by Nadine Mutas
For a second she wondered what he meant. But then her eyes tracked to the note lying on the floor next to their chair, to the pained faces of Lily and Alek on the opposite couch, and her heart splintered anew.
Maeve. She was gone.
She left for Arawn’s lair, surrendering herself to save Merle’s baby. It can’t be, it can’t be, a part of her mind kept repeating, still unwilling to admit the irrefutable truth. And yet the proof of Maeve’s sacrifice stared her right in the face, black on white in her sister’s handwriting, and the sorrow of Maeve’s decision clung to the paper like a whiff of perfume.
Her stomach knotted so tightly it felt like a cramp. This is all my fault. She made that ill-fated deal for an open favor with Arawn in the first place, not covering her bases enough to prevent the Demon Lord from demanding her sister as his price. And now…she should have called Maeve right away after Arawn paused the deal this morning. She should have told Maeve about the pregnancy, and that the baby was safe.
Closing her eyes, she shook her head. Damn it all to hell, but she’d wanted to tell Maeve face-to-face that she was expecting, she wanted it to be this beautiful moment between sisters, so she could be able to hug Maeve and cry with her. But if she’d realized Maeve already knew about the baby, that Maeve had one foot on the doorstep, ready to sacrifice herself, she’d have called her. And then Maeve wouldn’t have felt the need to turn herself in. She’d still be here.
With a hand over her mouth, she covered her sob.
“Merle…” Lily tentatively said.
But she shook her head again. “I need…a minute.”
There had to be a way. There simply had to be a way to get her back. Her mind started working feverishly as she untangled herself from Rhun’s arms, combed through her hair with shaking fingers. How long had Maeve been gone? Maybe she wasn’t even at Arawn’s lair yet. Maybe she could…
With a soft gasp, she felt a piece clicking into place in her memory. Arawn wanted magical custody over Maeve…but Merle had to give it to him, didn’t she? Maeve had gone to him without consulting Merle—and she hadn’t agreed to a transfer of custody.
Merle was still head of the family. And Maeve was still a MacKenna, for all magical intents and purposes.
Could she…compel Maeve back? That was the right and power she held as the oldest living MacKenna, wasn’t it? She could magically order Maeve to do something, and Maeve would have to comply. She’d never done it before, had never exerted her privilege as head of the family, but if it was the only way to pull Maeve back before she made the biggest mistake of her life…
She gathered her magic.
Rhun stirred next to her, and shock, then anger vibrated down the mating bond. He grabbed her shoulders, turned her to face him. “No.”
“What?” Lily asked, sitting up straight.
“She’s calling on her magic.” His focus burned through Merle. “Whatever ill-advised idea you just had, little witch—don’t.”
“I can bring her back,” Merle whispered.
Lily startled. “No,” she echoed Rhun’s sentiment, her eyes going wide.
Alek glanced between Rhun, Lily, and Merle. “Will someone please explain?”
“As head of the family, Merle can compel Maeve to come back,” Lily said. “But it’ll draw on her magic, and we don’t know if it’s enough to call for a payback to the Powers That Be…”
“Which would endanger our baby,” Rhun gritted out, still gripping Merle’s shoulders.
“We don’t know that,” Merle shot back.
It was only a little bit of magic, and she wouldn’t even have to tap the power worked into the layers of the world to supplement her own…
Her powers swirled to the surface, ready to be wielded. She closed her eyes, and time slowed to a crawl. She barely heard Lily’s protest, Rhun’s muffled curse as she primed her magic—
Pain sliced through her. She cried out, sagged into Rhun’s arms. What was hap—
Dark silence where a bond once thrived within her.
Aching, the spot was aching like a fresh cut, bleeding magic in her core. She choked on a breath. Patted the severed link with mental fingers, wincing at the pain.
“No,” she whispered. “No, no, no…”
Rhun’s hands now cradled her face. “Merle. Merle. Look at me. What happened?”
“She’s…she’s gone.”
He frowned, opened his mouth to say something, but closed it again.
