by Eden Butler
My gaze kept steady on my wrist in his grip, as though on their own, my eyes decided looking at Bane wouldn’t be smart. “Why are you touching me again?” Finally able to control myself, I looked up. “The spell is over.”
“Is it?”
There was something new, something strange to how Bane pulled me in. The lines weren’t calling me, insisting that I take him, claim him once again. They were, in fact, nothing more than a quiet whisper I could barely make out, begging now instead of insisting. The sensation had no bite, not as it did before Bane’s spell, but there was still heat between us, that constant energy that no block could keep from us. We were drawn to each other even without the lines’ interference.
“Bane…” He inched nearer and I held my breath as that pull—our pull—drew us closer. “What am I thinking now?”
He growled, rushing toward my mouth, warming it with just a brush of his lips. “The same damn thing I am.” He gripped my face between his fingers and kissed me hard, scorching against my mouth like he wanted to claim it. God, how I wish he would, and just that thought made that low, deep groan in Bane’s throat transform into a growl of pleasure.
The air around us dropped, the temperatures cooling the wind, bringing brittle leaves and small twigs from the trees around us. Nothing slipped into my thoughts as we came closer, as I forgot that I wasn’t supposed to touch Bane, that he belonged to someone else, that he was meant for something else in which I played no part. But just for that moment, I wanted to take him. I wanted his touch and taste all over me.
At the thought, Bane broke away, his hot, hurried breath fanning down my nose as he rested his forehead against mine. “This spell was an insanely bad idea.”
“Why?” Fingers fisted in his collar, he moved when I pulled him toward me, too eager, too anxious to keep from touching him.
“Gods, Jani, because now I know you’ve been thinking the same thing I have since the second I walked into your apartment in the city.”
But I knew, I knew that it had all started for us far longer than a few days before.
“Bane…” Tell him no, I thought. Remind him who he is, who you are. But even thinking it was enough to settle him.
“I don’t think I much care.” He stopped me, answering my unspoken question about what would be or what should be. “Circe help me. I don’t fucking care about any of it.”
Like a flame igniting, like the rush of decision that is never given much thought, a choice that is more instinct than logic, we moved away from ourselves, from the people we were always supposed to be. There was no duty, no honor, no distinctions to be maintained, no expectations that needed to be protected. We’d come this close before, the near making of something new, something forbidden, but this time I gave no thought to what would happen if I let Bane forget that I was not for him.
Just one flashing moment where we pulled against each other, where his touch was like liquid fire on my skin, where my mouth against his throat made that huge man shudder at the feel of it.
“I don’t care either.”
It was all it took. Providence, destiny, the twist of some life-altering event set in motion by the lines, by the gods, by whatever it was that bent our wills, directed our paths down the roads we took. My declaration, my small lie that I truly didn’t care, was enough to pick apart the moment that might keep us from it. It was enough to ricochet into something that could never be unmade.
That’s when the screaming started.
In the quiet din of darkness, with Bane holding me, devouring my mouth, insisting my body bend this way and that, a scream rent through the moment and tore it to pieces, followed by another, and another.
“Bane!” Joe called out from seemingly so far away, sounding desperate, appalled. “Bane where are you? Get the hell over here!”
We ran together toward that frantic voice and the smell of blood that thickened in the air the closer we came to the campground.
Twelve
Death was coming too close to me as of late.
Cancer took my mother before I said goodbye. That death came in the form of a pristine body, laid out with roses and gardenia petals in her hair. She’d looked lovely, peaceful, like some ethereal fay resting in white lace and vintage silk.
The mortals from the mission where she volunteered couldn’t believe she’d been sixty. They’d kept their focus on me and my sister, as if looking at us closely enough would reveal some great secret to the age-defying genetics beyond the ageless melanin my mother had passed down.
But even Mom’s still, cold body, as beautiful as it was, came in the form of custom and preparation. It ended in a marble mausoleum, engraved by my father’s hand, while the mortals slept through the night.
