Faerie Rising: The First Book of Binding (The Books of Binding 1)

by A. E. Lowan

  Unfortunately, like conventional anti-depressants, her potions needed time and consistency to build up in the system and affect the brain chemistry of her patient to be effective. Her father wanted no part of that. He ate so infrequently that what little medication she could get into him was ineffective, and he knew it. So, she had a medical practitioner’s greatest frustration and greatest grief – a treatable patient who was non-compliant. And worse, it was her parent.

  He did not look at her. Colin’s head rested against one wing of the old chair, his dull eyes staring fixedly at the nothing beside her. He wore a dirty brown robe, threadbare at the neck and the elbows, the cuffs nearly black with accumulated grime. His dark hair hung stringy and limp to his shoulders, his face covered with a scraggly beard. White streaks marked his thin cheeks from where tears had fallen and been allowed to dry.

  Winter pushed the books away from his feet, noting that they had not changed position or order in weeks. He was not reading them anymore. “Can you hear me, Papa?”

  She watched his hands, rather than his face, for his response, but his fingers did not so much as twitch. Colin had been born mute. When they were children, she and her sisters would try to ignore their gentle father by simply not looking at him – it was a good way to get something thrown at them, though. And heaven help them if their mother caught them doing it. Winter barely remembered her, but she did know that Tersa would abide no one, not even her own daughters, mistreating her sweet Colin.

  Winter picked up the blanket that had pooled around her father’s bare feet and tucked it back over his thin legs. Her mother had disappeared nearly twenty years ago and her father had not left the house since. However, the depression had not consumed him, not entirely, until the deaths of her older twin sisters, Sorcha at twenty-two, Mirilyn along with her husband and little daughter the year after that. When her cousins died six months ago, leaving the two of them alone, he had simply stopped leaving the Library.

  Winter knelt and laid her head against his bony knees. He had always been shy, always been gentle, while her mother had been fierce and proud, the face of their marriage. Her mother would know how to fix this. Winter didn’t. “I wish you would eat, Papa.” She closed her eyes a moment, grief tugging at her, but no tears came. She had no more, tonight. “I miss you.” She whispered it against the blanket, a bare breath of sound.

  Something moved against her hair, and she felt the warmth of her father’s fingers against her neck. She pressed her face harder against his knees.

  They sat in the dark, in silence.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The alarm went off, piercing Winter’s drugged sleep, and she burst from uneasy dreams like a popped balloon. She slapped at the button and rolled up onto her elbows, pressing her eyes into the heels of her hands as she fought down the nausea brought on by too little rest. The long, frayed weight of her sleeping braid slid down over her shoulder, coiling on the sheet beside her...

  She jerked herself back awake, her breath coming in short gasps, her bandaged wrist aching dully from the weight of her head, and she looked at the clock. 4:43 a.m. Almost forty-five minutes lost to weakness. Winter grimaced with irritation as she flipped on the harsh light and reached down to rummage in the covered basket tucked away between her bed and her nightstand. She didn’t have time for that sort of self-indulgence.

  Her groggy fingers roamed over night-cool glass, picking up first one bottle, and then another. Empty... empty... empty... please, surely one was left? She could have sworn... Empty... empty... she began to feel the tide of desperation rising and shifted her body half off the bed, the better to see... She just needed one! Finally, her shaking hand closed on the cool weight of an unopened bottle, and she pulled the long green glass into the glow from her bedside lamp.

  The taste was foul, medicinal, and she shuddered in distaste even as energy flowed hot and harsh from her belly out, forcing back the floatiness of the sleeping draught she had taken only a few hours before. Nasty way to wake up in the morning, but it was awfully effective.

  Winter carried the potion bottle across the hall into the bathroom with her. She closed and latched the door behind her, entirely out of habit. Her father would not venture up the stairs on his own and there was no one else to bang on the door and howl that she was hogging the shower. Kelley and Martina were always terrible about that. They insisted on using the bathroom across the hall from Winter’s room, because they said it had the best bathtub. It had been the most annoying thing about her young cousins. Pain, knife-edged under her sternum, caught her breath. What wouldn’t she give to have that back?

