Under the Harvest Moon

by Robin Hale

  But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t try.

  I sat in the cab of my truck, engine off, at the back corner of the museum’s parking lot. I could barely sit still, fidgeting and scowling at my obsessive need to make sure that Laurel was safe. To make sure that nothing had happened. I’d been cleaning the insides of the greenhouses, wiping down the glass and repairing some of the scratched coating. I’d made it through nearly an hour of work — something I left until spring every year — thinking about patching those scrapes with my aunt, listening to my cousins singing loudly, off-key to some song on the radio.

  I thought about the years after the incident. The way that Absalon had shown up, how I’d felt worse every time he left.

  I couldn’t articulate what it was that I didn’t believe, or what it was that felt wrong about the whole thing — I had known that my mother had trouble with Absalon, that she’d refused to deal directly with him. But she’d never told me about the particulars. It wasn’t until she was gone that I even thought to wonder about it.

  And now Absalon was luring Laurel — Laurel who barely knew how to access her own magic, much less what the dangers were in the community — away from her coven, away from me for some unknown purpose.

  So there I sat watching the exit, torn between getting out of the truck and going inside to find Laurel and that moon-damned exhibit — she’d invited me, after all — and turning over the engine and going back home.

  ‘It would be a shame to see all the hard work you’ve done to maintain Barleywick’s legacy thrown away.’

  And damn me along with that exhibit, but I couldn’t shake the sound of Spears’ voice in my head. I knew that her threats weren’t empty. I knew that the Council still considered me a potential threat just for breathing outside a cell or a pair of magic-dampening bracelets.

  Cowed by the threat and hating myself for it, I waited.

  As the museum closed, a familiar cloud of hair floated out of the doors onto the steps, resolving itself into Laurel walking next to an unmistakable figure.

  Absalon was there. Absalon had gone to wait in the trap he’d baited for her. Impotent rage welled in my chest, burned in the base of my skull. I couldn’t protect her if she wasn’t mine, if she didn’t trust me to know that she might need protecting — but I couldn’t give in to the bond I knew we could have without risking everything I had built. She deserved so much more than my albatross around her neck.

  They stopped outside the door and I stilled my breathing, even though I knew there was no way I would be able to hear them, no matter how silent I was. I couldn’t see Laurel’s face, couldn’t read her expression, but Absalon was wearing that same smug smile that had crawled beneath my skin and left itching, burning scars since I was a teenager. Horrified, I watched him lift a hand and push a lock of Laurel’s curls away from her face.

  Bastard. I seethed, powerless and utterly at a loss.

  I didn’t approach them. I didn’t dare. Instead, I put the truck in gear and headed back toward Barleywick. If I was going to sort through any of what happened there, if I was going to figure out how to get Laurel out of Absalon’s snare — even if I didn’t know what his game was — I needed to think. I had decisions to make and they weren’t going to be made wallowing in grief and stupid envy in the back of a museum parking lot.

  As I drove away, I tried to soothe the self-loathing that bubbled in my gut. She’d been fine. Absalon was still a lurking threat and a definite creep, but she hadn’t been physically harmed. She was safe. For now.

  17

  Laurel

  The Cincinnati Art Museum wasn’t anything like I had expected.

  Something about the flyer, the way they’d announced a group of paintings on loan from a private collection had struck me as small-scale. I’d thought I’d find a small building with local work dating back as far as maybe the founding of the city — if they were ambitious.

  When I ascended the steps to the doors, I spared a moment for an apology to the Queen City. I’d been wrong. It wasn’t MOMA. It wasn’t the Louvre, by any means. But signage all over the lobby directed to artwork that spanned the past six thousand years and hailed from all over the world. Far from the shabby set of chairs I thought I’d find in front of a special exhibition of a dozen paintings, I was going to need a map to get where I was going.

  The girl at the front desk was all bright smiles and easy cheer and wasted no time in loading me up with a map and informational brochure about the exhibits they had going on.

