Chapter 3
A s soon as I awoke, I was greeted with a pounding headache and a healthy dose of confusion as I tried to remember what had happened before I passed out earlier.
Daphne had been so excited to tell me something, practically buzzing in her seat while she waited for things in the shop to slow down a bit…
Then I saw the gold flash of Dallan’s eyes, and after that, nothing.
I could remember the icy wash of panic easily because the cold fingers of it still lingered in my chest, but what had it been about?
With a groan, I pulled myself up into a sitting position in my bed, frowning over the fact I was even in my bed.
“Lass?” Dallan’s gentle voice came from the doorway where he was peeking his head into the room. “How are you feeling?”
“I feel…” my voice was hoarse, like I’d been screaming though I didn’t remember doing that either. “Like shit.”
Dallan’s chuckle washed over me, chasing away the chill in my chest with the sheer warmth of it. “I’ll bet you do after you caused all of the plants in a five mile radius to go insane. A new record for you.”
I grimaced, choosing to ignore his joke. “Why did I freak out like that? What was it that set me off?”
The tentacles on Dallan’s face curled inward, a telltale sign that he didn’t want to say what he had to say.
“Dallan… you know it’s going to come back eventually and I’m going to be even more pissed that you kept it from me,” I warned, my anxiety starting to ratchet up again.
The fuzziness that always accompanied my panic attacks was usually triggered by something that I wanted to forget—it was like my mind was taking over to protect me. I had a sneaking suspicion it had something to do with Daphne because her face was the last thing I really remembered aside from Dallan’s eyes.
“Lass,” Dallan sat on the edge of my bed and pulled my hand into his. My vines slipped around our hands, joining us at the wrist. “Daphne and Cash are going to have a baby.”
It all came crashing down again, Daphne telling me, her eyes sparkling with excitement as the reality of it hit me like a bomb.
I found myself wheezing as I tried to suck in a deep, steadying breath. Dallan hushed me, rubbing his free hand up and down my back as he tried to soothe me. “It’ll be all right, Effie, they’re going to be fine.”
I shot him an incredulous look. “And how do you know that? The maternal death rate for human mothers of halflings is one in three. ”
And maybe even more than that statistic. That was just what was reported.
As soon as the internet was invented and records started to be digitized I’d researched it until my eyes nearly bled. I wanted to know if what happened to my mother was common only to find that it unfortunately was the usual outcome.
But my case was special— unique —my father had called it. I was the product of magic in its purest form. He’d explained it all to me in ridiculous detail when I was twelve. Most little girls got the birds and the bees when they learned about sex. I got the birds, the bees, and the lady trees who die because they agree to be a part of a magical experiment.
Nymphs didn’t reproduce the way humanoids did. They created saplings that they poured their own version of magic into until a new nymph was created. My mother was the first nymph in known history to actually become pregnant and gestate infant me to full term thanks to a mix of her magic and my father’s. Then she died before she ever even got to hold me.
Most sane people considered me an abomination, an affront to the natural order of things. Alexander insisted I was born out of love and the desire for them to have a child, but how much could he have loved her if he was willing to let her die that way?
I would never let Dallan die that way.
Jerking back from the thought like it was a hot stove that had just burnt me, I turned back to the man in front of me.
Dallan, oblivious to my inner ramblings, continued to try and calm me down. “Yes, but they have us. Witches have been known in the past to help alleviate pregnancy symptoms for human women. Daphne said she feels fine and she’s already in her third month, so maybe it won’t be that bad.”
“Have you ever even seen a gargoyle halfling before, Dallan? In all your years?”
Dallan pursed his lips, probably trying to remember, before shaking his head. “But you know that they tend to keep to themselves, Lass, so if they have halflings they probably wouldn’t tell us.”
“And they won’t even speak to Cash even if he wanted to try and get information.”
Kicking the blankets away from my legs I got up from the bed to start pacing, mentally pulling my vines back until they disappeared back under my shirt.
I was in full blown crisis mode, thinking of all of the ways that Daphne’s unborn child could potentially end her new, happy life. The new happy life she’d just gotten to have.
Gods, this was going to be worse when Renaissance ripped her way out of Bella’s stomach in Twilight. I’d secretly read all four books when they came out years ago, though I’d never admit it to any of the guys who worked at the shop. While the author fundamentally misunderstood vamps, she sure got the halfling trauma right.
As a fellow hell-spawn, I felt for Renewal, but at the same time she got to keep her mom in the end.
Damn Cash and his virile gargoyle juices. I didn’t think it was possible for a human and a supe to get pregnant that fast, but then again, Cash was the only gargoyle that I knew very well and it wasn’t like he’d gone around boinking everything that moved—at least not until Daphne came along. Then they wouldn’t stop having sex… hence the stone bun in Daphne’s very much not so stone oven.
“Effie,” Dallan’s voice came from behind me but I ignored him as I continued to do laps around my bedroom, my mind starting to spiral again.
