After a steadying breath, I opened my eyes again and didn’t bother to brush away the tears. “Please, Kason. I don’t have anywhere left to go, and you’re the only person I trust.”
His jaw tightened as something flickered across his gaze. He stared at the doorjamb for a long moment but finally stepped aside and opened the door wider.
I zipped inside and beelined around the couch in the living room straight to the fire. All of my ice walls in the house had melted, either because of my leaving or in spite of it. The heat from the fireplace burned feeling back into my exposed skin, and the muscles in my arms screamed in agony when I tried to unfurl my tight clutch around Nasty and my wine. A pained hiss slithered out from between my chattering teeth.
“Jesus, how long were you out there?” Kason rushed to my side with a blanket, wrapped it around my shoulders as he sat me down on the brick hearth, and settled my belongings at my feet. “I’ll go make coffee.”
Nodding, I leaned toward the heat, my insides warming much faster than the outside. I honestly didn’t know what I would’ve done if he hadn’t let me in. I had no one but him, despite his understandably reluctant welcome and his sharp words that had jabbed tears from my eyes. He didn’t have to like me; he just had to listen to me. And then screw my brains out. Really, I wasn’t asking for much.
Kason came back with two cups of coffee, the metal box of fennel seeds, and a straw. “Here. Drink up.”
I gazed up at him while an unexpected ache swelled through my chest. “I didn’t even ask.”
“Well, it’s not like I could forget.” He set both cups down on the hearth, plugged the straw into the one nearest me, and flipped open the fennel seed box that never closed right. “Tell me when.”
He sprinkled some in, but I kept my gaze aimed at the way the firelight illuminated his skin, how his eyelashes shadowed his chiseled cheeks, how his tight, irritated voice mismatched the kindness in his actions.
“When,” I said, my voice barely carrying over the crackling flames.
He stirred it with the straw then brought the cup to my mouth. I wet my lips and wrapped them around the straw. The set of his jaw softened a fraction while a different kind of fire burned in his dark eyes. I sucked down burning hot lava while I met his heated stare with one of my own until he gently plucked the straw from my mouth.
In that moment, I would’ve done almost anything to touch him with my hands, feel his stubble scrape against my palms, brush my thumbs against his full mouth, rake my fingers through his hair to pull him closer. Because of his kindness I didn’t deserve. Because of his presence that drummed my heartbeat faster.
I lifted a hand, hesitantly, slowly, as much for his sake as my own. I’d touched him once before while we slept without it causing me pain, but that didn’t mean much now that I was awake. Awake and alive and charged with a fluttering energy at his nearness. I didn’t want pain, and I didn’t want to lash out at him for unintentionally causing me pain. This seemed reckless, even for me, but I wanted to touch him again. I needed to touch him.
He sat rigid, his gaze pinned to my face, as I ghosted a hand up his jaw. Not touching, but imagining it as soft and rough at the same time. Kind of like him. Exactly like him. I brought my fingers toward his mouth, tracing the air below his lower lip, mesmerized even though I’d already felt their magical touch with his searing kiss. He sucked in a breath as if to order me to stop, his mouth parted, his gaze watchful. When he didn’t say anything, I dipped my finger lower, past the cleft in his chin, still not touching.
His chest heaving, he caught my elbow, my hand hovering between us.
“Kason, I’m…” I started to pull away.
He brought my arm closer to his chest, his warm touch threading trust between our locked gazes. I knew he would never intentionally hurt me, at least not physically. Still, my pulse raced as he guided my hand closer to his chest, slowly, as if giving me a chance to back out if I wanted. But I didn’t. My fingers grazed his black cotton shirt over where his heart would be, light and quick, hardly contacting it at all, but I felt it. Only it and a smile stretching my thawed cheeks. No pain.
I was touching him like I had when we’d slept, but he didn’t have a magical bone in his body. Not in the traditional sense anyway. He didn’t have the ability to cure me, so what was happening here? I didn’t know if I wanted an explanation as Kason’s heartbeat slammed against my fingertips. His warmth, his compassion, skated up over my knuckles pain free. I wanted to hold my hand there forever if he’d let me.
