Interlude
Kingston
The house was cold again with his apprentice gone.
They’d lived together for over a hundred years, and sometimes he still turned the corner expecting to see him reading in a chaise as he had for so long.
It should have never worked as it did even with Graves leaving to venture around the rest of the world as it opened to them. But it did.
He’d built his home in New York City, and he’d had many apprentices over the years. But Kierse was different, and it seemed everyone knew. The engagement farce hardly seemed like much of a joke to him. If he said it to Aveline and Estelle, it had to be only a matter of time.
“Are they gone?” Andrew asked, stepping out of the drawing room. He was shirtless with a painting smock tied around his waist. Paint colors spattered the fabric and his chest and under his fingernails. The only thing more exquisite than his paintings was his body.
“Yes, they just left.”
“I would have liked to be introduced.”
“Next time,” Kingston said. Though they both knew it was a lie.
Andrew was his. And only his. The rest of the world didn’t exist when they were together.
“Come see what I’ve been working on.”
Kingston waved him off as he thought about the first time he’d met Graves.
He’d always told him it was when he’d found him in London in the early 1500s with his stomach split open on the steps of a now-destroyed inn.
He’d seen Graves’s magic then and figured he was a lost cause.
He’d left him there to die, and only a few weeks later, he was healed and running the place.
But the real first time had been before that.
He’d never said that the first time Graves had only been seventeen, trying to book passage to Ireland.
Kingston had seen Graves’s magic on the dock that day.
He’d known that he was a warlock immediately.
A gangly, furious youth that had more bitterness in his fingernail than anyone Kingston had ever met.
He should have started training him then.
Instead, he’d paid for Graves’s way to Ireland. And when he’d returned with his magic under control, the Druids behind him, and his fury tempered into something usable, then Kingston had taken him in.
Graves would likely never forgive that even if he understood. Sometimes, he still saw that seventeen-year-old with a wave of magic embittered by anger and abuse. He could have molded that. Should have. Maybe they’d be in a different place if he had.
His phone jangled in his pocket, and he cursed, pulling himself from his memory.
He hated the new technology that always resided on his person.
Long gone were the days when a butler would answer and screen all calls so he would only have to respond at his discretion.
Even longer since he sent love letters in a careful calligraphy.
A well-thought-out letter was better than phone call or text, or god forbid an email.
There was not always something better for efficiency.
Still he answered. “Yes?”
“I looked into anything suspicious in Edinburgh for you,” the man on the other line said.
“And?”
“Archie Blair is dead.”
Kingston sat down at the news. Archie was a fine warlock. A very fine warlock. He had such a unique ability. They’d argued for years over the Scottish independence movement. But they had agreed, as much as they hated each other. He considered him a peer.
“How?”
“Unsure, sir. It’s the talk of the town. I checked over his home, and it looks like a fight went wrong. As if someone breeched one of his conjuring circles.”
“Impossible. What could do such a thing?”
“I thought maybe he conjured something too big for him, but…”
“But what?”
“There was no body, sir.”
Kingston frowned, and Andrew came to his side and played with his hair. “Was it…eaten?”
It wasn’t the first time an evocationist had been taken over by one of his own summoned creatures, but he’d thought Archie was beyond that.
“No. No blood. But I found DNA samples from four other people in the residence.”
“Let me guess. Graves and Kierse.”
“Yes. Both of them matched up. One was Walter Rodriguez.”
“Hmm. He’s an old apprentice of Graves’s. They’re working together again. And the last?”
“Lorcan Flynn.”
Kingston nearly dropped the phone. Now that was the surprise of all surprises. Lorcan and Graves had hated each other for hundreds of years. This Oak and Holly King business had been messing up Graves’s life for nearly as long.
“Was anything taken of note?”
“Not that I could find.”
“Anything else?”
“Well, I found the body, sir. It was in a grave six feet under thirty minutes out of town.”
“They buried him?” Kingston asked uncertainly as he put the pieces together. “How did he die?”
“As far as I can tell, his magic was drained.” He was silent a beat. “But I don’t know what could do that.”
Kingston did.
Kingston knew all too well what could drain the magic of a warlock and then kill them. And they were supposed to all be dead.
“Sir?”
“Bring the body here,” he said. “I’ll deal with it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Kingston hung up and looked at Andrew. His golden locks fell forward into his face, and there was a furrow between his brows.
“Everything okay?”
“I’m not sure.”
He pushed away from the man and went to the museum room.
Andrew followed him at a distance, but he was lost to the artwork as his mind raced ahead.
As far as he knew, only a Fae could drain the magic of a warlock.
A will-o’-the-wisp was particularly adept at doing so.
And they were all dead. No one who could kill him.
But there were too many pieces he didn’t understand. Graves had never shown much interest in anyone. Not since his precious Emilie.
Then Kierse appeared. This magic creature who had changed his world. He had kept his tabs on them, as he always did with a new warlock on the scene. Lorcan was obsessed with her. It was likely he who had been following her that day she managed to portal alone.
Why would a Druid be obsessed with a warlock girl? A wren, no less? He was the Oak King. He had his robin. Kierse should have been of no significance except that Graves was interested in her. That was what he had concluded last year.
But now?
He was not knowledge personified like Graves, but he could put the pieces together all the same once they were laid out.
Kierse had the same power as him.
But also the same power as a wisp.
Portaling was a wisp ability. Immunity wasn’t…but absorption could look the same.
Had Graves brought a wisp into his house and asked him to train something that could kill him? That had to be beyond him. Didn’t it?
“Darling?” Andrew asked gently.
“She’s a wisp.”
“Aren’t wisps supposed to be dead?”
“Yes,” he said, low and dangerous.
“What are you going to do about it?”
“Correct a mistake.”