Chapter 34
She was barely conscious of her sprint across the lawn. One moment she had caught sight of him, and the next she was leaping, and he was laughing and spinning her—the billowing lengths of her skirts floating around them like the unfurled petals of a flower.
Stephan lowered her to the ground, but she stayed with her arms wrapped around him, soaking in the feeling of belonging she had been missing here in this place that was supposed to be her home.
“You came.”
“I did,” he breathed. “And I didn’t come alone. Rowan’s here too.”
“Rowan came with you?”
He nodded, and Hayleigh’s heart skipped a beat. With Midwinter magic involved, her plan felt less like a Hail Mary and more like the inevitable conclusion of everything that had come before.
“There was this big-ass raven outside my window, squawking all morning, and then I felt like I heard you calling my name. Like maybe you needed me. I know you didn’t want me here—”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I mean, yes, I didn’t, because I wasn’t ready for what that meant.
But…” She breathed in deeply. “I am now. I was wrong. Thinking I could play their games again was wrong. I should have known. I think I knew, but I was just…afraid. But I’m ready now. I deserve better.”
“Fuck yes, you do,” he whispered, holding her tighter.
“It was never about you, though. Never. I was ashamed. My dad, Stephan, my dad was involved in what happened in Eucharist. He was involved in switching out the soil samples, and I…I helped it happen. I didn’t know exactly, but I suspected something was off and talked myself out of it.
I wasn’t ready to tell you. God, I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to stop apologizing for making you feel like you weren’t enough. ”
His eyes were warm as they drank her in, and he cupped her face, tilting her chin up. “I was feeling like I wasn’t enough long before you came around. It was only because you started making me feel like maybe I was that the whole thing knocked me on my ass so hard.”
She ran a hand down his face, tracing the lines of his cheekbones and then letting the short hairs of his beard catch beneath her nails. “You are. Enough and more. And I don’t want to do any more of this without you.”
“Good, because I didn’t plan to let you.”
And then he trapped her in a kiss. A kiss that was both fierce and forgiving.
Rowan was waiting out front when they finally rounded the house and started moving the moment she’d spotted them. They met in the middle, forming a knot in the colorful lights lining the Gray mansion overhead.
“Thank you for coming,” said Hayleigh, her voice catching in her throat in an unexpected lurch of emotion. The ground firmed beneath her feet, and for the first time in days, she felt like she could breathe all the way in.
Rowan smiled a bit shyly. “There were plenty of people to cover at the festival. This is important. Do we have a plan yet?”
Suddenly, from the woods there came a rustling of wings, a pounding of hooves, and the tripping of mischievous giggles.
She wasn’t the only one aware of it this time.
They all turned to see the Wild Hunt bearing down from the woods.
At their head walked an old woman, head wrapped up tightly in a red cloth, and the icy winter came with her, spraying across their surroundings and leaving everything stiff with frost.
“Well, to start with,” said Hayleigh, “them.”
The Gray mansion descended into chaos. Krampus chased down Colt’s stockbroker, shaking a bundle of birch branches; Pastor Gary scrambled by as an enormous black Yule cat did its best to shred his pant legs; and a group of kallikantzaros rode atop the shoulders of the women from Luda’s tennis club, the little goblins furiously snipping away at their ornate wigs with tiny silver scissors.
A group from Gray Industrial Services huddled together in a corner, seemingly unwilling to pass by a tall skeletal horse, the Mari Lewd, which had its head thrust into the punch bowl and was drinking furiously. The liquid flowed straight out of its body and splattered to the floor below.
She’d sent Kelsey a text message to warn her of what was coming, and her sister looked completely unfazed as she chatted with a spectral woman dressed in a silvery-white gown bound with a red sash. A crown of holly ringed with burning candles sat on her head.
“Okay, but how do you keep your skin looking like that?” asked Kelsey.
“Nothing that would work for a mortal such as yourself,” said the woman with an enchanting smile.
There were others whom the visitors left unmolested. The Wild Hunt only harassed those with karmic debts to pay, and everyone else was free to go—which they did, shrieking into the night, because the sudden appearance of things that should not be was frightening even if you were not their targets.
“Hayleigh!” a familiar voice shrieked. She looked over to see Jack Bree surrounded by a cloud of tiny white flying figures who pointed at him and giggled as tiny patches of frost erupted to stiffen his already too-tight Balmain jeans. “Help me!”
“Mmm,” said Hayleigh, “sorry, Jack, pretty sure I couldn’t handle the pressure.”
She left him swatting and scrambling with a grin as she headed toward her father’s office at the back of the house. Getting there meant passing row after row of plaques commending her father on business accomplishments and on his generous efforts in the community.
It was her mother who had spearheaded those efforts, but Luda’s name wasn’t on the plaques.
The same way it wasn’t on the deeds, or the accounts.
