by Lila Dubois
Harris rolled his shoulders and flexed his fingers. “We’ve got our hands back.”
Trajan shoved his right sleeve up to his elbow. “Harris, look at your hands, your arm.”
Harris’s smile dropped and he mimicked Trajan and Nimue’s postures.
The palm of Trajan’s left hand, as well as parts of his fingers, was now pure white. Not the cream or tan color of white skin tone, but a silvery-white like snow in starlight.
His right palm, where it had been pressed against Harris’s forearm, was gold. The inside of his wrist was also gold, and the inside of his forearm, where Harris had gripped him, bore a perfect print of Harris’s hand in the same gold tone that colored his palm.
Nimue held up her hands, palms out. Her palms and sections of her fingers were different colors. The hand that had held his was a rich blue, while the one that had held Harris had the same gold markings that colored his skin. Harris was similarly marked, his right hand that Nimue had held now silvery-white, while his palm was blue and his left forearm bore the blue tattoo-like imprint of Trajan’s hand.
“Whoa,” Harris said.
“We…burned…each other?” Nimue shook her head. “But it doesn’t hurt.” She flexed her fingers.
Harris peered at his hand, then licked his finger and rubbed at the coloring. “It’s not going to come off.”
Trajan looked at his own palms. It looked like the coloring was under the skin, or part of the skin. He wasn’t sure which. What he was sure of was that it was permanent. And it was…satisfying.
“I need to see my crop,” Nimue announced. “Maybe…maybe we killed the blight and that stopped the curse.”
She waved her hand, and the wall of dirt between the trunks of the trees flew away in a puff of dirt and dusk. Grabbing ahold of one of the trees, she stepped out of the sunken circle, ducking under the low, spindly branches of the saplings.
“Wait!” Trajan shouted. His spell was still active. If she hit the updraft of wind it would cut through flesh and bone.
Even as he yelled she was moving. His spell parted for her, like a curtain.
Trajan felt his mouth drop open in shock.
Harris looked at him. “Follow her?”
Trajan closed his mouth and with a sharp inhale killed the spell. Then he nodded. “We follow her.”
Harris stepped out of the circle, not bothering to duck since the trees folded their branches in, making space for him to pass. They stayed like that when Trajan followed him out.
Harris and Nimue were stopped shoulder to shoulder, looking around. Trajan stepped up on Nimue’s other side. He started to laugh.
“Why are you laughing?” Nimue asked.
Trajan was a tad worried the laughter was taking on a hysterical edge, so he forced himself to stop and clear his throat. “Enchanted forest,” he said at last. “We’re dead and going to spend our afterlife in an enchanted forest.”
*
Nimue couldn’t fault Trajan for his reaction. Laughter was as good a response as any. She might have laughed if she hadn’t been so dumbstruck.
His description was perfect. This was most definitely an enchanted forest. Or perhaps an enchanted version of her forest was a more accurate description.
They were still standing near the bottom of a valley, facing a stream, but now the stream was large enough to be considered a small river. The impossible albino redwood was on the opposite bank. A semi-circle of small redwoods stood around it, protecting it on three sides, while the river protected it on the fourth.
The rock on the near side of the bank where she’d sat to watch Harris was no longer the size of a steamer trunk. It had grown in proportion to the river and was now a massive flat-topped boulder with a tongue of rock that extended out from one side, reaching to nearly the middle of the river. And it was no longer granite. It was made of pink-tinted translucent stone—pink quartz. The dust motes that danced around them continued to sparkle like tiny disco balls.
She turned her back to the river and looked up the hill. Where she had once had decent-sized plots of five-and six-foot cannabis plants, there was now a forest of twenty-foot bushes, each in full bud. The buds were not just green, but neon yellow, bright pink, and pale, shimmering blue.
The men turned around a second after she did. They stood there, contemplating the massive, oddly colored pot plants.
