“He wanted the seizures. For the visions. He used the visions.” Her voice sounded small and defeated. She hunched in on herself and it took all Kyle’s self-control not to fling himself at Deck and start beating him up for terrifying her.
Frankly, what stopped him was less self-control and more common sense. Deck was not only bigger and stronger than he was, but a witch whose magic did freaky things when he got emotional—and he was already emotional. Not to mention it would upset Meaghan even more if they started fighting.
“Who did this to you? I’ll kill him.” Now Kyle definitely saw the Viking ancestors in Deck. And Donovans might be pacifists in this place and time, but he was willing to bet that hadn’t always been the case. Irish history wasn’t exactly sweetness and light, and Donovans had been part of Irish history, so they claimed, pretty much forever. Even if they couldn’t kill with magic, ancestral Donovans undoubtedly bashed a few skulls and Deck looked ready to follow in their footsteps.
Which made perfect sense. His own ancestors were aquatic mammals dangerous only to fish and abalone, and he still wanted to get all medieval warrior on someone’s ass.
He put a hand on Deck’s arm, the same arm Deck had on Meaghan. “Make you a deal. You hold the bastard down and I’ll kill him, since I’m the carnivore in this relationship. Then we feed him to sharks.”
“Too late.” Meaghan had struggled to her knees on the bed, brushing them aside. “He’s already dead.”
“Shaw?” The word came out of Deck’s mouth as a howl of fury.
Meaghan twitched her head, so small it might have been an involuntary movement. But Kyle was sure it wasn’t.
And so was Deck, apparently. Lightning crackled in the room. A lamp blew out, sparking, though fortunately nothing else caught fire. The computer smoked. Outside, a massive storm hit, thunder and lightning and pounding, violent surf.
“Get ahold of yourself!” Meaghan exclaimed. “You’re going to hurt someone.”
The atmospheric violence continued unabated, along with Deck’s rage. “I want to go into hell and kill him again.”
“You don’t believe in hell any more than I do,” Kyle ventured. It wasn’t a time to make a joke, but his otterside was going crazy, chittering in his skull, baring his teeth, flashing images of holding something underwater until it stopped struggling. Only the person he wanted to kill was already dead.
And he was left in the weird position of trying to be the voice of reason between two witches when all he wanted to do was rip something to pieces with teeth he didn’t have in this form.
Meaghan turned to Kyle, her unseeing eyes frantic. “I’m sorry!” she repeated. “I didn’t want you guys to know. I knew you’d hate me for it. I’m sorry.” She began to cry again, and this time it was the kind of tears that hurt to see. The storm increased in violence, rain joining the lightning and surf.
“Shaw used you,” Kyle said, tasting bile and anger with each careful word. “He hurt you. We’re not angry with you, not at all. We’re just sorry someone else killed the bastard before we had a chance.”
Deck must have heard him, because lightning seared, with a boom immediately on its heels, and the electricity shut down. Meaghan grabbed Kyle’s arm. “Do something! He’s going to hurt someone. Or maybe he and I are, because we both lost control. That storm’s not just here, it’s all up and down the coast. But I’m trying to pull it in and he’s not.”
Kyle weighed his options. He didn’t have a lot. But he could sense the magnitude of the storm, the vast waves coming out of nowhere. Trickster, give me an idea. A good idea. Things are going to shit here and I don’t have any magic to counter them.
He didn’t like the idea he got. But it would work. And, Powers, it would release some of the rage that was surging in him.
“You figure out what’s going on with the ocean, see if you can calm it. It’s centered about a mile offshore. I’ll try to get Deck under control.”
Which he did by punching his lover in the jaw as hard as he could.
Kyle hit hard. Harder than Deck would have expected. Hard enough to jar him and make the room spin blearily. Hard enough that for a split second his focus went from fury at a dead man to pain, disorientation and a desire to do something truly vile to Kyle when his eyes focused again.
And in that split second, Deck felt the force of the storm.
