by Robin Hale
“Can vampires do magic?”
The question sent a horrified shiver all the way through my gut but Laurel only sounded curious. “No,” I said. “At least, not really. They can invoke enchantments that someone else placed and some of them can — it’s like mind control. Hypnotic suggestion. Illusions. Dreamwalking. But that’s rare and requires getting pretty close without a focus.” There. That was true and hopefully not completely terrifying.
“And this, right now — not a dream?” Laurel ventured again.
“Afraid not. Why, Pearson, you dream about me often?” The tease won me the flush I was hoping for even as I reeled from letting my guard down enough to tease her at all. That sure as hell wasn’t like me.
“Sometimes,” Laurel whispered.
The admission seared beneath my skin and I was saved from trying to figure out how to respond by the clattering arrival of our chili.
Laurel’s apartment was closer to the bookstore than I would’ve expected. I followed her most of the way back to where I had parked my truck. It would’ve been rude to peel off, take a different route so I wouldn’t have to shoulder whatever that spark was that was pulling at the back of my head, simmering in the base of my skull.
“Would you — God, this is embarrassing — would you mind coming up?” Laurel’s eyes were wide, earnest and she bit a divot into her soft lower lip after she managed to spit out the question.
My gut lurched. I jerked sideways to whirl around and face the shorter woman with what I was sure was a shocked expression. Heat warred with panic under a wave of disorientation.
“Would I —” I repeated, then lost the words in the worried bunching of Laurel’s brow.
“I just…I feel like a little kid again. Like monsters under my bed are real, and I just — the window was open the other morning and I’m not sure that I opened it?” The words came out in a hurried, embarrassed rush. “I would feel a lot better if you could — and you don’t have to, obviously, I —”
“Sure, Pearson.” The words were harsher than I had intended them to be. Mostly I wanted to stem the tide of babbling, because every word Laurel said had me imagining what the inside of her bedroom might look like and how the brunette might look pressed back into her sheets — fuck, I’d been alone too long.
The grateful smile on Laurel’s face was almost as bad as the whispered admission that I featured in her dreams and I tore my eyes away from it.
The apartment was up a narrow staircase on the third floor of an old Victorian house. It was a converted attic more than an apartment. A lot of the houses in the area were divided up into multiple units with attic apartments mostly becoming studios or one-bedroom places.
It wasn’t so bad, really. Certainly better than some of my cousins’ college apartments when they’d lived near the university. Where they’d lived before life and tragedy had flung them across the country to other cities, other covens. The bathroom had some cracked tile, the towel rack seemed to have given up the good fight, and there were splits in the ancient plaster on the walls and ceiling in the bedroom. But it still had charm. It was exactly the sort of place I could see Laurel choosing for her landing spot in Cincinnati.
Once I was in the room, however, autopilot locked up. Did she actually want me to look under the bed? I looked back at her with a raised brow.
“I — if there’s anything, like, magically? That you could do to check things out?” Laurel winced even as she asked the question.
Well, she wasn’t wrong.
I kept a firm hold on my power but began a slow circuit of the room, reaching out with the sense of magic that sat squarely in the center of my chest.
There were the usual things: the hint of magic at the thresholds, a concentration of power that had settled in among the sheets and pillows on Laurel’s rumpled bed, but nothing that quite pinged as threatening. I finished the circuit, walking through the magically null kitchen so that Laurel wouldn’t worry about ghouls in her oven and stood in front of the younger witch with my hands shoved deep into my pockets.
I shrugged.
“All clear, boss.” It wasn’t quite true. There was magic, but it wasn’t anything I could identify without letting go of my death grip on my own and none of it felt malevolent. There certainly wasn’t any sign that a were had been there. No reason to get her all worked up over something that was probably her own power filling in the cracks. “You’ve got the Barnes guarantee that there is nothing lurking beneath your bed or in your closet.” That was true.
