by Robin Hale
“The Accords — it’s the Crescent Accords, but if you say that to someone you’ll sound like an idiot — the Accords are the peace treaties that were signed maybe a hundred and ten years ago? Close to that.” I shrugged. “Established the Council. Made the rules. Set up the punishments for breaking them.” The words tasted sour on my tongue and I tried not to shudder. Last thing I wanted to do was stand in the Book Wyrm and explain the ins and outs of Council justice to Laurel, especially with the weight of everything hanging over me.
“So the Harvest Moon,” Laurel began and I let out a slow breath of relief. “It’s corn mazes and apple cider? That kind of community festival?”
The chuckle in my throat took me by surprise and I didn’t miss the flash of delight on Laurel’s face. “No, not like that. It’s…all the witches show up. Pretty much every coven, every hedge witch. You don’t just do magic with your coven, and witches will spend all night invoking blessings and community rites. Dancing under the moon, nudity optional.” I raised an ironic brow. “Shifters have races or they’ll wrestle. They go on runs together regardless of pack. Vampires are usually in charge of the music and there’s always dancing. Always. And some of the vampires run, too.”
A moment of silence settled around the pair of us in the strange golden light that filtered through the front windows, and it was suddenly, desperately important to me that Laurel want to go to the Harvest Moon. That she might be willing to go with me. I’d gone every year of my life except the first after — that my coven was gone. It was the one constant: that even those of us out of favor with the Council weren’t totally separate from the community. That the Moon was for us, too.
“It sounds amazing,” Laurel said at last and the words brushed over her lips. Wisps in the forest, tempting me away.
It wasn’t rational, the way that sentence swelled in my chest like it was somehow about me. Not a whole lot had been rational about the way I reacted to Laurel.
“You should come with me.” I was stunned to find that the sentence blurted into the air by some idiot had come from my own mouth. “To the festival, I mean.” I coughed, cleared my throat of imaginary blockage to cover the fact that my heart was trying to drill its way out through my ribs.
Laurel’s eyes went wide. “You want me to go with you?” She repeated it cautiously, unsure I’d said it and I couldn’t really believe it either. “I mean, yes! Yes, I would love to do that. That sounds — yes. Thank you.” There was the tiniest flinch at the end of her rambling and some of my anxiety slid away from me.
I wasn’t particularly smooth, but as long as Laurel was willing to babble along after me I must’ve been doing something right.
“I’ll pick you up at seven,” I said as I finished emptying the box I’d carried in with me. “The festival doesn’t really get going until moonrise, but it’s a ways out of town.”
“Seven,” Laurel repeated with a nod and a broad smile.
I ducked my head, trying to hide the grin that was fighting its way onto my face, and lifted a hand in farewell as I turned toward the door. The sunlight outside the shop wasn’t anywhere near as golden and warm as the light in the Wyrm, but even the clouds that were gathering overhead couldn’t touch the spark of excitement that built in my chest.
Laurel was going to be my date for the festival. For the day of truces, of pardons…maybe I could have that. Maybe it wasn’t too much to hope for: a night with a beautiful woman who looked at me like she wanted to know everything about me and wouldn’t turn away.
For the first time in a long time, I was looking forward to tomorrow.
13
Laurel
Sitting in the cab of Rhea’s truck while she drove the two of us out into the hills of rural Ohio, making our way to a community festival that would be attended by witches and shapeshifters and vampires, was every high school daydream I’d had about finding a girlfriend — warped by repeated reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Not that I was complaining.
Rhea drove with one hand on the wheel, the other tapping out the bass rhythm of the song on the radio against the window well of her door. She looked incredible. She always looked incredible. But the way the light was shifting did intoxicating things to her already drool-worthy cheekbones and the sleeves of her flannel shirt were rolled up so that her forearms were on full display.
Apparently, I had a thing for forearms.
Forearms and literally everything else about her.
