by Kristie Cook
Michaela spun on me, shaking her head. For the first time in a week, she looked at me with something other than hatred.
“You can’t do this,” she whispered.
“I have to.” I brushed my thumb over the soft skin of her cheek. “He has a kid, Kales. His son deserves the chance to have a dad. I have … nothing.”
“You have me.” She blinked rapidly, tears pooling in her eyes. “What about us?”
I managed a small smile, but I really wanted to sweep her into my arms, bury my face in her neck, and cling to her forever. “We’ll figure it out. You heard her. This will buy us all time. But I have to at least try. For my brother. For both of our families. For all of us.”
She stared at me in silence, a million unsaid things flickering in her eyes.
“He’s here, Kales. He came through. That means something. Now it’s my turn to come through for him.”
“You’re always coming through for him,” she muttered.
“And I always will. For all of you. That’s what family does. Right?”
She pressed her lips together as a tear rolled down her cheek. I caught it with my thumb and brushed it away. Her chin trembled as she finally nodded, and then she threw herself at me. I caught her in my arms and pulled her into me, relieved to finally be holding her again. Her body shuddered against me as she fought to suppress a sob.
“Michaela, come here.” Addie held out her hand. “It’ll be okay. I promise.”
Michaela hesitated before stepping out of my embrace, and I reluctantly let her go. She moved over to Addie, who laid her arm over Michaela’s shoulders, giving her a squeeze. Addie leaned her head against Michaela’s, and her lips moved, but if she spoke actual words, I couldn’t hear them. She grasped Michaela’s hand for a brief moment, and Michaela’s eyes tightened. Then she dipped her chin before they both straightened.
“Let’s see what you can do,” Addie said to Magda, her tone challenging.
The other witch blinked, then nodded. She lifted both hands up, one palm facing me and the other facing Tase.
The knife wobbled and rattled on the floor, then rose into the air.
Her mouth curled up in a devious smile.
“I will end all of you,” Magda threatened. “But not today. And not because I give a flying fuck about any of you. I will do it for the Collector. Everything else is Magda’s story. Not mine.”
Then everything happened in a second.
The blade flew through the air right at me.
I lifted my hand, and the knife stopped.
At the same time, Michaela flicked two fingers.
The knife rotated, pointing back at its thrower.
Magda shrieked and jerked forward as though to run, but couldn’t.
Addie chanted softly with her hands splayed out in front of her, paralyzing Magda.
“You end today,” Michaela said as the blade plunged into Magda’s heart.
The woman exploded.
Literally.
Black smoke suddenly filled the room, blinding us. Wet, gooey gunk rained down, splatting on my head, my shoulders, the floor. A most horrific, yet familiar, odor brought me to my knees, gagging. The sound of vomit hitting the floor came from Tase’s direction.
“Fuck,” he choked out.
“Gross,” Addie gasped.
The smoke began to clear.
I blinked and stared through it as I rose to my feet.
Magda was gone.
A pile of pink plasma-like substance was left where she’d been.
“Skinwalker,” Michaela gasped, her voice muffled behind the glove she held to her face as she lifted from a crouch.
“Where the fuck did she go?” Tase demanded. He blurred around the room, looking for her.
“Who did she become?” Addie said. “That’s the better question.”
“Why the hell did you do that?” I shouted at her and Michaela. “She was our hope! And now we don’t even know what the fuck she looks like!”
Addie snorted and gestured at the mess around us. “Open your eyes, Xandru. She wasn’t a witch. I could barely sense any power in her diluted blood. Her little bit of magic couldn’t do anything more than save her own ass with a parlor trick.”
“She was bullshitting us,” Michaela said, flicking a piece of Magda’s old skin off of her.
Addie held up the Eye of Valerian, and Tase, Michaela, and I all groaned. Fire erupted in my throat again, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the pocket watch.
It was a beautiful piece, the silver lid’s intricate design embellished with slivers of moonstone.
