Under the Harvest Moon

by Robin Hale

  I snorted. She’d been afraid with good reason. I dug one corner of the pendant into the callused pad of my thumb and closed my eyes against the sudden swell of tears. But what had she been afraid of? It hadn’t been me, even if it should have been. So what did she think was coming? What made her go to Blackthorne, to have them cast something that could call outside of her own family, her own coven? What did she think was going to happen that she might not be able to protect me?

  My heart ached and I fought the attendant wave of nausea down while I shoved broken sheetrock into a trash bag. My mom would be so fucking ashamed if she could see me then. The thought crept along my skin and left rancid trails behind.

  She’d have loved Laurel. I knew that with a certainty I could barely quantify. My mom would’ve welcomed her into our house, taught her all the magical properties of herbs she’d made me memorize. She’d have given her a margarita and told her every story about Olivia that she could remember. There probably would’ve been dozens.

  But what she’d love most was how Laurel had managed to make me care about someone again. For the first time in more than a decade.

  Goddess, how had she done it? How had she made showing someone the magical world into a delight, rather than a punishment? That year’s Harvest Moon was the first one I hadn’t dreaded since before Barleywick fell. It’d felt as joyful as they always had when I was a kid.

  And Laurel had been relentless. She’d shrugged off my prickly exterior like it didn’t mean anything in particular. She’d asked questions, been genuinely interested in me as a person. Not a set of powers that might ignite at any moment. She’d looked at me like I wasn’t a danger to anything but her heart. She’d looked at me like I was someone anyone might have a crush on.

  When had I last been a target of interest that...innocent?

  And Laurel had needed to be told. Where the entire rest of my world had known the worst thing to ever happen to me, had been whispering about it in the corners of rooms since I was first allowed to drive, Laurel had needed to be told. And it hadn’t changed the way she looked at me.

  Something hot and uncomfortable built in my chest and my magic reached for her across the impossible distance from Barleywick to her uptown apartment.

  Laurel Pearson had been the first person to know all of who I was without defining me by the worst of it. And if my mom could’ve seen me, I knew what she would have said. She’d tell me that I’d been sitting in Barleywick waiting for death. That the only person who had trapped me there was myself, and if I wanted to move on, I could do a hell of a lot worse than the bright-eyed Seer who’d made me look forward with hope.

  Fucking hell.

  I pulled my phone from my pocket and checked the time, wincing at the too-bright display. Jean wasn’t wrong, it would make more sense to crawl into bed, try to rest before I talked to Laurel. Tried to explain. Tried to apologize.

  But Jean didn’t know how it felt to have a partial soul bond in the back of her head screaming to be near its other half. She didn’t know how it felt to be sure that she’d fucked things up with someone who only wanted to be good to her. No. There wasn’t any way that I was getting to sleep without seeing if Laurel was awake and willing to listen to me try to apologize.

  I bolted from the mudroom toward the shed, grabbing my keys and my jacket, and swung into the cab of my truck as quickly as I could.

  Uptown was strange at that time of night. It wasn’t cold enough to see my breath or punish me for being out so late but the silence was eerie. The occasional car rolled down the street, the occasional window slid shut against the lingering summer humidity, but other than that? The street where Laurel lived was utterly still. Hell, parking hadn’t even been a problem. If that wasn’t a sign of a fucking bizarre time of night, I didn’t know what was.

  Lingering in front of the street-level door seemed strangely illicit and I hesitated with my finger poised over the buzzer. It was stupid. I knew it was stupid. I’d driven all that way — what? I was going to chicken out? But it was one thing to give in to the impulse to dart to Laurel’s apartment in the wee hours of the morning, it was another to ring the buzzer. I’d never heard a pleasant-sounding apartment buzzer.

  “Fucking coward,” I whispered, scowling to myself in the sickly yellow light of the entryway. I pressed down on the buzzer and heard the faint echo of it in the stairwell beyond the door.

  And then I waited.

  And waited.

