Marked By Masks and Secrets (Everlasting Possession #1)

43

EVIE

“ Y ou saucy minx!” Mena exclaimed when she found me reading in the gardens. “I have barely seen you in weeks!”

I raised a brow, smiling at her dramatization. “Mena, it’s been like, three days since I last saw you.”

“In my heart, it’s been longer.” She sat on a bench near my blanket.

I bookmarked my place and set my book down.

“To be perfectly honest, I am over the moon that things are clearly hot-and-heavy with that charming, dreamy young man. How dare you keep him from us for so long! I’m old, you know! What if I’d had a heart incident being surprised like that?”

I rolled my eyes. “Are you implying Kylo is beautiful enough to give you a heart attack?”

Mena opened her mouth with a sly grin, but loud voices rang out through the garden, interrupting our banter.

“Hey!” a woman yelled.

“Cindy, please,” a man barked. “You need to get a hold of yourself.”

Cindy and Roger Whitfield headed around the side of the estate, following the narrow stone path toward us.

Mena stood, crossing her arms as a rare look of derision crossed her features. I scrambled to my own feet, staring at my ex-boyfriend’s parents in utter confusion.

When Cindy attempted to take a shortcut and trample over my herbs, a gust of wind blew her back into Roger’s chest.

“Please don’t stomp on my plants,” I said calmly. “There’s a path for a reason.”

Cindy clutched her chest as if I’d stabbed her thrice with a dagger instead. “I told you, Roger. She just attacked me!”

My heart hammered. Actually, the spirits of the gardens had redirected her, but I doubted that explanation would be a comfort.

“What is going on?” I asked.

“You are on our property,” Mena said. “Mind your manners, Sandy.”

“Sandy? My name is—” Cindy cut herself off with a dramatic huff as if it was beneath her to finish the sentence. She planted herself in the grass in front of us as she lifted her finger.

Roger dragged a hand across his face. “We apologize for the intrusion. We were knocking on the front door, but we heard voices and realized we might find you out here.”

His eyes flickered to my chest for a moment, no doubt admiring the stitchwork in my corset.

Cindy’s finger shook, her features twisted with rage and fear. “Where is my son?”

I stared at her blankly as the words landed. “What?” I looked at Roger, clearly the more reasonable party. “We broke up. He said he was returning to the countryside.”

“See? Just as I told you,” Roger said calmly to his wife. “Jacob’s an impulsive young man. He made some boyish mistakes, likely got an earful about it from Miss Evie, and escaped to the hills.”

Irritation heated my blood at Roger’s assessment of the situation. I was growing quite tired of him treating Jacob like he was a child, incapable of holding responsibility for his own shitty actions. Or of me as some kind of nagging girlfriend and stand-in mother figure.

How had I ever tolerated these people?

“You see that,” Cindy hissed. “The pure contempt on her face?” Her disdainful features quickly shifted into a dramatic show of terror. “She did something to him!” She clutched Roger’s arm as she stared at me. “Farleigh told us about how offended you got at their harmless jokes about love spells and hexes, how you stormed off in a fit of rage. How you’re a chaos witch. ”

That finger pointing my way was not helping to calm me down. Anger and nervousness warred in my bones. I couldn’t show an ounce of my power. I couldn’t react at all.

“And I went to Celeste’s,” Cindy spat, “where they pretended like you never worked there at all. As if they’d cut all ties with you. Who are you, really? And what have you done to my son?”

Mena moved closer to me. She didn’t do a thing to hide the fury in her features, her dark red lips curled with rage.

I spoke before Mena could. “We broke up. He said he was returning to the countryside. I haven’t heard from him since.”

I repeated the same words as before, and Cindy fucking hated me for it.

“Where did you even come from?” she spat, her blue eyes wide and crazed. “They said you had some country bumpkin accent when you showed up on this poor woman’s porch all those years ago. Where’d that accent go, huh? Why are you here in Etherdale? Is that boy even your brother?”

Don’t you do it , a screeching voice hissed in my ear. Don’t you fucking cry.

My eyes burned, and my lower lip trembled. Roger watched me carefully, holding Cindy back from stepping closer.

“I am not a poor woman , you unbearable shrew,” Mena retorted, taking a step in front of me.