So much enraged energy. His power fed on it, and he’d been so lost in anger he’d let it. His earth sense picked up tiny tremors, nothing you’d be able to feel without earth magic or sensitive instruments, but his earth magic told him they wanted to build up to something bigger—and his unbridled rage, pumped by all the red magic the three of them had generated, was feeding them.
Deck yanked in all his magical energy and threw up his shields so hard he half expected an audible clank. It didn’t stop what was already in motion, but at least he wasn’t feeding the self-perpetuating cycle anymore. In the sudden quiet, he forced himself to close his eyes, breathe deeply and recenter.
He couldn’t kill a dead man. But he might kill other people if he didn’t shut down the storm his anger had started.
He opened his senses gingerly, reached out to see how bad things had gotten when he was out of control.
Bad, but not deadly yet, as long as there were no small boats caught in it.
The earth was calm again, now that the minor fault near the house was no longer irritated by his magic. He said a few words in Gaelic under his breath, a simple soothing spell that saw a lot of use among the Donovan earth magicians. Right on top of a small fault and near the much larger Cascadia fault, the earth witches learned to play safe at an early age. Sometimes, though, a working had unintended consequences, especially if the caster was inexperienced or pushing limits—or, as he just proved, shunting power around instinctively in the grip of strong emotion.
He still felt the energy of a lightning storm outside, but diminished now, fading away as such storms naturally tended to do as they expended their energy. Deck had never figured out a formal way to deal with his lightning magic, but he’d figured out a few kluges, including the one he called upon now: roughly and rapidly yanking the energy away from the storm and shunting it somewhere else.
Most went to Donovan’s Cove’s defenses, because excellent as they were, you could never be too careful. He sent some to the vegetable garden, even though the family’s green witches had it well in hand. Some went to his personal shields, which were obviously still leaky after he’d let them down to observe Meaghan better.
He gave the last bit to Meaghan.
As he did, he felt her magic reaching out to the ocean. She was finding the patterns of disturbance and disrupting them.
And it was working. Not as efficiently as a more experienced witch’s effort, but it was working. Surprised, though pleasantly so, he opened his eyes.
Meaghan had scrambled off the bed and was standing near the open window. She was leaning on Kyle, who occasionally whispered in her ear. Maybe that was the secret. Kyle had a lifetime of experience sensing the water. He couldn’t use that knowledge the way a water witch would—it had more practical applications, since otter duals spent most of their animalside time in the water—but he could pass on what he knew to Meaghan.
Amazing. Once things settled down, he’d pick their brains and find out how they did it, if they could even explain it. But at the moment he had more important things to do.
He closed his eyes again, refocused and began to chant in a combination of English and Gaelic, weaving his energies with the water and with Meaghan’s, working to dissipate the waves before they did more harm to ship or shore.
At first, it was just the two of them working, with Kyle supporting. Meaghan’s magic was erratic, as he’d expect from a beginner, and she didn’t seem to know she could pull energy from the disrupted ocean or from the red magic that still zinged ungrounded around the room to power he
r work. Of course she wouldn’t know that. She had to be winging this because she’d had only one formal lesson so far. He moved closer to her and put one hand on her bare back and one on Kyle’s.
He couldn’t remember the last time he felt less sexy, but connecting with their skin, their energy, called up a surge of red magic anyway. Power shivered through him, unlike anything he’d experienced before, a complex union of his magic and Meaghan’s, with Kyle’s fluid strength bolstering it.
Meaghan was using her water magic in a way he’d never seen before, almost as if…
No, not almost as if. She didn’t read only the current state of the ocean, but saw ahead, weaving her seer’s precognitive magic with the water power.
Her visions lacerated her, hurt her physically—yet she was invoking minivisions to help dissipate the storm.
There was so much Deck wanted to say, but he pushed it aside for the moment, focusing on following the waves and crosscurrents of Meaghan’s magic and repairing what it pointed out. Before long, he started to sense other witches in the working as well: Heather, Gilbert, who wasn’t a water witch but excelled at harnessing storm energy, Aunt Bath channeling some dead ancestor’s knowledge. He even felt Portia, though she was heavily shielded and working on her own, not weaving into the group work so she didn’t accidentally get entangled with Meaghan.
