by Robin Hale
I opened my eyes, unable not to, and looked through the back door to see Laurel standing alone in the darkness, hurt and confusion on that beautiful face.
“Laurel,” I breathed helplessly. Uselessly.
What else could I say?
19
Laurel
The world was a riot of color and texture and sound and it was all too much. It was too much.
Jean looked back at me with the sort of ‘deer caught in headlights’ expression that I never thought I could inspire, but she’d had been instrumental in proving a number of my misconceptions wrong. Why not another one? I stifled the hysterical laugh that threatened to burst from my throat and listened to the blonde mumble something about an order — why she was trying to cover her retreat I didn’t understand. I couldn’t exactly fault her for wanting to get out of the way. And retreat she did. Jean’s footsteps crunched over gravel and pavement and dissipated off toward the rest of the grounds.
Later, I might find it interesting that she hadn’t headed to her car. Right that minute, I didn’t have a lot of brain to spare for anything other than the magic crackling around Rhea, the holes she’d slammed in the beautiful old house we’d walked through so recently, and the dagger-like words that still stuck in my chest.
She knew. Rhea knew.
Rhea knew that we were — that we were soul mates. She knew that she was the one person in the whole world that I would be able to connect to the way I connected with her. The one person whose magic called to mine the way hers did. The one person who could completely understand me and the one person I could completely understand.
And she never intended to tell me.
The cold wave of rejection that flooded over me was utterly at odds with the way summer still clung to the night air. The shiver clashed with the heat from my skin and I drove the point of a canine into my cheek to stem the awful sounds that were fighting their way out.
“You weren’t —” I tried again. “You of all people here, you know what I’ve been missing. You know how little I knew about who I was, where I came from —” Pain lanced through my throat as the muscles tightened. I couldn’t tell if it was my body trying to save me from saying the humiliating things that were dripping from my tongue, or if it was worse to keep them in. If maybe the pain was due to a build-up, an unhealthy suppression of my honest feelings for Rhea.
I hoped it was the latter.
“I just can’t believe that — that knowing all of that, you could keep this from me,” I said at last, finally forcing some semblance of coherency. “Did you think — god, Rhea, did you think that I would force you? That I would pressure you into something you didn’t want?” I took a stumbling, staggering step up toward the laundry room where she stood among the rubble of everything that had seemed so fucking important. I took little satisfaction in the half-aborted move she made to catch me when I tripped. “Soul mates or not, I would never — you don’t owe me anything. But I thought you might think enough of me to tell me the truth.”
Rhea looked stricken.
Had it not occurred to her? That I was measuring the time I’d known who and what I was in weeks, months if I was being generous, not years? That there were things I could only learn if someone thought to tell me, or if I happened to stumble across them in the archives?
“I couldn’t — I’m not right for you,” Rhea said, voice rough and low and spewing nonsense that didn’t follow at all from what I had said. It was a special sort of knife between my ribs that Rhea didn’t appear to be listening to what I was saying. “My past, the things I’ve done — it’s too dark. You’re only getting started. You have your coven, your magic, you — you don’t need me to weigh you down. And I can’t risk what little I have left.”
They were the most words she’d said to me since that night in my bedroom. But rather than the bittersweet elation I’d felt hearing her open up to me, even about something so painful, I staggered under grief and rejection. Of course she didn’t want me. Of course she didn’t. How could I have imagined that things would flow so easily together? That I’d find my mother’s identity, her people. That I’d come to understand myself. Why not throw a gorgeous woman into the mix, one who was my soul mate? The other half of me.
Of course I didn’t get to have that.
“That doesn’t explain why you’d keep this from me,” I said fiercely. It was comfortable to hide behind anger when the pain was too close and I had the forbidding sense that Rhea knew that as well as I did. “Shouldn’t it be up to me if you’re wrong for me? If you don’t want me, just say it! Don’t hide behind this idea that you’re protecting me from myself — I’m a grown woman. I don’t need it.”
“You’re a grown woman who moved halfway across the country because a dart told you to,” Rhea snapped, eyes unnaturally bright in the night’s darkness. “Some of us don’t have the luxury to do that. We can’t all drop everything, Laurel. Some of us have to play with the hand we’ve been dealt. And I’m sorry if I’m not willing to risk what I’ve built because you want to know what a soul bond feels like.”
A shadow passed over the other witch’s face and she visibly reeled. Maybe she regretted saying it. Maybe she’d even surprised herself by saying it. But her mouth stayed closed despite the miserable cloud that hung around her simmering power, and I staggered backward down the steps. Tears pricked in my eyes and I waved a silent hand through the air.
I didn’t have a retort. I didn’t have a ridiculous joke or a pithy one-liner that I could drop as I made my escape. All I could do was run, so I did.
I fled down the gravel-covered drive to my car and from there I drove back toward the city. Away from Barleywick, away from Rhea, away from every stupid, inconceivable hope that I’d let myself feel.
They should sit there in the rubble that Rhea was pulling from the house, broken and forgotten.
My knuckles were white against the steering wheel, my pulse fluttering dangerously in my throat and I fought to keep the tears from actually forming in my eyes. I was driving. I didn’t need the blurry vision, the distraction.
