Banishing the Dark

by Jenn Bennett

He warned me; I cursed him.

  And I knew the exact second he was lost, when he couldn’t hold back. His forehead pushed against mine hard enough to bruise, and I felt all that strength crumble under the free fall of his surrender. And it was so good, watching him come, so sweet and disarming and brutal, that I forgot about my own racing needs, just for a moment. Just long enough for me to be caught off-guard when my own orgasm came at the tail end of his.

  It was almost as if my body had forgotten how to do it right and that it, too, was surprised. Then it felt as if the floor dropped out beneath me. I clung to Lon as if I were dying. It was so intense it was almost painful, and I was half afraid I’d broken something. But when the last shudder ran through me, I collapsed in a pile of relief, satiated and thoroughly wrung out.

  Lon didn’t say anything. He just rolled off onto his back and took me with him, settling me on top of his chest, penning my legs between his, as if we’d done this a million times. He held me loosely and kissed the top of my head as it fell against his neck.

  The lingering, pulsing pleasure that steadily thumped through the middle third of my body made me forget my own name for a long moment. But somewhere in the distance, in a deep, quiet place inside him, I heard something. It spread like warm honey, slow and unmanageable, a wild thing that had no center or borders. I didn’t know what it was, but it grew so loud that I was overwhelmed by the unexpected strength of it. I felt the wet tickle down my cheeks before I realized I was quietly crying.

  And then he said something that turned my world upside down.

  A simple thing. Innocuous, almost. A sentiment that clearly just slipped from his lips. A casual confession that was an outgrowth of the thing I could already hear him feeling.

  He said, “Jesus fucking Christ. I’ve missed you so much.”

  And that’s when I absolutely knew something wasn’t right inside my head.

  I slid to my side, heart hammering in my chest, and stared at him. “What did you say?”

  Had I not been wielding the empathic knack, I might have believed his poker face when he said, “Hmm?” God, he was good. Better than I ever realized. Because behind his languorous façade, his emotions were going haywire, practically screaming Oh, shit! in my face.

  My mouth dropped open. “We’ve had sex before.”

  “Cady—”

  “My screwed-up memories . . . that night I can’t remember before our road trip. Did we have sex that night?”

  “No.” He was telling the truth.

  “But we’ve had sex before,” I said, putting a palm on the center of his chest.

  He closed his eyes and let his head loll on the rug. “Yes.”

  “Not just once. Lots.”

  His panic slowed and trickled into heavy resignation. “I haven’t kept count.”

  “Try. How many?”

  “Once or twice a day, four or five days a week, give or take . . .”

  “Mother of God. Since when?”

  “Six months.”

  I covered my mouth with my hand. “You haven’t taken me in like a refugee. I live here.”

  “Since October.”

  My brain fired through all the missing pieces of my memories, thinking back to the first day of our road trip, when he was quizzing me on the way to Golden Peak. “Oh. My memory loss isn’t a holdover from my coma, and I didn’t get drunk that night.”

  He groaned, exhaling heavily as he draped a forearm over his eyes. “No.”

  “H-hold on. This has the stink of dirty magick all over it. You did a memory spell on me!”

  “It wasn’t my idea.”

  Anger flared. “Whose idea was it, then?”

  He lifted his arm briefly to squint an accusing look at me.

  Crap. I bit the inside of my mouth. “I asked you to?”

  “Argued it until I couldn’t see any other option.”

  Oh. That did sound like me. “Why?” But as soon as I said it, I knew. “My mother. To keep you out of danger.” But that didn’t seem like Lon. He was too proud, too selfless, to care about his own safety. The only person he’d worry over would be—“And Jupe. To keep Jupe safe, too.” That sounded right, but there was something he wasn’t telling me.

  “The spell is temporary,” he explained. “We wanted to keep certain things out of your mind in case your mother tapped into your dreams. And since she did exactly that last night, and the spell was active, then I guess it was the right decision. I just didn’t know it would be so broad.”