Fearing I would break the spell or whatever this was, I flattened my hand against his chest in ultra-slow motion. My palm caught each of his heartbeats, feeling his life pump against my flesh, instead of the curse I’d inflicted myself with. But why Kason? Why was it his chest I could touch freely? I supposed I could experiment on random strangers, but I didn’t want to.
My breath hitched when I met his gaze. It was strong, unflinching, yet tender at the same time. But looking up into his perfect face unhinged something deep inside of me, a sorrow that I’d kept hidden, locked away in my blackened heart for two whole years, complete with a barbed wire gate that led down the darkest part. Only the gate was slowly creaking open, the black was peeling off in long, slow strips, and the sorrow washed out in crushing waves.
I jerked away from him and stood, letting the blanket on my shoulders fall to my feet. “I’m…I’m sorry,” I said on a sob.
He stood, too, but his image swam behind a fresh onslaught of tears.
“Hadley…”
I flinched as if he’d touched my hands and walked blindly toward the kitchen with little idea of what I was doing. Tears gushed down my cheeks, and I didn’t think they would ever stop. All these emotions I’d kept bottled up for two years were melting me into a soggy mess.
The kitchen beckoned with its darkness, as if the black void could once again hide all this nonsense. I fumbled my way toward the far corner like a sunburned vampire, but the overhead light flipped on and doused me with reality.
“Talk to me,” Kason said from the kitchen’s entryway, his voice low. “What happened?”
I had allowed myself to feel something other than revenge—that was what had happened. Due in some part to the man leaning against the table next to the poppies. I glanced behind him in the direction of the front door, my lungs squeezing together into an awful ache. Even if I didn’t try to free the witches from fae rule or didn’t seek revenge for my family—both of which I fully planned to do—I would never, ever be able to walk out of this house and just forget Kason existed. He’d done something to me, far more powerful than magic, and it fucking hurt and felt strangely liberating at the same time. It didn’t even matter that he didn’t want me.
Taking a deep, shaky breath, I met his steady gaze. “My whole family was murdered by the Isa fae.” My voice sounded dull, lifeless as if I were reading a headline off a computer screen.
“Jesus,” he said and scrubbed a hand down his jaw. He stared at me for a long moment as understanding dawned bright in his eyes, and I let him so I wouldn’t have to fill in his blanks. “You were there. You survived.”
I gave a sharp nod. Even talking about it on a superficial level took the thick pools of blood in my memories and smeared it across my current life. Red bricks on the walls. Red poppies. Red bowl drying next to the sink. A violent shudder ripped down my back. My lips trembled as I tried to rein my emotions back inside where it was dark and cold and safe, but that place no longer existed.
He splayed his fingers on the tabletop and bowed his head. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t want your pity.” But the words came out much too rickety, and I wasn’t sure even I could believe them.
Shaking his head, he shoved away from the table. “Too bad, Hadley. That’s too much for anyone to carry by themselves.”
I shrugged since I didn’t know how to respond to that. I’d done okay carrying it by myself for the last two years, if okay was very loosely defined. “
It was a fae. After the sonic boom they used to break in, I could tell because of the stink. My family was in the living room. I was in my parents’ bedroom collecting fennel seeds from my mom’s indoor garden for her tea. My mom had chronic pain in her joints that fired up when she went to bed, so she kept her fennel seeds close for midnight inflammation emergencies.”
One seed and then the next, Mom would say in her sing-song voice, will drive away the bad.
“The…the sounds that came from the living room…” I swallowed a number of times while my stomach churned. “I didn’t… I couldn’t…” A full-body tremble swept to my toes and back up again.
Kason rounded the table, and before I knew what he was doing, he folded me against him, his strong arms circling my shoulders. For an instant, I froze, but his warmth, his chocolate and cedar scent, all of what made him him, molded my body to his. He pressed my head against his chest, lightly caressing my hair, while my tears soaked through his cotton shirt.
