by Cate Tiernan
Asher smiled at the doors, then turned back to me. “Anyway, lick the bacon grease off your fingers, grab your coat, and come with me. Time for a lesson.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Are you sure you want to teach the devil spawn any more magick? Aren’t you afraid I’ll turn you into a jackass? You can see what I’ve already done with him.” I motioned my head toward the parlor.
“You know there isn’t any devil, much less spawn of one,” Asher remonstrated. He pulled me toward the front door and handed me my coat. “Besides, I’m afraid Ottavio was like that long before you came on the scene.”
I knew I shouldn’t ask, but when has that ever stopped me? “How long have you and River been together?”
He held the front door open and we went out into a morning that had turned not mild but definitely less frigid.
“I’ve known River for about two hundred years,” he said, surprising me by answering. “And was in love with her since the first day. But she saw me as more of a brother type.”
I wrinkled my nose.
“Exactly,” Asher said, leading me toward the side yard. “We lost touch off and on, especially during World War Two. But right after the war, I found her in Italy. And we’ve been together since then.” He looked thoughtful. “Sixty-six years. It’s the longest I’ve ever gone steady with anyone.”
I laughed, then remembered hearing that Asher had been in Poland during the war and that he was Jewish. What had happened to him?
“Okay now,” he said, all business. “Today we’re going to practice spellcrafting. As you, I hope, know by now, focus and concentration are a crucial part of making successful magick. The quicker you can achieve a pure, focused state, the quicker you can craft magick—until it’s all second nature for you.”
“Okay.”
“Now, find something around here—anything—and use that to focus on,” he directed.
I looked around and saw piles of mushy leaves. And… okay, a twig. I bent over to get it and saw a chicken feather next to it. Focusing on a feather seemed all cool and Native Americany, so I picked it up and showed Asher.
“Fine,” he said. “Use the feather as a focal point, and sink into concentration the way we’ve been teaching you.”
“Then what?”
“Then craft a spell to make this walnut husk split open.” He held out his hand to reveal one of the katrillion walnuts we’d harvested last fall. My hands had been stained brown for weeks. We’d hammered most of them out of their husks and shells, but not all.
“Split the husk open?” It was a round, dark thing, dry and wrinkled. Last autumn it had been green and slightly patterned like an orange.
“Yes.”
I opened my palm, and Asher placed the walnut in it. A spell to split a walnut husk. At first my mind went blank, and I tried to keep the panic off my face.
“Use the feather,” Asher said softly.
Oh, right. It was small, fluffy, speckled brown and white. Not as impressive as, say, a falcon’s feather. But I concentrated on it, praying for a spell to pop into my brain, fully formed and walnut-appropriate. Obviously it would be much easier to use a hammer here, but it seemed bad form to point that out.
Was I taking too long? Should I already have the spell together?
Come on, feather, speak to me. Suddenly I wished I were holding my mother’s amulet, and I wanted to ask Asher if he’d fixed it yet. I bet I could split this shell wide open with that.
Concentrate. Breathe. Release all thought. Open yourself to the universe. Anne’s quiet words came back to me.
And… the more I calmed down, the more I was able to push other thoughts out of my head, and the more my spellcrafting lessons came back to me. Without deciding to, I began to hum my mother’s song, the ancient tune of unrecognizable words that she had used to call magick to her. But unlike her, I made pathways to channel magick through me, not to me, protecting the feather and everything around me so I wouldn’t take their magick from them.
The walnut grew heavy in my hand. It was the only thing I could see. My surroundings faded but also sort of melded with me so that the lines between us blurred. The feeling of power, of magick, rose up inside me, the familiar chrysanthemum of light and joy. I felt part of everything, and everything felt part of me. Including this walnut. I smiled. After that, all I had to do was think, Split open, reveal yourself. And the hard brown husk bloomed in my hand, peeling back like a fruit rind. I gasped in delight and saw the walnut shell break in two, showing the tan, convoluted nut inside.