And Freya… Circe. There had been no beauty in her death. There had been no spell fixing her body into anything resembling the witch she’d been in life. Nothing could. It ached to remember her that way.
Death, like the one at my feet, was bloody and vicious and looked damn painful.
I could not pull my attention from the body. There was a great clot of tension in my stomach, one that had been given life the second Bane and I stopped running after a screaming, fearful Joe.
The moment we saw Wyatt’s neck twisted beyond its limits. And the blood, lots of it, pouring from the cut near his neck and rib. That smell—metallic and bitter—filled the night around us, peppering the darkness with a stench that was unmistakable, unforgettable.
The weres around us bellowed, cried with their primal voices begging vengeance. Around us, the other group converged, smaller, true, but on alert. The Biloxi contingent—a group of witches who instantly split around the area mentioning wards and signatures—and Ethan Rivers, Cari’s brother, and Bane’s cousin Malak both came to our sides, their normally smirking grins vacant for once.
At my side, Bane knelt next to his murdered friend, fingers covering his mouth, eyes hard and squinted. There was a heaviness around him, that deep, angry venom the lines loved to stoke pulsing from him, shifting a heated, white energy between his fingers. Him lashing out would not do. Not if we wanted to keep the scene of the crime untainted.
When Bane’s hand closed into a tighter fist, I squatted next to him, not caring that it was probably improper to touch him. Not caring that the others might talk about me offering my boss comfort.
Then, a rustle from behind us, and the rich smell of expensive perfume announced Cari ambling from her potion-influenced sleep as she stopped short, gasping at Wyatt’s body.
“Gods,” she cried, angling around Bane, her arm snaking over his shoulder. “Sweetheart.” There was nothing more she needed to say. It was enough to remind me of my place. Cari leveled a look at me, one not tinted with sorrow and pity over the were’s death. One, in fact, that told me plainly I needed to back away from what was hers.
I did, because it was proper.
I did, because I knew Bane well enough to know there would be no words to still his anger. Nothing anyone said would ease this ache, and I made no attempts to soften this blow with words that he’d never remember. But he let Cari console him and he did not push her away. He didn’t retreat from her or make her feel useless. Bane, in fact, seemed to take the comfort she offered and let it soothe him.
That hurt more than it should have and I felt the sting of it deeper than I wanted to admit. Something, it seemed, Bane noticed. He stiffened away from her touch and moved his head toward me, not looking at my face or glancing in my eyes, but enough to let me know he understood my misplaced offense.
“I don’t understand what happened.” That customary Iles calm had slipped for only a moment—a little gaffe when Bane let the worry, the fear that this attack had been meant for him, outweigh the mourning I knew he craved. But it was a dangerous moment. Only when it passed did he square his shoulders.
“We heard him yell. It was Wyatt’s watch.” Joe’s voice cracked at his cousin’s name, as though saying it delivered pain he couldn’t quite bear. “It
was seconds. Seconds and we ran to him here.” The shifter’s breath released in a sputter of noise that sounded like a wheeze. Something that could not be controlled. Anguish hidden within the patent ache this death had caused. “He was just…he was laying here.”
“Where was she?”
Bane and I both stood from our crouch over Wyatt’s body as Hamill Donaldson’s question had the crowd around us looking my way. “What?” I stammered, incredulous.
“Convenient that you weren’t near the camp.”
“She was with me,” Bane said, ignoring the glare Cari gave him at the admission.
The accusations in the silence that followed were still deafening.
“She takes off, no one sees you, Bane, and then Wyatt gets dead.” Hamill didn’t back down from the glare Bane gave him. Instead, the angry shifter kept his attention focused on me, the thin line of his top lip making him look even more hostile than he had earlier that night when he nagged me about doing my job. How the others had managed to shift him back from his were form, I had no clue, but the angry, bitter man stood in front of me now.
“I said,” Bane started, walking away from his examination of his friend’s body to step close enough to Hamill so that he could look down at him, “she was with me. I never let her out of my sight once.”
