog’s tongue didn’t seem to fit inside its mouth.
“Your dog talks.” Tamsin’s voice was full of wonder. She wanted to interrogate the dog, to find out all it could tell her about dog culture. And she wanted to give it at least one thousand belly rubs.
“Is it a demon?” Cash asked.
Rye shook his head. “Crowley is just a dog. He used to belong to Dynara, but ever since she vanished I have been taking care of him.”
Crowley sniffed Rye’s pants. “You smell like trees,” he said.
“Why does your dog talk?” Tamsin asked.
“It was my sister who did this. So Crowley could tell her what he needed.”
Crowley leapt up on Rye and pushed him of his feet. When the big man hit the ground the hound was on top of him, sitting on his chest and licking his face. “You smell different. You kissed someone? I love you. Do you have food?”
From the side it was clear this was no ordinary dog. Golden sigils glowed behind his ears and traced a path down his spine. The line work on them was precise and breathtaking. If this was the work that Dynara did when she was just a girl, then she was a genius.
“Oh my god, you have a dog,” Gray laughed. “This is your big secret?”
They had been bracing themselves for some terrible revelation—some secret that would destroy the peace they had just found in each other.
A secret dog? That was not it.
Cash was the first to start laughing. He dropped to his knees and put his arms out to catch Crowley and the dog rocketed into him. The shifter was bowled over into mud just off the path. But the mud was really oil paint. He didn’t seem to mind.
Crowley sniffed Cash all over. “Hello, cousin,” he said. “Why are you hiding inside a person?”
“I’d love to have my wolf come out and play with you, but I can’t shift in here. This place has its own rules.”
Crowley nodded and smiled in the same way that Rye always did. “I love you.”
Had Tamsin ever seen Cash laugh before? Really laugh? He was more of a wry grin kind of guy. Maybe a knowing smile if he was feeling particularly upbeat. The belly laughs that Crowley elicited from him transformed the man in Tamsin’s eyes. He carried such a weight all the time that it made him seem much older than the rest of them. But here, wrestling a dog, Tamsin could see him for the carefree boy he could have been.
It was beautiful.
Gray, for his part, marveled at the world they walked in. “Where is this, Rye? We’re not in the green realms of Faerie. No, I know those quite well. And this isn’t Erebus.”
Rye spat on the ground. “Don’t name that place in here.”
It was the dark shadow of the world, Tamsin knew. But that was literally all she knew about it. All of her textbooks and readings mentioned the place without explaining anything about it.
“What happens if I pluck an apple from that tree and eat it?” Gray asked.
Rye sat in the muddy paint and wiped dog prints from his chest. “You get a mouthful of paint, my friend.”
“What if I walk in that direction? What’s beyond this little house?”
“More houses. A rendition of my village. Eventually you would end up back here.”
“Eventually? How big is this place?” Tamsin asked.
Crowley and Cash were still wrestling.
“Ten, maybe fifteen square kilometers?” Rye said.
Gray was stunned. “This is incredible, Rye. This is groundbreaking. I’ve never heard of anything like this before. Did Dynara make this?”
“No, no. This is my work. She made her own. But this skill is common where I am from. The world-within-a-painting is an old art of my people. We have been doing this for ten thousand years.”
“Impossible,” Gray said. He looked shaken. “Your tattoos are amazing and all, Rye, but I have to admit I kept thinking of you as some peasant hedge wizard who grew up applying poultices to injured farmhands.”
“I know. People underestimate me. Even in my village.”
Gray bowed low. His silver hair swept through a painted flower bush so that when he stood up, blue paint dripped down his face. “I apologize. It was arrogant and colonialist of me to assume that Highborn magic was more advanced than yours.”
“Oh it is in many ways,” Rye admitted. “In other ways . . . ” He gestured to his painted world for a striking example.
Crowley had half buried Cash in paint. The shifter had oil paint daisies stuck in his hair.
A thought occurred to Tamsin. “Those other paintings—the ones the demon destroyed? Were they little worlds, too?”
Rye nodded. “A few. Only one mattered to me. I was working on a fairytale castle. But I’ve never seen a castle in person, so the work was slow.”
“I have a castle,” Gray said. He popped into the house that Crowley had emerged from. Oil paint bunnies scattered from one of the nearby bushes. “Or rather I did. It’s still there. It’s just rather not exactly mine anymore.”
“I would like to see that,” Rye said.
“Me too,” Tamsin said. “Where is it?”
