Mara
Aaron leads us out of the cabin and down the porch steps into the grass, and the rest of the Blackwoods come down after him.
Jacob is already out here, standing in the open with Kane, Levi, Gabriel, and Micah ranged at his back, and the whole pack turns to watch us come down.
I catch Seth’s scent before I find him, tucked in close behind Jacob and peeking out around his father’s arm, curious.
I settle in at the edge of it all beside Kade.
Aaron walks into the middle of them and lifts his hand, and the light pours off his fingers in a ribbon of blue and gold. My lion presses up hard against the inside of me to watch it. He turns it over once, easy and unbothered, like he’s the only one out here who isn’t bracing for something.
“I don’t know when it happens,” he explains. “That’s the part I can’t give you. My magic pulls from any witch or warlock I touch, and I never feel it leave them.” He closes his hand and the light winks out. “But I always know when I’ve got it. And I always know where it came from.”
Angie steps off the porch with her arms folded over her apron. “How long have you known?” Her voice has gone flat and careful. “And why didn’t you say anything?”
Aaron shrugs one shoulder. “Daddy issues.”
Angie rolls her eyes.
“Don’t play with me.” She jabs a finger at him.
He grins, and then it fades into something steadier. “Ma. You’re a master of conjuring. You’ve studied the old spells. Your magic remembers things the rest of us have to read off a page.” He turns his palm up toward her. “Cast one. The oldest one you’ve got.”
Angie’s gaze cuts around the ring, to her daughters, to Jacob, to me. Then she sighs and lifts her hand.
Angie closes her eyes, and the chant rolls up out of her low and even, the words round and ancient, a tongue I’ve never once heard spoken.
Anwe na’thari. Vos Blackwood, vos vael. Anwe na’thari, ko’re.
Her fingers curl and beckon as she speaks, and where they move the air thickens. Marks bleed up out of the nothing, gold lines folding and locking one over the next like a door being built. My lion draws back, and my ears go flat.
Aaron lifts his hand and does it back to her.
He doesn’t say a word. The same marks bloom off his fingers and lock together in the air, the same door his mother just built, except his goes up faster and cleaner than hers did, like he isn’t even trying.
Angie frowns at her son.
“That’s child’s play.” Tiana flicks two fingers and both sets of marks scatter like ash on a wind. “Give us something better.”
Aaron turns to his smallest sister, and his whole face softens.
“Samara. You’ve got a gift none of the rest of them have. You give life wherever you go.”
Samara’s mouth drops open. “I didn’t think you ever paid attention to me, brother.”
“Of course I pay attention to you, Samara. You’re my favorite sister.”
Samara ducks her head with a shy smile, her cheeks warming, and behind her Tiana and Kiara roll their eyes in unison.
He nods at the grass in front of her. “Show them.”
She presses her palms together and opens them toward the ground, and the earth at her feet shudders and splits and pushes up green.
Then the flowers come. A whole ring of them blooming open around her, reds and golds and a purple so deep it’s nearly black, climbing her ankles, lifting their faces to her like she’s the sun.
The smell of them rolls warm across the cul-de-sac, sweet and growing, and for one breath my lion leans into it, soothed, the only magic out here so far that hasn’t put her on edge.
Aaron lifts his hand.
The flowers come up everywhere at once. Not a ring around one girl but a wave, tearing out of the whole clearing, climbing the porch steps, winding up the railings, rolling out from his feet until the entire cul-de-sac of House of Zorah is drowning in bloom.
He does in a single breath what his sister built petal by petal.
Samara looks around at all of it with both hands pressed to her mouth and her eyes shining, and she looks like she might cry. The happy kind.
“Little magic tricks,” Tiana mutters.
Samara whips a glare at her. Tiana just shrugs.
Aaron turns to Kiara next. “You too. Go on.”
Kiara lifts both hands, cupped, and draws them slowly apart.
The air between her palms goes wet and shining, and water pulls itself out of nothing, gathering into a long ribbon that coils and follows her hands like it’s alive.
She winds it into a serpent of clear water, head and all, and sends it gliding a lazy circle around her shoulders.
Aaron flicks his wrist.
Water roars up out of the ground in a column taller than the cabins, a twisting tower of it catching the last of the daylight and throwing it back in pieces.
It hangs over all of us, and my lion claws at me to run because there’s a wall of water about to come down on our heads.
