Hex, A Witch and Angel Tale

by Ramona Wray

  Was I? His bare arms came up around me and I was once again surrounded in that fresh, pine-y scent of him. It soothed me.

  “I could never go to sleep without you near me,” he whispered. “I would go mad.”

  Sobbing even harder, I fumbled for his lips blindly. He kissed me, softer now, that much more bitter for it. What wouldn’t I have given to hold on to that softness! To keep it. To keep him.

  “Before we … first,” he pulled back, breathing hard, “I need to give you something.” He paused. “Something I carry for safekeeping only because it actually belongs to you. Always has. I’m sorry for not giving it to you sooner.”

  I considered putting up a fight or throwing myself at him like a wrestler, pinning him down to keep him from leaving. Lucky for him, my body didn’t really want to move now. He walked toward the opposite corner to a small wooden desk, and every step he took was another punch in my gut. When I didn’t touch him, everything hurt worse than an acupuncture session done with those thick rabies-shot needles. I whimpered, keeping my eyes glued to his back, his glorious, statuesque back, that glimmered in the moonlight as if it had been sprinkled with fairy dust.

  He came back, turned on a little bedside lamp, and then took my hand gently. A small velvet box appeared in my palm. My breath hitched. I wasn’t born yesterday. I knew a ring when I was given one.

  “What...?”

  “Open it.”

  The next few seconds both crawled and went by much too fast. I couldn’t quite put two and two together; a newly hatched chick would’ve done better. So, there was a ring … there was my palm, still firmly attached to my arm, which meant that I was holding the ring. And if I held it, if he had put it there …wait, how did it go again?

  Totally bovine. Frozen and mute. I stared at the ring and, from it, to the celestial being who’d given it to me. Back and forth between the two items that simply couldn’t match. Oil and water. Halfling didn’t marry, did they? Some rebel angels, maybe, but that was all ancient past. Unless … Holy cow, what had Ryder done? What had we done?

  “I can’t let you into my bedroom,” he went on evenly, “if you’re not wearing this. But you’re here now, so we should be as we were. Husband and wife.”

  Chapter: Twenty-Nine

  Splash a bucket of water in my face and it wouldn’t have achieved what Ryder’s words did. Heck, pour the whole of Lake Superior on me and it still would have been less of a jolt. The world swayed and then turned upside-down. My head throbbed, which was funny, considering that no blood reached up there anymore on account of my heart having stopped dead a while back.

  I turned halfway, about as nimbly as Mrs. Burns, our sexagenarian pharmacist, and placed the box carefully on the bed next to me. So carefully, like handling a bomb. I couldn’t have it in my hand. This couldn’t be happening! If he had really married me, then we’d both broken, oh, about a trillion laws.

  We were doomed! D-O-O-M-E-D.

  The shock jump-started my brain. The part of it that actually worked, that is. Whatever I was running on until now had been some emergency system, set to kick in if the main crashed and, frankly, it performed about as well as a kitchen appliance made in China: all thrum, little bite, meant to die young. So now, relatively clearheaded at last, I found myself thinking that there had to be something I’d missed somewhere. Some detail, a sign, turning the right corner, anything —

  For his part, Ryder looked as if he’d been struck by lightning. With a stony face, he watched me pushing the velvet box aside, never touching the ring, all the while pulling off the human-statue thing better than any street performer ever would.

  It should have hit me earlier, since I’d been staring right at it, but my mind had chewed and then spit it right out. No alarm buttons were tripped, not even a tiny blip. Until now.

  “Turn around, please,” I whispered.

  His face moved, but couldn’t quite nail a real frown.

  “What? Why?”

  “Please, just do it.”

  He did.

  And there it was, right in front of me. His wide-shouldered back, beautiful and graceful and … ink-free.

  “There’s no tattoo on your back,” I said, stating the obvious mechanically, like a recording playing in a train station.

  He spun around fast. “Should there be?”

  By now, my knees shook as if I’d OD’d on Red Bull.

