by Jade Alters
“Do you think you could cast one over the whole house?” Ian says. “Something to repel evil spirits or anyone with power and malicious intent?”
“Oof…” I scratch my head, trying to think. The larger the area you’re trying to cover, the more power is required. I would definitely need the guys to help me. Just them being there, their power catalyzed through their physical presence on top of a chant, would reinforce a spell on something as a big as a house. But that’s also probably a different spell than the one I used on my room, and I’m not sure I know what the spell would be. “I need to call Shea,” I mutter.
“Shea?” Mitch says.
“My best friend,” I explain. “And a good witch. She studies this stuff a lot. She might know more about casting over a house and the right spell to use.
I whip up my phone and call up Shea, getting up from my seat because I can’t talk normally when people are just sitting there watching me. I take the call into the library as I’ve decided it’s my favorite room in the house. Which makes sense, given how much I love to read.
“Vic!” Shea all but explodes when she answers the phone. “Tell me everything!”
“I kissed Darren and Ian,” I blurt out.
I swear, I really meant to save that information for later seeing as how it’s not at all the reason I called. I hear Shea’s gasp through the phone and plop down in the big, black leather chair by the French door, squeezing my eyes shut.
“You didn’t!” Shea says. “Do they know? About each other, I mean?”
“Oh,” I clear my throat and make a sort of nervous laughing noise that sounds like a donkey. “Yeah, they do. That’s… not actually a problem. Ian said they don’t get jealous of each other.” I shrug even though she can’t see it.
“Vic, are you telling me you could have sex with all four of these men and they’d be fine with it?”
“Um,” I say, twirling a lock of hair around my finger. “Potentially. I think so. Unless it’s my messed up spell making them act this way, but it might not be. Maybe.”
“Vic, you better bang these hotties or I’ll never speak to you again.”
“Okay, okay,” I say, laughing. “But that’s not why I called. I need your expert magic advice again.”
It takes a while, but we finally work out the right spell to cast for protection over the entire house. Shea has to dig around for some old spell books of her grandmother’s which gives us time on the phone to talk about the boys. I find myself going on and on about Brendan’s aristocratic sensibility and Darren the adorable geek and Mitch the sweet surfer and Ian the “seems to always know what to do” alpha.
“Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t be able to choose just one,” Shea says, having finally found the right spell.
The idea of not having to choose, makes me shiver, but I put that aside for now.
“Okay,” Shea says. “Here are the ingredients you’ll need.”
It turns out I already have most of the ingredients for the spell with me. The rest I need to procure from a magic shop. When I update the guys, Ian tries to insist that I should stay at the house while Brendan goes to pick up the ingredients, but I’m too worried about him getting the wrong thing since he’s not versed in casting. Ian finally relents, and I go off with Brendan. It’s a little bit fun (and a little nerve-wracking) to go off with Brendan on an errand. I ask him about studying under that French chef and he tells me all about it. When I happen to mention a novel I read about a chef, that gets us talking about books again.
“I’d love to read a book with you,” I say wistfully as he pulls over in front of the magic shop that’s hidden away on a shady little part of Green Street. They each have their own cars and Brendan’s is a sleek, forest green Jaguar. I feel like a million bucks just riding in it. “I mean, ya know, like a club. If we both read something neither of us has read before and discussed it. That would be fun. I love talking about books.”
Brendan shoots me a funny look as he pulls the emergency brake. Then, he gets out and walks around to meet me, taking my hand like a true gentleman as he helps me out of the car.
“I don’t see why we can’t?” Brendan says. The breeze is blowing his long dark hair around and the sun makes his dark eyes glitter. He’s got the longest eyelashes… they’re sort of hypnotic.
“I guess I’m just afraid that when all of this is over, you all won’t want me anymore,” I whisper. The thought makes me want to cry. I feel such a connection to them. Even without the spell, it all seems too good to be true.
