Lorelei glanced over at Patrick who had lifted up his daughter and placed her on a table. They were singing a song in a different language and giggling with every other word. “I can’t see them doing that. And you’ll have to say something when the faeries come anyway.”
Estrid groaned. “Of course, your promise. Patrick’s people already believe in something like the feer. In fact, those ones you met sneaked over here on the same ship with the cargo.” She drummed her weathered fingers on the table. “Perhaps they can hide inside the walls once I am gone.”
“When you’re gone?” Bridgette grunted as she picked more leaves out of her hair. “You better have enough of that root for all three of us to go.”
But Lorelei shook her head. “Won’t they be in danger if you leave?”
Patrick and Madeline were scrubbing out the bowls in a basin of water and were now splashing each other.
Estrid tore her eyes away from them. “Zyr will not stay if I take the source with me. He will try to find it. It is all he wants, so it must go as well.”
“Ugh, that guy’s a pain.” Bridgette waved her hands in the air. “Just blow him up or something.”
“He is a god.” Estrid’s hands were in fists as she stood. “He cannot be killed, only weakened which already took so much out of my companions and I. When he finds me again after many centuries, I will bind him, and the source will finally be safe.” She straightened her top and swept down her skirt, folding her hands before her. “It is late, and both of you need rest, as do I. Tomorrow we will leave.” Her eyes flicked over to Patrick and back. “It is decided.”
That night, Lorelei and Bridgette lay out in the main room under thin blankets, the others shut behind the doors to the two rooms in the cabin. The floor wasn’t comfortable by any means, yet Lorelei felt her eyelids drifting down anyway.
“You saved me.” Bridgette’s voice broke into the silence, curiously accusatory.
Lorelei pried her eyes back open. “Sorry?”
“You could have just left me.” The witch shifted in the darkness. “You should have.”
Lorelei propped herself up and peered over at Bridgette, her features muted in the shadow, but she could still tell the woman was glaring at her. “Why would I do that?”
“Don’t you, like, want me out of the way?”
Lorelei’s eyes widened, fully awake now and glad it was dark enough to hide the color in her face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, sure, yeah, okay.” Bridgette laughed under her breath, but she didn’t sound all that amused.
“Even if I did think you were in the way of whatever you’re suggesting, which I don’t, I still wouldn’t leave you in colonial times with a bunch of faeries to be pestered for eternity. They don’t even have Moondoe’s yet.” She was sure the witch was already jonesing after a day without her favorite coffee chain.
Bridgette made an indiscriminate noise that told Lorelei she didn’t believe her.
“Wait, would you? If we’d been switched back there, would you have left me with the fae and gone home alone?”
“Oh, my gods, no.” Bridgette sucked her teeth. “Leave the changeling behind? Like I wanna deal with how mopey that’d make him. Plus, you’d have to be, like, a for realsies threat for me to waste my time trying to get rid of you.”
Lorelei flopped onto her back again. She’d never been so annoyed to not be threatened.
They lay in silence for a long moment, but the promise of sleep had gone. Lorelei studied the shadow of a branch and the way it bent with the sound of the wind outside. The moonlight was brighter here, the world quieter and louder at once, insects and night creatures venturing close in the dark.
“Do you think Conrad loves me?”
Lorelei choked on her own breath at Bridgette’s whisper, so quiet she wondered if she’d imagined it. Of course he did, she thought, you didn’t deal with a person like Bridgette if you didn’t love them, certainly. And you didn’t stay together for so long if you weren’t—she swallowed, she knew from experience that wasn’t actually true. Love was complicated and weird, and how the hell was Lorelei supposed to know what someone else—Conrad especially—was feeling when she couldn’t even figure things out for herself?
When she realized how much time had passed without responding, Lorelei mustered the only thing that didn’t sound completely insane or insulting, “That’s a weird question.”
“And that’s not an answer.” Bridgette flopped around with a huff. “Whatever. We just better be put back at the right time so nothing gets screwed up.”
Lorelei squinted at the ceiling. “What do you mean? Isn’t time passing the same in the…the future?”
