18. Kiaran
Kiaran
A melie learned more about her family tonight than most people did in an entire lifetime.
Her brain was muddled by the outpouring of honesty.
She deserved all of the answers she wanted and I hoped she got them.
I felt her mind haze over as Josef and Niklaus cracked everyone’s hearts wide open with how devastating love truly was.
I assumed with everything that happened, she missed the tiny comment that Al made about the prophecy. Weird word to use for a curse but after all was revealed, it made everything that I’d felt before they walked through our front door feel so much heavier.
Witches were known for doing good, benefiting the enchanted world and making life better. When droughts took over, we brought rain. When famine hit, we sent crops and animals. When babies got sick, we sent souls of the past to strengthen them. When a Witch broke the rules, they were exiled.
Our current High Priestess was great at showing the celestial world how great we could be, but she had a bad habit of twisting fates that should’ve never even been close to each other. She had a sinister side that everyone feared .
Long before I was born, she took charge.
Everyone in the Coven knew her, she was extremely well respected but you did not call her by her name.
Only her family was allowed to do that and even they had a hard time doing so.
She was a ruthless leader, just as the women before her but she had insidious ulterior motives that she’d been playing at for years.
As the Lost Souls continued to memorialize their lost Morgenstern women, their history in Avonya was coming back to me.
The only other family that rivaled the family in power was the Morgensterns.
Their power was unbound by any laws of magic and completely tied to the elements.
Water, air, earth, fire. Four different places to siphon magic from and at any given time, those elements were available. It was limitless.
It wasn’t power that could be learned, only passed on through bloodlines. They held their magic in their eyes, I can’t believe I didn’t remember that when I first noticed the gold in Amelie’s.
The High Priestess wanted that power so badly, she created a fucking mess to get it.
When she learned that it wasn’t a power she could order them to give or teach her, she sent them to the enchanted Forest to practice , to become so powerful they could take over an entire realm.
I didn’t remember much about their send off, being only four or five at the time, but the sisters were determined, unaware of what the High Priestesses really had in store for them.
The Lost Souls still believed they were here on less harmful orders, another Witch trait was knowing how to keep a secret.
Evari ruined the Coven’s plan by tampering with the fates. She started crossing bloodlines, passing the magic down.
I wasn’t sure how far the High Priestess knew it had gone, surely she didn’t know that there was now a Morgenstern heir back in the Forest. She would’ve sent someone already to take care of that if she did .
Our guests left a few hours ago. Amelie gave Ethel a tight hug and then slipped a vial of something into Edgar’s hand. It occurred to me that Ethel’s husband might’ve been the Dwarven man who Amelie helped in her dreams. Her dreams were so fucking real.
I had been sitting on the couch trying to respect her space but who was I kidding? Being in separate rooms was crushing me.
Without thinking, my feet padded across the hardwood floors. I swung her door open, ignoring the knocking part because that would just waste time.
“Kiaran, please. Not tonight.” I heard exactly what she said but I didn’t really care.
She was strewn across her bed in that fucking slip dress. Her hair was perfectly mussed, her arm laid flat across her face pushing her breasts together. One leg was bent and tilting to one side giving me even less of a reason to stay on this side of the room.
“Too bad,” I replied as I took my place on the bed next to her. She tried to make room but I grabbed her and held her so close we only took up space for one person.
“You okay?” I asked, but the new bond between us was already telling me more than her words would. She wasn’t okay.
“I’m fine, just a lot happened tonight,” she said in a flat tone but what her soul said, How did I end up here?
“Why did you stop kissing me?” Amelie’s voice was sprinkled with dread. After everything that she learned tonight, the fact that I abruptly ended our kiss was what was torturing her.
And now that was going to torture me.
“Our guests arrived, it would’ve been rude to continue.” I lied, and she knew because she could read my soul as well as I could read hers now.
“Stop lying to me.” She peeked back from my hold to catch my eyes. Every inch of her face was begging me to be honest, to tell her everything. “I’m a bad kisser aren’t I?”
I scoffed. “The worst.”