  I watched a pedestrian — probably an early-arriving college student who’d be spending most of their time on campus or in a bar in a few weeks — shuffle by me on the sidewalk, not bothering to contain their own side-eye while I lingered in the alcove leading to Laurel’s apartment. Couldn’t really blame them. I was sure that nothing about my expression said ‘calm and totally normal’.

  I pressed the buzzer again. Still no other sound from the other side of the door. Apprehension raised the hair on the back of my neck. It was probably nothing, but if she’d gone to sleep inside — wouldn’t the buzzer have woken her? I could hear it from where I was standing. Was Laurel that heavy a sleeper?

  It probably should’ve taken longer before I was pulling out a multitool and slipping it between the door and the frame. Buzzer-system doors on buildings that old didn’t usually engage a deadbolt, so it was easy enough to pry something metal and slim between the moving pieces and encourage them forward. If I turned out to be wrong and Laurel was in her apartment ignoring me — like I deserved — I would apologize and steer clear. But there was no such thing as rest for me until I knewthat she was safe.

  I took the steps two at a time, heavy boots squeaking and thumping on the stairs in a way that probably infuriated the neighbors, but I didn’t care. Her door was locked and I rapped my knuckles against the heavy wood in a sharp staccato rhythm.

  There wasn’t any sound of movement from her studio. No rustling bedsheets, no feet on the floor, not even the exasperated sigh of a woman who would strongly prefer that I fucked off.

  The multitool made quick work of the second door — and really, that one I made a mental note to talk to Laurel about. She should close her deadbolt — and opened the door to find Laurel’s small studio apartment silent and empty of the person I was looking for.

  My heart leaped, my stomach soured, and I ruthlessly quashed the way my mind tried to draw parallels between that moment and stumbling out of the woods around Barleywick. It wasn’t the same. She wasn’t dead. She wasn’t.

  But she wasn’t there.

  I looked around the room in desperation, searching for a hint to where she might have gone. The ache in the base of my skull was a searing throb, pulling my attention back toward the door, back down the stairs. I had the sudden, insane certainty that if I followed it I would find her.

  Then I saw it. A shiver of dread ran skeletal fingers down my spine. Had it been there the last time I stood in that room? Had I confessed my darkest secrets to Laurel beneath it, had I kissed her in range of its power? An amulet hung by the corner of the window near the edge of her bed and I recognized it instantly. I should have, after all. It had hung by my own bed for countless weeks leading up to that night at Barleywick. It had disappeared thereafter. Lost in the chaos, I’d thought.

  Evidently, I’d thought wrong.

  The memory of Zora pressing it into my hand was no longer sweet, no longer thoughtful. It spoke of premeditation. And its presence in Laurel’s apartment whispered something darker.

  With a fierce expletive and another jolting, stumbling trip down the stairs, I headed back toward the truck. If I hurried — and I was for damn sure going to hurry — I could make it to Absalon’s nightmare of an estate in about fifteen minutes. Fuck, I hoped that I wasn’t too late.

  21

  Laurel

  Arriving at the address I had for Absalon’s registered residence — thank you, Council archives — left me staring up at a place that was not at all what I would’ve expected from a vampire’s lair. Was it inse
nsitive that I thought they would have lairs? Maybe. It occurred to me that I didn’t know a whole lot about the political history of the world I’d stepped into. I knew that there had been lethal conflicts between the factions of star-born and that there had been a peace agreement signed. The Crescent Accords. But that was about as far as my history lessons had gone.

  I frowned. That was something I needed to change. I couldn’t afford to remain ignorant and I resolved to ask Jean about a reasonable plan of study when I next saw her at the Wyrm.

  Regardless, for someone who’d been brought up on cheesy Hollywood horror movies and entirely-addicting young adult novels involving vampires, Absalon’s residence looked out of place.