  Winter took another pull from the bottle, swallowing down her pain, her loneliness, and caught her reflection in the mirror as she brought it down from her lips. She was getting even thinner. Her cheeks had sunken in more, the shadows under her eyes deepening. The corners of her mouth were becoming pinched. When was the last time she had really smiled? Smiled with her eyes and her soul? Had it been so long since she had been happy? She closed her eyes and tried to remember when her family had been around her and their warmth had filled her more surely than the bottle she nursed… but it had been so long. So very long. She was only twenty-four and already she felt like an old woman.

  Winter opened her eyes and faced her harsh reflection, her gaze clinical. It was stress wearing her down. That and the poison-green potion she drank. She was too well-trained a physician to deny it. The stimulant was stealing from her even as it gave her the energy she so desperately needed to keep working. She was overwhelmed and self-medicating; dosing herself at night to sleep through the stress and nightmares, dosing herself in the mornings to claw out of bed and face another painfully long day, dosing herself during the day with enough caffeine to make her heart race right up until late into the night when she again fell to bed with the sleeping draught. Soon would come the day when she would not know if she was up or down, when it would all catch up with her.

  She knew it, knew that for anyone else she would warn them that they were traveling a dangerous path, that it was a danger for any medical practitioner to practice on themselves in such a reckless fashion – but what choice did she have? Find her rest while the city burned around her? She was the lone Mulcahy wizard remaining functioning in Seahaven, where once there had been dozens. She held the reins on a wild horse, barely under her control. Trying to hold against the power vacuum left by her family’s demise was eating her alive, but she alone held the ability to maintain the tattered remnants of the City of Peace founded by her great-great-great-great grandfather and Erik Eriksson, the King of the Seahaven vampires. The vampires had her back – she knew the city would have exploded into factional wars months, even years ago, without them – but she was the wizard here, the ultimate authority and neutral negotiator for Seahaven. With the newest Mulcahy brought low by his crushing depression, Winter had no illusions how alone she truly was.

  She could not afford to give the vampires, her closest allies, too much power. The other groups would riot in protest – were already grumbling that the Mulcahys favored the vampires over the other groups. Seahaven had been founded on a balance of alliances, where no one group had power over the others, where all could live in harmony and peace, unlike other cities of the world which were ruled by one powerful group to the detriment and subjugation of the others. Erik Eriksson had had an egalitarian dream, born from his Viking heritage and centuries of living through power struggles and the machinations of vampire politics in Europe, of founding a city ruled not by vampires as would be expected of him, but of power shared.

  Mahon Mulcahy had similarly sought peace from a world of strife, but understood that there must be at least some authority to rule that peace, to maintain the balance and protect it from those who might take advantage of the unique political experiment he and Erik proposed. And so the family of wizards ultimately ruled Seahaven, taking the reins of power here where wizards in the rest of the world preferred to remain aloof and above what they conside
red to be the petty squabbles of the masses. It was a responsibility the Mulcahy family took very seriously, acting as the peacekeepers of Seahaven. A responsibility that had slowly, inexorably, come to rest fully on her thin shoulders.

  Winter held her own gaze in the mirror and drained the potion bottle slowly, defiantly. She would not let them down. No matter the cost to her. Her family before her had made a promise and she owned fifty-four black dresses that still hung in a room in this house, a testament of their sacrifice to this city. Fifty-four funerals over twenty years, the measure of Mulcahy blood spilled for the sake of peace in Seahaven.

  And when she, too, was gone…

  Winter dropped her eyes from her reflection’s, as the false energy from the potion filled her belly and spread out to her slender limbs, burning just a little more of her away. The emptiness of the house stretched around her. No one banged on the door to rescue her from her dark thoughts. She had no one to rescue her but herself.

