by SM Reine
I woke up again before dawn and both werewolves were still crying their pain at the moon.
The sounds cut off abruptly when the sun touched the horizon.
Somehow, the absence was as bad as the sounds themselves. I felt the strange urge to head outside and find Donne wherever the change was seizing him so that I could touch him again, helping him through all the violence and the pain.
A far more rational response would have been to want to avoid him. But I needed to be close to Donne.
I grabbed a silk bathrobe from the armoire and headed barefoot onto the lawn, damp grass tickling my feet.
Faint magic sparked as I passed through the wards that protected the outer walls of the house. Though I couldn’t find the marks themselves, the wards that Rage had placed around my bedroom seemed to be denser than those around the gazebo.
There was no way that Donne would be able to reach me where I was. I had to go to him.
Following my instincts, I headed straight out, parallel to the beach. I couldn’t quite describe how I knew that the men would be over the hill, but that was exactly where I found them: unconscious in a valley beyond the gazebo. The ground curved around them as though the earth had risen to cradle their unconscious bodies.
Both werewolves were human again. After transformations so rough, I thought that they should have looked beaten up. I’d been imagining cuts and bruises to show where the bones had broken themselves under the surface. Yet neither appeared injured.
That didn’t mean that they looked good, though.
Graham’s huddled form looked about twenty years older than the day before. The lines on his face were heavier and his hair seemed grayer. If I wasn’t mistaken, even his muscles were diminished.
Dehydration? Or just his time running out?
Donne almost looked as bad as his father, and he was much younger. His eyes were just as shadowed, his sleeping face just as exhausted. His skin was the yellow of a moon on a smoggy night.
Sympathy made my heart contract.
If Graham had been a werewolf for twenty-three years, then how long had it been since Donne’s bite?
Both of them were obviously very ill.
If I wanted to help, I needed to learn how to be the witch that Rage thought I had to be.
And I would need to do it fast.
XI
I didn’t get to see Donne after he woke up. The coven moved in too quickly with blankets, cups of coffee, and raw steak for me to get involved. They were a loving swarm of leather and lace.
All I could do was stand back and watch as they bundled up the werewolves and carried them inside the house.
Ravyn caught me hovering outside the door to the bedroom where the men had been taken. She barred my passage with her arms braced in the doorway. “Go away. They need to rest.”
I was too short to see over her, although I tried bouncing up on my toes. “I won’t bother them.”
“You’ll bother them. Trust me. Get ready to leave—the tour bus is heading out in an hour, and Rage wants you on it.”
It was easy to get ready in an hour when I didn’t need to pack. Storm had put together a suitcase for me, and he kissed me on the cheek before carting it down to the bus.
I touched a hand to the place his lips had brushed. It was such a warm, affectionate gesture. It reminded me of…well, honestly, it reminded me of my mom. She would go postal if she knew I’d compared her to a drugged-out witch who dressed like a Victorian era reject, though.
Donne and Graham weren’t on the bus when everyone loaded up. Disappointment made my stomach clench hard.
“Donne won’t miss a concert,” Rage said, plopping onto the couch across from me.
I stopped worrying at the lace on my dress. “What? I didn’t ask.”
“I know what you’re thinking.” He wiggled his fingers at me. “I can see all your dirty little secrets, Kitten. Witchy power.”
“Bullshit!” Ravyn yelled from the front of the bus.
Rage ignored her. “Speaking of witchy powers, it’s a long drive to Los Angeles. Time to learn.”
“Now?” I asked, eyes widening.
“Yes. Now.” There was a hard edge that told me this wasn’t the time to argue.
The last full moon had really shaken Rage.
So we spent the hours on the road studying.
I’d figured that magic couldn’t be that hard to learn. I mean, magic, right? I was a freaking English major. I’d read more books, some of them fantasy novels, than could fit into any single house. My speed reading skills were unmatched. And my retention? Forget about it. I wasn’t smug about many things, but I was pretty smug about my studying skills.
And Rage had a book about magic for me to use my skills on. It was a binder, actually, thicker than any binder I’d ever used in school, with a spine that I couldn’t wrap my hand around. The laminated sheet he’d tucked into the cover said “Book of Shadows” in a tacky gothic font, accompanied by a bad illustration of a flaming pentacle.
Just because he was a famous rock star and high priest of a coven didn’t mean that he had taste in graphic design.
But it was a book, more or less, and I knew books. All it was going to take was a couple hours of dedicated speed-reading and I’d be more witchy than Hermione Granger.
My confidence took roughly twenty minutes to shrivel into a dead little raisin after we started.
You know, once I started actually reading the book.
It turned out that magic had a lot more in common with chemistry and science than English. Everything was listed in weight and volume with careful drawing of angles and tracking moon phases and…
Basically, opening up that binder made me feel like I was going back to high school and staring at the jumble of pre-cal in my textbook.
Nightmarish.
The Book of Shadows wasn’t structured like an instructional book. It was obviously a compilation of notes by Rage and his forebears; some of it was even hand-drawn.
It immediately delved into formulas. Like, actual chemical compositions.