The sense of impending doom faded. The crashing surf diminished to its normal music, stronger than usual, but no longer a major storm. Reaching out his energy, Deck sensed the danger had passed.
As he did, Meaghan spoke. “The sea’s not angry anymore. I’ve seen ahead to tomorrow and the next day, and there won’t be big problems because we accidentally screwed up the weather.”
Her words confirmed what he already suspected. “You’re not just predicting what will probably happen based on what the ocean is doing now, like Kyle and I can,” he said in awe. “You’re using visions. Controlled visions, not ones that come out of nowhere and hurt you.”
Meaghan turned toward his voice, and once again he was struck by how focused her blind eyes seemed. She nodded, her face pale and drawn from the energy she’d expended. “Is that all right? I’m not doing something wrong, am I?”
“Of course not! It’s genius for someone with your powers. I’m impressed you were able to get that kind of control, and frankly I’m surprised you dared to try. Visions suck, from what I understand, and yours usually hurt you.”
She shrugged and seemed to struggle for words. After a long time silent except for mumbled ums, she said, “I was so scared there’d be damage or someone would drown because we both freaked out that I forgot to be afraid of the visions. I wasn’t sure it would even work to try to see something specific in the very near future, but I could. And it didn’t hurt.”
Deck tried to come up with something wise to say. Kyle, to his surprise, got there first. “Maybe it didn’t hurt because there were no people in the vision, just water and waveforms and wind. No emotions.”
“Nothing that we can harm, and if it harms us, it’s not out of malice.” Meaghan smiled and the smile made Deck shudder. It reminded him of Elissa’s face when she talked about Shaw. “No one I can betray.”
The eerie smile faded as suddenly as it appeared. Meaghan’s body sagged, and it looked like she was fighting off tears of exhaustion. Deck put his arms around her and she snuggled into his chest. Kyle wrapped his arms around her from the other side and Deck expanded his embrace to include the otter dual as well, as best he could.
“Ground,” he reminded Meaghan, partly because he’d almost forgotten himself. She nodded against his chest and he sensed her energy moving, some of the magic grounding out to earth and ocean. It was quiet except for their breath and the sound of the waves in the distance, a soft shushing now after the earlier crash and boom.
Deck’s lack of control had kicked in what promised to be a major coastal storm—and Meaghan and Kyle had helped him get his control back and dissipate the storm before it became one for the history books. Part of Deck felt shattered by what he’d done, by how close he’d come to a real disaster.
But part of him felt more whole than he ever had. Sure, his family had jumped in to solve the problem—it was what Donovans did—but once they figured out what happened, he was sure he’d be hearing about his screwup for years because that was also what Donovans did. Meaghan and Kyle wouldn’t do that.
And while they’d finished their work, his magic still twined with Meaghan’s, Kyle’s strong dual energy buoyed them both up, helping them recharge after expending so much power. Deck’s skin tingled everywhere he touched Meaghan or Kyle. It wasn’t sexual, not after what they’d just been through, but it was sensual on a profound level, sensual and exciting, like surfing on a warm, beautiful day when the water and air were both caresses. Like Meaghan’s energy and Kyle’s having a party on his skin.
Having a party.
Dancing.
And when he looked with his witch sight, slender silver cords connected him to both Meaghan and Kyle. Similar cords connected them to each other.
“Powers!” he exclaimed, fracturing the quiet.
“What?” Meaghan looked up. She looked mildly concerned, but her voice was mellow, as if she knew on an instinctive level what was happening.
Which she might, on some level, considering her powers and what he was about to say.
“My magic is dancing.” He repeated it louder, “My magic is fucking dancing on my skin. You two…you’re making my magic dance.”
Over Meaghan’s head, Kyle raised one eyebrow. “That’s good, right? It sounds fun in an ‘it tickles but I like it’ way, but you don’t seem one hundred percent happy about it.”
