by AJ Myers
“Sweetheart, we have to talk about Nate.”
I drew away from her with my eyes narrowed in suspicion and brushed the tears from my cheeks. How had she known I was just thinking about vampires? Her expression was smooth and unreadable, giving nothing away.
“What about Nathan?” I asked, getting to my feet. I turned and walked away from her and stood at the very window where she had stood the night before, staring out at the beautiful fall landscape I couldn’t really appreciate. “There’s nothing to talk about, Grams. I think he would agree. He sure didn’t waste any time escaping last night, did he?”
“I sent him away,” Grams said softly. I heard her chair scrape against the tiled floor as she rose, and it wasn’t a few seconds later that I sensed her standing very close behind me. “I knew you would come back. You’re smart, Ember. I knew you would come to the realization that you needed my help. He wanted to stay and wait for you, but I thought it might be best if we talked about all of this without his rather distracting presence.”
“Sure he did,” I sneered, giving her a sideways glance over my shoulder. “He didn’t want to be here at all, Grams. Why would he suddenly change his mind?”
“Because he cares about you—and he knows something you don’t,” she answered, holding my gaze. “Yes, he wanted to run. If you knew what he knows, you’d want to run, too. Don’t judge him too harshly, Ember. He is the most honorable of his kind I’ve ever met.”
I snorted in disbelief. Yeah, he was a real gentleman. I’m sure all honorable vampires were fans of playing with the emotions of the women they met. Somehow, I didn’t think kidnapping and branding me with his teeth in the middle of the night were signs of chivalry.
I wondered what he knew that I didn’t, but then decided that was probably a lot. Then, there was so much about Nathan that I didn’t know. Figuring out what he knew would take me a lifetime and then some, and I was pretty sure he wouldn’t help me out there. He could have probably told me all kinds of awesome things, but he wouldn’t. He would either ignore me or growl at me that what he knew was none of my business. And he would be right, it wasn’t my business.
“I know that I’m a damn fool and that I hurt the only person in the world that matters to me, that’s what I know. In fact, I think it might be the only thing I really know anymore.”
I turned toward that voice like a compass turning North, without thinking. I felt a jolt of surprise when I realized Grams was gone. I had been so preoccupied that I hadn’t even heard her leave. Sitting at the table, his feet propped up on the chair next to him, was Nathan. His posture was relaxed, but I saw the cautious look in his eyes.
“For how long, Nathan?” I asked tiredly, too exhausted to even yell at him like I should. “How long will I be important to you? Until you get a name and location from Grams? I’ll make her tell you today. I swear.”
“Why do you keep doing that?” he asked, tilting his head to examine me. “Why do you keep trying to push me away?”
“I don’t have to ‘push you away’,” I told him, rolling my eyes. “It’s not too hard to run somebody off when they already have one foot out the door, now is it? This might surprise you, Nathan, but I don’t need you.”
“You do need me,” he said simply. “You just don’t want to admit it yet.”
There was nothing simple about the way he was looking at me, though. Nothing simple at all. I turned away from him before he could mesmerize me with those amazing eyes of his, something that was so easy for him to do, but he was suddenly right next to me and turning me back to face him.
“Ember, please,” he said very softly. “Let me help you. Let me take you somewhere safe. I know what Shea’s planning. You’re not ready for that kind of confrontation. I’ll take you wherever you want to go. We’ll go to France. I have friends there who can protect us both. I’m begging you, don’t do this. Please, baby.”
I pulled my arm free and looked up at him with my head tilted all the way back to keep eye contact. I told myself I didn’t care, that the ache in my heart would go away as soon as he did, that I was better off without him. In other words, I stood there, staring up at him, and lied to myself. It didn’t keep my heart from racing at his nearness, but it kept me from throwing myself into his arms and making a complete idiot of myself.
“Why are you doing this, Nathan?”
“For you,” he said, taking another step closer to me. “I would do anything for you, Ember, but you don’t want to see that.”
