by Robin Hale
Even his fondness was tinged with grave dirt and loss. I didn’t know how he could stand it.
“Was she…am I related to her?” I asked. Immediately, I expected him to say ‘yes’, regardless of the truth. Why wouldn’t he? Why wouldn’t this person, who was clearly trying to build a rapport with me, use any possible means to make me feel connected to him?
“No,” Absalon admitted with a wry grimace. “Not that I can tell, at least. Simply an accident of similar genes and maybe a little bit of fate.” His lips curved into a teasing smile and his eyes sparkled in the dim light. “The physical resemblance is striking, however. And to hear that you share her gifts? It does make one wonder at the mysteries of our universe. What else might be in store?”
He might’ve been reciting the names of the albums in his music collection for all that I was listening to him. My mind had already wandered back to Rhea, always to Rhea. It was late — too late to go barreling into Rhea’s workshop with any hope that she might still be there. Or even that she might still be awake. But it tempted me. Everything Absalon had said, I wanted to ask her about it.
I wanted to know what she thought, how she felt.
I wanted to know if there was something in her that longed for me, too.
I wanted to know if we could be soul mates.
Time melted away and before I realized it, a recorded message played over the speaker system announcing that the museum was closing. Absalon walked with me out the front door and paused a moment on the steps.
“It has been a pleasure speaking with you, Ms. Pearson. And I hope you won’t think it too forward if I invite you to come to my home — I have some things from your mother that I think would interest you, especially pertaining to our discussion of soul mates.” Absalon reached toward me.
I froze up. I couldn’t have moved away from him even if I’d managed to summon the thought. I kept my eyes trained on his hand as it came toward my face, my — my hair. He was reaching for my hair.
His thumb stroked over a curl while he spoke. “You look so much like her.” Absalon pulled back, smiled again and gave a strange sort of half-bow that I didn’t know how to politely respond to. “Until next time, my dear. I hope you’ll dream of me again.”
The thought was as unwelcome as the touch had been. I hoped that I wouldn’t.
No, if anything intended to paint itself behind my eyelids, I hoped it would be the sharp edge of Rhea’s cheekbones, the unrelenting set of her jaw. If partial soul mate bonds led to dreaming of your potential bondmate, I wanted to see no one else when I shut my eyes.
But while I watched Absalon disappear into the shadows around the museum — they didn’t seem deep enough, but what did I really know about vampires? — I felt the hooks from his invitation burrow into me. He had things that had belonged to my mother. Whether they pertained to some sort of soul bond or not, the idea that he had anything that my mother had so much as touched…how? Why? Had they been friends? He’d said so little about her while we sat in that gallery.
Regardless of what Rhea feared, I wasn’t actually an idiot. I knew that going to Absalon’s house rather than meeting him in public was a serious escalation. I just wasn’t sure if I could resist the bait.
The dream, when it came, was like slipping into the heat of a bath after a long time spent shoveling snow. It was intoxicatingly perfect.
Rhea stood in front of me, callused palms smoothing over my jaw, my neck, and I tangled my fingers into her hair. We weren’t anywhere. We weren’t at my apartment, weren’t at Barleywick. We were somewhere else — maybe those stars we were supposed to have been born from? Maybe there.
Her hair was silk against my fingers and Rhea practically purred beneath my touch, nipping at my jaw with the incongruous softness of her lips, the sharp edges of her teeth.
Rhea’s skin was alive with her magic, and I could see where tendrils of her power mingled with my own — we were joining. There was a connection. My breath caught in my throat and every bit of me went warm in the thick, wet air that flowed over our bodies with the inevitability of a Midwestern thunderstorm.
Potential crackled between us and I wanted her mouth on mine, I wanted to taste her, but every time I tried to tilt my head, every time I tried to claim her mouth with my own she moved her lips away. She painted fire up and down my neck, grasping at my hips, my waist, touching me with a building intensity made all the more devastating because I knew that there was something I was missing.