She hit my chest, I took that stupid fucking sweater off and wore my silk pajamas now. Though the fabric was cool, Amelie’s playful touch heated my skin.
“No, pretty girl. You’re not a bad kisser at all.”
Winter Solstice was only a few weeks away at this point.
Knowing now what it felt like to have Amelie for myself and having less than a month to spend with her before I had to make the most painful decision someone could make was gutting me.
If I told her everything, then every second would become precious.
The pressure would be crushing. Would it break us before we could stop it? Would she accept me as her fated mate and try to die for me? Sacrifice herself?
If I didn’t perform the sacrifice, the consequence would be fatal.
If I did complete it, Amelie would die. Either way the curse ended in death.
There was no fucking way to win here and the High Priestess made sure of that.
Making my fated mate the thing I lost was against every law of the Coven, and there weren’t any loopholes in that law.
They were clear, the High Table could not, under any circumstance, ever , tamper with mates.
“You better not be lying to me. What is this between us?” Very direct question, most girls waited at least a few dates before asking.
“Well, I really like you. Don’t humans, or whatever you are I guess, kiss the people they like?” I asked.
She popped an annoyed brow at me and her nostrils flared slightly.
“No, this?” She waggles a finger between the small amount of space between us.
“I’m not sure what you mean. This is… space between us ?” I was desperately trying to find the answer she was looking for.
“God, you are infuriating.” She rolled her eyes at me.
“The colors, Kiaran. The rainbow that’s literally whirling between our bodies.
” She looked back down between us and I followed her lead, I didn’t see what she was talking about.
Pressing my hand against her forehead, I checked for a fever. Maybe she was officially going mad.
When she realized what I was doing she whacked my hand away and fought my hold on her body.
“I’m not mad you idiot! How can you not see this? Just look!”
And as if it was willed from her power alone, her alleged madness appeared right before my eyes. Vibrant shades of every color you could imagine created a celestial tie between our two souls.
Fated mates were not a mystery to me. We were told about them our entire lives.
Women flocked to me constantly prior to my exile to the Forest. Everybody wanted to be a McCalmont.
But we were also warned about how dangerous it was to find that person.
The way your soul would fight to shrivel up before it allowed you to see the loss of them.
They are the most important link to the world as you know it.
However, no one had ever talked about the colors that matched our souls and bound one to the other.
I unwrapped my arms from her body and stood from the bed, watching the colors stretch further as I walked around the room. Where I went, they went. No set beginning or end between us, it just flowed as if it was a part of nature itself.
“I don’t know what this is.” I told her honestly.
“It has to do with the kiss, doesn’t it?” she asked, and I knew that it had to. I just didn’t know what it meant.
Staring at the colors in awe, I wondered if she felt the curse lock into place too. “Did you feel anything when we kissed? ”
Her cheeks turned bright red and she averted her eyes to anywhere but mine.
“You did, didn’t you?” I panicked.
“No. It was just a kiss.” She was shying away.
I tilted my head and arched my brow. She was lying and we both knew it. No kiss like that was just a kiss.
“Fine. I had butterflies.” Her cheeks heated as she tried to cover her body with the nonexistent fabric of her slip dress. “Is your ego stroked? You’re a good kisser. But you’re an asshole for teasing me.” She hid behind her chocolate locks.
I smiled at her, she obviously didn’t feel the curse lock into place but her admission was adorable.
“Come here.” I said, rejoining her on the bed blending the colors together. I held her tight to my chest before rolling her to her back to hang over the top of her.
She was still avoiding eye contact with me so I held her chin with my thumb and pointer finger to force her to look at me.
“I had butterflies, too. I promise I wasn’t trying to tease you.” I pressed a light kiss to the corner of her mouth. Her mind might have still been upset with me but her body’s response to my touch was quite the opposite.
“Pinky promise?” She held her pinky up between us.
“Pinky promise.” I linked my pinky with hers, kissing her knuckles.
“I’d like to keep kissing you. If you’ll let me.” I pressed another featherweight kiss to the other corner of her mouth, then leaned around her to press another to the space under her ear. She quivered and slowly wrapped her arms around my neck.