by Robin Hale
“I know. I understand. And believe me, I had fights with my mom like you wouldn’t think possible. But at the end of it…a witch is grown at sixteen.” The blonde shrugged helplessly. “Sure, by human law we could’ve taken her from Barleywick and put her someplace she didn’t want to be. But as star-born? She was an adult. Old enough to decide that she wanted to stay there. The first thing she did was emancipate herself.” Jean winced. “There’s no…Ohio doesn’t have an emancipation law. And she probably should’ve ended up in the system. But the Council smoothed things over, let her stay at Barleywick on her own as long as she let them keep tabs on her.” Jean ducked her head, met my eyes with a pleading stare. “You have to know that almost every coven petitioned to take care of her. The Council said no. She was an adult in our traditions and she’d chosen to remain there. We had to respect it.”
I didn’t respect it. Not at all. Even though I knew that Rhea would’ve fought tooth and nail to avoid being a burden on anyone else — especially while blaming herself for her coven’s destruction — but how could they have let her? How could they have decided that she was old enough, stable enough to be on her own?
“I hate it,” I hissed and screwed my eyes shut.
“I do too,” Jean admitted. “I think if she’d come to Greenhollow, or Blackthorne, or any of the other covens…I think she’d have forgiven herself for it.”
I pressed my lips together in a firm line while thoughts boiled through my brain. Part of me wanted to think that the possible futures I was imagining were from my magic. That those worlds in which Rhea smiled easily, had a family that could never replace the one she’d lost but still provided stability, home — that those worlds were things that might’ve happened if this Council had behaved differently. But I didn’t know that to be true. I just wanted it.
Scowling, my eyes lit on the silver-chained pendant on the wall again. It made me think of cinnamon. Why cinnamon? “What is that? It looks familiar but I can’t — I don’t know where I would’ve seen it.”
“That?” Jean asked stiffly. “That’s a promise my mom made. If it becomes relevant, I promise you’ll hear about it.”
There was something in her voice that I couldn’t tease apart. I was too restless to focus. I needed to do something productive. Something that would help me make sense of things with Rhea. With Absalon.
“I want to know more about Absalon,” I said at last.
Jean’s eyes went wide. “Absalon? Why?”
“I’ve seen him — at the festival, at Barleywick, in dreams — and he seems…he’s connected to too many things. I want to know more about him.” There was a finality in my voice that I was proud of. “How would I go about that?”
For the first time since I’d met her, Jean looked cornered. “Well, I…there are records. The Council has an archive. That would be a place to start…and he’s, you know, he does live in Cincinnati. He’s the sort of person whose name might crop up in local media.”
Anticipation thrummed up through my body from the soles of my feet. Finally, something I could do. A puzzle I might be able to begin to solve. “So how do I get access to that archive? Where is it?”
“Oh, well the archive itself isn’t exactly open to the public,” Jean said.
My face fell.
“But I can set you up with our coven’s credentials for the online portal,” she continued. She dropped back into the wooden rolling chair behind the desk and pulled open one of the top drawers. “Mom always kept that stuff in a notebook — security risk, right? But this one is at least charmed so only a Greenhollow witch can read it.” She shrugged. “That’s something, anyway.”
“There’s an online portal?” I blurted, astonished.
“What, you thought witches couldn’t handle a web browser?” Jean laughed. “Yeah, there was a push a while back to digitize the existing records. You can find them both as scanned image files and hand-entered data. For me, I like being able to compare them. The interface isn’t great, but it gets the job done.” Jean copied some information from the notebook in her hand onto a sticky note and handed it to me. “Just try not to do anything that’s going to blow up in our faces, yeah?”
“It’s only research. How bad could it be?” I asked, smiling at Jean’s grimace.
16
Rhea
“Do you want to go to the art museum with me?”
Laurel’s lilting voice shattered the white noise hum of the fan and irrigation systems running in the back of the greenhouse. I jolted upright and caught the edge of the worktable with my skull.
Touching the throbbing site of impact didn’t bring my fingers away with blood, so I was willing to take victory where I found it. I rose unsteadily to my feet and turned to face Laurel’s look of guilt.
“Sorry,” she said with a wince. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.” Bruised and embarrassed, but that was unavoidable some minutes. “What were you saying?”
“Hi, by the way.” Laurel’s face lit up with a fond, genuine smile and I swallowed against the dryness of my throat.
I was an asshole.
“Hi.” I leaned back against the worktable — fingers clinging to the edge — with exaggerated calm. She was there. In my space.
And I didn’t know what to do about it.
I’d barely had any time to think since the festival. I hadn’t called her, hadn’t decided what I was going to say if I ever did. How did someone start that conversation? ‘Hi, Laurel, I know I made it seem like I was ready for something with you, but I think you might be my soul mate and I’m ninety-nine percent certain that I’m going to get both of us killed if we continue with this.’
Her smile faltered at my admittedly cool greeting, and I tried to ignore the pang in my chest.
Laurel rallied. “I was asking if you’d want to go to the art museum with me.” She held out a flyer: one of those mass-produced, glossy things that the museum placed in coffee houses and buildings on the university’s campus to lure in the sort of intellectual crowd I’d never belonged to. It looked generic, uninspiring. Someone had let the museum borrow a bunch of artwork and they were showing it for a limited run.
