by Eleri Stone
And yet, this one had done just that.
She could feel the wards buzzing along. A familiar sound, reassuring. These were weak, no doubt about that. A hundred years was the outer edge of their life expectancy. All magic dissipated eventually. Strange to think that the founding witch of Ragnarok had set these so very long ago. Kathy had replaced their own as her first order of business once she took over as clan witch. Apparently Aiden had expected Raquel to do the same. She wished she could. It was hard to be excited about the wedding when she was so hyperaware of how badly she was letting everyone down.
Christian... He hadn’t even spoken to her since her revelation.
Dry leaves crunched underfoot. Everything was painted in shades of brown except for a couple of tall pines and some stubborn tufts of grass poking through the leaves. It was quiet and very peaceful. But not safe, particularly not now.
She knelt on the ground when she came to the next stone and covered the rune with her hands. It was warm to the touch. All potential energy there, keyed to draw energy from the ley line. It wasn’t necessary to direct the flow to the ward. The power stones would soak it up, store it. When the wards were activated by a threat, they’d pull from the nearest available energy source. A simple design, but those were usually the best.
She closed her eyes and felt the magic along with the wall that blocked her from that pure, deep well. She wanted to dive in, let all that power flow into her body. She wanted to dismantle the failing wards while the fault was quiet and create blazing pillars of protection that would last for another century. She had the raw power to do it. But a gigantic wall stood between her and her birthright, with no way to breach it.
She’d tried. Heaven help her, she’d tried everything she could think of. Meditation, yoga, crystals, pain because her last idiot of a boyfriend had suggested that as a way to break the block. She still had the scars on her thigh to disprove that theory. She’d been so desperate and so stupid. Fen had promised to help her with the tattoos. Those would be permanent too, but at least he wouldn’t place them until she was ready. She was so fucking ready to break down that wall she hurt with it.
She found a tendril of power, a leak, the slenderest of threads, and she held onto that, drawing at it until she had just enough to burn the gap she’d left in the rune to complete the figure. She smiled as it powered up. She could feel it link to the ley line, feel it connect to the nearest ward stone as well. Standing, she brushed her hands off on her jeans and met Lois’s haughty stare.
Lois was just waiting for her to screw up. Only two stones left.
* * *
Christian walked down the front steps of the home he’d rented for Raquel’s family. It was his sister’s home, but she’d married into another clan last year, leaving it empty. It was the house they’d grown up in, small but well kept because his father believed in living simply. He’d been an Æsir purist and a warrior of the Spartan variety. Disciplined, stern, demanding.
Christian had put a second bathroom in for Wendy off the master bedroom, sparing no expense—a steam shower and heated towel rods, marble tile surrounding the big tub. It had given him great pleasure to put such a lavish room inside his father’s home. The kitchen was new too. They’d expanded it, adding an attached four-season room that overlooked the park. Now when he visited, he barely recognized the old place. Some of his father’s ideals were too deeply ingrained for him to question, others not so much. He hoped Raquel was comfortable here. He hadn’t had more than an hour alone with her since she’d arrived to find out.
She wasn’t home now and he was at a loss. Not that he expected her to sit on her hands and wait for him to show up, but why of all people would she go to Lois? He shoved his hands in his coat pockets and started walking toward the shop. He should have tried harder to draw her out after the mess the other night, should have taken the day off. But there’d been a problem at the grain elevator. Beth had called in sick, and Jim couldn’t find the records he needed on her computer. Before Christian knew it, he’d lost half his day. But he’d make it up to Raquel. He had his whole life to make it up to her.
This should be easy. He genuinely liked women and women had always liked him. Raquel had seemed nervous and excited but content with the match that first day. And within just a few short hours, she’d become wary. He didn’t know what he’d done to screw up, or even if it was something that he had done. This secret her parents had wanted her to carry had to have been an awful burden. There were the pressures of adjusting to a new town, Lois’s antagonism and her discovery of the problem with their portal. All of it had probably combined into a perfect shitstorm that made her doubt the wisdom of continuing with the wedding. He’d like to believe that she’d made her confession about her block because she trusted him, but he suspected she’d done it to test him—or worse, to cast him off. He wouldn’t abandon her like that. If she’d known him at all, she’d have known that.
But that was the problem wasn’t it? She understood him as little as he understood her.
The light was still on inside the florist’s shop but the closed sign was up. He stopped outside the door. It was nearly six and most of the shops along Main Street were already closed except for the diner two doors down. For the first time in years, there was a woman he wanted badly to seduce but he couldn’t think where to begin. By rights, she was already his.
He didn’t want to screw this up.
There was no movement in the shop. She might already be gone, out to eat with her sister, Grace or even Fen. He couldn’t make himself knock at the window and when his phone rang, he turned away to answer it with an uneasy sigh of relief mixed with guilt.
Chapter Eight
When Fen called to see if she and Audrey wanted to come over later to go over the plan for the runes, he mentioned that he was picking up supplies in town and Raquel jumped at the chance to hitch a ride. Fen’s awkward pause told her she’d overstepped.