I’d spent the first few minutes of the drive trying to make small-talk before the capacity to do it drifted away. After that, I contented myself with basking in the last of the summer sun, watching as the city around me faded into suburbs and then into the rolling expanse of hills and farmland.
“Where is this place?” I asked
Rhea bit down on her lower lip and squinted — clearly from the question rather than the dwindling sunlight. “That’s, ah, hard to explain. Up ahead we’re going to take a turn off and we’ll be on a drive that’s warded against humans. It makes mapping the area hard. We’re still near Cincinnati. Still in Ohio. But as far as the state is concerned, where we’re going doesn’t exist.”
I huffed a laugh and grinned out the window at the suddenly-fascinating scenery. “That’s — how did the Council pick this place?”
“Process of elimination, mostly. The first one was in a forest between some disputed territories. Kind of a no-man’s-land. But when they wanted to make the festival a regular thing, no one was willing to meet somewhere that had ever belonged to someone who wanted them dead.” There was a wry cast to Rhea’s voice and I wondered who had told her all of this. Had she been as fascinated by it as I was? Or was it all old-hat to someone who’d been raised around magic? I couldn’t really imagine being bored of hearing about the history of witches, but six year olds could probably be bored by anything if they tried hard enough.
“Given what you’ve told me about the time before the Accords, it seems like it would be hard to find a place that qualified,” I commented.
Rhea gave an amused snort of agreement. “Pretty much. So they snapped up the one spot no one had objected to and now the Council owns it. They’ve been holding it there since the Accords were signed.” She gestured with her free hand toward a cluster of trees on the right. “That’s our turn-off.”
I frowned. It didn’t look like a road there at all to me — had Jean been wrong? Would my mother’s magic be enough to get me in? Had I come to Cincinnati, to Greenhollow too late?
Then our tires crunched on gravel and downed twigs and the view in front of me began to change. The trees parted. Foliage that had been an impenetrable wall of branches and thorns melted away into a tree-lined path, wide enough to allow a pair of vehicles to pass one another if they were careful. There were lights among the trees, softly glowing, intermittently brightening the friendly shadows that Rhea eased the truck along. Fireflies? No, they were too bright for that. They were something else entirely.
“Alchemical lamps,” Rhea explained, politely abstaining from mocking the way I had my face pressed against the window to stare out. “Like the ones I have in the shed but charmed to twinkle.” She lifted a shoulder. “They used to have wisps out there, but I guess a few too many outsiders wandered off.”
I laughed because it was the only thing I could think to do. It was all incredible. Just utterly unbelievable. A renewed sense of excitement flowed through every inch of my body, more than anticipating the first day of school, more than anticipating Christmas or any other day, I was dying to see what was at the end of that lane.
We pulled off and parked among a scattering of vehicles and then I was out in the dwindling sunlight. The air smelled fresh, free of car exhaust and the lingering smells of city life. Once the sun set and the sky went dark, there would be a riot of stars in the sky. Away from the light pollution of Cincinnati’s nights, it would be like my mom’s house in Nebraska: more stars than anyone could count.
“Come on,” Rh
ea said with a nod toward a tent near the entrance to a clearing.
The whole place was unreal. Like it had been built by someone who designed sets for a living. The grass was too green, the trees too beautiful as they surrounded the open space. There were soft-looking flowers and trails that headed into the woods around us. I followed along after Rhea helplessly, craning my neck to see all the things that I had never seen before.
I’d thought, perhaps, that we’d be early. That we’d show up and there’d be nothing much to see. But the clearing was full of people. There were women dressed in flowing scarves and skirts, bangles and necklaces catching the remaining light. There were birds in the trees, large animals lounging on beds of long grass and my breath stuck in my throat as I finally, finally caught on to what they must have been.
“Are they…?” I trailed off, looking longingly toward a bear napping beneath an oak tree.
