Chapter 31
HARPER
It’s fucking Luka Ortiz!
We’re sat on Dad’s motorbike beneath the shuddering shadows of branches, watching Luka blunder along a trail path wheeling a mountain bike.
He’s not following anything I can see, but his right hand is outstretched, groping through the air as if he’s blindfolded but reaching for something he knows is there.
My arms hugged Lachlan’s waist while we rode, but now they fall away in disgust.
‘What kind of connection do you and he have?’ I demand.
Which is when I notice the large signet ring, conspicuous upon Luka’s finger.
The twin of one I used to see on my father’s hand.
The one he told me he didn’t need anymore, even as he reassured me that Bea should never have been in danger from Luka.
That the woman who drowned in Bittershore shouldn’t have lost her life, merely had her braid sacrificed in some weird Scandinavian ritual.
I’d put two and two together then, months ago, and realised that my father had been involved in – was partly (wholly?) responsible for – Luka’s crimes.
That’s the argument Luka’s defence team are going to make, too.
Magical coercion. But seeing Luka here, drawn by that ring toward my father, makes it suddenly, horribly real.
It’s clearly a powerful enough artifact that even Luka, with his puny Gift, has been able to follow it all the way from Philadelphia to Maine – to here, a few dozen kilometers from Redhaven, the most feared and searched-for witch refuge in the country.
Luka would have been electronically tagged as a condition of bail.
That he’s not been scooped up yet can mean only one of two things: either he’s found a way around his tag, likely magically, or law enforcement are playing cat and mouse and following him to see where he runs. In which case, we’re all in danger.
‘His tag!’ I whisper to Lachlan, urgently.
‘Gone.’ My father points, and I see Luka has both his pant legs rolled to mid-calf so he can cycle.
My heart rate calms fractionally, but there are still no words for how much I don’t want Luka Ortiz anywhere near us.
‘Better take him back with us,’ my father sighs. ‘He’s not heavy-built. The bike will cope.’
‘That’s a fantastically bad idea,’ I say. It’s the most diplomatic I’m capable of being right now.
Lachlan swings off the bike and looks me in the eye. Those brilliant, pale blue eyes that mark us as father and daughter. A matching pair.
‘I owe him, Harper. I used him. I was so intent on taking down his mom I never stopped to think about the consequences for Luka – or cared much if I did. Goddess help me, I think your mom and her conscience are rubbing off on me.’
I grip the back of the pillion seat all the way back to Redhaven rather than touch any part of Luka Ortiz.
Grimly, I enjoy watching Dad struggle to explain to the Redhaven folks why he’s brought their worst enemy’s son into their midst. Those who I suspect know what he did to Luka – Tavi, Yara, Eugene and a few others – look dismayed to be confronted with this evidence of how far he’s prepared to go.
That night, I hear raised voices behind imperfectly muffled doorways.
There’s no BBQ welcome for Luka Ortiz. The room he’s shown to is securely warded from the outside by Yara. Yeah, maybe I lend a hand. I touch her shoulder and feel that flow and connection.
‘Woah,’ she says. ‘It’s only locking a kid in his room, Harper. No need to give me all your juice.’
I bite my lip. I’d barely cracked open the gates of my magical reserves. Remembering the chaos I caused with my magical surge at Stoneacre, I scold myself for still not learning my lesson. Be smaller, Harper. Weaker. You’re scaring even your own kind. And I wonder again, why am I like this?
‘It’s the son of the Witchfinder-General,’ I tell her. ‘We can’t be too careful.’
However much I want nothing to do with Luka, I find I can’t shake him.
Wherever I go at Redhaven, whether making myself useful in every aspect of the community’s life, attempting to prise away as much of my father’s time as I can, or carving out time alone to study Starcross, sooner or later he’ll appear at my shoulder.
Sometimes he’s earnest and wide-eyed, other times it’s the confident, college-boy persona with which he would have charmed Bea.
I keep my guard up, determined not to let either approach work on me.
Honestly, I’m baffled by his persistence.
‘Is this about my dad?’ I ask after a couple of days of being trailed like this. ‘Because you want his attention? If so, I’m afraid there’s a very long queue in front of you, and not even I get to jump it.’
‘Lachlan,’ he says, with a weird reverence that freaks me out. ‘But also your mom. The Fenns. You’re witches all the way back. The way people tell it, you shaped American magic during the colonial period.’
‘Not sure that’s anything to be proud of,’ I say. ‘Given how there were – still are – people and magic belonging to this land long before the first colonizer ships came.’
Luka’s hand flaps in a gesture so dismissive I can picture him at the Cawden DebateSoc, or some junior conference of his mom’s party, railing about how liberals have made Americans ashamed of their history, while his White audience nods along smugly coz a Latino boy is making the argument.
‘Lachlan is busy,’ he says. ‘I get it. My mom’s shitty new law is really stirring things up. And everyone else here has their role to play. But I feel so useless. All I ever wanted was to understand my magic better. It’s how your father got to me in the first place. Harper, could you teach me?’
There’s so much to absorb in that short speech, I have to wring my brain out – once I’ve suppressed my initial urge to hysterics at the notion I could teach anyone anything about magic. Does he really feel such resentment toward his mom? Was that reference to my dad to guilt-trip me?
Could I make use of his desire to have me teach him?
‘Let me think about it,’ I tell him, coolly. ‘But maybe?’