by Cate Corvin
Fury temporarily stole my breath. My fists clenched. This tool seriously thought I was out here in the human world wasting my life for fun? He had no idea what it’d cost me to leave my home, or what it would take to go back.
Fucking Wardens.
Fucking Grimmcliff, too. Leave it to those negligent assholes to cry when someone else took on a job they couldn’t handle. It wasn’t about the money; it was just plain cruel to ignore a haunting petition. And Grimmcliff didn’t need the money, anyways.
I took a deep breath, pulling my wards back into place so they wouldn’t explode, but my voice was sharp with suppressed irritation. “No way. You’re gonna have to rob me if you want that money, but we both know you wouldn’t dare to try that, Warden. I banished it, I get the payment, and anyways, Christabelle Grimm wouldn’t know how to exorcise a spirit if it crawled out of her-”
“Morena. Not here.” Eric’s fingers tightened on my shoulder, cutting me off.
Warden Stone was grinning now, his teeth sparkling white. Never trust a hot guy, that was rule number one. All they did was leave the toilet seat up and serve you with paperwork for cleaning up other people’s problems. “Uh-huh. Take care of those notices and keep your nose clean. I got my eye on you, Bell.”
He gave me a flippant little salute and turned on his heel, the door-bell tinkling in the silence left in his wake. As soon as the door closed, the human occupants started whispering among themselves.
I watched him through the diner window as Warden Stone strolled into the parking lot without a care in the world, looked at my junker and snorted, and vanished in a spume of sparkling air.
“He laughed at my van. Did you see that, Eric? He laughed at it. What a total douche-canoe.”
“Mor.”
“Who does he think he is? I wasn’t going to let that poor woman sit there until Christabelle decided to get off her ass and do something about it.”
“Mor, sit down and have your coffee.”
I reluctantly sat, and Carrie finally reappeared, laden with creamer and cinnamon buns still hot from the oven. Eric was right; there was no problem a healthy dose of caffeine couldn’t fix.
Like gorgeous Wardens who went poking into things that didn’t concern them.
I took a massive bite of the cinnamon bun, managing to get icing all over my mouth in my haste to eat. I washed it down with a gulp of scalding coffee and gazed levelly at Eric.
He met my eyes squarely, but his gaze dropped to the icing clinging to my lip. I licked it away carelessly. “I’m not paying Christabelle. We can just get that out of the way right now.”
“I wasn’t going to ask you to pay her. They can talk to the coven lawyers if they want recompense. But this-” He tapped the scroll on the table. “This is a problem.”
I kept my eyes firmly off the scroll. Just looking at it made my stomach churn with nausea. Six years there and gone in the blink of an eye. Six years, and I still hadn’t found peace. I might never find it.
“Eric… okay. Let’s just take care of this next petition, and then we’ll talk about things.”
He tucked the scroll into his pocket, but his brow was furrowed as he looked me over. “We’ve been talking about things for almost six years, and we never come closer to an answer. It’s time to decide what we’re doing, Mor.”
I nodded, looking down at the icing-drenched cinnamon bun before I glanced back up. Sometimes the understanding in Eric’s eyes was too much to bear. “I suppose this is the part where you lay a guilt-trip on me?”
A faint smile touched his lips. “John would roll in his grave if Melinda Thorne got her hands on Bellhallow.”
Hell, I’d roll in my grave, and I wasn’t even dead yet. “And Mom would curse me from the deadside for giving Edgar Black a single dime.”
Eric’s grin was appealingly crooked, an expression I knew all too well. He knew it worked on me. “See? There’s a hundred reasons to go home, Mor.”
My own smile faded. There were so many reasons… but one big reason to stay. “I guess.”
Eric reached out and put his hand over mine, sending my heartbeat into overdrive when he squeezed my fingers. Would that he would do this at any other time... “We’ve had six years to put the past behind us,” he said, gazing into my eyes. “It’s time. Bellhallow is rotting away every day that we spend here pretending it doesn’t exist… and it wasn’t just your home, Morena. It was mine, too.”