  For one thing, despite the sheer expanse of the lawn out front, I was definitely standing in a suburb. The neighborhood probably had a homeowner’s association and trick or treaters. When someone new moved in, they probably received baked goods from a woman in pearls. The house was a little more visually impressive than the neighborhood, to be fair to the vampire in question. It was an enormous, brick-facaded Victorian thing, but it still had a mailbox sitting out by the street. Of all the minor details, it was that last that threatened to send me into a peal of hysterical giggles.

  Someone working at the United States Postal Service, some letter carrier just doing their job brought junk mail, grocery store circulars, and jury duty notices to a centuries-old vampire.

  I couldn’t decide if that was an argument for the ‘I’ve been in my death throes since that night in Burnet Woods’ theory, or against it. Probably if I’d come up with all of it on my own, I would’ve inserted some sort of gothic castle in the Queen City skyline for the vampire to live in.

  A shiver fought its way up my back. Now that I was there, now that I was sitting outside the house I had cold feet. It was hard to stay actively angry and frustrated long enough to drive from uptown to another part of the city and I wasn’t sure anymore if I wanted to be there.

  Hell, if I called my mom she would tell me to go to bed. That it would all look different in the morning. I caught my lower lip between my teeth and looked back at my car.

  “I didn’t think I would have the pleasure of your company again this evening, my dear.”

  Absalon’s voice broke me from my ruminations to look up at the front door, now standing open. He leaned casually against the frame, a glass of something dark and red in his hand. Blood? Wine? Could vampires even consume anything other than blood?

  I shook the questions off and pasted a friendly smile on my face.

  I was being an idiot. He was a prominent member of public life, after all. Surely someone would’ve noticed if he had a habit of eating witches. “I decided that I wanted to hear what you had to tell me about my mother,” I said as I approached the door. I didn’t want to shout in that neighborhood in the middle of the night, but I also didn’t mind it if a nosy neighbor saw my cheap car parked out front and remembered that it had been there should anything go wrong.

  The rush of nerves was ridiculous. Besides, I couldn’t run off without coming inside. Not without being rude.

  As I approached, Absalon pushed the door further open and gestured for me to go inside. “Then by all means, Ms. Pearson. Come inside and be elucidated.”

  The inside of the house fit with my expectations better. It wasn’t all cobweb-covered red velvet and dimly lit stone passages, but everything I could see struck me as both extremely old and extremely expensive. Polished hardwood gleamed in the tasteful lighting, setting off the high-end furniture and elegantly framed photos on the walls as perfectly as the exhibit at the museum had.

  I wanted to wander further into the house, wanted to see the story being told by the photographs. Something itched at the back of my mind, a welcome change from the ache in my chest, and I turned to see Absalon closing and locking the front door.

  “Never can be too careful,” he said with a charming smile.

  Somehow, I doubted that the creature of the night standing across the entryway from me was worried about home intruders.

  “Did you take these?” I asked, gesturing to the photos. I walked a few steps down the hall, trying to build a buffer of space between us, trying to keep that itching out of my brain.

  “No, I’m afraid not. I have a fair eye for beautiful things,” the pause was so heavy-handed that I had to fight back the urge to cringe in sympathetic embarrassment. I knew he was looking at me but I couldn’t bring myself to meet his eyes. “But I’m not much for the creation of art, myself. My gifts are in curation.”

  He stepped closer and joined me in looking at the photos on the wall. They were extraordinary. Photos of construction sites that evoked the stage design of an opera, well-dressed men and women in gaslit streets that I recognized only from living above them for the past months. They weren’t the sort of photos I often saw from centuries past. They weren’t simple documentation of the way the city progressed. They were clearly taken with an eye toward finding the beauty in a world still forming itself.

  “You said that you had some things that belonged to my mother?” I said when I felt the first hint of that itch again. I stepped back, gaining distance while yielding the floor to Absalon to lead. I’d been a young woman for a long time; I knew how to maintain space.

  “Of course, my dear. After all, you must be tired. It isn’t exactly your time of day, is it?” There was a shared joke in Absalon’s smile, but I was stretched too thin to find it funny. “No time to linger over artwork. We’ll simply have to plan to examine the rest of my collection another time.”