No, if anyone was going to get someone pregnant at Monstrous Ink, my money would have been on Fiero. The satyr screwed anything that moved and I was pretty sure that, statistically, it had to happen at some point and yet there weren’t any little goat-legged children running around at all.
Damn Cash and his super sperm , I thought again with a hard shake of my head.
“Effie,” Dallan tried again, this time moving directly into my path, his expression worried as I veered around him.
There was only one person within a thousand mile radius who would know how to handle this situation. That had handled this kind of situation before. Granted, he ended up with a dead nymph wife, but Daphne’s pregnancy should be a piece of cake compared to using magic to conceive a half-nymph, half-witch, all bitch child like me.
I just needed to figure out how to get him to do it without signing away all of the freedom that I’d gained fifty years ago—even if it took me getting booted from the coven to do it .
“ Euphemia .” Dallan’s hands gripped my arms tightly but not hard enough to hurt as he stopped me in my tracks and brought me back to the present.
“Sorry,” I apologized, a little dazed as I gestured to my head. “The mind squirrels were going nuts.”
Dallan sighed and pulled me into his arms, and despite knowing it was a bad idea, I inhaled his salt-air scent deep into my lungs and let it soothe the nervous jitters that were trembling through my body. I hadn’t realized how much I was shaking—practically vibrating—until Dallan had stopped me.
“You’re not going to give any of your freedom away to that man,” Dallan said, his lips in my hair as his tentacles tickled my cheek.
I stiffened. “Did I say that part out loud?”
“Yes. You did.”
“How much of it did you hear?” I hated when my inside thoughts suddenly decided to spill out of my lips without me realizing it and became outside thoughts. It usually got me in trouble with clients because they sometimes said the dumbest shit, but it was almost worse when I let it happen mid-freak out. Too much vulnerability for me to share and it was usually Dallan who heard it, making it even worse.
I wanted to look sexy and confident for him, not meek and needy.
“You started speaking right around Cash and how virile his juices are,” Dallan answered, and even though the situation really didn’t call for it I found myself laughing as I buried my nose in his chest and held on for dear life.
“You know Alexander’s the only one who can help Daphne if she needs it, right?” I asked, the pit in my stomach growing ever deeper. My own magic wasn’t anywhere near what a seasoned witch my age should have been able to do.
I could enchant things—my specialty—but any of the elemental magic outside of plants or even some of the most basic spells were way outside of my wheelhouse.
It had made me a resounding disappointment when I was younger and the other witches and wizards my age were bypassing me with ease. Alexander Finch was the head of his coven, so his child should have been a magical being capable of wielding complex magic with ease, but instead all he got was a weird leafy daughter that couldn’t even teleport herself anywhere.
Most parents would be proud to teach their child how to drive a car, instead my lessons had come with a lecture about how none of the other teens in our coven needed four wheels to get around.
“We can find another magic user somewhere else, Eff,” Dallan reassured me, his arms tightening around me like he was scared to let me go. “I can ask my contacts in the underground, I’m sure there’s a witch somewhere that specializes in human-hybrid childbirth.”
“And how do we incentivize them to come?” We made pretty good money here, but any witch or wizard worth their salt wouldn’t dare work in another coven’s territory without being compensated handsomely. “No Alexander is the best—”
I stopped as I felt the alarm system that I’d enchanted be triggered. It normally functioned like any old electronic alarm for human intruders, but whenever a supernatural or magical creature that wasn’t supposed to be here stepped over the shop’s threshold it was like the threads of my magic were being tugged upon and if they also had magic then I also could tell who or what was coming in.
The scent of balsam filled my nose and suddenly I knew exactly who was downstairs.
“The man is like fucking Beetlejuice. Say his name three times out loud and he appears in a poof of damn smoke,” I muttered to myself as I gently pulled away from Dallan, my insides screaming at me to ignore the intruder and continue pressing my face into his chest.
Skirting around the Cthulhu I hurried into the living room which Dallan must have spent the evening cleaning up while I was passed out in the bedroom because aside from a few glass bits that were missing it looked exactly as it had this afternoon right before Daphne had shared her news with me.
“Effie,” Dallan called after me as I yanked the front door open and flew down the stairs just in time to hear him ring the bell.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, my words coming out sharp and fast as I skidded into the lobby.
“I’m just coming to check on my daughter. It’s not often you feel a magical pulse that sends all of the plants in the mansion chasing after its residents,” Alexander Finch said, turning to offer me his usual polite, if incredibly absent, smile.
My father was over three hundred years old and yet he didn’t look a day over thirty-five thanks to the strength of the North Coast coven keeping him young. Aside from the streaks of gray in his dark hair and the hint of lines around his dark blue eyes, most humans wouldn’t believe that we were related let alone father and daughter.
But unfortunately for me I’d spent enough time with him growing up to know that we were far more alike than either of us cared to admit.
Every person who described my mother Elowyn always talked about how soft, kind, and sweet she was.