  “I thought angels and halflings have their name tattooed between their shoulder blades. A symbol that, if read correctly, makes their wings visible. They shoot out from the center of it.”

  If my source was wrong, and it had been an obscure Web report, so there was every chance of its being full of horse poop, then, at the very least, I risked having him laugh at me. Worst-case scenario, he’d recommend a real nice straight-jacket.

  But Ryder didn’t laugh. He kneeled in front of me again and placed his hands on each side of my face. I thought he looked worried, which he would’ve been if my straight-jacket theory applied. But then I saw the first signs of anger flashing in his eyes. Angry, though? What for?

  “That may be so,” he said carefully. “But why would I have a symbol like that on my body?” He swallowed hard. “Lily, who do you think I am?”

  Something snapped in my chest, possibly my wishbone. No, wait, that was in chickens. Head! My head! That was where all the screws were coming loose. But I was close, so very close, to putting my finger on that magic button labeled: “Press here to see sense.” But I couldn’t quite touch it. I couldn’t quite figure it out.

  He spoke again, words that came out clipped, through lips like blades of garden shears. “What did he tell you about me? Who do you think I am?”

  His voice rose at the end and I could glimpse his anger. It was the kind that made hurricanes seem like soft showers. My mouth was drier than Africa. There was no way to persuade it to talk, the useless trap. I gulped mouthfuls of air, which tasted like the air in Pompeii must have on the day Mount Vesuvius had blown up. The words were cinders on my tongue, too, when they finally spilled out.

  “The hunter. My … halfling.”

  I looked away. Except there was no real “away,” not for me, not anymore. There was only Ryder, from whom I could never pull away.

  God help us both, I just couldn’t do it.

  He wasn’t breathing. I could tell, because suddenly the silence around us felt thicker than motor oil. Then he tilted my face up a notch, forcing me to meet his eyes.

  “So what are you doing here, then?” he asked in a smothered voice. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll hurt you?”

  I gave the tiniest shrug that showed me as I was: more breakable than a Swarovski ornament. Vulnerable. For all the powers and my special bloodline, in front of him, with him, to him, I was just Lily. The girl in love with him. Who was about to die. Where else would I be now?

  In the corners of his eyes, moisture glimmered like dew drops. His expression changed into something different, something soft that left him just as exposed as my shrug had left me. He ran his tongue over those dry lips and his Adam’s apple moved, as if he was choking back tears.

  On my face, his fingers trembled slightly, just as his voice did when he spoke.

  “Oh, Lily,” he sighed. “Such a long time, sweetheart, and your taste in men hasn’t improved one bit. You’d put yourself at risk, again, for me.”

  While he brooded, I groped for my voice and found it still as stubbornly defective. By now, I could glimpse where this was headed, but I was too scared to believe it, for fear that it might not come true. Lily-logic, about as reliable as the Weather Channel.

  “So if I’m the hunter, then who is he?”

  I could only whisper. “William Kingscott. The real one.”

  That did it. His arms dropped; they just went soft, lifeless, and slipped away from my face. Panicking, I jerked forward and grabbed them, tugging at him with all my might. There’s nothing better than a little despair to change you into a full-fledged Amazon.

&n
bsp; “Ryder?” I shook him. “Talk to me, please!”

  Awareness flashed across his face, but it left his eyes a murky lavender shade I didn’t recall seeing before. With a startling lurch, he pulled free of me, only to clutch my shoulders right after. Now he was the one channeling his inner ancient warrior, unfortunately to grind my collarbones into dust.

  “You need to tell me everything!” he demanded sharply. “What happened between you and him?”

  Was this jealousy, or was he plain mad?

  “Why? What’s that going to change, anyway?”

  His jaw squared warningly. “I am William Kingscott, Lily. You must know that in your heart, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. Now, please, tell me what I need to know.”

  He released me at last, which elevated my chances from needing a collarbone transplant to making do with just a cast. Crossing the room in long strides, he paused in front of an old armoire, from which he retrieved a T-shirt and pulled it on fast.