  I smiled and hummed something noncommittal while I followed him into the front sitting room. An enormous woven carpet covered the hardwood, leaving a perfect buffer of eighteen inches of gleaming woodwork between it and the plaster walls. The furniture there was arranged in careful angles proximate to a fireplace that crackled with life. It was a relief that there was a fire burning — Absalon’s house was colder than anywhere else I’d been that night, including the newly-ventilated laundry room at the back of Barleywick.

  “Your mother and I were not quite as dear friends as I had hoped we would be, I’m afraid,” Absalon said, crossing the elegant room to a cabinet at the far wall. A small brass key emerged from somewhere I couldn’t see, and the sound of the latch turning competed with the burning logs. “I do think that, had she lived, we would have grown much closer, but such is the nature of friendships with mortal beings.”

  ‘Had she lived.’

  The words echoed inside my head, catching on the raw, rough edges of everything that had happened to me since I’d first seen the vampire in my dreams. Something cold and dark settled into my stomach.

  “Who told you that my mother is dead?” I asked in what I hoped was a conversational tone.

  “Oh, my dear, the star-born community is a bit of a small town. Nothing, once learned, remains secret forever.” Absalon’s back was still to me and he rummaged through objects I couldn’t identify in the cabinet in front of him. There was the clinking of glass, the solid slide of metal over metal, and the rustling of — paper? Stiff fabric? I wasn’t sure.

  It was possible that Absalon had heard about my mother’s death through the star-born grapevine, but it was difficult to imagine him gossiping over lattes with a member of my coven. I took a slow step back toward the door.

  “Besides,” Absalon continued breezily. “After saving her from the rabid creature she fancied herself bonded to, I felt quite responsible for Olivia. It is impossible that I wouldn’t know what had become of her.”

  ‘She was worried about something, but she never told the coven what it was.’

  ‘…after her husband died, she was a changed woman.’

  Jean’s voice filtered up from my memories and the cold thing in my gut grew heavier.

  “You protected her?” I asked and my voice was far away. Outside myself.

  “Mm, of course.” Absalon tossed a teasing smile over his shoulder at me. “I’m sure you
’ve seen it in those dreams of yours.”

  Blood on the ground in the clearing, rage and grief on a man’s face. The rush of golden and rust colored magic — a scream splitting the night.

  I’d seen it. My stomach lurched in the expensively furnished room and I spared a second to think that I might be about to lose it all over the antique rug.

  I’d seen Absalon kill my father.

  I took a staggering step back, catching my hip on the edge of a table and nearly sending something unimaginably expensive tumbling to the floor before I caught it. As if it mattered.

  “The soul bond is the most beautiful, most intimate form of power there is, Ms. Pearson. To see Olivia wasting her potential, caught in a bond that was limiting her…well, I certainly couldn’t allow that to continue. Not when I held her in such high regard. What sort of friend, what sort of soul mate would I be if I did that?” He asked.

  “Soul mate,” I repeated, my tongue going thick and useless and numb with my shock.

  “That’s right. You saw the portrait of my Mary. You know that there’s nothing coincidental about your mother’s, your resemblance to her. I’ve waited so long for her to come back to me. I wasn’t about to let anyone keep me from her. Not again.” Absalon’s voice had lost its charm, its soothing veneer. It was nothing but a threat wrapped in expensive tailoring.

  “Who kept you from her?” I whispered. My back was to the wall and I eased closer to the door. I would only have one chance. There was a lock to turn, the door to open. The long driveway that led to the street. Could I scream loudly enough to raise the neighbors? I wasn’t sure.

  “Too many people,” he growled. “That inbred cur she married. That Barleywick wretch. Imagine my surprise when her daughter interrupted my little re-enactment in the woods. I was supposed to save you from the coyote, Mary, my dear. And this time, this time you were going to swoon into my arms. But there’s never been a Barleywick witch who didn’t get in the way — and if Zora had done things properly, she wouldn’t have had the chance.”