I breathed in, and the crisp sounds of nature came back to me. I blinked, and Asher’s face was near, his brown eyes solemn.
Excited, proud, and way impressed with my newbie self, I held out the walnut. “It’s beautiful,” I said. “That was a beautiful spell. It felt so easy, once I got out of my head.” I beamed at him, waiting for him to clap me on the back and tell me how awesomesauce I was, how brilliant and advanced.
Instead, Asher coughed slightly and pointed off to the left.
My eyes widened as I saw a young maple sapling maybe ten feet away—that had been completely stripped of bark. Its bare, pale wood gleamed in the sunlight.
“Did I do that?” I squeaked. “I didn’t mean to. I made all its bark fly off?”
Asher nodded. “Did you remember to set up limitations?”
“Jeez, I guess not enough. I’m sorry.” And then I saw the chicken. River’s chickens ran loose through the yards during the day, being all free-range, and this chicken… had apparently wandered too close, during the spell? “Um… that chicken,” I said faintly. “It’s… naked.”
Asher nodded again, then captured the featherless, very indignant chicken and tucked it under his arm. “I’ll take it into the barn,” he said. “It can’t be outside till its feathers grow back.”
“Will they grow back?”
“I hope so,” said Asher.
“What about the tree’s bark?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I hope that comes back, too—if it doesn’t regrow soon, the tree will die.”
Well, now I felt like crap, my proud victory turned into an embarrassment. “I need more practice,” I said glumly. I know, right?
“You did very well, my dear.” I could hardly hear him over the squawking of the angry chicken. “You need practice, and you need to set up all boundaries of limitations, not just some of them. But you still did very well. We’ll practice again tomorrow, or this afternoon.”
I rubbed my forehead.
Asher and I were headed for the barn when we heard the big-throated growl of a powerful engine coming up the driveway. This was something new and different, and we stopped to watch.
Sure enough, a neon-yellow, low-slung sports car pulled too fast into the unpaved parking area, sliding to one side and spewing gravel as it stopped a mere six inches from the red farm truck. The top-hinged door rose, and a dark-haired man unfolded himself from the car. He looked around with interest and with one hand removed his sunglasses.
“Daniel,” said Asher.
“Have you seen him yet?” Brynne practically hissed in my ear as we headed down to dinner.
“Only from a distance,” I said.
“Well, mreow,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows.
So another of River’s four brothers had decided to vacay here in rural Massachusetts. Excellent.
I’d slithered away while Asher and the naked chicken waited to welcome Daniel, and once inside I’d gone up to my room wishing I’d never have to leave it again. Just how dangerous was I? Could I be this bad without knowing it? What were these guys doing here?
When the dinner gong had sounded, Brynne had stopped by my room, and then I was on my way to what was no doubt going to be another intensely unpleasant dinner with the Two Horsebutts of the Apocalypse.
“He seems younger and less stuffy than the king,” Brynne whispered at the bottom of the stairs. Abandoning me, she entered the dining room, bright and pretty, calling cheerful
hellos to all.
I hesitated at the doorway. When my skin tingled, I whipped around to see Reyn, who had come up behind me silently.
“Could you not sneak around?” I said irritably. “I’m going to put a little bell on you.”
Reyn glanced at me, then looked into the dining room.
“Would you like to go out to dinner?” he asked a trifle stiffly, and my jaw dropped. Last time he’d spoken to me, it had been an angry bellow. He was… unpredictable. Being out alone with him seemed… deliciously risky.
But he was the devil I knew. As opposed to the ones I didn’t.
“Oh God, yes,” I said, lunging for my coat.
This was like a date. It was probably a date. Our first date. Mostly we’d been making smoochy-face in weird, out-of-the-way places, when we weren’t arguing. But this seemed like an open proclamation somehow.
I was tense and quivery, sitting in the middle of the truck’s bench seat. I hoped he wouldn’t seize this opportunity to lecture me some more while I was stuck inside this moving vehicle.
“This was a good idea,” I said, trying not to seem as thrilled as I felt.
