Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
brEN
“What the hell was that?”
Cormac didn’t bother to lower his voice, but I doubted the stunningly beautiful woman had heard. The music had swelled loud enough to swallow most of the conversation around us, the fiddle bright and relentless above the low, warm hum of the crowd.
I dropped my gaze from the disbelief simmering in his deep brown eyes to the amber liquid in my glass, watching the light fracture through it, casting small broken shapes across the table.
“She asked you to dance,” Cormac continued, undeterred. “You could have simply said yes.”
“I could have,” I agreed, because that part, at least, was true.
“And you think you didn’t just break her heart?”
I curved my mouth, though there was no humor in it, only the faint exhaustion of someone who’d had this conversation in one form or another across several centuries. I buried the emotion burning in me and met my friend’s gaze. “Add it to a long list.”
Cormac scrubbed the stubble darkening his jaw and stared at me for a long moment. “You could have been nicer about it.”
I kept my voice even. “If she understood what involvement with me actually entails, she’d consider it mercy.”
Cormac snorted and reached for his glass. “You act as if your curse won’t allow you to bed a woman, let alone dance with one.”
“Watch your language,” I said dryly. “In this era, people use the word fuck.”
Cormac wrinkled his nose. “That’s unnecessarily crude.”
I didn’t respond as my gaze drifted across the room. The auburn-haired woman had moved to stand at the bar, and whatever mildly useful thing I might have said to my friend dissolved the moment my gaze found her.
She leaned one elbow against the polished wood, her posture easy and unhurried, her attention already given entirely to the bartender across from her.
Whatever brief humiliation my refusal might have caused, she’d apparently decided it didn’t warrant her time, and there was no trace of it left in her open laugh.
I released a weighted breath. “She’s not what you think she is.”
Cormac followed my gaze. “A witch, you mean? Yeah, I sensed that about her. So what?”
A snort, heavy with sarcasm, slipped from me. “She’s far more than that.” Witches possessed ability, but they rarely held the raw power capable of disturbing the Veil itself.
He cocked his head and then widened his eyes. “That’s the one, then,” he said quietly.
I didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “Yes.”
Cormac leaned back slowly. “With the way you stared at her, I thought you wanted her, when you were actually assessing her.”
I nodded once.
He studied her with a thoughtful look. “She doesn’t look like much of a threat, but that shockwave wasn’t subtle.”
I tapped my finger against the table, wishing I could make sense of her. But she was unlike anything I’d encountered before. The scent of her still lingered in my awareness, her essence still pulling as it had earlier in the day before I’d known anything about her.
Cormac returned his gaze to me. “The Veil doesn’t thrash like that for an ordinary witch.”
“It doesn’t.”
He sipped his whiskey, eyeing me over the rim of his glass as he did. “You should have danced. It would have told you more than staring across the pub at her.”
A humorless snort left me. He wasn’t wrong, but the uncomfortably simple truth of it was that seeing her had unsettled me.
More than unsettled. It had shaken something loose inside me that I’d spent centuries locking down.
It took me a moment to find another reasonable excuse. “Did you ever think that’s why she wanted to dance?” I said calmly. “To be closer to me and learn more about what stands in her way?”
Cormac blinked. “That seems a bit strategic for someone who looks like she just wants a pint and a good time.”
I lifted a shoulder. “Powerful witches don’t wander into guardian territory by accident.”
He studied her again. “I didn’t get the sense she’s out to cause trouble, but okay.”
His tone made it clear he wasn’t entirely convinced. I wasn’t either.
Across the room, the woman laughed again, drawing something tight inside me. She tipped her head toward the bartender as if whatever he’d said was the most interesting thing she’d heard all evening.
The spark I’d felt the moment she stepped inside hadn’t dulled in the least. If anything, her proximity and her brief but undeniable attraction to me had left me restless, wanting something I could never have.
That she’d moved on so easily should have been a relief.
I’d grown tired after centuries of encountering women who stepped into my space, their breaths softening as their pupils widened, turning them into something pliable and unguarded. I didn’t enjoy using others.
And yet something told me she wouldn’t be like them.
I blinked at my wayward thoughts, knowing the moon’s pull affected me more strongly when it was at its fullest. Whether I used it for battle…
or for other things. The glass and stone of the pub thinned and diffused its reach, but it wasn’t enough to dim its effect completely, the way I wished it could.
I focused again on the intriguing witch and swallowed more whiskey. It did nothing to erase the taste of iron on my tongue, left there by my rejection.
I’d almost said yes.
And that alone made her more dangerous than any breach I’d faced in years.
The impulse had flared sudden and sharp, a pure betrayal of centuries of restraint, and for one irrational instant I imagined what it would be like to take her hand, to let music and movement dictate the space between us instead of law and duty and the long habit of self-denial.
Thank the gods logic had overridden instinct.
Cormac remained silent beside me, which was its own kind of commentary.
When he finally spoke again, sincerity replaced his teasing. “Sorry, man. I live from full moon to full moon, and I sometimes forget what you bear.”
There were times when Cormac’s intuition caught me off guard, and his comment brought an unexpected smile to my lips. “The eclipse is a few months out, but I feel it.”
At speaking those words, the fleeting sense of ease disappeared.
I regretted my earlier thought, wishing I could escape the moon’s grasp at times.
Another eclipse approached, and I dreaded the vulnerability that accompanied it.
During that time, it hid the moonlight and all it powered from the world.
The sacred stones trembled in ways only I could sense, and the restless whispers were not limited to the dark hours.
Time was contracting once again. And I couldn’t afford the woman standing twenty feet away, even if she wasn’t a potential threat.
I eyed my friend. “Might want to warn your pack to be ready for the unexpected. I hear the lunar cycles surrounding it might be more erratic than usual.”
Cormac’s expression sobered. “Is that so?”
I shrugged. “So they say.”
He folded his thick arms. “Is that why you’re not in the mood to mess around? You need your strength?”
I didn’t answer.
“I’ve been feeling something in the air too,” he continued. “But you know how that goes. Life is unpredictable.”
I checked my watch more from instinct than necessity, and then I lifted the remaining whiskey and swallowed it in one controlled motion. “I need to go.”
My friend straightened. “It’s that time, then, is it? We’d better get to it.”
We both worshipped the moon, though in different ways. He with his pack. For me, it was my lifeblood.
Cormac led the way out, but before I exited, I allowed myself one last look at the woman.
As she spoke with the man next to her at the bar, the warmth of the pub’s light caught her profile.
I could have sworn she glowed. A deep ache threatened to rise, and I severed it as swiftly as I’d cut the common wraith’s anchor.
I adjusted my coat and strode through the pub’s door. Outside, the cool air struck my skin, bringing relief.
Ahead, the mountains rose dark against a thinning sky. The moon hovered just below the horizon, soon to be at its full glory.