by Lila Dubois
“What have we done?” Harris whispered.
Trees swayed though there was no wind. Animals screamed.
“We’re fucked,” Trajan said blankly.
Nimue looked toward the plants, and there was hope in her eyes. That made no sense, until she said, “Maybe this will end the curse.”
She looked at Harris, and tears filled her eyes. “I’m so sorry.” She reached out and took his hand. Whatever had passed between them, it was clear that Harris was here with her willingly. Maybe Stockholm Syndrome.
To his surprise, Nimue reached out her other hand to Trajan. There was a weighty finality to the moment. What had come before no longer mattered. Each misstep that had led to this moment was now incidental.
Trajan took her hand, sliding his fingers over hers. Electricity sparked between them, but that didn’t matter now.
The time for blame and recriminations was over. They were about to die, and he would accept the touch of another human in this final moment. At least he would not die alone, and in the end that was all anyone could really hope for.
There was a low roaring sound, like an approaching avalanche, or the roar of some great, nameless beast. Trajan closed his eyes and squeezed Nimue’s hand. He reached out blindly, finding and grabbing Harris’s forearm. Harris twisted his wrist and clasped Trajan’s forearm in turn.
The roar was broken by the tolling of a great bell, the sound so loud that Trajan gritted his teeth against the pain of it. Nimue threw her head back, mouth open in a silent scream. Harris’s eyes were glowing gold, and saplings had sprouted along the edges of the circle. They grew, as if they were the beginning of a recording of a tree life-cycle set to play at a hundred times the normal speed. Rather than growing up toward the sky, the young trees curved their trunks, arched over the circle, branches weaving together until a solid dome of greenery rose above Harris, Nimue, and Trajan. Harris was, perhaps on no more than instinct, trying to protect them.
Trajan met first Harris’s gaze, then Nimue’s.
The world went white.
Chapter 8
Death seemed a lot like life.
Harris opened one eye, then the other. He blinked until his vision cleared of the flashbulb-like spots. The blinding light and terrible, bone-vibrating jarring were gone. He was still kneeling, arms outstretched, head bent so he was staring at his knees and the bare ground below. He was in the same position he’d died in—on his knees in Kim’s dug-out working circle, but now it was enclosed, so it was like kneeling inside a small bio-dome made of wood, leaves, and dirt. He should have been able to see out between the bases of the saplings, but soil had built up between the slender trunks. The soil was held there as if the inside of the dome were a solid object, and the dirt was packed against it.
It was dim in the strange little snow globe. The light that did filter between the leaves was a pale green, laced with a few rays of sunlight that arrowed in through breaks in the foliage. Dust motes floated through the rays of light, and as they did they sparkled like tiny disco balls. He blinked and watched as another dust mote flicked into the light and tossed off hundreds of needle-tip-fine points of sunlight.
Okay, so that was different. In death, dust became disco.
Harris snorted out a laugh.
“Harris?”
He looked up at Kim kneeling beside him, her hand still clasped in his. Her long dark hair hung in wild tangled waves around her head and shoulders, and though there was no breeze, her hair was moving as if in a gentle wind.
“We’re alive?” Kim asked.
“No, we’re not.” The gravelly reply came from Harris’s other side, and he looked over to see that he still clasped Trajan Dixon’s forearm. Seeing the other man snapped him out of the strange stupor that gripped him.
The moments before they’d died, before they’d each used their magic and initiated the catastrophic event that killed them, were crystal-clear in Harris’s mind. He looked at Kim.
That wasn’t her name.
“Your name isn’t Kim?” His tone was harsh, and when she flinched he only felt angrier. “You lied to me.”
“She kidnapped you, too.” Trajan sounded resigned and tired. “And now we’re dead.”
Kim was looking around, her hair still moving in that eerie way. Worry made lines between her eyebrows and pinched at the corners of her lips. Trajan’s words snapped her attention back to him. She stared hard at the blond Scamall witch before shifting her attention to Harris. Kim squeezed his fingers. “I’m sorry, Harris. I’m so sorry. For all of this.”
