The Problem With Witches: An Arcane Shot Series Novel

by Joey W. Hill

  “I’d agree with that.” Marcie came around the end of the wicker sofa where Raina was sitting. When the witch held out her hand to her, she took it, let herself be drawn down into a sitting position near her.

  The sounds of the city seemed strangely muted, probably because the event had driven most tourists home, and most locals had the day off in the aftermath of the “storm phenomenon.” She realized she would be hungry soon, and found herself anticipating the meal with the people they’d met only a couple days ago. Casual conversation only, no need for grand strategies to save anything.

  At least she hoped that could happen. Looking at their faces one by one, she drew her knees up, feet curled over the sofa edge. Smoothed the long robe over her shins. “You’re scaring me a little bit. Is Ben okay? He didn’t sell his soul or something while I was out, trading his life for mine. If he did, I’m going to kill him.”

  She said it lightly, though the moment she uttered the words, fear tightened things inside her. Because he would do something just like that, damn it all. If he did, there was going to be some way she could fix it. They now had friends who could do…magical things, involving life, death and the afterlife. They could help them reverse fate.

  “No,” Raina said. “He didn’t. Rest easy on that.” She looked toward Ruby. Whatever she saw in her face apparently told Raina that Ruby wanted her to take the lead on the explanation. Marcie’s fingers tightened on the soft terrycloth.

  “Please just tell me. I can’t do anything to help or fix it until I know what we’re dealing with.”

  Raina put her hand out again. Bemused, Marcie took it. It did help, having the witch touch her, letting that energy she carried wash over her. Raina must be modulating it, because though it was definitely sensual in nature, it had a more relaxing component to it.

  “Are you doing some kind of magical Prozac on me?” she asked.

  “She isn’t, but there is a version of that I use in my shop,” Ramona said. “If someone comes in feeling tense and unhappy, it helps. It’s not to manipulate or talk them into a sale. Just to help them leave the shop feeling better than they came in, no matter if they buy anything or not.”

  “Which is entirely impractical,” Raina said. “No harm in earning a few dollars while providing a service they’re glad to have.”

  “Raina,” Ruby reminded her.

  “I know,” Raina responded, an edge to her voice that sent a ripple through that energy. But then she sighed, squeezed Marcie’s hand, let go, though she kept the hand on the sofa close to her. “When I struck Elagra with the magic I used to make her…shatter, for lack of a better word, it dislodged all those souls from her. You felt them.”

  “Yes.” Even now the thought made Marcie grip the collar of her robe in nervous fingers. All that pain and despair. Ben had helped loosen the grip of those memories, but she’d never be able to forget that a soul could exist with the weight of all that hopelessness upon it, a never-ending torment and nightmare.

  “I redirected them, released them,” Ruby said. “If it was a piece of soul with a still-living host, it returned to them, restored their soul to wholeness. That’s the ideal outcome. For the souls belonging to the dead, they might drift for a time, but they will drift with purpose. They will find their way home.”

  “This is all sounding really good,” Marcie said slowly. “So where’s the ‘but’?”

  “We made a decision,” Raina said. “Mostly me, and I bullied Ruby into it.”

  “No, you didn’t.” Ruby tossed her a look. “For one thing, you can’t bully me into anything. For another…I made the choice.”

  She looked toward Marcie again. “There was one piece…we realized we had to embed it in you so you could channel your particular energy through it, let the souls understand they were free. What helped was that particular piece wanted to stay with you, as if it knew you already were bonded with the original soul.”

  The import of it took a moment to sink in. “Elagra had a piece of Ben’s soul?”

  Ruby nodded. Marcie felt a mixed wave of emotions. Fury at a witch who was now dead. A renewed grief that Ben had literally lost some of his soul to a childhood nightmare. And wonder, that it was within her now. Marcie’s hand crept into her robe, pressing against her beating heart.

  “So you’re saying a piece of Ben’s soul is now part of mine,” she said slowly. “I like that idea.”