“And why is that?” The question was honest, if not invasive, and when the wizard asking it stepped forward, I understood where the curiosity came from.
“Something I’d damn well like to know myself,” Cari said, glaring at me, but I didn’t bother answering her.
Things were tense enough without engaging the jealous fiancée.
“Funny,” Hamill continued, “how you have an answer for everyone where this witch is concerned.”
“Funny?” I said, tilting my head. “He hired me. Most employers want to know what their workers are up to. It’s how they know whether or not to pay them.”
“And what job is he paying you for exactly, Miss Benoit?” Ethan asked, folding his arms, a question his sister seemed to approve of.
Bane shot them both a glare of warning, but it didn’t take the bite from their expressions.
“Not to kill people.” I told Hamill, who still held his expression tight and his eyes like there was an accusation on his tongue reserved for me. “And certainly not to fuck him,” I said to Cari and Ethan, their twin smirks unconscious, I was certain, just as sure as I was my comment had made Sam’s frown dip hard. My brother looked on the verge of wanting to thrash Cari and Ethan for what they were implying. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t a real consideration to anyone. And my attempt at a blunt joke likely wasn’t funny to them. Crude, possibly, and I couldn’t argue with that.
There was a haughty snobbery about the way the Rivers carried themselves. Their clothes were too clean, too above rim to be convenient for a long hike and search through the forest. The black leather boots were made for looking good, not walking; the long trench coats had begun fraying at the hem from the hours they had been brushed against the ground.
The ridiculous penchant for appearances over practicality, the perpetually lowered gaze down their long noses, none of it was new to me. I’d seen their sort my entire life in the Cove. I’d seen more of that entitled, rich-bitch swagger working catering events in Manhattan when one of my friends needed an extra pair of hands serving New York’s richest. Money is the same no matter where you are. It might come in different clothes, speak with different accents, but the attitude is the same; it’s the unbendable belief that just being born into their lives, their station, engenders some sort of declaration—the fierce determination that the world is theirs to take and anyone not in that same station didn’t warrant a second thought.
“Please, Jani…Cari, there’s no need for this cool attitude.” Malak stood next to her. It had disappointed me when Sam told me that Bane’s little cousin had become thick as thieves in anything remotely decadent with Ethan Rivers. But at least Malak was subtler than Ethan. He was kind, sweet still. He wasn’t like Ethan, who wore smiles that weren’t friendly and spoke with the glimmer of kindness without sentiment he’d never mean.
“And Hamill, really,” Malak said, waving between Wyatt’s body on the ground and me. “What kind of idiot would blame Jani for this? What possible motive could she have?”
“She had opportunity.” But even as Hamill spoke, his voice held little conviction. The small amount of pride he had deflated as he scanned Bane’s face. “She’s not one of us, Bane. You know that. Who’s to say she wasn’t hired. That…father of hers…”
“Excuse me?” I said, charging forward, but Bane caught me before I could lift my hand and pull a bit of the line into my limbs.
“Not going to work now, remember?” he said against my ear.
“At all?” I asked, suddenly worried that the block would render me helpless.
“No. You can still fight.” Bane released me when the conversations around us sounded a bit too much like judgment. He was better at ignoring them than I was. “You just can’t seriously injure anyone.”
Something heavy, something that could not be easily lifted from me had crashed onto my chest. “I won’t have any power.”
“You have power, Jani. More than you know.” Bane’s voice was softer, lower, though I could still make out his sadness, that foreign emotion I knew he tried to keep off his expressions. There also was a peak of pride, a little swirl of confidence in me that slipped to the surface. Bane could not block me from the lines without letting me feel what he felt as well, and as he stared down at me, defying the murmurs surrounding us, I realized that block may have uncovered more than it held back.
“This is fucking adorable, really.” Ethan’s whine broke the spell, and Bane stepped back, keeping enough space between us that Ethan and Malak could corner him, usher him away from the crowd and, it seemed more importantly, away from me.
