by Juliet Dark
“Oh, my sweet baby, no!” she cried out, quicker to reassure me than to wonder what stranger had possessed her little girl, but then I saw the understanding dawn in her face.
“You’re Callie grown up, aren’t you?” she asked. A tear slid down her face. “You will grow up then.”
“Yes,” I said, “but you …”
I couldn’t finish. Couldn’t tell her that she wouldn’t be there to watch me.
She shook her head and placed a finger over my mouth. “It’s okay. Don’t tell me. As long as you’re okay …” She looked at the glowing spiral. It had begun to spin. “But you aren’t, are you? You’re trapped here where I set the wards on you. Oh my darling, I’m so sorry. I only did it to protect you.”
“From what?”
“From your grandmother discovering your power. The Grove would have used you …” My mother’s eyes skittered away from me toward the perimeter of the circle.
“Used me for what?” I cried, my voice high and whiny as any six-year-old crying for her mother’s attention.
My mother turned back to me, fear in her eyes. “To close the door. They tried to do it with your father but we found a spell to stop them. We were afraid they would try to do the same with you if they knew you were a doorkeeper.”
“How?” I cried.
“It’s your blood,” she began, but then she looked back at the circle. This time my eyes followed hers. The glowing spiral was spinning faster, its coils contracting, drawing closer to us. I felt its heat on my skin. “I don’t have time to explain. The spiral is collapsing,” she told me. “You can’t stay for long in the past. I wish we had more time, but I’m grateful for this, Callie; I can’t tell you how much. Just to know that you’ll survive. That you’ll be all right. You will be all right after this, darling, won’t you?”
I thought of how many times I’d wished that I could speak to my mother one more time. Of the questions I had … I knew I should use the few moments we had left to ask about the spell I needed to keep the door open, but I had Wheelock for that, so instead I asked something else.
“Mom, there’s this guy … and I almost love him, but something’s in the way. Is there something wrong with me?”
“Oh baby, no! There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s these.” She held her hand to my chest. “It’s the wards I put on you to keep you safe. How can you be safe if you love?” She touched my face, brushed my tears away, stroked my hair. “But there are some things better than safe. If you’re ready, we can cut the wards away. Your power—and your ability to love—will be released as the wards unwind … but they might take some time. They were never meant to be on you so long. They’ve become intertwined with your fears and doubts. It might hurt as they unravel.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “It couldn’t be worse than how I have been feeling.”
A look of pain crossed her face and I was sorry I’d told her that, but then she steeled her face and laid the knife to the coils. Sparks flew from them and they lashed out at her.
“I can’t do it,” she said. “It has to be you.”
She handed me the knife. It felt cold and heavy in my hand. She showed me where I needed to cut. I lifted the knife to the coil … but then hesitated. I looked her in the eye. If I didn’t cut the coil, I’d be trapped in this moment with my mother. I could stay here with her forever, with the one person, along with my father, I was sure I loved, who understood me … as she understood me now. She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it. I was old enough to make my own decision. That look decided me. She had been willing to risk her own safety for me. I touched the knife to the coils.
Something inside snapped and I was back on the porch. Duncan was pulling my hand back, tugging me away from the rain. The coils were unwrapping around me, hissing in the rain, turning into white mist. My mother had been right. It hurt, as if someone was pulling a length of barbed wire through my flesh. Duncan tried to pull me out of the rain, but I was doubled over in pain. I got myself together enough to keep hold of his hand, and with my free hand I felt in my pocket for the bag of herbs I’d stashed there. I took a pinch out and held it up to the wind. Through teeth gritted with pain, I recited the last bit of the spell I’d memorized.
Carry these leaves on your wind.
Let all whom you touch put away their disguises.
You who reward the just and punish the false,
wash away all illusions with your rain.
Duncan tried to lunge at my hand, but he was too late. I let go of the herbs and the night was suddenly full of the scent of clary sage and bluebells. The wind blew the rain straight onto the porch. Duncan tried to step back but I had slipped my hand around his wrist and held on tight, aided by the power of the goddess I had called on. She was in me now. My wards were rising off my skin and dissolving in the mist as I turned around.