It was an ugly piece, its darkness calling to me.
“This is our key to breaking Tase’s curse,” Addie declared. With her other hand, she held up a metal skull, about the size of my fist. One eye socket was closed off, covered with clock gears of various colors and sizes. The other was open, empty. I vaguely remembered noticing it at Dad’s old shack a few weeks ago, when I’d been overcome with bloodlust. Addie had been inspecting it earlier when we’d gone there, looking for Tase. I didn’t know she’d pocketed it. Now, she opened the skull’s jaw, snapped the Eye of Valerian into the inside of the empty eye socket, and shut the jaw. “And this is the cage we keep it in until we figure it out.”
She dropped the whole thing into her coat pocket.
The dark whispers in my head silenced. The burn in my throat vanished. Both Tase and Michaela moaned with relief. And Tase’s bright green eyes faded as more gray bled into them.
A murmur came from the center of the room.
“Gabe!” Michaela shrieked, blurring for her stirring brother.
“Kaekae?” he whispered. “Where are we?”
She fell to her knees beside him and gathered his thin body into her arms, rocking him while she cried tears of relief. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” He wriggled to free himself. “But you smell disgusting.”
She threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, my god, you’re okay!”
“We all smell disgusting,” Tase said. “Can we get the fuck out of here?”
Michaela stood and faced him. “Thank you.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t really do anything.”
“But you were willing. You stepped up, Tase, and I appreciate it.”
“We’re family, Michaela. Like it or not. If the time ever comes, I know you’d do the same for me and mine.” He jerked his head in Addie’s direction. “Smarty pants over there is the real hero, though. She was one step ahead of all of us.”
Addie scowled at him. “Fuck off, Tase.”
He opened his mouth, but must have realized saying anything was pointless. He had a lot of groveling to do if he ever wanted to be on her good side again.
“Well, you were one step ahead,” Michaela said to her. “How did you know?”
“The real Magda had real magic.” Addie shrugged. “I don’t know what that thing was, but it wasn’t her. It took me a while to figure it out, but I knew something wasn’t right, so I called her bluff. See, the Luna Coven’s spell on Tase ensures that it stays with him. That was the deal when we first cast it, remember? There’s no way it can be dispersed unless one of us does it. But I wanted to see if she’d even try.”
Tase rolled his head toward me. “And your dumb ass volunteered as tribute.”
My turn to shrug. “It’s what we do.”
“What about the rest, though?” Michaela asked Addie. “How’d you know about the Eye and that skull cage thing?”
Addie gave her a pointed look. “That I’ll tell you later.”
“So, back to what Tase said first,” Gabe said weakly. “Can we get the eff out of here? You guys stink, and I want to go home.”
That evening, I rapped on Michaela’s door, then fisted my hands in front of my mouth and blew on them as I waited for her to answer. After we’d returned through another portal this morning, she’d only had four words for me before shutting the door in my face.
She opened th
e door now, dressed in leggings and a long-sleeved, oversized T-shirt that I knew she wore as pajamas, her hair piled in a messy bun on top of her head. Her mouth fell open. “You came.”
I offered her a smile. “You said, ‘We need to talk.’ So I’m here to talk.”
“I know. I didn’t think—”
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s not to ignore you when you say we need to talk.”
She returned my smile and motioned me inside. “Is that all you’ve learned?”
I peeled my coat off and hung it on the coatrack before turning to face her. “Not even close.”
Her smile remained as she walked by me, her arm brushing against mine. She curled up sideways on the couch and pulled a thick purple sherpa blanket onto her lap, then patted the cushion in front of her before using the remote to turn the TV off.
“I’ve learned a lot, too,” she said as I sat down next to her, angling my body to face hers.
“You have?” I asked.
She gazed at her lap, her fingers picking nervously at the blanket. “I learned that you will do whatever is necessary to protect those you care about. Even if it means lying and keeping secrets from others you love.”