To my horror, my throat swelled shut around a painful lump. I was being selfish, letting my legacy rot and keeping Eric from the place he’d grown up. “We’ll see. Can you just give me a few days to wrap my mind around this?”
He stroked the back of my hand with his fingertips, and my skin started tingling where he touched me. “Don’t take too long. Want me to drive you home?”
I glanced out the diner windows, mostly so he wouldn’t see me blinking back unwanted tears. The last of the sun was sinking, but the caffeine buzzing through me wasn’t going to last another hour. “No. I’ll walk home. I need to be alone for a while. Thanks, Eric.”
He gripped my hand hard enough that I had to pull myself away. Ironic. Most nights I would’ve been happy to stay in his grip.
Tonight, I just wanted solitude as everything I dreaded came crashing down on me.
4
I didn’t bother to pull a glamour over myself. Humans didn’t walk around wearing witch-jewels and rowan weapons, and most of Ashville knew me on sight at this point. Anyone who saw me would give me a wide berth.
The Blue Lake apartment complex was only several blocks away, past a gas station, an abandoned and boarded-up public school (which was most definitely haunted, but no one had called me yet about it, and the local teens thought it was a great joke to sneak inside), and a bodega, which still had the flower-cart parked out front. I frowned as a bouquet of bruised scarlet roses caught my eye, and repressed a shiver.
Once the lights of the bodega fell behind me, night took over. The sun had set while we were in 141 Azalea, and tonight was a dark moon, casting everything in velvety shadows.
Chain link fences sagged alongside overgrown fields, until the dark edges of the public school came into view.
I had just stepped into a circle of light cast by a streetlight when it flickered, humming and zapping overhead.
My feet froze in place. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up straight, telling me that something was seriously amiss. My heart began to pound even though my beads remained warm, and I wrapped a hand around the handle of my sickle.
Eyes weighed on me like stones. Something was watching me, silent and deadly.
A low growl echoed through the silent street, rumbling through my chest. Eyes flashed like foxfire from the overgrown grass and I held my breath, frozen as still as a statue, as three hundred pounds of mountain lion slunk from the grass. A tail longer than my entire body whipped around, just catching my leg as the beast circled me.
His paws were the size of my face. Mountain lions weren’t even native to Ashville. Its presence made no sense. I took a deep breath against the incipient panic of a giant predator appearing where it had no business being, my fingers clenching on the handle of my sickle.
I couldn’t even remember what you were supposed to do for mountain lion attacks. Play dead? Climb a tree? I was pretty sure the first one was for bears.
“Hey there, good kitty,” I said soothingly, not daring to move a muscle. The mountain lion sat on the sidewalk directly in front of me, its tail curling around its feet. My breath caught in my throat as it turned its enormous head, revealing indigo eyes.
That was not natural in the slightest. There was no hint of a witch’s psychic signature, but the beast had to be a familiar. My shoulders relaxed and I shook out my trembling hand, feeling foolish- a witch’s familiar wouldn’t attack me. Shouldn’t attack me, anyways, unless I’d made another enemy in my long absence besides Warden Stone.
Although I did wonder what insane witch out there thought a mountain l
ion was a good idea for a familiar. Most of us chose something that fit pleasantly in a lap or a pocket when it wasn’t working, like cats, mice, or bats. Having a cuddly familiar gave all the benefits of both a pet and a magical construct.
“Whoever you belong to, I’m not interested,” I told the mountain lion. “Let me live my life in peace.”
I turned to walk into the street but the mountain lion rose in one smooth motion and cut me off, prowling at the edges of the light.
I held up my fingers, conjured a tiny ball of witchlight, and tossed it so it raced along the ground and into the night like a crazed laser-beam. “Fetch, Kitty!”
Good Kitty was not amused. His tail thrashed.
I sighed. So, mountain lions didn’t like to play fetch. That would be my luck.