“Thank you,” Laurel whispered on a rush of air leaving her chest. She looked a little less like a balloon that was about to burst. “Barnes?” She quirked a brow at me.
“My last name.”
“Ah.” She nodded and looked past me toward her bed. She twisted her fingers in the hem of her shirt, shoulders drawing in, and I watched tension build in her body. What the hell could she be working herself up over now?
“Are you a hugger?” She blurted out at last, nearly startling a laugh from me.
I really, really wasn’t. But telling her ‘no’ right then would’ve been on par with punting a puppy into a woodchipper and I couldn’t bring myself to do that either.
“Sure, Laurel,” I said softly and Laurel was in my arms, wrapping her own around me with unexpected strength. Her scent washed over me, that tempting combination of things I’d never had and things I would always miss. How did she smell so damn good?
“I don’t know what I would’ve done without you.” The words ghosted along my neck in soft puffs, painting my skin with her voice the same way the cloud of her hair painted my nose and mouth with her scent.
Fuck. I didn’t know either. Involuntarily, my grip on her tightened. I should’ve been ashamed, but I gave myself permission to hold her for a minute. It was the most I’d touched anyone — any conscious person, anyway, since I didn’t figure that carrying her out of the woods should count — in years.
That spark in the back of my head kindled, burned brighter.
She was warm in my arms, soft and solid at the same time and I closed my eyes, turning my head to dip my nose just barely closer to her hair. It wasn’t a kiss, not even a nuzzle, but it was something.
Heat built low in my belly and along all of my nerve endings, and it wasn’t too long until I started to taste the hint of ozone at the back of my throat. I needed to let her go. I had to.
I didn’t want to. Even with the panic that was building, I didn’t want to.
“You’re going to be okay,” I said and turned my head to look down at her.
“Sure about that?” Laurel laughed weakly, tilting her face up at me.
The movement brought our faces so close together that I could see every competing fleck of green and brown in her hazel eyes. Her lips were close, so close and the heat of them was a bonfire in the little attic room. Fuck, I wanted to taste her. Her mouth would sear my skin and it was the best idea I’d had in years.
I shifted my grip around her waist. I pressed my palm into the side of her and let my fingers stroke over her jacket. Her pupils dilated, those hazel eyes going dark, and the bloom of her mouth was soft and yielding as her lips parted.
The parting of her lips convinced me: she wanted me to kiss her as much as I wanted to do it.
Like following the irresistible pull of gravity, I ducked my head almost imperceptibly closer. I could feel every inch of my body where it touched hers — and suddenly every inch of it felt like a bad omen.
Disaster coming.
I jerked back, face heating and grimacing at my own foolishness. Laurel’s eyes widened, confusion replacing the heat that had been in them a second ago, and I slammed every shield I’d ever had back into place.
“Have Jean let me know when she wants the next Harvest order, okay?”
The words were ridiculous. Even I knew that. Something had nearly happened there but I needed to pretend that it hadn’t. I nodded a goodbye and fled for the stairs, leaving Laurel behind me with her
hazel eyes, her unkissed lips, and that fucking intoxicating smell while I escaped in the dark.
Coward.
9
Laurel
The walk to the Wyrm was impossible. It was longer than it should’ve been, years longer, but also over in an instant.
I’d woken up in my bed sure that I was waking from the most vivid dream I’d ever had — and given my usual relationship with dreams, that was saying something.
It felt impossible that any of it had actually happened. Everything, every moment of the previous night since stepping foot in the park was like I’d watched it happen to someone else. The whole thing played out in the style of B monster movies only shown at drive-ins.
But it had happened.
All of it had happened. The coyote, the bite. Rhea finding me — I still didn’t understand how she had found me — and bringing me to Jean.
The candle.
Eating chili in the small hours like we’d come from a football game rather than a fight for my life.
Rhea standing in my apartment, saving me again.
Nearly kissing me.