Claws slashed across my face, blinding me. I screamed and raised my hands to my eyes and fell to my knees. I heard Duncan’s footsteps running down the porch steps, then his cries of pain as he fled into the rain, and then nothing but my own ragged sobs mingling with the falling rain.
TWENTY-FOUR
He’d missed my eye, but the pain from the slashes was unbearable. My mother had said that the wards would hurt as they unraveled, but they didn’t hurt as much as Duncan’s betrayal. He’d also been in pain, I told myself. He knew that if I saw his face there would be no chance of his being freed from the enchantment, but what kind of monster was he?
The thought made the slashes across my face throb and the barbed coils tighten around my heart. I had to get inside and tend to my wounds … find a healing spell … or call Diana. I tried to get to my feet, but slipped on the porch’s wet floorboards and fell painfully to my knees, my limbs flailing, weak and helpless. Instead of gaining power from cutting the wards, I’d crippled myself. What if they had become so intertwined with who I was that I couldn’t live without them? What if my chains had become the strongest part of me?
Clinging to the porch rail, I struggled to my feet, took a tentative step toward the door, and fell flat on my face.
I turned my damaged cheek away from the floorboards. The rain was still blowing onto the porch, soaking my face. All I could think of was how Duncan had struck me and left me. My tears mingled with the rain, stinging the cuts on my face … and then I felt a hand on my back and one on my face.
Then strong warm hands moved down my back, my legs, my arms, their touch gentle but firm, feeling, I thought, for broken bones.
I’m broken inside, I wanted to shout, but I couldn’t. Razor wire gripped my throat. Besides, I liked how these hands felt. They were turning me over now, cradling my face, stroking wet hair away from the gashes. A face came blurrily into focus. Not Duncan’s.
“Bill?” I managed in a hoarse croak.
He looked up, startled, his brown eyes flaring like hot coals.
“Who did this?” he growled. Anger transformed him from an unassuming handyman to something quite different. For a moment I was frightened, but then he cupped his hand around my face and the fear slipped away—but not his anger. “Was it that blond man?”
“ ’s complicated,” I managed.
“No, it’s not,” Bill muttered, sliding his hands under me and then scooping me up into his arms. “It’s really very simple. No one should hurt you. No one. Not ever.” He kept up this monologue—more than he’d said in the two days I’d known him—as he carried me inside and upstairs to my bedroom. I rested my head on his chest and felt his words as a reassuring rumble that made the barbed-wire coils inside me loosen their grip. When he laid me down on my bed, Bill’s monologue had turned into a list of rather colorful things he was going to do to Duncan Laird. I must have briefly lost consciousness because when I next came to, Bill was gently swabbing my face with a washcloth and singing. It was the song I’d heard him singing once before. It had sounded familiar then, but the words weren’t in English.
“That’s pretty,” I wh
ispered. “What is it?”
“Just an old song my mother used to sing to me … Hey, you’re shivering. Are you cold?” he asked, drawing a blanket up over me. “I should have taken off your wet clothes …”
“Too much a gentleman, eh?” I quipped through chattering teeth.
“Not anymore,” he said, unbuttoning my damp dress. “I promise not to look—” His voice froze, his eyes widening as he stared at my chest.
“Hey! That’s looking!”
“I’m an idiot,” he said, stripping off my dress. “There’s poison spreading through your body.”
I looked down and saw jagged red lines—like claw marks—spreading across my skin. The red made them look like burns, but they felt like ice daggers ripping open my chest.
“So … cold …” I bit out between shudders.
Bill gave me a frantic look and then started to chafe my skin with his hands. He started with my legs, working his hands up my calves, then my thighs. He did my arms next. Wherever he touched my skin warmed, and the red marks faded. It felt so good I forgot to be embarrassed that he was rubbing his hands all over my naked body—or to wonder how he knew what to do—but when he came to my chest he looked up at me and I saw that he hadn’t forgotten.
