by Bella Falls
My instincts screamed, alarm bells clanging in my head. I thought back on my first encounter with Ashton in the park when he shook my hand. When I'd seen him after that, he looked about as good as I'd felt.
“Where is Ashton now?”
“He wasn't at the dance,” Tucker said.
Pulling on the chain around my neck, I touched the pink key hanging on the end of it. “I think I know where he is. I have to go find him.”
Tucker grabbed my hand. “You're crazy. I was planning to go to the warden station in the morning, but I wanted to tell you first.”
“Why?”
He released me and ran his fingers through his hair. “I don't know. Maybe to get you to see that I was worthy of you. That I could stand up for something good for once.”
With sympathy, I squeezed his hand. “Tucker, you have to be worthy of yourself. If you had read my note, you would have known that I didn't leave you because of you. I left because of me. Because I knew I had to find my own path. And I just wasn't ready to be with anyone yet.”
His voice lowered. “And what about now?”
He reached out to touch my cheek, but I flinched away, letting go of his hand. “I don't know. Maybe being with someone else is something I can explore if I get more time.”
Tucker sighed. “But not with me.”
“No. Not with you.” I gave him the gift of honesty so he could move on. “Right now, I need you to go to the warden station.”
“What are you going to do?” he asked with concern.
I squeezed the key and sent a small amount of intent into it until it tingled in my touch. Fingering it, I gathered up all my courage. “I’m going to solve things once and for all. And I'm going to be my own hero and save my life."
Chapter Twenty-Three
The fairy path shimmered closed in a cloud of pink sparkles once I pushed my way through to the other side. Gossamer had warned me to use it only in an emergency, and this definitely qualified. However, the effort sapped the last dregs of my energy. I doubled over, coughing and gasping for air.
“Yeah, I feel it, too.” Ashton entered the room in Tipper’s house where I stood. The glowing ball of light floating above his head revealed his disheveled appearance. “Who knew that old man had it in him.”
A sick satisfaction settled in my stomach. “The curse got you, too?” The dark circles under his eyes and his shaky demeanor showed me that, like a virus, the curse had found its true home and taken root.
“Had I never met you,” he spit out with venom, “maybe I would have gotten away with it.”
“You poisoned Tipper,” I accused.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a glass vial. Holding it up, he let the light filter through its liquid contents. “Did you know that the same plant extracts that can heal us can also harm us? I learned a lot about plants and what they could do when they killed my mother.” He furrowed his eyebrows.
“Who killed your mother?” I did my best to keep my distance from him, my eyes tracking the vile.
His lip lifted in a snarl. “My father and his family.”
“Why would your father kill your mother?” Keep him talking, I told myself, taking slow steps towards the foyer.
Ashton followed me. “Are you in a hurry, Charlotte?”
“It's Charli.”
“Charlotte. Charli. Birdy. What does it matter? We’re both expiring. Breathing our last. Don't you want to know what you're dying for? If you leave, you may never know.” He took a step to show me that even if I made it to the front door, he would do his best to cut me off anyway.
He had me. For the moment. “Fine. I’m listening.”
Ashton coughed once, pulling his hand away and staring at the red splotch of blood dotting his skin. “You and I, we have a lot in common. Tucker told me that you never knew your real parents.”
“I knew my real parents. They raised me.” My brain worked overtime to process the scene.
The curse was working through him in a much more insidious way than me. Maybe if I could outlast him, it would take him down first.
“Biological parents, then,” he clarified with a dramatic roll of his eyes.
“But you just said your father killed your mother.”
“For once, be a good little girl, and shut up and listen.” His manicured demeanor cracked under his mania. “I had a wonderful mother. But I never knew my father. She did a remarkable job making sure that she took care of my every need so that I would forget to ask her who he was.
“She was the one who taught me all about plants and herbs, and how to use them. Mom used to run a table at the market in Charleston, and I would help her, selling essential oils to tourists. And on the side, she sold potions to those like us.”
Charleston's council of witches enforced strict policies about the use of magic. Running a hybrid operation in that city cost a lot of money. I didn't have to ask whether his mother's business was legal or not.
His hand holding the vial shook, sloshing its contents, so he set the bottle down on a nearby table. “We did fine for a long time until the wardens in the city ran a sting on my mother. They set her up and then took her away. By this time, I wasn't a kid anymore. I did some digging and found my real father. Unlike us, he had real money since he was from one of the oldest families in town. Not once had he ever experienced what scraping by on almost nothing was like.”
If I weren’t trying to stay alive, I might be able to summon some sympathy for him. “Did you ask your father for help?”
Ashton sneered. “That was the last time I let my naïveté get the best of me. Yes, I went to their big house on the Battery. Tried to get him to come out and talk to me.”
“And what happened?” I pressed, taking small steps toward the table with the vial.
“I found myself spending the night at the warden station. No formal charges were filed, but they put me through the ringer as a warning. And they thought that I would drop it. That's because they never had to work for anything in their lives. And they don't know what true hunger is.” A look of determined contempt gleamed in Ashton's eyes.