“I can go with Audrey,” she said, backpedaling. “She just...really likes to shop.”
“And you don’t?”
“Not for shoes.” With Audrey they’d be gone all day, until the energy drain from being so far from the fault forced a retreat. The nearest town with decent shopping was an hour away. Two hours of drive time would mean Audrey could potentially have her trying on every shoe in town, all the while harassing her for not having taken care of it sooner.
When she started to explain this to Fen, he said, “Okay, yeah. That would be cruel. Will you be up by noon?”
By noon? “I told you I’m not a morning person, but I’m not that bad. Noon’s fine.”
Noon was actually great because Audrey had a meeting with the caterer to discuss table linens. When she’d heard Raquel tell the woman to pick whatever she liked, Audrey’s eyeballs had nearly exploded. She’d volunteered to go in her sister’s stead. Raquel didn’t see what the big deal was over napkin color but Audrey, she knew, would make sure everything was perfect. So the least Raquel could do was to take care of the damn shoes.
The wedding dress was long—no one would even be able to see her feet. She could wear sneakers except Audrey would surely notice and Raquel would never hear the end of it. It was the sort of thing that would matter to Christian too. And if it was important to him, then she’d go shoe shopping, much as it pained her to do so.
Fen was a good sport and even though it was shoe shopping, they had fun. She liked hanging out with him.
When they stopped for lunch at a diner on their way, he didn’t blink when she ordered a side of onion rings with her cheeseburger and still made room for pie. Of course, the man did have a truly disturbing fondness for ketchup so maybe that explained why he didn’t criticize her culinary choices. He didn’t complain that time ceased to have meaning for her when she stepped into the bookstore, and he didn’t tease her about the stack of romance novels she picked up.
She caught the wistful expression on his face when he returned a big, kind of pricey book on art to the sh
elf. She fought the impulse to add the book to her order as a thank you, but she did make note of the title. Friends could buy friends gifts, right? And that’s what he was—her first friend from her new clan. Kind and funny and smart. It was an enormous relief to find someone here that she could just be herself around.
She found shoes and did it in a hurry, as that was the one part of the trip where Fen truly seemed like he’d rather be somewhere...anywhere else. On their way out of town, he ran into the tattoo shop to grab his supplies and she called Christian to let him know they were running late.
“I’ll meet you at the house,” he said, sounding distracted. “Beth, one of the riders, is having a wine tasting at her shop in town. If you’re up to it...”
“We were planning to look at the book of runes Kathy sent me and see if we can work up a sketch for the tattoo. Audrey’s coming. Can we skip the party, or do we really need to go?”
“I need to go. I promised her a few weeks ago. But I’ll make an excuse for you. Maybe I can leave early and come over.”
“That would be great.”
Fen held the door for the woman entering the shop as he was leaving. He also totally checked out her ass while doing it. Raquel must have muttered something out loud.
“What?” Christian said in her ear. “I didn’t catch that.”
“Oh, nothing.”
Fen walked to the truck, lean and fast and sort of dangerous-looking. He moved like a hound even in human form. There was something powerfully attractive about that in a purely animalistic way—probably why the woman was still watching him through the store window.
She said goodbye and clicked off her phone, grinning when Fen opened the door. “That girl is checking you out.”
He gave a put upon sigh. “A heartbreaker, that’s what I am.”
“I can see that.”
He tossed his bag in the backseat and started up the truck. “Some people just want what they can’t have. It’s a normal thing. It fades, especially when all they’re after is the challenge.”
There was a strange note in his voice, as if he was trying to tell her something. Even though Christian had been upfront with her about how many women he’d been involved with, people—women especially—of the clan seemed to feel compelled to warn Raquel about it. She would have been fine with that if they’d come right out and tell her they thought her fiancé was a slut to her face, but it was all hints and innuendo. She hadn’t expected it from Fen. She frowned out the window.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
He gave her a longer, harder look. “It’s the first time you’re quiet all day and you look like you’re thinking about politics in the Middle East.”
She shook her head and smiled into his eyes. “I’m fine. Did you get what you wanted?”
“All of it. We have everything we need to permanently defile your sweet, young body.”
She snorted. “Defile? You couldn’t defile freshly fallen snow.”
“You don’t think so? You’ve only known me what? A week now?”
“Yep. Seven days.” Fourteen days until the wedding, not that she was counting them down like a doomsday clock or anything. “It seems longer, doesn’t it?”
A funny look crossed his face, but he nodded in agreement. “It does.”
She took a long sip from the water bottle she’d left in the truck. “Christian is going to Beth’s house tonight.”
“Without you?”
“He said we should stick to our plan, but...Beth won’t be offended, will she? Were you invited?”
“No.” He gave her a quick smile, eyes glinting with humor. He had nice eyes—an unusual shade of green. Right now, they were warm, almost hazel, but when the light hit them just right they turned gold. “Beth doesn’t invite me anymore. She got tired of asking, which is just as well because I got tired of saying no.”
“How very antisocial of you,” she murmured, jealous that he had a built-in excuse to get out of that kind of thing.