“How fucked up would you get from smoking that?” Harris asked conversationally.
“Very, very fucked up,” Trajan commented.
Nimue took a deep breath. “I don’t see anything on the stalks. I’m going to look with my sight.”
“No!” Harris and Trajan both shouted.
Nimue jumped in reaction to the stereo effect of having them both say it while they stood on either side of her. “Ack!”
“You can’t use your sight in a place like this.” Trajan grim tone was punctuated by the passage of a dragonfly with glittering iridescent wings—an indigo pair and pale blue pair. While that might not have seemed like a cause for concern, dragonflies weren’t native to this area, and the dragonfly’s abdomen alone was nearly a foot long. From head to the tail tip of the abdomen, the thing was over eighteen inches, with a head the size of a small tomato.
Nim and Harris both ducked as it flew by, the sound of its wings a terrifying buzz. Trajan remained standing, but his fingers were trembling.
“Did you see the size of that?” Harris yelped.
Nim nodded frantically.
“I’m not afraid of bugs,” Trajan said.
“That wasn’t a bug,” Harris insisted as he stood and held out a hand to Nim.
She placed her fingers in his and rose. “I don’t think they’ll revoke your man card if you duck when a dragonfly the size of a drone is coming at your head.”
Trajan snorted and relaxed. “That was a fucking big bug.”
Nim’s attention was drawn back to what had been her crop. Was the blight still there? If it was gone, did that mean the curse was too? Harris had never had a chance to tell her how he thought the curse and the blight were connected. She took a half step forward, but Harris caught her elbow. She looked at him.
“I need to know.” There was more she could have said, but she held back the words. She felt exposed and a bit raw after everything she’d shared with them.
“Let me.” Harris stroked her arm, then walked away, heading for the nearest cannabis plant.
“Don’t you use your sight either,” Trajan warned.
“I won’t. But if the blight is still there, I’ll be able to feel it.”
Standing shoulder to shoulder with Trajan, she watched Harris. She wasn’t sure why she stayed near the big blond man. He was imposing, with a hardness that was as cold and sharp as a winter wind. Though he was taller than Harris, the man currently examining her enchanted pot plants was broader in the shoulders, with a sort of sturdy warmth.
And why was she thinking about them like this? Comparing them as if she were trying to decide which one of them she wanted to ask to be her date to a family wedding? She’d kidnapped one, and the other had come to save the first, meaning he probably would have hurt her, if not killed her, to do it.
Fear skipped down Nimue’s spine. It was the instinctive fear of someone faced with a more physically powerful threat. She’d been lucky in that she’d spent most of her life on or near her family’s lands, meaning she’d always had access to her power. The times she’d been harassed or felt threatened she’d been able to call a small tremor in the earth, and that was usually enough to distract any potential threats.
That wouldn’t stop Trajan Dixon.
She’d heard of Dixon Securities. They were rich, powerful, and dangerous. When she was younger, before her cousins died, she and her sister Vivien, who was only a year an a half younger than her, would poke around the internet looking for pictures of hot witches their own ages—bonus points if they were also from a powerful coven. To a young witch, a hot, magically gifted practitioner was the equivalent of the lead s
inger of a boy band.
They’d predominantly been searching for the sons of others in Salachar, since those were the boys they could realistically daydream about dating, and because they knew the names of the dozen most powerful Salachar covens, and the twenty or so mid-level ones. However, there were a few powerful covens from the other cabals most practitioners knew of. They were the equivalent of the Kennedys or Rockefellers.
The Dixons were one of those families. Their coven territory included the entire city of Chicago. Both Los Angeles and San Francisco were neutral no-magic zones, so she’d romanticized the idea of what it would be like to be free to use her magic in a major metropolitan area. Beyond that, the Dixons were easy to recognize, because they were all tall, slim, and had white-blond hair. Nim’s youngest sister Evienne, who’d thought herself quite the scientist when taking AP Bio—and who had gone through her own hot-witch-stalking-phase—had been convinced that they used magic to make sure all their kids came out with white-blond hair. Nim had rolled her eyes until they came across a picture with a man with brown skin and improbably white hair.