Deep in Rhea’s chest, right where her heart would be if I cracked open her ribs, there was a thick layer of darkness. It tangled itself around her heart, kept the light of my own magic from reaching her there. I could see it — could see the places we were still separated.
Grazing my dream-fingers along the thick blackness that enshrouded Rhea’s most intimate self sent a jolt of grief, fear rolling through me and I shook from it even as Rhea clutched me closer. There was no getting near her while that cloud of darkness interceded.
‘Rhea,’ I breathed against the soft lobe of her ear. ‘Rhea, let me in… You can trust me. I never want to hurt you.’
Her mouth moved but the sound was no more intelligible to me than whale song.
Then the scene shifted. My stomach lurched. My skin grew tight and the feeling of beetles crawling beneath my skin — of a color palette so wrong that my eyes fought against seeing it — overwhelmed me.
Absalon. Absalon was there, the edges of him vibrating like a segment of damaged tape running through a VCR. Rhea was gone, the comforting strength of her, the vulnerability painted across her skin. Her wicked sharpness and fierce loyalty that waited just out of my reach — she was gone.
Instead, there was Absalon. Absalon in the park, handsome and wrong, and then a scream. It split the darkness into shards. There was a flash of brown hair, a flare of fizzling magic, a growl so full of anger and rage and grief and fear that it strangled me to hear it.
And blood on the leaves. Blood marring the ground, seeping into the dirt, making violence a part of the lifecycle there.
‘Laurel.’ One word. One word in three voices — it pulled and it pulled and it —
I jolted upright in bed and scrabbled for the glass of water on my nightstand. My heart pounded in my throat as I swallowed, fighting to shake the feeling of that last image, that sound from my body. I fumbled for my phone and swiped open the message thread with Rhea — filled with such touching, intimate conversations as ‘This is my address’ and ‘I’m outside’ — and tapped out a quick message to her.
‘Had another dream about Absalon. I think he knows what was going on with my mother.’
After a moment the message status updated to ‘Delivered’ and I sat there staring at the display.
Every inch of my body was shaking, jittery and restless and unwilling to relax back into sleep — even the shallow, fraught sleep I’d found a few hours before. I gave it another thirty seconds before I was out of bed and pulling on pants that I could be convinced to leave the apartment in.
It was late. Absurdly late. Stupidly late.
Rhea was certainly asleep. If I showed up at Barleywick she wouldn’t be in the greenhouses or her workshop. She’d be in bed. I should have been in bed. And if that was what I found when I arrived, I would turn around and come back home and hope that the drive had settled something in me.
And if I found her awake, I’d soothe the cloying ache in my core by being near her. Just being near her.
I swept my keys off the hook by the door and took the steps two at a time down to the street. I couldn’t wait any longer.
18
Rhea
Power raced to the surface of my body everywhere my grasp was slipping. Magic arced along my tongue, my teeth, until all I could taste was the storm-ready rush of ozone.
I couldn’t get the image of Absalon touching Laurel out of my head. It wasn’t jealousy, wasn’t possessiveness. It was the same impotence I’d felt when I looked up at Barleywick, reaching out with
my magic and finding no answer. Finding the house a lifeless shell where it had once stood like the fucking castle at Camelot: golden and untouchable and eternal.
Standing in the doorway of my workshop, I stared up at the empty house at the front of the lot. It mocked me. It sat there and it fucking mocked me. Despite the happy memories Laurel had managed to dredge up during her walkthrough, it would always, always be outweighed by the bolt of poison she’d felt at the end. By the person that I’d let into my life, into my family’s house — the person that I let take everything from me.
And the person who’d been happy enough to let her do it.
Suddenly, it was too much.
The latch on the cabinet next to the workbench groaned under the force of the door being yanked open, splitting the night air with a creak and a screech that didn’t stop me from wrapping my hand around the sledgehammer that hung inside. Absalon and Zora may have done what they set out to do — they may have taken everything from me, every possibility from me — but no one could force me to leave that corpse standing.