“When did you tell him who he was?” I asked.
Ashton looked away for a second, recalling the memory. I took my chance and rushed toward the table with my arm outstretched. He snatched the glass container first, twisting and catching me around my neck with his arm.
“Oh no, no, no. That won’t do, Charli.” He dragged me into the formal parlor and tossed me away from him. “You do not want to play too much with what’s in here. It could be dangerous. Tonight’s the night of the dance. Let’s see what steps the two of us have left to make.”
I wanted to fight back, kicking and screaming. But the curse worked its way through my veins, too. The trip through the fairy path had drained too much out of me. Keeping my distance from him, I countered his moves as he maneuvered me around the room with his threatening presence.
“Good girl. Now, where was I?” He coughed again and wiped his mouth, smearing a red stripe onto his cheek. “Oh, right. My father. Rich men love to slum it, especially when looking for some fun outside of their marriage.
“I followed him for months, finding out his habits and where he liked to go at night. The good thing about being a nobody is that you can sometimes slip through the cracks. All I had to do was pay another nobody to let me in. When I finally told him who I was and where my mother was, I begged him to help her. And he laughed.”
Ashton’s pain reached me despite our current predicament. I often wondered what I would do if I ever found one of my parents. To know that one of them was rotten on the inside would break my heart.
“That must have been tough,” I tried to empathize.
“Save your pity.” He brandished the vial in the air. “Do you know that I could have killed him right there and then? I had brought some digitalis with me. Foxglove for the uneducated. It's an easy way to end someone's life. In small doses, you can help someone with a heart condition. But an
overdose will end the life instead of save it. But I didn't use it.”
Charli sucked in a breath. “Like the night of the engagement.”
“You're thinking of your great-uncle, aren't you?” A proud smile spread on his red-stained lips. “Fine. I'll give you what you want. Yes, I used digitalis to kill him. But that wasn't the original plan. I wanted to make it look natural. Use it on him over time. Give him heart problems so that the town healer would notice, and then when he died of a heart attack, no one would think anything about murder.”
“Why the big confession?” I pressed. “Aren’t you afraid that I’ll tell?”
“You’re not getting out of here. At least, not alive. Neither of us is.” He shook the glass container again. “Consider this my parting gift to you. The gift of knowledge. You're smarter than I took you for, Charli. I can’t say the same about some of your family members.”
His threat to my life shattered my fear. If these were my last moments, then I needed to make the most of them. My one final act could be finding Tipper’s will if it was in the house.
Hiding my concentration, I mustered what magical energy I had left and focused it in my gut. Under my breath, I muttered the same rhyme I used before. “Let me access all my skill and find the path to Tipper’s will.”
Ashton regarded me with suspicion. “What was that?”
“I said, I thought you liked Aunt Nora.” I clenched my fists, forcing my body to stay upright.
A sheen of sweat broke out on my brow, but I refused to show him the cost of my magic. A thin line shimmered across the room between an antique secretary, piled high with knick-knacks and overflowing with papers, and me.
Ashton paced in front of me, cutting off the direct route. “That dried up delusional witch? It took a few compliments and a little attention to turn her head and win her to my side. She brought it on herself, bragging to me about one day inheriting the Walker property, and I saw a quicker way to accomplish my goals.”
I had been right all along. There had been a puppeteer behind Aunt Nora’s actions. It didn’t excuse her from her participation, but at least she hadn’t been in on the murder.
“And what were those goals? To steal from my family member?” I took slow steps around the brocade chair, acting as if I wanted to keep my distance from him and trying to hide my real purpose.
Ashton watched me with curiosity. “No, to make myself a success in another town. To forget all about that young man, staring at his father and wishing he was better. See?” He pointed at himself. “The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.”
“Whatever happened to your mother?” I distracted him with the one subject that softened him. “Surely, this hadn’t been her plan for you.”
“Well, she’s not here to plan anything for me. She lost hope while they had her locked away. And when I told her about finding my father and what he'd said, she told me to wait. That she knew he'd do the right thing in the long run. Little did I know that day when she said that to me, it would be the last time I'd see her.
“Somehow, she got ahold of some oleander flowers. Beautiful but deadly when ingested. She committed suicide. And she was right. My father felt so guilty that he paid for my college education as long as it was far away from Charleston.”
He stopped following me, and his shoulders hunched. Sniffing, he straightened himself up. A small drop of blood trickled out of his nose.
“I thought you met Tucker in Charleston?” I asked, taking another step in the right direction.
“I had already returned to Charleston with the intent of setting myself up for life.” He smiled at whatever memory replayed in his head.
“You mean blackmail your father for more money.” I guessed. One more step and I might be able to reach the stack of papers that the thread pulled me to.
