Chapter 28
28
GAbrIEL
T he next morning, Evangeline, Marcus and I crammed ourselves into Marcus’s horrific truck, which I had been informed was named Floyd. Floyd had presumably once been green, but half of the chassis had been replaced, and the original pieces were mottled with rust like an autumn leaf. There seemed to be a small thyme plant growing on the dashboard. When we approached the truck, Marcus patted its door affectionately, and the interior warped and contorted until there was a narrow third seat between the driver’s seat and the passenger side.
The interior of the car smelled strongly of sweetgrass and artificial strawberry flavoring. The seats were covered with the fabric used on public buses, and one of the cupholders was full of candy. I was in the unenviable position of being the only one in a situation who recognized that anything about it was unusual. I was also in the much less comfortable position created by the middle seat. Evangeline, with her red-rimmed eyes and flat expression, seemed like she needed every scrap of comfort she could get, so I braced myself and settled awkwardly into the narrow center seat.
The truck rattled along country roads, and Marcus hummed along to the stereo. While Evangeline stared out the window at the trees rushing past, Marcus treated me to an astoundingly thorough but mercifully brief lecture about how Jethro Tull was massively underrated.
It always surprised me how abruptly Eldoria ended. The city was dense, and it felt massive while you were there, but if you went forty minutes in any direction you would wind up in the countryside amazingly quickly. There was no urban sprawl, no suburbs, no belt of strip malls and hotels. Once you left the city, you were just in the woods, like the city was a surprise the trees had decided to keep hidden from prying eyes.
Our destination was barely an hour from the manor, but it felt as though it was in a completely different world. Marcus pulled off the main road and onto a poorly maintained narrow strip of pavement that zigzagged up the side of one of the small mountains. Frost heaves had done their work on the cracked surface of the road, making it wildly bumpy. We wended our way upwards to the peak; Floyd jostling and rattling as we went.
The top of the mountain—it was too small to really deserve that title—had been cut bare some time ago, although saplings were doing their best to reclaim the territory. The charred remains of a house stood in the center of the clearing. Most of it was unrecognizable, collapsed in on itself and overgrown with opportunistic vines, but here and there were glimpses of the lives that had been here. The end of a brass curtain rod, a faded throw pillow torn open by wildlife, its filling taken away for nesting material. A chunk of wall remained stubbornly upright, trying, and failing, to shelter a pot-bellied wood stove from the elements. The rusted remains of a sedan was parked at the end of the narrow road. A little pond, ringed with smooth, round stones, had been dug into one side of the yard, a safe distance from the rust-fuzzed swing set half hidden between young trees.
Evangeline looked out of the windshield with grim intensity. I had seen that look on her before. It was the one she wore when she was focusing on clues above all else, even when she truly wanted her attention to settle elsewhere.
“I haven’t been here in a long time,” Marcus said. “After the fire, I searched, but…” He shook his head, and the muscles in his face jumped as he clenched his jaw.
“It’s definitely here,” Evangeline said. Her voice was worryingly level. “I can feel the last piece of the ascendancy array. We’re close.” She got out of the truck and slammed the door hard behind her. Marcus and I exchanged a concerned look and hurried after her. I did my best to keep some semblance of dignity as I scooted out of the truck, but I was fairly certain it was a lost cause.
I took a deep breath of the crisp forest air. There were traces of dark magic here, old and faint but still definitely present.
“The fire was magical?” Evangeline asked Marcus as they stood side by side in front of the remains of the house.
He nodded. “Either Everard’s Cinders or a modified casting of Willowbight’s Torch, based on what I could tell in the aftermath,” he said, and she let out a pleased hum like she’d just had a hunch confirmed.
“Were there any traps laid last time you were here?” Evangeline asked.
“Nothing that would trigger for either you or me,” Marcus said, “Although your angular friend over there might have a bit more trouble.”
“Gabriel, can you tell if there’s been any dark magic used here recently?” Evangeline asked me, her tone all business.
“Nothing within the past few years,” I said. “I think I can feel the remnants of the fire spell, but that’s it.”
“Must’ve been Everard’s Cinders, then,” Evangeline muttered to herself. Then she spoke again, pitched for us to hear it. “Okay. It’s kind of… loud. The magic here is all messed up. I can’t get a clean read on the fragment.”
“I was worried about that,” Marcus said. “There was a lot of light magic in the house when the spell went off. If all of those wards and charms are still trying to run themselves, even now…”
“Then they might be muffling the signal from the ascendancy array,” Evangeline said with a sigh. “Great. Just great. So, what do we do?”