Harris had to look away. “What happened?”
Trajan cleared his throat, then said in an overly patient tone. “We each used our magic. That was bad. Kaboom.”
“I know that,” Harris grumbled. “I mean, what did we do? Earthquake? Fire?”
“I don’t know, because we died.” Trajan’s voice was dry.
“I don’t feel dead,” Kim—no, her name was Nimue—said.
“Neither do I. But the dust motes are disco balls.” As if to illustrate his statement, another mote floated into the beam of sunlight that pierced the dome of saplings he’d called to life in a vain attempt to protect them. The mote cast off thousands of sparkles.
Nimue blinked. “Well, that’s different.”
Harris started to smile, then remembered she’d lied to him and stopped.
“We’re still holding hands,” Trajan pointed out.
Harris looked at the other man. Trajan Dixon was big and blond. His hair was white-blond, his eyes piercing ice-blue with a dark cobalt ring around the outside of the iris. He wore black pants that looked a bit like the bottom half of a military uniform. The military-esque impression was reinforced by his plain gray tank top and dark blue jacket with a variety of pockets all over it. Harris had heard of Dixon Securities, and knew his uncle, the baron of his coven, had hired them to deal with some business issues. As far as Harris understood, the problem his uncle had needed help with had nothing to do with magic, but Dixon Securities handled both magical and non-magical problems.
“I’m sorry,” Harris told him. “You came to save me, and you died.” He had to swallow against the bile that rose in his throat. He could have left Nimue, and this place, yesterday, but he hadn’t. He hadn’t even called his family. He’d been too caught up in this strange adventure she’d pulled him into. With the clarity of hindsight he could acknowledge that he’d been having fun—the challenge of figuring out the blight, their banter, the slow sexual tension. He hadn’t stopped to think about, let alone call, his family, and they’d sent someone to rescue him.
Trajan interrupted Harris’s mounting self-loathing with a casual shrug. “No need to apologize. If I’d done my job correctly, I would have rescued you from her and no one would have died.”
Nimue stiffened when he said “rescued you from her.” There was a tense silence in their little green-gold dome.
“We’re still holding hands,” Trajan pointed out again. “Why?”
“Let go then,” Nimue snapped.
Trajan didn’t move. “I…can’t.”
There was another beat of silence before Harris cleared his throat. “Uh, so are we in hell? Is this our hell? Stuck in this place holding on to one another?”
“I don’t believe in hell,” Nimue said. “Hell is something you face when you’re alive.”
“You’re taking this rather well,” Harris remarked.
“She was dying anyway,” Trajan said.
“Oh yeah, what’s that about?” Harris looked at Nimue when he asked the question, but she ignored it. She was back to looking around while frowning.
“You must have heard of the Mahkah curse.” Trajan arched one pale eyebrow Harris’s direction.
“It sounds vaguely familiar.”
“Seriously?” Trajan sounded disgusted by his lack of knowledge.
Harris shrugged. “I like plants and staying out of coven politics. That’s my thing. Or that was my thing.”
&nb
sp; Trajan snorted in amusement before saying, “The Mahkah curse kills the female heir on her twenty-fifth birthday. Once she’s dead, the curse jumps to the next heir.”
That was one hell of a curse.
“Oh.” It was the only thing Harris could think to say in response.
Nimue’s fingers dug into his, her nails pressing into his skin. Harris manfully suppressed a yelp. She had a tight hold on him, but her grip on Trajan was so tight that both their fingers were turning white.
“How dare you?” Her voice shook with emotion.
Trajan’s gaze snapped to her. “How dare I what?”
“How dare you talk about the curse like it’s an…an inconvenience.” She hissed the last word. “I was only a baby when it killed my aunt. Then it killed her daughters, my cousins, one by one. They never had children of their own because they didn’t want to have a daughter who would be forced to carry the curse. You see the heir is the oldest daughter of the oldest daughter. If the oldest daughter doesn’t have a child, the heir is the second oldest daughter. My cousins didn’t want to have children who would be orphaned when they were babies.