  She scowled and set down the bottle, picking up her sturdy brush and set to work on her hip-length hair. She would die, sooner than later – but today was not that day. Today, she would stand between the factions of Seahaven and act as the buffer that held chaos back. Just for one more day. It was all she could do. One day at a time.

  Winter bound her long hair up into her customary bun and pinned the wavy, curly mass into some semblance of order, brushed on a little light brown mascara to darken her white brows and lashes, and then unwound the bandage from her left arm. It stuck to the skin where blood and ointment had dried, and the flesh remained sore, but she was satisfied that the deep wounds had been reduced to a tracery of pink lines. Long sleeves would be the order of the day, then. In the late October chill, she preferred it that way, anyway. She tossed the bandage into the laundry chute and crossed back to her room to dress for the day.

  Before 5:15 Winter was carrying the basket of empty bottles down the chilly back stairs to the massive kitchen, her steps quiet in her well-cushioned flats. She knew where each squeaky spot was from years of early mornings in a house of late sleepers and avoided them out of habit. All three greymalkin greeted her as she emerged into the relative warmth of the kitchen, kept that way by the English stove’s constant heat. Freya, her companion from the night before, was the smallest of the faerie cats and the quickest to scorn. Freya’s two companions topped out at over twenty-five pounds of sleekly furred muscle each, their green-and-lapis miss-matched eyes fixed on her. Frick and Frack were twins, as far as Winter knew, and probably Freya’s mates as well, though they had not once produced a litter in the hundred and fifty years since they had appeared with Winter’s sidhe ancestress, Ethne.

  Ethne and her sister, Aideen Laughing Waters, had appeared to Mahon Mulcahy when he reached this shore, and Ethne had chosen him for her husband. Shocking, for wizards fanatically guarded their lineages and never sought spouses outside the Wizard Houses, Mahon and Ethne’s marriage set a precedent for the Mulcahys to seek mates outside the established Bloodlines. Though their marriage was short-lived as many fae/mortal matches were, Ethne gifted Mahon with three powerful sons as well as the greymalkin, and, with her sister’s assistance, Mulcahy House.

  Winter smiled a little to see her medium cauldron already out on the custom-built casting stove, the House again anticipating her needs. “Thank you,” she said politely into the quiet of the kitchen. Though the House had quieted slowly over the years as the family died, the figures in the densely-carved woodwork ceasing their dance, the many rooms no longer changing to meet the needs of owners no longer there, the kitchen remained the heart of the House and the last stronghold of faerie magic. Only one other building in the city was remotely like it, the smaller version Aideen and Ethne built when Aideen eventually married, but the carved figures there had not moved in well over a century, the magic not surviving the death of its original mistress. Mulcahy House still lived, but it, too, would probably become still when the last of the Mulcahys were gone.

  Winter set the basket of bottles near the washer and started stacking them inside to be cleaned. “Maria’s Great Book, please,” she said aloud. This particular washer had been designed strictly for bottle washing, its two wide racks filled with upright posts for holding the potion bottles in place, and Winter filled it to capacity. She closed the door and slid the latch home, started the fill cycle, and turned to find her great-grandmother’s immense tome perched on its big book rest on the casting counter.

  The Book lived in the Library, where it would be kept safe from everyday kitchen messes, but held court here when in use, in the casting section of the kitchen. She brushed her fingers over the soft, scrolled leather cover, then deftly opened the Book to the recipe she needed. It was quickly becoming a worn place in the Book, Winter noted with chagrin, one of those places the Book would open to naturally, like the “good parts” of a well-loved romance novel, and just as embarrassing. Any other Potion Master who found how easily the Book opened to this one page would know in a moment exactly what Winter had been doing.

  Well, “other” was probably a strong word to use. Winter caught up her favorite basket and carried it to the enormous glass-fronted cabinets that held her spell ingredients. Winter was only twenty-four – extremely young as wizards went, who could easily live to see thirteen or fifteen decades – and talented as she might be she had never been formally trained outside the family, as most wizards were. Technically, she was no Potion Master and there would be few among the wizards who would consider her such.