“It better not be. My father will kill me if I go missing.”
“Well, he can’t really do that if you’re not around.”
“He’ll find a way.” She clicked her tongue. “He’s, like, totally obsessed with everything I do.”
“Oh?” Lorelei was glad they’d switched subjects. “That sounds really annoying.”
“Yeah,” she said with a deep sigh. “He checks in a lot, and obviously I don’t get a signal here, so his texts aren’t getting an answer.”
“It’s sort of nice he’s concerned about you,” Lorelei offered quietly.
Bridgette’s eyes practically made a sound rolling in the dark. “Yeah, totally. I bet you love when your dad tells you where to go and who to talk to and what to do too.”
“He doesn’t,” she said. “He doesn’t tell me anything. Not since he got remarried like fifteen years ago.”
“Oh.” Bridgette hummed into the darkness for a few minutes, fidgeting. “I mean, my parents are splitsville too. I only see my mom once a year. Most years anyway.” Bridgette swallowed in the dark, and then added quickly, “She’s got a really important position in her coven, so she’s, like, super busy.”
“Yeah.” Lorelei sighed. “It sucks having busy parents.”
That unquiet silence of the night filled up the cabin again, an owl hooting lowly somewhere far off and another gust of wind shaking the dry leaves.
“Anyway, thanks for not leaving me with those stupid faeries or whatever,” said Bridgette, rolling over.
Lorelei closed her eyes. “Don’t mention it.” She was sure she wouldn’t again.
***
Estrid’s hair had fallen from its bun, stringy and flat around her face, and her skin was still sallow. Lorelei assumed she had not slept much the night before, and the presentation of some sort of goo in a mortar and pestle proved that. “Everything is nearly prepared,” she told them the next morning. “For all three of us.”
Patrick came inside then, Madeline trailing him, and when he saw Estrid his face lit up, telling her he had checked the traps and they would have a feast for dinner. She nodded, quickly looking away, her eyes glassy.
“You don’t want to go,” Lorelei whispered brushing through knots in her own hair with her fingers while sitting in the corner she and Bridgette had slept in.
“Zyr is here because of me. He is at his weakest now, and frankly he was foolish to follow me to this land, but if I leave, so will he.”
“You said you planned to bind him when you get to the future, so why not do that now if he’s so weak?”
Madeline skipped over and offered them each an apple, giving Estrid a squeeze before skipping back off again. The witch was distracted momentarily then turned back to Lorelei. “I need time to stow the source. He is drawn to it, all four of them are, but his attempts to take it are relentless. I cannot risk failing.”
Lorelei bit into her apple, chewing nervously while she asked, “All four? There are more of him?”
The witch turned the fruit over in her hands. “Gods, like him, yes, but not with the greed he has for the source. In fact, one of them tasked me with this duty to keep it safe.” She touched her chest again then drew her lips into a tight frown.
“Well,” Lorelei bit a lip, hesitating, “it’s go
ing to break their hearts when you go.”
Estrid’s frown only deepened. “They will not remember me.” She glanced to the window, a sprig of a drying, purple herb hanging there. “It has been decided. We will leave soon.” She swept out of the room, hesitating at the door. Patrick glanced over at them, and Lorelei gestured for him to follow. He hurried out with Madeline on his heel.
“Do you think we can bring Patrick and Madeline with us?” Lorelei asked Bridgette, tying off her braid.
“Ew, no! There’s only enough components for three, and we’re already messing with time enough by coming back here—who knows how bad Estrid jumping into the future is going to screw things up, we’re not adding to that.” Bridgette had finally gotten all the leaves out of her hair and was scrubbing her face with water she had siphoned muck out of with a spell.
Lorelei sighed, lamenting that the long glances between the witch and the man would be for nothing, and knowing that even if there were some fancy, memory-erasing spell on the two, Madeline and Patrick would surely have an Estrid-shaped hole in their hearts when the witch was gone. She took another bite of her apple, sad for the little family that could have been, then almost choked on her mouthful. “What did you say?”
