by Elsa Jade
Slicing through the silver cord that bound her spell bag, the point of the athame pricked her fingertip, drawing a dark bead of blood.
Dang it, she couldn’t lose focus, not wistfully, or longingly, or any other -ly, not even Leblanc. She’d seen sidetracked spellcasting go drastically awry, and with the surge of raw, unchanneled energy here, distraction might even be deadly.
Spreading the black velvet into a circle, she rearranged the elements of her potion. On impulse, she smeared her spill of blood on the ghostberry. Had a nice poetical ring to it—the circle probably wouldn’t approve, but they appreciated that magic was as much art as craft.
Though it hadn’t been that long since she left the VW, the temperature had dropped enough that the stars seemed brighter. The waxy white little moons of the berries practically glowed around her. Filling a crystal chalice with pure water distilled from Gypsy’s vodka, Gin whispered the start of her spell before dropping in the bloodied berry. The white berry with its dark stain floated down like a snowflake.
Knowing better than to risk a fire on the mesa (she would not think of Smokey the bear, she would not…) she’d completed all her purification and distillation in advance, so anchoring the loci of power and delineating the channels of energy toward those points went quicker than she expected. Around her, she felt the energy gathering. The living power of the mesa flowed along the lines she’d laid and began to coil at each locus—as if she held a mighty beast on a silver string, guiding it to rest within her spell.
The sensation made her almost dizzy, her nerves tingling and her fingers trembling like she was holding the power inside herself. It reminded her of…having sex with Ben, amazing and a bit scary as she opened herself up to him.
She forced herself to take her time, measuring out her ingredients and her chanted words in exact degrees despite the husky timbre of her voice.
Speaking of degrees… When she finished another round of incantation, her last words emerged in a puff of silver. That wasn’t Puff the magic dragon shit; the temperature had dropped again, cold enough to see her breath.
Frowning, she glanced up from her work. She’d been so focused, she hadn’t even noticed the clouds rolling in, blotting out the stars. Without the starlight…
Yeah, she might be a shadow witch, but there was shadow, and then there was darkness, and then there was alone on Mesa Diablo at midnight on a moonless night, amalgamating magics in ways that hadn’t been done before, while storm clouds gathered.
She swallowed hard enough that it sounded like a gulp.
But she couldn’t stop now. Oh, she could end the energy gathering that would power the spell, but if she stopped, she’d have to gather the ingredients anew, reweave the powerlines, not to mention wait until next month’s dark moon. And the circle would know she’d needed a second try to get things right. No, she had to keep going.
When she resumed chanting, the tingles were gone, replaced by full-on shivering. Her black silk robe was usually adequate for the sometimes stuffy work in the spellatorium, and the glyphs of support and protection needlepointed into the cloak had always given her confidence in her work. But now, she might as well have been naked. Too bad she couldn’t make her own fur.
This was the first time she’d ever truly felt the danger of her calling. Her fingers weren’t trembling now—they were numb. Muscle memory and determination took the place of any feeling in her hands. With clouds blocking out nearly all the light, only a faint reflected glow from the town far below bounced off the black underbellies to give her some working illumination. She stretched the third-to-last silver thread outward from the decanter to a fist-sized chunk of fool’s gold in the rough shape of a heart. “Where the heart is foolish and leads us astray, instead let the silver guide us back to ourselves. So mote it be.”
Her breath was a continuous silver plume now. She didn’t need just a fur coat; she needed a whole big body to keep her warm with a wide chest and long arms to wrap all the way around her. When she shuddered, the black silk, half frozen around her shoulders, tugged at her, not a loving hug, but the cold embrace of death.
She grimaced at her fatalistic thoughts. Anti-love didn’t mean death, no matter what Ben had implied. She couldn’t let his doubts change the spell. For all its accouterments, magic relied equally on intention and belief for forging raw power into purpose.
