by Eva Chase
Ky chuckled. “Aw, my brother can’t help it. That’s just how he operates. He hates problems he can’t just step up and solve with his hands.”
And here I’d come barging back into his life. I rubbed my mouth. “Yeah, I guess I brought some big ones back with me.”
“Hey.” Kyler waited until I raised my eyes again. “Maybe he worries, but don’t let yourself think for a second that he’s not overjoyed that you’re back. Your presence here is a net gain, Rose. I promise. We’ve all kind of drifted apart, but you’re bringing us back together. And I think we’re better off that way, you know?”
The affection in his tone and his gaze made it suddenly hard to breathe. I fumbled for something to say. “Damon doesn’t seem to think so.” The way he’d talked to me when he’d found me in his mom’s apartment—my gut still twisted when I remembered it.
“Damon…” Ky exhaled sharply. “He’s had a rough time of it. I don’t even know the half of it. But it’s still not your fault. I do know his mom struggled to get enough work after—after she lost the job on your estate. And his dad, who knows where he is? But Damon just got really angry in general. He did a bunch of stupid stuff at school, got expelled halfway through senior year—after a ton of warnings… And the company he’s been keeping lately is pretty sketchy. But that’s on him, and he knows that, deep down.”
“Maybe too deep down for it to make a difference?” I muttered.
“Oh, no. He’s not that far gone.” Ky paused and shot me a conspiratorial smile. “He’d blow a gasket if he knew I told you this, but you know what? I don’t really care about him being pissed off. He texted me the other day. Saying he wanted me to keep him updated, if whatever issues you were having took a turn for the worse. If we started doing anything to help.”
“Oh.” The knot in my gut unwound. I sagged a little on the futon. Maybe I’d gotten through to Damon last week after all. He cared at least a little. “Thank you for telling me. It’s good to know.”
“He’ll come around completely,” Ky said. “Even he knows what we had back then—it was something pretty special.”
“Yeah.” The way Ky was looking at me left me groping for words again. Then he turned to his computer.
“All right. Let’s see what secrets we can uncover.”
His fingers started flying over the keyboard. I didn’t understand the process he had to work through, so I found myself just watching him as I leaned against the back of the futon.
I’d never really thought about the lovely speckling of the faint freckles on his face, denser along the prominent cheekbone and then more scattered across the slight hollow below. His eyes, I could see when I was this close, were speckled too, the foggy gray-green flecked with shards of a more vivid green. And they seemed to shine when he focused this intently on a task.
“Here we go!” he said. He made a quick gesture with his hand. I leaned closer to see the screen—but not too near. When I closed that distance, every inch of my skin woke up to his presence. A hint of a smell that had to be him reached me, lightly musky with a hint of mint.
“So,” Ky said, motioning at the screen, “that first transaction you saw was actually your stepmother moving her money from a joint account she has with your father to a private account that’s only in her name. Then she transferred it again to a… Cora Conwyn. Does that name ring any bells?”
My lips parted. My heart had been beating a little fast before, but now it was outright thumping.
“Derek—my fiancé,” I forced out. “Cora is his mother.” The lady and head of his witching family, until one of his sisters claimed that role.
Ky’s eyes widened. “And you didn’t know anything about your stepmom passing on this money to her? This isn’t, like, some wedding tradition or something?”
“Not one I’ve ever heard of.” If it was, there’d be no reason to keep it secret. Snuff my spark. “Why would she be paying his family all that money? There’s got to be something going on that she’s not telling me.” Or Dad, if she’d bothered to transfer it to a separate account before giving it to her intended recipient. She must have told him it was for something else. Which meant whatever it was, it was something he wouldn’t approve of.
My chest clenched. Kyler grasped my hand. “Rose,” he said. “It’ll be okay.”
“How can it be okay?” I demanded. “My stepmother is having secret discussions about special… techniques, she’s paying huge amounts of money to my fiance’s family in secret, she’s hiding all of it even from my dad.”
“But now we know. We’ll figure it out from here.”
“I can’t even prove it! There’s no legitimate way I could bring this to my dad.” I waved at the computer screen. “He’d believe her over you. It’s not like I can explain how you figured it out.”
“So we’ll find more proof. Rose.” He raised his other hand to touch the side of my face, bring my gaze back to his. “We can do this. You can do this. Look at how much you’ve been able to unravel already.”
My breath came a little steadier as I stared back at him. “How can you be so sure?”
He gave me a crooked smile. “Because I know you. And I don’t believe there’s anything you can’t do, especially when you’ve got us behind you.”
The gentle contact of his fingers against my cheek sent a wash of heat through me. The faith and admiration in his expression seared right through to my soul. I’d like to say I couldn’t have helped what happened next, but I probably could have stopped myself. It’s just that right in that moment I didn’t want to.
I leaned across those last few inches and pressed my lips to his.
Ky’s breath hitched. His fingers slid back into my hair. His lips were warm and the kiss he offered in return so tender and—
A jitter of energy shot up from the center of my chest, right behind my rib cage. No, not just a jitter—a spark. A flash of magical electricity, so heady it tingled right up to the roof of my mouth.
