Aaron
The magic sets me down outside the cottage, and I go straight to my knees. One look at the dead Glen, and I’m sick into the dirt, heaving until I’ve got nothing left.
Leaving her is the worst thing I’ve ever done, worse than anything Eric ever put me through. The cruelty he showed me, I never asked for. This one I walked into on my own, knowing exactly what it would do to her. I’d give the whole Glen and every drop of power in my body to take it back.
Every cell I’ve got is screaming to undo it. I could be back at that line before I finish the thought. I could tear her out of her father’s arms, carry her home, never let her go. The bond pulls so hard it’s like a hook sunk in me, dragging.
I stay down and take it without giving an inch. If I move, I lose, and her whole life goes down with me.
When my stomach finally gives up, I push to my feet and drag the back of my hand across my mouth. The Glen sits there in front of me, waiting, and I can’t make my legs carry me into it. Not yet.
So I put it off one more time and stand at the edge of it, watching the market wind down. Shifters haggling at the last open stalls, a witch hauling her cart home, two pups chasing a third through the lanterns.
None of them know the warlock at the tree line is about to trade everything he loves for a Glen full of strangers. I almost envy them.
The sun sets. The stalls close one by one, and the lanterns get carried in. Soon it’s just me, the dark, and the smell of the day’s last bread cooling behind a shuttered window.
I conjure a toothbrush and let myself into the bakery without touching the lock. I scrub the sick out of my mouth at the wash basin. Cold water over my face, dirt worked out from under my nails.
There’s half a muffin and a little bottle of milk left in the cold box. I eat and drink fast, standing up in the dark. Then I wipe down the basin, set the cold box right, and leave the place cleaner than I found it. Whoever bakes here in the morning will never know I fell apart in their kitchen.
But I’m not getting out of here clean. Someone’s waiting for me out in the dark.
Seth’s there when I come back around, rocking on his heels at the cottage door. His head comes up as I clear the corner.
“Seth.” I keep my voice even. “Go home.”
“I knew you hadn’t gone yet.” He doesn’t move. “Ma’s been looking for you all day. None of her locating spells will catch you.”
“I’m cloaked.” I stop a few feet off. “I didn’t want anybody to know the hour I left.”
“I see why you have to do it.” He won’t quite hold my eyes. “I hate it and I get it.”
“I figured you’d be glad to see the back of me.” I try to make it a joke. Neither of us laughs.
He crosses to me and grabs my arm. “I have to ask you one more time.”
I shake my head. “No. You don’t know what you’re asking me for.”
“Aaron—“
“Listen to me.” I turn and look him dead in the eye. “I know it’s hell, living split between two worlds. I do. But what you’ve got is a gift, Seth. You can’t see it yet.”
“I just want to be a wolf.”
I rub a hand down my face and look up, like Mother Fate might lean down and take this off me. She doesn’t.
“When you go,” he says, quieter now, “I’m on my own out here. You know that? Half of Wintermoon only puts up with me for your sake. Once you’re gone for good, I’m right back to scratching for a place to stand.”
“What are you talking about?” I frown at him. “People love you, Seth.”
“You’ve been so deep in your own world you never once looked up and saw how much your people needed you.” The words come apart on Seth. “And you’re leaving me too.”
“I am not leaving you.” It comes out sharp. “This is the one right thing I’ve got left in me, Seth. Don’t stand there and make it ugly.”
“Please.” His eyes fill, and he doesn’t fight it. “Please, Aaron. I’ll never bring it up again. Not once. I swear it.”
I hold the line through the argument and the guilt. The bare please is what gets me—my little brother begging for the one thing I keep telling him not to want.
There’s no help coming for either of us. So I turn back to him.
“Some lessons a man has to learn for himself,” I tell him. “Looks like this is one of yours.”
I step in close. He flinches and gives ground.
“You remember the spell I cast that stopped time?”
“Yeah.” He swallows. “What about it?”
“That power came from somewhere. My magic pulls from the witches and warlocks around me, learns from them, grows.” He just frowns at me.
“That spell came out of you, Seth. The power to bend time and space is sitting right there in your blood. You’ve never once touched it. You won’t even pick your own magic up.”
“You’re just saying that.” He shakes his head, fast. “You’re trying to talk me out of it. I don’t want it, Aaron.”
