by Kayti McGee
“Summerland,” Rose whispered, entranced.
“Yes. Marion painted it for me. Uncanny, isn’t it?”
She nodded slowly, never taking her eyes off the scene. I grazed my thumb over the top of her hand.
“Close your eyes,” I said. “You’ll still be able to see it.”
She closed her eyes and inhaled. The atmosphere changed around us, from that of a still room to a balmy afternoon. Wind rushed through summer foliage. The smell of grass and sunlight rose from the earth. I squeezed Rose’s hand and smiled.
“Now open your eyes,” I said. “Here, you can lose control of your magic all you want.”
Sixteen
Rose
Losing control with Thorn was quickly becoming my favorite vice. So when he told me to open my eyes, it took a moment before I looked away from his.
Once I did, I was in a world of magic. Literally. Each leaf on every tree was a brushstroke, yet as real as the man standing in front of me. I opened my mouth, but I didn’t even know what I was asking.
“It’s a pocket universe. Out of time, out of space. Not Summerland, but not of our world either. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
My mouth still wanted to make little high pitched noises instead of real words so I just nodded. The painted objects were becoming more real, until the last of the art became indistinguishable from reality. I could smell his saffron and woods, the leaves underfoot, the rich soil that they were rapidly decaying into. Each leaf budded, grew, changed, fell, and rotted in the span of a moment, all at barely different times, a constant dance of birth and death. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
Aside from the man who’d shown it to me.
Which brought up a very real question—was what I felt for him entirely real? He’d told me that my bathtub experiment had been a binding. And he was, of course, my Hogwarts letter. My entree to the proverbial new world; the Virgil to my Dante.
It wasn’t what I wanted to be spending this moment thinking about, but the weight on my shoulders was becoming burdensome. There was the lack of my own knowledge, except of course for the certainty that I was cannon fodder for the coven of Juniper Hollow. And the certainty that I’d lead this man to his own end. So if there was a single chance that I could unbind him, that we could be friends…? Nothing about friendship seemed to signal doom in my heart.
Of course, nothing in my pants said I wanted to remain friends with a man who could do what he did, either. I meant what I said earlier about belonging. The feelings he sparked in me had grown stronger after the spell, but they had started before. I didn’t want to set them aside, not just yet.
Besides, binding or not, I was genuinely fascinated with this green-eyed demon who kissed like an angel and laughed with the delight of a child when he watched me fumble through his world like it was as dark as the town itself.
All these thoughts ran through my head in the span of two life-cycles of the forest, as he gazed at me gazing around.
I didn’t think it was possible, hadn’t come across it in my reading, but still was nervous that he’d somehow read my thoughts. I felt guilty questioning my feelings, questioning his, but he was the one who’d planted that seed. The only thing we could both agree on, certainly, was that I needed to learn more if either of us had any chance of making it out of this alive. Regardless of the state of our hearts.
As though he had read my mind, Thorn sank to the ground and gestured for me to follow, though his grace wasn’t exactly reflected in my plop.
“Casting, as I’ve said, is just a ritualized imposition of your will upon the world. All the Latin, all the herbs and crystals, none of them are necessary. They’re tools to help you focus. This is a space for you to explore. You can’t hurt anything if a spell goes awry. So… have at it.”
I wasn’t sure where to begin. For one, I could hurt him. For another, I wasn’t sure what exactly I was supposed to be doing.
Looking around, I saw a butterfly perched on a branch. Okay. I could do this. I closed my eyes and thought about it coming over to me. Landing on my hand. I raised it, and waited. Nothing happened. I opened first one eye, than the other. The butterfly had completely disappeared, and Thorn was smirking at me.
“Why didn’t it work?”
“I’m not sure there was a lot of will behind your will there, little witch.”
I considered that for a moment. It was true that I didn’t particularly care about butterflies, but I had wanted it to come to me. What was will and what was want? I closed my eyes again and summoned the butterfly with more force in my thoughts. Still, nothing.
Thorn just let me work under his cool gaze, offering nothing else. I couldn’t decide if that was helpful or annoying. It took twelve or thirteen more rounds of mentally screaming at that stupid little thing with zero result before Thorn cleared his throat purposefully enough that I knew he had something to say. I raised a brow at him.
“Remember what I told you about your emotions?”
Of course. That time, instead of thinking at it, I just imagined how soft the tiny feet would feel on my hand. Eyes closed again, I smiled, my heart lifting a little. And then I felt it. The whisper-soft landing of a butterfly on my hand. My heart swelled with pride and excitement, and the feeling multiplied. When I opened my eyes again, there were easily a dozen butterflies lazily flapping their wings all over me. As thrilled as I was that I’d done it, the best feeling was seeing Thorn’s smile.
God, I was pathetic.
Not that I cared. I knocked him down to the ground, painted butterflies scattering everywhere, and jumped on him for a kiss. He indulged me—fairly enthusiastically—but then sat up and set me back where I was.