“That is a complicated question. Let me just say, in the interest of brevity and not wanting to draw diagrams to explain myself, that it is in several locations at once. One of those is Los Angeles. One is London. One is the green realm of Faerie and one is Erebus.”
Rye winced. “Do not say that name. To say that name is to invite evil.”
“As you say.” Gray bowed politely. “I shall be back soon. I simply must see more of this world.” Mindless of the paint that stained his clothes, Gray hiked off to see the village Rye had made.
“What’s this Ere—” Tamsin paused at the upset look on Rye’s face. “—place?”
“The dark shadow of the earth,” Rye said.
“Yeah, but what is it?”
Cash and Crowley walked back over to them. They were both dripping with paint and panting. “It’s where souls go when they die, before they pass on to the next world,” Cash said. “It’s a land of shadows and ghosts and decay.”
Rye nodded. “It’s also where demons live.”
“So, hell? It’s hell?” Tamsin asked. “Gray has a castle in hell?”
Crowley sat on Tamsin’s foot. “You smell nice. I love you.” He got lots of belly rubs for that.
“Darlin’, you’re from Seattle, right? I’ve never been there. Does it have a bad part? Have you driven through a part of a big city that’s just fallen down into itself?” Cash sat in the painted mud. He seemed more at home here. “My mom was from Detroit. A bunch of my pack was, before they moved to LA And Detroit has these parts that have just fallen apart into a sort of wasteland. Erebus is like that. It’s the neglected part of the spirit world,” Cash said. "But it's not all bad. There's beauty there too. In my pack, going there was a rite of passage."
"I do not believe any parts that place is nice," Rye said.
Gray had wandered out of sight, deeper into the painted world.
"None of you judge me for having a dog?" Rye asked. "The administration were very upset with me last year when they found me hiding Crowley in my room."
“I love your dog,” Tamsin said. “Why would Penrose care?”
"Some spirits and demons like to use pets to seduce witches," Cash said. "I've had to chase more than a few away myself."
A wind blew through the painted trees. Cicadas sang a song. It felt so real.
"This painted world of yours, Rye. Can anyone hear us in here? Can they scry us or eavesdrop?" Tamsin asked.
"No, koshka. Magic cannot reach us here. At least, not easily."
"What are you thinking, darlin’?”
Crowley lay on his ba
ck at her feet, his tongue lolled out as he happily received belly rubs.
"Hannah and Grace and Janet have been playing me since day one. They've been spying on me and manipulating me the whole time. I need to find out why and for who whom. Are they working for the King in Shadow? Is he working for them? Or is there something bigger going on? I need to know. And if we’re in here, Janet can't spy on us. Probably."
In Tamsin's belly, something unraveled. It felt like a sharp thread spooling out of her navel, cutting her in the process.
"Boys, something is wrong." Tamsin fell to her knees. The paint squelched wetly on her new pants.
"What's wrong?" Cash asked.
Crowley licked her face. "She smells nice. She's dying."
Rye activated his diagnosis rune. His eyes flared again with pink light.
"How come your magic works in here?" Cash asked. He sounded offended.
"Because, my friend, this is my world." Rye ran his hands over Tamsin's belly and legs and arms to see what was wrong. "This spell is unraveling. Oblivion is taking her."
Tamsin tried to speak, but all that came out was a groan. The spell holding her soul together—the silver net—was falling apart. Faster and faster.
"What? Why now?" Cash was in a panic. "Fix her. Fix her! You can do it."
Rye was deep in concentration. Finally, he spoke. "It's Gray. He's gone too far from us. He is tied to the spell but he's gone out of range. The ritual is failing."
"Then let's find that silly elf,” Cash said. He picked Tamsin up and placed her on top of Crowley’s wide back. Cash ripped his t-shirt into shreds and used them to bind her hands around the big dog’s neck.
"Crowley, find Gray." Rye commanded.
"Who?" Crowley tried to lick Tamsin's fingers but couldn't reach them.
"The one who smells like flowers and running water," Cash said.
"Oh, him. Okay." Crowley took off like a rocket. Cash and Rye followed as fast as they could. Thankfully the dog’s trail was easy to follow. They just had to look for the giant smear of paint across the world.
The nearer they got to Gray, the better Tamsin felt, until soon her soul had stopped unraveling.
Gray was sitting at the edge of a pool that glowed with purple light. It was the pool from Rye’s stories, the one he and his sister had fallen into. Gray had his shoes off and he was wiggling his toes in the purple water.
Light Up The Night: a Reverse Harem Urban Fantasy Romance (Lick of Fire Book 2) Page 17