“I don’t think that’s possible,” Brendan whispers. He kisses me then; chastely and sweetly on the lips. It’s a soft, sweet kiss and the little smack of our lips sounds so nice to my ears. Still, even that little kiss is as electric as the others, and I shiver. He rubs my arms as if I need to be warmed up. “You’re blushing,” Brendan says in my ear.
I smile at him a little impishly and murmur, “Shut up.” He cackles at that and takes my hand as we head into the magic shop.
“Okay, here we go.”
Brewing this spell is the easy part. I guess I shouldn’t be cocky about it considering how much I screwed up so royally with the initial repulsion spell, but I’ve checked my ingredients about five times by now. Once we got home, I laid everything out on the kitchen counters. I even had Brendan double-check everything with me just to make sure I wasn’t misreading anything or mistaking one herb for another. There are about thirty ingredients for this spell, and unlike the simple little spell I cast on my bedroom, this one has to be brewed in a cauldron over a fire.
Brendan seems nervous about me brewing in his kitchen and he puts almost every single thing away until there’s nothing left on the counters. He even double-checks the temperature of the stove a couple of times.
“Do you need help mixing?” He asks.
“I’m not going to mess up your kitchen,” I finally blurt out. “I’m very tidy.”
“No, no!” His brows crease and he throws up his hands. “It’s not that at all, Victoria. I just want to be sure you have everything you need. Do you need help?”
I cast him a relieved smile and say, “Sure.” They really are all sweethearts.
Brendan goes to work chopping and peeling and I start heating up oil in the bottom of my cauldron. I have to make sure it doesn’t burn, and then I have to melt a couple of black candles over it as I stir. I will need Brendan’s help for that. I don’t understand how any witch manages some of the more complex spells alone.
Maybe that was the real reason I screwed up that spell. Because I tried to do it on my own. It’s worth thinking about, anyway.
“Raven feather…” Brendan hands it to me and I snip it apart over the cauldron. “Goat bones…”
One after the other, we add in the ingredients as I stir and repeat the chants. Shea emailed the spell over, and Brendan’s got it displayed on an iPad on a little stand in the kitchen.
It takes about an hour just for the brew, and then I pour the contents of the cauldron in equal amounts into four jars. We have to go all around the inside of the house and drip just a tiny little bit here and there as we chant. Next, we have to go outside and pour the remainder in a circle around the entire house. It can be a very thin little line of liquid, but there has to be a circle around the entire house and every bit must be connected, or it won’t work. When we’re done, we finish it off with the old circle of salt.
All of the guys file into the kitchen, and I tell them about ten times that they have to be very careful to drip and pour sparingly so we can be sure there’s enough brew to go around the whole house.
Already, I’m wondering if I should have doubled the recipe. It was measured for a house, but then again, the Love house is a mansion and the spell is old. Didn’t most witches back in the day live in little stone cottages?
“It’ll be fine,” Mitch whispers in my ear. My shoulders unclench a little, and he rubs my arm and squeezes my shoulder. I lean into the touch, but he steps away all too quickl
y. “We got this,” he says.
We start dripping the spell around the house; just a few drips in every room, in all the hallways, and a dab on each wall. It’s so hard to use just enough and not too much. When we’re finally finished with the interior, we move outside. We place drips here and there along the veranda and the wood siding. All the while, we have to keep chanting. That alone takes a while. I have the guys practice the chant over and over, but they’ve also got it on their phones for easy reference.
The moment I step off the front steps and onto the lawn to start the circle, I get an abrupt and very strange feeling. It feels as if someone has poured a bucket of cold water over me, magically speaking. That’s the only way I can describe it as I stand there on the lawn with my jar of brew. It’s like a strange, cold and creepy feeling washing over me all at once. And just as quickly as the sensation arrives, it’s gone again. I look around, over the fence to the street. I squint in either direction, but I don’t see anything.
“Ian!” I shout back at him. He’s in the driveway with his jar and he’s just started pouring.
“Yeah?” He shouts back, walking through the little gateway to the front yard from the driveway. “Something wrong?”