The sky above darkened, and I worked to take deep breath after breath. I remembered the deep onyx nothingness of Princeton’s shadows. The way I’d been able to find my center again in the darkness.

“What are you even accusing me of?” I asked, my voice shaking. “Murder? Kidnapping? Anything else you want to add to the list?”

Cindy suddenly wailed, her face crumpling with grief. “He’s gone, Roger. I told you. He’s dead.”

My fists clenched. “He’s just traveling! I can assure you that he’s not suffering! Why aren’t you asking Kailey where Jacob is? She’s far more likely to have heard from him recently.”

“Who do you think has been asking about him every day since he disappeared?” Cindy sobbed as she fisted Roger’s shirt and leaned against him, breathless now as she continued to work herself up. Roger held her as he rubbed soothing circles on her back. “Sure as hell wasn’t you. ”

Cool. It was nice to hear that I was the only person in Jacob’s life unaware he was cheating on me with his ex. Sounded like she was what they all preferred for him, anyway.

Mena hurled another insult at the Whitfields, now commanding them to get off her property as Cindy grew more and more incoherent. Roger, of course, offered few words of substance to the conversation.

My brows drew together, that terrified lump in my throat growing exponentially. “No one has heard from him since he left?”

Roger shook his head.

“Did he take any of his belongings?”

“Yes, he did. He packed a bag,” Roger said.

I sighed in relief. “So this is all just because he hasn’t written to you?” I asked an inconsolable Cindy. “That’s why you’re barging onto our land and accusing me of being some kind of evil mastermind?” I waved around my garden. “ This is who I am. I read. I grow plants. I create goods that help people. Magick for healing, protection, inspiration.”

I’m good! I wanted to scream. Please see that I’m good!

Rain trickled from the sky.

No. No, no, no. Oh gods, no.

It was like I was holding water in my palms and begging it not to fall through the cracks in my fingers.

I glanced up at the sinister clouds that had gathered above our neighborhood. I quickly looked back at the Whitfields.

“We’re sorry to have bothered you,” Roger said. “I’m sure Jacob will return soon, and this will have all been a misunderstanding.”

“She killed him, she killed him, she killed him,” Cindy repeated as she cried into Roger’s chest.

I thought of Kylo. I held the image of his devastating smile, that silly little dimple, in my mind. I imagined his shadows coiled around me like they might never let me go.

The clouds would pass. No one would notice, so long as I didn’t explode. It rained in Etherdale all the time.

Everything was okay. There was no need to run.

“I hope he writes to someone soon. I’m sorry he’s worried you,” I mumbled.

Mena made a soft noise of derision, clearly uninterested in making peace. Roger smiled politely, in that mechanical way wealthy people did. He pulled Cindy away from us without another word as she continued to spew accusations about me in a jumbled, slurred manner, apparently already drunk at this early afternoon hour.

The trickle of rain let up. I exhaled deeply, continuing to practice my most trusted methods of avoidance as I shoved all of Cindy’s words deep into the recesses of my mind.

Everything was fine. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I was good .

Cindy was barely lucid. Roger clearly didn’t believe anything she was saying. But what about Jacob’s friends?

What about Kailey ?

“Am I in danger?” I asked, my eyes welling with tears. “Are they going to sell me out to the born?”

Mena watched the Whitfields disappear around the front of the house like a guard dog before quickly folding me into her arms.

“No,” Mena said, squeezing me tight. “She’s a drunk and a coward. She only had the gall to hurl those words at us because she thought us weaker than we are. They know their immature playboy of a son is gallivanting across Ravenia. Why do you think Roger was so damn calm? He knows the son he raised. And the women they’ve trained to dote and fret over them until the day they die, buried with a harem of mistresses.”

Mena pulled away, and for a moment, I just stared at her resolute features. “Why didn’t you say any of that while I was dating Jacob?”

She shrugged. “You didn’t want to hear it. You were always going to learn the lesson you needed to learn, in your own way and at your own pace.” She smiled. “I’m just pleased we’ve reached the chapter where I can shit talk to my heart’s content.”

“Me too,” I said. My smile wobbled. I glanced back up at the sky and the clouds that were slowly dispersing. My hands shook; my heart was in a tight fist. “I need some chamomile tea.”

And, as much as I hated the thought of relying on anyone but myself … I needed Kylo. I hoped he was safe.