However Alexander was stubborn, prideful, impatient, and had a healthy dose of vanity that showed up in the perfectly tailored suits he wore.
I was too much like him, and growing up, I could never tell if he liked or hated that fact. Maybe if I was more like my mother then he would have loved me the way a father should have.
“We don’t do worrying about each other,” I told him dryly, crossing my arms over my chest. “Or checking up on each other. So, why are you really here?”
The stairs creaked behind me and I watched Alexander’s eyes shift from me to Dallan who’d come to stand behind me.
“Cthulhu,” he said by way of greeting—the same one he always gave when faced with the proprietor of Monstrous Ink .
“Wizard,” Dallan responded in kind, his voice a few octaves deeper than it normally was.
I had to force myself not to roll my eyes at the ridiculous display of masculinity currently being volleyed back and forth between the two men.
Reaching back, I elbowed Dallan in the ribs before turning my attention to the wizard still standing at the counter. “What do you actually want, Alexander? I’d talk fast before I kick you out of here.”
Alexander’s dark brows lifted with surprise. “Oh? Are you finally capable of banishing magic?”
I winced, wishing more than anything that I was so that I could banish his ass from the shop forever. But even if I was capable, it probably wouldn’t have worked anyway. Magic users couldn’t cast spells on stronger magic users—it was one of the laws of the universe that kept us all in a lovely little hierarchy.
Alexander was the strongest wizard on this side of the world. It was why he’d been in power in Port Haven for so long and why he was the mayor Arsenio’s right hand man.
“No, but I do have an enchanted potion that will make you wish I could banish you instead. You ever had blue skin before? I’m sure it would match your eyes.” I was about to tell Dallan to go back upstairs to get the potion in question off of the shelf when Alexander held up both hands in surrender.
“I’m not here to disturb your peace, Euphemia, you should know that by now. I was just curious about the magic pulse earlier, I’ve never felt anything like that from you before. ”
Dallan’s earlier words about the pulse being a ‘ new record ’ rang in my mind as I tried to keep my face impassive. Of course Alexander wouldn’t have felt it before as the man and the rest of the coven rarely came down from the foot of the mountain where the mayor’s mansion was. Though, mansion was maybe too simple of a word for the veritable palace and its expansive gardens and ridiculously opulent insides.
I straightened, nearly giving into the urge to lean back into Dallan’s bulk for comfort, but I didn’t and just shook my head. “That’s none of your business, Alexander.”
Okay, well that wasn’t completely true. My magical panic attacks were usually thanks to the result of him and his choices in life, but he didn’t need to know that.
When I was younger my panic attacks from being in a completely new world learning to read and write like a regular human, learning how to exist in the complex social world that was a coven, and quite literally not fitting in anywhere, were usually treated as a nuisance by the man in front of me.
But they hadn’t started becoming magical until after I left the mayor’s mansion and hadn’t grown in size until the past few years anyway. In fact, all of my magical abilities had started to grow exponentially in the last decade, causing me to be able to do things I’d never been able to do before.
Something that I was pretty sure Alexander could feel even as he stood several feet away from me. His magic had slipped out of him and started to prod at the edge of mine, testing it, evaluating it for the changes I knew he would find .
Before, when I was a child, it used to hurt when he did this, like thousands of needles slowly slipping under my skin and into each nerve ending until I nearly sobbed for him to stop. But now my magic seemed to snap back at him like a wild animal until he withdrew the unseen threads back into his body with a contemplative expression.
“Your magic has matured.” He said it like it was a fact that I couldn’t ignore. “I didn’t think it ever would.”
“And?” I asked, my voice flat. “What of it?”
Alexander frowned at me, his eyes narrowing. “ And it means that you need to be taught again to develop your magical skills.”
“Like hell she will,” Dallan cut in, clearly done with holding his silence. “I think the decades have made you forget, Finch, but the last time you had your paws on her she nearly didn’t survive it.”
That was a memory I wished I could make myself forget, but unfortunately I’d never been any good at mind magic either so the memory came bubbling up to the surface as clear as the day it had been made.
I held up a hand to stop Dallan before he could tell Alexander to leave. As much as I wanted the man out of my life permanently, I needed him and now I had incentive for the greedy bastard.
“Okay, I’ll do it.”
Both men turned to me with twin expressions of incredulity, like I’d lost my mind in the past minute and there was a good chance they would need to lock me up in the psych ward for all of our sakes.
“...Say that again?” Alexander asked, clearly having expected me to reject him outright.
“I said I’ll do it,” I repeated, forcing my arms to loosen to my sides as my vines slipped under my shirt to press themselves into Dallan’s chest in a silent plea for him to stay quiet. “But on my terms and I need you to do something for me.”
“Lass—” Dallan began, ignoring my plea, but I cut him off with a stern look, shaking my head.
I wasn’t going to let Daphne die the same way my mother did, and if that meant making a deal with Alexander, then so fucking be it.