I roll my eyes. Never make a bet with a fairy, or a witch for that matter. We cheat. Magic is too easy of a shortcut. But it’s a compulsion I’ve always had a hard time resisting. Rochie knows this. A bet was what got me and Jack started in the first place. Syana bet me I couldn’t get a kiss from him, this sexy older guy.
It’s pretty safe to say I was on that bet like white on rice. I won, too.
Rochie smiles, no doubt knowing exactly where my thoughts have headed. “My bet is that you and Jack kiss each other before the week is out.” Her look at me is pure fairy evil. “I lose, and I’ll go spy on the damn wolves for you. Find out what Luna’s up to.”
Oh, that’s tempting, that is. A fairy would be the perfect spy. And alls I have to do to win is not kiss Jack? Of course, now I’m thinking about kissing Jack, which does more weird things to my belly, but still…not going to happen. On my end of things anyway.
“You’ll just make Jack do it, so you win.”
She folds her arms and gives me one of those impatient looks again. “No one makes Jack do shit. You know that.”
Do I ever. “Okay, so if I lose?”
“You get a tattoo. With his name.”
“What? Oh hell no.” Just the thought of a needle near my skin has me shuddering.
“Wimp.”
“I thought you wanted me to help him.”
She gives me a tiny smile. “This will do, for now.
I think of Jack’s tatts, the spells woven in his skin. “This is some kind of magic trap, isn’t it?”
“Paranoid much? No. It just amuses me.” She points at the sign above us. “Your sister can do it. I won’t be anywhere around. It’s not like you’re gonna lose anyway, right?” The dare glitters in her eyes.
I think of werewolf eyes in the night. Thomas’s poor face. The attack that nearly killed Sy. Three dangerous little words come out of my mouth.
“It’s a bet.”
9
I can’t sleep.
I closed the bar down over an hour ago. Sy came over and hung out ‘til midnight, way later than she should’ve with her opening at Beaner’s all week. Having her around definitely helped, but I’m just too keyed up to rest.
Everything is swirling in my head like a snow globe full of Technicolor glitter. Jack. Thomas. Wolves. The bet with Rochie. Jack’s mouth. Where the fuck is Georg? Stephen. Jett. Jack putting those packets in my hand. Wondering if he still tastes the same…
Fuck.
I throw the covers off and get to my feet.
I gotta walk this shit off. It’s what I do. Throwing on jeans, a T-shirt from T&T (a cauldron with steam rising, a pair of crossed whiskey bottles just above) along with a hoodie, fingerless gloves and my trusty Uggs, I open the window. I could take the front door, but I have a feeling Ana has wards set up all over the house. I’d rather her not know what I’m up to every second. She plays at being Mom, but she’s a damn poor substitute.
The trellis has been replaced since I used to use it to sneak out and see Jack, but halfway down this all feels way too much like memory lane. I cling to the trellis for a moment, smelling roses that died weeks ago. I almost expect to see a tall, dark form waiting on the sidewalk on the other side of the hedge. No one is there, of course. The night is empty.
Or so it would seem.
I jump into a patch of browning lawn (the snow is mostly melted, for now) and head for the street, weaving through crazy Mrs. Rudd’s yard, praying she doesn’t come out to feed the squirrels. She likes to do that at odd hours, wrapped in her ever-present flowery house robe. My mom used to have tea with her now and then, said it was a gas, but the woman has given me the heebie-jeebies since I was tiny. I catch a whiff of vinegar and the creak of a door and haul ass out onto the street.
It only takes me a few minutes to reach my destination. Soon I’m slipping down into the small canyon that makes up the actual ‘park’ part of Congdon Park.
It’d probably seem creepy to most, walking down the moonlit hiking trail, skeletal trees waving overheard, the slight moan of the wind, leaves crunching under foot, odd crackles off in the woods…okay, it’s creepy as fuck, but I like it.
It relaxes me. I’m not particularly worried about being attacked. Anything human I can handle, and while there are a lot of scary things in the FTC world, most of them will leave me alone.
Or so I think until I realize I’m being shadowed.