She had traded it all for the promise of Colt’s security.
Seeing it now felt like a whisper of a Christmas Future.
One Hayleigh was now on a path away from, but the possibility haunted her all the same.
Hayleigh reached out to the doorknob, hoping the domovoy had done as she asked.
Her father would’ve locked it for the party, but with any luck, the house spirit had opened it from the inside.
She turned the knob, and it swung open to reveal the richly furnished, lustrous wood room where her father conducted most of his business—it had been years since he regularly went in to an office.
The domovoy melted from the walls, hands clasped beneath the drooping mustache at his front. Somehow, the spirit had already fattened a bit, her offerings improving his condition. “This is good?”
“This is good,” she said, and then with a nod, “Thank you.” She deposited more treats on the table, and the domovoy’s eyes brightened as he dove into them, rolling around in sugar and flour and butter as he scarfed it all down.
Her father was not a stupid man. He wouldn’t keep anything incriminating out where just anyone could find it. It would be in the safe, which he had hidden behind a false cabinet.
How to get it open?
She glanced at the domovoy. “You don’t happen to know what he used to punch in here, do you?”
The little man stared at her blankly. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy.
After firing off a text, she paced and waited. A few minutes later, the door pushed open and Stephan slid inside, Rowan at his heels.
“I don’t suppose either of you has A Spell to Break a Lock or something like that?”
“Not something as secure as a safe,” said Stephan, “but if you ever lock yourself out of the house…”
“Any other creative ideas on how we might get in, then?”
Rowan looked thoughtful. Finally, she said, “Have you ever seen him open it?”
“I have, but I’ve never gotten a good look at the code.”
The white-haired witch didn’t look discouraged.
“I can give you an echo of the memory. It’ll be like you’re reexperiencing it.
” Her eyes darted around the room with excitement.
“Since you’re where the memory actually took place, it should be even clearer than it would be otherwise.
I used to cast it all the time to replay things teachers said in class when I’d been spacing out, so it’s second nature at this point. ”
Hayleigh gave her a long, considering look. “It sounds like it’s worth considering. So long as it lasts long enough for me to see the whole thing.”
“Oh, for sure,” said Rowan, waving off the concern. “If it was good enough for AP Physics, it’ll be good enough for this.”
“Hold on a sec.” Stephan stepped in close to stare down at Hayleigh. “You’re sure you’re okay with Rowan casting a spell on you?” His gaze stripped her of all pretenses, uncovering the discomfort she tried to push aside.
“I…” She tried to say yes, because it needed to be okay if it would help her do this, but she couldn’t. Because it wasn’t.
The idea of Rowan’s magic wrapping its way around her brought her back to last year, to the disorienting feeling that something had been taken from her.
And of the shame that followed when the spell’s effects made her look like a fool in front of the people whose respect she’d worked so hard to earn.
Only she’d never gotten it, had she? If they’d respected her, they’d have understood that what happened was a blip and would have valued the track record she’d maintained up to that point.
But they had not valued her, and she had been given no grace.
In the boys’ club of Goshen, there was only room for women as mascots, never equals, and you could only stay a mascot so long as yours was the flawless face they wanted representing them.
As soon as it hadn’t been, she’d had no value, and the monster whose jaws she had avoided by agreeing to feed it had, in the end, devoured her too.
Rowan’s spell hadn’t taken anything from her. It had only revealed what she had been trained not to see. What she hadn’t wanted to see.
Hands appeared at her front—palms lined with a unique, intricate pattern of creases. She realized they were Rowan’s, and the witch was offering peace hands. After a moment, she stretched hers out to meet them, and the white-haired witch gazed her way, hazel eyes heavy with apologies.
“When I told you I was sorry last year for what happened with the spell,” said Rowan, “I really did mean it.”
Hayleigh inhaled sharply, remembering that final morning on the sidewalk New Year’s Eve, the first time Rowan had extended a hand in peace, but Hayleigh had batted it away.
“I believe you,” she said, finally. “And I also understand why you did what you did. We both wanted what only one of us could have. You felt threatened. Things are different this time. We’re on the same side. I know it’ll be okay.”
“It will be,” said Rowan in a low voice, squeezing Hayleigh’s hands. They both looked at Stephan, and his look of concern gave way, and they took hands to form a circle.
Magic flowed around the pair of Midwinter witches differently. Rowan’s smelled like spring and moved in dozens of tiny lines that constantly spiraled and bounced, like a playful zephyr, while Stephan’s stretched from the ground below to envelop their bodies in a way she had started growing used to.
In the end, both gathered in a swirling mass around Rowan, who reached out to tap her fingertips to Hayleigh’s temples.
“Past to present, let me see,
All that once used to be.
By the power of three by three,
As I do will it, so mote it be.”
Hayleigh tumbled straight into her past.