by A. L. Tyler
Martha relaxed, and Adeline’s eyes moved to Vince and me. She held out her hand.
“You must be Vincent.”
They shook, and she came to me.
“And Annie.”
She took my hand, and after everything that she had said, I felt compelled to apologize.
“I’m not a warlock,” I said, shaking my head and frowning. “The whole thing with Charlie, it was kind of an accident, because—”
“One hell of an accident,” she said gruffly. “But Martha already told me. She’s vouched for you. She told me that Charlie went out of his way to keep Vince alive when other options were available. She called in every debt my family owes to your aunt, so I hope it’s worth it to you.”
“Debt?” My frown deepened.
Adeline’s sharp eyes flashed to Martha again, questioning why I didn’t know.
“Kendra did everything in her power to save my mother’s life,” she said. “It wasn’t enough in the end. The cancer was too widespread, and werewolf skin is impenetrable to most magical forces, helping or hurting. But she gave her years more than she would have had, and they were quality years. I won’t forget that she did that for us.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.” The words felt wrong, and I felt like a child saying them, but the little twitch in Adeline’s eye and the small smile on her lips made it a little better.
“Vince, go on back to the cabin. They’ll show you around and talk about what we can do for you.” She nodded in the direction of the cabin, and Vince started to move off.
I made a small noise in protest, and went to grab his hand. He gave mine a quick pat and said he would be okay, and I was once again amazed at his courage.
Adeline focused her intense stare on me, and waited until Vince had gone inside to speak again.
“You’re together?” she grunted.
I nodded my head to the side, shrugging a little, but Adeline seemed to be waiting for me to speak. “Yes, I think so.”
“You think so?” She shook her head. “Oh, honey. This is going to be just as bad for you.”
Chapter 10
Adeline refused to let us back around the cabins, but she did walk with us through the forest. Knowing that Vince and I were in some capacity more than friends made her open up a little more about what life would be like for him, but she was still hesitant to share too many specifics. I kept asking for details, and she finally snapped at me that she wasn’t going to give Charlie any more information than absolutely necessary.
Then she apologized, and quickly changed the subject. She wanted to know how Vince had become infected.
I told her about meeting Walter. Charlie held his tongue the entire time, but when I got to the part where Stark had showed up using Walter as a bridge, and she called me a liar, he couldn’t stay quiet any longer.
“He knew me when he saw me,” he said from the ground. “I should have made more of it, but I didn’t. I think he went after the only weapon he thought could defeat me, and summoned Stark.”
Adeline stopped walking, considering his words. I saw thin beads of sweat forming on her brow. “That’s really it for Stark, then? He’s gone to the Other Side for good?”
“If I can help it,” Charlie said.
“And that boy is out there, calling him up to see if demons can kill each other.” She wiped a hand over her face. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“I suppose he saw some irony in it,” Charlie said bitterly. “If you don’t mind my asking, when did werewolves start summoning?”
“I mind you asking,” Adeline responded. “Around here, it’s only been the last five or ten years, as far as I know. The thought was to fight fire with fire, but the ones who meddle with demons usually end up sold by the pound on the black market. Seems most of the demons would rather work for warlocks, and werewolves make good bait for finding new employers. It’s been a real lesson in natural selection to weed out the stupid. You said his name is Walter?”
I nodded. “He said his parents lived in Stonefall.”
Adeline grimaced as she looked at Martha. “I’ll see if I can find him. We have our own justice for these situations.”
“What are you going to do to him?” I asked. “He was scared. He didn’t know.”
“He infected a bystander,” Adeline said, unimpressed. “Our gift isn’t something to treat lightly. It’s for his elders to decide.” She looked at Martha, and then at Charlie. “I’d like to speak with Annie alone for a minute, Martha, if you wouldn’t mind taking that back to the car.”
Martha bent down to pick Charlie up, and he gave a low growl before stalking away from her.
“He reads my thoughts,” I said to Adeline. “If it’s something you don’t want him to know, you’d better not tell me.”
“It’s something I’d just rather say between the two of us,” she said, still eyeing Charlie as he left. “He’ll know eventually, anyway. When Martha asked if we could help your friend, that’s all she said he was. A friend.”
I took a deep breath, shaking my head. I wasn’t sure how any of this was relevant. “It’s kind of a new thing. Well, we’ve been friends for a long time, and I guess we kind of recently decided that maybe we’ve wanted to be more than friends for a long time, but—”
“This will probably destroy that relationship,” Adeline said. She looked me in the eye without blinking, and I knew that she regretted having to tell me. “If I had known, I might not have offered to help, but what’s done is done. I’m not saying you have to end it, because that won’t do any good. I’m saying that this is a part of him now. More often than not I find that late converts like Vince prefer someone who also has the gift. He has two lives, and he will never reconcile them. You’ll never understand that.”
I reached to clutch my sumac pendant without realizing it, and Adeline shifted her weight away. She was afraid of me, or what I was about to do. I forced my hand back to my side.
