Chapter 2
2
HE CLEARS HIS THROAT. “What?”
I could repeat it, but that feels like a kindness, and kindness hurts. “You heard me.”
“But we haven’t. Not since...”
“You can count. Congratulations.”
I don’t tell him that I haven’t been with anyone else since then. He doesn’t need to know that. We’ve always been very good at letting each other know all the other people we’ve slept with. It’s possible we’ve even slept around at each other, enjoying witchkind’s disinterest in what I’ve heard called consensus morality .
It’s never had much to do with morality. Not for us.
It’s that there’s nothing out there that’s better than what we do to each other. The sex isn’t good. It isn’t even great. It’s world - altering .
I spent many years dedicated to the sole mission of proving that wrong, and failed.
Repeatedly.
All that aside—and I like to keep it as far aside as I can get it—it doesn’t matter how old we are or how mature we try to become. It doesn’t matter how many old wounds we’ve healed or how many worlds we saved right here in St. Cyprian in the last year.
We are bad for each other. Even when it feels way too good.
Maybe especially then.
I used to lay all the blame for that on him. But as the mature adult, successful local businesswoman, and grown-ass woman that I am, I can say now that some of it was, indeed, my fault.
Though I am less to blame than him.
His dark gray gaze moves over my body, a late-summer storm, and I could drop my glamour to prove myself. But I don’t. I want him to believe me without evidence.
I’m protecting myself and our baby, that’s all.
Because protection is the name of the game. If I hadn’t learned that when my father’s disastrous double life came to light, causing my mother to accidentally curse me, I certainly learned it when Zander decided that our senior year Beltane prom was the time to break up with me when we had promised each other we were going to be together. Forever .
“I don’t understand.” Zander sounds grim, but also confused, and I know he’s working through all the same things I did when I finally understood what my weird symptoms meant. Having cycled through all other options first. Twice. “All those years we...?”
I know he doesn’t mean the years in high school we were so hot and heavy that it’s a wonder we didn’t burn the whole town down. He means that secret we keep from everyone , and have for a decade.
Zander and I don’t spend time alone. Because we don’t get along—to put it mildly. We don’t like to breathe the same air, and no one who knows us has any doubts on this score. We make sure of it.
This is true every day of the year— except on Beltane.
Because those first few weeks after Beltane prom our senior year, our breakup was terrible, but we still couldn’t seem to keep our hands off each other. All wildfire and terrible storms day in and day out until we were both half-sick with it. Screaming at each other in high school hallways, parking lots, the middle of Main Street. Sobbing on the floor. Punching fists through walls. Nothing worked. Nothing settled us down. We could hate each other, and we often did, and still want our hands all over each other.
No matter what damage it did to both of us.
Hate is its own protection.
But it exacts its own price.
Back then, we made a compromise. Total abstinence from our destructive, all-consuming hunger throughout the year, with one cheat day. One very, very long cheat night. On Beltane we eat each other alive and don’t talk about it when the sun comes up. On the days I can’t think for wanting to punch him and fuck him, well, I know I can hold off until Beltane, when I can do both.
And do.
Back in the beginning, I figured it’d work so well we’d only need one Beltane, maybe two, to be cured. I was sure there had to be someone else out there who knew their way around an orgasm so I could move on at last.
These days I suspect we’ll never be cured.
But he’s right that we’ve had ten years of secret Beltane nights with no consequences. Until this one. The great thing about being a witch, even just half a witch, is the ability to use magic as birth control. Go figure, mine finally let me down.
“I don’t know how or why I’m pregnant. I just know that I am .”
He holds up a hand, and his gaze changes. Darkens, somehow. “May to June. To July. August. September.” He ticks off the months with his fingers. “Four months. You haven’t told me for four months.” He squints at me, still not entirely sober because he hasn’t taken even a sip of my cure for him. But that sudden, intense focus I see on his face is definitely him trying to break through my glamour. Also I can feel it.
His magic has a flavor a lot like his scent. Woodsmoke, whiskey, and the pull of the rivers all around us.
I know he’d probably break right through the glamour if he was full-on sober, but I don’t want that. So I do what it takes to protect myself. Not with magic, but with my other tools.
“You try breaking that news to someone, Zander. Oh wait, you’re a man, so of course you’ll never have to. You could have children littered all over witchdom for all you know.”
He has the nerve to roll his eyes. “Why tell me now, then?”
That gives me pause, which is less fun than poking at him. I’m all for hurting Zander in the ways I can hurt him, but I don’t want to use Zelda as a weapon. That feels like stooping too low, even for us.
But I can’t lie. And the evasions I can use to twist around my curse don’t work on him. Or anyone who knows me well enough to know what my pointed evasions mean.