“I have to keep your circulation going to get rid of the poison … especially around your heart.”
“It’s okay,” I said, taking his hand and placing it over my left breast. The blood rose to his face and his eyes widened and seemed to burn into mine, then he bent his head and carefully, methodically stroked my breasts and my throat. The red marks faded under his hands and warmth poured into my body. When he reached my stomach, the warmth pooled in my navel and cascaded down my legs like a waterfall. I’d felt like this before but at the moment I couldn’t remember when. Nothing seemed to exist but Bill’s hands touching me … caressing me …
Then his touch changed: his hands moved slower, lingered, and trembled. He was trembling, I saw when I looked at him, shaking as if he’d absorbed the poison into him. His eyes caught mine and I felt something click. The wards that had been loosened inside me began to melt. When he met my eyes, he took his hands off me.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to …” he began. Bill was always apologizing to me, I realized. And yet he had been unfailingly kind and gentle to me since we’d met—only two days ago, a little voice reminded me. But I shushed that voice. Looking into his eyes, I felt I’d known him forever. His hands on me were more right than anything I had experienced since … well, since forever. I wanted them on me again. Right now.
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” I murmured as I pulled his head down to mine and found his lips. He moaned as he kissed me, something between a growl and a purr, a deep sound that I felt reverberating in his chest as I slid my hands beneath his shirt. There was tension in his body, as if he was holding himself very tight, afraid he might hurt me. I pressed against him and forced his mouth open with my tongue, wanting to break through.
There are some things better than safe, my mother had said.
He gasped and pulled back, looking into my eyes, a question in his, and then, as if that question had been answered, he slid one arm under my hips, sliding between my legs. I felt him hard, straining against his jeans, pressed against my belly. I struggled with buttons while he stripped off that damned flannel shirt. Beneath it his chest was smooth, his skin golden. I ran my hand over those smooth rippling muscles and heard him gasp as my hand brushed against his erection.
“Kay-lex!” My name came out as a growl—when had he learned to say it right? I thought—and then he was inside me and I didn’t think at all.
I woke up the next morning reaching for Bill and found myself alone. A terrible emptiness swept over me, then longing, followed by embarrassment—I slept with a man I barely knew!—and the fear that it had all been a dream. But then I heard noises from downstairs, a clanking of pans that suggested Bill hadn’t fled. Relief flooded me as I reached for a robe and started downstairs … but stopped in my bedroom doorway. From here I saw the open door to Liam’s study … Liam’s empty study. That’s where my last impetuous affair had gotten me, pining for a man who wasn’t even entirely human.
I felt the sharp coils of the wards clutch at my heart. So they weren’t entirely gone yet. They had unraveled when I cut them in the vision with my mother and eased their grip last night with Bill, but they were still there. Although every nerve in my body yearned to run downstairs and throw myself back into Bill’s arms, I made myself go back into the bedroom and change into jeans and a T-shirt and comb my hair. In the mirror, I saw the scratches over my eye. They’d healed remarkably well—no doubt due to Bill’s swift ministrations—but they were still clearly visible. If Duncan was the incubus, what did that say about my romantic judgment?
I walked downstairs, schooling myself. Take it slow, give it time, don’t rush in … all the admonitions my friend Annie would give me if she were here, but when I walked into the kitchen and saw Bill bending over the oven, his firm behind filling out faded blue jeans, I went weak in the knees. And when he retrieved a pan of fragrant corn bread from the oven and turned, a speckle of flour dusting his hair and loose flannel shirt, other parts of my body went soft. I heard Annie’s voice in my head concede, Okay, with an ass like that and cooking skills, maybe you shouldn’t be taking it so slow. “Hey,” I said. “I was afraid you were gone when I woke up.”
