by D. D. Chance
The soft, gentle sound caught me by surprise, and as Belle moved ahead down the short path that led to the cottage her great-grandmother had set against the lake, a strange disquiet built within me. Belle had made no promise to the Fae. Neither had her great-grandmother, but some long-ago ancestor, agreeing to terms that were now becoming murkier by the moment. Even if Belle was somehow still infernally bound to this contract we’d struck with the Hogans—did I want her to be?
The obvious answer to that was yes. The Fae’s need for magic was paramount, especially now with the Fomorians at our doorstep. But was forced magic instruction the only way we could improve our abilities? Surely, there were witches out there willing to share their knowledge, the same way the original Hogan witch had been willing to sign the contract?
“I’m always surprised to see it,” Belle said, interrupting my dark thoughts as we neared the cottage and angled around the building to the decks that overlooked the lake. “It still feels strange, as if my great-grandma still lives here and I shouldn’t go barging in.”
I glanced at the building, frowning. I felt the same way, yet this construct was on the academy grounds, which were on the grounds of my own castle. All this was mine, after a fashion, and yet it wasn’t. When Reagan Hogan had left, she’d taken access to the academy with her. Apparently, she had made provisions for its doors to be opened to a future Hogan, but she still hadn’t handed over the keys, despite the fact she was long since dead. Quite obviously not, now that I thought about it. Before Belle, each Hogan witch had generated a school to match their own personalities, but Belle hadn’t. She was still working in her great-grandmother’s shadow.
Why?
“Geez, I always forget how gorgeous this place is,” Belle murmured, and I returned my focus to her, my heart shifting hard in my chest as I took in her delighted smile. She looked out over the wide lake, the wind lifting her hair from her cheeks, her storm-gray eyes focused intently on the water. “If I lived here, I would have a kayak and go out on that clear water every day. I can’t imagine anything that would be more peaceful than that and there’s so much wide open space, so much to explore.”
Once again, something in her voice caught at me.
“You didn’t explore much back in your home?” I asked softly, hoping my question didn’t break her spell. There was something important here, something I needed to know.
“Ha! Not hardly. When you run a tavern that’s technically open twenty-four seven, you never really leave, you know? I lived above it and alongside it, like a yin-yang symbol, the two of us locked tight. Anytime the front door opened or even rattled, I felt it in my bones, even if I wasn’t on-site. I’d get away for an afternoon, but not more than that. And I never wanted to leave, honestly. My work was there. And there were always people coming and going. Some for a friendly face, some for a much-needed drink, some for a safe haven that only I could provide. And some…”
She broke off, and I sensed it anew, the shard of fear and anger that had pricked through her protective barriers to slice into mine. She was thinking about the coven who had frightened so many persecuted souls to her door.
“Tell me about these witches you help, Belle,” I said quietly. “Who needs you more than the realm of the Fae?”
She looked back at me, her eyes clearing, her cheeks flushing as if she realized she had already said too much. But she pushed on.
“They call them rogue witches, like it’s some kind of slur. They called me that too—and my ma and grandma. Witches without a coven. There are so many of them, four or five a year, which doesn’t seem like much, but when you think about what they had to do to get to my bar, to get even to the US, in some situations—it’s a lot. It sucks, honestly. My heart breaks every time a new one comes through the door.”
“Why do they come to you?”
She gave me a rueful smile. “Because of the Fae realm, I suspect. The White Crane was built with wood my great-grandmother brought from here. How she did that, I have no clue, but she did. And as a result, coven witches don’t even see us, while rogue witches can see my light shining from like a freaking hundred miles away. Whenever they come to me, I help them. It’s good work, needed work.” She sighed. “I keep wanting to do more to help them, but…I do what I can.”
“But I don’t understand. Covens were intended to protect witches. Why are they suddenly the enemy?”
“When does any group in charge become the enemy? When they make rules we don’t want to follow. And if one person chooses not to follow the rules, that’s a problem, right? It’s for damned sure what the coven of the White Mountains wanted to avoid more than anything. Their power stretches across the globe, and they’ve got networks built on networks. Every witch I’ve helped has been connected to the White Mountain witches in some way, even if they don’t know it. The coven is massively strong, and they’ve gained a ton of magic over time. I don’t know how, and I don’t care, but I keep my head down, all the same.”
The coven of the White Mountains. I frowned, not recognizing the name. “Only them? If they are acting against their own people, aren’t there other covens that could rise up and censure them?”
“I mean, yeah, sure,” she said. “But that would be an act of war. And who’s going to lodge a complaint, exactly? Persecuted witches hide. They don’t stand in the fire, putting those they love at risk. That would kind of defeat the whole point.”
I grimaced, recalling the words of the valley Fae. Sometimes war comes for you even when you’re determined to look the other way.
“You need to get back, then, to protect them.”
The corners of Belle’s mouth turned down, and I caught a wisp of loneliness from her that I couldn’t quite pin down. She pivoted away to gaze out over the water again. “I don’t even know what’s left of my tavern,” she said quietly. “There may be nothing left for me to protect.”
“And these witches are who burned your tavern,” I said, drawing lines in my mind, marking enemies I had never seen. “This coven of the White Mountains.”