“I can’t feel her anymore.” Her voice was scarcely more than a sob. “The link. It’s severed.”
Rhun’s face fell, and Lily stifled a gasp.
There was only one explanation for why the familial link between witches broke—death. Maeve was…she was…
“That’s not what happened.” Rhun’s features were grim, his voice determined. “That’s not what happened, okay? She’s not—” He broke off, clenched his jaw. “Why would he do that? Arawn wants her for her powers. She’s worth more to him alive.”
Silent tears now spilled from her burning eyes.
Rhun—his shape blurring—looked to Alek and Lily as if for help.
Alek cleared his throat. “Rhun’s right. If there’s one good quality about Arawn, it’s that he’s patient. He doesn’t make rash decisions. He doesn’t kill impulsively. He plays a long game, and keeping Maeve around as an asset yet to be used fits his MO.”
Merle hiccuped. “Then why was the link severed? What other explanation is there?”
Lily leaned forward on the couch, her voice thoughtful. “Remember how my mom lost the link to me when I turned into a demon? She—and you—first thought it was because I died. You didn’t know a witch could be turned into something else, and you couldn’t have guessed the turning would sever the link. There are other explanations. We’re just not aware of all of them yet.”
“You think she was turned into something else?” Merle croaked.
Lily rubbed her temple. “No…well, it’s a possibility, but I think it might be something else altogether. Arawn has a lot of strange powers we don’t even know about.”
“When Arawn came to claim Maeve,” Rhun said, “didn’t he say he wanted magical custody over her? And that you’d have to transfer it to him?”
Merle sniffed and nodded.
“What if he just did that? What if severing the link to you is part of the process?”
“It’s…possible,” Merle conceded, her chest a little less tight.
“Then we’ll assume that as the most logical explanation,” Lily said. “The other option doesn’t make any sense.”
“She’s alive, little witch.” Rhun caressed her cheek.
“That doesn’t mean she’s safe,” she whispered back. “That…monster owns her now. And…all the things he could do to her…” Her voice broke.
“Merle,” Alek said gently. “I’ll do whatever I can to find out where exactly she is, and how she’s doing.” As one of Arawn’s enforcers, he had the necessary connections.
She sniffed, wiped at her eyes. “Thank you.”
The doorbell rang, startling all of them. Lily and Alek exchanged glances, then looked at Rhun and Merle.
Merle blinked, sat up. Right. They couldn’t go out during the day because of their sensitivity to sunlight…
“I’ll go,” Rhun said with a long-suffering sigh. “Since I’m the only one not inconvenienced by a convenient sun allergy, or a bun in the oven.”
“I’m not sick or disabled,” Merle groused.
“No, but you’re super-precious and growing a little witch volcano in your belly, which has all of my protective instincts running in overdrive, which means I’ll coddle you until you strangle me.” He winked at her as he walked out of the room.
And there it was. The familiar feeling of not knowing which she wanted more: kiss him or smack him.
When he returned a few minutes later, he was holding an envelope and frowning. “This was stuck to the front gate. It says ‘Murray’.”
He raised his brows at Merle and Lily, silently asking who should have it. Lily rose and took it from him.
“I’m still a Murray,” she murmured and opened the envelope, pulled out the letter, and read it. Her eyes narrowed, her nostrils flaring. “It’s from Juneau.”
Merle’s blood pressure soared just hearing the name. That conniving bitch of an Elder had driven the formerly united witch community apart by taking a hardliner stance when Lily was turned into a demon—through no fault of her own, at that. Juneau forced Merle and Hazel to fight her and her followers in order to protect Lily, and when Juneau declared Merle and Hazel traitors to witchkind and rallied half the Elders to agree, the other half walked out and joined with Hazel and Merle.
And now the community was divided, and each side had been eyeing the other for weeks without serious incident. But it felt like the calm before the storm. Merle and Hazel, and the other Elders on their side, had reached out several times to Juneau and her witches in hopes of mending the rift in the community. To no avail. Juneau and her followers didn’t even deign to reply.