Mere inches separated his body from mine, and it took all the will I had left not to close my eyes and breathe in the scent of his skin…like the totally pathetic loser I had become the moment I laid eyes on him.
“You don’t believe me, and that’s okay,” he breathed, cupping my face in his hands. “I’m going to win you over one step at a time, and we’re going to start, right now, with trust. Trust me to keep you safe, Em.”
It hurt to admit it, even to myself, but I was never going to trust him. What would be the point? The first chance he got, he would be gone, off to find the woman of his dreams, leaving me to grieve over the loss of the man of mine.
“Then you really are wasting your time here with me,” I whispered past the lump that had risen in my throat, pushing past him. “I’m never going to trust you. I can’t.”
I had almost made it out of the room when his voice followed me. I don’t know if it was what he said, or how he said it, but I suddenly felt a little spark of light flare to life in the black hole that was my heart—even as I wished he had kept his damn mouth shut.
“You and I have something in common. I don’t know how to give up, either, Ember,” he said softly, the hard ring of a promise in his tone. “In the end, I always get what I want.”
“And what exactly is it that you want, Nathan?”
“That’s easy,” he murmured, so close that I could practically feel the electrical charge he seemed to produce turning my skin into a superconductor. “I want you.”
But he didn’t, not really. He had a soul mate out there waiting for him somewhere, a person that was made for him—and God how I envied her. I envied her his time, the silkiness of his voice that could cause full-body tingles in under a second. I envied her the feel of his touch and the warmth of his smiles. But, more than all of that, I envied her the love he would give her.
She was his future. The most I could ever hope to be was a distraction.
“No, Nathan, you don’t,” I told him, shaking my head sadly. When he started to argue, I held up my hand and he immediately shut up. “I’m not the one for you and we both know it, so why don’t we just let it go?”
“What if I don’t want to let it go?” he asked softly.
“That’s too damned bad,” I told him. “I know enough to get out before I lose.”
With that, I turned and walked away, knowing I already had.
Witch Bane
The rest of my weekend was a crash course in insanity. Determined to make me believe the unbelievable, Grams set about trying to teach me how to be a witch. Unfortunately for her, I wasn’t interested in the lesson.
“Look, Grams,” I said as she led me into the living room and started pulling books off the bookshelves, “I don’t practice Wicca—afraid they’re a little too fond of candles for my taste. And that whole standing in a circle and holding hands thing isn’t going to work for me, either. I have a real thing about personal space.”
“Wicca?” Grams repeated, laughing, without even turning around to look at me. “Oh, no no no, sweetheart. You’re not that kind of witch. We’re bandraoithe. Blood witches, Ember. That’s a completely different playing field.” The way she said bandraoithe sounded like she was talking with a mouthful of rocks—or choking on a frog that wasn’t going down without a fight.
I squinted at her. “Blood witches, indeed. What does that even mean?”
I had the sudden vivid mental picture of drawing things in blood and watching as they came to life. I shuddered in bo
th revulsion and fear before muttering, “Finger painting with blood. So not going to happen.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Grams muttered, turning in time to see the look on my face. “The word ‘bandraoi’ literally means ‘woman of magic’. It means we carry magic within us, Ember. Where most witches have to have an energy source to manifest even the simplest of powers, we do not. We don’t have to tap into the earth or combine our energy with the energy of others to make our powers manifest. Our power is in our blood. Hence, the term ‘blood witch’. I can assure you, there will be no bloody finger painting involved.”
“In my case, there will be no power involved, Grams,” I told her, trying again to make her realize I wasn’t the witchy version of the Golden Child she seemed to think I was.
“Ember, you’ve already demonstrated a remarkable amount of power,” she said, starting to get irritated. “Why you refuse to see the truth that’s practically dancing naked in front of you is beyond me! Even after I healed your leg, giving you all the proof you needed that we’re different, you still refuse to accept what you are.”