The teeny hairs on the back of my arms are buzzing. I look around warily. Somehow I’ve made my way down into the canyon proper without realizing it. Tischer Creek is pretty unassuming most of the year, except spring when the snowmelt can turn this little stream into a raging monster. Tonight it’s just a faint ribbon of starlight, winking over the rocks and whispering under the bridge looming before me. I sniff, but it isn’t my nose that tells me who’s following me. It’s my heart.
“Hello, Luna.”
She emerges from the night, shaking her head with her close-cropped hair. To say Luna is …unusual in appearance is putting it mildly. She’s an albino dark wolf, which means in human form she is a black woman without color. Her skin glows as if she’s dusted in luminescent chalk. Tall where I am short, hard where I am soft. She ripples with muscle and strength. A predator from head to toe. There is beauty in Luna’s appearance, but it is a cold, otherworldly beauty. Cruel.
It wasn’t always this way.
Luna was my best friend before Sy. My childhood partner in crime, truly my fourth sister. And oh boy, did the two of us get into some wild shit. The werewolf and the witch.
Then my mother killed her father, and here we are. Watching each other through the strips of moonlight that flutter into the depths of the canyon like forgotten ghosts. Wondering which of us is going to draw blood first.
In wordless agreement we walk up the steps to the bridge and lean over the railing, side by side, not looking at each other. Not touching either, though the air is thick between us.
About fifteen years ago, her dad went rabid as fuck. Honestly, Gilead was kind of out there even before he caught the moon madness. When he died, Luna lost her mind, and she never got it back.
Fairy-tale creatures have our own form of law. One that might be rather loosely applied and subject to interpretation, but once the Council hands down a sentence, it’s ruthlessly carried out. When they got enough complaints about Gil running rampant—after the pack refused to mete out justice—they took matters into their own hands. Or my mother’s hands, as it turned out.
While not much of a team player normally, Mom agreed to be the Council’s executioner in this instance. I didn’t realize it then, being young and blinded by my friend’s pain, but I know now she did it to spare Luna what pain she could. I hated her for it at the time. So did Luna.
Mom caught Gil by using a morphing spell she’d always refused to teach me, or my sisters. Her excuse was that it was too dangerous to run with wild things. Once she got close enough to Gil’s wolf, she transformed back and bound him in iron. Iron forces a werewolf into their human shape, and holds them there. She took his life with a silver athame that is still in her room, locked away. I know, because she warned me never to touch it. It’s imbued with Gil’s spirit now, and the spirit of a crazed and vicious alpha male is not something to be trifled with.
I sometimes wonder if she took his soul, too, but I never could bring myself to ask.
Mom brought his body back to the pack. They couldn’t eat him the way they normally do their dead because of the moon madness, so they burned him instead. I was there, I saw the pyre.
I snuck in that night to see Luna, casting invisibility to get inside their lands. A spell I was barely capable of at the time. She attacked me as soon as I showed up in her room at the lodge. She didn’t call the pack down on me, but I was lucky to get out alive; a trio of older teenage wolves picked up my scent and nearly ran me down before I hit the perimeter.
Luna has vowed to tear out my mother’s throat. God knows I feel for her, but the w
hole bloody mess put quite the damper on our relationship. Then her pack crashed my twenty-first, almost killed Sy and tried to get their fangs on me. She wasn’t part of the alpha hierarchy then, but she damn well was when they went after Thomas several years later.
Now she’s top dog. Her and her lovely mate. My teeth grind together. If the pack really is targeting Duluth, it’s because Luna is ordering it.
She breaks the silence first.
“I never could sneak up on you, Sephie. It always pissed me the hell off.”
“It still does.”
She laughs then, a wild, animalistic sound that raises the hairs on the back of my neck. “Yeah, it fucking does. I could never hide anything from you.”
“I don’t know about that.” I give her a sidelong look and catch the flash of a toothy smile. I don’t like that smile, not at all. “Hearing some things that make me concerned.”