Bridgette scrunched up her face. “Ew?”
She swallowed painfully, waving a hand as if that would help to bring the words back. “No, the other stuff. About Estrid screwing up time.”
The witch shrugged, picking up her apple and examining it for bruises. “Oh, just, like, ya know how my magic didn’t work right away because I wasn’t where I belonged or whatever? She’ll be where she doesn’t belong too.” She took a cautious bite.
“So, everything Estrid would have done after today to lead to our future won’t happen?”
“Maybe.”
Lorelei stared at her for a long moment, and Bridgette just stared back, flaring her nostrils, annoyed. “You know who Estrid looks like, right? Tall, blonde, perpetually cranky?”
The witch took another bite, eyes narrowed, thinking.
“Listen, I don’t know if it works like this, but I had a feeling before that she and that source thing weren’t supposed to leave, and now it makes a lot more sense. If the source doesn’t stay here, I don’t know if Moonlit Shores Manor will end up existing in the future.”
Bridgette chewed slowly, eyes never blinking.
“And if Estrid doesn’t stay here and make babies with Patrick, I don’t think there will be any Rognvaldsons in the future either.”
Bridgette froze mid-bite.
“What I mean is, if she comes back with us, Conrad’s not going to exist.”
“I know what you mean!” she spat, mouth full, brow furrowed in anger. “Ugh, why does he always make everything so much harder than it has to be?”
That wasn’t what Lorelei was expecting her to say, but in a way it also was. “So, what do we do? She has to stay, but she’s pretty convinced she needs to run away from that god guy.”
“Ugh, he’s not a god. He’s just a pointy-toothed elf with some good tricks.” Bridgette chucked the half-eaten apple out the window beside them.
“Elf?” Lorelei remembered his long ears, similar to Ren’s. “Zyr’s an elf?”
Bridgette shrugged. “I dunno, looked like one. She said he was fae, and elves are fae. Could be a lorelei, a dryad, or a sylvan, it doesn’t really matter, I don’t see why she doesn’t just destroy him.”
“Wha—destroy Zyr? Can she do that?”
“She should, she’s a witch,” Bridgette lilted. “He’s just some stupid fae who thinks he’s big and bad and is all hyped up on that thing around her neck. She should just stick him in a bottle and bind him up or whatever and be done with it.”
“Bridgette.” Lorelei leaned toward her, trying to catch her eye. “If we can do that, we really should.”
She dropped her head back and closed her eyes, whining. “But I wanna go home!”
“Okay? Maybe we do both?” Lorelei held her hands out, empty, and then brought them together to try and show her.
Bridgette glared at her as if she had just proposed staying in an electricity-less cabin in the woods forever, then she growled from the very depths of her bowels. “Ugh, fine!”
“Really?” Lorelei grinned.
“Yeah, yeah.” Bridgette got to her feet like she was carrying around an extra two hundred pounds and dragged herself to the other side of the cabin. She shuffled through a small stack of things, finally pulling out an amber-colored, glass bottle. “This will probably work, but you need to get your gross little faery friends to help—I’m not doing this by myself.”
***
Lorelei watched from the window, her eyes peeking over the sill. One of Estrid’s wards fell to the ground silently, the air catching it as it went, innocuous, but then she saw a glimmer of light that flitted to another branch and the ward there.
“The faeries are starting.”
“Blessed Powers, this better work.” Estrid stood near the door to her room, pounding at the mixture she’d made in her mortar. Beside her, the mirror was set up just in the doorway.
“Um, excuse you, but I, for one, am a pretty amazing witch, so…” Bridgette was sitting against the wall, a knife digging into the amber bottle’s neck, etching symbols.
Estrid paced, her face drawn tight, eyes unblinking. “They are out of sight, yes?”
Lorelei nodded, coming away from the window. “I’m going to owe Bur a big one when we get back.” The faeries had spoken to Lorelei through Estrid again, and she traded a future favor for Patrick and Madeline’s safety, though it had taken a lot of convincing. The mushroom circle deep in the forest was untouchable by Zyr, and so the two humans would spend the day there in a pleasant, little haze until Zyr was gone and promptly be returned at nightfall. Provided it all went well. Lorelei wrung her hands—it really needed to go well.