Rhea nodded. “Yeah. About the only folks who aren’t here yet are the vampires.” There was a note of disapproval in her voice and I wanted to ask what it was that made Rhea so uncomfortable with them. I wanted to ask about her history, her background. Was there some long-running strife that I still didn’t know about?
She didn’t mind the shapeshifters, and from what I could tell, they’d done as much violence to witches as vampires had before the Accords.
We reached a wide purple tent with carpets, soft chairs, and couches spread underneath it. As soon as I stepped under the canopy, the thick air flowed away from me. It was nearly fall, but Ohio obviously didn’t know that. The humid air still clung to summer’s damp heat and it was incredible to step under the canopy and feel the rush of cool air I’d expect from an air-conditioned building.
“What — how did?” I asked, spinning in a circle, flailing a little as I looked for the magic or charm that could’ve done it.
“Magic, Laurel.” Rhea lifted the corner of her mouth in a smile that I was coming to be addicted to. “It’s all magic.” She cocked her head, angling her jaw toward me with an amused glint in her eye. “You’re something else, you know that? Layla’s out there in full grizzly and you’re fixated on the fact that you’re not drowning in sweat.”
It was mockery, but the gentlest kind of it and something uncoiled in my chest at the idea that Rhea had let herself tease me. I followed her to an antique freestanding bar — something that belonged in a speakeasy in the twenties rather than the middle of nowhere in the 21st century — and she pulled a couple of china mugs of something spicy-smelling and steaming. Inside the tent, it wasn’t too warm for a hot drink.
“What is it?” I asked. I sniffed, but not only was my sense of smell probably worse than average, I also didn’t have any idea what different herbs even did. Maybe it was some sort of magic-enhancing potion? Or the star-born equivalent of a mild intoxicant?
“Mulled cider.” Rhea paused for a beat and her mouth quirked again. “You weren’t entirely wrong. No corn maze, though.”
I accepted the mug and took a sip of the cider, apparently mundane but still magical for me. It was perfect, delicious and there was something so bizarrely wholesome about sharing some cider while on a date — I was pretty sure it was a date — with a woman I had a crush on. The contrast between that simple fact and the knowledge that I was sharing it with her at a festival for magical creatures, well, that would never feel normal.
“Come on. There are decorations up all over and the shifters will be starting their events soon. You should see all of it your first time.” Rather than beckoning me along with a move of that sharp jaw, Rhea reached back and took my free hand in her own. She led me through the throngs of people lounging on overstuffed sofas back out into the clearing, the sky growing darker by the moment and lending the world that same sense of theater I’d felt when we first arrived.
The press of Rhea’s skin to mine made me shiver and I ducked my head and grinned. It was going to be an amazing night.
‘Decorations’ turned out to be a wild understatement. My mom put up Christmas decorations — an artificial tree covered in blinking lights, little statues of Santa Claus and reindeer around the house. This? Was nothing like that.
Nothing at the festival did the least little bit to suggest I hadn’t been in a coma these past weeks. How else could I explain any of it? There were twinkling lights floating around overhead. Wooden carvings chased each other around poles strewn with flowers and ribbons, roaring silently in the evening’s dying light. Delicate paper figures flew, beating wings and all, sailing through the air around alchemical lanterns I couldn’t understand.
And that was just the setting.
I didn’t want to blink because if I shut my eyes for a second it might all disappear. When I was a kid, I’d read books about fairy rings and magical places that turned out to be illusions. It broke my heart when the story ended and the hero had to go back to their mundane life. Every second that I took in the festival around me, I was afraid that I would be that person. That the next time I opened my eyes I would be standing alone in a perfectly ordinary clearing and every magical thing would be whisked away.
I stepped carefully around a witch shaping the smoke from a censer into frolicking rabbits chasing after the paper boats in the sky.
Rhea’s hand was an anchor. No matter how much I felt like Alice tumbling down that rabbit hole, I couldn’t drag my attention too far away from the feeling of her skin against mine. Her hand was warm and dry, its grip strong and sure.