I swallowed. “Kales—”
She looked up at me. “It’s okay, Xandru. I understand. I didn’t like being the one you lied to, but I get why you did.” She blinked and looked away for a moment. “When you were willing to take Tase’s place and accept that deadly curse into your body for him, for his kid … it hit me. You’d do anything for your family. Even die for them. And … to be honest … I both love and hate that about you.”
“I’d do the same for you and your family.”
“I know that now. I didn’t believe it before, but I was wrecked with Gabe. He was all I could think about. But when you came with us to the mine, I knew. You could’ve insisted on finding Tase and then sent him off in the opposite direction to save himself. You could’ve left Addie and me alone to fend for Gabe ourselves.”
“You two did it all anyway,” I pointed out with a chuckle.
She snickered. “Yeah, we did. But you came. And that’s what matters. Like Tase, you showed up when I needed you most.”
“I was trying before then, too. I was doing everything I could think of on my end to fix things. To help you. Kales, I want to always show up when you need me most.”
“Until you’re needed by your family.”
“No. Not anymore.” Gnawing on my bottom lip, I mentally pulled together the right words to convince her. I tapped into the conversation Tase and I had today. “Look. In his own fucked-up way, Tase thought he was doing the right thing for everyone. He wants to break the curse so he can try to be a dad someday. And he thought if he could use the Eye of Valerian to do it, he’d also figure out how to use it to help Gabe, too. That’s why he disappeared for so long—he was trying to figure it out, all the way up to the last minute. He thought if he turned it over, we’d never have a chance to fix everything. But he ran out of time.”
“That’s what he says …”
“But I believe him. You know why? Because the Eye’s darkness had a hold on him, was digging into him, but he fought it. He overcame it to show up in that mine. And there’s only one way to overcome darkness.”
Michaela nodded, understanding. “Light. Love.”
“Exactly. Tase just has a really weird way of showing it.”
“And he always will. He’ll always be doing something stupid that you’ll have to bail him out of.”
“Probably,” I agreed. “But it will never again be against you or your family. He knows that from this point forward, you come first in my life. From now on, you and Gabe and Aurelia are part of our family. He made that vow, and in front of all of our siblings, so they know, too. And they’ll follow Tase’s lead. Even Adrian and Alina.”
She tilted her head. “So no more tug-of-war between our families with us in the middle?”
“If there ever is, I will let go of them before I let go of you. That was the vow I made to them.” I took her hand into mine and held it to my lips. “So, yes, I will always be there when you need me most.”
Smiling, she cupped her hand against my jaw. “I need you to trust me, too, though. Because we still don’t have that part right. If you’d told me about Tase having a son and everything else, we could have been working together all along instead of apart.”
“It wasn’t my secret to tell, and it would have put you in a bad situation with Addie.”
Her thumb stroked my cheek. “I get it. Like I said, I know where you were coming from. But there’s one thing I feel like I know about my parents and their secret to staying married for over two hundred years. And probably yours, too. They confided in each other, and they kept each other’s secrets. They trusted each other. What they shared in private stayed that way, no matter who else it might affect. I think that’s what husband and wife must do.”
I lifted a brow. “Husband and wife, huh?”
She smiled shyly and lifted her shoulder in a slight shrug, her hand on my face brushing against my short beard. “Maybe someday?”
I turned my head enough to plant my lips into her palm. “Definitely someday.”
She leaned forward, rocking up on her knees so our faces were inches apart, and brushed her lips against mine as her hands slipped behind my head. “I missed you.”
“You have no fucking idea.” I went in for a longer kiss, and the need to taste her, to please her, to claim her as mine again took over.
“Xandru,” she murmured against my lips, “I need you most right now.”
Chapter 21
Michaela
“So I put that Eye thing in the leather cuff thing and wore it before we went to Denver,” Gabe was telling Aurelia as they prepared for the first day back to school after winter break. I thought I’d wake up early to see them off. I also had a date with one of my besties and a demon summoner.
