by Mindy Klasky
He caught his breath, waiting for an omen. And then he had it—a wash of jasmine against the back of his throat, headier and sweeter than he’d ever sensed before. Jane, his brain chimed.
And Hecate’s energy rose within him—her light and her song and her glorious terrible power. “Serve my daughter,” he heard, each word echoing through the caverns of his mind. “Serve Jane Madison.”
He reached for the cottage in the Peabridge Library garden.
49
He stood on the stairs that led to the basement, listening to Jane chatter. “I promised Gran,” she said. “The day Evelyn told me I’d be living here in the cottage, Gran called at work and made me promise not to lick any toads.”
“What sort of fool would lick a toad?” Neko sounded scandalized.
“My point exactly. I promised, without considering the consequences. Drinking a potion poured over the skin of a toad might violate the spirit of my promise.”
The familiar had to be pushing her toward the elixir of joy, one of those ancient potions that had probably never worked but had found its way into the oldest magic books. Rainwater, bluebird wing, apple blossoms, all poured over the back of a garden toad…
Neko sounded surprised. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Nope.” Jane replied, and he could picture the stubborn tilt of her chin. “I’ll talk to Gran. Take back my promise. But not tonight.”
“Would she ever know? I mean, I don’t think the elixir of joy is what she had in mind when she called.”
Bingo. David had correctly remembered the ancient text.
Jane said, “A promise is a promise. We’ve always trusted each other. Besides, I’m pretty sure she would know. When I was a kid, she could always tell when I was lying.”
The simple statement pricked David’s conscience. Jane wouldn’t take kindly to discovering he was eavesdropping on her conversation. Averting potential disaster, he moved down the last three steps, entering the basement before he said, “Now that sounds like a witchy power, if ever there was one.”
She startled visibly, but he saw the moment she recognized his voice. As she turned to greet him, a faint smile played about her lips. “I don’t think I invited you in.”
David inclined his head up the stairs. “Warder’s rights, remember? In any case, you shouldn’t leave your front door unlocked, if you don’t want visitors. Especially on Halloween. Who can say how many ghosts and goblins might take up residence here?”
At the same time, he shot a silent message toward Neko. “Help a warder out? Give me a minute to talk to Jane. Alone.”
The familiar shook his head, a tiny flicker of disagreement. “She’s terrified you’ll punish her for working spells at the Farm.”
“By Hecate, I’ll never do anything to hurt her.”
The familiar was no fool. He correctly read David’s sincerity, all the devotion he’d ever sworn to Hecate transferred to the witch who stood between them. Neko stood and stretched with deceptive casualness. Pointing toward the disputed lock upstairs, he said, “I’ll go check on it.”
“You don’t have to,” Jane said.
So she didn’t want to be alone with him. Probably didn’t want to be alone with any man, after the fiasco at the farm. David sent another mental nudge toward Neko.
“No,” the familiar said to his witch, but his eyes stayed on David. “But I need to, um, get a drink of water.” And he was gone, before Jane could beg him to stay.
David’s witch wasn’t a coward. She took a deep breath and turned to face him directly. “So,” she said.
“So,” he repeated.
“Just how much trouble am I in, for Connecticut?”
He studied her face for several heartbeats. “If you’d stuck around till I arrived? You’d still be unable to use your powers. I would have locked your witchcraft down so tightly, you wouldn’t be able to watch The Wizard of Oz.”
“But now?” she asked warily.
“Now, I’ve had a chance to calm down. Neko explained everything to me.” Neko had explained. And Pitt had reminded him of the stupid things anyone could do, even when they had good intentions.
And Hecate had spoken. Most of all, Hecate had spoken, confirming that he was exactly where he was supposed to be, doing exactly what he’d trained to do.
“Everything?” Jane blushed, and he knew she was ashamed of how she’d let herself be fooled by that lying, pretentious jackass of a professor.
“Enough,” he said.
“I suppose you’re here to gloat over the mess I made of things.”
“Mess? It seems to me that everything worked out pretty well.”
She shrugged. “If you don’t count lying, cheating, and deception.”
He didn’t. He couldn’t. But he asked, “Who did you lie to?”
“Harold? Jason. Mr. Potter.” Suddenly, she looked stricken. “You! Oh my God, you too. That’s why you kissed me that night. That’s why you changed your clothes, why you became something you weren’t. You were caught up in the love spell too! Be free, dammit! Just leave me alone!”
She froze, like she was listening for a distant sound. Her hands extended toward the ceiling, fingers pointed as if she were summoning Hecate directly.
He’d kissed her because he’d been a fool, a schoolboy lost without the anchor of his Torch. He’d started wearing clothes that he knew wouldn’t intimidate her, wouldn’t make her think of every man who’d ever held a position of power over her. If not for her obvious distress, this would all be a funny misunderstanding.