“And you on the other hand are dying to go to a cocktail party, I can tell. I’m busy tomorrow, but we can do this Saturday if you want.”
She rocked her head to one side. “Let’s stick with the plan.”
“Christian likes to entertain. You’ll be planning your own parties soon.”
“Not likely. But if I do, you’ll come to them.”
His smile this time was slow—and a little sad. “Not likely.”
“Do you really think the shoes will be okay?”
“For the party?”
She rolled her eyes. “For the wedding.”
“I’m the best tracker in the clan—if I can’t follow you, Rocky, no one can.” But she could hear the amusement in his voice so she didn’t take offense. “Do you like them?”
“What?”
“The shoes.”
“Yes.” While it had seemed like a great idea at the store now that she was heading back to show Audrey, doubt was setting in.
“Then they’re the right ones.”
“Audrey won’t like the color.” A pale pink that reminded her of the blush at the center of the single white rose Christian had sent her yesterday. “Do you think Christian will care? They’re not very traditional.”
Fen considered it for a moment and shrugged. “Well, they’re probably not the ones he would have picked out, but he doesn’t have to wear them.”
“Right,” she said, capping her water bottle and putting it in the holder. She turned the radio up and searched until she found a station she could live with. “I saw you checking out that girl’s ass, by the way.”
He raised his brows. “I don’t check out girls, Rocky.”
“Fine. That very definitely grown woman’s ass.”
He grinned and shot her a look. “Are you sure you weren’t checking her out?”
She shook her head and looked out the window again. Dark came early this time of year and the sun was already setting behind the far hills. They called them hills. Coming from Colorado, that seemed almost sacrilegious. But there was a clean kind of beauty to the area and all of the neatly squared tracts of land soothed the part of her that craved order.
Fen was wrong about her skipping around in conversations. She was just able to carry multiple threads in her head at the same time and switch between them at will. A skill similar to spellcasting, weaving the different strands of power together. It had taken her a while to realize that not everyone thought the same way she did. It drove her mother crazy. Fen didn’t seem fazed by it. She wondered if Christian would be.
Fen took a right turn onto a gravel road. In the side mirror, she watched the dust spin out behind them.
“What are you smiling about?”
She turned to look at him, but his eyes were on the road. One hand on the steering wheel, the sleeve on his T-shirt had ridden up, revealing a nicely defined biceps and the edge of his tattoo—Fenrir breaking his chains. His design. He glanced her way, eyebrows raised. “You’re blushing.”
She touched her cheek. “I am not.”
“What is it?”
“This is the song I lost my virginity to.” She laughed at the expression on his face and then stopped abruptly. “Oh, God. I’m sorry, Fen.”
“No, it’s all right.”
It wasn’t all right. She hadn’t meant to mock him. She grimaced. “If it makes you feel any better, I could probably narrow it down to a single verse.”
“That bad?”
“Uh-huh.”
The silence stretched but not uncomfortably. Some of the tension left his shoulders and his hand eased its death grip on the wheel. The crunch of gravel beneath the wheels nearly drowned out the radio. “Tell me.”
Startled, she stared at his profile, trying to decide if he was serious. Fen looked very serious, but other than that she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. This is a bad idea. But it was also the first time he’d asked her for anything, and this was the kind of thing she’d share with any of her fr
iends. She could be friends with Fen. She wanted to be.
“His name was Brad Dougan.”
“Sounds like an asshole,” Fen said immediately, but the corner of his mouth turned up and she relaxed a little bit.
“I haven’t even started. He went to my high school and we’d been dating for two months, which I know makes me sound easy, but it wasn’t that exactly. It wasn’t even him. I was ready. We waited until there was a surge so my parents would be gone. And that was it.”
He raised an eyebrow. “That was it?”
“Pretty much. We were on my bed. This song was on the radio.”
“Green Day?”
“What’s wrong with Green Day?”
“Nothing. It just seems like an odd choice for a seduction.”
She tilted her head. “What would you choose?”
“Honestly, I’ve never considered it,” he said gently. “Go on.”
She felt a twinge of uncertainty but shrugged it off. “Okay, my bathroom light was on and so was my tank top. He never even made it under my shirt. God, he was nervous. I thought he was going to tear the condom trying to get it on. And then...it was over.”
Fen shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m not. He did get better eventually.” She laughed. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this.”
The silence stretched and that twinge of uncertainty grew into more of an ache.
“You probably shouldn’t be.”
She met his eyes and it was there again—that sick mix of longing and regret that they weren’t ever going to talk about. “No,” she agreed. “I probably shouldn’t.”
* * *
Fen’s house was a family-sized ranch at the edge of town. The hardwood floors in the entryway looked recently finished, but the furniture appeared to have been there forever. They were likely hand-me-downs. Since clan didn’t tend to move around like the rest of society, a lot of people ended up living in the houses they grew up in. The furniture might actually have been here for quite some time. The couch was brown...plaid with a colorful afghan folded on the nearest cushion. She could almost picture a five-year-old Fen snuggled up on that couch in his Spiderman pj’s watching Barney.