Hexed and Vexed

by Rebecca Royce

  Lila Blakely was a formidable woman. If she’d chosen a different path in life, she could have had his job. Oh, who was he kidding? She’d have his boss’s boss’s job. But she hadn’t gone after a career. She’d married Emilio Blakely and helped him create a dynasty. Not an easy feat considering one of her daughter’s—his wife who he would die or kill for—had serious problems when it came to the witching world.

  “How bad is it?” She didn’t turn to look at him, keeping her eyes on the distant trees. “You can’t undo the wedding. It’s not heard of. Your father managed to have a life outside of your mother. Perhaps you could do the same. You can bring her back here. I’ll care for her. We can just act like…”

  He concentrated on a potted plant, cracking it in half right in the middle of where she held her gaze. She gasped. Yes, that was right, he could be violent if he wanted to be. His powers allowed it. He wouldn’t be—but she needed to understand how serious what she’d just said to him was.

  “My father was a very bad man. He destroyed my mother and me. I am what I rebuilt from that mess. I love Ava. She is in my soul. I will never, ever stray from her love or her heart. Whatever happens, she’ll stay with me.” Right at that moment, he wasn’t certain if she should ever set foot within these walls again. He sat down on the chair next to her. “Start talking.”

  Her chin quivered, and it took his mother-in-law a minute to find her voice. He gave it to her. “A week after I married Emilio, my mother-in-law took me aside. She needed to warn me about something. There was a remote and hardly ever seen, but still real, possibility that the women born into the Blakely family would suffer from a serious problem with their powers. A long time ago, it wasn’t so unusual for witches to feel a connection to the earth around them. To feel they could speak to the earth itself. We don’t think of such things now. Powers change, life evolves. What Ava has, what her great aunt had, and countless women had before her in this family, is that. Ava can hear the earth. She’s not lying when she says she can… speak to it.”

  She wasn’t speaking to it. Not yet. It was shouting at her. “Go on.”

  “The women who suffer from this, they don’t last long. Emilio’s mother hoped it was long gone. Most of the witches who suffer don’t go on to have babies. They die when their powers turn on. It’s maddening. It cannot be controlled, and they either expire or they are locked away.”

  Lawson was starting to understand. “You couldn’t have a Blakely locked away. What would that do to your family name that was starting to be so sought after?”

  She rounded on him, pointing her finger at him. “Whatever you think of me, understand something very clearly. I love my girls with no bounds. There is nothing I would not do for them. If locking her away would have saved her, then I would have done that and visited every day. Who cares what others think. I didn’t do that because my mother-in-law had another suggestion. When Ava was eight she started to show symptoms.”

  “Does she know this?” He had no reason to think she did, but maybe he was wrong.

  Lila shook her head. “No, she doesn’t remember. She started to say things about hearing the birds speak to her. At first, I thought it was just nothing. Then it was clear it wasn’t. She heard the bird die outside. It called to her. She screamed all night.”

  That must have been a nightmare. He wouldn’t let his heart become unhardened right then. Not until he knew it all.

  “Lila, what did you do?”

  Chapter 17

  Ava

  She didn’t know how long she stood and watched before Lawson became aware she was there. Ava had fallen asleep, glad for the oblivion, but the earth had called to her. Told her to wake, that she needed to hear, and she’d followed directions.

  Her husband turned to meet her gaze, and her mother cried out in realization. Ava found her voice. “He asked you something, Mom. Answer. What did you do?”

  “The cookies.”

  Lawson’s eyebrows shot up on his face. “You cursed your daughter?”

  A silent sob wracked her mother’s body. She took that as a yes to Lawson’s question. Ava’s husband got to his feet. “The cookie. The one that is specially made for Ava. You have been cursing her for seventeen years?”

  Lila jumped to her feet, pointing her finger at Lawson. “I will do whatever I have to do however I have to do it to protect my family. She still had a life, a good one. She owned her own store before breaking up with you caused some kind of nervous event and she sold everything she worked for away. Thank you for that, by the way.”