“I never saw you wear it,” Aurelia said.
“Duh. You would have made fun of me. Besides, it made me feel … weird.” He shrugged, as though it were nothing, but I knew better.
He’d already told me how he’d found the Eye of Valerian in the metal skull in the conservatory and had taken the Eye out. He couldn’t remember what he’d done with the skull, because the Eye had him so enamored, but evidently, he’d tossed it back in the conservatory, and Tase had found it.
Tase kept it because it was a skull—it looked cool.
Gabe wanted the timepiece for the leather cuff he’d found previously, having no idea that it was a dark artifact. Almost immediately he started to feel strange, but he didn’t connect the feelings to the Eye until the afternoon we left for Denver. He hadn’t wanted to leave it behind, in case someone else found it, so it’d been in his backpack, feeding him darkness, and that’s why he freaked out in the car. Then in the hospital, it had called to my and Xandru’s bloodlust when he opened the bag and grabbed it in relief that it wasn’t lost. By the time we returned to his room, the darkness had already overcome him, and he attacked me again.
After Gabe awoke as a mature moroi, he buried the artifact, too afraid to tell anyone about it, even when Tase started harassing him for it. But even buried, it had called to him. Once Tase took possession, its power only became stronger, likely feeding off of Tase’s curse while also returning the energy to him. Addie thought the longer Gabe denied its power, the more drained he became, until his body shut down his mind, putting him into the coma.
“Weird?” Aurelia snorted. “It almost killed you.”
“Well, it didn’t,” I said. “We need to put all of this behind us. Not. One. Word. To anyone at school. Gabe had a virus. He’s over it. That’s all. Understood?”
“Of course,” Aurelia said flippantly.
Yeah, that wasn’t going to work. I hated memory spells, but there was too much at risk for anyone to know as much as they did about the Eye of Valerian. Especially two kids, who could easily let
something slip to the wrong person without realizing it.
A horn honked outside.
“Gallad’s here,” Gabe said. “That’s cool that he offered me a ride to school.”
“You have all of your catch-up work?” I asked.
The Academy had actually returned to classes last week, but I’d kept Gabe home longer to ensure he was okay. He seemed to have fully recovered, but only time would tell. He’d been a little disappointed about having to go back to the Academy, but he understood now how easily things could go wrong. He didn’t want to take any risks.
What he didn’t know was that Gallad was ordered by the Court to give Gabe a ride to school today, and on the way, he’d be changing my brother’s memory about the Eye of Valerian.
“I’ll see you both tonight for the Festival of Lights, right?” I asked Aurelia and Gabe as they headed out the door. Neither answered, and Gabe was already on his way down the steps, Aurelia right behind him.
“Hey, hold on a sec.” I took her by the shoulders and dipped my head to look into her eyes. “Thank you for not being a brat during all of this with Gabe.”
She shrugged. “You had a lot going on. I didn’t want to add to it.”
Her kindness made me feel even worse as I made the connection with her mind and compelled her to forget about the Eye of Valerian and what it had done to Gabe.
“Gabe had a virus, but he’s fine now,” Aurelia repeated.
I nodded. “See you tonight.”
“See ya, Kaekae,” Gabe called before slipping into Gallad’s car.
“Yeah, see ya, Kaekae,” Aurelia echoed as she ran off down the drive to meet her ride at the street.
Sindi laughed from the front porch of the cottage next to ours. “I kind of like being an aunt. I get to teach them all kinds of fun stuff. Kaekae.”
“Shut up,” I growled, but then I smiled. “So does this mean you’re staying for a while?”
She snorted. “Who else is going to run this inn? You’re going to give me a raise, though, right?”
“Heh. Let’s see how this ski season goes first.”
She stared out at the snow-covered lawn and rocked on her boot heels. “Ah, well, I’d stay anyway. I still haven’t bagged me a lumberjack.” Giving me a sideways glance, she smirked. “Or a Roca.”