Lunaria
SEVEN
She learned that Avine’s magic was from the sea: water, tides, life under the water.
That Cassia’s storm magic was directly tied to her emotions, which explained why lightning occasionally flickered outside the windows when the conversation got heated.
That Narla’s truth-revealing candles had caused more romantic chaos in Haven Shores than anyone had anticipated.
“Five couples in two years,” Dahlia said from Paris, her bear having finally given up all pretense and settled behind her with a possessive arm around her shoulders. “The mating surge has been intense here.”
“And everyone thinks it’s not done yet,” Junie added. “Aero—Cassia’s mate—has been researching it. He thinks the surge is building toward a climax.”
“You’re thinking too hard.” Narla had moved from the window seat to the couch, settling beside Lunaria with the careful ease of someone who knew how to approach skittish creatures. “I can see it. Whatever’s sitting heavy on you.”
“Just processing. It’s a lot—new town, new project, new people.”
“Do you read charts?” Cassia’s question cut through the moment. “Star charts, I mean. For other people?”
Lunaria hesitated. “Sometimes.”
“Do mine.” It wasn’t a request. Cassia’s intensity was back in full force, storm energy crackling beneath her skin. “I want to know what you see.”
“Cassia—” Avine started.
“It’s fine.” Lunaria set down her wine glass. The familiar tug of her magic answered the call, ready to reach for the stars. “I’ll need your birth date and time, if you know it.”
Cassia rattled off the information. Lunaria closed her eyes, let her consciousness expand, felt the celestial patterns align.
Cassia’s chart blazed into view—dramatic and stormy, just as she’d expected. Lines of fate that crackled with electricity, crossed and recrossed by another presence—Aero, unmistakably, his ancient dragon energy wound so thoroughly through her destiny that separating them would be unthinkable.
“You’re intense,” Lunaria said, opening her eyes. “Your chart looks like a thunderstorm. But it’s anchored—stabilized by someone much older. The dragon, I assume.”
Cassia’s smile held a softness at odds with her electric energy. “That’s Aero. Eight hundred years of calm to balance my chaos.”
“Do me!” Junie bounced on her seat cushion.
“I already know yours.” Lunaria couldn’t help the smile. “You’re chaos personified. Your chart looks like someone threw glitter at a star map and called it destiny. But there’s a steady point in the center—Leo, grounding you. Without him, you’d probably have set vital information on fire by now.”
“Rude. Accurate, but rude.”
“You’re good at this,” Avine said when Lunaria finished. “Really good. Have you always been able to see so clearly?”
“Since I was sixteen.” Lunaria didn’t elaborate. Didn’t explain what that clarity had cost her, what she’d been forced to see.
“Do Hux.”
The room went still. Junie’s request hung in the air, seemingly casual but loaded with meaning Lunaria couldn’t identify.
“He’s not—” She started to refuse.
“Please?” Junie’s expression had shifted from teasing to concern. “He’s been weird lately. More closed off than usual, which says a lot. Leo’s worried about him.”
“I don’t have his birth information.”
“March 15th, thirty-eight years ago, 2:47 AM.” Narla’s voice was quiet. “Wyatt looked it up once. Law enforcement records.”
No escape route. No graceful way to decline without explaining why she didn’t want to look at the chart of a man she’d met exactly once and couldn’t stop thinking about.
Against her better judgment, Lunaria reached for the stars.
Hux’s chart formed in her mind’s eye. She saw the structure first—the rigid lines of a life built on duty, on control, on expectations inherited from generations of capable men. The lion energy pulsed beneath it all, surprisingly strong, surprisingly contained, a weight pressing it down.
And then she saw his fate line.
She went still.
It wasn’t empty. She’d expected empty—a void, an absence, matching the void she’d sensed in him during their brief meeting.
It was overshadowed.
A massive darkness sat directly on his destiny, blocking it from view.
Darkness that wasn’t absence but presence—deliberate, imposed, feeding on the light that should have been there.
His capacity for a fated bond, for the love that had transformed every other chart she’d read tonight, was being smothered by a darkness that had no business existing.
This wasn’t natural. This wasn’t chance or bad luck or cosmic indifference.
Someone had done this to him.
“Luna?” Junie’s voice came from far away. “You okay?”
Lunaria yanked herself out of the reading. Her hands were shaking. She gripped her wine glass to hide it, took a long swallow to buy time.
“Fine.” She forced her voice steady. “Just tired. Long day.”
“What did you see?” Cassia leaned forward, that crackling intensity focused entirely on Lunaria now. “You went white. What’s in his chart?”
“Control issues,” Lunaria said, which wasn’t a lie. “Very structured. Very rigid. The lion is suppressed—he doesn’t let it out much, does he?”
“No,” Avine confirmed quietly. “He’s never been like that. Even as a child, from what I understand. Very contained.”
“That’s all?” Junie pressed. “Nothing about why he’s been acting strange? Nothing about—”
“That’s all.” Lunaria met her cousin’s gaze evenly. “Charts aren’t magic eight balls. They show patterns, not explanations.”
It was a lie. A necessary one. Because what she’d seen in Hux’s chart wasn’t truths she could explain to a room full of people she’d just met. Wasn’t truths she fully understood herself.
Lunaria made her excuses an hour later. The readings had exhausted her—she said so, and it was true enough to be believed. Junie offered to walk her home, but she declined. She needed the night air. Needed the silence. Needed time to think.
Haven Shores was quiet at this hour, the streets deserted except for the occasional supernatural going about their nocturnal business. A wolf shifter nodded to her as he passed. A group of younger witches giggled their way out of a bar. The harbor lights reflected off still water.
She walked toward the gardens without consciously deciding to. The path was becoming familiar—the turn at the old oak, the stretch of coastline where the forest met the cliffs, the overgrown drive that led to her cottage.
The garden gates stood open. She’d left them that way this morning, and they’d stayed put. A small victory, or perhaps just the gardens conserving their energy for a greater purpose.
She didn’t go inside. Instead, she sat on the low wall beside the gates and looked up at the sky.
The stars burned brightly tonight. The ley lines beneath Haven Shores amplified celestial visibility, making the patterns clearer than they had any right to be. She found Hux’s constellation easily—March born, the fish, the dreamer, the one who felt everything too deeply and showed nothing at all.
And there, exactly where she’d seen it in the reading, the darkness sat heavy on his fate.
Who did this to you? And why?
She shouldn’t care. He was the annoying mayor with the clipboard and the forms. In a few months, she’d be gone, and he’d be nothing but a memory.
But she thought about the flash of understanding in his eyes when she’d asked if it had to be him. The way he’d admitted to reading the forms three times, control being all he had left. The hollowness she’d sensed beneath the polished exterior—not emptiness by choice, but emptiness by design.
“I know,” she said aloud. “I shouldn’t get involved.”
Lunaria stood, brushing dirt from her clothes, and made her way to the cottage.
She would find out what was blocking his fate. Not because she cared—she didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t let herself—but because the mystery was there, and she had never been good at leaving mysteries unsolved.
That was all.
Two mysteries now. The gardens and their murdered witch. The mayor and his stolen fate.
She suspected they were tangled up in each other. The timing couldn’t be coincidence.
Sleep, when it finally came, was full of amber eyes and falling stars and a lion that roared in the darkness, calling for something it had been denied.