  “You didn’t expect me to forget about us.”

  “We didn’t expect that. We.”

  Right. Because this was my idea. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”

  “Because I didn’t want to risk you remembering everything.”

  “Like now.”

  He grunted.

  I fell onto my back beside him and stared up at the pendant lights dangling from the library’s ceiling. Had I done this before? Had crazy monkey sex with him on this rug? It was surreal to think about and gave me a nasty headache. Yep. That was magick, all right. Pretty freaking good magick if I hadn’t realized it until now. Then again, Lon always could work a decent memory spell.

  My arm bumped his. I immediately heard an erratic mix of angsty emotions, from regret to begrudged resignation to something that felt a lot like guilt. And that’s when the other emotion jumped back into my head, the warm-honey feeling I couldn’t identify before, only this time it had an undertaste of ache.

  I pushed up and leaned over his face, pulling his arm away from his eyes. “Lon Butler, you’re in love with me.”

  He reached up and ran his fingers along my clavicle. “Nope.”

  “Liar.”

  “You’re just some girl who shows up for dinner and ends up hogging all the covers.”

  “Double liar.”

  “And you aren’t in love with me, either. You just stick around because I’ve got money and a nice cock.”

  “It is pretty nice,” I admitted.

  Merriment sparkled behind his squinting eyes. “You seem to be fond of my kid, too, but I really can’t figure that one out.”

  “Well, that’s . . . that’s—”

  My mouth fell open again. I kicked my leg over his hips and straddled him.

  “Where is it?” I said, reaching for the chain around his neck.

  He grabbed my hands. “Hold on, Cady.”

  “No, you hold on. Let me see it. Now.”

  We wrestled for a moment, but he finally gave in and scooted it around the chain from where it had twisted to his back. There it was. That big-ass stone swirling with gold and green.

  “I saw it last night, when you passed out on the bed after the snakebite. I thought it was Yvonne’s.”

  “Yvonne’s ring was normal,” he said quietly.

  “No halo.”

  “No halo. And she ‘lost’ it a couple of years before we got divorced, which probably meant she sold it for drug money. But either way, it’s long gone.”

  “Oh.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  I felt the grin coming on, and I just couldn’t stop it. “That’s my ring.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He calmly shifted me from his stomach to his thighs so he could sit up. The ring swayed on its chain.

  “It’s beautiful,” I whispered.

  “You think so?” Oh, the feeling of pleased satisfaction that fluttered through him. I could enjoy him feeling that for days and never get tired of it.

  “I’m sure I’ve oohed and ahed over it already.”

  One brow lifted. “Not quite.”

  “I turned you down?”

  “Christ, I hope not.”

  “Oh, shit. You haven’t asked me yet.”

  He confirmed my horror with a clucking noise. “Things have been busy around here, in case you haven’t noticed. I’d originally planned to give it to you in France a week or so ago, but our trip got waylaid.”

  Holy shit. That was the reason for
the déjà vu sensation I felt when we were talking about vacations. “You gave me plane tickets for Christmas. The French Alps. We joked about it—sex vacation.”

  “You remember that?”

  “Barely.” I squeezed my eyes shut and groaned. “Oh, Lon. I’m so sorry I spoiled it.”

  He wrapped his arms around my lower back. “I’m not. To be honest, I’m—”

  “Relieved.”

  He chuckled. “Yes. Very good.”

  “Mmm.” I stared at the ring. I couldn’t help it. I’d never been the kind of girl to pore over wedding magazines and dream about square-jawed princes whisking me away to some fairy-tale white-picket-fence home. But the ring was pretty dazzling. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “I wasn’t sure what you’d want, but I couldn’t see you wearing something precious or girly.”

  “It’s beautiful.” Had I said that already? My cheeks warmed. “And bizarre that I can’t remember anything that made you want to give it to me in the first place. I’m sorry all of this spoiled your plans.”