I pushed the Book of Shadows away from me in exasperation. “There’s way too much to get here.”
Rage was painting his fingernails black. “You barely read any of it.”
“That’s all I need to read to know that this isn’t going to work.”
“Donne said you’re a straight-A student.”
“Yeah, of English literature. It took me two and a half years to get my bachelor’s.”
He smirked. “Lazy ass.”
My cheeks flamed red. “My ass might be lazy, but it’s also incredibly well-padded.” Okay, maybe that wasn’t much of a defense.
“Very well-padded,” Rage agreed. “I was being sarcastic, though. You do fine with school. You know how to study. You can do this.”
“I suck at math and science. Did you know that only twenty-four percent of people in STEM fields are female?” I fixed him with a hard look. “There’s a reason for that.”
“Don’t say that around Ravyn if you like having your head attached to your shoulders. She’s an astrophysicist.”
Ravyn? An astrophysicist?
My jaw dropped as I leaned over to check out the coven at the front of the bus. Somehow, Ravyn had already ended up shirtless. Both of her nipples were pierced and the jewelry flashed with LEDs that made her perky boobs sparkle.
As I watched, she pointed at a glass of absinthe. It caught fire without being touched. A large, glowing crystal in her left hand burned with sympathetic flames.
The shirtless witch with pierced nipples was setting her booze on fire with her mind.
And she was also an astrophysicist.
“You’re messing with me,” I said.
“And you’re talking like an idiot,” Rage snapped. “I don’t think you’re an idiot, so I’m not sure why you’d act like one. Don’t use your pussy as an excuse not to learn math.”
I stood, putting a hand on the bunk beds to keep the swaying bus f
rom knocking me over. “I’m not listening to this.”
Two steps away from him, he managed to stop me dead in my tracks. “Giving up on the wolves that easily?”
My eyes flicked back to the coven, who had swarmed Donne and Graham with such love, wrapping them in blankets and feeding them hearty breakfasts to build their strength.
The coven wasn’t giving up on the werewolves.
I sat back down with Rage.
He didn’t acknowledge the fact that I’d tried to walk away. He turned the binder around to face me again, open to the exact same page that I’d been on before. “Once you’ve got the basic properties of herbs down, it’ll start making sense. Don’t worry about crystals yet. Focus on herbs, moon phases, the cardinal directions…”
It wasn’t the last time I gave up on the drive to Los Angeles. I tried to walk away every few minutes, but I always came back. And every time I did, Rage was waiting for me with that stupid binder.
Knowing that I needed to get a grip on all this information as quickly as possible felt like cramming for the hardest test of my life.
Except it wasn’t just my grades at stake anymore. The lives of two men were hinging on my ability to learn all about the mystical properties of sage, arrowroot, and ginger—along with a thousand other herbs.
The pressure was too much, but I couldn’t let it drag me down.
Donne needed me.
The time crunch wasn’t enough to keep me focused. I caught myself studying Rage as much as I was studying the binder.
The tattoos on his arms were entrancing. It was easy to lose myself in the intricate illustrations of wolves, especially now that I knew the truth about Donne. Rage had inked his skin in homage to one of his roadies. There must have been a story there, but I could only speculate.
“Let’s move onto mugwort,” Rage said, reaching out to turn the page for me.
I interrupted him to ask, “Why are you retiring the band? I saw you singing. You’re still really into it.”
Rage leaned back on the couch, contemplating the question. “You know, Kitten, music was all I ever wanted to do with my life. And I did it. I did it very, very well. Now there’s another destiny calling me. I can hear it when I’m singing—like I should stop what I’m doing and listen to this voice.” He linked his hands behind his head, gazing up at the roof. “I need to stop. I need to listen.”
“When you talk about destiny, you mean…”
“The tarot witches need me,” Rage said. “You need me.” I opened my mouth to speak, but he lifted a finger to his lips, silencing me. “Wait, Leah. Don’t you hear it?”
My mouth snapped shut. My eyes closed. And I listened.
I didn’t hear anything that sounded like destiny. I heard my stomach growling. I heard the coven up front playing drinking games. And I also heard people talking about how we were getting close to the venue.
But when I strained my ears, I thought I could almost pick something else up—a quiet song that was just out of my reach.
If everyone would be quiet, I’d be able to hear it.
Was it really a song, or was it more like the wind rushing through the long grasses on a hillside? It reminded me of trees rubbing their branches together in a slow, rhythmic sigh, and the tapping of deer hooves against the natural trails that form through thickets, and butterflies landing on flowers to taste pollen with their feet.
The music was so close. I just had to reach out for it.
My hands were stretching in front of me, fingers spread. There was almost something tangible I could grasp. It was just a tiny bit beyond me.
“Goddess,” Rage whispered.
I opened my eyes to find that my hands were glowing.
And even though I didn’t remember bringing it with me, my fingers were wrapped around The Hierophant card.
I dropped it with a gasp of shock.
As soon as my hands were out of contact with the card, the glow completely left my skin.