She sketched the second-to-last silver line from the decanter. A pale silver shimmer through the glass told her the power was starting to distill. The crystal, reinforced magically and physically, should hold, but…
Linking the silver thread to a small, flawless, diamond pane of mirror, she intoned, “Where we struggled to find our place in the wandering eyes of another, instead let us see ourselves as beautiful and true. So mote it be.”
You’re beautiful. Like, from a storybook beautiful, something powerful and precious.
Ben had said that to her the night of the thunderstorm. It had to have been a lie—or not a lie, exactly, but an infatuated fib. And anyway, everyone knew bears didn’t have the best eyesight. Beasts weren’t always beautiful, and how could shifters stay true to a mate when they couldn’t even choose one shape?
Even as she thought it, Gin knew she was the one who was lying now.
Aghast to find tears in her eyes, she blinked hard, and for a heartbeat her damp lashes froze together, blinding her. She pried them open to find the decanter alight with thick whorls of silver slowly settling through the vodka-water as what was left of the ethanol converted to pure magic potion.
So close. Just one more line, one more incantation.
With her whole body juddering on the verge of hypothermia, she had to use both hands to lay out the last silver line in a spiral across the black velvet. She connected the end of the line to a crystal amphora. Amphorae, with their rounded rather than flat bottoms, were inconveniently tippy, but their precarious shape represented the magic’s search for balance. She drove the pointed end of the jar into the earth, pushing down the black velvet too. Stuffing the sachet of herbs, including the rest of the ghostberries, into the wide mouth of the amphora, she upended the larger decanter over the opening and quickly looped the silver thread around its neck, binding the two vessels together in a perilously top-heavy union, mouth to mouth.
If that wasn’t a metaphor…
Grimly, she waited, shaking with cold even with her arms wrapped around her knees, as the first drops percolated through the sachet. When the herbal packet grew saturated, the dribble became a thin stream, like another silver thread unspooling into the amphora. As the vessel filled with scintillating light, Gin gathered her fading strength. This was almost over. Just the last chant.
She struggled to remember the words she’d written in her grimoire what seemed like a lifetime ago. “Where we thought to pour ourselves, body and soul, into another, instead we remake ourselves unbroken and free of any chains. So mote it Ben…”
Damn her chattering teeth! “So mote it be,” she repeated quickly as she severed the silver thread the moment the last drop of vodka-water drained into the sachet.
For a moment, the empty decanter wavered. Finally, with a delicate chime of breaking ice, it cracked from the mouth of the amphora and tipped over. Instead of landing softly on the black velvet and the dusty ground underneath, it shattered. The sound, like an entire splintering sea of ice, cracked Gin’s nerves along with it. The ground seemed to quake under her, and she had to sit back on the heels of her combat boots or she would’ve keeled over.
Had the cold made the crystal brittle? Or had the powerful magics of the mesa strained the reinforcements past their holding point? If it had broken just a second earlier…
She shook her head, as if she could shake off the shock. Didn’t matter. The spell was fully decanted into the amphora. The potion was finished.
Tiny flecks of silver began to precipitate out of the solution. The crystalline shards would be perfect in anti-love charms so that no one need ever suffer the dark side o
f longing and desire.
As for the light side…
Well, that wasn’t her path, was it? Though she’d happily be her sister’s bridesmaid—maybe she could hope for a new black dress…nah, probably not—she wasn’t interested in walking down that aisle herself in white.
From the corner of her eye, a pale flicker made her startle. Ghost! Of course not, but… Her lower legs half asleep, half frozen, she rose painfully to her feet, swaying in exhaustion. The ghostberries gleamed white in the light of the magic potion—that was what she’d seen. Another flicker twisted her around.
Had some of the magic escaped?
A closer glint drifted just past her nose.
A snowflake.
Then another, and another, and another, as if the black clouds were sifting out the stars from the sky.
