Chapter 3
3
“WHAT WAS THAT ?” Rebekah demands immediately, sounding particularly outraged as she stares at the place where the shadow disappeared.
This is partially because my best friend is also our coven’s Diviner, and she takes it personally when surprised by things she feels she should have foretold.
Nicholas Frost, her outrageously powerful boyfriend—if that’s what you call a formerly immortal witch—shakes his head as he stands beside her. He’s bleeding from the corner of his lip a little, but that’s the only indication that he sacrificed his immortality for Rebekah back in June.
When Zander can’t even let me fight my own battles ten years later.
“A problem, but one we handled,” Frost says in his usual resonant voice. “For tonight.” He’s never one to get carried away with the optimism, which is maybe what happens when you have centuries under your belt.
“How cheerful,” Rebekah replies, but there’s laughter in her voice, and the way she looks at him is all heat and joy.
I glance over at Zander. He’s holding his arm at a very wrong angle, gritting his teeth against what must be some considerable pain. I don’t like any part of that, and I’m about to reach out to him, no matter how telling that would be right now—
Rebekah takes me by the arm. “You’re hurt. You’re...” She trails off.
In a very significant way.
Significant enough that everyone looks away from the sky and the shadows, to me.
Standing here in all this moonlight with no glamour, because I lost it somewhere along the fight. A four-month pregnancy isn’t a huge baby bump or anything, but I’ve been hiding it. While seeing these people every day. So they notice the difference between my glamoured stomach and my actual, pregnant stomach.
They all notice.
I can’t focus on that disaster because I’m also looking down, and I see the angry claw mark across my tiny swell of belly. Once I do, I feel it. For a moment, my brain goes entirely blank, then fills with nothing but terror. I almost pass out. All I can hear is Zander talking about our child .
Our child. A little person we made, but the shadow—
Then Jacob is next to me. He murmurs some Healer words as his magic seeps into me, but I’m not really listening. I’m looking at the angry claw mark and hearing nothing but a kind of low buzz in my ears. Panic and a million other things.
Things I don’t want to name.
Slowly, the marks stop bleeding and start stitching back together. Jacob’s work is swift and good. He heals me, and not for the first time this year. Not even the first time this long, hot summer.
“Is everything okay?” I whisper at him.
Jacob holds my scared gaze and gives my arm a reassuring squeeze, wordlessly telling me the baby is fine. I begin to breathe normally again, which is when I realize I...wasn’t.
The terror inside of me slowly recedes. Only then do I remember Zander’s arm. I turn around to find him, to make sure he’s okay too—
Jacob’s already moving over to him, and though Zander’s injuries are different, our Healer repeats the same process.
He calls on his magic so Zander’s broken arm starts to straighten. The gash on his cheek and the deeper one across his eyebrow begin to fill in. There’s a long scratch across his neck that looks ugly, and I have to force myself to keep still, to keep from doing something incredibly stupid and revealing, like running to his side.
Or like...having his baby? Ruth asks dryly.
I’ve never liked owls , I tell her in my head. The only place I can lie at will, and do.
She hoots from her perch on Zander’s roof. While Jacob works on his arm, Zander’s gaze finds mine. We clash there in the moonlight, intense and obvious.
Revealing in its own way, at least to me.
I look around at my other friends then, though I feel off balance. They all look a little bruised and bloody, but we’re all on our own two feet. Zander took the brunt of the attack. Because he brought it on himself , I remind myself. If he let me help, he wouldn’t be so beat up.
Jacob looks at Emerson, our Confluence Warrior, coven leader, chamber of commerce president, and soon-to-be most powerful witch in the world, if we can convince witchdom to choose her—and us—in the coming ascension at Samhain. Jacob gives her a nod, making it clear Zander’s okay, though I’m sure he talks to her privately too. That’s their fiancé stuff.
Emerson nods back, like the general she is.
Her nose is bleeding, and her hair is in a crazy tangle. There’s that gleam in her eye. The Confluence Warrior gleam that might terrify a person if they found themselves lacking the confidence Emerson Wilde has in herself and her friends.
“We’ll go discuss this while we recover at Wilde House,” Emerson says in her decisive way. “On the bricks, where it’s safer.”
