“You held it together better than I ever imagined!” she exclaimed, interrupting him. “Now that I have it, I can’t believe how together you were all that time.”
He rested his forehead against hers, then took the ice pack out of her hand and set it on the small table next to the bed.
“Your eye,” she began to argue, and he stopped it with a kiss. Sophie let herself melt into him, let herself focus on everything she knew he was trying to tell her with his kiss, with lips and tongue, with the gentle nip of his teeth on her lower lip. When he finally pulled away, he stayed close, his lips a hair’s breadth away from hers, his gaze intense as he looked into her eyes.
“You are the strong one, Sophie. You always have been. And I am the world’s luckiest bastard, because you managed to make your way back here, and out of all of the men you could have chosen, you chose my undeserving ass. I love you.”
The words hit her, the sincerity of his tone nearly undoing her. She felt tears spring to her eyes. “It’s always been you, Calder. It always will be,” she said.
“And it’s always been you for me,” he murmured, running his fingertips up her sides again. “Now tell me where you went, kitten.”
So she did. She told him about the woman in the lobby of the hotel with her guidebook, and her ride to follow a ghost story. She told him about the dead and barren land, the huge Victorian house, the cold woman and the way she’d tossed Sophie around like a rag doll. Her refusal to help Sophie figure out her powers. She left out the part about the Shadow witch’s advice to put her affairs in order. She had no intention of giving up that easily. When she finished, Calder’s hands were tightly gripping her hips, his hold on her firming more as the story had gone on. They sat in silence for a few moments.
“So she knows about you now,” he finally said.
“And she knows I’m not any kind of a threat to her,” Sophie said. “I had to see, Calder. I can’t just sit here and wait for him to decide to use me, to depend on him to teach me, because we both know he’ll only teach me those things he wants me to learn. Nothing more.” She paused. “And I keep trying things. I feel like I’m on the verge of breaking through, on the verge of making it work, but I’m not quite there yet. Part of it is, I can’t see the way the magic works, not the way I could see the way Light magic worked.”
“That makes sense, I think. You’re of the Light, so it would maybe reveal itself to you that way.”
She nodded. “That’s what I think, too.” They had talked often, laying together at night, about magic and how she’d learned to wield what little power she’d had, about how she could see the mechanics of a spell, even though she’d never heard another Lightwitch describe it that way.
“I still see the Light spells,” she said quietly. Calder ran his fingertips up and down her spine, gently, soothingly. “I see them, and they’re just out of reach, like an oasis in the desert. It looks so close, so real, and every step, thousands of steps, miles even… nothing brings it any closer.”
She paused, and they sat in silence. “I would feel better, maybe, if I could at least see the Shadow spells. If I can do that, I could probably make them work eventually. That was what happened with the Light. All I can do is feel the Shadow inside me, but I can’t actually do anything with it. I hope that eventually, I’ll see Shadow so I can figure out how it works.” She closed her eyes. She had neglected telling Calder, ever, what it felt like to have the Shadow power inside her. It felt like she was never clean. It felt like there were millions of foul, many-legged insects writhing, crawling just beneath her skin. It made her nauseous and uncomfortable, and she’d found herself, more and more often, contemplating the fact that death would be a welcome respite from it. As soon as the thought came, she pushed it away angrily.
She could never tell him that. She could barely admit it to herself. She had been though this before, had been through a time when death seemed like the only way out, and she still had the scars on her wrists to prove it. She’d failed that day, the Light keeping her alive, even as it fled her for the way she’d lost faith, for the way she’d tried to turn her back on Its life and power. She could see herself there again, all too easily, trying to drift away in a hot bath, or by leaping from one of the cliffs near Rockway. A long, slow descent into nothingness.
“Sophie,” Calder said in a low voice, bringing her attention back to him.
“It’ll work out. I’ll keep working at it.”
He lay down, and she snuggled into him, relishing the strength of his embrace, the safety she felt there. She knew it was only the illusion of safety.
There would be no true safety unless she figured out how to make the Shadow magic work for her.
And as long as she did it before the curse she’d taken from Calder wore away at the remains of her sanity.
Sophie had the next day off of work, and she woke the way she always wanted to, to Calder’s kisses, the excruciatingly perfect way his hands teased her. After her Calder time and a shower, she stepped out of the steamy bathroom to the scent of pancakes. Calder stood over the stove, dressed in a blue flannel shirt and the stained jeans he wore when he worked.
“You are perfect,” she told him, planting a kiss on his bicep before stepping past him to pour a cup of tea. He’d already boiled the water, as he so often did for her.
“Not even close. But you are,” he said, setting her plate in front of her and capturing her lips for just an instant before going back to the stove for his own plate. They sat at her little kitchen table, the local classic rock station playing on the kitchen radio. That was a Calder thing. He always had the radio on. She usually preferred the silence in her house, the sound of the birds out her windows. They dug into the pancakes, and she let out a little hum of appreciation at the first bite.