God, that moment. If anything would convince me that it hadn’t been a dream, it would be that Rhea had pulled away rather than tucking me closer. If it were the sort of dream I’d like to have, it would’ve involved her hands cupping my face followed swiftly by the taste of her tongue in my mouth.
But the way she’d jerked away from me? That was just depressing enough to have been my waking life.
Impossibly, stupidly, I still felt a flicker of hope kindled inside me. Rhea hadn’t been entirely unaffected by that moment either. And it might have been pathetic but right then? That was enough for me.
I hesitated at the back door, hand poised to grab the handle but I wasn’t sure I was ready for what was on the other side. Jean had promised that we’d talk once she had a chance to rest, but what could she possibly have to say? The world had turned upside down and I couldn’t even see the beaten path.
“Come on. You can’t hide from me.” The door swung open to reveal Jean, hip cocked and a sly grin on her friendly face. “Witch, remember? Get your ass in here.”
All ability to form words vanished and I silently followed her into the shop, watching Jean’s nimble hands do something to a suncatcher hanging next to the front door. The light shifted, went slightly golden where it had been the clear, pale blue of early morning and I stared. Was that more magic?
“Charm,” Jean explained. “It’ll help discourage foot traffic that isn’t…local, let’s say.”
“You mean people who aren’t witches.” Euphemism wasn’t doing it for me. I needed the comfort of specificity. If I were losing my mind, I wanted to know exactly how far gone I was.
“That’s right. Well, or shifters. Vampires, if it weren’t too fine a morning to see any. Furies should be all right, too. Pretty much only keeping non-magical folks from popping in to browse.” Jean shrugged and turned away from the glass to face me again. “Coffee?”
“Yes please.” I stared at the coffeemaker while my brain worked on the concept of ‘magic’ like a corgi trying to bite an exercise ball. Then my brain caught up. “Furies?”
“Don’t worry about that right now,” Jean said with a reassuring smile. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I hit my head and woke up through the looking glass.” I grimaced even as Jean smiled at the weak joke. “It’s fine. I did feel better once I’d eaten — Cincinnati chili is not a thing I expected to enjoy but I’m on board! But I…I’m having trouble wrapping my head around all of this.”
Jean nodded like that made perfect sense to her, but I didn’t see how it could have. She’d been raised with this, right? This was her normal.
“So, I think maybe you’ve been experiencing your power your whole life and you just didn’t know what to call it.” Her blue eyes narrowed as she considered me. “How’d you pick Cincinnati, again?”
“I threw a dart at a — Oh, you’re kidding me. It was a dumb game!” I scoffed, clutching at the mug of coffee that Jean had handed me as if it were a life raft.
That was impossible. I hadn’t been doing magic. I’d been lost and depressed and looking for a way out, and my mom had suggested picking someplace at random. I couldn’t have been tapped into some mystical power.
Of course, anytime before last night I would have said that the only way to light a candle was with a match and that a bite from a wild animal would lead to a series of rabies shots, not a visit to the local New Age shopkeeper’s dining room table. But my leg was fine, so maybe it was time to consider alternatives.
“A dumb game that brought you to —” Jean jolted. “I skipped ahead. I haven’t told you. Okay. So — do you want to sit down?” Jean gestured to the tall stool by the counter.
That didn’t bode well. I slid onto the stool slowly, like the thing was rigged with physical explosives rather than whatever metaphorical bomb awaited me once I was seated.
“The day after you started working here, I called my mom,” Jean leaned back against the wall and the casual pose was incongruous with the careful way she spoke. “I told her that you reminded me of someone but that I wasn’t sure and — she got in touch with a friend in another coven. And I — look, I need to apologize. I’m so, so sorry. I never would’ve done it if I could have come up with another way and I swear I only took the one hair. But I may have taken a single hair of yours off the counter.” Jean winced, her apology written all over her face even more than it dripped from her voice.
I stared.