Gin grinned and held up her icy hands. A snowstorm in July in the high desert? That was power! She spun in a circle, trying to rev up her body temp, and stuck out her tongue to catch one of the pure crystals. The chill was a tiny pinprick, and she laughed.
She’d done it! The circle would have to grant her ordination, and she’d bring back the rituals of the shadow circle. Brandy would be glad for her, even if she didn’t really understand what it meant, and Rita would cheer her on. Even their mother…well, if she ever checked in she’d have to be reluctantly impressed.
Letting her hands fall to her sides, Gin finished her spin, and the black robe settled coldly against her legs. She hugged her belly, holding in the little warmth she’d generated.
No one else would get it except maybe Ben, since she’d told him more than she’d intended about her reasons for charming an anti-love potion. Would he celebrate her triumph? Or would he condemn the spell? She’d never know.
The chill sapped her moment of glee, so she quickly gathered the remains of the spell, careful not to cut herself on the broken crystal. Too cold for niceties, she dumped everything except the amphora into the hatbox. She wrapped the vessel in the black velvet and nestled that among the leftovers.
“Thank you, Mesa Diablo, for giving me a place to work this magic.”
The night wind whispered back something too elemental for even a shadow witch to decipher. Snowflakes swirled lightly past her lashes as she straightened with the hatbox under her arm. Now which way…
Apprehension, more icy than the clouds, settled over her as she turned in a slower circle. She’d left the creek to walk through the ghostberry shrubs, which weren’t that dense, so she should be able to see or at least hear the water. But the whispering wind was stronger now, filling her ears with a low growl and her view with snowflakes.
This wasn’t another summer thunderstorm somehow whipping up a few icy droplets from the frozen edge of space. This was magic turning back on her, cold and alone.
She scowled. No way would she let this moment be taken from her. She’d worked too hard to die in a freak storm.
Stomping to one edge of the clearing, she shoved her way out through the shrubs. The patch of ghostberry wasn’t as large as the huckleberry field. If she got to the darker bushes, she’d know she was going in the right direction toward the VW. If she crossed into the stand of ponderosas, she’d know she was going deeper across the mesa.
Or toward the edge of the cliff.
The wind snapped at her nape, and she hunched her shoulders. With her head bent, she noticed the moment she crossed into the clearing.
Not a different clearing, the same clearing. She could tell by the shard of crystal from the broken decanter glinting in the dirt. She whipped her head up and glared at the white berries which gleamed back innocently.
Not so innocent, the shallow drifts of snow whisking up to the edges of her black boots, as if some giant hand was trying to sweep her away.
“Not welcome here, I get it,” she muttered as she snatched up the shard she’d missed. “I’ll show myself out.”
With a drag of her toe, she marked her exit from the clearing.
Which made it really annoying to find herself entering the clearing again from the opposite side of her mark.
No way had she walked all the way around the mesa. Growling under her breath—but not as loud as the wind—she scuffed another exit.
And found herself back in the clearing.
She squinted. “Groundhog shifter day?”
When she came back again, no marks were visible through the deepening snow.
She was shivering so hard now the glass and stones in her hatbox clanged a warning. Not that she needed it to know she was in trouble.
All this time, she’d just wanted to earn her place on the shadow path and—Ben was right—to prove herself to everyone who had left her behind. But she’d called down too much. And this much darkness and solitude would kill her.
She clutched the hatbox. Okay, she was lost on the mesa, and she obviously wasn’t going to find her way out until the snowstorm raged itself out. So she needed to hunker down. Except she’d left her fire-making tools behind—thanks a lot, Smokey the bear—and the last dregs of Gypsy’s finest had drained into the sand when the decanter had shattered, so she couldn’t even die drunk. Fuuuuck.
Except she wasn’t ever going to get to do that again either because she’d told Ben she didn’t want him.
And she’d believed it too. Because only someone who truly didn’t want a big, strong, sweet hunk o’ manly bear would push one away, right?
