Chapter Fourteen #2
And then there was Taliesin and this bargain between them.
Ostensibly she’d entered it to get her office back, to get her life back on track, but she had a sinking feeling every time she felt the strange pull between them that she had, instead, veered farther off course.
She looked over her shoulder, trying to catch a glimpse of Taliesin, and found him already watching her, his gaze sharp and searching.
What had he seen pass across her features? She snapped the jewelry box shut.
“Thanks, Nat,” Maggie said as they packaged the box in a gift bag.
After Nat handed her the bag, she wanted to vanish, to escape out the door and return to the street, lest Nat think she was waiting for Taliesin as they rang up the trains he’d bought for his nephew. Instead, she busied herself with scratching Mustard’s ears until the creature purred.
“We’ll let you get back to studying,” she heard him say. It was so easy for him to say we so casually. As if he didn’t care whether Nat did gossip about them. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe it never occurred to him what could happen if people thought they were together. “Good luck on your exams!”
When they were outside, Maggie looked back through the shop window, but Nat had already returned to their textbook, wholly uninterested in what Maggie and Taliesin were doing out in Galloway on a Thursday night.
“I got you something,” Taliesin said, interrupting her thoughts, his hand outstretched toward her.
She frowned but took the cellophane-wrapped candy from Taliesin’s palm. Before she unwrapped it, she glanced up at him. “I thought you might like it,” he explained, though she hadn’t asked.
She unwrapped the sweet and plopped it in her mouth.
A sugary floral burst of honeysuckle bloomed on her tongue.
She had never tasted this flavor of Glinda’s, but something tugged on her memory, though she couldn’t quite place it.
She didn’t understand how this man could infuriate her one moment and charm her the next.
It was confusing, and she was sure her confusion was plain on her face.
“Where next?” Taliesin asked, casting a nervous glance at the sky.
“Willoughby’s. They ordered in a rare edition of Branagh’s Aubade for me.”
They walked side by side, their bags knocking into each other occasionally, but they were quiet, both lost in their own thoughts.
Though they were the only ones on the street, music still poured out of Rodrigo’s, where Thursday Open Mic Night was apparently still on.
An off-key serenade echoed against the old brick buildings, when suddenly Taliesin tensed and, without warning, reached his hand out to stop Maggie from walking on.
He peered into the darkness of the alley between buildings and said, in a hush, “What was that?”
Maggie looked down at where his hand grazed her stomach.
“I didn’t hear—” But then Maggie did hear it.
It was somewhere beneath the music coming from Rodrigo’s, something guttural and deep.
A hum that didn’t quite sound like it came from earthside.
Maggie was sure that if the air didn’t already carry an unseasonable chill from the pall, they would have felt the presence—whatever it was—like a breeze slipping from the alleyway’s darkness.
Maggie’s heartbeat sped up, and sweat broke out on her brow as she remembered the ghoul, with its horrible teeth and spiderweb hair, its mindless hunt.
The hollow look in its eyes as she banished it to wherever it came from.
It was instinct that made her reach out her hand and grab Taliesin’s arm, the one that was already shielding her from whatever was in the alley.
It must have been instinct, for him, too, that made him step in front of her.
It all happened so quickly, their movement toward each other as easy as breathing.
She waited for a ghoul to drag itself out of the alley, for a banshee to swoop down from one of the building’s eves and screech into the night, but all she saw was a wispy shadow. Her pulse calmed.
“It’s just a wraith,” Taliesin confirmed, his shoulder sagging.
The wraith was otherworldly, slow and fast all at once, appearing to jump from shadow to shadow without moving between them.
Sometimes there was the suggestion of the human it might have been—the curve of a shoulder, the nod of a head—but mostly it was incorporeal and indistinct, fuzzy-edged. Maggie shuddered.
Wraiths were the least dangerous of the fantasmia.
They couldn’t grab or bite or poison. They didn’t possess ethereal screams that could maim.
The worst a wraith could do was drop the temperature in a room a few degrees or run through a person, leaving them shivering and maybe a little frostbitten.
Near a fountain of energy like a pall, they often took on more human shapes.
They were the source of most childhood ghost stories, of tall slender men standing at the foots of beds or lonely women sweeping down hallways, but they were relatively harmless.
Wraiths were something of a mystery. No one knew if they were human souls or something else meant to mimic human shapes, and that uncertainty had always made Maggie uncomfortable and more than a little existential.
“I’d rather a wraith than a ghoul or a banshee,” Taliesin said. “But maybe we should cross the street.”
“Sure,” Maggie said, staring down into the alley as the wraith seemed to watch where they stood on the corner.
Taliesin cleared his throat, and Maggie pulled her eyes away from the wraith. He glanced down at his arm where she was still holding him tight. Heat spread up from her neck, and she released him, sure he’d have pinprick indents where her nails had dug in.
“Sorry,” she mumbled.
“Don’t be.” He said it quickly and so quietly that she wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly.
They left the wraith behind them. When they reached Willoughby’s, halfway down the block, both of them turned to see the wraith still following them.
It slinked alongside the brick of the buildings, sticking to the shadows.
When Taliesin reached behind him and opened Willoughby’s door, the wraith vanished, returning to the shadows it had come from.
Maggie was unsettled by the wraith, by the way it seemed to stalk them down the street.
Maybe Taliesin was right and walking downtown had been a bad idea after all, but if nothing else, Maggie was a stubborn creature.
Together, they walked into the inviting warmth and bright light of Willoughby’s Books.