  Her husband shook his head. “Lila, you really don’t want to go there right now. What happened between Ava and me is between Ava and me. Trust me when I say your daughter knows her own mind. She didn’t sell that store because of me.”

  He was right but that was beside the point because all Ava could hear was the plant on the ground crying for help. Why was it on the ground? Why had it broken? What was happening?

  Ava. Help me.

  She covered her ears. How was she supposed to do all of this? She couldn’t follow what her mother and Lawson were shouting at each other if the plant needed her and she didn’t know what to do.

  Suddenly, Lawson was at her side. “Hey, tiny, what’s wrong?”

  “The plant.” She didn’t know how else to explain it. “It’s hurting. Something threw it over. I don’t know.”

  He winced, and a second later the plant was upright, potted, and back where it had been. She could take a deep breath.

  “Sorry.”

  Ava stared at him. “You did that to the plant?”

  “I did. I… sorry.” He scrunched up his nose.

  She pointed at the plant. “Well, don’t apologize to me. Apologize to the plant.”

  “For real?”

  Her mother let out a sound that was somewhere between a groan and a laugh. “Do you see? You can’t possibly function like this. I mean it. She had a life and before she had you, before that interloper hexed him, she had Mitchell Sharpe. Ava could have gone her whole life without ever having to experience this.”

  “At some point, she was going to be away from you for more than a week.” Lawson had his arm around her, and she leaned into him. The wind was talking. Something was wrong at the house next door. They were going to give themselves food poisoning if they didn’t pay attention to the meat going bad.

  Lila shook her head. “I was going to explain it to Mitchell. He would have seen to it that she got the dosing when I couldn’t give it to her. You? I didn’t even bother. You’d never have done it.”

  Next to her, Lawson went very still. “You’re right. I wouldn’t have taken away Ava’s powers without her permission. That’s called cursing—most of the time it’s done to a place and you did it to your daughter—and it’s illegal. I kill witches who do it on a larger scale and I put them away when they do what you did.” He was quiet for a second. “And that’s why you didn’t want her with me. Not because my father was a notorious philanderer and not because I’m beneath the great Blakelys but because you knew that the more time she spent with me, the more likely you were to be caught.”

  Well, there it was. Lila had the good sense to turn pale. Ava didn’t even know what to say. How was she supposed to handle all of this?

  Lila sighed. “Come with me, my love. I always have the cookies. This can all end immediately.”

  Ava shook her head. “I don’t want that, Mom. I don’t want to go back to just… nothing.”

  Her mother seemed not to hear her. “You were doing fine before, you’ll do fine again.”

  “I was not doing fine.” The windows that faced the patio shattered. Ava gasped. She’d never done anything like that before. Lawson had gone very still again. She’d come to realize it was when he considered things, when he needed to concentrate so even breathing seemed to get in his way. “I won’t go back to… nothingness. Knowing there was something wrong with me. Living like that.” Her voice shook, and she didn’t even try to stop it. “Yo
u can’t drug this away. If I’m broken, then so be it. Imagine if you could never feel Dad’s love for you inside. I can, now. I won’t go back to losing Lawson like that.”

  He stroked a finger down the side of her face. “You’d never lose me. That doesn’t change.”

  She put her hand over his heart. “Imagine if you couldn’t feel me? What if you didn’t know all the time how I loved you? What would you be missing? And besides that, I got concussed like a human. The Healers couldn’t help me.”

  That seemed to do the trick. The two people in front of her went quiet. Lawson looked away, a muscle ticking in his jaw. He’d moved from stillness to anger. She had no idea how much of it he was going to address directly at her for refusing her cookie. Instead, he shook his head. “Who else have you cursed, Lila?”

  “Lawson.” Ava had no idea how she was going to process any of this, but they didn’t have to go around being ridiculous. “My mother isn’t a serial curser.”

  He ignored her. “Lila? Your husband. What’s in the whiskey?”