  His words pounded in my cerebrum, alarmingly nauseating. Why was it so loud up there? I wanted to believe him more than I wanted to breathe. But how did I dare? Lucian had showed me the past, a past in which he was Sir William. No matter how much I’d wished Ryder to be him, the fact was that it didn’t add up.

  “Lily?” he pressed, now standing in front of me.

  “Um …” I was dizzy. Where did I start? What was the point? “I guess it all began after we came back from the picnic. I … er, Lucian, he sort of showed up in my room.”

  Here I was, more precariously poised than a Chinese acrobat on a tightrope. The story came out splintered, like a piece of wood chopped with your eyes closed. Big lumps of unnecessary details poured out of my mouth in a jumble, as if I were a toddler, still trying to figure out speech. And all the way through it, I couldn’t shake this feeling that I was walking a tightrope, ten thousand feet above the ground, ready to fall at any moment and break every single bone in my body.

  Ryder didn’t handle it much better, either. He went from pacing furiously to being so still it kind of made me wonder if his heart kept on beating. He comforted me when I got to the part about J, and then swore under his breath and went back to burning holes in the floor while I went ahead and talked about Lucian and the relevant remaining facts. And, no, I didn’t think that Lucian kissing me was relevant; the Marie Antoinette-wannabe in me still didn’t want him dead.

  He didn’t once interrupt. Bit by bit, that softness I knew and loved found its way back into him. The storm clouds in his eyes drifted away, and by the end of my tale I thought he looked at me the way he always had. Like nothing else mattered. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe he’d reached my own conclusion, simple and crazy as it was. We loved each other. Yes, it was dumb and insane and deeply wounding, but there it was. The bottom line. We loved each other. Which made the rest into background noise. A very painful and, in my case, lethal, background noise.

  “It’s all my fault,” he said quietly. “I should’ve never let him get so close to you.”

  I barked out a bitter laugh. “You know, that’s exactly what he said.”

  His head whipped around, hands seizing my face again. Licks of flames burned in his eyes.

  “Lily, you do understand that he lied to you, yes?”

  “I-I want to,” I stammered. “But Ryder, I’ve seen the past when he touched me. And this,” I pointed at the mural, “two of these girls are the same ones he showed me in the past. Isn’t this proof that he didn’t lie?”

  He let go of me, grunting unhappily.

  “So you think I’d hurt J? You think I’d twist your arm like that, using your best friend so I could get my way? Do you think I could ever,” his voice shook, “hurt you?”

  “No, no, no!” Denial tumbled from my mouth like a hot liquid that was scalding my tongue.

  “Then?”

  “I think you didn’t have a choice. It was either sending J to sleep or not being here the next time I return. You couldn’t ask me to cast the blood-spell, so you did the only thing that was guaranteed to convince me to work the magic.”

  He laughed then, and it sounded like a wild animal dying.

  “You’re so wrong, baby. I could never touch a hair on your head or on those whom you love. I know you see J like a sister and I’d die first before hurting you like that. How can you not know that?”

  My sanity was wearing off fast. I brought my knees up and cradled myself, biting my lip not to scream.

  He went on. “This explanation of yours is just a way to make peace between your mind and soul. Because your soul knows me, Lily, and that is why you’re here. That’s why you came to me even when you thought I was the one hunting you. Hurting you. You came because part of you remembers and recognizes me. But your mind keeps providing incriminating evidence against me, in spite of what you feel deep down and what your instinct tells you. It makes you look crazy, except you know you’re not. So you made up a story to reconcile the facts with the way you feel. Because you can’t function unless things make sense. Because all your life, you’ve had to fight to keep your sanity, and coming up with reasons to get you through the day was the only way to do it.”

  He paused.

  “Your story makes sense, but is still only a story. It’s not the truth.”

  I wiped my eyes with the back of my hands. “What is the truth, then?” My head was going to explode for sure.

  He winced. “I can’t talk about it, you know that. What I can say is I am William Kingscott. I am your rightful husband. Stop thinking, baby, and let your instinct take over. You already know the truth. You know who he is.”