It wasn’t until I saw the name of the benefactor that I understood why Laurel had brought it up.
“Laurel — Aaron Griswell? You know that’s —” I began, not even taking the poster from her. I didn’t want to touch anything that so much as had his name on it.
“One of Absalon’s public aliases. I know,” Laurel said with a nod. She looked down at the flyer like she was confirming that the name hadn’t changed when she showed it to me. “Jean gave me access to the archives — did you know that the query portal runs direct SQL commands?”
I hadn’t known that. I also didn’t know what those were, so it didn’t strike me as important. What was important was the fact that Laurel insisted on fixating on the one person I wanted to keep her away from. “Why do you want to go to that…that exhibit?” I ground out between clenched teeth. I could feel my magic humming, the way it pulled away from me and toward Laurel. The way it always did when she was around.
I should’ve realized what was happening a hell of a lot sooner.
“Well, I was doing this research — Clan Leinth has pretty reasonable records, all things considered — and I found his aliases. I was heading out from my apartment to grab some curry from the Thai place down the street — I think you’d like it, by the way. It isn’t Cincinnati chili, but it’s still got an interesting set of flavors that I think would work for you —” Laurel rambled. Most days, I liked her rambling. I liked getting to see the stream of consciousness behind those pretty eyes.
But that day? That day I couldn’t deal with it.
“The exhibit, Pearson.” I didn’t mean to snap but it was the only way I could get the words out.
“Right, the exhibit. Well, I was heading out to pick up dinner and I found this flyer tacked to the notice board outside my door. There hasn’t been anything new there since
a local production of Fiddler that closed more than six months ago, so I noticed it right away,” Laurel remarked. She made it sound like an interesting piece of trivia rather than a serious red flag. “I recognized the name, so I thought I’d go check it out. I can only imagine what his art collection must look like, you know? And I thought I might be able to get a read off of some of the pieces. Since they belong to him.”
It wasn’t a bad idea if what she wanted to do was make herself a target while searching for information that didn’t help either of us in the slightest, but I was having trouble accepting that that was what she wanted to do.
“It just showed up outside your door,” I said flatly. “Right after you accessed the Council archives about him. And that didn’t strike you as a little suspicious?” My voice was coming from someone else. Had to be. I clung to the edges of my control over my own body in failing desperation. “He’s trying to lure you out, Laurel. Why would you go?” The first hints of panic, the half-seen wisps that moved through the shadows in my mind were beginning to gather.
“Oh, no, I figured he either left it himself or had someone do it for him.” Laurel looked up at me, fully convinced that she was being sensible.
“Then why go?” I asked in a tense whisper.
“Because if I leave him in the shadows I’m going to be afraid of him forever.” A muscle in her jaw jumped and flexed, and it was the first sign that this wasn’t as easy for her as I had initially thought. “I’ve seen him in my dreams, Rhea. Standing next to my mother. I need to know why I’m seeing that. And I think you deserve to know what he knew about Zora.”
I shook my head and took an aborted step back, hitting the worktable with jolting force. “Don’t do this for me. I can’t stop you from going, but if you think — if you think you’re doing me a favor — you aren’t.”
The corner of her mouth twitched downward and the determination in her eyes frosted over. Went rigid. She was clinging to it rather than feeling it. “Okay,” she said after a long, tense pause. “I’ll let you know how it goes.”
I turned back to the work I’d been doing when she came in but it was no use. I couldn’t remember which screws I’d been tightening, which I’d already finished. I listened to the sound of her footsteps leaving the greenhouse. My magic raged beneath my skin and I let Laurel walk away. I let her walk toward the man who’d been a shadow looming over my life since the day my world had become nothing but ghosts.
Bitter self-loathing rose in my throat.
I made it through a half hour of puttering around the workshop before I ran out of tasks to keep my hands busy. All the work that remained needed focus, and I was too self-aware to believe I could do anything that required my full attention.
Was she there right that moment? Was she standing in front of one of his pieces, trying to read magic off of it, leaving her back exposed to anyone in the city who might wander by?
I couldn’t stand it. It was holding a hot coal in the base of my skull, my mind burning out from the inside.
That was it. I needed to let someone know that Absalon was baiting Laurel — someone who had the power to do something about it. I pulled my coat off its peg by the workshop’s door and headed toward my truck. I didn’t know if Councilwoman Spears would see me, but I was at the end of my rope and I had to try.
The Council hall was an unobtrusive building. As a kid, I’d always thought it would be in one of the old Victorian mansions in the eastern part of the city. But it wasn’t. It was downtown, tucked in among the high-rises and the corporate headquarters the same as any other modern place of power.
I waited for the elevator to finish its ascent and hoped that I could be able to get in to see her. That she was still in the office, that she wouldn’t be in a meeting.
The man at the reception desk gave me a broad, bright smile that told me he didn’t have any idea who I was. I’d spent two years coming into that office, sitting in front of Councilwoman Spears and answering the same battery of questions — how was I managing Barleywick, was I still sure that I wanted to keep the place by myself, had I felt out of control lately. Had I had another ‘incident’. Every receptionist in that building had learned my face and wore the same, painted-on expression that said they expected me to go supernova any moment.