“Okay, brother.” I take hold of his arm. “Okay. But you’re going to stand here and listen to my lecture while I do it. Understand?”
He nods. My magic reaches into him. He smiles, feeling his own gift come loose and pour into me, like I’m lifting a weight off his back he’s carried his whole life.
“This is only for a time,” I tell him. “I’m not keeping it. I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t. Mother Fate put this in you for something. One day you’ll reach for it again, and it’ll come home to you.”
“I just want to be a wolf,” he says. The fight’s gone out of him.
A portal tears open beside us in a spray of blue and gold sparks, and my mother comes through it at a dead run with Jacob a step behind her.
“What the fuck are you doing—stop!” She lunges. Jacob’s arm hooks across her middle and hauls her back. She fights him, twisting, clawing at his hold. “Get off me, do you understand what he’s doing? Aaron. Aaron, stop. Stop it!”
Seth’s eyes go past me to her, and he sags. “I’m sorry, Ma.”
The magic runs steady between us, and Seth’s knees buckle. I go down with him without breaking contact. I take every drop, drawing his power out in a long bright thread, until all that’s left in him is the wolf he always wanted to be.
“Now you’ve got Ma furious with me,” Seth manages, grinning. “Hope you’re happy.” He throws his head back and yells.
My mother rips free of Jacob. Her hands come up, the first syllables of a stopping spell already on her lips. Jacob catches her arm again and turns her to face him.
“You put a spell on either one of them,” he says, quiet, “and you put it on me. They are both my sons, Angie. Both of them.”
“Goddamn you, Jacob.” She shoves at him with both hands. He doesn’t budge, and her voice gives out. “Goddamn you.”
The last of it leaves Seth and settles into me, warm and strange, humming with a power I have no right to. I let go of his arm. He pitches forward and barely catches himself on his hands.
My mother’s on me before I’m fully standing. She gets right up in my face, her eyes wet and furious, and shoves me hard in the chest. “Put it back. You put it back right now. Give it back to him.”
“I can’t, Ma.” I don’t lift a hand against her. I take it. “It doesn’t work that way. It has to come from him when it’s time.”
Jacob crouches, gets an arm under Seth, and brings him to his feet. Seth sways into him, wrung out.
“Ma, stop,” Seth slurs against Jacob’s shoulder. “I don’t want it. I don’t... want it.” His eyes roll back, and Jacob scoops him up into his arms.
I look at Jacob over my mother’s shoulder. “He’ll sleep a day, maybe two, and then he’s fine. I promise.”
Jacob looks at me, and there’s no anger in it. There’s grief, and there’s an understanding I didn’t earn, the look of a man who’s loved children that came to him broken and never once asked them to be anything else.
He gives me a single nod. Then he turns, my brother cradled against him, and carries him toward the portal. My mother stays where she is, looking from Seth’s slack face to mine.
“You selfish boy.” Her voice is barely there. “Why would you do this to me?”
“I can feel it, Ma. Seth needs this road. It’s only for a time, and his magic comes back to him. I’d swear it on anything. You just have to trust me one more time.”
She shoves me once more, weaker than the first. She turns and runs for the portal, both hands over her face. Then she’s through it and gone, the light folding shut behind her.
It’s just me at the edge of the Glen, holding magic that was never mine to keep.
I wipe the wet from my face and turn for the cottage, and I don’t make it two steps.
Amir stands between me and the door, his hands clasped behind his back. Those golden eyes find me.
“That was noble,” he says. “Handing your brother the very thing he begged for. There is a particular cruelty in giving a man exactly that.” He tilts his head.
“Sometimes it is the only way to teach him it was never what he needed. You let him hold it, feel its weight, and find out what he was really reaching for.”
“So you came to stop me too. Get in line. It’s a long one.”
“I would never stop you.” He takes his time crossing to me. “I will only say that I am disappointed, and I will not pretend otherwise. You have chosen to be a warden of corpses over the king of Wintermoon. Do you have any idea, Aaron, what you hold in your hands? What you would squander?”
“I’m done answering your questions. My turn to ask a few. Why do you want this throne off your hands so badly? Why would you burn the whole Witching Glen down just to back one warlock into doing what you want? Your three days were never a deadline. They were a leash.”
He grins at me and says nothing.
“You believe you can change them,” he says. “It is a noble thought. It is also a child’s thought.”