Had Trajan been one of the sexy young witches she and her sister had cyberstalked? Possibly. He had the sort of lean, chiseled face that reminded her of Italian cologne models. There was a chance he’d gone through an ugly, awkward phase as a teenager, but she doubted it.
She herself had gone through several awkward phases, including a year where she’d written more than her share of star-crossed lover stories about how a powerful witch from one of the other cabals had fallen madly in love with her but they could never be together.
That had been when she was a tween before the last of her older cousins died, before she realized there was nothing romantic about star-crossed lovers and curses. Though she’d grown up knowing about the curse, it hadn’t been until she was nearly twenty that she’d been able to really understand what the curse meant. Before then she’d been angry at everything she would miss out on. She didn’t get to fall in love or plan a future because of the curse. She’d still been caught up in the self-centered teenage angst until well after she turned twenty.
Then she realized the true, insidious nature of the curse. It wasn’t about what she would miss out on, or what her life could have been, or even being forced to face her own mortality.
It wasn’t her own death that scared her.
It was leaving behind the people she loved. Knowing that they would grieve and suffer after she was gone and there wasn’t a damned thing she could do to stop or prevent that pain, including the pain her sisters would bear when Nim’s death forced them to take up the curse.
Nimue had purposefully stayed away from not only romantic relationships, as her cousins had, but friendships as well, because she hadn’t wanted to leave another person grieving when she died.
She shook her head, as if the physical movement would alleviate her emotional turmoil. Trajan looked at her. “Nimue?”
“Nim,” she corrected.
He arched a brow.
A flash of hot anger spiked through her. It was an overreaction, and some part of her was aware of that, but her emotions were too close to the surface, and thinking back on her embarrassing, naive teenage years, and the pain she might have already inflicted on her family by maybe dying, made her want to lash out.
“Fine, whatever. You seem perfectly happy with that stick up your ass.”
He blinked in surprise. “You’re mad at me?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot that I’m supposed to be groveling for forgiveness.”
“You kidnapped a man and ended up killing us all. Don’t act like I’m the bad guy.”
Nim smiled, and it wasn’t a nice smile. It was a Disney villainess smile. “You’re right, I’m the bad guy. The evil witch.” She plucked at her black skirts. “I’m even dressed for the part.”
Trajan sighed and started to roll his eyes.
Oh, he did not.
He did not just roll his eyes at her.
What she did next she would always regret. Reaching down into the earth, she called it up around him, wanting to encase him up to his neck in dirt, to trap him there so she could tell him exactly what she thought of him, and if he rolled his eyes again she’d raise the top of her pillar of soil half an inch at a time.
Her power, as she reached down into the earth, was not suffused with hot anger, but with cold, hard fury and fear. Fury at him, though he was only the lightning rod for the real source of her rage, and the fear she had yet to name. The fear that they lived but caused others to die. The fear none of them had named.
What responded to her hard pull of magic was not rich warm soil, but stone.
Granite shot up out of the topsoil in thin, sharp-edged blades, like the great teeth of some subterranean anglerfish. A half a dozen sword-like protrusions pieced the air, causing Trajan to swear in shock. The flat of each blade was flush against the sides of his shoes, creating an outline of each foot. He tried to step back, but the stone was pressed so tight to his boots that he couldn’t move. The blades that lined the inside of each foot rose to knee-level, while the ones at his toes reached mid-thigh. The blades angled in slightly as they rose, particularly the ones at his toes, so there were only a few inches between the tips of those and the front of his thighs. He was caged by razor-sharp granite, and risked cutting himself with even the slightest movement.