  “And I’ll just need you to sign in right here,” she chirped and slid a guestbook across the table toward me.

  I scrawled something that might’ve once passed for a signature, then printed my name in small caps on the next space.

  “Oh!” She said as she took the book back. “Your ticket price is waived today, Ms. Pearson. Mr. Griswell arranged a guest pass for you. You’re all set. Sorry for making you wait!”

  She thrust a matte gray guest pass into my hands and I stared down at it, mouth forming nonsense syllables in the face of irrefutable evidence that Rhea had been right. I’d known that she probably was. I wasn’t stupid, after all. I didn’t think the flyer was an accident. But I’d thought that Absalon would want me to think it had been.

  This proved otherwise.

  “I — thank you,” I managed at last. I gathered up the map and offered a weak smile and a wave back toward the girl at the front desk, whose sunny smile had spread so wide that her eyes were nearly completely shut. I turned down a hallway marked by large, glossy signs indicating a special exhibit and tried not to listen to the echo of my own footsteps.

  Immediately, I wished that I hadn’t been wrong about the museum. I would’ve been more comfortable somewhere that I could see the entire space without having to go down a hallway or up a set of stairs. Somewhere that I didn’t have to worry about who or what I might see when I rounded a corner, or whether someone might be following behind me. I longed for a space that no one could hide in. Not even me.

  The exhibit, once I found it, mimicked walking through a well-appointed gallery in some nineteenth-century pork baron’s mansion. There was thick carpet on the floor rather than the museum’s usual marble. Gold filigree lined the frames, the sort of gilt edging that mocked the garishness of cheap, down-market mimics. I had no doubt at all that it was genuine gold and that those frames alone were worth more than anything I had ever touched. Even the lighting belonged in someone’s estate. Where the lights in the rest of the museum were designed to show the colors of the paint, the texture of the sculptures to their clearest point of accuracy, the light in the exhibit was intimate. It was golden and close as the light that came from a fireplace in winter.

  I should have been wearing a smoking jacket, maybe carrying a snifter of brandy. Not that I could’ve picked a snifter out of a barware lineup, but I was pretty sure that was the one for drinking brandy.

  No one else lingered in the exhibit, which was strange given the amount of attention the museum was drawing to it. I was alone in the secluded gallery and with my footsteps muffled by the carpet, it was easy to feel I’d been wrapped in cotton wool, put away in storage for safekeeping.

  I rolled my shoulders to dislodge the loop my brain was stuck in and approached the beginning of the exhibit.

  The first painting in the collection was of a young man standing over the carcass of an enormous buck, blood pouring from a wound in its neck to stain the strangely arranged silks that covered the ground. His eyes were dark, sad in a way that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, and I stepped closer to the portrait despite myself.

  Energy poured from the painting. There was a wistfulness, a sense of loss without quite matching the bitter bite of grief. I could feel the emotion as if I were standing inside the person who had felt it. Did it belong to the young man in the portrait? The owner of the painting? Another visitor who had stood where I did and considered the life of the sad boy with the dark, soulful eyes?

  I pulled my
self back from the portrait and moved on, shaking the last of the cloud of feeling that clung to my shoulders, my back.

  There were several scenes of balls, gorgeously-dressed figures twirling in such elegant detail that I could nearly convince myself that the paintings were moving. The colors, the composition…I’d never been much for art. I lacked the skill to draw anything recognizable and if I didn’t stick to a limited color-palette in clothing, I resembled a preschooler who’d been allowed to dress herself. But those scenes? I could hear laughter. There was something in the fluidity of the gowns, the starched white collars that the gentlemen wore that made the scene feel vibrant. Alive. It wasn’t a photo-realistic piece. I could see influences of more romantic rather than realistic art styles even if my art teachers in high school had never been able to get through my block about identifying specific movements, but it still felt like a viewport into a world that existed beyond the frame.

  I was looking at pieces that commemorated the best nights of someone’s life — but I didn’t know what it was that made me so certain.