Or someone who had to be staring into the icy teeth of a winter death in July to tell herself the truth.
She was scared. Not of dangerous magic, not of dying—well, yeah, she didn’t want to die—but she’d give up her blood for her magic, risk her life for the spell, rather than confess…
She wanted Ben.
Wanted to know what it’d be like to be with him. So mote it Ben.
That hadn’t been a mistake of chattering teeth. It had been a truth slipping out, its path smoothed by ice and blood, vodka and a whispering wind.
She could confess it now, considering she was probably going to freeze to death. Also, he wasn’t there to say I told you so.
She wished she was half as versed in wilderness survival as she was in shadow magic. Instead of ushering in a renewal of the tradition, she was going to go down as a footnote in circle history, a warning against hubris and hiking without the ten essentials. How embarrassing.
On the plus side, she wouldn’t have to wear what was sure to be an ugly bridesmaid dress.
“Oh, Ben,” she murmured as she placed the hatbox in the snow and sat down. “You said I just had to be willing to risk my heart. But I never believed that anyone would want it. I should’ve guessed that a bachelor bear who found the one stunted, mutant branch of a rose and made it beautiful would be the one to make me question my way.”
Apparently not knowing where she was really brought into focus where she wanted to be.
With her bear. With Ben.
For however long it lasted. And considering the ever-deepening snow, that might not be long at all.
Chapter 13
The cold draft down the back of his neck woke Ben from a dead sleep.
Cold? It was July in Angels Rest, and the cottage didn’t have AC. Rolling carefully on the too-small twin bed, he peered blearily toward the window he’d left open to catch the night breezes.
There was a tiny drift of snow in the corner of the sash.
He blinked, then blinked again. “Christmas in July,” he murmured.
Grabbing the corner of the blanket folded at the foot of his bed—even in high summer, the desert nights sometimes got cold enough to need something to cuddle, if one were sleeping alone—he rolled away from the window to burrito himself in the blanket and thumped his head into the pillow to fluff it again.
He paused mid-thump and glanced over his shoulder, slightly more awake this time.
While desert mountains might pick up flurries until late in the year, snow in July in town was not a natural thing.
But there w
ere lots of preternatural things in these parts.
His bear prodded him to take a look. Pulling the blanket around him like a cape, he went to the window to take a breath. The air was chilly and edged with a strange scent—not quite the ozone snap of lightning, not the softer whiff of rain on rock, not the sparkling purity of fresh snow. The bear shifted uneasily inside him, so he lumbered out to the yard, tugging the blanket close against a chill that had nothing to do with the inch of snow turning the moonless night to a black and white Ansel Adams poster.
Looked like snow, felt like snow, cold and melting under his bare toes. Only the smell gave it away.
Smelled like…magic.
He craned his neck to see the mesa through the neighbors’ poplar trees. Not everyone liked a clear view of the brooding peak. But even through the lush green and silver leaves, the mesa’s looming presence was impossible to ignore. Except instead of its familiar dark spires rising over town, Mesa Diablo was a fairytale castle of frosted white towers, the points shredding the last of the retreating clouds.
Not natural, not preternatural. Supernatural.
His bear rumbled.
“Gin,” he murmured. “What have you done?”
Shedding the blanket as a burst of dread sleeted through him, Ben strode back to his room. The bear clawed him from within, demanding they leave at once.
But he knew she wouldn’t be asleep in the Victorian, safe in her bed. No, of course she wouldn’t be. So he’d take the truck to the center of the storm.
He was dressed and out the door before the bear could concede that was a good idea.
“Where are you going?” The deep growl behind him brought the bear to a halt.
It couldn’t retreat from the threat in those words. “Gin’s on the mesa with some sort of magic gone bad.”
In the dark, Thor stood with his legs braced wide. At least he was fully upright, although Ben could’ve done without the closeup of his cousin’s boxers. “Gone bad? Been bad this whole time. Which is a good reason to leave her up there alone.”