“Seemed as good a plan as any. Until I met Tucker and heard all the wonderful stories about this special town, full of idiots and dupes, your aunt becoming one of the biggest. And you becoming a close second.” He darted past me to the stack of papers, grabbing them and throwing them in the air. White paper rained down and scattered on the floor. “What are you looking for, Charli? The will? Believe me, it’s not here. I’ve checked.”
I collapsed on a nearby chair, my hope withering. “How did you get in?”
He shook the vial in his hand again. “I’m good with plants. There are many mixes and combinations that can trick spells. Manipulate them. Even change them.”
Pain throbbed through me, and I groaned in agony. Clutching my stomach, I doubled over and crumpled to the floor.
“The curse hurts, doesn’t it? If your great-uncle hadn’t been such a fool, it never would have affected you. But he screwed it up, and now you get to die with me.” Ashton wheezed out a laugh that turned into a hacking cough. “You and I are coming to our end, aren't we?”
He dropped to his knees, careful not to break the vial in his hand. “I think the two of us should go down in flames, don't you?” He studied the liquid contents.
“How will poison set this place on fire?” I uttered.
“You think this is poison? When I went away to college, I set myself the task to learn all I could about the mixology of potions. I experimented with adding in a little magic here and there and came up with some wonderful results.”
While he spoke, I risked one last attempt at finding the will. A sliver of a thread connected me to a few papers lying on the floor within reach. But the effort knocked the wind out of me, and I gave in to the racking wheezes and rattling coughs.
“Don’t worry. I’ll put you out of your misery,” he promised, pushing himself off the floor for his triumphant last act. “This one here I call dragon's breath. It smells horrific because of the essence of sulfur contained in the beast’s saliva. But a few drops of this can set a room on fire. I should know. I did the live testing.”
“You,” I managed between coughs, “are a monster.”
The dark intent in his smile chilled me like the darkness that threatened to take me.
“I am my father’s son.”
I shook my head, following my last line of connection and crawling toward the papers. “You are what you chose to be.”
He shook the vial again. “This amount should take out the entire house. What do you say, Charli? You ready to die?”
Shattering glass interrupted the verbose maniac. Loud cawing and a fluttering of black feathers filled the room. I screamed and lunged for the papers, grabbing them and shielding them against my body.
“Get away from me, you crazy bird.” Ashton stumbled backward, and I feared the vial would break.
“Biddy, no,” I cried out.
As he fell, the crow circled and caught the glass mid-air in her talons.
“No,” screamed Ashton. Tipper’s stalwart friend flew back out the window and into the night.
Closing my eyes, I chuckled. “So much for your plan.”
“It may not be elegant, but I’ll kill you myself,” grunted Ashton. With a groan, he launched his body on top of me, his hands circling my neck.
I didn't know what hurt worse, the pain of his fingers squeezing off my last breaths or the agony of the curse working through my veins.
Either way, the truth had come to light. I could finally stop fighting and give in to peace. Life flickered out of me like the flame of a spent candle.
Another crash interrupted Ashton, and my dim brain wondered if Biddy had sprouted legs. Multiple limbs surrounded us.
“By warden command, you are under arrest. Hands up,” Mason barked.
The pressure tightened on my throat until Ashton’s body got yanked off of me.
“The man said to take your hands off the lady,” a familiar voice growled.
Darkness swirled around the edges of my vision. I rolled onto my side to capture one last glimpse of the dragon I had slain.
“You think you've won,” Ashton choked out. He produced a pill from his pocket and popped it in his mouth. “You thi
nk you had the last word. But like I told my father as I watched him take his last gasping breaths through his blue lips, I'm the one who gets to win.”
Pink foam bubbled at the edge of Ashton’s mouth as he collapsed onto the floor in a shaking mass.
Shouting erupted around me. Strong arms scooped me up from the floor, and two male voices tried to keep me going with reassurances.
“It's over, Charli.”
“We've got you.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
In a small Southern town, people rallied around each other to celebrate the good times and console one another in the bad. Support often showed up in the form of food. Based on the number of casseroles and dishes we received, and thanks to Nana’s extra freezer and a couple of specialized freezing spells, we wouldn't have to cook for at least a month.
I placed a plate of gifted brownies on the coffee table in Tipper’s parlor. It had taken me a few days to recover from the end of my great-uncle’s death curse and the night of Ashton’s confession. In the end, the right person had gotten punished, whether through the curse or his own choices. I didn’t know why, but I still felt sorry for the man who got so lost that taking a life, even his own, was the only option in his eyes.
When Mason explained how he had arrived just in time at the house that night, he told me that he had found Ashton's fingerprints on Tipper’s flask using the phoenix feather. Because of how isolated Honeysuckle was, it had taken a little time to get confirmation from Charleston, but when he received it combined with Tucker’s trip to the station after I sent him, he knew where to find me. And for a short time, he and Dash worked under a truce to get me.
I hadn't seen the wolf shifter in days. That didn't mean he didn't check in on me. But he always seemed to show up at the house when I was taking a nap or not there. I didn't know if he was still angry with me for my reaction the night he got taken in or whether he was afraid of the cursed girl.