“More,” he said. I rolled my eyes, but he was right. No one ever saved their own life with a butterfly swarm. Turned out I was a baby, in the scheme of magic. So over the course of the next few hours, I grew a new tree, killed it, and used the decomposing wood to grow white-speckled mushrooms from primordia to toddler-sized. I argued with Thorn about whether we should then pick them for recreational use, made up with him over more kisses, and amassed a small murder of crows that all traced his name in cursive in the painted sky. None of which would help me survive, but all of which taught me more about casting and will.
I think he’d have kept me working even longer, except that in the midst of a spell to reshape earth, I accidentally fell asleep.
When I woke, I was back in his bed.
“I forget how easily children tire,” he told me. “I’ll teach you how to circulate the energy you’re expending back into yourself next.”
“Now?” I was hungry, still tired, and ready to jump back in immediately. If I could pull energy back in, then I could do magic tirelessly. Outside of space and time, I could spend years learning the craft. I could become the powerful necromancer Juniper Hollow feared in their darkest nightmares, and all of it before his Maven even knew I was here. If I could learn enough, practice hard enough, maybe I could find a way to hide Thorn from Death.
“Soon. There’s something else I’d like to do first.” Naturally I assumed that meant he’d be joining me in bed, but as usual, I had no idea what was in that pretty head of his. Which was how I found myself ritually bathed and naked in the middle of his temple room’s pentagram, watching as he painstakingly created an ink from the soot of a carved and dressed candle and rose petals he ground with a mortar and pestle. I was shaking a little. The anticipation was worse than the cold creeping into the air.
It must have shown on my face, because Thorn chuckled as he removed his own clothes and walked towards me. As I watched, he set the ink down next to me and called a circle to surround us, lighting a candle at each point of the pentagram. The air shivered with each word he intoned. And then his attention was on me, searing my insides with the force of his stare. When we kissed, I could feel myself relax, the taste and feel of his lips already becoming familiar to me. I didn’t have to rely on my own gracelessness this time. His arms held me
tight as he lowered us to the floor.
With my thighs outside of his, it would only take the slightest of movements for me to sink down on top of him, to take him completely inside me. His hands held my hips firm to make sure I didn’t. I whimpered a little into his kiss, wanting him.
“Vive ut vivas,” he murmured. Repeated. Chanted. He removed his hands, but I remained in the position he’d posed me, waiting, thighs burning with the effort.
As he chanted, he dipped a long, wickedly sharp thorn into the ink and brought it to my breast. His other arm encircled me. Finally, finally, he pulled me down, filling me up completely in one smooth stroke. I cried out even before the pain of the thorn-prick hit. He held me there steady, my hips writhing against his completely still form, as he formed the outline of a protective sigil over my heart. Each dip of the ink, each tiny puncture of my skin, was accompanied by his low, rhythmic chant. Without meaning to, I had synced the movement of my hips to his cadence.
He didn’t have to point the magic out to me. I could feel it surrounding us, an undercurrent of the air. A vibration that tied his voice and my heart, our bodies and the elements. I could taste it.
Pleasure and pain battled for dominance until at last he dropped the thorn. I rode him until smears of sweat and ink covered both of our torsos, until vive ut vivas were the only words left in the world, until we sealed the wards by coming together under the dark of the moon.
I let him carry me to bed because I wasn’t certain my legs were steady enough for the job. He cleaned my new tattoo with a warm cloth and tea tree oil. I just lay there, luxuriating in his touch and attention like a sated housecat until he lay down next to me.
“You look sleepy,” he said.
“I’m fine. You can teach me the energy thing, and I’ll rally.” I hoped the energy might speed up the healing process as well. The sigil was starting to feel like a really nasty sunburn.
“Later,” he said. “Tattoos can wreak havoc on your immune system. Right now, your body is reacting not just to the ink, but to the wards as well. You need to rest.”
“We don’t have time to rest,” I told him, but my eyelids were already fluttering shut.
“We have forever.” But of course, that wasn’t true.
Seventeen
Thorn
That month, my life was more inside of the mural than out. Rose’s appetite for knowledge waxed with the moon and the more I gave her, the more she wanted. Again and again we stepped into a counterfeit Summerland, inscribed casting circles in the earth, and knelt and chanted together.
The dream of the mural and the dream of Rose melted together in my mind and I began to feel them everywhere. When I left the house, pretending to search the valley or caring for my greenhouse, the scent of a summer forest and flashes of flame-red hair teased at my thoughts. Once, a little fox crossed my path. She stopped and stared at me and I at her, and I wondered if Rose had shucked off her human form to pursue me. Soon, such spells would be within her reach. Soon, almost nothing would be beyond her reach.
She was tremendously powerful and voracious. When we kissed and held one another, I could feel her longing drawing at me and fighting to pull me under. It was much more than physical longing. It was a magical vacuum, a vampiric thirst for strength. If I had allowed it, I believe that Rose would have killed me more than once. I wouldn’t have minded dying like that.
One afternoon in the eternal afternoon of the mural, she whispered nox and night filled the forest. I smiled through the darkness at her. She was becoming dangerously good at manifesting her will.
“Lux,” I countered, and little tongues of flame sprang from the ring of pillar candles around us. I touched the side of her face and leaned in for a kiss. She returned it, but I could tell that her mind was far away. I sank back on my heels and watched her, waiting.