  I dragged my eyes away from the last ballroom scene, caught up in the sense of illicit love captured in a few strokes evoking a young man and a woman meeting in a darkened hallway at the back of the scene — and stumbled over my own feet.

  There in the next portrait was my mother’s face.

  Her hair was bound with jeweled combs. It curled around her face and drew back toward the nape of her neck. She wore a gown embroidered with impossibly delicate stitches — rendered in the smallest paint strokes I’d ever seen — that draped in sapphire shades around her shoulders, bare to the eyes of the painter. Her cheeks were rosy, dusted with the faintest suggestion of freckles — something I’d thought a portrait artist would have been encouraged to gloss over, but maybe this one was paid for verisimilitude.

  I waited there, half expecting her to take a breath, to speak, when at last I caught the plaque that hung below the portrait’s frame.

  ‘Portrait of a Lady - 1838’

  No name. No artist. Just ‘a Lady’. A lady who could not have been my mother, going by the year posted with the portrait.

  I looked down the row of paintings and found a portrait of the same woman — and Absalon. She sat in an ornately carved chair and he stood behind her. He rested a hand on her shoulder, one of hers over it, fingers tangling together. He was handsome, even through the filter of another time’s beauty standards and the medium of portraiture. His hair was thick and wavy, his eyes soulful, and he stood broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted with the confidence of someone who would still be walking the earth two hundred years later.

  A slow breath settled some of the nerves in my stomach and I reached into the part of myself I was only beginning to understand — the seat of my gift. The frame wasn’t enchanted. There was no clinging aura of magic, just the same humming, radiating emotion that I’d felt on the first portrait.

  The feelings were different — there wasn’t the same wistfulness, but rather deep affection. Fondness. Loss, but also hope for the future. More disturbing than seeing a portrait of a woman who was not my mother but wore my mother’s face, was the fact that I could tell from standing there that the owner — that Absalon, had loved this woman with every part of himself.

  It was unsettling.

  “She was beautiful, wasn’t she?” A voice came from behind me, soft and gentle, the sort of tone one might use to interrupt a person deep in thought.

  “I don’t know that I can say that without sounding like a narcissist,” I said and turned to face Absalon. He leaned carelessly against one of the beams that divided the space.

  His laugh was polite and the smile didn’t budge from his face. He came closer, gliding more than walking and my imagination was in overdrive. This was the first vampire I’d ever spoken to and unlike witches, who had quickly become basically mundane, vampires were still unaccountably fantastical.

  “We haven’t been properly introduced,” Absalon said, extending an elegant-looking hand toward me. “I am Absalon of Clan Leinth. Or,” his smile shifted as his eyes twinkled with mischief. “Aaron Griswell, for the purposes of engaging in support of the arts community in our fair city.”

  I accepted the handshake out of reflex and completed the introduction. “Laurel Pearson,” I said then tilted my head to the side. “But you already knew that.”

  “Guilty.” Absalon’s fingers slid along mine and sent a shiver through my body — all the more uncomfortable because it wasn’t uncomfortable at all — as he released me and clasped his hands in front of himself. “I was pleased to see that you accepted my invitation.”

  “Couldn’t stay away,” I said. I squinted, considering the tall man away from dreams and fairy tales. I should’ve known what he was the instant I saw him at Barleywick. “I’ve had dreams about you.” I swallowed the end of the sentence, overwhelmed by the quaking sensation of how out of my depth I was.

  “Oh?” Absalon raised his eyebrows in pointed interest. “I’m flattered. You know,” he continued. “Mary — the woman in the portrait there — she also had a gift for prophetic dreaming. She was the most wonderful woman I’ve ever met. So full of life. So full of spark. The world became a darker place with her passing.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.” That was an idiotic thing to say, but it had been drilled into me from childhood that it was the only appropriate response to someone else’s grief. My mom’s etiquette lessons ran deep — even when it came to vampires, evidently.