I had backed myself against the wall of the bus, as far from Rage, his Book of Shadows, and the tarot card as I could get. But it wasn’t far enough. The Hierophant had landed face-up on the floor. The priest in its picture was staring at me, hand uplifted, followers kissing his feet.
Rage was looking at me as though I were the celebrity between the two of us, and he couldn’t believe that I was on the bus. “So you can do it.”
I glanced up at the front of the bus. They weren’t watching us. They had no idea I’d just gone all…freaky.
“What in the world was that?” I asked.
“That was magic,” Rage said. “That was the beginning.”
It had felt like I was going to float away into the stratosphere.
I didn’t like it. Those strange sensations shouldn’t have been inside of me. I was just a girl who didn’t date much because she was too boring. Someone who was eventually going to go home, get sealed to a nice Mormon man at my family’s temple, and make lots of grandbabies for my parents.
None of this was me. Not the lacy dress or the tour bus thing or…
“I can’t do it,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I slid away from Rage, careful not to touch the tarot card, and joined Ravyn at the front of the bus.
This time, I didn’t return to Rage for lessons.
We arrived shortly before the concert to find everything prepared for us. The equipment had reached the stadium where The Forbidden were performing before we had, and there was already a huge line of fans waiting to get inside. It was even bigger than the line I’d been waiting in with Chad when Donne had ripped me away.
Glowing with magic was weird enough on its own. Being greeted at a stadium with the rock star treatment—screaming fans pounding their hands against the bus and all—was something else entirely.
I gaped at the crowd outside the windows as the bus inched into the secure part of the parking lot. There must have been hundreds clamoring for a glimpse of The Forbidden.
If Chad was anywhere among them, it was going to be hard to get in touch with him. If I could get my hands on an unattended phone, I could call his cell—but once I got in touch, it wasn’t like he could get back into the band-only areas to find me.
I’d have to escape first. I’d have to save myself.
The bus came to a halt.
“Keep reading,” Rage said, shoving the binder at me. “I’m going in for sound checks. Ask Ravyn if you need help with anything.” It was the first time he’d spoken since The Hierophant made me glow.
I still didn’t touch the Book of Shadows.
The bus was too stifling after so many hours on the road. Rather than reading, I got out and sat on the rear bumper while everyone else unloaded for the concert.
It didn’t escape my attention that the coven was near enough to keep an eye and an ear on me.
Even if I was a guest, I was still a closely supervised guest.
Especially now that I’d rejected Rage’s lessons.
The wind gusted around me. Trash skittered across the parking lot behind the stadium, which had been cordoned off to give the band privacy, and my hair blew across my face. I pushed it behind my ears again.
With the second gust, something tickled against my leg.
I tried to flick it away, expecting it to be another piece of trash. But it was stuck to me and a little too rigid to be garbage.
The Hierophant had appeared from nowhere, and now it was tickling me for attention.
As soon as I grabbed it from the folds of my dress, the wind stopped.
I stared at the empty night. Rage wasn’t casting magic anywhere I could see him, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t doing it somewhere else.
The card’s presence wasn’t a very subtle message.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.
Ravyn broke away from the rest of the coven. Her hair back-combed into a cloud of curls for the night, with streaks spray-dyed an electric shade of purple.
I couldn’t judge her. I’d
decided to wear another of Desdemona’s dresses for the night so I’d be able to fit in with the coven, and I looked almost as wild as she did.
“Need something?” Ravyn asked.
I hid The Hierophant at my side. “I’m fine. Thanks.”
She smiled and went back to the other witches.
Now that I was as alone as I was going to get, I took time to study the tarot card. The wind thing must have been some trick of Rage’s. Some way to remind me of what he thought were my responsibilities, with a heaping dose of magic to make it seem more mysterious.
It definitely wasn’t like destiny nudging at me or anything. That was crazy.
“Why was I glowing?” I whispered at The Hierophant. “Why won’t you leave me alone? Why can’t someone else help Graham and Donne?”
Well, I had an answer to that last one. Someone else would have to help Graham and Donne. No matter what anyone said, and no matter how many weird colors my body glowed, I wasn’t anyone’s savior.
I couldn’t be what they wanted me to be.
The guards pulled part of the barricade away to allow an old Corvette to enter our parking lot. The car pulled up near the coven. The engine cut out. The driver’s side door opened.
And there he was.
Donne.
I was shocked when Graham got out of the car with him, too. He looked much worse than the night before. He hadn’t recovered at all from his transformation on the moon.
The coven seemed equally surprised to see Graham there. They gathered around the car like a cluster of concerned, clucking hens, obscuring my view of the werewolves.
I couldn’t see Donne, but I could hear him speaking. I was pretty sure I would have been able to hear his voice from any distance. “He’s acting like there’s another moon tonight. I couldn’t leave him alone.”
“But you brought him to the concert?” Ravyn asked.
The group shifted, letting me glimpse Donne.
He was looking over Ravyn’s head right at me.
“I brought him to her,” Donne said to Ravyn.
Fear guttered through me. He expected me to do some kind of magic to save Graham, but I was supposed to have two weeks before the next moon.