  “Yes…but it connects to what else we need to tell you. Soul magic is the ultimate concentrated life energy. Because of the way I had to craft it to save your life, at the time I embedded it, it overrode anything that blocked life energy. And its effect would have been…retroactive, for lack of a better word.”

  When Marcie gave her a puzzled look, Raina tapped the top of her hand. “She’s saying if you’ve had your man inside you in the few days leading up to our fight on the docks, any type of birth control would have been completely useless. Except abstinence.” Raina’s gaze flashed with humor. “Though honestly, I think that male could make you pregnant, just from the way he looks at you.”

  “This isn’t a laughing matter, Raina,” Ruby said tersely.

  “But it’s not necessarily a tragic one.” Raina tilted her head toward Marcie. “Is it?”

  Marcie’s mind couldn’t hold onto it. It was too much. “Are you…is this a ‘maybe this is going to happen’ thing or…are you sure? Has it happened?”

  “I can find out, if you’ll allow me. May I?” Ramona rose, stood before her.

  Her heart was thudding in her ears. Marcie started to get up, thinking she had to stand, too, and her knees went out. Raina was there, steadying her, pressing her back down on the couch.

  “Easy. Put your head between your knees a second. You went white as a sheet.”

  “No. I’m good. How silly; I’m being silly.” She bent her head down a moment, though, taking breaths. The sounds of the city had briefly disappeared behind a hum of white noise in her head. Raina was gripping her hand again, and Marcie put her other one on top of it until that noise stilled.

  “We should talk about this later,” Ruby said stiffly.

  “No. Oh hell no.” Marcie let out a laugh that she knew sounded a bit hysterical. “I mean, there’s no way you can come back to that kind of subject, right?”

  Raina’s fingers touched her chin, and Marcie looked up at her. The witch’s eyes were warm, a smile on her lips. “Okay now?” she said.

  “Yes and no.”

  “You don’t have to get up,” Ramona told her. She’d circled to the other side of the couch and now dropped to one knee. “Is it okay, if I open your robe?”

  Marcie nodded. The chaos witch tugged the tie of the robe loose. She didn’t open it so much as slipped her hand inside, resting her palm over Marcie’s womb, her other over her heart. She closed her lavender-grey eyes. In this position, Marcie was looking past Ramona’s shoulder, into Ruby’s face. The woman looked concerned, tense, obviously not sure how Marcie was going to feel about…

  It was a thrum, like a vibration. Marcie let out a little gasp and started back. She stared at Ramona, and realized she’d wrapped her arms around her middle. “I can feel it.”

  Which seemed a ridiculous thing to say, because right now it was just a tiny egg and sperm, less than a couple days’ old.

  But Ramona smiled, and nodded.

  She was carrying Ben’s child. Their child. Oh God.

  Her eyes went to Ruby, who was looking at her, oddly expressionless. “You can terminate the pregnancy in the normal way, of course,” she said. “If you do, it will send the piece of Ben’s soul back to the Hall of Souls, which will eliminate the issue of your mortality being linked. It will be safe there until Ben’s death, whenever that happens, at which time it will rejoin his soul, make it whole again. It’s sensible. An option you understandably would want to consider.” She took a breath. “But…I can’t…I can’t do that part for you. I’m sorry. I know how to do it, terminate a pregnancy, but I can’t. Raina, or Ram
ona…”

  “Never. No.” Marcie wrapped her arms more tightly around her middle, as if afraid just the suggestion would take what was growing in her, right then and there.

  The relief on Ruby’s face was palpable. It also made Marcie realize what the witch must be thinking about her shocked reaction, up until this moment.

  “I need to…” She didn’t finish it, just got to her feet. Ramona rose, moving out of her way, but she and Raina were both there to steady her as Marcie moved around the coffee table between her and Ruby, then sank down at her feet. Her hips were pressed against Raina’s legs behind her, suggesting she’d shifted closer to sandwich Marcie in between them, a show of support to both women. Ramona had likewise moved to flank Ruby on the other side. Protective. Family.

