Chapter 13 #2
“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” He kissed her, and all thoughts of falling stars were replaced with the quivering echoes of their love making.
* * *
Malcolm held Calli in his arms, the sheets and the comforter of her bed cocooning them together in bliss.
He couldn’t escape the truth of what he’d felt tonight.
Giving himself to Calli the way he had, taking what she offered in return…
that exchange of passion and pleasure went beyond everything he’d ever experienced.
He was almost asleep when he heard Hades’d low growl downstairs a second before he heard the knock on the front door. It was a faint, soft sound and yet a black pit of dread formed in Malcolm’s gut because nothing good came from visitors this late.
Careful not to wake Calli, he slid out of bed and put on his jeans, patting barefoot down the stairs.
He opened the door, and there in the muted starlight stood his father.
Reginald looked like his usual frustrated self, but there was a pallor to his skin that Malcolm hadn’t seen before.
Perhaps it was just a trick of the light?
“Do you know how long I’ve been looking for you?” Reginald asked in a low voice that held both frustration and worry.
How the hell had his father found him? He hadn’t been hiding, but Calli had explained yesterday that the town wards protected them from most searching spells. It had to be because the wards were down.
Malcolm crossed his arms over his chest and held his father’s glare with one of his own.. “I’ve been here since I left your house. I think we said all we needed to say.”
“Malcolm, you must come home. The Council—”
“Malcolm?” Calli’s voice came from the top of the stairs. “Who is it?”
“No one,” Malcolm replied at the same instant his father said, “his father.”
Malcolm shot him a warning look. “Say anything rude, and I will slam this door in your face.”
Reginald had the decency to look affronted as he straightened his suit jacket.
A moment later, Calli came downstairs, wearing a fluffy bathrobe and pajamas. Her hair was mussed and she looked cozy, inviting, and warm. Everything Malcolm desperately wanted to hold on to at that moment.
“Mr. Wellesley?” She joined Malcolm at the door, but kept his body between them. “Would you like to come in?” she asked, trying to tame the mess of her hair.
“He can’t.” Malcolm almost growled. The last thing he needed right now was his father and Calli talking, because he knew how his father felt about hedge magic.
“He can.” Calli gently pushed Malcolm aside to open her front door wide. “Stop treating him like a vampire.”
Malcolm snorted darkly. “He might as well be.”
Calli elbowed him in the ribs and smiled warmly at his father. “Please come in, Mr. Wellesley.”
His father arched a brow at Malcolm but said nothing as he stepped into the house. His eyes widened slightly, then narrowed.
“So, you’re a hedge witch?” he asked, although his tone implied less of a question and more of an unamused statement.
Her features tightened. “Yes, I am. My name is Calli Wynters. Come into the kitchen and I’ll brew some coffee.”
“Wynters?” Reginald repeated the name, and something strange flashed across his face. Malcolm didn’t dare ask what that was about. An old family grudge, perhaps? Great, on top of a prophecy to deal with, he might be living out Romeo & Juliet.
“How do you take your coffee?” Calli said as she headed toward the kitchen.
“You needn’t trouble yourself, my dear,” Reginald said with shocking politeness. “I just need to speak to my son alone, if you don’t mind.”
“I mind,” Malcolm replied.
“Are you quite sure you want her to hear everything?”
A gloomy sense of defeat tightened Malcolm’s shoulders. This probably wasn’t going to be pretty. He looked at Calli. “Just give us a few minutes.”
She nodded. He wanted her to be there, he truly did, but he didn’t trust his father to behave. He wasn’t ashamed of Calli, he was ashamed of his father.
The moment he and his father were alone in the living room, his father’s face darkened.
“What were you thinking? Opening up a portal on the street like that? What if someone had seen you? Or worse… followed you through? You could’ve killed someone. And you endangered yourself and all of the magic users here by threatening exposure to the non-magics.”
“Dad, I didn’t—” Malcolm started.
“But you could have.” Reginald closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “And here you are playing house with some hedge witch when you have the pick of women with bloodlines that go back hundreds of years.”
“Calli isn’t just some hedge witch. She’s—” he stopped. His father would lose it if he learned Malcolm was close to witch-locking with a hedge witch.
“She’s what?” Reginald asked.
“She’s important to me.”
“Malcolm, she’s no different from the other dozens of women you’ve courted. This one just happens to be a witch.”
“Don’t you see her spells? Look around you. Really look.” He urged his father.
All around them, Calli’s spells drifted through the air.
Faint shimmering webs and streams of magic that looked like muted starlight and seemed to have a life of their own, protecting the house, encouraging the plants to grow.
Simple spells cast with such intense power.
For a brief moment, his father’s expression changed slightly.
Curiosity? Interest? Then he seemed to recover himself.
Unlike the stately looking, stoic spells of a blood magic like those of his father’s, Calli’s magic was ever moving, ever evolving…
as though it was alive. Tendrils of spells reached out to stroke the leaves of plants, and test the moisture in the soil and the air.
Everything had a sense of being constantly tended to and taken care of.
“She’s powerful. That doesn’t change the fact she’s a hedge which. You can do better, boy. Much better.”
“Like you did? Marrying a non-magic?” He hadn’t meant to draw his mother into it, but the hypocrisy was too much for him.
“Your mother is different,” Reginald snapped.
“How?”
“Because I love her! I went to war against my family to be with her. I have no regrets in choosing her. Not for an instant.”
“Well, I love Calli,” Malcolm said. A moment later his own words caught up with him. He loved Calli. He wanted to bask in that revelation, but this wasn’t the time.
“Be sensible. You barely know the girl. Come home with me. The Council is waiting for you. Lady Batsford only has so much patience.”