“Why now?” he repeats, with that same focus, more sober by the second.
I don’t know if he suspects something or if he just knows I’m hesitating because it’s going to hurt. The problem is that we know each other too well. We know where all the wounds and scars are, because we’re the ones who hurt each other first and worst. Like too many things in my life, it’s as much a blessing as it is a curse, and right now it sucks.
“Who else knows?” he asks, changing tactics.
I brace myself against that voice , serious and dark and low . “No one drawing breath on Hecate’s madly spinning earth.” Not a lie. Spirits can’t breathe. “I was always going to tell you first.” I said it so it has to be true, but I know I have to tell him about Zelda. Because it’s the right thing to do. And I like to be salty, I won’t deny it, but not about this. “Your mother came to see me tonight.”
Zander sucks in a breath, like I’ve reached out and stabbed him with my athame instead of staying right by the closed front door with an entire room between us.
“Nice.” His gruff voice hurts to hear. His storm cloud gaze hurts to hold. “She say hi?”
He doesn’t wait for my answer. He goes for his cabinet, where we both know he stocks the alcohol he actually bothers to put away. To throw more oblivion on the problem like he’s been doing all summer.
I’ve spent the past months he’s just counted out in denial, but when I can’t hold on to that, I’ve practiced what I would say. How I would behave. It hasn’t gone to plan—shocker—but there is one thing I have always known I’d tell him. “You don’t have to be involved.”
His hand drops from the cabinet door. He skewers me with a look that is somehow both outrageously hurt and volcanic. It’s the worst I’ve ever seen from him, and that’s saying something. “Fuck you, Ellowyn.”
I don’t want to analyze why that simple statement, said almost quietly, sends a wave of panic through me rather than the typical tsunami of fury. “We know how bad we are at getting along. You think we should raise a kid together?”
I’d love to say this is why I’ve put off telling him. That I didn’t want an argument.
But I love an argument.
The real reason is that it hurts. It all hurts . Like I’m eighteen and he’s breaking up with me at Beltane prom all over again. Not before or after, like a normal person who is also a stupid boy. Actually at the prom.
Not because he thought I’d been flirting with Tony Alward in potions class (I wasn’t) or I thought he’d been staring a little too hard at Michelle Holland’s miniskirt while she pretended not to understand spellcasting (he definitely was). No, Zander was being noble . He wanted to set me free .
So I used that freedom to destroy us both in the way I knew he would hate the most.
Even ten years later, I keep waiting to look back and think, Remember how huge that felt? What babies we were.
It was never baby stuff , though, even when we were.
I’m still waiting for that freedom.
“I have a right to be in my kid’s life,” he says in that deadly quiet way that makes my stomach twist into a million knots, because quiet Zander is a dangerous thing. It’s the real him. The Guardian he always has been under all the smiles and jokes and masks.
I wish I didn’t know that.
“We’re already in each other’s lives with the coven and Emerson’s ascension bullshit,” he continues, like I’m so stupid I can’t possibly understand the things happening to both of us, all our friends, and—no big deal—the entire world thanks to the Joywood. “Our child is going to be there since you are. I’m just supposed to pretend he or she isn’t mine ?”
I am so not ready to think about what’s growing inside of me as a child . One that will be real. And here. And have to come out of me . Zander’s right. We can’t cut each other out. Even without the extenuating coven and ascension issues, we’ve never been any good at that.
“You know what?” I say to him—because a great defense is always an asshole offense. “I’m not going to get into this with you. I told you. That’s all I came to do.” I turn toward the door, horrified that tears are stinging the backs of my eyes. It’s the hormones, I assure myself. Even witches aren’t immune when growing life inside their own bodies. “When you decide to be civil, we can—”
“ Civil? You’ve got some fucking nerve.”
I do. Oh, I do . Just to show him, I fling out some magic that has every cabinet fly open. With another wave of a hand, I slam every liquor bottle in the house—and there are a lot—on the counter next to him. “Drink yourself to death. See if I care.”
Then I whirl away and open the door. A few sparks fly as he hurls out his brooding, angry magic to stop mine, slamming the door shut again. I throw mine back and the door wobbles, caught between both of us trying to impose our will on the other. Trying to win .
Welcome to us .
I dig in, exulting in the fight the way I always do with him, because I don’t have to worry if he can handle what unpredictable thing I might or might not do—I know he can take it.
The door blows open on a huge gust of magic, and I stumble back. My butt hits the floor, not hard, but not like I hit a feather pillow either.
I certainly didn’t expect to win a power battle with him. I might be angry, I might wish I had stronger powers, but at the end of the day, I am only half witch. Even when I can muster something powerful, the control is shaky at best.