“When my youngest cousin died we thought maybe, just maybe, the curse had died with her. My grandmother told us no, that there was no escape, but my mother had hope.”
Nimue took a shaky breath, and as she did the ground trembled. Without thinking, Harris speared his senses down into the soil, finding the roots of the bearberry, firefly, and white orchid rock rose he’d grown to form his own casting circle. He called the plants to him, urging them to grow and stretch until there was a small net of roots under the spot where she knelt.
The magic came easily. Before now, when he’d been alive, he would have said that he was not just proficient, but good, with magic. Though instinct and ability were important, magic was akin to intelligence or physique. You were born with a certain ability, but you had train it, use it. Harris was a B+ magician, but born with an incredible amount of magical talent, so even his less-than-all was more than many practitioners could manage.
But now…
The magic came readily and easily, with no specific effort of will. It was as if the magic could sense what he wanted, rather than him having to form it with a mental casting. It was like the first time he was able to do advanced mental math, his thought process moving so quickly that it seemed that the answer simply came to him—he hadn’t had to mentally voice each of the steps. It was that same feeling, as if his brain now had shortcuts for magic.
With a start he realized that it wasn’t just the plants that were responding to him, but the earth. The reason the roots grew so easily was because the earth itself parted, easing the way. In life he had no power over the earth. That was reserved for the witches of Salachar like Nimue. Experimentally he stared at the ground and tried to push up a small bit of dirt, as if an anthill were forming. Nothing happened, but he felt the tingle of magic. Odd.
Nimue had fallen silent, and he’d been so distracted by the magic he hadn’t noticed the tension that was building inside their little dome. Trajan was staring at Nimue, who was looking straight ahead, apparently at nothing, and her lower lip trembled each time she exhaled.
“I was fourteen when my cousin, the last of my aunt’s daughters, died. The curse came to me. I could feel it passing into me.” She paused, and streams of sunlight seemed to grow brighter, to the point of being almost blindingly white beams of heat and power. Harris had to narrow his eyes to slits. “My grandmother is the youngest of two daughters, but when her sister, my great aunt died from the curse, it passed to my great aunt’s eldest daughter, who was only a baby. This meant my grandmother was safe, but then my great aunt’s daughters died without children of their own, and the curse jumped to my aunt—who was the eldest daughter under the age of twenty five.”
Her hair was whipping around her faster now, long dark strands slashing at her face.
“Now, I’m the heir. I’m the one who’s cursed. I have three younger sisters. Do you know what I should have done?” She blinked, still staring at the middle distance, and a tear slid down her cheek. “I should have gotten pregnant.”
“What?” Harris was sure he’d heard that wrong.
Trajan sucked in air through his nose, and his eyes widened with understanding. The dome swayed as a sudden fierce wind whipped at the saplings. Harris felt it as they pressed their roots down, down into the earth, bracing themselves against the onslaught.
“Your family asked that of you?” he asked.
Nimue blinked and looked at Trajan. “Asked it? No. It’s not the sort of thing that’s ever said aloud.” A bitter laugh cut through the sound of the angry wind. “But that’s what’s done.”
Harris thought about it for a second. “Wait…no. You don’t mean…”
“I mean that there is a tradition in our family. The heir gets pregnant. Usually when she’s twenty-three or twenty four. The curse makes sure it’s always a daughter. She never even holds the baby. They take the newborn away from her so she doesn’t get attached, and the baby doesn’t get attached to her mother, who will die anyway. The child is born for one reason. To inherit the curse and protect the rest of the coven.”
Nimue took a breath and the ground seemed to rise and fall in time. “When the heir dies, her innocent child, usually no more than two, inherits the curse. She is raised knowing what she is—cursed—and what she has to do. Have a child. Sacrifice her child. As long as there’s a living heir who carries cursed, other daughters are protected until after they turn twenty-five. Once they do they’re safe.” Her breath was choppy as she repeated, “Have a child. Sacrifice her child. Protect the coven.” The last statements were laced with vitriol and pain.