“Ah,” Marcus said, rocking back on his heels. “I was hoping you would have a plan.”
Evangeline gave him a look that probably would have incinerated me on the spot. Marcus, however, seemed unbothered.
“May I ask a potentially stupid question?” I interjected.
“Best way to learn,” Marcus said grandly, while Evangeline glanced at me curiously.
“If the problem is the wards your parents left behind, and you’re the heir to their magic, could you remove the wards?” I asked.
Evangeline cocked her head to the side. “Huh.” She looked down at the pile of charred wood. “Huh.”
“That might work,” Marcus said.
“Only one way to find out,” Evangeline said.
We spent the next several hours picking through the debris, searching for anything that looked like a still-active spell. My job was lifting things the witches couldn’t manage, and Marcus and I gathered a pile of items and components that seemed like likely suspects. Then Evangeline looked them over, turning each item in her hands and staring down at it intently. She was sitting in the back of the truck, slowly and carefully removing the spells from everything we found. Some of the items were, if not simple, at least straightforward: a horseshoe that had presumably been hung above a doorway, or a shard of windowpane with runes marked into it. Some were more complicated.
One of the complicated ones was a half-burnt child’s shoe with sigils carved into the rubber sole. The protection signs cut through a pattern of small hearts and stars. Evangeline held that one for some time.
“Evangeline, if this isn’t helping, we can try something else,” I told her softly. I was leaning against the side of the truck, taking a break while Marcus found sandwiches in the glovebox. My arms were black with charcoal up to the elbows, and Marcus wasn’t faring much better. “There’s no point in making you look over all of these things for no reason.”
Evangeline leaned against me, and I brushed my sooty knuckles against hers. “No, it is helping,” she said. “I can feel the fragment more clearly now. And it’s… I dunno. It just feels right to do this, I guess. Like I’m laying them to rest.”
She seemed like she had more to say. I waited her out—a trick I’d learned from her.
“I don’t even remember them,” she said finally. “Like, I sort of hoped I’d see this place and it would all come flooding back, but it’s still…” She shook her head. “It’s like they’re strangers. But seeing all of this… I don’t know. It’s just so weird.” She picked up the tiny shoe. Underneath the soot, it had once been alarmingly pink. “They were strangers who loved me,” she said. “All of these protections, they were all to protect their family. If… if part of them, somehow, is still trying to protect me, if they’re, like, putting in effort from beyond the grave, I feel like I have a responsibility to show them that I’m okay.”
“Evangeline, I’m aware that I’m absolutely filthy, but if you’d like, I’d be more than willing to—” I began, spreading my arms awkwardly.
“Oh, my God, you dweeb. You can just hug me,” she said, but she sounded lighter than she had all day.
We hugged tightly. The side wall of the cargo bed pressed into my torso, trapped between us, but she still dropped her forehead to my shoulder with a sigh, and I felt the muscles of her shoulders relax under my touch.
“Ah, here we are!” Marcus said, popping out of the interior of the truck. “A muffuletta for the lady, and a Marmite and Swiss for me.” He started to set down the paper-wrapped bundle on the bed of the truck, then looked at the sheer quantity of charred rubble and glanced around for somewhere more suitable. “Perhaps food intended to be eaten with the hands was unwise,” he muttered.
Evangeline let out a surprised, slightly wet laugh, and pulled away.
“God, you’re so weird,” she said, watching Marcus dig a packet of wet wipes from his cargo pants.
“With age comes whimsy,” Marcus said sagely, scrubbing the soot off his hands. “And whatever doesn’t kill you makes you much odder at parties.”
We were making good progress, but the sheer quantity of work was daunting. So much of what we found seemed to still have a bit of magic to it, according to Marcus, and Evangeline could only power down the enchantments so fast. Besides, as we kept going, our work went slower and slower. Marcus and I, in an unofficial agreement, were taking turns trying to convince Evangeline to take breaks. What worried me was that she was starting to take breaks without arguing about it, which meant she must have been truly exhausted.
For every dozen minor items—enchanted hinges, a charmed boot-scraper, a magic-imbued screwdriver—there were at least one or two things that caused Evangeline to spend a while staring into the woods unseeingly. A gold ring. The spine of a journal with whatever pages that hadn’t been taken by the fire eaten away by rot. A miraculously intact handmade mug with a mark on the underside that Marcus told us identified it as Ewan’s handiwork.