Zander is a full witch from a hereditarily powerful witch family. He should win, but it still pisses me off, and I start to tell him so—
But a shadow from outside rushes toward me, and I get it then, but it’s too late—
This shadow is the source of the blast of magic that knocked me down. Zander must sense it a second or two before me, because a rush of his magic encases me before I can even throw my hands up in defense.
Ruth dive-bombs from wherever she was hiding. Storm screeches out a battle cry.
Suddenly we’re in a real fight.
I scramble back to my feet. I can move, but I feel Zander’s magic wrapping me in a kind of armor, which makes it impossible to use my own magic unless I can somehow break through his spell.
Something, it pains me to admit, I’ve never been any good at.
Zander manages to wrestle the shadow back out the door while keeping me inside. He’s acting like we haven’t fought side by side all damn year, stopping floods, facing down the Joywood, saving our friends and ourselves and everyone—well, almost everyone—we love.
Once again he’s making it clear that I’m the very odd one out in a friend group full of not just witches, but special witches. Chosen witches.
And me, the half-witch disappointment he set free ten years ago.
“Ellowyn,” he growls, his voice rough and magic igniting his dark gaze. “Stay put.”
I don’t listen. Not thinking beyond my temper, I follow him right outside, even though I can’t do anything in this stupid magic bubble Zander stuck me in. Outside it’s dark—much darker than it should be on such a clear night. The stars and the moon were out when I flew over, and it hasn’t been that long.
I don’t have a lot of time to worry about that, because the shadow is waiting right there .
It rushes at me once more, but again Zander’s magic meets it before I can do a damn thing. Sparks fly where magic battles magic, gritty and mean. The shadow surrounds him, like it’s trying to suck him in, but he fights it back. Again and again, and I can’t get his walls of protection off me to lend a hand.
So I do what I can, since he’s neutered what I can do here. I call out to our friends. Our coven, the Riverwood. We all promised—if there’s a call, no matter what or why, we all come.
The way we promised ten years ago when it was Emerson we were trying to keep safe from all the things she couldn’t remember.
It doesn’t take long tonight. The past few months have been too quiet. We know the Joywood are working against us in the lead-up to the ascension rituals that will begin soon and then end at Samhain when witchkind will pick its ruling coven. We’ve been waiting for something .
Maybe not a shadow. Maybe not tonight. But we’ve all been on edge.
Everyone appears on Zander’s porch at once. No one waits to dive in.
It’s too dark and I can’t see everything, but I can feel the bursts of magic. The deep, dark wrongness of something wanting to hurt us all and doing its best to make it so. It’s not the hideous, supposedly mythical adlets Emerson fought off back in March. It’s not the Joywood themselves we all had to fight in June. It’s just a shadow.
Yet something about the dark, slimy way it glistens, darker than the dark itself, reminds me of something—
Before I can put my finger on it, the protective bubble around me drops. The first thing I feel is the cold, when it’s still warm—or it was, earlier.
I know Zander didn’t let me go because he suddenly trusted me to fight. He dropped the walls because he doesn’t have the magic to maintain it and fight.
I don’t like that notion at all, so I wade in.
Because I might want to pound on Zander right now—and really all the time—but I’m not about to let anyone else have the pleasure.
With all seven of us fighting, the tide turns. First that nasty, sickening shadow looms large, but slowly, surely we surround it. I finally figure out what this weird black thing that isn’t fully formed reminds me of.
Back in the spring, when we first fought the Joywood. There was all that black .
The black that was in the rivers when they nearly drowned the town and most of Missouri. The black that Jacob described as being inside Zelda, the cause of the sickness that took her from us. It’s all the same, and I have no doubt the Joywood are behind it.
Litha proved that, not that we needed it proved. We already knew.
Tonight, though, I find myself wondering how much of this black is in them. If they’re made of it too.
This horrible black magic with no end.
It doesn’t matter right now because we’re still fighting. The seven of us fall into place, hemming the shadow in on all sides with the magical ring we make. We chant as we move, making it smaller—
“We call on the moon, the confluence, our connection,” we intone, while the magic we make as the Riverwood coven blazes hot and bright, shooting deep into the center of that oily dark. “Give us your might. Strengthen our fight.”
Something screams—
“Indict the dark that threatens the light,” we all shout in unison.
It’s the shadow itself, or something deep within the shadow, and it seems to recoil. It wraps in and around itself like a collapsing dark star, consuming itself from within.
There’s a sickening tearing sound, like rending flesh—
Then it shoots up and flies away from everyone—
Except it veers toward me at the last second.
Right at me.
Right at the baby, as if it knows.
I fling up a protection spell, but it claws through it. A brutal slice, and then there’s a searing pain across my abdomen—
Then it’s gone. Like it was never there.