  She went from door to door, deftly plucking up bottles, boxes and jars, noting which were getting low and needed to be replenished, which was a lot. She needed to spend time in the garden and the House’s huge conservatory gathering ingredients, she needed to spend time processing those ingredients for storage… she just needed time! Winter set the basket down on the low counter a bit harder than she intended to, frustration welling inside her again. She needed the time to do the work of five wizards, and did not even have enough time to brew herself morning coffee. The Daily Grind, the coffee shop near her store in the Historical District, got a great deal of business from her.

  Standing in her echoing kitchen, the Great Book open before her, Winter found herself feeling a little like a fraud, even as she set to filling her cauldron with purified water. Everyone said that she had learned at Maria’s knee, and she let them because that much was true. She had been knee-high to Maria when she taught her, a tender four-year-old, the most basic tenants of potion making, all with the promise that Winter would in time become her official apprentice and take her place at Maria’s side.

  But then Maria had died, of food poisoning of all the damn things, at barely sixty-eight. And Winter had been left alone with the Great Book, the culmination of Maria’s life’s work, all painstakingly recorded, annotated, and indexed. It was a brilliant work of incredible value and only in the past year had Winter begun to feel confident enough to add her own notes, to begin filling the blank pages that comprised the last quarter of the Book. Pages Maria herself should have filled. Losing her at such a young age was a tragedy for both the family and wizards at large, for hers had been a once-in-a-generation mind. Maria’s death also seemed to be the great ill omen that doomed the Mulcahys, for after that they began to die more and more often, singly, in groups, even whole families, taken by death in the twenty years since.

  And the wizards of the world had watched… and done nothing. The Mulcahys were cursed, it was whispered. They brought this on themselves by breeding outside the Bloodlines. But the truth was no one knew the reason why. Many accomplished, experienced Mulcahy wizards had spent what would prove to be their last days desperately searching for a curse that they would never find. And the idea that it was their mixed blood was ludicrous. For Winter, who had grown up with her family dying all around her, it was simply tragically, horrifyingly, normal. It was only when she realized that her friends did not go to so many funerals that she began to ask “why,” as well. But there were
no answers for her, either.

  The Mulcahys had once been powerful, and even now held claim to a seat on the Wizard Council, the governing body wizards answered to among themselves, after the Servants of the Eldest. But Mahon Mulcahy had lost a power struggle in Ireland that cost him the original Mulcahy House as well as his first family and drove him underground and across the Atlantic for fear of his life – until he met a Viking vampire in New York who wanted to found his own city. Mahon found running until he hit water again to be a tempting thought and ended up with Seahaven.

  Over the next few decades he managed to return his family to its position as a Great House, even with his scandalous marriage – it was amazing what forgiveness could be earned by raw power among the wizards, and Ethne’s sons had raw power to spare – but they never rose as high as they had once been. Even then, most of their marriages were made within the other Great Houses, both in Europe and the United States, and Winter’s sister Mirilyn had married the scion of an Arabian Great House. But the deaths quickly ground them down. Houses once considered good friends and allies stopped coming to the funerals, stopped offering their Houses for training Mulcahy children, stopped courting the Mulcahy Bloodline, powerful though it may be, especially after Dermot died. The remaining Mulcahys, bitter and increasingly isolated, were happy to see the door hit the other wizard families on the way out. Not one Mulcahy had sat on the Council seat since Dermot, and he had only rarely traveled to London to attend. Even he had finally taken his ball and gone home.

  The Mulcahys, long considered eccentric, were now pariahs.

  Winter’s hands moved automatically, her eyes flickering to the page but more out of practical caution than real need. She could make this potion in her sleep – had made it before under the influence of her sleeping draught – but all potions had the potential for dangerous mistakes and today her mind was simply not on her task. She rubbed her eyes and pushed herself to focus more. The line between potion and poison was very thin and screwing up this brew would result in wasted time and ingredients at the very least. Should the mistake go unnoticed until it was too late, the results could be tragic.