  Ava quit breathing and waited for her mother to deny it, to say anything to indicate that he was so completely off base he couldn’t even see home plate from where he stood, but she didn’t. Instead, she looked down at the floor.

  “It’s not the same thing. The Healers say that it’s an unstoppable illness, it has turned into what the humans would think of as dementia. I’m just holding off the decline. Eventually, we won’t be able to stop it.”

  The world did go silent for a long moment. “Mom? Dad is sick?”

  Lila rubbed her eyes. “They’ll have to take the powers away altogether. You know what happens to witches when that happens. He’ll have to be institutionalized.”

  Because they lost control of their power…

  Ava swallowed. “The tsunami.” Her father was a weather witch, a powerful one. She looked at Lawson. “You knew? Even before now, you knew.”

  “There are maybe half a dozen witches in the world who could generate a tsunami over land and send it crashing into our city. It’s possible a witch is unregistered but, for the sake of time, we assumed we might know who could have made the wave. In this city, that’s your father. He hasn’t weather manipulated, at least not publicly, for a long time. The change in the weather? We started to wonder if maybe it was happening without the practitioner knowing it. Your father doesn’t come out in public anymore, except for occasional visits to Congress, but he doesn’t really participate.” He shook his head. “I came to believe it was likely your father.”

  Lila moaned. “You brought an Enforcer right into our home.”

  “Mom, that wave almost killed me because you’ve been cursing me. If humans had been there, they’d have been dead. The point is not that Lawson is in our lives or that he suspected Dad, it’s that you have been covering things up for years and years. How much more, Mom?”

  Lila sat down. “I will not apologize for protecting all of you.”

  No, of course she wouldn’t. She touched Lawson’s arm. “You knew. But you never said anything?”

  “No one was ever going to come here to arrest him, Ava. It would have been handled, differently.”

  She didn’t know what it meant exactly, but at least, he’d made an exception she doubted he’d do too often or even should have done this time. The wind was screaming, the lights too bright, and she’d had about as much as she could handle right at that moment.

  “Lawson?”

  He nodded. “Okay, tiny. We’ll go.” Lawson linked their fingers, and then they were gone, back home. She closed her eyes.

  After they arrived in the house, he didn’t try to move her and that was good because she needed to stay very still. Finally, she opened her eyes to look at him. “A million secrets.”

  “Well, two big ones that we know of.” He glanced down at his feet. “Your father would not have gone to jail. He won’t now. It has to be handled. It will be. I… Maybe there shouldn’t be, but there is always leeway to friends and family. That’s how the world works. I’ve never asked for any. My father-in-law being taken care of privately is not that big a problem.”

  She dropped his hand. “That’s actually amazing of you.” Ava sucked in a long breath. Could she hear the moon? Did it buzz? Whatever the Healers had done to her was wearing off. “Thank you.”

  He shook his head before he yanked her to him. “Don’t thank me. Don’t you ever thank me. I love you.”

  She could feel his love for her, right pressed against her own heart. The gift of magic. The way that witches got to experience love that humans never would. “How will I ever go back to not having it again? I don’t think I can.”

  “Nothing about how I love you will ever change. What you can feel, that’s real, whether you dull the spell or not.”

  She knelt down on the floor. “I don’t feel right, that’s the truth. I can’t continue like this.”

  He sat down in front of her. “This just happened. It hasn’t been twenty-four hours. The brain has a way of adapting. Maybe if we give it a few days, you’ll adjust. You were meant to have these powers.”

  “You heard my mom.” She winced. The milk again. They had to get it out of the fridge, thrown out where it would be absorbed and oh, she could practically feel the absorption. “This kills people or makes them mad.”

  Lawson didn’t speak for a moment. “Well, so says your mom and your grandmother. I think there have to be better experts.”

  Ava wiped her cheeks. “Sure, I’ve met one. He’s taking care of Elmer at Prestige. They don’t know what to do about him except to keep him there for the rest of his life.” She shuddered at the idea. “I suppose not having any powers is a preference to that.”