  Marcie gripped Ruby’s hands, both of them. “You saved my life. You protected that lost piece of Ben’s soul. You did the absolute right thing. Thank you. And I would never, ever…it’s him and me. Our love created it, as much as soul magic. Right?”

  Ruby nodded, her gaze locked on Marcie’s face. Ruby was a beautiful woman, but not one with much spare flesh, and when she was worried, the angles of her face were sharply sculpted and tight. “I will do anything to protect this baby,” Marcie told her, squeezing her hands hard. “Because that’s what being a mother’s all about, right?”

  Tears abruptly flooded Ruby’s eyes. But Ramona bent down, the hand she had on Ruby’s shoulder now coming around the other witch to hold her. Glancing up at Raina, Marcie saw a similar look of love on her face for her friend. Regardless of what those words meant to Ruby, Marcie knew they’d been the exact right ones to say.

  Problem was, they were as much a reassurance to herself as to Ruby. A declaration of determination. Because she knew the decision didn’t belong to her alone. And as her mind turned to that, she felt a clutch of total trepidation in her lower abdomen that dropped her stomach to her feet.

  Oh God. He could not want it. The idea of being a father terrified him deeply, because of the darkness within him. He became quiet, or tense, if he even thought she was going to bring up the idea of kids. So she hadn’t yet. That had been fine. They were still just newlyweds, after all.

  Having pulled herself together, Ruby drew Marcie out of her head with further explanation. “Thank you for that, Marcie. But you need to understand, because of how the babe was created, we’re not sure what kind of child it will be. He or she has as much chance of being healthy as any baby; it’s not that. It’s just…when magic is involved in a pregnancy, the child could be…different.”

  "Whoever he or she will be, will be perfect," Marcie said softly. "Because it was meant to be."

  She looked down, then pressed her forehead abruptly to Ruby’s hands. “But I am… God, I have no idea how best to tell him. He is going to majorly freak out. He freaked out about marrying me, because he was terrified he was going to ruin my life. He’s going to panic over the idea of being a father.”

  “Maybe not as much as he would before this,” Ramona said, making Marcie lift her head, look toward her. “It’s funny how chaos can reveal truths about yourself you didn’t expect.”

  “This might delay your career with the police department,” Raina said practically.

  That one was a blow, no denying it, but life could change in an instant. She knew that. Marcie managed a wan smile. When she lifted her chin, she didn’t know she showed them the determined face she’d showed Ben when she’d declared her love for him, a defiant shot across his bow that had ultimately won her the war for his love.

  “I had to wait seven years for the dream I most wanted to come true,” she said. “I know how to be patient.”

  But first things first. She needed her cell phone. Fortunately, unlike Ben, she’d left the new one in the hotel room, and it still sat on the wide square coffee table in the living room.

  When she left the balcony to retrieve it, she was surprised to see Mikhael sitting on the couch in front of it. He appeared to be doing that meditative thing, and she didn’t want to disturb a conversation in process, so she hesitated, unsure about scooting in between his legs and the table to get it. The coffee table was too wide to reach across.

  However, before she could debate it, he lifted his head, and fixed his dark eyes on her. He knew, she realized, and not just because he might have been sitting there long enough to overhear the conversation.

  “Um, I’m just getting my phone,” she said.

  He stretched forward and picked it up, offering it to her. When she took it, he held onto it an extra moment, rising so he stood before her. He was imposing even sitting down, so the unexpected gentle note to his voice caught her attention.

  “You like to tame the lion in him. You do it not with force, but with your submission. The depths of the darkness within him needs your light, to reach all the way down to what he thought was a fathomless bottom. He asks much of you, more than most are willing to give, but in return, you have compelled him to give all of himself to you, so the balance is there. The two of you are proof that the universe sometimes knows what it is doing.”

  His fingers tightened on hers. “Don’t forget that.”

  He left her then, disappearing back into the room he shared with Raina, making Marcie wonder if he’d emerged specifically to give her that message. He and Derek both had a way of talking like this, as if they dug wisdom out of the depths of places she’d never be old enough to know, and she guessed they did.