“You don’t have to talk about this,” he whispered.
“I hid underneath the bed,” I continued because I couldn’t stop reliving the memories until the bitter end. “I heard footsteps coming down the hallway…and whistling. He came into my parents’ bedroom, and I know it was a he because of the size of his pointed shoes with the gold toe and the timbre of the whistle.”
Kason squeezed me harder. “He knew you were there.”
I nodded, greedily taking the comfort he offered so I could find the will to end this nightmarish story. “He left eventually, but…he had to know I was still there.” My cheeks flamed at the evidence I’d left puddled on the floor before I’d dived underneath the bed. That was something Kason didn’t need to know. “By the time I came out…” I sealed my mouth shut and listened to his heart boom next to my ear, letting that steady beat remind me I was no longer in the past, but here, safe and warm.
“It’s okay, Hadley,” he whispered.
But it wasn’t. It never would be.
“My dad was still alive,” I said. “Just barely.” My memories flashed red, red, red. So much blood. But I’d zeroed in on his eyes, open, pleading, instead of anything else. “He wanted me to take the atern from his wrist. He wanted me to save them.” I swallowed thickly, then placed my palm against Kason’s chest as if to hold him there in case he jerked away after hearing the rest. “Save them with dark magic.”
He sucked in a sharp breath. “Bring them back, you mean.”
I nodded.
“He asked you to do this?”
“No. He couldn’t speak. He held his arm out to me, the one with his atern, and he kept looking from me to…to them. My little brothers and Mom. They didn’t have near as much magic as he did, so I…I got a knife from the kitchen.”
Kason released a long breath and settled his lips against my hairline, his hand still cupping the back of my head.
“The only way to take a witch’s atern and their power from them is to take their hand while they’re alive, and I…” I pulled away from Kason enough to gaze up at him so I could see the level of disgust or judgment that he had every right to feel. “I was too slow. I watched my dad take his last breath as I was hurting him. All for nothing.”
Kason’s throat bobbed, but that was the only sign of movement in the silent kitchen. His face remained stoic.
I peeled the rest of myself away from him and backed toward the sink. “I took what little magic I had left on my atern, not enough to resurrect more than a few heartbeats in any of my family, and cursed my own hands for not getting the job done.”
The one thing about performing curses—or any kind of magic—while highly emotional was that they often went crooked. Mine went jagged and black, linking the inside of my home and my heart with a sharp, spiked wire.
“It wasn’t a job, Ha—”
“It was my family’s life and I failed.”
“You can’t blame yourself. You didn’t kill them.”
“I didn’t save them either!” I curled myself into a corner by the back door that led to the garage and took a deep breath. “If I hadn’t been such a coward and hidden underneath my parents’ bed, I could’ve done something sooner, had spare seconds, something.”
“I don’t pretend to know anything about this, but…” He stepped closer, palms raised as if approaching a wild animal. “What if you had taken your dad’s magic and brought your family back? Would they have been the same?”
I shrugged and swiped my forearm under my nose. “I don’t know. But I would’ve tried. I would’ve done anything to have them—” My voice broke, so I tried again. “To have them back.” I slid against the wall until I was seated, so done with this conversation. My body felt beaten down after reliving that nightmare.
He sat beside me and leaned against the back door. “I know.”
We sat in silence for a long time while I collected myself. Exhaustion made my limbs feel rubbery, but my mind whirred. Not about the past, strangely enough, but about the future. It was almost as if by telling Kason everything, I’d purged myself of my past, though I knew I never really would. Still, it was an odd feeling.
“I’m sorry I dragged you into this mess,” I said.
“I don’t recall you dragging me anywhere,” Kason said, propping his elbows on his bent knees. “You keep ringing my doorbell, so to speak, and like the glutton for punishment I am, I keep answering.”
A chuckle tripped out of my mouth.