The first blow against the mudroom wall reverberated up through my arms into my shoulders and shook apart the tightly drawn web of fear and civility that had held me back. Fuck, it felt good. The head of the hammer crunched through the sheetrock, filling that dusty rose paint with a spiderweb of cracks — a Lichtenberg figure of my mundane destruction.
There wasn’t any point in leaving it standing. I was never going to be good enough, never going to be safe enough to earn the right to anything even close to what I’d lost. And the sooner I tore down that taunting monument to my unending failure, the better I would feel.
The air crackled and sparked around my fists where I gripped the hammer, power arced in my breath as I let out grunt after grunt of exertion. The wall crumbled beneath my blows, revealing the underlying framing, the carefully enclosed wiring that ran along the floorboards. I wasn’t an idiot, I had started with a wall that was more suggestion than structure but it still felt like flying to see it come apart.
There was rumbling in the distance and it took another five minutes before I realized that the sound should worry me.
“Rhea Barnes!”
The shout broke through the sound of my magic crackling over my eardrums, the heady feeling of my power smashing through plaster and paint and rendering what was unacceptable completely unrecognizable.
I dropped the head of the sledgehammer to the floor and didn’t even cringe at the way the weight of it dented the hardwood. Good. Let it scar. Let the whole place echo every mark on my fucking body.
“The hell are you doing here, Wyatt?” I growled back at the wide-eyed healer who came stumbling up the path to the back steps.
She was barely dressed: flannel pajamas covered in pocket watches and owls covered her legs while a pair of stiff slippers were on her feet. She was barely more than half awake. Must’ve been in bed less than twenty minutes ago.
I dragged the back of my hand across my forehead, wiping sweat and sheetrock from my brow while I waited for Jean to explain herself.
She scowled at me and lifted something metal in response. It was — fuck. I looked down at my chest, at the place where my mother’s pendant pressed against my skin above the neckline of my tank top. The same metal figure that Jean held in the air pressed against my skin in miniature.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” I said and threw down the sledgehammer’s handle. “It was what — a nanny charm?”
My mother’s smile when she’d placed the chain around my neck, the way she’d touched her fingertips against it — I’d loved it immediately. I’d worn it constantly, sure that it was a simple token of affection, a symbol of our coven, a way to recognize that I was beginning to grow into my powers. But no. My mother, who had her secrets — and goddess knew that she’d gone to the grave with them — had been making sure that someone could keep a magical eye on me even when she was gone.
“That thing has been hanging in the office at the Wyrm since we were kids. This is only the second time I’ve heard the damn thing go off,” Jean huffed and climbed up the stairs to push her way into the mudroom and survey the destruction I’d only just begun. Her mouth pinched, her brow furrowed, and I could see the way she kept herself from enfolding me in one of her hugs.
If nothing else, she’d learned that wouldn’t go well for either of us.
“When was the last time?” I asked, throat tight, but I already knew.
The reproachful glare from Jean told me that she was perfectly aware that I knew.
“What set this off, Rhea?” Jean sighed. “What the hell triggered this at —” she looked down at the silver watch face on her wrist. “Two in the morning?”
“Who else?” I spat. “Fucking Absalon.” I kicked ineffectually at a pile of rubble and took some satisfaction in the way it scattered across the floor. The boards were intact but they were marred now, and I wanted to pull the whole place down. “I’ve spent thirteen years caught in that bastard’s sights and no one — no one ever believed me. He shows up here anytime he wants, just to drive it home that he’s the reason — the fucking reason I’m trapped like this and there’s nothing I can do about it. He didn’t dare step foot on our land until my mother was gone and now? Now I can’t even keep Laurel away from him.”
The words caught in my throat, choking me with dust and magic and the way everything was going wildly out of control once again.