  He took in a deep breath through his nose. “I bet a lot of couples have wondered, if they’d met under different circumstances, perhaps they would’ve taken a different path and never ended up together. And in a way, you got that opportunity. You chose me twice. If that’s not meant to be, then I don’t know what is.”

  I swiped a couple of quick tears from under my eyes. “Well, when all my memories come back, I hope you’ll still want to give it to me.”

  “I will,” he assured me, but I heard a little disappointment behind his words and knew I’d hurt his feelings. “I can wait. There are other . . . practical things to consider.”

  “Like what? I hate to break it to you, but you’re going to be sadly disappointed if you’re expecting a dowry. I have no cattle or acreage to offer.”

  “No cattle?”

  I laughed. “I can give you half my share of the profits from the Tahitian pinball machine at Tambuku. And maybe—”

  “Maybe . . . ?”

  Oh, shit. I leaned over Lon to reach the side table and got my fingers on Wildeye’s wrinkled journal entry.

  “What?” he asked.

  “3AC 1988,” I said, staring at the page. “Jupe said Mrs. Vega first met my parents in La Sirena in January 1989. What if they bought the winter house instead of renting it? Not ‘3AC’ but ‘3 AC.’ Three acres.”

  “Three acres purchased in 1988,” Lon murmured. He lifted me off his lap and rolled over to pull down his laptop. “If that’s right, there’s a public record of it.”

  It didn’t take long to search through the state’s land-sales records, and there was nothing under Duval. But a few minutes later, under a search in the county’s real estate archives, he found a two-bedroom house on a three-acre plot of land about fifteen minutes north of Lon’s house. It sold in December 1988 to an E. Artau.

  A misspelling that cut off the last letter in Artaud.

  Enola Artaud. My mother’s maiden name.

  The land’s previous owner was listed, and when I saw the name, I forgot how to breathe.

  The party who sold it to her was Ambrose Dare.

  The SUV’s headlights illuminated the white antlers nailed around the front door of the hunting cabin. The property was nestled in some heavily wooded foothills bordering a popular hunting spot that had become popular over the last couple of decades for wild boars. The house, we learned, was built by Dare’s father in the 1940s. Dare had sold it to my parents for a dollar.

  It was almost two in the morning. Lon cut the engine and transmutated, listening for any signs of life before we stepped out of the car. The heavy silence felt deceptive. I half expected to be attacked by a ghost—Dare’s or my mother’s. Or maybe some golem my mother had constructed to guard the house.

  Nothing.

  “Look how the SUV’s wheels cut into the gravel.” Lon shone a flashlight in one gloved hand and motioned with the sawed-off shotgun in the other. Now that we were home, he’d traded the handgun for his beloved vintage Lupara. I usually hated the noisy thing, but I wasn’t complaining tonight; we might need it. “No other cars have been out here for a long time. And the front steps are covered in dead leaves.”

  He was right. The place looked as if it hadn’t had human contact in a while, at least since autumn. In fact, the only active life I could detect was an owl hooting somewhere in the distance and a subtle glow of warding magick twining around the house.

  “You see it?” I asked Lon, whispering as if I could be heard out here, miles away from the nearest paved road. I wrapped my fingers around his flashlight hand and tilted it toward the edge of the front porch. “White Heka disguised by the white paint in the trim. Bet you anything that’s lead paint or there’s lime powder mixed in to hold a charge.”

  He grunted. “But those are just extensions. Where are they anchored?”

  Good question. We stepped closer and got our answer: the heart of the ward was hidden in the white antlers decorating the front door, which were delicately carved with magical symbols. Clever. But not extraordinarily sneaky. And not extraordinary warding magick, either, just a standard spell that would give the owner a brief mental image of anyone who crossed it. Not half as complex as the ward Lon had built around his house.

  “It’s a distraction,” I murmured. “Anyone looking for the symbols or the Heka signature can find it, but it’s hidden just well enough—”

  “To make someone cocky enough to think they’d outsmarted it. An ego stroke.”

  “Exactly. There’s more magick inside, I guarantee you.”