“You are so much better at making these than I am,” she said, taking another bite as her hunger became almost overpowering. She shoveled more into her mouth, then reminded herself to settle down. She forced herself to set down her fork and take a sip of tea. I will be sane, I will be sane, I will be sane, she repeated in her mind.
“Me and Jon practically lived on these when we were teenagers,” Calder said. “Dad was already losing it, and it was the one thing I knew how to cook at the time.”
Sophie smiled a little, though her heart ached at the thought of what Jon and Calder had gone through.
“Jon still asks for these when he comes over sometimes,” he added, and she laughed a little.
“Are you working on Bryce’s car today?” she asked, nodding toward his work clothes.
He nodded. “He’s been real patient, but he deserves to have this done. And I have other jobs lined up that I want to get to. That Barracuda is going to be a big job, but I can’t wait to get started. It’ll be fun to bring that bad boy back to its former glory.”
She smiled, loving the boyish expression, the enthusiasm in his voice when he talked about his work. She knew it was the same way she’d sounded when anyone had asked her about her soap making, her lotions, her perfumes. She missed it.
“I know it’ll be gorgeous when you’re done with it. But I don’t quite believe that Bryce’s big blue monster will ever be pretty.”
“Oh, ye of little faith,” he said with a grin. “Just wait.”
She watched with amusement as he dug into his third plate of pancakes. She would be right there with him if she let herself go, but she was holding as tightly to self-control as she could. Her stomach ached from hunger, from the need to gorge herself on the stacks of pancakes she knew were in the oven.
Control. Control.
Another mantra she used. At first, she had tried to keep control for Calder’s benefit, so he would not have to see the chaos his curse wrought in her. But, as the past few weeks had gone by, she’d begun doing it more for herself. She hated herself when she lost control. She hated the sense of helplessness she felt. She had vowed, upon returning to Copper Falls, never to feel helpless again. And she hadn’t. Eve
n when aunt Evie’s debts had come in, even when she’d been in danger of losing the house, she’d kept hold of herself, she’d worked harder, she’d insisted on doing everything she could to save it. In the end, that had meant doing what Calder asked her to do, and working to find an end to his curse.
She hadn’t expected to fall in love with him again. Not then, not when he was holding her house over her and acting like he didn’t remember her. But she’d fallen anyway, and he with her. And she hadn’t broken his curse, but stealing it had been a compromise she was happy to deal with.
It gave her a hell of a lot more practice in control.
“What are you doing today?” he asked her as he finally pushed his empty plate away from him.
“Layla and Cara keep bugging me about going to yoga. I’m going today, mostly to get them to stop, but also because I feel a little calmer after,” she said, looking at the pools of syrup on his plate, imagining smearing it all over Calder and then licking it off. She shook her head a little, trying to rein it in.
He gave a low growl, and she met his eyes. The way he was looking at her, as if he wanted to devour her, had her heart racing, her need increasing.
“You are driving me insane,” he said in a low voice. “Do you have any idea what it does to me, when I can smell you like that?”
She didn’t answer, though her face flooded with heat at the tone of his voice. “We both have things to do today,” she reminded him quietly.
“All I really want to do is keep you here and make you scream my name.”
She swallowed and squeezed her legs together. Control. This was just another time she needed to force herself to have some. “You can make me scream later,” she said, meeting his eyes. “I’m already looking forward to it.”
He captured her lips with his, and she grabbed his shirt, holding the fabric tightly in her fists. She kissed him back with equal fervor, her entire existence seeming to depend on the feel of his lips on hers, on the feel of his heart pounding against her body, the sound of his low growl as she gently bit his lip. She started to pull away, and he held her tighter, kissed her harder, hungrier, and she gave a helpless whimper against his lips as she let herself drown in him.
Finally, when she was nearly out of her mind with lust, she forced herself to push him away, and he let her, though she could tell he didn’t want to. He had that intense, hungry look in his eyes that never failed to make her ache for him. “Later,” she promised him.
“Later,” he agreed, his voice rough, his hands still tightly holding her hips. “The things I want to do to you, kitten…” he said in that low, rough voice, and she could barely breathe.
“I want them all,” she said, promising him. She knew, when he was like this, that she needed to soothe him, reassure him. His bear was so close, in those moments, that he was more animal than anything else. Instinct and power and possessiveness. She hadn’t been sure whether that was all the curse or not. The curse made it worse, twisted it, but that animalistic need was all shifter. She’d seen the same thing in Bryce when he was watching Layla, and in Layla when she was watching Bryce. It was one of the many shifter things that she hadn’t understood, that Layla had had to explain to her.
He seemed to calm down a bit, soothed by her words. “Glad to hear it,” he said, clearing his throat a little. “You should go though, before I take you out into the woods and do a few of them.”
Her face warmed, and hot need curled deep inside her, but she nodded, then kissed him quickly before grabbing her yoga mat and bounding out the door.
Once she was outside, she breathed in the cool air as if she couldn’t get enough of it. The intensity between her and Calder was almost too much to handle at times, and that had been just one more example of it. She unlocked her car, and breathed, and tried to get her traitorous body under control. It was perfectly happy with the idea of Calder taking her out into the woods and having his way with her.