Trajan snarled, and a fresh jolt of fear shot through her. That fear overrode her shock and dawning horror at what she’d just gone, and fed her anger. Her magic, almost of its own volition, reached deeper into the earth. Nim was distantly aware that her magic was spilling from her eyes in a nimbus of moonlight-white illumination.
Wind punched her in the chest, picking her up and tossing her several feet away from Trajan, still facing him. She landed on her feet, and might have regained her balance if a second punch of wind hadn’t slapped her back. She stumbled forward a few feet and would have fallen if she hadn’t opened the earth under her bare feet, sinking ankle-deep into the soil as if it were wet sand, grounding herself in the earth so the wind couldn’t push her around.
Trajan shifted his weight and rammed his knee into the blade of stone in front of him. He hissed in pain when nothing happened, and the wind whipping around Nimue intensified. She couldn’t see through the whirl of her own dark hair, and when she tried to pull it back, her raised spread arms created more surface area for the wind to push against. She started to fall forward. With her feet planted in the soil there was the very real risk she could sprain, if not break, her ankles.
“Release me.” Trajan’s voice was thick with power, and even through the ever-shifting ropes of her hair she could see the blue glow of his eyes.
“Stop the wind,” she retorted.
“You started this fight, but I will end it.” His voice was hard and sure—and she was certain that he could do far more than push her around a little.
She called power up from the deep parts of the earth and it responded with delicious, intoxicating ease. All that power just begging to be used.
And finally she could use it, she could pit her strength against that of another practitioner. Not just another practitioner, but a witch from another cabal. Earth versus air, a battle that could never take place anywhere but here, in this strange forest.
Nimue’s stomach clenched. What was she thinking? Her magic felt different, wild, almost out of her control. That was a very good reason not to use it.
Besides that, she had no idea how to fight in a magical duel. She’d only ever even seen one, and had no idea how the two Salachar witches who’d been dueling had done what they did. She was all about practical application.
Was she going to let her pride and fear push her to do something so insanely reckless as to try to battle another witch? A man who probably used magic as a weapon as a regular part of his job, and would wipe the floor with her based on experience alone?
She closed her eyes, trying to ignore the cold air that whipped against h
er skin, pulling at her wrap dress, tugging her hair. Everything she knew about magic said that a duel between practitioners from different cabals wasn’t even possible, because long before the first magical punch was thrown, the interaction of the powers would cause a catastrophe and at least disable, if not kill, the potential duelists.
“I’m sorry,” she said, but the wind snapped away the words.
If the wind would just stop, she could think, she could apologize and put an end to this stupid magical dick-measuring contest.
The howling wind dampened to a breeze.
“What the fuck?” Trajan snarled.
Nim looked up, confused. “What’s going on?”
He was glaring at her. “What did you do?”
Had she stopped the wind?
Harris was crouched, peering at the main stalk of the closest plant. He’d been ignoring them, but now he looked over. “You two done?”
Nimue raised her hands in surrender. Time to clear the air. “I’m sorry, to both of you. My actions led to this. I hurt you both, and that wasn’t my intention.” Her conscience pricked her, and she amended the statement. “That’s not true. Or at least it’s only partially true.”
Harris was standing no more than three feet from her, but his hair was barely fluttering, while her own continued to blow in the breeze that was now only as strong as if she’d been standing in front of a fan set on high. She felt both of them watching her, and squared her shoulders at the same time as she willed the earth to release her. She stepped out of the small holes, her feet as clean as if she’d just showered.
“All I was thinking about was protecting my family by ending the curse. I kidnapped you because I thought that would protect you—give you plausible deniability.” She smiled ruefully, and had to look away from Harris’s calm, green-gold gaze. “And because I didn’t want to waste time asking for help. I thought it would be easier to convince you to help me if you were already here.”
Neither man spoke, so she took a breath and kept going. “I didn’t think it would take that long. I didn’t think they’d send a secret agent to rescue you. I didn’t think about anyone or anything besides myself.”