“And I hear Frost is back in town,” she shoots back. “Maybe you should be more concerned about keeping an eye on your ex-lover.” I resist the urge to flinch, but it’s a close thing. Everyone knows what happened between me and Jack. FTCs are a gossipy bunch.
“Jack doesn’t scare me.”
Luna’s lip curls at the obvious lie.
“And I do? Hell, I’ll take that as a compliment. But you can bet he’s scared of you, baby witch.” My hands tighten on the bridge. She hasn’t called me that in years. Not that we’ve been prone to regular conversations, but I’m confused. Why the hell does she think Jack would be scared of me? “They’re all scared of you. Weak and sneaky with it. But not me. I’ll give it to you straight. You best be careful. Shit is coming down, Persephone.”
I stare at her. Luna’s always needed to be the baddest badass around. Comes of being a female alpha, and her methods of attaining that come of what happened to her dad. Or so I tell myself. I kick a pebble off the bridge and into the shallow water, watching the splash and wishing things could be different. Me, I didn’t give a shit about power then and I don’t give a shit now. But I do protect my own.
“Just keep your hunts out of my city and we won’t have a problem, sunshine.”
My use of her old nickname makes her start, but she covers quickly. “Wake up, dammit. It’s not gonna be your city for much longer, Seph.”
Before I can ask her to explain that little nugget, she vanishes into the moonlight. I catch a flash of blood-tinged eyes low to the ground and then she’s gone.
A howl echoes down the canyon a minute later, a howl that makes me almost as cold as Jack’s magic.
After the encounter with Luna, I don’t wanna go home, so I head to the bar. It’s only about a forty-minute walk from Congdon to downtown, so I hoof it. I like to walk, what can I say? It usually helps me think, but tonight there just seems to be too much to sort through as I wind down the hill and finally hit Superior Street.
Snow starts flirting with me as I get closer to T&T. It’s thinking about falling for real, pressing what feels like teasing little kisses to my hair and cheeks. A smile tugs at my lips until it hits me why this feels so damn familiar.
Jack holding me down against the grass, grinning as he makes snowflakes fall over my hair and face…
I enter the alley and stop short. Because there he is, standing right outside T&T, watching me.
I fucking knew it.
“Bar’s closed, asshole.”
Jack leans against the brick wall by the door, arms folded, looking all long and dark and dangerous, watching me approach. “I want to say I can’t believe you own a bar now, but it actually makes perfect sense.”
“As the guy who gave me my first taste of whiskey, you should know.”
He chuckles. “I can’t regret that, you were cute as hell. Your eyes all watery, cheeks bright pink… hell, you could barely talk, but you still asked for more.” Jack shakes his head. “Typical Seph.” The warmth in his teasing unsettles me, and I can’t reply for a beat. When I do, I get right to the point.
“Why are you here, Jack?”
“Maybe I wanted to see your place.”
“At four in the morning?” I shake my head. “You’re stalking me, why?”
He just smiles. “Apparently, I’m not the only one. How’s Luna?”
I roll my eyes and give him my shoulder while I unlock the door, just wanting to be inside and alone. Then I hear it. A whisper against the stones, a touch of magic brushing my cheek. I turned my back on him. Again.
Just how much of an idiot am I?
I whirl, my fingers sliding over his forearm, the series of runic tattoos there buzz lightly under my touch. I yank my hand back, cursing. They used to do that now and then, like brushing against a weak electric fence. He never would tell me what those particular runes meant, or why they sometimes reacted that way to me. His other ink doesn’t do that. I learned to avoid touching him there, but I’d forgotten.
After the bullshit went down between us, I tried to find those runes in our family library, but I couldn’t. Another mystery I failed to solve. I glare at the twisting symbols, then Jack’s face.
He’s already backing off, hands raised. “I wasn’t—”
I don’t believe him. Rage bubbles up from somewhere deep inside me, taking over.
Rage for the memories that won’t stop messing with me ever since he showed up again. Rage at the pain and confusion they cause. Rage that I can’t seem to stop myself from going soft anytime he’s around. I can’t afford that, not again.
I’m done.