I grimaced at that and looked down at my leg without meaning to. The terrible burn that had been there the day before was gone, leaving nothing behind but a bright red patch that looked like sunburn. It still stung, but there wouldn’t be a scar there. In fact, if I hadn’t known it had been there—and, trust me, I had no doubt about that—I would have never known I’d been burned.
I had never seen anything so crazy awesome in my life, to be honest. She had unwrapped my leg and wiped away every trace of the burn cream that had been left on the wound. She had then closed her eyes and held her hands over the burn like she was praying over it or something. And then, a radiant golden glow started to spread out from Grams’ hands to the wound on my leg. I had stared in amazement as the wound began to tingle and heal before my eyes.
“Talking to ghosts doesn’t make me powerful, it makes me crazy, Grams,” I told her again, as I threw myself down on the couch. “You healing my leg was awesome, but that doesn’t mean I can do crap like that.”
“I wasn’t referring to your ability to communicate with the dead,” she said with a sly grin. “I was referring to my ruined oven.”
“That so wasn’t me!” I yelled, having defended myself umpteen times since the oven had mysteriously caught fire. “I don’t know how your oven started belching up flames, but I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
I felt a strange humming sensation flow through me, causing my muscles to tense and my heart to start pounding. Why couldn’t she just believe me already? I mean, even if I was a bandraoi or a witch or whatever—which I still had my doubts about—I still couldn’t have set that oven on fire. Even if I’d wanted to, and I really didn’t, I still couldn’t have done it because I didn’t know how.
“So you had nothing to do with it, huh?” she murmured, one eyebrow arched skeptically. “I suppose you didn’t have anything to do with that, either.”
She waved her hand grandly in an arc and I followed it. My eyes nearly bugged out of my head when I saw everything in the room was floating at least two inches off the floor.
Including the couch I was sitting on.
“What the hell?!” I yelped, jumping off the couch like it had just caught fire, too. “How are you doing that? That’s not funny, Grams.”
“I’m not doing anything, sweetheart,” she said, shrugging and smiling when I turned an accusatory look in her direction. “Now, if you will just calm down, I do believe we can put the furniture back.”
Too stunned by what she had just implied to do more than stare at her, I felt that buzzy, humming feeling start to lessen. The second it vanished, the furniture fell to the floor with a loud thud.
“I didn’t do that,” I said stubbornly when Grams turned to smile at me again.
But I knew, deep down, that I had. It had started when I got angry and that buzzy feeling started making me feel all electric, and it had ended when I calmed down. That was too much of a coincidence to be ignored.
“Shall we try something else?” Grams asked cheerfully, walking over to pull an old, battered book off the shelf. “I think we should start with grounding and learning to breathe properly. Ungrounded magic is dangerous and…well, you definitely need to learn to breathe. Learning a little control over that horrible temper of yours would probably be wise, too, come to think of it.”
I was still staring at the couch. I mean, I'd seen my fair share of poltergeists, but none of them had ever been strong enough to lift a couch. Could that really have been me? Instinctively, I refused to believe it.
I needed proof. I mean, for all I knew, Grams was just messing with me, trying to make me believe what she wanted me to believe. Given how she had already tampered with my memories, I wouldn’t have put it past her.
Therefore, I wasn't really all that polite when I crossed my arms and told her, “Before I learn anything from you, Grams, you're going to have to prove it was me.”
Grams scowled at me, obviously losing her temper. “Okay, Ember. You want proof you're a blood witch? Fine.”
She went into the next room and dragged out her favorite houseplant, a pretty little African violet that had always held a cherished spot on her windowsill. She shoved this into my arms and started towing me towards the back door.
“Take that out into the woods with you. And take this—” she paused to yank a paring knife from the wooden block on the kitchen counter as we passed and held it out to me, “—and cut yourself with it."
I balked and didn't take the knife. "Cut myself with it?"