Not safe like we were raised to believe, not anymore. The lore tells us that the bricks that make St. Cyprian’s historic cobblestoned streets were enchanted as they were put in place, a standing vow to all magical beings that no harm could come to them here. But we’re not dealing with magic that follows the rules these days. So far, this year, there’s been black magic and blood barters and all sorts of twisted histories hidden underneath the surface of the rules we thought we knew—and the long-trusted people who govern us.
The bricks are saf er , anyway. They offer more protection than a rickety river porch. My worry over what that vile thing did to Zander is for a different time. When I’m alone and haven’t just accidentally announced my pregnancy to all of our best friends.
When I can let myself feel the things I prefer to pretend I have no access to in the light of day. Or even by the light of the moon, if there are other people around.
Jacob and Frost help Zander, and Emerson links arms with me. I would tell anyone who asks that I’m not tactile, but my friends get a pass. And her gaze doesn’t linger on my stomach, thankfully. She’s focused on action. On getting us all to her family’s grand old house on one end of Main Street where generations of Wildes have fought off all kinds of threats in their day. I feel almost teary—again—because it feels like a reprieve. And I need it.
I’m sure she knows. She always does.
“I imagine your mother felt the fight too,” she says quietly, so only I can hear her. “I can hold her off at the pass if you want to...” she flicks a glance down at my now-healed stomach “...wait.”
I shake my head. No more secrets. “No, she should know.”
We all fly back to Wilde House, where Emerson and Rebekah grew up, though lately they both spend more time with their significant others than in the big Victorian that commands its part of town. It has stood here for almost the entire sweep of St. Cyprian history, as elegant and elaborate as houses out this way get. Its turret, where Georgie currently resides, sparkles bright beneath the September moon.
We all land together in the living room that has become Ascension Central, but has always been a meeting space since long before we needed to be a coven and officially fight the Joywood. Even back when Emerson didn’t remember all we are or even who she really is.
We met here. We ate. We planned. We helped Em run her festivals and plot her course through the local politics that were thorny and difficult even for someone who didn’t know there were witches involved.
Zander and I went whole meetings, now and again, without sniping at each other—much too busy supporting Emerson in her role as the youngest chamber of commerce president in St. Cyprian history.
Because sometimes love is as complicated and as simple as just showing up.
Georgie hands Emerson a flowy bandanna to blot at her nose. Rebekah is holding an ice pack on Frost’s cheek, and it’s clearly not because he can’t do it himself. No one announces that Jacob’s pushed his Healer magic to the limit, but there’s a communal agreement that there’s no point in him healing such tiny injuries that will mend before morning.
Not when there could be a whole war before then that he’ll need to be ready for.
“Should she rest?” Rebekah asks Jacob, referring to me.
“She’s up for a quick...recap,” Jacob says, looking over at Emerson. Again, not at me. “Nothing too involved.”
“ She is right here.” But Emerson is looking at Zander when she stands up for me. “So. What happened?”
She doesn’t get out a notebook, but we all know that somewhere nearby or out at Jacob’s farm, a pen is floating above a notebook and fully prepared to take down every detail in written form. She’ll pore over it later. Obsess over every detail. Try to figure out everything so we aren’t caught unaware again.
It isn’t only the Warrior in Emerson that won’t ever give up. It’s just who she is.
I love her ferocious optimism, even if I can’t share it.
Zander looks across the room at me. He’s pale—and clearly sober. He’s holding his right arm gingerly, and some of the cuts on his face are still visible as faint pink streaks, but he’s healing more by the moment. I can see that he is.
There’s no reason for me to think I need to go and touch him to make sure.
“Ellowyn and I were having an overdue discussion.” Zander turns back to Emerson as he speaks. Something’s shifted since Litha, I think. There’s a quiet acknowledgment of the change in our coven situation. Because covens have hierarchies. Emerson isn’t just a friend, sister, or cousin anymore. She’s our leader. “She went to leave, and that shadow thing flew in. So I fought it.”
He fought it. Because of course. Zander the Guardian wouldn’t dare let me do the honors or even help. Disappointing half witches can’t be trusted with simple tasks like fighting off evil.