“I feel like I missed something?” I offered, reflexively apologetic. “I shed hair all the time. I didn’t miss it, if that’s what you’re worried about?”
Jean’s face cracked into a grin as she barked a surprised, relieved laugh. “That’s — okay, fair point. Um. A witch’s hair can be used in a lot of magical ways that are pretty invasive. I shouldn’t have taken it without asking you but I didn’t know how to talk to you about this without knowing anything for certain.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling a little dumb. I probably could’ve worked that out for myself if I weren’t so thrown by everything. “It’s okay. I trust that you, ah, won’t do it again?”
“Absolutely not,” Jean promised. “Especially not to someone in my — well, I planned to ask, since — Hell. I keep getting all of this out of order.” Jean scrubbed a hand down her face and took a sharp breath. “Okay. I’m just going to say it.” Jean met my eyes as she spoke. “I knew your mother.”
All of the air rushed out of the room.
“You knew my —” My voice cracked on the word. I couldn’t get it past the lump that had formed in my throat. “How?”
“Your mother — Olivia Bradley, I mean — was a witch.” The words hung in the space between us. Jean’s friendly eyes searched mine, making sure I was following, making sure I was okay. I had the sudden, ridiculous thought that she should’ve been a doctor, but maybe witches didn’t do that.
“Olivia. People kept calling me Olivia.” It was small but my mind latched onto that idea with a dramatic little montage: replaying every time someone had said Olivia when they first saw me.
Jean nodded. “Yeah, I — you’re just the spitting image.” Jean’s hand disappeared into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out her phone. With a few swipes she was turning it around to show me something on the screen. “My mom sent me this. Sorry about the quality. She took a photo of a photo, but hopefully you can see?”
I could. I could definitely see.
There was my hair. The giant, frizzy mess that it always was. My face shape. She was dressed in long lines — I couldn’t pinpoint a decade, only the overwhelming sense that it was right. That it was what my mother had looked like.
It was what the woman in my dream had looked like. That dream I had about the woods, about the voice — I’d been dreaming of my mother.
“She was a seer,” Jean said, not moving to take the phone back from where I sat staring at it.
“Her magical gifts were mostly in divination. And I think she passed those on to you.”
The idea was stunning. Impossible, really. But…was it?
My uncanny ability to always know when I was dreaming and to recall my dreams. The fact that seeing Rhea Barnes had been watching someone walk out of my dreams into real life. And that dart — what were the chances that it could have led me to the city where my mother had lived without some sort of magical intervention?
“Why did she leave?” The question erupted from my mouth before I was completely sure I had formed it.
Jean returned the phone to her lap with a soft frown. “I don’t know.” The furrow in her brow deepened. “I — your mother was a member of our coven. Greenhollow. I asked my mom about it and she — she remembers Olivia being anxious. Maybe afraid? She was worried about something but she never told the coven what it was. I think she was trying to protect the rest of us by handling it herself.”
I let out a shaky breath. I should’ve known that I wouldn’t get all the answers so easily.
“Mom said that after her husband died she was a changed woman. On edge. Strong like always, but more...aware of dark corners if that makes sense.” Jean rubbed her thumb along the outside of her mug.
“Her husband died. My father?” My heart pounded. I’d never known anything at all about my father. My mother had been trapped in my mind as the tragic victim of a car accident — the trauma of which had given me a nice middle school fixation on brain death and hallucinations — and if she’d been on the road in Nebraska coming from Cincinnati, it didn’t seem likely that it was a weekend jaunt. But my father? I didn’t even have a scarf to remember him by.
Jean nodded. “Yeah, I don’t remember him. My mom might if you’d like to talk to her about him. She’ll be around at the next coven meeting.” She paused. “I wanted to say — I don’t have clear memories of your mother but, from what I do remember, she was always kind to me. She’d sneak me cookies from coven meetings and she was never too busy or involved in the boring grown-up stuff to pay attention to me.”