“I’ve got nothing else for you,” I told Good Kitty. “If you have a message, spit it out now or forever hold your peace. I’m tired and ready to be home.”
He padded forward, his tail curling around my legs as a rumble vibrated through me. Those indigo eyes flashed as he rubbed his gigantic head against my thigh.
I tentatively dropped my hand and leaned over to touch his head, scratching behind his velvety ears. He thrust his head against my knee before he raised one gigantic paw and stepped on my foot, pinning me in place.
I humored the mountain lion, running my fingers through his cream-colored fur. “Okay, Good Kitty,” I said. The longer we were out here, the higher the chance that a potential future client might see me standing out here petting a mountain lion like a crazy cat lady taken to the extreme. “I really do need to get home.”
I knelt down to give him one last good scratch and he turned his head, the whiskers tickling my nose. The tips of his fangs shone ivory under the streetlights. I wondered if Eric would protest going out to the forest to find my own mountain lion familiar; he was pretty soft and cute. Maybe mountain lions weren’t all that bad as pets.
Good Kitty let out a rumbling sound that was somewhere between a purr and a growl, and pressed his warm nose to my cheek before he flowed back into the grass.
I stood up slowly. Now that the mountain lion was gone, it was like he had never been here at all. The night was silent around me once more.
Except for the rasp of cloth against grass, and the fact that my tourmaline beads were beginning to ice over.
“Fuck, do I ever catch a break?” I muttered, drawing my sickle. The clean, curved lines of the wood gleamed under the streetlight, hardened with magic-imbued varnish and inlaid with swirling silverwork.
I should’ve just gone home with Eric. My fingers twitched as I activated a night-sight charm, and the multiple pairs of ruby-red eyes watching me from the grass were suddenly obvious, like I’d turned on a light in a dark room.
The vampires were feral, with wild tangled hair and hunched postures. Dark lines streaked under their ashen skin, indicating that they hadn’t fed in some time.
Another figure prowled the edges of the abandoned school. The colony must’ve just moved in, and now they thought I was the first meal of their new home.
Where was the mountain lion when I needed him?
I knelt and slipped a silver dagger from my thigh strap, gripping it in my left hand. The tiny amount of witchlight I possessed blossomed in my palms, sliding down the blade and bursting into balls of light like tiny flowers. They filled the air, floating over the field and blinding the vampire’s sensitive eyes.
They crouched down lower, high-pitched keens filling the air as they tried to hide. I charged into the grass, plunging the silver dagger into the skull of the first vampire with a sickening crunch.
A solid slash with the rowan sickle separated his head from his shoulders, and the corpse slumped over, decaying rapidly into dust now that he was truly dead.
The knife slid free easily. A few more shapes had scampered back into the school.
I dispatched the other two vampires lurking in the field and stepped from the grass onto an old basketball court. The windows of the school were boarded up, but I felt eyes on me. They were still watching from some dark bolt hole.
My psychic protective wards suddenly hummed, jittering around me as another witch approached- no, a warlock. The signature reaching out to mine was distinctly masculine.
And familiar this time.
My heart began pounding again as the signature became clearer, filling my mind with the sensation of flames against skin, the prickle of thorns biting into flesh, the rush of plunging through the sky in free-fall.
I knew that signature so well, I still dreamed about it.
Sparkling ropes snaked through the air, tendrils formed of pure fire that plunged into the school and hauled out dark, squirming figures. They clustered in the middle of the basketball court, bound by the shimmering flame-ropes, until the ropes ignited and the group of feral vamps became a roaring column of white fire.
My sickle drooped as they were incinerated almost instantly, my necklace growing warm against my skin again.
He stepped out of the darkness, a familiar wicked grin on his carved face, eyes as bright a blue as the heart of a flame. “There you are, Morena Bell.”
Joss Thorne, my childhood best friend, once inseparable from my side. I felt like a fist had pummeled my stomach, knocking all the air out of me.