She wore all black and her hair hung loose around her shoulders. The tattoo I had given her peeked through the eyelet embroidery of her top. She looked perfect, barefoot and wild, and I wanted her. That kind of wanting was simple and natural. The things Rose wanted, which I felt continually stirring between us, were far more complex.
“I’m ready, you know,” she finally ventured.
“Hm?” I feigned ignorance. I plucked a clover and tucked it behind her ear. “I’m ready too, in case you hadn’t noticed.” I gave her a wicked grin.
She smirked and shoved me. “You know what I mean.”
“Actually, I haven’t the slightest.”
“You’re lying,” she said.
“Very good.” Part of my training with Rose involved teaching her to see with her third eye: To see the spirit realm, the magic woven around us, and the shades of truth and deceit. Of course, few things were strictly true or false; I had tried to teach her that, too, although it bordered on a personal philosophy.
“I’m ready,” she repeated. She touched the clover in her hair and it withered. The grayed, deadened leaves fell to the earth.
I extinguished the candles with a gesture and walked away.
“I can’t teach you everything, Rose.”
She followed, wrapping her arms around my waist and nestling her cheek between my shoulder blades.
“But you haven’t even tried.” She was talking about necromancy, death witchcraft, which was a dirty word in most covens.
“I know very little. I know it’s dangerous, that its practitioners are as likely to die as to raise the dead. I know that it will drive you mad much quicker than any other craft. Some of the greatest death witches in history were nothing more than homicidal maniacs. It’s easy to get addicted to the power that flows out of death.”
Because I would not turn to face her, she came around to look at me.
“Homicidal maniacs, huh?” She put a hand on her hip.
“Fair enough, Little Red.” I smiled sadly. “I’ve done too much killing, and I’ve enjoyed too much of it. I don’t want that for you.”
“I don’t want to kill. I want to bring my mother back.”
“Impossible.”
“Why?” She stepped closer to me. “I did it before, didn’t I?”
“But you mean something else, don’t you? You mean forever. You shouldn’t even be thinking about that. I told you what life after death is like for a witch—Summerland and reincarnation. When you call up the dead, you’re restoring a soul to what amounts to a corpse. It’s unpleasant and dislocating, to say the least. Your mother’s soul is elsewhere, having another life. Do you really want to disturb that?”
She took my hands, as if to keep me in the conversation.
“It seems like it was easy for me the first time. Did I actually disturb her?”
I broke away from her. “Probably not. There’s a reason deathcraft is usually practiced at night, beyond the Hollywood sensationalism of midnight séances. It’s difficult and risky to pluck a soul out of the beyond. A soul’s natural tendency is to wander at night, when most bodies rest. That’s why—” I stopped before I blurted out that most witches didn’t sleep, and that it was an evolutionary precaution against the entrapment of our souls. “Ah, that’s why you mustn’t try to resurrect the dead permanently. The effort required to sustain the temporary housing is too great. And when dust returns to dust, the soul may try to find a new home, in a body that’s already inhabited. Things get messy. And that’s for people who’ve had a lifetime of practice.”
“Then why was it so easy for me?”
“Probably because your mother was searching for you, too.” I glanced at Rose. “It’s different, in that case. Easier.”
“Then she must have something to say to me. Thorn, I have to talk to her.”
“She’s going to tell you exactly what I told you the first time we met: Leave this place and never come back. She knows it’s dangerous for you here. She knows the Blackmanes want you dead.”
“How do you know?” She pursued me and tugged at my arm. “Look at me. What if I could talk to your parents? What if I could bring them back?
Wouldn’t you want to hear what they had to say to you?”
I turned on her. “No,” I snapped. It was a shameless lie and the emptiness of it rang between us. “I don’t care what they would say. I never knew them. They’re nothing to me.”
Rose’s expression darkened. “Don’t lie to me.”
“You can’t practice true death magic here”—I gestured to the landscape fluxing around us—“because there are no true dead. Even if I knew what to teach you, I’m afraid there would be limits to what you could accomplish. Your mother died on Blackmane land, and you can’t go there. It’s far too dangerous now. I forbid it.”
“You what?”
“I. Forbid. It.” I leaned in, my breath on her face.
“Are you saying I’m a prisoner in your house?”
I smirked and shook my head. After all that I had done to preserve her life—after everything I was sacrificing to keep her alive—she chose that absurd, reductive analysis.
“If that is how to choose to see it,” I said, “then as you like it, Rose.” I turned and dissipated, stepping out of the painting and into my ritual room. I had pictured a very different end to our evening.
Or to our afternoon, rather, because it was very much three o’clock on the other side of the mural. I stalked to the doorway and waited, my hand on the knob. Early on in her lessons, Rose had asked me if it was possible to get stuck in a painting or trapped in a moment of time. I had told her not to worry about that, seeing as I wouldn’t let it happen. The answer, however, was yes. I had known witches who deliberately stepped out of time. I had also known witches who were in painted worlds when their homes burned down. What became of them was a mystery to us all.