I jerked back, my body suddenly shaking. How could that—it wasn’t possible. Ky didn’t have a witching bone in his body. He couldn’t have lit my spark.
And yet I could still feel it, sizzling faintly behind my sternum.
“Rose,” Ky said, his voice rough, and I snapped the rest of the way back to reality. Ky didn’t have a witching bone in his body, no, and I had no business kissing him anyway. I was supposed to be getting married in a month and a half’s time to Derek. If I screwed that up, I might as well kiss my magic good-bye. What the hell had I been thinking?
I scrambled to my feet. “Thank you,” I blurted out. “For the—the computer stuff. I have to go.”
I snatched up my phone and bolted for the door before I could do anything even more stupid than I already had.
Philomena caught up with me at the bottom of the stairs. “You couldn’t have interrupted that?” I asked. “Yelled ‘Fire!’? Thrown something at my head?”
Her smile was both bright and strained. “I’ve never been one to stand between a woman and what she truly wants.”
“I want my magic,” I said.
The tingle of energy inside me had already flickered out. Had I even really felt it?
It didn’t matter whether the sensation had been real or my imagination. I couldn’t do that again. I couldn’t let one kiss distract me. All I could focus on right now was uncovering the rest of my stepmother’s plans before it was too late.
Chapter Ten
Jin
Rose by mid-morning sunlight was my favorite Rose. The soft glow brought out the pink in her pale cheeks and the gloss in her black hair. Seeing her in it made my fingers itch for a paintbrush or a stick of oil pastel.
Of course, there were other Roses I’d never seen. Rose by twilight. Rose when she first opened her eyes in the morning. Those might be even more arresting.
I’d have liked to see them all. But I’d take what I got, which was mid-morning Rose.
“I wish I had something better to offer,” she was
saying as we ambled down the street to my studio. She’d just finished visiting with my mother, trying to make up for what her family had done wrong eleven years ago. “If I’d known back then…”
“It’s fine, Briar Rose,” I said before she could go on. “Like the fairy tale, right? You were asleep, unknowing, and now you’ve woken up. What matters is what you do now. That stuff from the past, you can’t let it drag you down.”
She groaned. “Easy to say, not so easy to do.”
I knew the shadows in her eyes had as much to do with present concerns as anything way back then. “How have things been going with your stepmother?”
“Oh, you know…” She made a face at the ground. “I’m still playing along, acting like everything’s fine. That’s all I really can do until I figure out more about what’s going on. I just need something obvious I can take to my dad. Once I have him on my side, I’ll be fine.”
“And your fiancé?” I asked.
I didn’t have anything against the guy exactly. Or I wouldn’t have, if he’d made Rose happy. But I was pretty sure he didn’t. Every time she or anyone else mentioned him, her mouth tightened, just for a second.
Like it did right now. “I’m acting like everything’s fine with him too,” she said. “I have no idea if he even knows about the payoff, after all. It didn’t go to him. His parents might be manipulating him like Celestine is trying to manipulate me. If that is what she’s doing.”
“You could postpone the wedding until you have—”
“No,” Rose broke in sharply. “Jin, I can’t. There are parts of the situation you don’t understand.”
Parts she wasn’t willing to tell me. It was all right. I could give her that space, like we always had. But when she looked that downcast, I couldn’t just leave it.
“I’m sure there are,” I said. “But I’m also sure that there’s a way out of any bad situation, even if you can’t see it right away. So keep looking, all right? And we’ll look with you.”
“I know you will,” she said, and I got the smile I’d been hoping for. Maybe it wasn’t as relaxed or as happy as she deserved to feel, but I could keep working on that.
I’d closed my little gallery space for the morning. I unlocked the door and motioned Rose in with a little bow. Her lips parted as she ventured inside, taking in the same mingled smells of oils and acrylics, glue and gesso, that I was. Our feet clattered loud against the floor in the quiet.
“Wow,” Rose said, turning around. “These aren’t all yours.”
A couple dozen paintings and mixed media pieces scattered the white walls. Five sculptures posed on display stands spaced around the room. I’d wanted to capture the feeling of all those great modern art galleries I’d gotten to visit over the years around the world, squeezed into miniature form.
“Only about a quarter of the pieces are mine,” I agreed. “I take works on consignment from local artists across the state. The place doesn’t get a lot of visitors, but I’ve made it into a few guide books, so we get some tourists stopping by. And people from around here come by more often than you might think.”
I didn’t sell enough to fully justify the space, but my dad covered half the costs, and I had no problem taking advantage of that generosity. It was his way of apologizing for not being around half the time.
“This is yours,” Rose said, pointing to a red-tinged piece with an arching bridge.
The corner of my mouth twitched up. She could recognize me in my work already, huh? “There’s a lot of Paris in that one,” I said.
“And this?” She motioned to a jumbled city street streaked with blue.
“Berlin.”
She raised her eyebrows at me. “You’ve gotten around a lot.”