By late afternoon, Evangeline had a small pile next to her of things to keep, and we were all extremely tired.
“Perhaps it’s time to call it a day,” Marcus said gently, patting Evangeline’s shoulder. She was staring at the mug, which was the same rich green as her eyes. “We can come back tomorrow. Start fresh.”
Evangeline looked like she was about to protest, but then she looked up at me and something in her eyes softened. “Yeah,” she said. “A fresh start sounds good. But if you try to get me to sleep in tomorrow, I’m kicking both of your asses.”
“That seems fair,” I said. Marcus’s eyes were on me, unnervingly assessing, but I did my best not to let it bother me. “I hope you won’t find it unnecessarily devious if I get dinner delivered.”
“I think I could live with that,” Evangeline allowed, hopping down from the bed of the truck. “I’m thinking Auntie Wong’s, but I’m gonna need the?—”
“Congee with extra chili crisp and a side of dumplings,” I said. She stared at me, her mouth still open. “What? I listen.”
Marcus laughed to himself on the other side of the truck. It might just have been my imagination, but I could have sworn that Floyd made my seat a bit larger for the drive back into the city.
Later, after watching with morbid fascination as she demolished a plate of dumplings the size of her own head, I managed to talk Evangeline into having an early night. Without talking about it, we both went to my suite. Neither of us were particularly keen to sleep alone. A few weeks ago, if I had imagined sharing a bed with Evangeline, it would have been something torrid and probably impressively athletic. The idea of spending my evenings slowly stroking her hair while we watched a documentary wouldn’t have entered my mind at all.
I was surprised by how much I liked it. Most of my relationships—if they could be called that—were either one-night stands or no-strings-attached hookups. The closest I’d gotten to this sort of simple companionship was probably with Gwendoline, which was somewhat horrifying to realize. Especially since I didn’t really trust Gwendoline enough to sleep around her.
“Okay,” Evangeline said as the credits rolled on the documentary— Love to the Point of Invention: the surprisingly romantic history of rubber gloves. “I think I’m ready to talk about stuff. Are you cool to let me, like, process out loud, or should I call Isabella?”
I stared down at the woman in my arms, slightly baffled. “I’m happy to help you process.” It came out sounding like more of a question than I had intended. “I thought that was somewhat obvious.”
“I just don’t want to, like, overstep or whatever,” she said, digging her thumbnail into a streak of soot marring her cuticle.
“You’re not,” I said gently. “I’m here for you, Evangeline. If there’s anything I can do to help, you simply have to say the word.”
“Yeah, but it’s… Ugh. Okay. Thank you.” Evangeline sighed, shaking her head a little. Her curls rustled against my chest, and I smoothed them back toward the base of her ponytail.
“I feel like I’m doing it wrong,” she admitted.
“Doing what wrong?”
“Grieving. I’ve never really… I mean, both of my parents—my adoptive parents—are still alive, and one of my grandmothers died when I was pretty young, but we weren’t, like, close or anything. I’ve never had… I’ve lost people in a way that made me go, shit, I’m really gonna miss them , but never in a way where I’ve been fucking wrecked by it if that makes sense.”
“It does,” I said softly.
“And I didn’t really…” Evangeline groaned, scrubbing a hand over her eyes. “I guess I never thought that much about my birth parents. I did when I was a kid, but it wasn’t like I was secretly longing for them to come back and sweep me away or anything. By the time I was, like, twelve, I was pretty cavalier about the whole thing. Like, if they’d decided they didn’t want me, that was their problem, because I’m fucking cool as hell. I had two great parents already; I didn’t need them.”
“You are… ‘fucking cool as hell’,” I said, making it sound as clinical as possible to make her laugh.
She huffed out a quiet chuckle. “Goddamn right,” she said. “God. I feel like I should be more messed up about this. I mean, I am kinda messed up about it, I guess, because I wouldn’t be on the verge of fucking tears if I wasn’t, but it’s just too big to fit in my head right now, I think.”
“I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way to react to something like this,” I said. “Although, admittedly, grief tends to be different for immortal beings. Sooner or later, we start trying to avoid getting too attached to people who will age and die.”
“How’s that going for you?” Evangeline asked dryly, tangling our fingers together.
I shrugged. “Well, I’ve been doing some reading, and apparently powerful witches tend not to grow old,” I said, then frowned at myself. “Because they can control their own aging, not because they die young,” I added.