The experience hadn’t engendered a lot of trust for the Councilwoman — warm and maternal she certainly was not — but she was the only person I could think of who might even take a meeting with me.
“Hi!” The receptionist said brightly. “Can I help you?”
“I need to speak with Councilwoman Spears,” I said, trying not to grit my teeth against the way even the sound of the air conditioning rasped along my nerves. “Tell her that Rhea Barnes is here. It’s important.”
He hesitated for a moment and I thought that he might refuse, but he pressed a button on the phone sitting on his desk and the line crackled to life. “Councilwoman? There’s a Miss Rhea Barnes here to see you.”
Spears’ voice came through the speaker, rough and gravelly the way it’d been the entire time I’d known her, shit-scared sixteen-year-old and all. “Send her in.”
The receptionist waved to the door and gave me a confused, yet encouraging nod. “Right through there, Miss Barnes.”
A wordless grunt and a nod was all the interaction with an innocent bystander that I was willing to risk. Everything ached. I stretched around my power like a balloon reaching its breaking point. There was too much and none of it stayed the least bit calm since I’d first met Laurel Pearson.
“Rhea,” Spears said, not exactly warmly but with less open contempt than I’d anticipated. I’d take it. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”
I hadn’t stepped foot in that office since my eighteenth birthday when I no longer needed the Council’s assistance to keep me out of a foster coven or the human welfare system. I hadn’t said anything. Just hadn’t come back. Given that the Council didn’t send any of their marshals after me, I took it as read that they were fine seeing my back.
“Have a seat,” Spears said, gesturing toward the chair opposite her desk.
I settled into it and considered the woman sitting across from me. A decade hadn’t changed her much: the lines weren’t any deeper, her hair wasn’t any grayer. And the flinty sharpness in her eyes hadn’t dulled in the slightest.
“So,” she began. “Why are you in my office, Barnes?”
The words caught on the inside of my lip and I suddenly felt ridiculous sitting there. What could I say? ‘I had a bad feeling.’ ‘A suspicious flyer showed up outside my probable soul mate’s house.’ ‘I saw Absalon at the Harvest Moon and his smile was off-putting.’ Spears would laugh me out of her office. But I had to try. I’d never believed that Absalon was as innocent in what happened at Barleywick as he’d claimed, and the Council had never even looked.
That's what friends in high places bought for someone like him.
“You know that Greenhollow registered a new member, right?” I said. Seers were rare. Spears would want to keep Laurel around and available. Focusing on the potential for abuse of a rare gift might be enough to overcome Absalon’s clout.
Maybe.
Spears frowned and pulled her glasses off. “I think I saw that go by my desk. Why? You want to lodge a protest?”
“No,” I said quickly. “That new coven member is Laurel Pearson —” The blankness on Spears’ face spoke for itself. “Olivia Bradley’s daughter.” There. That registered. The calculating gleam in Spears’ eye was exactly what I’d expected from her. “She has all her mother’s gifts. And now she has Absalon’s attention.”
“Are you lodging a complaint against a prominent member of Clan Leinth?” Spears asked, narrowing her eyes at me in consideration. “Has he done something that violates the Accords?”
“She’s been dreaming about him — you know that he can dreamwalk.” I leaned forward in my chair.
Spears’ skeptical brow insisted that she did not, in fact, know that.
“We had to leave the Harvest Moon because he was leering at her. He’s been baiting her.” The words churned and I didn’t have to look at Spears’ face to know that I’d already lost my argument. “Do you really want to leave the only known Seer vulnerable for a vampire to meddle with?” It was a desperate shot, but I was out of options.
I could see Spears weighing what I’d said, taking her own selfish interest in access to Laurel’s power and balancing it against Absalon’s popularity, his usefulness in helping her secure her seat on the Council year after year. And I saw the moment that she decided.
“You said yourself that Laurel has her mother’s gifts. Isn’t it more likely that she’s dreaming of him because of her own magic, rather than anything he’s done? Nothing you’ve brought to me is a crime, Rhea. I can’t lock Absalon up because you have a bad feeling about his interest in your…friend.” The pause was small but it rang out in the room. Spears rose from the desk and it wasn’t the subtlest way I’d ever been kicked out of someplace. “Now listen, Absalon is a respected member of this community. He doesn’t deserve Council harassment — or yours. If I hear that you’ve been anywhere near him…well.” Spears sniffed. “It would be a shame to see all the work you’ve done to maintain Barleywick’s legacy thrown away.”
My blood ran cold through my limbs and I reeled back, scowling. “She won’t be worth anything to you if she’s dead, Spears,” I growled, already heading toward the door.
“Does she even want to be protected from him, Rhea?” Spears asked. She sounded infuriatingly calm. Reasonable. I could almost believe she didn’t know that Absalon was a viper that Laurel would have no defenses against.
The thought of Laurel heading to the art museum, excited to follow up on a mystery, believing the whole thing was an interesting game rather than deadly — no. No, she didn’t want to be protected.