He turned his head, a curious glint in his searching gaze, his lips parted. “Do me a favor and make that happen more often.”
“What?”
A loud knock sounded from the front door.
We stared at each other as if we had no idea what to do in this type of situation, similar to what I did back home when someone knocked and I wasn’t expecting anyone.
“Did you bring more hellhound friends with you?” Kason asked.
“All of my friends are in your wine cellar.” I stood and crossed the kitchen, my gaze flitting around the corner to the front door. Night pressed in from the semi-circle window at the top, shivering a sense of dread across my shoulders.
Kason followed. “Tied up and gagged?”
“Just bottled,” I said absently. “What kind of friend do you think I am?”
At least, I didn’t think I’d brought anyone here with me. I’d zigzagged through random neighborhoods to lose the guy with the shoes even though I never saw anyone following me. The Diamond Dogs didn’t seem to be the knocking type. They were more the roust-you-out-of-bed-with-a-sonic-boom type. So was the guy with the shoes.
I whirled around, and Kason must’ve seen something in my expression, because he shot out a hand to touch my shoulder.
“It might be the man with the pointed shoes.” I searched his features to be sure he understood. “I saw him today at the tattoo shop and thought I heard shoes following me on the way here, but I never saw anyone.”
“Shit,” he breathed and rubbed a hand down his jaw.
I grazed my fingertips up his chest again to snag his attention and make him listen. “Promise me you’ll stay inside this time.”
But he was shaking his head before I’d even finished. “No. No, we’re not doing this again. You don’t get to barge out there like a superhero. If that’s him, he’s a cold-blooded killer.”
“And he needs to be taken out,” I hissed.
He stepped into me, almost nose-to-nose. “Not when we don’t know what’s out there. It could be a whole army of fae.”
“Then stay inside and let me handle it.”
“It’s not me I’m worried about,” he snapped.
His words jolted through me like a slap. I swallowed at the fierce expression on his face, at the thundering jump of his heartbeat against my palm. A muscle in his jaw ticked as his fingertips trailed down my arm, chasing wings through my gut.
The knock came again, louder, making us both jump apart.
“Let me at least see who it is.” He strode past me to th
e front door, his fists balled at his sides, and looked through the peephole. He shook his head over his shoulder, a deep furrow marking his forehead.
“Who is it?” I whispered.
“It’s nobody.”
I chewed the inside of my cheek. The Diamond Dogs or the man with the shoes had likely called in reinforcements, and this was probably some kind of trap. Or a distraction… There was no reason to open it. Especially if Kason didn’t see anything outside. Especially if all I felt capable of doing right now was hibernating. The magic inside his house would keep the fae out. Until it didn’t. And I only had twenty-three clicks of magic left on my atern.
I shook my head both at Kason and the front door. Whoever it was, we weren’t going to battle it out tonight. But as I backed away from the wind screeching through the cracks in the door, a dark feeling prickled over my scalp. Somehow I didn’t think it would matter if we opened the door or not. The battle would find its way inside. And when it did, the key to ending fae power would be unable to escape.
11
No one knocked on the door again. No spell shrank the house to test the magic inside. From then until the next morning, Kason and I stayed holed up inside while blowing snow pelted the windows and wind battered the walls. Most of that time I spent on Nasty, slowly keying in searches for how to break the spell on his house to release him, to untie the Legacy knot without actually defiling his broomstick, and what Corvus the constellation had anything to do with anything. I was scoring zero for zero for zero on all three fronts. That must be some kind of record.
I also flipped through my client orders to see who could pay with magic, but even if I completed the hacking job, I’d have to venture out of the house to an atern charging station. Probably not the safest thing to do.
Frustrated, I swiped my arm into the poppies, but of course they snapped back into existence right after. I groaned and lay my head on the tabletop, glaring across the keys of my laptop at the ridiculous flowers. They weren’t even pretty anymore, just a bright red pain in my ass.
Legacy: Faction 11: The Isa Fae Collection Page 10