Control, she chided herself again. She started the car and pulled out of the driveway, heading toward town. She managed, even as the curse had her nearly insane with her need to go back to her cabin, to stuff herself with pancakes and milk and let Calder have his way with her as often as he could manage…
No. She rolled the window down, and drove, and breathed.
She would not let this curse control her, just as she sure as hell had no intention of letting Shadow destroy her.
Chapter Nine
Main street in Copper Falls was pretty much what you could expect of any northern Michigan small town. Low brick buildings flanked the street, a mix of shops, bars, and restaurants. The library and post office were at one end, and the town’s only church, St. John’s Catholic, rose in the distance at the other end. During tourist season, it was nearly impossible to even find a place to park, but now that summer had ended, it was much quieter. There was always an upsurge during the peak of fall color, but even that had passed and now the town was pretty much down to its year-round residents.
Which mostly meant shifters and witches. This was the time of year Sophie loved most in Copper Falls, when she was surrounded by familiar faces, by the faces of people she’d known as a little girl, by the faces of people who understood, at least partially, what she was. There were humans, too, but those that lived in the town year-round were either related to shifters and witches or married to them, and could be relied on to keep their secrets. That had been the bad thing about the school she and the other kids from Copper Falls had had to attend as kids; it was a combined district with three other nearby small towns, none of which had their particular type of residents. They had had to hide what they were, and, for Sophie, it was even harder because she’d been one of the very few non-white kids in the district. She remembered, smiling, how she’d begged her mother to go to the school on the reservation because she was part Ojibwe so why couldn't’ she? Her mother had calmly explained to her that she’d always be “other” so she may as well get used to it.
At the time, Sophie had hated her mother for that. As she’d gotten older, she’d come to appreciate the lesson her mother had been trying to teach her.
She shook the memory of her mother, as well as the ache she felt every time she remembered her, away as she got out of her car and walked down the block. She was meeting the twins at their family’s diner before heading over to yoga. Her thoughts drifted back to her mother as she walked. Her mother, who Marshall had very likely murdered in his sick, twisted plot to get to Sophie. Yet another reason she needed to hold it together. He would be forced to pay for what he’d done to her mother. Her father. Her first, young husband who’d never seen it coming, who had no idea what he was getting mixed up in when he’d fallen in love with her.
She pushed the thoughts away again and opened the front door of the homey little diner that Layla and Cara’s family owned. Their aunt called a hello from the kitchen, and Sophie waved and smiled back. She sat in one of the booths near the front window, and within moments, the twins’ grandmother, Faye, bustled over to her.
“You owe me a hug, girl,” she said in a voice roughened by a lifelong love of singing and Virginia Slims. Sophie grinned and stood up again, and Faye pulled her into a strong hug. She stood a few inches taller than the older woman, who was wearing one of her seemingly endless supply of gaudy Western-style shirts, this one complete with rhinestones and fringe.
“How are you, Faye?” Sophie asked as they drew apart.
“Just fine, just fine. You meeting my granddaughters here?”
Sophie nodded.
“Pie?”
Sophie nodded again, this time with another smile. Faye bustled away, patting her shoulder as she did, and Sophie smiled after her. Like the rest of the twins’ family, Faye had seemed to adopt Sophie as one of her own. She’d made sure Sophie was fed and warned some of the rougher men in the diner away from Sophie as if she was one of her own precious granddaughters.
She also wielded a mean flyswatter, which Sophie knew all too well from her c
hildhood growing up with Layla and Cara. Sophie smiled at the memory, then glanced up as the bell on the front door rang. Layla and Cara came through, looking as gorgeous and fit as always. Amazons, she thought, every single time she saw them. And they had the temperaments to go with it. They sat down, each hugging Sophie quickly, and their grandma came to the table with three plates of pumpkin pie and three steaming mugs of coffee.
“Thanks, gramma,” Cara said, and Faye blew her a kiss. She was about to bustle off when Layla took her hand.
“Stay here a second, gram,” Layla said, eyes sparkling.
“What’s going on?”
Layla was smiling, eyes shining, practically bouncing up and down in her seat, and Sophie had a notion of what had her friend looking that way.
“I’m getting married!” Layla screeched, and Sophie, Cara, and Faye all squealed in delight along with Layla. “He asked me before he left for work this morning!”
“Hold on. I’m going on break,” Faye called to the other waitress. People were shouting congratulations to Layla, and Faye shuffled back to the table with a slice of pie and a cup of coffee for herself. She sat beside Sophie. Faye and Layla exchanged a long look, grinning at one another, and Sophie couldn’t help but smile at the obvious adoration they had for one another.
“It is about damn time,” Faye finally said, and Layla laughed, nodding.
“Amen,” Sophie and Cara said, meeting one another’s eyes.
“We haven’t been dating that long,” Layla said, rolling her eyes.
“Maybe not, but only because you’re both blind. You and that MacEntire boy have been dancing around one another since you were kids. The only ones more obvious were this one and the Turcotte boy,” she said, nodding toward Sophie.
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