  She also noticed, maybe not for the first time, he smelled like smoke and fire. The good kind of aromas associated with those elements. A bonfire on the beach, the heat of the sun, a hearth fire on a cruel winter night.

  Peculiar.

  Holding the phone, she wandered out to the balcony again. So deep in thought, she barely acknowledged the three women, though she wasn’t deliberately being rude as she moved away from them to the railing, the view of the city.

  Their presence gave her a privacy buffer. When Raina made the suggestion they could go inside, Marcie shook her head. It was okay for them to be nearby. They’d warn her if Ben came out of the room.

  The sun was warm, but the air was soft. In the aftermath of the storm, there was even a cool breeze, like sometimes happened after a hurricane blew through. The city had that expectant, things-aren’t-the-norm feeling that also came in the aftermath of a storm, though this time they had far more to celebrate than they’d had after Katrina. As Raina had said, some clean-up of the waterfront, and things would be okay again. They’d made sure of it.

  If things could be okay after a very large Loch Ness type creature had emerged from the Mississippi, this was manageable, right?

  Marcie leaned against the rail for a long series of moments, pressing the phone to her forehead. She should be able to put the phone down, go and handle this directly with Ben. But she couldn’t. She just couldn’t.

  She hit the preset number. Matt was down in Texas with Savannah and Angelica. She almost never called him. She always called Savannah. She didn’t know if it was a sub thing or what, but in this case, she knew she needed to talk to him directly.

  “Marcella.”

  Ben must have given Matt both their new numbers, such that Matt had answered, knowing who it was. His authoritative voice made her smile a little, even as it choked her up. It was the kind of voice that immediately told everyone in the room, “Whatever is wrong, I will fix it.”

  Good luck, Angelica, finding a guy out there more awesome than your own father.

  Though he might not appreciate hearing it, Marcie was glad to be able to turn to him in this moment like she might have turned to her own father, if she’d had one who was a tenth of the man Matt Kensington was.

  “Um…Matt. I’m pregnant.”

  Another thing about him. He understood what she needed, without another word said. “How do you want to handle telling him?” he asked quietly.

  “I don’t know if I can.” It was hard for her to admit that. She’d fought Ben over thi
ngs where no one else could and prevailed, but this… “I’m brave about a lot when it comes to him, but if he reacted really badly to this, Matt, it would just crush me.”

  Most of the times she’d stood toe-to-toe with him, it had been because she was convincing him they were meant to be together. At that point, he hadn’t accepted it yet, accepted that she was his submissive, his and his alone. Because of that, she’d had some level of shielding, flimsy though it was, protecting her in case she failed.

  When he’d accepted what she had always known in her heart, that he was her Master, the submissive in her had dropped all those shields, so she could give herself to him fully, unconditionally. Which meant that line past which she could push, had pushed before, would tear her soul up to do it now. He could destroy her heart and soul, because she trusted him utterly not to do so.

  There were some things that needed time to build a foundation in a relationship. This was going to drop them both into the deep end of a pool they hadn’t expected to experience for some time.

  Love healed a lot of things, but maybe because of recent events, her soul was a little more fragile than usual. She didn’t mind calling on the strength of four other Masters to come to her aid.

  “Can you…”

  “We’ll take care of it. We’re coming home tonight. Timing is important. We’ll meet with him…”

  As they worked out the details, the band of worry around her gut loosened.

  A bit.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The next couple days were non-stop activity, the entire K&A team and their wives joining in local relief efforts to clean up the waterfront. Knowing Marcie wouldn’t be able to hide something this momentous from Ben if they were alone together for more than ten minutes, Matt had miraculously engineered their respective schedules so that didn’t happen. When she was with Ben, she was with the group, and it helped to distract her as much as him.

  At night, Matt volunteered the men to help with the citizen patrols to prevent looting, and she and the other women went to give relief to the homeless shelter volunteers.