Harris felt sick. “That’s…”
“My aunt wouldn’t do it.” There was pride in Nimue’s words, a respect for the woman. “She’d been conceived for no other reason than to be the cursed one. She was raised to bear the curse and then have a daughter of her own. But she was brave. So brave.”
Even Trajan, who’d seemed to know about this curse, was listening in mute horror and fascination.
“Aunt Morgana was raised by my grandmother, who was technically her mother’s younger sister. The only reason my grandmother didn’t bear the curse was because my great-aunt had done what she was told and had my aunt, giving her up at birth.” Another breath, another tear. “Aunt Morgana thought that maybe the curse persisted because of how we behaved. What we’d been doing for generations. She left the coven when she was eighteen and got married, had three kids and raised them instead of giving them away. They were all daughters.”
“But she died,” Trajan said.
“Yes, and the curse passed to her daughter, my oldest cousin, when she was young. She, like her mother, refused to follow the family ‘tradition’ and have a doomed child. Instead she remained celibate her whole life. By doing so she sentenced her sisters to each bear the curse in turn.”
Harris stared at Nimue, horrified. He pictured his own family. He might not like all of them, but he loved them, and he’d do anything to protect them. He couldn’t imagine what her family had gone through, what it must have been like to know that someone was always slated to die. And she was the heir.
Harris’s fingers flexed around Trajan’s forearm. The other man looked over and they shared a long, silent glance.
“But you don’t have a child?” Trajan’s question was soft, his tone carefully neutral.
Nimue’s gaze snapped into focus. “No. I would not, could not, do that to a child. Even if it might buy my sisters time. I intend to break the curse.”
Intended. She’d intended to break the curse. Because they were dead. He couldn’t bear to remind her that she’d failed.
“I’ve been pooling power in this forest.” She took an unsteady breath, and there were tears on her cheeks. “The curse was going to end with me. I was going to use all the power I’d amassed, and my own death, to break it. I was going to save my sisters, my
younger cousins.”
Harris stared at her, aghast at what she’d said. No wonder she’d been so desperate for his help. “And if the blight killed the plants, you wouldn’t be able to keep holding the power.”
Nimue nodded. “I tried a dozen things over the years. This is what worked.”
“Why cannabis?” he asked. “I mean, why use that?”
Trajan snorted. He now seemed unmoved by her story, but Harris has seen the emotion in his eyes earlier. “Don’t you know? The Mahkah coven owns half the pot dispensaries in California. The instant it became legal they opened a hundred shops. They’re one of the richest covens in Salachar.”
Harris blinked at her. “You’re a drug dealer?”
The tears dried up and she cleared her throat in a prim manner. “Excuse me, I provide top-quality natural, organic cannabis for both recreational and medicinal use. My biggest customers are the elderly.”
“Cursed drug-dealing witch.” Harris wanted to scrub his hands over his face. “Right.”
Trajan stared to laugh. The sound was low and rich and had that startled quality to it, the sound of someone who had been surprised into laughing.
Nimue’s lips twitched. “Well, that wasn’t exactly how I’d put it. More like cursed, drug-lord witch.”
He was dead, stuck in some weird hell with the woman who’d kidnapped him and the man who’d been sent to save him. Harris started to laugh too.
Nimue looked at each of them in turn, then shook her head. “Men.”
That set Harris and Trajan off on fresh gales of laughter. It was taking on a slightly hysterical edge, and Harris threw his head back, gasping for air between peals of laughter.
The verdant dome above them sprang apart, each tree snapping up so the trunk was no longer arched, but straight as a ruler. Sunlight, so bright and white that Harris closed his eyes, bathed them in heat. He bent his whole upper body forward in reaction to the sudden light, and as he did he managed to drag Nimue and Trajan down with him.
“Let go.” Trajan’s tone was sharp, and he started tugging at Harris’s forearm.