“It was him, Jean. That were in the park? I would bet anything that was one of his. He’s dedicated his life to making sure I have nothing in mine and I am done with it, Jean.” I wrapped my bare hands around the framing boards in the wrecked wall and squeezed until the first splinters started to dig their way beneath my skin. “You’d think the Council would care that he’s chasing down the only Seer anyone knows of. That he’s setting traps for her, that he’s pulling all the same manipulative shit he’s always —” And the words stopped. I couldn’t force any more of them out around the lump in my throat and I fucking refused to cry over Absalon. I refused.
“Rhea,” Jean’s voice was warm, calm. That ‘bedside manner’ tone she’d always leaned on and I wasn’t in the mood for it. “Why are you tearing out the walls of the house? I thought I was going to find you dead out here.”
“No such luck, just yet,” I laughed bitterly and Jean’s answering glare was a clear rebuke. The words had slipped too smoothly off my tongue and I hated it. “Damn it, do you have to do that?”
“Do what?” Jean asked, blinking her round blue eyes up at me in mock innocence. “I’m a healer. I have a very trustworthy bedside manner and people open up to me. You’re not immune to that.”
“You have a magically enhanced bedside manner and you know it,” I gritted out. “Stay out of my head, Wyatt.”
“Not until I’m sure that leaving you in there alone won’t end with this whole place burning down. And you with it.” Jean’s voice was firm and I yanked reflexively at the walls, frustrated that without the sledgehammer’s weight behind me, I couldn’t tear apart the place my coven had died. “Why are you tearing down Barleywick?”
“Because it’s everything I can’t hope for anymore.” The words were a tight whisper and I hated that I couldn’t keep them away from Jean. Fuck every part of her magic. “With this place gone — it’ll kill that last part of me that wants to risk feeling again. This is Carthage, Jean. If I don’t salt the earth, I don’t have a chance in hell at survival.”
“That is really, really not what happened at Carthage, Rhea,” Jean sighed. She scrubbed a hand down her face and I could see the exhaustion etched along her features. “This is about Laurel, isn’t it? You’ve been a — well, a different kind of mess than usual since she showed up.”
My fingers curled tighter into the framing boards, nails gouging the wood. “It can’t be about Laurel,” I said after a long moment. “Nothing can be about her, Jean.”
“Rhea, you’re allowed to fall in love. You’re allow
ed to — to go to Harvest Moon festivals with a pretty girl and make new friends. You were put on probation, you weren’t sentenced to solitary confinement for the rest of your life.” Jean leaned against a piece of the ruined wall and tried to insinuate herself into my line of sight.
I sank my teeth into the inside of my cheek, courting the taste of blood to try to keep myself from spilling all of my secrets to Jean. Damn healer was a menace.
“That isn’t — Jean, that isn’t how things are,” I growled. Fuck. “Laurel isn’t some girl I could have a passing crush on. She’s my — Jean, she’s my soul mate.” The last words were barely a whisper, but judging by the excitement pouring off of the blonde she heard it just fine. “I knew the second she kissed me.”
“Rhea — that’s…that’s amazing! Congratulations!” The lethargy, the slow-moving pain that had been in her voice was utterly absent, replaced instead with genuine excitement. “Oh, Rhea, you have to know that Laurel wouldn’t do anything to hurt you — this is going to be wonderful, you’ll see.”
“It isn’t going to be anything,” I said. “We haven’t completed the bond. We’re not going to complete the bond. I’m going to tear this place down and make sure that Laurel knows not to come around here anymore and I’ll — it’ll all go away. Eventually.” I could feel the first pinpricks of blood welling up on my palms against the boards.
“But why?” Jean asked softly.
“I’m not going to tell her that she could be my soul mate — and neither are you. I want to be left alone.” I shut my eyes against the condemnation I would see on Jean’s face and was utterly unprepared for the voice that pierced the silence.
“You weren’t going to tell me?” Laurel’s voice broke halfway through the sentence, drifting in through the open door to match the splinters in my palms for the fastest way to cut me open.