Time to see just how immune Jack really is to my magic.
10
“What are you doing, Seph?” Jack’s voice takes on an edge.
One that I ignore.
He has to touch me to freeze my magic, and I don’t plan on letting him get close enough for that. My innate magic will be worthless on him, but I can still cast.
Jack stares as rainbow-colored sparks dance over the backs of my hands. So do I.
Witch magic is rarely visible to anyone but the caster and almost never corporeal, but I’m so pissed, it bursts over my skin. Like sparklers on the Fourth of July.
Magic skips over the alley and up the walls. The air goes faintly purple as the surrounding energy is pulled so quickly to my bidding, it’s like reality is being torn a little. The alley seems to twist and bend. Something that smells like burning popcorn fills the air.
Jack’s eyes widen. My own breath comes fast and short. I’ve never done that before—never seen that done before—but the words keep falling from my lips, one after the other.
“The king was in his counting house…”
“Calm the fuck down. Right now. You’re gonna hurt yourself.” His tone is sharp and he looks honestly concerned, but what is honest to Jack? Anyway—I can’t.
I simply can’t calm down. Bricks spill down from above, along with a couple old stone roof tiles, crashing onto the pavement like mortars going off. Jack dodges them all, cursing.
“…counting out his money…”
Jack takes a step toward me, then stops, tension bunching his shoulders. There’s a reason people don’t just rush witches when they’re casting. Touch us once we’ve started calling the magic down—before the last word has been spoken—and all that unformed energy has the potential to go wild.
What does that mean? In simple terms, wild magic go boom.
Big fucking boom.
“The queen was in the parlor…”
I’m shaking as the words come out of me. It’s too much; him being back here, Luna’s bullshit, Georg’s bullshit…hell, even Mom being gone. It’s all catching up to me.
“…eating bread and—”
“No more rhymes now, I mean it,” Jack quips gently.
I pause, my hands in the air. He did not just quote The Princess Bride at me. Reality shimmers between us as I stare at him. “How do you remember that?”
“What can I say? Your taste in movies must’ve rubbed off on me.”
“Bullshit.” We spent half our re
lationship in Jack’s apartment, watching my favorite movies ’cause he didn’t know any, hiding out, hiding our relationship. But I never cared. I had him.
Or I thought I had.
He shrugs now, giving me the ghost of a smile, as if the air around us isn’t crackling, ready to explode, waiting on my rhyme. His face, though, is as pale as I’ve ever seen it. What’s he so damn scared of? “It did. Well…not those crazy blood fests you loved so much. What was that actress’s name? The one that’s in all of them?”
“Jamie Lee Curtis.”
Jack shudders. “That’s the one. My ears have never been the same…”
I take issue with this, my hands dropping a little as I shoot him a glare. “Hey, Halloween and Prom Night are classics, bub.”
He ignores this, except to roll his eyes, “…but The Princess Bride? Sure. What’s not to like?”
“Yeah.” A vision of me feeding him popcorn flashes in my head. His head on my lap, my fingers threaded in his hair.
My hands start to tremble. I suddenly want to cover my face and cry, because I can’t hurt him. I don’t know that my magic even could, but it doesn’t matter anymore, because I can’t fucking do it.
Instead, I whisper the last line of the poem, and let the magic dissipate in a simple spell of warmth with a little hiss.
All around us snow turns momentarily to rain, pattering across the pavement, wetting our hair and skin, sending the false scent of spring into the chill November air.
Suddenly as woozy as if I’d spent a night out with Sy doing the bar crawl on Tower Avenue, I sway, almost going over. It’s weird, because cast magic isn’t supposed to do that. It uses the energy around us, not our own, like innate does. Jack takes a quick step forward, but I wave him back. I don’t want him touching me right now. His hands fist at his sides. He shoves them in his pockets and glares at me.
“Don’t try that again. Attacking me for real is a very dangerous idea, Seph.” His voice has gone cold and stern.
“Why?” My throat is tight but I get the word out with some bite of my own. “I shot that bit of soul magic at you the other night.” Not that I’d come close to making contact.
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