“Then why tell me?” I asked. “If it won’t do any good?”
“Because he’s going to try to hold on,” she said, still staring at the pendant with trepidation. “He might hold on a long time after you want to let go. What he’s going to go through might last months or years before he finds a balance, and he won’t be the same person when he’s done. He might not recognize that he’s the one changing, either, and he’ll project that anger and frustration onto you when the relationship starts to fail. If it fails, I mean. It might not, but that’s between the two of you. I’m just warning you that if you hold on, you should come to me if things go badly. I will be there for you when you need to end it. And Annie, I am serious when I say I need to be there. I have seen this end in death for one party or the other, and I don’t want to see it again.”
I swallowed the dry lump in my throat. I couldn’t imagine that a time would ever come when Vince could be angry enough to try to kill me, or that I would have to kill him in self-defense. We’d been through too much together already.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll call if I need to. I promise. I really just want what’s best for him at this point.”
Adeline knew that I didn’t believe her. She crossed her arms and shrugged. “I suppose you’re seeing his resilience right now. It’s a honeymoon phase when the power is new. It fills him up with confidence so there’s no room for worry. Maybe that’s why he chose now, of all times, to approach you for something more. But it doesn’t last. I know you feel guilty about all of this. You should, because it’s your fault.”
The words stung more than I thought they would. Even in the pain, there was some small freedom of release. I had been feeling guilty for some time, and everyone around me kept saying that it wasn’t my fault because no one could have foreseen it.
But it was true. If not for me, this terrible thing never would have happened to Vince.
Adeline’s eye twitched, and her next words were said with a fixed frown. “It’s not all bad. If he’s going to be with you, it’s
probably the best thing that could have happened. Kendra could tell you what life is like for the witches that dabble. It isn’t easy. He would have been a target for every person you ever angered, made jealous, or got in the way of. Now he’s protected. That’s why we call it a gift. I always thought that’s why Kendra took up with Stark, and then Charlie. She’s made more than a handful of powerful enemies. She wouldn’t have a love life at all unless her men could protect themselves, so she only ever fell for the ones that could. With our guidance, Vince will be able to protect himself. I’m sure you don’t want to get in the way of that.”
The sun was beginning to set behind the side of the mountain, and the cold September air suddenly felt even more chill. Adeline was walking away, and the stillness of the woods around me made me shiver. There were werewolves here, and no one would have ever guessed.
“There are others.”
When I spoke, Adeline turned back to me, looking weary.
“There are others, besides Stark,” I said again, quieter. “Kendra must have had other enemies, if Stark needed to protect himself.”
Adeline paused for a minute, looking away. She shook her head like she didn’t want to say it.
“She has friends, too,” she said finally. “The name Hawthorn carries a reputation in a lot of circles, and even I can tell you aren’t equipped to deal with the consequences. Between the demon and the necromancer, you’re starting off on the wrong foot in this circle. You should watch your back introducing yourself to anyone else.”
I followed her back to the car in silence. I found Martha lying on the hood with her back against the windshield, staring at the stars. Charlie was in the back seat, watching something in the distance, and I had to squint in the dark to see a group of people laughing and carrying on as they tossed something around. It might have been a football.
Adeline gave me another stern warning about calling her if anything didn’t seem right in Vince’s mood. She asked for my cell phone to program in her number. When I went to take the phone back, she caught my hand and we locked eyes for a moment.
“You’re alone in all this,” she said. “Aren’t you?”
“I have a sister,” I said.
“She’s not here.”
“I didn’t want to bother her,” I said. I didn’t like her insinuation. “She has a family.”
“I’m already bothered,” Adeline said, letting go of my hand. “If you need anything, even if it’s not about Vince, call me.”
I nodded. Vince came back over, and I could see the sweat glinting on his brow in the glow from the headlights of the car. He’d been playing hard, whatever they had been up to. We had a quick reunion, and then said goodbye to Adeline, and piled into Marth’s car.
I was too exhausted to say anything, but everything that Adeline had said weighed heavily on me. She liked to interrupt a lot, but she had a new perspective, and I wasn’t sure how to piece everything together.
She didn’t think that Vince and I would ever work out as a couple, or possibly even as friends. He was going to change, and blame me for it. If we did work out, then she thought it was better for him to be a werewolf, which was the most contradictory thing I had ever tried to process. His being a werewolf was possibly the worst thing that had ever happened to me, because I had ruined his life forever.
She had seemed cordial enough with Martha, but then told me in private that hanging around a necromancer was a bad idea.
Her thoughts on Charlie were perhaps the most concerning, because she had called him Stark’s weapon. I understood that a warlock had a level of control over his demon, but I knew Charlie wasn’t a mindless automaton following orders. He and Stark had killed innumerable werewolves, and I knew that Charlie carried more blame than Adeline laid on him.
I didn’t know how I felt about that. I didn’t know how I felt about investing so much worry into the words of a wise older woman I had just met.