“I figured dinner was going to be a little rough,” he said. “Probably.”
“Yeah, you think? That’s all I need, another disapproving man glaring at me squinty-eyed.”
He snorted.
I glanced up at him, his hard-boned face outlined in the moonlight. Once again I was slammed by a rising tide of attraction, which was always followed by wonder and confusion. As in, I wonder why I’m so attracted to him? He was my family’s enemy. Confusion.
But right now he had gotten me out of Inquisition Thursday, so it was cool.
“Where are we going?” I didn’t care.
“Halfway to Turner’s Falls,” he said. “There’s a Mexican place.”
“Great.” As long as he wasn’t carping at me, I was content to sit there beside him. We drove through the night, and for a few minutes it was oddly reminiscent of crossing the prairie in a covered wagon. The darkness; the quiet; the always looking forward, unsure of what lay ahead.
Except I knew what lay ahead. Mexican food.
As we walked into the restaurant I wished I didn’t have eau de barn all over me and that I’d remembered to brush my hair. Like, in the last few days. Reyn was used to seeing me like this, and so far he hadn’t seemed put off by it (or by anything, really). But being out in public with a bunch of people around reminded me of all the dinners I’d had with Incy over the last century. I remembered him looking at my clothes, up and down, and saying, “Are you planning on wearing that?” Sometimes I would say haughtily, “That is my intention, yes.” Other times I let him cajole me into changing into something more Incy-approved. It had seemed funny at the time—kind of flattering that he cared what I wore, that he thought I should make the best of myself.
What was worrisome about Reyn was that he’d seen me at my worst, taken every barb I’d thrown at him, watched me be an ungrateful failure, and yet still… seemed to care about me. I mean, what was I supposed to do with that?
We both got carded when we ordered drinks: me a girly margarita and Reyn a beer with lime and a tequila chaser. It was strange seeing him against the backdrop of a restaurant instead of in the barn, in the yard.
Reyn squeezed the lime into the beer bottle and took a sip. He was just so freaking manly, I couldn’t stand it. I drank my margarita in small, icy tastes, remembering getting plastered in Boston, how awful it had been. What would happen if Reyn got tipsy? Would he loosen up, get funnier or sweeter or—
Raging, furious, violent. I’d known some mean drunks in my day—perfectly nice guys who turned into nightmarish alter egos when they got soused. Surely Reyn wasn’t like that. I’d never seen any inkling of it. Now I watched him toss back a shot of tequila without wincing and wondered if this was possibly the start of finding out Reyn hadn’t changed much in the last three hundred years.
“What’s wrong?” he said. His eyes hadn’t left my face.
I sat up straighter and tried to look casual. Saying “nothing” would be such a sissy cop-out.
“Did you ever go to school? Like college?” Avoidance, something I’m much more comfortable with.
“College?” Reyn looked bemused, then drank more of his beer. “Yes. Have you?”
“I started a couple times. I didn’t last very long.” And that had never, ever bothered me until now. Thanks, self-awareness. You’re a peach.
“How come?”
“It seemed so… slow. It seemed to take so long.” I shrugged. “Can an immortal have ADD? ’Cause that would be bad.”
Reyn smiled, which for him was not as wide and toothy as it might have been on someone else. “That would be bad.”
“What did you study?” This was probably the most we had ever talked that didn’t involve sniping at each other or raking over the past.
“Different things.” He was distracted by our food arriving, and I tried to suppress whimpers of happiness as I dug into the hot, cheesy, fat-filled, totally-not-River’s-Edge food. Without being asked, the waitress brought me another margarita and Reyn another beer, lime, and shot of tequila, smiling deeply at him and leaning over as she placed them on the table.
I gave her a look, like, Really? and she bustled off. I picked up my margarita, instinctively planning to subdue my anxiety, and then realized what I was doing. Slowly I pushed it back and looked up to see his golden eyes on me.
I managed a little smile. “Things like what?”