Okay, it was funny, distressed witch or not. He let some of his amusement sift into his voice. “Jane, I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
She crossed to the cracked leather couch and collapsed against its cushions. “That first spell I did, the grimoire spell. It worked, but it made too many men fall in love with me.”
She actually thought her little love spell had reached them all. Him. Mr. Potter, whoever that was. Her disastrous excuse for a boyfriend. The poor janitor at the library. She believed her working had ensorcelled them all for days, weeks…
He crossed his arms and shook his head. “You don’t get it, do you?”
“Get what?”
Her stubborn question woke a bubble of laughter inside his chest. “The way spells work.”
“I think I have a pretty good idea. You’ve been a good guide to all this witchcraft stuff, and Neko helped a lot too.”
She was so damned earnest. He could respect that. He could pity her, too. She’d been trying to make her way through a strange new world, and neither he nor the familiar upstairs had turned out to be a very good guide. In fact, he admitted as much: “Well, neither of us taught you enough about the grimoire spell.”
She ground her teeth. “No time like the present, then. What about it? Did I change the balance of the universe as we know it? Have I set the world of Faerie upside down, releasing petty spirit vengeance on all the world?”
“Nothing quite as dramatic as that,” he said, trying not to laugh as he sat beside her. First things first. He had to reassure her she wasn’t the monster she’d become in her own mind. He took a deep breath and met her eyes. “The grimoire spell only worked on the first man you saw after you worked it.”
“The first man…” She trailed off, clearly thinking back to the night she’d worked that initial spell. “Neko!”
“No.” He shook his head in brief annoyance. Even now he wasn’t making things clear. “Neko doesn’t count. For purposes of magic, he’s a part of you.”
She blushed again. It seemed to take an effort, but she said, “You, then.”
“No. Warders are immune to their witch’s workings.”
“Then the first man was…Harold.”
“Precisely.”
“But the others? Jason, finally realizing I was alive? Mr. Zimmer, ordering coffee? Mr. Potter, talking to me at Gran’s, and at the Gala, and making his donation to the Peabridge?”
This was important. He had to make her understand her innocence. “Just Harold,” he insisted. “The spell bonds to the first man. The others weren’t caught up in your magic.”
He watched her process what he said. She clearly wanted to argue, wanted to fight. But she finally asked, “But why? Why would everything change now, all at once?”
David gestured smoothly. “Look at yourself.” She glanced at her jeans. She raised her fingers to her hair. “You’re the one who’s different, Jane.”
“I’m not! I’m the same person I’ve always been!”
“Are you, really?” He tried to keep his voice soothing, knowing instinctively that she’d reject his next words: “You’ve cut your hair. You grew out your nails. You put on makeup every morning and touched it up during the day. You started wearing contact lenses.”
It felt odd to say those words to her. Intimate. But she was his witch, and she needed his reassurance. When she started to get up from the couch, clearly uncomfortable, he reached out and grabbed her wrist. “We men are really dumb creatures, you know. We can be led anywhere by our…senses.”
He’d started to say something else, but she wasn’t ready for that. She already seemed dangerously close to dying of mortification.
“Jane,” he said, and he removed his fingers from her wrist, only to cup her jaw with his palm. “You’ve grown. You’ve changed. You like yourself more, and people can see that. Men can see that. You have confidence. You’re at ease—and that draws us like flies to honey.”
His fingers tingled where they touched her skin. He was nearly overwhelmed by the scent of jasmine, by the heady essence of this woman he’d sworn to protect.
He watched her accept what he was saying. Her shoulders straightened. A light kindled deep in her hazel eyes. She measured out a reply and made the decision to challenge him. “And you? If self-love and independence are symbolized by wardrobe shifts, what are you doing in those clothes?”
He glanced down and shrugged. He could tell her about Hecate. He could explain about his rite on the beach, about the goddess binding them together with the power of Samhain.
But that was too much. More than she could needed to hear tonight. So he answered her with other words, honest ones, but less supernatural. “I’ve grown, too. I’m not the same warder who was fired by my last witch. If I’m going to succeed as a warder, as your warder, I’m going to succeed on my ability to guide you, to protect you. No one will care if I wear stiff, formal clothes or magical robes inscribed with symbols.” Her skepticism felt like a physical veil between them. He fought for more words, different words, words that would convince her. “I like myself this way.”
She actually laughed out loud. “That, I understand.”
He joined her in laughter then, all the tension between them drifting away. She did understand—on some essential level. As their laughter trailed off, he looked around the basement. “I like what you’ve done to the place.”
“Really?”
She wanted his approval. She needed it. She needed him.