Her shoulders slumped, and she lifted a resigned hand. “Yeah. The wards have been so strong, for so long but—they failed, finally. I failed.”
Never. I drew closer to Belle, taking her hand, and I lifted it as she turned. Her eyes flew wide as I dropped to one knee. “I pledge to you, Belle Hogan, I will rebuild your home. I will help you rebuild your life. The sacrifice you and yours have made will not go unpaid, and the witches you have saved will remain safe from their hunters. I swear it.”
The trees shook around us, caught in their internal spring, and flower petals drifted through the air, whispering the oath upon the wind.
29
Belle
I stared at Aiden, taking in his words, yet not fully believing them. Not because he wasn’t sincere, but because he didn’t understand. He couldn’t.
I tried to pull him upright, but it was like moving a stone. Still I wasn’t going to let him remain kneeling by himself. I knelt too, and rushed to speak as his gaze flared with unexpected emotion. Had I broken some unknown Fae rule yet again? I didn’t care. This was too important.
“You can’t, Aiden,” I protested, drawing his hands to my chest and gripping them tight. “You can’t come to the human realm for longer than a few hours, unless you want to draw the attention of every warrior witch on Earth. We hate the Fae. All of them. Even—especially—the ones who act like they want to help us.” I poked his chest. “That means you.”
“Maybe that hatred needs to be changed,” he said, and though he spoke with conviction, it wasn’t with the smug boastfulness I would have expected from the king of the Fae. It was simply curiosity. As if he’d never really given the matter careful thought before but now, upon reflection, maybe new analysis was needed.
“Your own great-grandmother defied what we believed we knew about human and Fae interaction by bringing artifacts of the Fae back across the veil that you were then able to use,” he continued. “She built her cab
in with Fae trees. You said so yourself. She used that same wood to line the walls of her tavern. She gave pieces of spelled Fae jewelry away to witches to protect them. You have done the same. As has your mother and her mother before her. It would seem that the Hogan witches have run roughshod over this unspoken agreement to keep the Fae out of the human realm for generations. Who is the one who makes the rules for your kind?”
I grimaced. “The oldest witches of the oldest covens, and the White Mountains coven is one of the oldest of all.”
“One, but not the only one,” Aiden countered. “There may be others who would come to your aid, if you’d let them. I can help you protect those you love, those who are vulnerable, Belle. As you have helped me protect my own. Will you let me?”
I blinked up at him, the words suddenly sticking in my throat. Oh, Aiden, I thought, since I didn’t seem capable of speech. He was so beautiful in that moment, so perfect and fierce and full of hope that he could do this thing for me. All he ever seemed to want to do was to help me, and all he needed was for me to let him.
Why couldn’t I let him? Even knowing that this wasn’t going to last, that it couldn’t—that he was Fae and I was human, a witch and a teacher doomed to be returned to my own realm—why couldn’t I just take this? Enjoy this? To make his strength mine, and share that strength with the witches and hunted monsters who just wanted to survive another day?
Why couldn’t I have this?
As tears leaked from my eyes, Aiden moved his hands from mine, lifted them to frame my face, then leaned down and took my lips with his. There was nothing of my body that Aiden hadn’t already claimed, but with this kiss, with the promise behind it, he was capturing a piece of my soul too. This oath to not only protect me and keep me safe, but to work with me, to help me save those near to my heart? Again, how could I say no to that?
These women and sometimes children had no one to advocate for them in a society where they were shut out by traditional structures and afraid of the one organization that was supposed to welcome them in. There were men too—but rarely, so rarely it felt like they simply weren’t persecuted much by leadership…maybe because their low numbers kept them safe? I’d never known.
But whether male or female, these rogue witches were truly alone, as my family had been before them. I had given them a family of one, and slowly, steadily, we had formed our own community—even if we rarely kept in touch after they passed through my doors.
But now Aiden was adding not one more pair of hands to the fight, but a family, a clan, an entire race of mighty warriors. My head swam even as my brain tried to maintain some semblance of balance. It wasn’t possible. The Fae couldn’t protect humans. That wasn’t how any of this worked.
“Oh, sweet Belle,” Aiden murmured, leaning back from me to shift his hand to my face, the callused ridge of his thumb brushing away the tears that had spilled over my cheeks without me realizing it. “What are you thinking of that you keep shielded from me? Because I’d like to believe it’s not me that’s making you cry.”
“You aren’t—I’m sorry,” I managed as he continued stroking my cheek, as if he could brush away the loneliness of a lifetime spent in hiding. And then I realized—he was. Magic flowed from his fingertips, searching out the broken places and making them whole again. “What are you doing?” I whispered.
“I don’t know,” he murmured back, with an honesty that arrowed through me. “We Fae may no longer have great native magic, but perhaps we do have strengths we haven’t called upon. How much of that strength has fallen away since our last Hogan witch? And did she truly take it all with her, or did it simply go dormant?”