Bridgette yelped, the knife grazing her thumb as she made the last mark in the bottle’s neck. She huffed and handed it off to Estrid as she stood, sticking her thumb in her mouth.
“I’ve never seen these bindings before.” Estrid admired the work Bridgette had done, thin lines all over the dark glass, barely visible. “This…are you sure these will contain him?”
Bridgette crossed her arms, visibly offended. “Of course it will.” Then she turned her eyes on Lorelei. “My boyfriend designed them.”
Lorelei tried to not roll her eyes, looking back out the window. More of the wards had fallen from the trees, and the last of the faeries’ lights were flickering out. “I think they’re almost done. Everyone knows what to do, right?”
Estrid dug the source out from her blouse and allowed the necklace to lay in the open. Even in the dimming lights of evening, the stone looked like it was moving on its own. Lorelei’s contribution to everything had been the ruse, something she figured she should be good at, but she wasn’t sure she was smarter than an elf, especially one that a witch insisted was a god no matter how weakened he’d been.
Bridgette, though, was more than ready. She stood next to the mirror on the other side of the room and gestured for the mortar. “Let’s get this show on the road: I need a shower and a macchiato.”
Estrid placed the mortar on the ground just before the mirror, and Lorelei crossed the room to stand on the other side of it.
“This better work the way you say it does.” Bridgette started tapping her foot, but it didn’t seem like the kind of tapping one did when they were anxious. Bridgette was at the edge of her patience, but Lorelei had enough anxiety for them all. It was her plan after all, and it needed to work.
There was a buffet of wind through the dry leaves, and a shutter on the house slammed. Estrid’s head snapped to the ceiling as she backed up against the wall across from them. “He’s here.”
“Well?” Bridgette waved her hand at the front door.
Estrid locked eyes with Lorelei, face pinched, took a deep breath, and opened the door.
The space in fron
t of the house was strewn with leaves and pine needles, and a gentle breeze blew the debris across the yard. The trees at the edge of the forest were shadowed. And then the shadows moved. They came together until a figure formed within them, and out it stepped from the line of trees, tall, thin-limbed and dark.
With the wards gone, Zyr strode across the yard, the sounds he had brought with him before rattling in the back of Lorelei’s skull. He was like walking smoke, features obscured, a man made of burnt-out fires and ash and darkness. She wanted to reach out and take Bridgette’s hand, but the mirror was between them, and even if it weren’t, she figured the witch wouldn’t like that very much anyway.
Estrid’s hand instinctively went to the source at her neck. She grabbed it with a tight fist, her arm shaking, but the elven god had seen it shimmering against her clothes already. His desire for the thing was all encompassing, a draw so great, Estrid had said, that nothing could stop him. It was apparent in the way he sped up, not bothering to consider the line of three women he was headed towards. And that was exactly what Lorelei had been counting on.
Estrid raised her wand, and it appeared to point right at Zyr, but he barely took notice. She mumbled a few arcane words, her eyes flicking down to the mortar full of muddled oison root and other components. The tip of her wand began to burn with a blue flash. Still, Zyr did not stop.
If anything, he came faster, just at the entrance to the door now. His figure, massive in comparison, had to duck to enter, long fingers wrapping around the frame as he pushed into the woodworker’s little cabin. The sounds of a thousand screams and thrashing metal and dying horses echoed off the walls and beat at the roof, and the whole place shook.
Lorelei could hardly keep her feet planted. There was a hatred and a darkness in Zyr that she recognized, if only slightly, dark eyes she’d looked into before that were just like these. But Bridgette was standing her ground, and she was doing it with what looked like no fear at all, and so Lorelei could stand there too even as Zyr closed in and raised an open palm to them, arm reaching out, ready to snatch away the stone.
The Wayward Deed (Vacancy Book 2) Page 9