He got up to study the nearest bookshelf, walked to the next one, and eventually traced his way around the entire room. He nodded when he found the spice chest, and he took note of the tackle box full of crystals. He made a mental inventory of the little cauldrons and other witchy supplies stored on their respective shelves. “A place for everything,” he pronounced at last. “And everything in its place.”
She beamed her appreciation. “It just feels…right like this. I hadn’t realized how much the disorganization was bothering me.”
“So now it seems like you’re truly ready to study. Ready to learn.”
A frown wrinkled her forehead, and she caught her lip between her teeth before she asked, “What about the coven? What are the chances they’ll challenge me for all this? For Hannah Osgood’s collection?”
David shrugged. “High.” Higher, now that he’d made an enemy of Norville Pitt. And if Teresa Alison Sidney ever found out he’d dragged her name into his fabricated documents… He kept his voice even. “They’ll say you aren’t skilled. You aren’t trained. You don’t know what to do with everything you have.”
He watched indignation bloom across her face.
Before she could protest, he said, “They’ll say that. But they probably won’t succeed. For one thing, they could never come up with a list of everything that’s here. They’d have to, to convince Hecate’s Court that the books belong to them.”
She nodded, but her voice became very small. “But they’ll definitely try?”
“They’ll definitely try,” he confirmed, because his bonded witch deserved his telling her the truth. “But that will take a long time. In the meantime, you can learn more about using your powers.”
She caught her breath, and yearning splashed across her face. “You’ll teach me?” she asked.
He wanted to. He wanted to do anything she desired. But he had to say, “Jane, I told you before, I’m not supposed to be a teacher. I’m a warder.”
“Then, you’ll…ward me? Be my guide? Keep me safe?”
He looked at her for a long time. His life had been insane from the first moment he’d been pulled into this cottage. He’d been thrown from one battle to the next, from Pitt to salamanders to shifters to a tender new witch who needed him to stand fast. He’d doubted himself. He’d doubted the entire magical world of the Eastern Empire.
But Hecate had spoken. The goddess had bound them together, and that was more than he could ever have hoped when he’d first pounded on the cottage door in the middle of a driving storm.
“Please,” Jane said. “As warder to witch. Say you’ll help me.”
He nodded gravely. “As warder to witch.”
She reached out to embrace him, and he tensed. He couldn’t help himself. He was the one who had introduced confusion into their relationship. He was the one who had kissed her when he was off balance, when his Torch was gone, when he’d forgotten what he was trained to do and who he was supposed to be.
But she turned her face away, settling safely, platonically, in his arms. As he allowed himself to relax, he felt her gain strength. She took a deep breath and seemed to set aside her own past. She was embarking on a new journey, same as he was.
Pulling back, she said, “We should celebrate.” He saw the moment she remembered his rules, his regulations—more important now than ever, if he was truly to keep her safe from the power she could wield. Especially tonight, on Samhain. “Not with alcohol,” she amended. “How about a cup of tea?”
He followed her upstairs to the kitchen. Neko had made himself useful, putting on the kettle and setting out a teapot along with mugs and his monstrous pitcher of cream.
The familiar looked up as they entered the room. He studied his witch, weighing, measuring, calculating every last gram of her emotions.
And then he turned a long look on David, asking a thousand silent questions. David couldn’t give him answers, not in words, not even in specific thoughts. But he gathered up his recollection of Hecate’s presence on the beach—the glory and the power of the goddess directing him here, binding him to his Samhain witch. He opened his mind enough to share that pure presence with Neko, hoping the familiar would understand.
At last, Neko seemed to agree his witch was safe. With a flashing grin, he asked, “Trick or treat?”
“Treat,” David and Jane said at the same time.
It wasn’t going to be easy. Pitt still held David’s mistake in abeyance; the man could present his evidence at any time. The Eastern Empire would be unsettled by the salamanders’ destruction in the lair beneath Rock Creek Park. The shifters had to settle under a new alpha, and Connor was left to find his own way in the world, a solitary brute.
But David had sworn to protect his witch in a magic circle on a moonlit beach, and the only goddess he’d ever served had accepted his oath of loyalty.
None of it would be easy.
But it would definitely be a treat.
G
irl’s Guide to Witchcraft
Did you enjoy David’s story? Did it leave you wondering what Jane was doing while David fought the salamanders? Well, you’re in luck!
You can read Jane’s version of the events in The Library, the Witch, and the Warder. Her book is called Girl’s Guide to Witchcraft, and it’s the first volume in the Washington Witches Series, part of the Magical Washington universe.
Buy Girl’s Guide to Witchcraft today!
Thank You
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David and Jane are working well together now, but there are more magical adventures afoot in Washington DC. Check out these other books in the Magical Washington universe!
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