  And … of course I did.

  “He’s the hunter. Lucian is the halfl ing.”

  Ryder’s eyes closed slowly in relief. Or agony.

  Chapter: Thirty

  My reaction speed beat that of a Porsche Panamera Turbo. That car goes from zero to sixty in about four seconds; it took me only one to jump to my feet and bound across the room as if I’d suddenly grown wings. “Whoa.” Ryder joined me by the stained-glass walls, which I had no idea how to open. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “You don’t understand.” I pushed against the walls mindlessly. They just wouldn’t give. “I left him at the hospital. How do you open this? With my mom, Ryder!”

  I was frantic. Even a newborn’s movements were better coordinated than mine at this point. “And J. Open this stupid thing!” I shouted, pounding my fists on the beautiful, and, obviously, extremely hardwearing, glass wall. He stepped in and gently caught my wrists, stopping my assault against the stubborn wall.

  “Calm down,” he said soothingly, making sure he got my attention.

  I struggled against his hold. “But you don’t —”

  “He won’t hurt either of them, Lily. I promise you.”

  Glaring at him, I quit fi ghting. “How can you be sure?”

  “He needs you, simple as that. And you have to understand, he can’t just lie. More like distort the truth. So a part of what he told you is accurate.” I tugged at my confined hands once, hard and deliberate, and he let go. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  The barking, which I now called speech, came out distinctly screechy. It even hurt my ears. But Ryder didn’t seem to care. His self-control never wavered, his expression never grew annoyed. And when he spoke, he sounded calm and more pacifying than a temple full of horn-playing Tibetan monks.

  “He told you how and why you can help J for more than one reason. First of all, he set you on the right path. He explained what you need to do and why it would work. But, at the same time, he gave you a message.”

  “What message?” I asked, marginally calmer.

  “If you discovered his lies in the meantime, he wanted you to know that he was powerful enough to hurt J. That if you didn’t do what he wants, he could go after someone else you love.”

  “Which is exactly why I need to get to the hospital,” I said, back to barking.

  “No, see, this is where you
’re wrong. Right now, neither of you holds all the cards. He needs something from you, something only you can give him. Until he’s sure you won’t deliver, he’s not going to jeopardize himself by crossing you. You’re in what’s called a holding pattern, baby, and the ball is in your court, not his.”

  I nodded; sure, yeah, that made sense, of course. But no, not really. I’d had theories and explanations. I’d had it all worked out: Lucian’s reasons, Ryder’s reasons. There were rows and columns; there was sense. Logic. A logic that now looked like Stonehenge. Just blocks of stone that may or may not have formed a circle in a distant past. Who put them there, whatever they meant, that was all speculation.

  “I don’t understand!” I shouted, pressing my hands against my temples. “I spent time with him. He … I was sure he cared about me! He was hurt, he … he … he said things.”

  Now I was the one pacing. The carpet in Ryder’s bedroom was having a really rough day. My boy-turned angel, turned boy again-friend watched me closely.

  “I wish I could tell you more, Lily,” he offered evenly. “But all I can say, all I can swear to you, is this. You are the reason I live and why I die inside each time you leave me. Everything starts and ends with you. That’s the truth.”

  I stared at him like a child who’d just been told there was no Santa. But the reindeer, the gifts under the tree, the milk and cookies gone during the night, of course there was a Santa! What was wrong with him?

  “B-but you said … you admitted you’ve lied to me.”

  He never even flinched. “By omission, yes. By not disclosing the truth about myself. About who I was.”

  Okay, was it just me or had this really become The Twilight Zone?

  “But … how could you? The hex wouldn’t let you talk about it. How could you have told me anything?”

  “There were ways. Not to tell you everything, but to at least put you in touch with MK. She could’ve filled you in on the basics. But I didn’t want to spook you, Lily, or have you worry beforehand. I didn’t want you to go crazy trying to find a loophole and change what I know for a fact cannot be changed. I wanted you to be happy a little longer.”