“Yes,” I agree, making no attempt to sound anything but mad. Because I am. Because maybe that’s more easily accessible than all the other, messier things I also feel. “ He fought it because he put an unwanted safety spell over me. But I watched. It was the same dark shadow you all saw. No real shape. Just...power, I guess. Dark, ugly power. With claws.”
Zander nods. “Dark, yeah, but different.” I can’t let myself nod along. Casual agreement is a slippery slope to our particular brand of toxicity. “It definitely wanted to take a chunk out of me.”
Me , he says, so matter-of-factly. As if it didn’t slash a shadowy claw across me too.
Typical. “And when Zander was in over his head, I called you guys.”
I can see he wants to argue that he was never in over his head or anywhere near it, but I said it. So we all know it’s true. I accept his glare as tribute.
Emerson ignores our silent battle of one-upmanship. She’s frowning. Thinking. “You don’t have any clue what prompted it?”
Both Zander and I shake our heads. I can’t imagine the Joywood or anyone else cares that I got myself knocked up. The timing doesn’t make any sense.
“What were you guys talking about?” Georgie asks, and the thing about Georgie is that I’ve known her my entire life. She grew up next door to Wilde House. I still can’t tell if she’s as dreamy and otherworldly as she seems, her face always in a book—or, lately, talking about seemingly very boring things with her high school teacher boyfriend, Sage. Who...seems nice. Enough.
For a moment, the entire room is silent, like maybe none of us can tell if Georgie is really asking that question either.
I point at my expanding middle. “Hi. Hello.”
“So it is Zander’s,” Georgie says, almost wonderingly.
“Obviously it’s mine.”
His what the fuck, Georgie , lingers in the air as if he yelled it. Though he didn’t. And I hear an odd creak from the front hall, like the old staircase with the creepy newel post is reacting too.
Georgie only smiles. I can feel everyone’s eyes on me, and I can practically hear the questions they’re very purposefully not voicing. How? When? Where? Why?
“Did something happen at the bar tonight? Anything out of the ordinary that might have caused or hinted at an attack?” Emerson asks Zander, as if oblivious to all of these things going on around her when we all know she’s not. “Maybe a strange ferry passenger earlier?” She turns to me. “A customer at your shop that felt off?”
My customers at Tea & No Sympathy are there for artisan tea blends, my trademark scowl, and no sympathy, as advertised. They’re all a little off, but I don’t say that.
“No,” I say instead, as Zander shakes his head. And I’m mad at him, so I continue. “Maybe something happened while you were busy drowning your sorrows. Hard to see an evil brewing when you’re face down in the gin.”
Not that I care that his grief takes the shape of self-sabotage.
Zander and I get locked in one of those staring battles that only end in Pyrrhic victories, if any, and only after too much history passes between us, silently. Bruisingly.
Years ago we forbade ourselves from taking part in any silent, witch-type talking inside each other’s heads—not when it was only the two of us. Taking private conversations like that off the menu was supposed to make this better.
It didn’t. It doesn’t.
“We’ve been waiting for the Joywood to make a move,” Rebekah is saying, because they all have practice ignoring us. Even the one who was away for a decade.
“Yes, but the fact they’ve waited makes me wonder why now , why tonight. We still have over a month to Samhain, and hoops to jump through yet.”
She’s talking about the ascension rituals.
Everyone in witchdom knows that ascension means we get to choose our ruling coven. No one seems to know the details about how that choice gets made. The Joywood have held their position for so long that no one can recall how they won it in the first place. We originally figured we’d let Frost fill us in, because he’s lived so long and—rumor has it—was once a member of a ruling coven himself.
But it turns out that losing his immortality when he saved Rebekah means he’s lost access to parts of his vast knowledge too. He and Georgie and Rebekah spend hours every day trying to work through the gaps, but it’s hard to chase down things you can’t remember that you ought to know. What we do understand is that we have to appear before the town council—in a shocking coincidence that shocks no one, said council is also the Joywood—to announce our intentions, complete with certain spells, and the presentation of sponsors. This must take place during the celebration of Mabon, the witch festival that celebrates the autumn equinox.
There’s a human festival too—the Apple Extravaganza that Emerson launched a few years ago, which manages to merge the usually still-hot Missouri summer weather with a little fall goodness that gets people on Main Street and into all the shops and restaurants and U-pick apple orchards across the river. Despite impending war and/or ascension, she’s maintained her typical schedule with her usual summer activities that keep this place humming and full of tourists, human as well as witch.