  “But your servitor didn’t show you any magick.”

  “That’s what worries me,” I said. “I don’t want to get caught in another landslide.”

  “Maybe I should go in alone and scout it out first.”

  “Just because you’ve given me hundreds of orgasms I don’t remember doesn’t mean you have to be my knight in shining armor. We go in together.” I shook the can of spray paint I’d purloined from Lon’s garage and sprayed a nice fat line of blue over one of the ward’s extension lines. The Heka powering the front of the ward evaporated. Good enough to get us onto the leaf-strewn front porch, and, once there, I sprayed down the antlers and dismantled the rest.

  “Electricity’s still on,” I said, surprised when I reached out for current and found plenty.

  “Makes sense if they came here every winter. They’ve probably got automatic payments coming out of an account that hasn’t been drained yet. They didn’t exactly have time to close everything out when you sent them across the planes. Might have a small fortune tucked away somewhere that technically belongs to you now.”

  “I wouldn’t touch their dirty money with a ten-foot pole,” I murmured.

  Lon handed me the gun and the flashlight long enough to splinter the doorframe with a crowbar and pry open the front door. Then he slowly swung the door open. Dust motes danced in the flashlight’s beam as he shone it inside.

  “Empty,” he said, searching the entry for more magick.

  He found a light switch and flipped it on. I was eager to confirm that the interior looked the same as it had in my servitor-powered vision, but I couldn’t see past his broad shoulders.

  “Come on,” he said, motioning for me to step inside. Why was I so wary? My parents weren’t here, and Dare was dead. There was nothing to worry about but months-old magical traps that may or may not still have enough charge to be effective. I stepped over the threshold as he continued to talk. “Stay close behind me, just in case—”

  I never heard him finish.

  Within a blink, he vanished. I was standing in the entry of the house alone, and everything was coated in the silver sheen of my moon magick, only I hadn’t used it. I hadn’t tried, hadn’t felt any indication it was coming, and I wasn’t transmutated into my serpentine form. But Lon was gone, and I was alone. And it was . . .

  Daytime.

  Silver-tinged sunlight slanted across t
he floor from a window I couldn’t see. But this was definitely the same house my servitor spell had shown me.

  What the hell was going on?

  A knock sounded behind me. I whipped around and found the door closed. Someone was knocking on the other side. I backed away, stumbling further into the house, and glanced around in a panic. Same great room, same fireplace.

  Same enormous grandfather clock.

  And sitting on the floor at the base of the clock was a large gated playpen, a bigger version of Mr. Piggy’s. No hedgehog in this one. Inside sat a little girl. A toddler with dark bobbed hair and thick, straight bangs. She was humming to herself while shuffling wooden puzzle pieces over a tiny play table.

  And she had a small, pale halo swirling around the crown of her head.

  Quick footsteps and whispers drew my attention to a hallway at the back of the room. I nearly tripped over my own feet in my panic but managed to duck behind a chair before they saw me. I recognized the voices a moment before I peered around the back of the chair and spied two people striding past the fireplace toward the door, arguing in French.

  Mom and Dad.

  I clamped my hand over my mouth to stop myself from screaming.

  Impossible! But there they were. Not ghosts, not memories. In the flesh, just as real as I was. My mom was dressed in a skirt and a striped top—one I knew was navy and white, even though my silver sight didn’t show it; I remembered her wearing the outfit in photos of book signings. My father wore his usual button-up Oxford and slacks. And they were so young. About my age, I thought. Which meant—

  The girl in the playpen had to be me.

  Seriously, what the hell was going on?

  The knock on the door came again, this time more insistent.

  “Coming,” my mother cooed before she and my father momentarily stepped out of sight. The overly friendly male voice of the visitor boomed through the walls.

  “Enola and Alexander,” the voice said. “Hope you don’t mind me dropping by unannounced. I was on my way home from San Francisco and thought I’d take a detour to see if you’d arrived in town yet.

  “We have,” my mother said in her heavy French accent.

  “May I come in?”