“I don’t damn well think it is,” Cari said, moving between us, her back facing me as she jabbed a finger into Bane’s chest. “What do you mean you blocked her? You went into her mind?” When the wizard only stared down at her, the small witch’s face contorted, her mouth bunching up into a snarl. “Have you lost your damn…”
“Careful,” he told her, grabbing her pointing finger before it landed again. “I did what needed to be done in order to focus her.” He slipped his gaze up at me, not hiding his small grin before he looked back down at his fiancée. “We need her to find the Elam. I was only doing her a favor.”
“And what other favors will you do for her, I wonder?” Cari asked, knocking her shoulder against Bane before she walked away, muttering a low, dark phrase under her breath that he must have taken for a hex. Bane waved his hand, deflecting something over his shoulder—a whip of energy I took for a hex coming from Cari. Then it rebounded with a flick of Bane’s finger and shot back a spark straight at the witch’s ass. She released a yelp of pain, glaring at him again, then marched back toward her tent.
“I don’t care what Bane says.” Hamill walked behind me through the throng still looking for evidence, clues around Wyatt’s body. “I don’t damn well trust you.”
“Yeah?” I asked him, not caring that I’d hurt him just a few hours before.
“By the sodding gods!” Joe cried out, his voice ragged. “My cousin has been murdered right under our noses and all you do is bicker and point petty fingers and stir up trouble? What is wrong with all of you?” His voice broke, and he fell to his knees next to Wyatt’s body.
Bane knelt down next to Joe, spoke to him in quiet tones, words that mentioned revenge and love, but words that were meant to bring Joe alone comfort. I could see, though, by his clenched fists, and I could feel that it was all he could do, kneeling next to his friend, surrounded by violence and blood, that it was all he could do to keep from lashing out himself, in his grief and his anger. I wanted to go to him, but now was not the time. He needed space and to keep from being a target that he would feel obligated to defend. And Joe w
as right—Wyatt deserved better from us, from all of us. Even in death the were was handsome. Pale, ashen already, but still rugged and handsome as he’d been years ago when I first met him. Circe, had it only been a few days since he’d teased me about the past?
The body was solid, growing stiller by the minute as the weres moved around the area and Ethan and Malak dispersed, looking like they at least attempted to help search for anything that might give away what creature had done this.
His shirt was in tatters, his jeans and boots shredded as though someone had taken a weed whacker to them. Even the sleeves on his thick jacket were ripped and his tan skin and hairy arms were visible. Then I spotted the wrap I’d used to bandage Wyatt’s injury from the bobcat attack earlier in the day. The knot was still intact. The center was still bloodied, but the ends had been torn in several places, as though whatever had attacked had done so in a fit.
It was similar to the state Freya’s clothes had been left in, particularly the sleeves of her sweater.
My sweater.
“Gods above…” I whispered, covering my mouth when Bane shot a look my way. He moved his eyebrows up and narrowed his eyes at me as though he expected me to disclose what had made me upset, but I couldn’t say. Wouldn’t. Not here in front of everyone. Not while Wyatt lay right there.
So I held back. But as I did, my mind was racing. I couldn't help it. The one day I had met Wyatt he was witty and fun, and he obviously cared about Bane, but in his death it became clear that there were threats and danger abroad of which we had no clue. And something else was dawning on me, something that came unbidden but seemed important. It had been my experience that unwarranted anger came from somewhere. Hamill Donaldson was a shifter I’d only just met. He wasn’t even local. Logically, there should be no real reason for him to hate me. But for some reason, he’d mentioned my father.
I glanced over at where Hamill had been pacing, a cigarette in his hand. He stood apart from the crowd, eyes down, but his gaze did slip up once or twice to glare at me. What had my family ever been to him? Maybe Papa or Ronan had screwed up a job for his pack. Maybe they hadn’t done everything they were supposed to cover up the trace of magic. Whatever it was had angered Hamill, and that rage was now being directed right at me, despite the chaos in the camp, despite the murder of a fellow shifter.