I leaned back to look up at him, the two of us kneeling in the shadow of my great-grandmother’s cottage, as comfortable as old lovers in this moment, the certainty of our connection evening out my pounding pulse and the way my blood seemed electrified by his touch. But this made me frown. “Do you think my great-grandmother was to blame for the discord between your family and the other Fae? Do you think—”
“No,” Aiden said, but I pulled away from him, the idea catching hold as he groaned softly. I rolled to my feet, beginning to pace.
“But it makes sense, doesn’t it?” I protested. “Yes, your father was an ass, and it seems like his before him was as well, but had King Orin been a good ruler prior to my great-grandmother’s departure, prior to her betrayal? Had she put in motion this discord that you now face?”
“If she did, it was through no fault of her own,” Aiden said heavily, getting to his feet as well. “She was a prisoner to a contract she had neither signed nor believed in. Her obligation to our family, to the Fae, had been laid on her shoulders without her consent, and there is nothing in the histories that would indicate my grandfather was a prince prior to her departure, especially since he was the one who wrote the histories.”
I chuckled as Aiden brushed his hand down his trousers, as if any Fae leaves would ever dare stick to the legs of the king. “Fair enough. But there’s so much to do.”
He came to stand beside me, the two of us looking out over the lake.
“There is much to do,” he agreed. But something had changed in his voice. It was harder now, sharper, as if the interlude between us had been shattered for the moment, not easily recovered.
For the first time, I recognized that I’d broken that moment. That I’d pushed away the arms and the attention of someone who’d wanted only to focus on me—and that I was lesser for it. I blinked, glancing away with a sudden rush of sadness, as Aiden continued speaking.
“The Fomorians grow ever bolder. We will need to change our strategy, to bring in all four clans of the Fae to fight them. If the mountain Fae still have a record of what they did to defeat them all those millennia ago, we will need that, but not only that. Because what worked before may not work again. And you have much to remember, the collective history of your kind. The old tales said that human witches lent us aid in our time of need, before helping to ensure we returned to our own place.”
I nodded. “You took control. We opened the door, and you flattened our enemies is always how it was explained to me. As soon as you did, you started looking around, interested in this land you’d just liberated. It took everything we had to push you back, and that lesson has never been unlearned.”
Even as I spoke, I couldn’t help my growing dismay. Why had I broken the moment between us? With someone like Aiden, there would always be more battles, more problems to solve for his people. In my own world, there was always another customer, always another knock at the door. Why hadn’t I allowed myself the solace of his embrace? The answer came as softly as the blossoms on the breeze.
It was because I knew it would be taken away from me, and I shouldn’t get used to what wasn’t really mine. Dammit.
I looked at Aiden, but his focus remained on the far offshore. Instead, I saw his future. Sitting atop a throne, the assembled Fae before him. There was a figure at his side, but it wasn’t me, I knew instinctively. I couldn’t quite make out her face, but she was elegant, serene, her coiled long dark hair—
“Belle?”
I blinked sharply, the image disappearing as quickly as it had arrived. Was that sight from something that was going to happen today? Tomorrow? Would it even come to pass at all? Ordinarily, my visions were only good for a few hours hence, but how was that possible…?
“How long will it take to gather all four clans?” I asked.
Aiden’s brows went up. “Several days,” he allowed. “Why?”
“Oh—no reason. I just thought it would be sooner than that.” I shook my head. Several days? How was that possible? How had I seen this far-off vision of someone standing by Aiden—someone who wasn’t me? My magic had been augmented, sure, but…this was what it decided to show me? An image of some strange woman standing next to Aiden that made my stomach twist in knots? That seemed extremely not useful.
Unbidden, the dire words of Aiden’s cousin Lena assaulted my mind, her pre
diction that the return of war to the land of the Fae might be turned aside if Aiden killed me, or at the very least banished me back to my own realm. She’d told me that to protect me, she’d said, but it felt like anything but protection. The Fae didn’t want me here. Not even Aiden, not forever—and I shouldn’t want to stay. People needed me back home, witches and monsters who had nowhere else to turn. I knew that. Of course I knew that. And yet…
Why had I pushed Aiden away in one of the few stolen moments allowed us when I might lose him for good all too soon?
30
Aiden
I kept my expression perfectly neutral, but inside, I couldn’t deny the spurt of excitement in my blood, the quickening of my heart. This close, this attuned to Belle, I could read her emotions, if not the full context of her thoughts. And her emotions were excellent. She was dismayed and a little forlorn, undoubtedly because we had turned back to the work at hand, the idyll between us broken for the moment.
As much as I was tempted to turn my attention back to that, there truly was work to be done. And frankly, I didn’t so much mind the idea of Belle watching and even hoping for that next brief respite of intimacy between us. It perhaps didn’t make me a good person, but I’d never claimed to be that. Of all the battles that faced me, the one I cared about perhaps more than any other was the battle for my witch’s heart. If I could start with making her yearn a bit more for a stolen moment between us, I would happily do that.
I turned back toward the cottage. “Is there anything here that you need before we return to the academy? Anything we’ve missed?”
She gave a half-hearted gesture at the cottage. “I really wanted to come here, felt like we should. So yeah, we should look inside. I’m beginning to think my great-grandmother had a far more layered plan than simple flight all those years ago. I just can’t understand why she didn’t tell us.”