And she kept looking at me.
She stood a half-step back from me, not letting go but not clinging to my side as I was dazzled by everything. She stood back and she watched me, nodding and even going so far as to smile a little when she thought I wouldn’t see it. Even surrounded by magic, there was nothing better than the feeling of her eyes on me, the warmth from her smile. Her hand around mine.
Clustered together, apart from the rest of the festival but still in range to have been watching the rest of the events, were three women whose magic hung around them like no one else I had ever seen. It didn’t surround them in an aura. It permeated them. It was constantly roiling in their cores, constantly recombining itself into something dark and fierce and vibrant.
Rhea caught the direction I was staring and grimaced. “Yeah…maybe steer clear of those three.”
“Who are they?” I asked. The one in the middle, a slight blonde, said something to the other two, and I watched in astonishment as the tallest laughed so hard that the flower-drenched pole beneath her hand was crushed to splinters.
“They’re furies,” Rhea said dryly. With a gentle tug on our clasped hands, Rhea led me away from the place I’d been rooted and out toward another section of the festival. “The tall one is okay. The other two can be…kind of a lot.”
“I can’t…there’s the tall one, the blonde one, but the other…I can’t seem to focus on her.” I blinked and squinted in the dying light, trying to force my eyes to make sense of the images in front of me but it was no use. I could tell there was a feminine energy over there, a shape, but I couldn’t pin down what she looked like at all.
“You can’t see her?” Rhea asked, obviously surprised. “Well, all the better for me, then.”
I cast a bewildered glance behind me at the three lingering together in their dark power and followed Rhea when she led me away.
The first time I stumbled across a lounging lion my heart leaped into my throat. I froze and Rhea turned back, brow furrowed until she saw what had caught my attention.
“Shifter, Pearson. He’s in control.” Rhea’s voice was pitched to be reassuring and she gave my hand a soft squeeze, but it wasn’t fear that had stopped me.
I stood mesmerized and watched the shifter stretch, opening his mouth wide on a yawn that I’d seen from my mom’s house cat a thousand times. His claws splayed out, raking the ground in front of him and I watched the sweep of his long tail as he rose to his feet.
“My father was a shifter,” I whispered, eyes still wide, stil
l catching every last scrap of the huge cat’s movement. “A lion.”
Rhea came closer to my side, free hand squeezing my shoulder. “Got it. He’s part of the Leo pack. They should be having a demonstration soon — want to watch?”
I nodded, struck silent by the way the lion bounded across the clearing to join an impossible collection of animals.
The Leo pack’s demonstration — a series of races: running and climbing and acrobatics — had consumed all of my attention. It wasn’t until they stopped for a round of food and rest that I noticed the pavilion next to where I’d been standing, leaning against Rhea’s shoulder, spellbound.
The next pavilion held witches. Dozens of witches, many of them wearing emblems of their coven, all mixed together in different groups. In pairs or threes. I could see their magic in the air, the way their auras pulsed around their bodies and entwined with their partners. The air was thick with the taste of power and it rushed through me.
“What are they doing?” I asked and Rhea favored me with a wry quirk of her mouth.
“They’re drawing down the moon.” Rhea’s fingers tangled with mine.
I didn’t understand it, didn’t know what ‘drawing down the moon’ even meant but I wanted it more than anything.
“What does that mean? Can we do that?” I barely had enough air to ask the questions. Where watching the shifters had filled me with startled delight, watching the witches combine their magic inspired a longing so intense it hurt.
Hesitation flickered across Rhea’s face, and I wondered if I had managed to stumble across another one of those social taboos I kept finding. A heartbeat later the conflicted expression cleared and resolve painted the set of her jaw.
“Yeah, Laurel,” she said, voice softer than I’d ever heard it before. “We can do that.” She took both of my hands and led the two of us into the throng of witches.