And then there was the news that Stark wasn’t Kendra’s only enemy. By far, that piece worried me the most.
Sitting in the back of Martha’s weathered ‘85 Buick, I let my head roll back and I closed my eyes and sighed. Charlie had moved to the front passenger seat, and when I heard Vince unclick his seatbelt and move up next to me, I opened an eye in question.
He didn’t say anything as he clicked on the center seatbelt and put an arm around my shoulders. I let my head rest on his shoulder.
His shirt was still a little damp from either the night air or the sweat, and I didn’t care. I tried not to think about his resilience abandoning him, as Adeline had said it would, and I slept most of the way home.
He invited me down to his place for a movie when we got home, and even though I was exhausted, I accepted. I wanted to hear about what they had told him and what he had done with the other werewolves in our absence. Mostly, I just wanted to hear him optimistic that they might be able to help him.
He got us each a small cup of ice cream and put on a movie. We settled onto the couch. He sat down next to me, so much more relaxed than he had been the last time we watched a movie. After a while, I leaned over and rested my head on his shoulder again.
He reclined back on the couch. I reclined with him.
It had been my plan to talk with him when we came down, but we were too tired. Sometime after midnight I woke up in the dark alone on the couch.
I sat up carefully, feeling cold sweat break out on my skin. Adeline’s warning that Vince was unstable echoed in my mind.
Vince was asleep in his bed across the studio apartment. He had set a pillow on the floor next to the couch and thrown a blanket over me. I turned over and went back to sleep.
~~~~~~~~~
I awoke to the sound of water running as Vince took a shower, and quietly crept back up the stairs. I was mortified and afraid that Charlie would say something, but he didn’t.
Martha continued to read Kendra’s journals, and she asked me for more. I told her I had shown her everything that I had, but she kept saying how much it meant to her to have anything to reconnect with her friend. I promised her that I would show her anything else I came across. Even without talking to Charlie, I finally knew what she was after.
Charlie’s book. The one book that he had seen fit to steal from the collection, before doing anything else, when I had summoned him. He refused to let me see it, and I knew that Stark was after it, too. I didn’t even know what was in that book that he was protecting so fiercely. I didn’t have the opportunity to ask him with the lack of privacy, but I doubted he would have told me anyway.
Vince finally came upstairs. He didn’t say anything about my overnight stay. He went home that day to have lunch and spend the afternoon with his parents, and I went to the greenhouse.
I spent a few hours practicing the resurrection spell that Martha had tried to teach me. After the third employee “accidentally” walked in on me as I waved a crystal rod over a wilted cactus situated between a burning mug of sage and a dish of salt on the office desk, I decided it was time to call it quits. The first time had been an accident. Now they were spying on the freaky boss.
I extinguished the sage and stowed the crystal back in one of Kendra’s secret hiding places, and tried not to care about all the stares I received as I set the cactus in a window and went about clipping the spider plants like nothing had happened.
I got a text around three. Vince wanted to know if I was up for watching another movie that night, and perhaps making it past the first twenty minutes before we drifted off. It made me smile.
I drove home on that note, and called my dad on the way. He didn’t answer, but Janet did, and we had a quick chat about how their search for a place in California was going. Neither of them could believe how expensive things were out there, but his new job was offering an inordinately generous relocation bonus. They had narrowed it down to three properties, and my dad wanted the one with the pool, but Janet wasn’t sure if he would like maintaining it so much. I shook my head; the thought of my
dad in his trunks next to a pool in California, a smoothie in one hand and his work laptop open under the other, was almost too much. I got to talk to him for a few minutes before we hung up, and it was good to hear his voice again.
When I got close to the apartment, I passed the spot where I usually turned into the lot and went straight to the sandwich shop. All of the good spots in front were taken, so I had to double back to the apartment lot, and I ended up parking on the far side from my apartment to split the difference walking. I searched the tray where I dropped my change for extra quarters, because I felt guilty making Martha buy us so much food. As I was counting up my spare coins, I looked up and saw Martha, standing in the little alley behind the shop.
I was about to wave, but something stopped me. There was a guy with her, and he had the hood on his coat pulled up so that I couldn’t see him. He and Martha were talking, and it didn’t look amicable.
I didn’t know what to do. I was about to get out of the car to help her when I saw her cross her arms. She was repeating something in response to what he was saying to her.
Fine. Fine. Fine. But… I wasn’t a lip reader, and that was all I got. The conversation ended on better terms, and the guy in the jacket turned to go.
It was Walter. I watched him walk away, feeling my heart sink.
Then I looked back, and saw Martha looking right at me.
Chapter 11
I locked the doors on my car and fumbled for my keys.
“Charlie!” I hissed under my breath. I didn’t know if he could hear me. I really hoped he could. “Charlie!”
The locks on the doors all shot back up just as I got the key in the ignition. Martha opened the passenger side door. She made a disgusted noise as she shoveled three empty fast food bags and a stack of old notebooks and receipts into the back and got in.