“It’s good. It’s great. It’s…complicated. But not like the Facebook status, because that usually means ‘messed up’ and this isn’t. It’s literally complicated.” He made himself smile, though he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to grin like an idiot, weep or both.
“Why is it complicated?” Meaghan asked. “It seems simple enough. I love touching you guys and being touched by you and I think my magic is happy about it too. So it’s making my skin supersensitive and tingly. Has been for a while now. In fact, every time I kiss or touch the two of you at the same time I feel like I’m taking a bath in champagne.”
Meaghan was feeling it too, which was simultaneously oh wow and oh hell. It wasn’t some unusual magical side effect that had nothing to do with Meaghan and Kyle and the relationship developing between them.
Oh wow and oh hell because having a committed relationship with one person was hard enough and it looked like destiny and his magic wanted him to have a committed relationship with two people.
Oh wow and oh hell because the Donovans had a long tradition of monogamy, all tangled up in complex, and often valid, magical justifications. Deck enjoyed thumbing his nose at the more staid family traditions but he really didn’t want that level of angst with his parents, who hadn’t quite forgiven Elissa and Paul for winding up with two partners each.
Oh wow and oh hell because he couldn’t imagine two more wonderful people than Kyle and Meaghan to share the rest of his life—but Meaghan might not be there to share it for long unless his relatives could pull some magic out of the ether to cure her.
He realized he’d stayed quiet for far too long when Kyle slipped out of the group hug, circled around and smacked him on the back of the head. “Hey, asshole, you’re freaking Meaghan out. You’re freaking me out and that takes work. What’s going on?”
Deck reluctantly relinquished Meaghan. “I can explain…sort of…but we should probably put our clothes on. It’s easier to talk about clothes-off stuff with your clothes on. Less distracting. And this will definitely involve talking about clothes-off stuff.”
They ended up in the living room, Deck and Kyle perched at opposite ends of the couch, Meaghan curled up on the big, broken-down
easy chair. Deck wanted them all on the sofa, or maybe sprawled on pillows on the floor in a big, loving pile, but he wasn’t sure it was a good idea to touch them, not with red magic so potent in the air and on his skin.
Meaghan was wearing Kyle’s shirt, since her own clothes were still sodden, and a pair of Deck’s sweats. She looked like a kid playing dress-up in oversized men’s clothes, and she still looked distractingly good, her hair in tangled ringlets around her narrow face. Kyle was shirtless and barefoot, and that was even more distracting.
But Deck soldiered on and explained about dancing magic and what it meant for witches: how it meant you’d found your ideal magical partner as well as a good shot at the right life partner. “I was disappointed when it didn’t dance for you,” he conceded, looking at Kyle. “Once I decided I was ready to give you what you wanted, I hoped that my magic would chime in and say you were the one. But I guess it didn’t because you’re one of the two. Also it usually happens for the first time during sex and for us it happened after pulling off big magic. That makes more sense in some ways, but it’s not how it usually happens. Maybe it worked that way because sex has always been pretty straightforward for me and magic isn’t, so it was the bigger deal.”
He held his breath, waiting for a reaction. Kyle wasn’t a witch. He might take it badly that the magic hadn’t accepted him right away. Instead, he asked a smart question. “What do you mean about a ‘good shot at the right life partner’?”
“The old farts won’t admit it, but you can have a good romantic match without the magic connecting. My aunt Bathsheba and her husband are a great couple but their magic doesn’t sync, so they’ve never married by Donovan rite. So the fact the magic thing didn’t spark with you didn’t mean we couldn’t have something good. It just wasn’t guaranteed.”
“And since it wasn’t guaranteed you were scared shitless of screwing up and hurting us both, and then of hurting the three of us.” Amazingly, Kyle’s voice held only a hint of annoyance and far more compassion. After he said it, he leaned over and kissed Deck’s lips, a fleeting, gentle contact that set the magic dancing again. He then took three steps, did the same to Meaghan and settled on the floor between the two of them, one hand on Deck’s calf, one on Meaghan’s.
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