He frowned. “I wouldn’t do that. I just thought you might like breakfast. I hope you don’t mind …”
“No!” I cried, a bit too vociferously. I stepped toward him, wondering how we’d managed to get off on the wrong foot. He stepped toward me … but he still had a hot pan in his hands. He turned to put it on the counter … and the front doorbell rang.
The thought that it might be Duncan come to explain what had happened last night flashed through my head. I looked guiltily at Bill.
“Maybe you should get that,” he said.
“I could just wait until whoever it is goes away,” I said. Vigorous knocking suggested that wasn’t going to be a possibility.
“I think you’d better answer it,” Bill said. “Do you want me to go?”
“No!” I cried. “I mean … not unless you want to. Or have to. You probably have other things to do …”
The doorbell rang again.
“Let me just see who that is … I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.” I leaned toward him to kiss him, but he placed his hand on my face, his thumb stroking the scratches on my cheekbone. His touch made my entire body tingle. “I’ll be right here,” he said. “Take your time.”
• • •
Despite Bill’s directive, I ran to the door, determined to take care of whoever was there and get back to Bill. If it was Duncan I’d tell him to get lost. There was no good explanation for what he’d done last night. As soon as I saw Liz, Soheila, and Ann Chase on the porch, though, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get rid of them easily. They looked grim.
“Let me guess, another intervention? What have I done wrong this time?”
“You haven’t done anything wrong,” Liz said, twisting her hands nervously. “It’s all my fault …”
“No, it’s mine,” Ann said, laying a hand on Liz’s arm.
“We need to talk,” Soheila said. “Can we come in … or …” She lifted her head and sniffed. The scent of fresh-baked cornbread had wafted out from the kitchen, but I had an idea that Soheila was scenting the man who had baked it. “Do you have company?”
“No … yes … I mean, Bill is here … He’s my handyman …” The minute I said it I could have bit my tongue. I heard a door open and close in the back of the house. Had he heard me? “Come in, I’ll be right back.”
I ran back to the kitchen and found it empty. The pan of corn bread rested on a folded dishcloth next to a pot of tea, all laid out on a tray. There was a note beside it. It looks like you’re busy and I did have some other things to do. I’ll be back later to check
on your basement. Yours, Bill.
“Crap, crap, crap,” I muttered as I went back into the library carrying the tray.
“I can understand why you’re upset,” Liz said, taking the tray from me and placing it on the coffee table. “But first let me tell you the one piece of good news. We’ve located Lorelei. She’s at Lura’s house. The bad news is that Lura won’t let anyone in, but we’ve placed a guard around the house so at least she won’t hurt anyone.”
“That is good news,” I said, “so why do you all look so grim?”
Soheila and Liz looked at Ann.
“Duncan Laird,” Ann said, lowering her eyes. “He came to my house the morning after our first circle and told me he wanted me to recommend him as your tutor. Of course I said no, but then he said he had enough Aelvesgold to make Jessica well forever. He told me he didn’t want to hurt you. He said he was your incubus and he only needed some time with you …” She raised bloodshot, hooded eyes to my face and gasped. “Did he do that to you, dear?” She raised a trembling hand to my face.
“Duncan Laird did this when I used a spell last night to unmask him. Are you really sure that he’s the incubus? I didn’t know incubi had claws.”
Soheila picked up a book from the coffee table, flipped through it, and laid it back down open to a full-color insert. The picture that leered up from among the teacups was Fuseli’s Nightmare—a pointy-eared imp with long claws leering evilly as he crouched on the breast of a swooning maiden. Was that the face that would have greeted me if Duncan hadn’t struck me? Was that why he had lashed out—so I wouldn’t see him like that?
Ann craned her neck to look over at the picture and shuddered. “Is that what they look like in their natural state?”
“We have no natural state,” Soheila answered. “Incubi and succubi feed on human desire. We take the shapes humans imagine for us. We become their dreams … or their nightmares. I tried to explain that to Angus when he went up against your incubus to destroy him …” Soheila’s eyes glistened when she mentioned Angus’s name.