  The vampire at my side, no longer looking at me but staring with an aching mix of hope and loss at the portrait of himself and Mary, waved his hand to dismiss my condolences. “That is the lot of my kind, I’m afraid. We either keep to ourselves and limit who and how much we might love, or we open our hearts and lose what is most precious to us.”

  My heart clenched and my stomach churned in discomfort. He might have been talking about vampires but it was hard not to think of Rhea when he said it. She’d trapped herself alone in her grief, in the perfect echo chamber of every horrible thing that had happened to her. And I didn’t know how to break through.

  “I do hold out hope, however,” Absalon said brightly. “That her soul will come to me again and we might be reunited. Soul mate bonds are made of sterner stuff than death can sunder, after all.”

  “Soul mate bonds?” I asked, forgetting caution, forgetting that the man beside me was no man at all but a predator hundreds of years old. That he was someone connected to Rhea’s greatest tragedy. Someone that appeared in my dreams of my mother. He was dangerous, I knew that he was dangerous — but I knew so little of the world I’d entered. And he was so happy to tell me.

  “Mm, yes.” Absalon looked away from the portrait and seemed surprised by my expression — I could only imagine how intensely curious I must have looked. “Oh, has no one told you? I knew that you weren’t quite from around here, so to speak, but I assumed that your coven would have — no? Well, then, allow me the pleasure of enlightening you.” Absalon gestured to an upholstered bench across from the dual portrait and settled onto it with more grace than I’d ever done anything in my life.

  “So, that’s not a metaphorical term. ‘Soul mate’. You don’t just mean that you were in love,” I clarified. My heart pounded — Harriet had given me the briefest glimpse into what the term meant, but I’d been so overwhelmed that night. So awash in new things that I’d barely managed to hold onto any of it at all. Hadn’t managed to ask questions. Why not get the old vampire talking?

  I needed to know if all star-born thought of soul mates the way witches did. If it had meant for my father what it had meant for my mother.

  “Hmm, not at all. For star-born, finding one’s soul mate is the greatest gift that life can offer.” Absalon’s voice was warm, smooth. Rich like drinking chocolate, and I found myself pulled in by it. “It’s magic, of course. More than summoning fire or placing a ward — the soul bond is the most fundamental magic there is. It is the one magic
that is found among all star-born.” Intensity glimmered in his eyes. “Which is not to say that everyone finds that person. Far from it. Completing a soul bond is rare, but the potential — we all have the potential.”

  “What does it feel like?” The words were a whisper but I was desperate to know. That kind of connection — the idea was intoxicating. It was the purest form of what I’d been chasing my whole life.

  “At first, it mostly feels like longing,” Absalon said, eyes going soft and staring into the middle distance. “A partial soul bond aches to be completed. One finds oneself thinking obsessively about their mate. Every errant idea, every thought comes back to them. It is not uncommon for one’s dreams to fixate on them as a central subject.” Absalon looked down at me and pressed a hand to his chest. “It varies by person, of course, but there is usually a physical sensation close to where one’s magic corporeally manifests.”

  Anticipation built, flooded along my nerves and lit my skin with a crackling that had nothing to do with the aggressive A/C. I’d felt that. I’d felt what Absalon was describing. I’d been feeling it since the Harvest Moon. Ever since Rhea sat in my bed and confessed her darkest secrets to me.

  I’d felt it since I’d kissed her.

  Could Rhea be my soul mate? The idea was…all-consuming, if I were being honest. I was dying for that to be true.

  “And once consummated, a soul bond is a deep and profound awareness of your mate. A level of understanding that the unbonded could not begin to imagine. Mary and I…I knew her on the most profound level. And we made each other better. Better people, better star-born…the magical amplification of a soul bond should not be underestimated. Even the Council recognizes it as sacred. Bond mates are given all sorts of leeway with each other.” Absalon chuckled. “Once we had consummated, Mary told me that she had dreams of a distant future, one where the whole of our library could be condensed into a single, near-endless volume. You can imagine how the internet would have delighted her.”