I was such an idiot.
I’d known perfectly well that Rhea wasn’t interested in pursuing anything with me, despite her lingering looks. It was almost worse that every bit of her attraction to me was just…magic. There was something in her core, something in mine that drew her to me against her will and that? That was hell to realize.
Tension built in every muscle group in my body, tightening my back, my thighs, my forearms into pain-filled clusters until even drawing air into my lungs made my whole body ache.
It shouldn’t hurt so badly. I’d had crushes before. I’d set my sights on some wildly unattainable girl in my calculus class or someone I used to see at the park and I’d get my hopes up and I’d fantasize. And they’d never be anything more than that person I looked at and wondered about. But this was different. Rhea was my soul mate. The universe had basically parted the heavens and sent a message directly to me that my idiotic crush wasn’t so idiotic. That she was the person I was supposed to feel drawn to.
It was bad enough that she didn’t want me — that wasn’t anything I wasn’t used to. Thankfully, I’d never been quite so pathetic that I believed anyone owed me their affection. It wasn’t that. It was that she wasn’t even going to tell me what was happening to me. Why my magic reacted the way that it did.
This mystical connection, this profound aspect of who we were that I didn’t have any hope at all of figuring out on my own…and she wasn’t going to tell me.
I was an idiot.
I’d come to Cincinnati looking for community and I’d found it. I was welcomed into my mother’s coven. There was a whole world opening itself up to me and the last thing I needed to do was ruin that for myself because I got hung up on someone who didn’t want to know how good we could be together.
For a moment, the look on Rhea’s face, that hesitant, hopeful flash in her eyes when she’d invited me to the Harvest Moon flickered i
n front of my mind’s eye. The way she’d laughed with me at the chili place. The way she’d rescued me from a creature I didn’t understand. It made my chest seize up — there was so much there. So much we could have been to each other…but what else was she keeping from me? Even if she decided that she did want to explore this connection — how could I trust that she wouldn’t do the same thing all over again?
My ignorance was a weakness I couldn’t keep ignoring. All of my ‘first day of school’ excitement about magic was long gone, and in its place, there was just the realization that I was playing a game — a deadly game — that I didn’t know any of the rules to.
And I didn’t have anyone to turn to.
It was ridiculous that I’d let Rhea’s rejection steal my confidence. The ache in my chest, the one that I’d finally come to realize was my half of the partial soul bond, throbbed. It was an open wound drawing every last breath, every last thought, every errant image through the lens of what I might have had with Rhea.
Might have had. Sure, if I’d been the sort of person that Rhea could want. Someone more capable, someone more sensible. Someone who didn’t have to be taught every little thing about the world. Someone who knew about the Harvest Moon, hedge witches, and covens. Who understood that weres were different from shapeshifters, and that vampires weren’t what I’d always thought.
I knew less than any star-born child. Frustration drowned out the sounds of traffic around me, and the image of my mother with Absalon in the forest floated through the haze in my mind. Surely it meant something that I’d been dreaming of Absalon? Of his connection to my mother? Surely someone who had been raised among the star-born would know what it meant — but I didn’t.
The turn for my apartment came faster than I expected. Evidently, gritting my teeth and focusing on how foolishly I’d acted was a way to make travel time fly by — but I didn’t make the turn.
My pulse raced faster, excitement and curiosity now lacing the hurt and embarrassment. Tension throbbed in my knuckles where I gripped the steering wheel. It was reckless. It was dangerous. It was — the only thing that I could think to do in the small hours of the morning, alone and adrift and so sick of being in the dark that I suspected I might prefer mortal peril.
If Rhea didn’t want to let me in on what it meant to be someone’s soul mate, I knew someone who would. I took the next indicated on-ramp for the highway and headed to the east side of town. If nothing else, Absalon would open his door to me.
20
Rhea
By the time the sound of Laurel’s tires on the gravel drive faded from my hearing, my palms were slick with blood from the splinters I’d pressed into my skin. It felt good, somehow. Like opening a release valve on machinery building up too much pressure — like burning off a little magic when I’d kept it bottled up for years.
The magic arcing along my tongue settled to ash in my mouth and I fought the urge to spit the taste out. It was all in my head. I wasn’t exactly a stranger to emotionally-driven dry-heaves and I knew when something wasn’t going to go away just because I’d purged everything my body had once held. And the things I’d said to Laurel? Those were going to be seared into my mouth for a long time.
“This is why you shouldn’t live alone,” Jean sighed from the doorway.
I tore my eyes away from the blood on my palms to look toward the healer. She reached out, took my stained hands in her own, and the cool touch of her magic slid over and around my skin.
I wanted to pull away. The pain was mine, I’d earned it. It would be worse to have said the things that I said — true though they certainly were — and not be in pain afterward. Eventually it wasn’t worth the fight anymore. I relented. Jean would hate leaving the splinters in my skin, the open wounds on my palms, my fingers.
“Because I get splinters when I try to knock my house down?” I asked dryly.
Jean snorted. “Because you’ll try to knock your house down.” She looked up at me once the wounds were closed and the pain had receded.
