Chapter 14 - Zephyr
I wanted to talk to Alex and tell him everything I had felt in that pool earlier that day.
I wanted to ask him how he felt to have feelings for a non-shifter woman. As shifters, we were told what it was like to meet a mate—but that wasn’t how it had been between Adalyn and me. I hated her—I had tried to kill her and would have had Alex not stopped me in the woods that night. She couldn’t… She couldn’t be anything more than my enemy.
Sex was nothing for me. It had to remain that way.
And yet sex with her feels like everything , I thought to myself.
We were sprawled on the bed, Adalyn coveting a bowl of pasta heated up from a container in the fridge. I had begun making my way through rice drizzled with some sort of creamy spinach sauce. I looked at her, and when those dark eyes found me, I looked away.
I still didn’t know what had possessed me to kiss her after we had climaxed earlier, nor why I had let myself get lost in the kiss and not retreat from her completely.
Don’t be going soft for a witch now, Zephyr , I thought. She is a Lindell.
I looked back at her again.
Lindell witches were often blood-thirsty, vengeful women who stalked across the states in hunt of their enemies, tearing throats and hearts out. We had hunted each other across the country. I wasn’t the only shifter with revenge to settle with the Lindell coven.
“What?” Adalyn asked.
“How many witches are in your coven?” I asked her. The question took her off-guard. I watched the surprise flicker over her face before she furrowed her brows.
“Well, I’m not the matron of it, nor the leader, either, so I don’t entirely know.”
“What about an estimate?”
She shrugged, forking pasta into her mouth. A spot of sauce smeared on the side of her mouth and I wanted to lick it up.
Get a hold of yourself, Zephyr.
But everything in me was tangled and messy, wires crossing and sparking all wrong. Even now, just looking at her, I felt nervous and awkward. I had never felt like that. Fuck , I cursed myself. She’s done something to me. Spelled me or some shit.
I hoped she hadn’t.
“An estimate,” she mused, “Maybe one-hundred-fifty. We’re spread out across the state. We have the main bloodline—mine, Greta’s, etc—but then we have the witches sworn into our coven. Anyone can be a part of it if they swear loyalty and bring us the heart of anyone the Matron instructs.”
I went silent, waiting for the punchline, but she carried on eating.
“I know you rip out hearts, but… That’s literally your initiation?”
“It’s not initiation,” she snapped. “We’re not some damn college sorority.”
Ah, there she was, the sharp-tongued witch I loved to rile up. This was much safer ground
than the Adalyn, who looked at me like I had just turned her world upside down in a soft way.
“It’s loyalty,” she said. “Fealty. Honor to the blood.” She cocked her head at me.
“Surely you understand that.”
“Yes, but we don’t send our own out to retrieve a heart.”
“Neither do we,” she laughed. And the fact that her laugh rang out and I had never
made her do that before burrowed deeply in me. “I was teasing you. But we do give them
some sort of test of fealty.”
“What was yours?” I asked.
“I was different,” she answered. “I’m bloodline sworn.”
“That doesn’t always mean a lot, though, right?”
She shrugged. “I suppose not but it’s different with witches. It’s hard to fake loyalty. As you can imagine, we hold it in high regard.”
“Yeah,” I answered. “So what’s with the island, then? I know there were demons, shifters, and witches at the start, but—”
“That’s all there is.”
Her shut-down on my question took me by surprise, but not entirely. If the softness from earlier had drained between us then I had to understand that.
“But were the Lindells born here?”
“We are born everywhere,” she answered noncommittally. “Like I said, we exist in all the states. Our leaders are spread out.”
“And the Matron? Where does she stay?”
Her eyes narrowed on me suspiciously. “I’m not a fool, Zephyr.”
“I’m not trying to incite anything.”
“All you’ve done since you arrived at Azure Cove is incite arguments and fights between us.” Her voice was accusing. “Why would I trust you now?”
Hadn’t she felt that change between us earlier?
Or was that why she was acting this way?
“Fine,” I muttered. “Don’t tell me. I was only curious.”
She snorted. “Right. Yeah.” She finished off her meal. “Like, I’ll believe a shifter is only curious about a witch’s location.”
“I meant only if it tied in with the Cove.”
“Don’t call it that,” she snapped.
“Why?”
“Locals call it that. You’re not from here, Zephyr.”
“Once upon a time, I was,” I answered. “Or my bloodline was. At least we made a home here. Made it safe for other people to inhabit. We both know the demons only stole the land, too. Shifters were first.”
“Along with witches,” she warned. “Why do you hate witches so much, Zephyr?”
I stared across the bed at her. “It’s complicated.”
It isn’t , I laughed at myself. You’re just a coward.
“Is it really?”
“Yes,” I bit out. “Drop it.”
“Make me.” She bared her teeth, and I ignored her, spooning more rice into my mouth. “I cast a memory spell into the pool earlier.”
I stiffened, remembering my brother swimming for me, hunted by the redheaded witch, poised to kill. Poised to take the very life I was tied to away from me.