“What’s wrong?” As oblivious as he had seemed to the whole Nell thing—her undying love for him—he sure did seem all over the subtle-face-change thing with me.
“Nothing.” Coward. “So—what did you study?”
Reyn looked at me as if deciding whether to pursue it or let me drop it. “Um, history.”
“So you wouldn’t be doomed to repeat it,” I said, nodding. “Good plan.”
“Economics—tracking money all over the world. That was interesting. Medicine—once in the 1870s and once right before the First World War. Tech stuff that they teach you in the army—the Canadian army, Russian army. The SEALs.”
“The what?”
“SEALs. Part of the navy. In America.”
“Oh.” Of course he had been in the military. A bunch of militaries. “So you’ve been to school a lot.”
He shrugged and finished his second tequila. My eyes followed it like a laser pointer.
“Are you worried about something?”
I don’t care what anyone says—my face is not that freaking expressive. “Just wondering if you brought your sword,” I mumbled.
“What?”
Jumping right into it, I shrugged and said airily, “One shouldn’t drink and raid.”
His eyebrows came down, questioning if I was serious. “I don’t raid,” he said mildly. “I don’t pick fights in bars. I don’t mouth off to tough strangers. Is that what you’re talking about?”
By this point I had no idea what I was talking about. All these thoughts in my head, past and present, and someday I really needed to sit down and sort them all out. I scooped up some beans and rice on a tortilla chip and shrugged again. He was probably regretting asking me out.
Reyn took the last of the guacamole. “My sword’s in the truck.”
My head jerked up. His face was totally serious, but his eyes were… softer. Not so lasery. I laughed nervously, and he smiled.
“So… how does it feel being back?”
His question stopped me, instantly bringing Boston to mind again.
“Um… good, in that I know I should be here, and because everyone—mostly—has been really great about it. Some people have told me why they’re here, and that helps. ’Cause I’m not the only disaster.”
“No,” he said. “You’re not the only disaster.” I heard the deep thread of regret in his voice, and for a couple minutes we sat there and looked at each other like a couple of dorks.
“
It was awful, in Boston,” I said slowly. “So awful. I was so glad to come back here to normalcy—even normalcy with chores and lessons and a shared bathroom. I’ve always been able to just… leave awful behind, you know? Just move on.”
“New town, new name,” Reyn said.
“Exactly. Once I became someone different, it meant that I hadn’t even done that stuff, made those mistakes, hurt those people. Or whatever.”
Reyn nodded slowly, his long fingers smoothing the napkin under his beer bottle. “At River’s Edge, all the other names and pasts and excuses and lies get pared away.” He finished his second beer and waved Miss Thing away when she swept toward us all alert with a third round of drinks. Looking back at me, he went on, “Like, here you can be only the one you. Only the core you. Most of us have no idea who that person is. Or… we’re afraid of who that person might be.”
“Yeah, exactly,” I said again, wanting to fall against him. He knew just what I meant. Incy had never wanted to talk about this stuff, covering his ears and saying nyah nyah nyah on the very few occasions I tried to be profound and self-reflecting. Usually I wouldn’t, couldn’t admit these feelings to anyone. But without a doubt, Reyn of all people might be afraid of who he really was, underneath it all.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, and put some money on the bill tray.
“Okay,” I breathed, scooching out of the bench.
The ride home was darker and quieter than the ride out—Reyn took small back roads, and there were no streetlights, few houses. What would it be like to travel across the country with him? One thing’s for sure—I wouldn’t have to worry about robbers or carjackers or anything.
Reyn turned the truck unexpectedly, and we bumped over a dirt road in the middle of what looked like old cornstalks. The moonlight tipped them with white and if I looked far enough away, they resembled whitecaps being kicked up on the ocean.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
Reyn looked at me as he shut off the engine. “Parking.”
My heart thudded to a slow stop inside my chest. We were miles away from River’s Edge, completely away from everyone and everything. True, we were in a truck and it was going to get cold, but I didn’t care. I got light-headed and realized I’d forgotten to breathe.