  Her husband touched her cheek, his hands were gentle even as they were also strong. “You’re a potion master. Gary always said you were the very best. I’d come to see him. Kim and I were working on a case. He consulted with us, worked with us. You were there.”

  She stared at him. “I don’t remember that.”

  “Oh, no, you never saw us. You wouldn’t have. I saw you, though.” He smiled. “You were laughing at something Gary said and then you left. It was like… the world had color again. I mean, we didn’t exactly speak in high school. We weren’t hanging out, but you were there. You said hi when we crossed in the hall; you were kind. It was like you glowed. You still do. You’re mine. Whatever happens, we do it together.”

  She blinked away the tears. Although she couldn’t imagine a life without him now, that hadn’t always been the case. She’d hardly known him at all. “I’m glad to be yours. I’m so grateful that you’re mine. But Lawson…”

  “No buts. I don’t want to hear the end of that sentence.”

  Well, that was too damned bad. “Sometimes we have to hear things we don’t want to hear. How far do we take this? I become a raving lunatic that can’t be in public. Where do we go? Some cabin in the middle of nowhere? I can walk around all day talking to myself, ranting. And you can what? Live a miserable life, cursing yourself that you ever came and got me to help with some hex.”

  He pointed at her. “You were mine before I ever did that. I was looking for a reason. Gary was dead. We needed the hex removed. I could have gone a million ways, but I went to you. I’m not an idiot. I knew what I was doing. The second Mitchell didn’t show up at your wedding, I’d been trying to figure out how to re-meet you. I took a shot.”

  “That doesn’t change my scenario.” She rubbed her eyes. “I can hear the milk rotting in the fridge. We have to throw it out. And then it’ll be absorbed.” She pointed at the goosebumps on her skin. “It hurts me to think about it.”

  “Ava, let’s see what happens. A couple of days.”

  He was exhausted. Just that morning they’d been lying in the sun on their honeymoon. He’d been more rested than she’d ever seen him. They’d made love for hours the night before, his body bathed in moonlight.

  Her lips trembled. It was hard to speak. “If you promise me
you won’t destroy everything you worked for, all these years, to take care of me. Put me in Prestige. Or somewhere you like better, somewhere they’ll be kind to me. And find someone with your vast resources to do a spell so you can move on.”

  He pounded on the floor. “Ava, I am not my father. There is no moving on. I am for you. The world revolves because you are on it.”

  “Do you think that’s any different for me?” She closed her eyes. “I’ll take the cookie. Okay? I’ll go back to that life. I won’t have you ruined.”

  “You didn’t listen to me. What was the first thing I said? You’re a potion master. Fix this. Your mother made cookies. I think you can do better, right? There has to be a middle ground between too much and nothing.”

  She stared at him. “Are you suggesting I curse myself?”

  “I’m suggesting that you are currently not working. You have the skills of the greatest potion master I’ve ever known. Do it. Fix it. Fix yourself.”

  Now, that was a thought.

  * * *

  Lawson hadn’t moved in hours. He was deeply asleep, his hold on her light. She’d pretended to go to bed so he would. Ava didn’t try to sneak away from Lawson. He woke instantly when she moved. Instead, she kissed his arm gently. “I’ll be right back.”

  He rolled over, holding onto his pillow, but didn’t wake. She walked down the hallway. There were four bedrooms in his house. She hoped one day they’d be bedrooms for children, but that would be a long time in the future. Somehow, she had to get herself under control and then figure out how she could never pass this on.

  That hadn’t changed. Her future children had always concerned her. Only now it was that they’d have this power instead of none at all.

  She had boxes of supplies. The bedroom furthest from her own would have to do as her workshop. Her mother made cookies. It was a terrible delivery method for distributing the dosage. Ava could do better.

  Elmer had told her the earth told him how to save her. Well, maybe the earth could tell her how to save herself.