“I don’t see what you see,” she said. “But I thought you should know that I cast a spell for you to experience a heartbreaking memory. You were… Your words were causing me to remember some awful things from when I was younger. And I wanted to hurt you. I wanted to prove that I’m not useless.” I opened my mouth to talk, but she held up a hand. I flinched, realizing she truly had scared me earlier in the pool with that whirlpool vice. “I know, I know, I can’t exactly use these spells on demons, but I refuse to be put down by you any longer.”
I nodded. “Well… It worked. I experienced a pretty horrific thing.”
“I’m sorry.”
I shook my head. “Don’t be. If it helps, you scared me pretty bad.”
She snorted. “It’s not like you thought I’d kill you.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I did. For a minute, I did.”
Her eyes were intense as she gazed at me. “I guess we’re even.”
Silence settled around us. For once, it didn’t feel charged or angry. It just… was .
Once, I would have asked about the Matron’s location to hunt her down, but I found that I had simply asked out of curiosity earlier, and I didn’t like that. I didn’t want anything about me to change. Not for her. Not for anyone.
“Look, we have to find a way to coexist,” she said. “So can’t we just… Talk? Bond?”
“Bond?” I echoed.
“Yeah,” she said. “Bond.”
“What over?”
“Things that don’t hurt,” she said. “Just general things. Like, what’s your favorite color?”
“Black,” I answered. “Yours?”
“Green,” she said. I laughed at the absurdity of it. But anger, for once, wasn’t a driving force in my veins. There was simple happiness there. Just contentment to be .
“How did you meet Harper?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you the less painful version,” she said, wincing. “Basically, I moved from Brooklyn to the Cove. I’ve lived here since I was eighteen—”
“Not so much of a local, then,” I muttered, shooting her a smirk. She returned a glare.
“When Harper arrived, she looked lost. She looked like her world had fallen apart, and I recognized that look. She’d been standing on the boating dock, just coming over on a boat from the mainland. I went to say hi, we got chatting, and I invited her into the local diner. We had five people at our table offering her assistance within ten minutes.”
“Small town life,” I said. “Nothing like it.”
She nodded. “We got Harper on her feet here. I got her a job where I worked at the time.”
“The convenience store,” I said. “I remember seeing you there a couple times.”
“Yeah, I left over the summer,” she said. “Gramma can’t always work the Emporium as many hours she wants it open. I always helped her out but I started working there full-time recently. It’ll be mine to inherit.”
I nodded. “Pretty good store to inherit. Tourist trap, right?”
She scowled at me. “Say that again, and I’ll make sure you never have a warm shower while you’re on this island.”
I grinned. “I’ll just bring you in with me. You can be hot enough that the cold water won’t matter.”
She threw one of the cushions at me. “God, is everything just sex with you, Zephyr?”
“Yeah,” I answered.
Or at least it used to be , I thought, still unable to work out what had happened with that softer kiss earlier. I had gone from fucking her roughly to kissing her like a lifeline. Even worse was that I was afraid she had felt that desperation.
She shook her head and pushed off the bed. But I reached out and grasped her hand. She turned around, surprised.
“Yes?” she asked.
Any words left my mouth. I could only gaze up at her, speechless, unexpectedly. “Nothing.”
She paused before pulling away. “I’m heating up more pasta. Is there any word from Alex? We’ll need more supplies soon.”
“I’m waiting on an update,” I said. “Last I heard, things were still too bad to go back up.”
She was antsy as she cooked more food. “Would you like any of this?”
It would be the first meal we had shared properly. I had refused any sort of domesticity and eaten alone every time, leaving her to fix coffee and meals for herself.
“Yes,” I answered. “I could eat again.”
I made sure she saw a double meaning in my words.
“I don’t know why I’m so hungry,” she muttered. “But we need to go easy on the food if we don’t know when we can restock.”
I nodded. “I found some noodle cups in the cupboards. If we can do some fancy magic bullshit with the water, then we can cook those as a last resort.” Adalyn nodded and prepared the rest of our pasta for the evening.
When she came back to the bed, I shifted to make room for her, so we sat side by side rather than an awkward diagonal avoidance.
She’d donned a robe to cover herself with, but it shifted with her movements, exposing a thin strip of skin down her center. I found myself wanting to touch her again, unable to resist the urge to be close to her even if I didn’t understand it.
Once, I couldn’t even stand to be in a room with her.
Ask about the shifter and the witch , I told myself. Ask her what she knows about the start of their story.
But I couldn’t. It felt too close. Too similar. I couldn’t spook her now.
Instead, we ate in silence until she spoke again.
“What do you work as?” she asked.
I hesitated. “You know I’m in Alex’s special ops team, right?”
“Yeah,” she said, “But what is it you do on a daily basis?”
I frowned. “Well, when we’re not surveying dangerous movements, camping out in the mountains or deserts, or taking down shifter hunters, I train people in weaponry. Rifles, grenades, axes, knives. Anything. That’s my job. Frazer used to be our muscle guy; too much brawn and not enough close aim. It took me weeks, but I broke him in, taught him how to throw an axe into a bullseye. I was the one who even got Hec to pick up a gun for the first time. He wasn’t happy about it but knew it was necessary.”
“So, you’re a good shot?” she asked, smiling up at me.
“I never miss,” I answered, and the meaning felt deeper than just the target of a gunshot.