Until now.
Merle sat up straighter. “What does it say?”
“She wants to meet.”
Merle blinked. That was…unexpected.
“Yeah,” Lily said grimly. “I’m kind of flabbergasted, too.”
Alek quickly typed something on his phone, one side of his mouth tipping up, and then he turned the device around so they all could see. “It’s a trap!” an ugly-looking alien shouted in the short video clip.
Alek grinned at Lily. “You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for an appropriate situation to play that.”
“I’m so thrilled the conflict in the witch community could feed your addiction to Star Wars references.” Lily’s flippant-sounding reply was undermined by the warmth of her smile as she looked at him.
“The brilliance of that reference notwithstanding,” Rhun chimed in, “I tend to agree with the sentiment. It smells like a trap.”
“I don’t know,” Lily said, chewing on her lower lip, her focus on the letter. “She says she wants the meeting in a neutral place with all participants bound by oath not to use magic or other weapons during the meeting. That sounds pretty reasonable.”
Merle mulled it over. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this…”
Alek snickered, and Lily shot him a look and whispered, “Would you get your head out of the Star Wars universe now?”
Merle ignored them. “…but this might be our only chance to make peace before more blood is spilled.” She caught Rhun’s look, her heart twisting. “I don’t want any more witches to die.”
“Neither do I,” he replied, his eyes softening. “But I don’t trust Juneau to keep her word, and I wouldn’t put it past her to turn this into an ambush.”
She heaved a sigh. “We need to get in touch with the other Elders on our side. See what they think. And…ugh.” She thumped her head against the backrest of the chair. “Hazel. She’s still in Faerie looking for Basil and Rose. We can’t have this meeting without her, but we can’t let Juneau know we’re stalling because Hazel’s not here. Juneau and her ilk will see her absence as a weakness and pounce on us.”
“By the way,” Lily said into the heavy silence that followed, “we need to come up with names for both factions.”
Merle frowned at her. “The what now?”
“Well, we don’t have a snazzy name for our side. We just say ‘our side.’ And saying ‘Juneau and her rabid acolytes’ is quite a mouthful every time. We need something short and catchy.”
Alek opened his mouth, but Merle signaled him to shut up.
“She’s on a roll now,” she whispered to him, eager to hear the fun stuff her best friend would come up with. “Let her finish her speech.”
“Just think of Harry Potter,” Lily went on, eyes gleaming. “The bad guys were the Death Eaters. The good guys the Order of the Phoenix, or the Order for short. And then there’s Star Wars.”
Alek perked up.
“There’s the Empire on the one side,” Lily continued, “and the Rebellion on the other.”
“Don’t forget the new one,” Alek said. “They’ve got new names.”
“Right.” Lily snapped her fingers at him. “You’ve got the First Order for the baddies, and the Resistance for the heroes. See? Those are cool names! We need us some like that.” And with that, she crossed her arms and gave them all a smug smile.
Despite the gravity of the overall situation, Merle couldn’t help grinning. That’s what best friends were for—making you laugh in troubled times.
“All right,” she said to Lily. “I’m game. Let’s come up with some snazzy names.”
Rhun raised his hand. “Can’t we just repurpose Death Eaters for Juneau and her devotees? It would certainly fit her brand.”
“Nah.” Merle crinkled her nose. “That might be an insult to the actual Death Eaters.”
“How about Zealots?” Alek offered.
Lily nodded. “Ooooh, that’s good.”
“Draconians,” Rhun threw in.
Merle turned to him. “I like that one better.”
“Of course you do,” Lily said. “He’s your mate.”
“Draconians does have a better ring to it,” Alek grumbled.
A cocky smile snuck onto Rhun’s face. “I am full of awesome.”
Merle batted her eyelashes at him. “Well, then how about you grace us with an excellent suggestion for our side, oh exalted one?”
“I like that nickname.” He pointed at her. “I want you to use it in bed tonight.”