“Yes,” Grams said, impatiently waving the knife at me. “Take the violet and the knife out back to one of the big Mountain Ash trees my grandmother planted a century ago. There are several of them up on the hill. Once you find a tree, cut yourself and dribble a little of your blood on the violet, then a little on the Mountain Ash. The Ash is a plant that's also called Witch Bane. You'll quickly figure out why.”
Determined to prove to her once and for all that I wasn’t a witch, I turned on my heel and stomped out the door with my flower and my knife. When I reached the crest of the hill, however, I stopped and stared around me in defeat. How was I supposed to find a single tree in the hundreds surrounding me? I didn’t even know what a damn Mountain Ash looked like!
“This is so stupid,” I muttered to myself as I looked for the tree Grams had instructed me to find. “I’m not a witch, damn it! The sooner she accepts that, the better.”
“Do you talk to yourself often?”
I jerked my head around to find Nathan leaned against the trunk of a nearby tree, watching me with a genuine smile of amusement.
“Yes, actually,” I snapped, using my mission to find Grams’ damn tree as an excuse not to look at him. “I like intelligent conversation, you see. Given that my choices are talking to myself or talking to you… Well, I guess you can see who I’d rather talk to.”
“And what are you doing out here all by yourself?” he asked, tilting his head to study me. “You’re not running away, are you? That would be disappointing, seeing as you didn’t ask me to go with you.”
“No, I’m not running away,” I snorted, still not looking directly at him. “I’m proving I’m not a witch by bleeding on some stupid Mountain Ash or whatever.”
Nathan froze. For a long moment, he just stared at me, then he stared at the little knife I had in my hand. Then he swallowed. Hard. “Uh,” he said, giving me a nervous grin full of pointy teeth, “Are you sure you wanna do that?”
“To shut Grams up? Abso-friggin-lutely!”
I was going to prove once and for all that I was not a bandraoi or a blood witch or any other kind of witch. I didn’t care if that meant I had to run through the entire forest smearing blood on every tree like the damn Blood Fairy, by the time I was done Grams was going to admit she was wrong. I might end up in a coma from blood loss, but that was a price I was willing to pay to make all the supernatural bulls
hit go away. I was turning around to start marching up the hill to do just that when I noticed how pale Nathan had become.
“What?” I demanded.
“Shea actually said she wanted you to bleed on the Ash?” he almost whispered.
“Yeah, she did,” I told him, frowning. I really didn’t like the way he was looking at me. “Let me guess, all that blood is going to make you go vampy and I’m going to get a repeat performance of how it feels to be a juicebox?”
He gulped. “Uh, no. I’ll be fine. It’s you I’m worried about.”
“Well, don’t,” I told him, lifting my chin up a notch. “Now, stop stalking me and go find something useful to do. I have a date with a tree.” I turned to go find said tree, determined to prove Grams wrong even if I had to open up a vein.
“Em, wait!” Nathan called behind me.
I threw up my hand in a clear ‘I don’t want to hear it’ gesture and just kept walking.
Half an hour, and a lot of muttering, later, I still hadn’t figured out which tree I was supposed to be bleeding on. Therefore, when I nearly ran smack into Nathan who was leaning against yet another tree directly in my path, I wasn’t in the best of moods. When I scowled at him, my eyes narrowing, he pushed himself out of his slump against the tree with a smoky laugh and sauntered over to where I stood.
Taking my shoulders in his hands, he turned me to the left. My breath caught in my chest when he pulled me close to his chest and brushed my curls over my shoulder, giving him unobstructed access to the very side of my neck that bore his mark. When he pulled the scarf I was wearing to hide my brand from Grams away and leaned down to press a gentle kiss to it, though, my heart stopped beating and I forgot how to breathe altogether.
“The tree you’re looking for is over there, love,” he whispered in my ear, his lips brushing my earlobe and setting off a whole range of toe-curling sensations throughout my poor body.
“There’s fifty trees over there,” I gasped, wanting to pull away but unable to.