“Do you smell anybody?” I say, jogging up to him. “I just got a really weird feeling like… psychically, I guess. A magic shiver kind of thing. Do you sense anyone?”
Ian sniffs around and I see him trying to sense magic but he shrugs. “I’m not getting anything. But I can ask the guys-”
“No, it’s probably fine,” I say shrugging. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”
“Are you sure?” Ian says.
“Yeah,” I say, nodding firmly. “Let’s just do this pour.”
The five of us go about pouring the brew, and I find myself nervous that we’re not going to complete the circle. I worry it’s going to be too wonky or something, or our chants are going to be wrong. But eventually, the circle is closed around the entire house and the moment Ian and Mitch’s two unfinished lines of brew connect on the grass at the side of the house, the circle glows with a soft blue light which is exactly what is supposed to happen.
“It worked!” I say happily. They walk up to me and slap me high fives and I laugh with relief. It’s nice to feel as if I’ve done something. I quickly text Shea to let her know we completed the spell successfully as I make my way inside.
That evening, I’m hanging out in the backyard with Brendan and Mitch because Ian is on dinner duty, and Darren is helping someone with some tech stuff online. They’re telling me about when they lived in the French Riviera for a while. Mitch loved the surfing there although he has no complaints about Southern California.
“I thought Monte Carlo was so gauche,” Brendan says dryly. “But I suppose Cannes was alright.”
“You’re a snob,” I say, laughing lightly.
I’ve taken off my shoes because I like feeling my toes in the grass. I feel good right now. We’ve been drinking a little wine and the back yard is a nice place to hang out. There’s another old stone fountain between the hydrangeas and some rose bushes too. There are lots of fluffy ferns and a Japanese maple tree. It’s twilight out, and the lights of the city twinkle beyond the arroyo below. I’ve changed into a white linen sundress and the breeze feels nice on my legs. We’re all just kind of standing around, chatting in the grass, with no particular place to go. Brendan shoves his hands in his pockets, his dark hair falling over his eyes. His bare foot taps mine and he looks at me like a sad little puppy.
“You don’t like snobs,” Brendan says, sticking out his bottom lip just a little bit.
Mitch laughs behind me and I lean back a little, deliberately bumping against him. “He thinks you don’t like him,” Mitch says.
“Of course, I like you,” I say to Brendan, resting my hands on his shoulders. I feel my stupid heart thumping again, and I have that sense of feeling connected to all of them so strongly it’s like a physical ache. “I like all of you,” I murmur. “Wouldn’t… want to choose between you.”
I tug him a little closer and make sure he sees the way I lick my bottom lip.
“You don’t have to,” Mitch whispers in my ear, and when his arms slide around my waist from behind me, I feel myself melting against him. “You can have all of us. Whenever you like.”
I tilt my neck, baring it for him, waiting. “Promises, promises,” I whisper. I see Mitch wink at Brendan and then he’s kissing my neck, his tongue sneaking out to lick and taste as he embraces me from behind. Brendan’s mouth falls open but he leans in close. I tug him forward by his shirt until he gets the idea and kisses me, cupping my cheek. Ever so softly, he tastes my top lip and then my bottom lip, before nudging my mouth open to taste my tongue.
We stand there for a while, the two of them embracing me and making me wet with desire. Yet, it never goes farther than Mitch’s hand sliding up to cup my breast, kneading it just a little bit as he mouths at my neck and sucks kisses there. All the while, Brendan and I make out, my fingers tangling in his hair. I want them. I want both of them so badly that there’s a buzzing in my head. Brendan’s hand is at my hip and I’m guiding it to pull up my dress when we hear a car pull up in the driveway.
Of all the goddamn times for a visit.
Brendan stops kissing me and turns his head, seeming to sense something’s wrong. With great reluctance and all the self-control I can muster, I pull away from the both of them, feeling a little sheepish.
“Shit,” Mitch mutters. I squeeze his hand and we all kind of glance at each other, just a little flustered.