I flexed my hands and felt a little wistful. It was strange how easy it was to erase some things. But only some things.
“So she’s gone?” The other woman asked, and I was amazed at the gentleness in her voice even with exhaustion all over her face.
“Yeah,” I said roughly. “She’s gone. For good, probably.” The sound of electricity snapping through the air, arcing from my elbow to the washing machine sent both of us jumping.
Fuck.
My magic threatened to boil over, my heart was pounding trying to move cement through my veins, and I let go of Jean’s hands like they’d burn me. It would only ever be the other way around.
“You should leave,” I said. “This is…it’s been getting worse. I need to be alone.” Two steps backward, three, and my back was pressed against a wall I hadn’t broken yet. “I’ll calm down, get this back under control and…”
“And what? Go back to only leaving Barleywick when someone forces you to? Go back to punishing yourself for something that wasn’t your fault?” Jean frowned. “I won’t tell you that there’s no risk in getting involved with Laurel — there’s always a risk, even when two people are soul mates. But she loves you. You have to know that she loves you.”
“And what the fuck does that matter if it gets her killed?” I snapped.
Jean took a step back, eyes wide, then quickly regained her footing.
“Everyone I’ve ever — damn it, Jean, everyone I have ever loved is gone.” Heat rose all around my neck, my chest, my face, and I felt the unmistakable prickling of tears in my eyes. “Do you think after everything I’ve lost, everyone I’ve lost — do you think that I could survive losing a soul mate?” I staggered under a hysterical, humorless half-laugh. “Because I don’t. Absalon is already sniffing around — whatever his problem is with me, he’s already bringing it to Laurel and he doesn’t even know that we’re — that we could be soul mates.”
Jean chewed on her lip and tapped one ridiculous slipper against the floor. “How long has your magic been doing this?” She asked.
My nails scraped against the wall. “Since Laurel ran out in front of my damn truck. It’s been getting worse,” I sighed. “Kicked into high gear after the Harvest Moon.”
“And the Harvest Moon is when the partial soul bond triggered?” Her voice had taken on that ‘healer’ tone again, going through the available facts systematically. As if I were experiencing some unexplained illness rather than a simple lack of control.
“That’s right.” I nodded. “The…the sparking is bad enough — can you imagine what would happen if we completed the bond? The kind of power surge that would cause?”
“I really don’t think that’s likely.” Jean’s frown deepened. “Right now your magic is dealing with — frankly, more than a decade of neglect.” A sharp, blue-eyed rebuke. “Sorry, but that’s what happens when an elementalist stops using her power cold turkey.” She shifted, leaned against the doorframe and cocked her head at an angle. The healer in contemplation. “And now you have this person, this connection — I think the only thing that settles your magic at this point is completing the bond.” Her teeth sank into her lower lip, and all I could think about were the smears of blood still on my palms.
It felt too…poetic to be standing in that house with blood on my hands. The only thing wrong was that the blood on my hands was my own.
“And when Absalon makes sure that I lose her, too?” I asked bitterly. I sagged back against the wall, tension draining out of my shoulders along with my willingness to fight. “When all of that neglected magic gets triggered at once?”
“Do you honestly think that you’d deal any better with losing her now? Do you really believe that you can shove this down, button it up, and go back to how you were before you’d met her?” Jean asked. “Because I don’t think that you can.” There was an awful lot of skepticism on her face for someone with owls on her pants.
Fuck.
She was right. I knew t
hat she was right. I’d had flare-ups in the past — I did know that ignoring my magic wasn’t a great long-term solution — but they had nothing on this. Those had been…grief. Homesickness. The sort of thing that I could distract myself out of. I rebuilt the greenhouses, rebuilt the family business. I lost myself in work and there was no way that the old strategies would even touch the longing that was a constant ache at the base of my skull.
“It doesn’t matter now,” I whispered. “After what I said to her? She won’t want anything to do with me.”
Jean favored me with a particularly unimpressed look. “You can’t possibly think that. Laurel would absolutely forgive you. Apologize. Explain. And if she doesn’t forgive you, if I’m that wrong, I’ll help you tear this place down.” Jean looked around the battered mudroom. “If I leave, you’re not going to pick that hammer up again, are you?”
I shook my head, chastened and embarrassed by — well, by pretty much the entire past thirteen years.
“Good. Then I’m going back home and going to bed. You should get some rest and call Laurel tomorrow.” Jean reached out — unperturbed by the blood on my hands and the electricity still sparking around me — and squeezed my wrist. “It’s going to be okay, Rhea.”
My mouth went dry, my tongue lying useless and all I could do was nod and watch as she left.
It was habit and the imagined look of disapproval on my mom’s face that had me getting a broom from the shed and cleaning up the dust and piles of mangled sheetrock that littered the mudroom. Sweat bloomed across my shoulders, my back, and slid down from my hairline to drip, stinging, into my eyes.
I rubbed my thumb along the edge of my pendant, an idle gesture that I’d picked up without knowing what the damn thing even was. And somehow that made it all the worse. It was a habit that I’d built around a piece of magic my mom had given me and never explained. A piece of magic she’d given me because she’d been afraid of something.