Looking at him now was like looking at a warped photograph of the past. When I’d left, Joss had been a tall and semi-awkward teenager, his dark curls hanging to his shoulders, his witchfire explosive and volatile.
He’d filled out in the years I’d been gone. Joss towered over me still, but his shoulders had broadened, and every inch of him was no longer lanky but strapped with burly muscle. His dark curls were cropped short now, and the shadow of stubble covered his strong-boned jaw.
“Joss.” My already-jumbled nerves were screeching now. Where had he learned how to control his witchfire with such precision? When had he become this man with powerful arms and a confident gait?
“That’s my name. Glad to see you still remember.” He moved closer, that sly smirk becoming the sweet, open grin I was used to. Dark lashes framed those astonishingly blue eyes... and somehow, his dimples were way more attractive than I remembered. “It’s been a long time. Five years and six months, to be exact.”
“I know how long it’s been,” I said roughly, sheathing my rowan sword and wiping the silver knife on the grass.
The appearance of a Warden, a witch’s familiar, and my former best friend-all in one night, no less- didn’t bode well for me. If the other covens had been keeping track as well, that meant that they were definitely planning on enforcing the limitations for the abandonment of a covenstead.
The clock was ticking against me.
“Your advertising helped me pin you down.” Another flash of that smirk. I slid the silver knife away and crossed my arms, glaring at him. I had left for a reason: to get away from the covens. The matriarch of the Thornes, Melinda, Joss’s mother, was one of the primary factors in fleeing.
“Why are you here?”
He shrugged, moving around me in a circle, his eyes taking me in from head to toe with the kind of confidence teenage Joss hadn’t possessed. “I wanted to see you again. You look good, Morena. Really, really good.”
Joss was behind me now, his deep voice becoming a purr. Goosebumps washed over my body, a not-unpleasant sensation. The Joss I knew never would’ve been so… forward. “Okay. You’ve seen me. Now tell me what you really want.”
Had Melinda put him up to this? It was no secret among the covens that she was power-hungry. Sending out her eldest son to find me with some bullshit handfasting proposal was exactly the kind of tack she would take. And, because he knew me as well as Eric did, he would know exactly how to get under my defenses.
“I’m not here on behalf of my matriarch, if that’s what you’re asking,” he said, finishing his slow circle. His smile was gone, replaced by the tension of slow-burning anger. “Can’t I care about my oldest friend? Five ye
ars is a long time to vanish with no letters, no calls… not even a fucking messenger-bird, Morena. I would’ve been happy if you’d strapped a note to a pigeon so I knew you were still alive.”
“You had to have known I was alive,” I said quietly. “Bellhallow still lives, doesn’t it? I left the covens for a number of reasons. Melinda was one of them.”
“Alive and happy?” he asked. “How was I to know you weren’t out there in the human world, languishing in a hole somewhere? I would’ve had your back against my matriarch.”
I scoffed, moving away from him. Hundreds of tiny witchfires filled the air like fireflies, illuminating the pile of ashes in the center of the court. “Melinda spent the entire day of the funeral trying to matchmake,” I said, the bitterness of the memory galling me. “How was I supposed to be happy again with that hanging over my head? Or the constant fucking rumors?”
“By letting me help you.” His hands landed on my shoulders, spinning me around to face him. His skin was preternaturally warm, and the contact he made with my arms sent a frisson through me in a way I’d never felt before. “You didn’t even give me a chance to help you through it, Mor. You took off without a word. I thought you might’ve at least cared about our friendship enough to say goodbye.”
His fingers touched the underside of my chin, forcing me to look up at him. “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t stand to stay in that house another day,” I said. To my horror, my lower lip trembled, and the backs of my eyes prickled with unshed tears.
Joss’s full lips curved, his dark brows softening as he pulled me against him. I slid my arms around his waist, pressing my face to the hard planes of his chest as his hand wrapped around the back of my head.
“Just let me hug you, jerk. It took a really long time to find you. I gotta give it to you, that was an excellent disappearing act.”