If somebody wasn’t knocking at the front door, I’m pretty sure I’d be in a threeway right now.
Seems rude of someone to stop by at such a time, but I suppose they didn’t just assume there was a near orgy going on. Silly of them, really.
Brendan
I’ve never been in love before, but I’m pretty sure this is what it feels like. I hate to have to admit this to my pack mates as they never hesitate in grasping onto whatever excuse they can find to tease me (not that I doubt their real affections), but I never find it easy to admit my true feelings. I’m also not one to give in to infatuation. And after such a short time of knowing Victoria, it’s more than out of character for a level-headed person like myself to claim “true love.”
Yet, I know the fates have a hand in this. I know Mitch thinks so, and I might have doubted him at first, but now I’m inclined to think he’s right. It’s the strangest, and yet, the strongest feeling. I know that I love Victoria as much as I know that the sky is blue. I desire her so strongly, I’m dizzy with it. I consider kissing her a privilege. She is honey on my lips. I couldn’t ask for anything better. And more than that, she has a keen mind. I love discussing books with her. She does tease me just a little bit, but she’s softer than the others are about it. I feel as if she already knows that a harsh word from her would truly be painful. In my book, that’s a dangerous kind of knowledge for anyone to have about me. Yet, I find myself trusting Victoria as much as I trust Ian, Darren, and Mitch, and I’ve known those men for about one hundred and thirty years.
I feel as if I’m naked- as if Victoria can see me as I truly am. And being that I tend to be a little more guarded, it does put me on edge a little bit. Yet, when Mitch and I pull away from Victoria, she looks as stricken as I am, and that does give me some comfort.
“To be continued,” Mitch says, leaving Victoria with a kiss on the cheek.
“Yes, please,” she says, and she picks up my hand to kiss my palm before we go back inside. I feel like such a lovestruck young boy even being as old as I am. My palm is hot is with her kiss as I follow her back into the house.
Both Ian and Darren appear just a little bit smug when we go back in. I’m pretty sure they know exactly what we were just doing, and more than that, they approve of it. I try not to give myself away too much, yet I know I’m failing.
Somebody pounds on the door as we all head to the front to see who it is. Ian ro
lls his eyes and I step around Mitch, my ears perking up. I don’t know how the others feel, but I’m getting a bad feeling all of a sudden, even with our circle of protection around the house.
“You smell anything?” Mitch says to Ian as we crowd into the foyer.
“Nope,” Ian says, sighing. “I do sense magic though.”
He opens the door and Victoria is right beside me. Feeling protective, I wrap an arm around her. When she leans into my embrace, I feel right about it.
“Can I help you?” Ian says to the stranger.
The man at the door is dressed head to toe in soft baby blue. It’s a very particular shade that sets off alarm bells in my head. As does the strange scalloped cut of his suit jacket. He looks like one of those Department of Magical Authority fellows. They always wear that color. I’ve only ever seen one once since we’ve been in America. They know how to keep themselves hidden. Generally, running into DMA personnel is never good.
“Yes, sir, you certainly can,” the man says. “Darden Sidjus, Department of Magical Authority. May I come in?”
The man looks middle-aged. He looks sort of like a banker; handsome enough with clean-cut, sandy blonde hair. He looks like any other Southern California man, which means he looks rather odd in that baby blue suit with the scalloped edges and the diamond-shaped tie.
“Are you here for Victoria?” Mitch says. We all step back as Sidjus moves inside, showing us his identification with the seal of a wand in a circle that signifies he is who he says he is.
“I certainly am,” Sidjus says. He casts her a dark look that I don’t like at all.
“We didn’t call you,” Ian says slowly. “Perhaps her friend called you. Though, she is in need of protection-”
“I’m not here to protect her,” Sidjus says with a snort.
“What?” Victoria says, her eyes bulging a little bit. “Are you here to arrest me? For what?”
I have a terrible feeling now. This is all wrong. This can’t be happening…