Lily groaned and covered her ears. “Stop! TMI.”
Merle breathed past the heat of embarrassment rising to her neck and face and narrowed her eyes at Rhun. “You better toss in a brilliant idea for a name right now, or I’m going to strangle you.”
“Aequitas,” he countered.
“Bless you,” Alek said.
Rhun leveled a glare at him. “It’s Latin and stands for justice, equality, or fairness. Cicero saw it as a trifold concept of equity between the gods, the spirits of the underworld, and human beings. Since our side”—he winked at Merle—“seeks fairness in dealing with demons and doesn’t want to label them all evil, but rather strives for a world in which beings aren’t prejudged based on the species they were born to, while still keeping the human population safe from otherworldly threats, the name is fitting, don’t you think?”
Lily gaped at him. “How…even…?”
“I’ve been alive for a century,” Rhun said. “I did spend some of that time learning things.”
“I love you so hard,” Merle breathed.
Rhun grinned. “Does that mean you’ll call me ‘exalted one’ tonight?”
Chapter 4
The main part of Arawn’s lair, it turned out, stretched out for what seemed like miles underground. Maeve followed Lucía and the new bane of her existence through tunnels upon tunnels and cavernous rooms and along galleries above yawning chasms, the bottom of which she couldn’t make out in the dark. She suspected half of the trip through this subterranean sprawl was solely intended to intimidate her.
And it grated on her that he succeeded.
Merle had told her about her visits to Arawn’s territory for the magic she worked for him, but from what Maeve gleaned of those tales, she could say with certainty that Merle and the others didn’t have the slightest idea of how much power and influence and sheer number of forces Arawn truly had at his disposal. They still underestimated him—all but Alek, maybe. He didn’t talk much about it, but he had to know.
One lengthy trip through his underground dominion was enough to give Maeve a more realistic notion as to the power and authority Arawn commanded. The range of his lands alone was impressive. More so, however, was the deference and submission with which his subjects greeted him. Beings would bow low, some of them even prostrating themselves before him, and none of them would meet his eyes. They spoke in soft tones, humble murmurs,
the air itself hushing wherever he went.
And it drove home just how out of line she had been with the way she talked to him in the Grove, compared to the way his people treated him. She understood now why Warrick was so pale when she spoke to Arawn with an air of defiance. Because no one else here did. Ever.
She clenched her jaw. Well, she had no intention of groveling before him. She’d be respectful, but if he expected her to bend the knee and kiss his feet and whisper, “My lord,” then he had another think coming. Certain parts of her…had not been broken during those dark days in the warehouse, so much as they’d been reinforced. Certain things…she would never do.
Not for him. Not for anyone.
The bare, earthen walls of the wide tunnel they were in changed as they went ahead, became roughcast and more civilized-looking. Fireflies still danced in the air, but they weren’t the only illumination anymore. Crystals set in the walls glowed and bathed the hallway in soft, warm light, and here and there even beams of sunlight peeked through skylights that, at closer look, turned out to be vents that channeled the light through however many angled mirrors down from the real skylight in the surface.
Her eyes tracked to Arawn walking in front of her—Lucía was at her side—to the way his powerful frame moved with sinuous grace…far more grace than someone of his massive build should possess. It should have been a contradiction in and of itself, and yet…it fit. Like a tiger that, despite its bulging muscles and hulking form, still flowed with feline elegance.
And she couldn’t wrench her eyes off him.
Off the firmness of his backside, the broad shoulders and the corded forearms dusted with dark hair. Off the muscles flexing in his legs as he walked.
His magic was a steady beat of power inside her. Different from how the link to Merle had felt. So different. Darker, sensual, and…devastating. Because this constant reminder of his presence, his essence, made it so much harder to ignore the host of unbidden things she felt at the thought of him. Things she didn’t believe she could experience anymore after…
In the months since, her body had been numb. No spark of interest in any male. The mere thought of intimacy terrified her. It continued that way for quite a while, and she almost resigned herself to never feeling desire again.