I grinned back. “My dad thought it’d be good for me to take some time after high school, broaden my horizons. And the band he was substituting bass for was on a world-wide tour. I got to tag along for some pretty wild adventures. Lots of material to draw from.”
Rose wandered deeper into the room and paused by another work of mine. Fragments of glass pressed into the blues and greens gleamed under the overhead lights. She stared at it for a moment and then looked at me.
“This is the stream on my estate.”
I nodded. She swiveled on her heel, scanning the room, and found the other one in just a few seconds. A stone wall draped with vines, lit with the shifting colors of a clouded sunrise. Those were just the two I had out on display.
“I still get a lot of inspiration from those times, too,” I said. “There was… something really special about that time, wasn’t there? The way we all bounced off each other but somehow kept a perfect harmony.” For six years the six of us had roamed Rose’s property together, and I couldn’t remember a single fight that had lasted beyond one visit.
“Yeah,” Rose said softly. “I miss that.”
The words hit me with a punch of emotion so sudden I didn’t even think before saying, “Me too.”
Maybe that was true. But like I’d said to her before, there was no point in dwelling on what was gone. What I wanted was a Rose as bright and lively as she’d been back then. How could she think she was bound to whatever jerk her family had set her up with?
I stepped closer to her and gave a strand of her hair a playful tug. “I’d like to paint you sometime, you know. Not that I have much hope of doing you justice.”
She laughed. “I don’t think I’m quite that stunning.”
“Ah, that’s just because you haven’t seen yourself through someone else’s eyes. The line of your cheek… The angle of your jaw…” I traced a finger down her face. “It’s calling to be put to canvas, I’m telling you.”
A hint of a glow came into her face then. It took all my self-control not to keep trailing my hand downward to take in the other curves of her body. She was taken, and I could respect that.
But maybe I’d already overstepped a boundary. Rose blinked, and the glow faded. She backed up a step, looking around the gallery one more time.
“It’s gorgeous,” she said, with more distance in her voice than had been there before. “I’ll have to come back when I’ve got more time to take it in. Today I’ve been away long enough as it is. But thank you for showing me.”
I got a flash of a smile and then she was slipping out the door. As I watched it swinging shut, a strange ache welled up in my chest. As if I’d just lost something I couldn’t live without.
That was ridiculous. The only thing I needed was my art. Nothing good came from tying your happiness to any person other than yourself. I wanted to enjoy Rose’s company and for her to enjoy mine. I wasn’t looking for more than that—not from anyone.
But as I headed up to my apartment over the gallery, the uneasy ache remained.
Chapter Eleven
Rose
My goodness,” Philomena said, strolling past the bookcases. “I don’t recall facing an interrogation when I intended to get married. Which, I’ll remind you, has happened at least half a dozen times.”
“This isn’t my idea,” I told her silently. To the high witching figures across the library table from me, I gave only my most polite smile. The scrutiny of the pair who’d come to conduct my and Derek’s pre-consorting interviews made my skin itch, but the comforting smell of books all around me eased my nerves a little.
The woman of the pair tapped the end of her pen against the table. “Rosalind Hallowell, do you confirm your intention to take Derek Conwyn as your consort and husband, bringing him into your family and giving him your name?”
“Absolutely,” I said, hoping my smile hadn’t just gotten too tight. It wasn’t as if they could tell I’d just been kissing another guy four days ago… or that I’d wanted to kiss a totally different guy yesterday. I could keep all that guilt and all my doubts squashed down. I had to.
The man nodded with an expression that seemed inappropriately grave. “I see from your father’s records that you’ve received extensive tutoring in the forms and sy
mbols of magical practice. Do you feel prepared to take on the power of your spark? Any concerns you’d like to discuss?”
“More than ready,” I said. I probably would have felt ready with half the training Dad had insisted on. “I have no concerns at all.” Well, other than the fact that my spark had seemed to react to a guy with no magical heritage at all the other day.
But the more distance I got from that moment with Kyler, the more sure I was that I’d been wrong. The excitement of my first real kiss had simply felt like what I imagined the lighting of my spark might.
It wasn’t as if I could ask these two for their opinion on the subject anyway.
“And what career path do you see for yourself once you’re fully settled into witching life?” the woman asked.
That was an easier topic. “I’ve already been helping commit to computer and organize the records of the official Archive,” I said. “My supervisor there has said they’d be happy to take me on in a role of more responsibility once I can bring my magic to bear. And I’ve been working on a private project, compiling a history of modern witching.”
This time, both of my questioners nodded. “There may be work for you along that line to serve the Assembly more directly,” the man said. “It would be a shame to see the power you can expect to wield put only to our history rather than our present and future.”
A tingle raced through me at his words. The power you can expect to wield. I knew that was why Dad insisted on the training. The Hallowell blood—which had run from his grandmother and his mother into him, his mother’s only child, before he’d passed it on to me—was strong with the spark. But hearing a member of the Witching Assembly, the governing body over all those of witching descent, made it feel even more certain.
“I’ll be interested in hearing about the possibilities,” I said. “I think it’s important to have clear records of both our past and what’s happening now.”