Then it does come down, soft, falling as warm rain across the flowers and the porches and every upturned face before it’s gone.
That’s when I catch it.
Under all that wolf and worry coming off the pack, one scent runs the wrong way.
I track it to Seth, standing just behind his father with his hands shoved in his pockets, and it isn’t fear on him at all.
It’s realization. Something has clicked into place behind his eyes, and whatever it is, it’s making him happy.
Glad. Deeply, quietly glad, while the grown wolves around him stiffen with dread.
I narrow my eyes at him. Why in the world would Seth be happy his brother can do this?
Seth feels my stare land. His head comes up, catches me watching, and drops fast, his chin tucking down and away until his face is half hidden behind Gabriel’s shoulder.
Gabriel glances down at him, and across the ring Kade does the same, and the look that passes between them says exactly what my gut is already saying.
What is wrong with him?
“Okay.” Tiana steps into the middle of the ring and rolls her neck. “So you’re good. I’ll give you that.” She lifts her chin. “But I’m not impressed. Still.”
Aaron almost smiles. “Fine. Let’s do you, then.” He tips his head. “Though I don’t know what you think you’ve got left to show me. Haven’t I already shown you what I can do?”
The temperature drops.
It reaches my whiskers first, a wet, wrong cold.
I look up. The sky over House of Zorah is turning.
Clouds boil up out of a clear evening, black and low, swallowing the light.
Tiana throws her arms wide beneath them and tips her face up into the storm.
When she lowers her head, her eyes have gone white.
All the brown burned out of them, lit from somewhere inside.
Lightning cracks down.
It doesn’t hit the ground. It stops above her and curls in on itself, folding into a ball of pure white fire, and then another, and another, until a dozen of them hang spinning around her in a slow ring.
The hair lifts off my arms. My lion paces hard inside me.
My ears pin flat and my tail snaps behind me.
I don’t understand one single thing I’m looking at, and every animal instinct I have is telling me to get down in the grass.
Aaron studies her like he can see exactly where all that power is coming from.
“You’re already powerful on your own,” he says, quiet. “But this.” He takes in the spinning fire, the white eyes, the storm she pulled out of a clear sky. “Somehow you reach past yourself. You call on the ancestors.” His head tilts. “And someone else. Mother Fate, perhaps.”
Tiana throws the spheres at him.
All of them, at once, a dozen spheres of white fire tearing across the ring straight for my mate. My lion takes over. I lunge for the space between Aaron and the storm, my arms coming up, his name already ripping out of my throat—
A wall of blue-gold light snaps up in front of me. I slam into it palms-first, and it holds.
Aaron doesn’t so much as flinch. He’s got one hand out toward me, holding the shield that just caught me, the other lifted toward the fire screaming down on him.
“Keep your ass back,” he snarls.
Then he turns his head and looks at me, all that fire bearing down on him, and there’s a heat in his eyes that has nothing to do with the storm.
“You know what, Mara, you are really pissing me off here. I have told you. Time and time—“
The spheres come for him.
They don’t land. Inches from his palm they jerk to a stop, all twelve of them, snapping into a straight line in the air like they’d hit a wall I couldn’t see.
Blue-gold light unspools off his fingertips and wraps around each one, and then they’re his.
They drift up off his hand and begin to turn, slow, a ring of Tiana’s own white fire orbiting my mate while he stands there not even bothering to watch them.
My mouth’s hanging open. What in the actual fuck!
Tiana’s white eyes flare. She slashes both hands down and the fire in her own ring stretches and links and hardens, the spheres drawing out into long whips of white lightning, chains of it lashing the air. She sends them snapping across the ring at him.
Aaron throws her own spheres back at her.
They slam into her chains midair, and the two storms collide in a scream of light, and then his magic does something to hers.
It climbs up the chains, turning her own lightning against her, and the whips snap back toward the woman who made them.
They coil at her wrists, her arms, winding up toward her throat.
Tiana’s white eyes go wide. The cold certainty drops clean off her face.
For the first time, I smell real fear coming off a Blackwood, and it pours off Tiana in waves.
“Alright.” Angie’s voice cracks across the ring. “Damn it, Aaron, we get your point. Do not hurt your sister.”
Aaron lifts his free hand, almost lazy, and snaps his fingers.
It all stops.