Evangeline snorted. “You’re so bad at pep talks. Truly the worst.”
“And this is what I’m like after several decades of public-speaking training,” I told her. She let out a low, disbelieving whistle. “Are you worried about feeling disloyal?”
“Hm?”
“To your adoptive parents,” I said. “Do you think that letting yourself mourn your birth parents will make you feel disloyal to them?”
“Ugggghhh.” Evangeline covered her face with her free hand. “God. Yeah, I think so. They did everything they could for me. Honestly, they’re great, it’s just…” she trailed off.
“Do you think they would want you to feel guilty about it?”
Evangeline was quiet for a moment. “No,” she said finally. “No, they’d absolutely get it. They offered to help me look for my birth parents.” She untangled our hands and turned to kiss me sweetly. “You kinda pulled the pep talk back around.”
“My tutors would be so proud.” I deadpanned, and she smiled against my mouth.
I meant what I told Evangeline earlier. I would do anything I could to help her, no matter how big or small. If she needed me to, I would put my life on the line for her over and over again. Even worse, I realized, I would make my life better for her, turn it into something I truly enjoyed just so that I might have the privilege of sharing it with her.
I thought of all the moments when I’d first met her, where the smooth line of her neck or the quirk of her smile had practically made me lose my mind. Had I really been foolish enough to believe that was just lust?
I took Evangeline’s face in my hands and kissed her softly. “Grief isn’t a case you can solve, unfortunately, but if you think it would make you feel better, we can make a murder board about it.”
Evangeline laughed, her eyes scrunching up into happy crescents, and then she kissed me again. She shifted until she straddled me, and we settled back against the cushions. The kisses started out lazy and slow, but when I nipped lightly at her lower lip, she moaned and licked into my mouth in retaliation.
How had I lived without this for so long? This sweet, fond version of sex, where we pulled back at the same time to strip off our clothing and Evangeline managed a trick shot to land my T-shirt in the hamper was oddly intoxicating. When Evangeline nailed the shot, she cheered, and the bounce of her breasts hypnotized me.
I leaned forward and pressed my mouth to the pale underside of one, letting my fangs dig in just enough for her to feel it without breaking the skin, and her laughter broke into a moan. The sweet scent of her magic was dizzying. I kissed my way up to the peak of a nipple, sucking the little pink nub into my mouth and feeling it stiffen under my tongue.
When I pulled away, Evangeline was looking down at me with blown-dark eyes, playing lazily with her other nipple.
“What do you need?” I murmured, running a hand up her outer thigh to watch goosebumps spring up in my wake.
“I want you in me.” She had a hand curled around the back of my head, her fingers buried in the close-cropped hair behind my ear. I turned my head to press a kiss to the inside of her wrist, and I heard the steady thud-thud-thud of her pulse get just a little bit quicker.
I traced my hand over the top of her thigh, brushing the ridge of her hip, and carded my fingers through the neat curls between her legs. Evangeline bit her lip as I explored the velvety warmth of her, spreading her open with a gentle touch. With my free hand, I reached for the bedside table, pulling out a small but very expensive glass bottle. I took two pumps of the slick, scentless contents and spread them over the length of my cock, where it lay hard and heavy against my stomach.
“’S fine without lube,” Evangeline said. She was grinding down against my hand and looked half-drunk from just that simple touch.
“I think we can do better than ‘fine’, don’t you?” I pulled my hand away, eliciting a groan from her. She had gone delightfully pink, and I stretched up to flick the lobe of her flushed ear with my tongue. She took my cock in her hand and sank down onto me in one smooth drop, enveloping me in heat. The noises we let out came dangerously close to being in harmony.
I tangled a hand in Evangeline’s hair and held her close, kissing her deeply. We were moving in unison just as easily as we did in fights, rising and falling in sync as our tongues warred. Her tongue in my mouth, my cock in her cunt. I could hardly tell where she ended, and I began.
I surged up, flipping us over, and Evangeline murmured a soft “Fuck, yes” against the corner of my mouth, her breath fanning over my jaw. Even like this, we moved together perfectly. She ground back onto every one of my thrusts, faster and more intense as we both grew closer and closer to the edge.
“Better than fine,” Evangeline gasped, digging her nails into my back. “Definitely better than fine, fuck, Gabe, fuck! ”
I kissed her again, deep and sweet as she came. I tried to tell myself that what made me follow after her was the clench and pulse of her around me as I fucked her through it, but I knew better. The way she looked up at me was what sent me over the edge.