The binding spell his father had cast on him before he left Boston prickled against his skin at the reminder that his father was trying to force him to return to Boston to join the Council. He shuddered, trying to shake the enchantment off, even though he knew it wouldn’t work.
“It’s not my destiny, dad.”
His father dragged a hand over his face as he let out a weary breath.
“But it is, Malcolm. The day you were born, a seer was in the hallway just outside where your mother and I were. She had a vision about you, just before you came into the world. You knocked out all the power in the hospital and half of Boston for a full five minutes. You came into this world quite simply exploding with magic.”
Malcolm stared at his father, a terrible sense of dread rising inside him. He had never known that about his birth.
“What did the seer say?” He finally asked, his voice quiet.
“She said you were a warlock of a new age. That you would someday lead the Council, that you would save magic at its source once you married a powerful witch. You and your witch would change magic forever.” His father cleared his throat.
“I had hoped that if you got to know the witches from the best families, you would find that perfect match the witch the seer spoke of.” Malcolm had the sense his father wasn’t telling him everything, however.
“The point is,” Reginald continued. “You have a destiny beyond this little town. The Council made me promise you will take your place.”
“You shouldn’t have made that promise. You got to make your own choices and marry the woman you loved even though she wasn’t a part of your world, and yet you’d take away my freedom to do the same?
I’m not going back to Boston,” Malcolm said.
“So unless you want some of the coffee Calli offered, you can leave.”
Reginald’s green eyes betrayed his emotions, but only for an instant. He cleared his throat and tugged at the edge of suit again in an old nervous habit Malcolm knew he tried to hide.
“Very well.” He walked back through the hallway toward the front door, Malcolm right on his heels.
“Good night, Ms.Wynters,” he called over his shoulder. “I do apologize for the late night disturbance.”
Calli rushed out from the kitchen, smiling. “Please don’t be afraid to come back. I would love the chance to talk to you.”
Reginald offered her a polite smile, warmer than Malcolm expected, then his eyes turned to Malcolm and hardened again.
“Remember your duty, Malcolm. The more you fight a prophecy, the worse it becomes. Take me home.” Then he vanished, and a baseball rolled around on the wooden deck where he had been a second ago. A faint lacing of a spell covered its surface.
Calli bent to pick up the baseball. “What spell is that?”
“A traveling totem one. My father doesn’t like portals.
Too messy and they tend to cause problems. He prefers to use random items instead.
If I know him, he left this for me to get home, should I want to.
All I have to do is pick it up, say take me home, and I’ll be transported right into my parents’ house.
The baseball will stay here. There will be a matching totem wherever this will take you that can get you back here. ”
“My grandmother had something similar. You know the archway into the back gardens?”
“The one covered with flowers?”
“That one.” Calli smiled. “If you tell it where you wish to go, it will do the same thing. You simply walk through it, and you are immediately in the other place.”
“I guess we aren’t that different, are we?”
She wrapped her free arm around his and held the baseball out to him. “No, we really aren’t.” He reluctantly accepted it and put it on the reading table by the couch.
“I’m sorry he was so rude to you.”
Calli turned to face him and hugged him. “He wasn’t.”
He wrapped his arms around her in return. God, it felt good just to hold her.
“What did he say to you? If you don’t mind me asking.”
Malcolm rested his cheek on the top of her head, closing his eyes.
“Turns out what Zelda said about us isn’t the first prophecy about me.” He held her tight, as if keeping hold of her could anchor him here. “I don’t care anymore. I don’t want anything to do with that life. I’m tired of prophecies dictating my life. It’s my life.”
He would stay right here with her and damn the rest of the world.
* * *
Reginald appeared inside his study back home in Boston. For a long moment he didn’t move. The weight of the blood vow pounded in his blood. He didn’t have much more time before the consequences would catch up with him. He opened the door to the hall and stumbled straight into his wife.
“Reggie!” She gasped. “Did you find him? Is he all right?”
“I did,” he leaned back against the closed door. “He’s shacking up with some hedge witch. He’s fine.”
Sarah put her hands on his shoulders, and her eyes grew wide. “He’s what? A witch? Oh, how wonderful! Did you meet her? Is she nice?”
Only Sarah would treat such an announcement like their son was dating someone seriously. Malcolm never took any woman seriously. He always chose smart, beautiful, lovely women to date, but it was clear his son had no intention of ever settling down. And he had claimed he loved this one. Ridiculous.
“She’s a hedge witch, dear,” Reginald said. “Completely unsuitable for this family.”
Sarah dropped her arms from his shoulders and frowned. “Unsuitable to you, perhaps, but not to me.”
“That’s because you don’t understand the difference—”
“Oh, but I do.” Sarah eyed him reproachfully.
“The only real difference is the source of your magic. Only blood witches and warlocks want to make it seem like you’re special somehow.
But the truth is, you’re all the same. You all use magic.
” She declared this with such dismissiveness it would have irked him if he wasn’t so damned tired.
Reginald wanted to argue that the source made all the difference, but he’d be sleeping on the couch if he dared to explain. He pushed away from the door and came into the light of the wall sconces more clearly. The annoyance in her face vanished, replaced by concern.
“Honey, you’re very pale. You look ill.”
“I might need to rest a bit,” he admitted. He couldn’t tell her about the blood promise. If she found out, it could destroy his family.
“Go sit in the living room. I’ll make you some hot tea.” She stood up and kissed his cheek, then left him to go sit on the couch.
He only had a few months at most to get Malcolm to accept his place in the Salem Witch Council before the consequences caught up with him. If Malcolm didn’t come home soon, he’d have to tell Sarah what he’d done. And he might lose everything…