“Why haven’t they showed themselves?” Georgie asks into the brooding quiet, shaking her head. “We know they’re after us. They’re the ones who called it a war . Why bother with shadows ?”
“Even they can’t get away with bald-faced murder?” Jacob offers, with more hope than certainty, and we all laugh. A little.
Because they’re the Joywood. They can get away with anything. If we’re right about them, they already have.
“If they really wanted to murder any of you, or all of you, you would have been dead long ago,” Frost intones. Because the guy might not be immortal anymore, but he hasn’t changed. He is the first, best Praeceptor, the foundation of the witchlore itself, as we were all taught in school. He is also absurdly hot, all aristocratic angles and too-blue eyes, if much more mortal than he used to be.
“Nicholas, you are a constant comfort,” Rebekah says, making a face at him, but it’s a fond sort of face. I support her need to date an age gap beyond comprehension. I just wish the unconditional support flowed to me too. I can feel it doesn’t.
Then again, she’s only known that I’m pregnant—meaning, importantly, that I’ve been sleeping with Zander and not telling her about it—for about thirty minutes. That’s not a lot of processing time, I can admit. I decide to forgive her.
A little.
Emerson sighs. “You and Zander need rest, Wynnie.” She takes my hand and gives it a squeeze, and once again, I allow the touching and the nickname pretty much only Emerson gets away with. “So does Jacob.” The look she gives her fiancé is less coven leader and more worried soon-to-be-wife. “Tomorrow is our usual ascension meeting anyway. Let’s all take what’s left of tonight to gather our recollections. Leave no detail out, big or small, of what you felt, saw, thought, or even imagined at Zander’s. Tomorrow we’ll see if we can’t determine the why we’re missing here.”
No one verbally agrees, but no one mounts an opposition, so Emerson keeps talking. “I think everyone should stay put here at Wilde House for the time being. Until we really understand what happened tonight. No going it alone. No sleeping off the bricks. That wasn’t the hardest fight we’ve ever had, not even close, but that doesn’t mean we can be careless.”
Frost does that thing where he becomes an immensity as you look at him. An immortal party trick, I would have said—but apparently it’s just him. “Surely when you say here at Wilde House , you mean Ellowyn,” he says in his I Am the Greatest and Most Powerful Witch of All Time voice.
Emerson is unmoved. “Wilde House is the most protected option we have.”
Frost blinks. “I have wards on my house that are older than your entire ancestral line.”
“You’re up off the bricks. Jacob and Zander are across the river, also off the bricks.” Emerson shrugs. “I think that at the very least, we all need to stay on the bricks right now. It might not be as protected as we once believed, but it’s harder here. Let’s make it hard on them. At least until we figure out what’s going on.”
I have the terrible feeling she means, until we beat the Joywood . “My apartment is on the bricks,” I point out, because I would love nothing more than to go home to my sweet little apartment above my shop. My bed. My space. Alone and protected against all these feelings jumbling around the room.
I prefer to indulge in feelings exactly once a year, then otherwise pretend I’m immune.
“But alone. So no,” Emerson says, not gently. More General Wilde-y, and a few months back, I would have argued. But we’re the Riverwood now, so I bite my tongue. “Wilde House is the best option until we know what this is. Why this is. And how to protect ourselves against it, particularly if the Joywood aren’t showing themselves. Besides, there’s plenty of room.”
I wait for someone to argue with Emerson, but no one does. I decide that I will—but tomorrow. When I have a little more energy. When I don’t feel exhaustion creeping over me like a weighted blanket.
When I can close my eyes and not see that shadow flying at me. Or feel that terrible clawing over my belly. Or, somehow just as terrible, watch Zander taking those cruel blows from the same shadow.
“Good. It’s agreed. So, we’ll all get some rest and—”
“Is no one going to address the elephant in the room?” Rebekah finally turns and meets my gaze full-on. Then she points at my stomach, theatrically , and she’s always been the most dramatic of us when she feels like it. “What. The. Hell. ”
“Cosign,” Georgie murmurs. Not airily.
But that’s not a question I’m going to have to answer just yet, because we all hear the front door slam open.
Hard enough to make the old house groan.