Chapter 7
7
WALKING WITH ZANDER down to the ferry is a little too much like stepping back in time. You’d think a Summoner would be all about it, but hard pass. There’s nothing worse than going back to a happy place in time that you know you’ll never get to live again.
I could be optimism personified—I could be Emerson Wilde herself—and I’d know there’s no going back to the simplicity of being fifteen, stupid, and stupid in love with an equally stupid boy.
Emphasis on the stupid.
Walking side by side on Main Street is like walking on broken glass barefoot for me. Because no matter how I try to block them out, old scenes play out all around me.
Walking down to the bookstore with my mother, not more than ten years old. Mom bumping into Zelda, who has little Zander with her. He’s the boy who teases me on the playground, so I stick my tongue out at him from behind my mother’s back. He grins at me, and I can feel the same things I felt then. Confused. Embarrassed.
Desperate to do something to make him look at me like that again.
A few more blocks down, teenage Ellowyn and Zander making out in the alley between Confluence Books and the former Joyful Books & More that Maeve Mather tried to use as a way of putting Lillian Wilde out of business.
It didn’t work, but I don’t feel the usual satisfaction at that old victory, because I see teenage me and Zander, not caring that we might get caught as long as this kiss never ends.
It all cuts deep. Because what I can feel the most in those memories is the wild hope for all those things I know now are never going to happen.
I’m so busy trying to avoid the gauntlet of our past while not letting Zander see what I’m doing that it takes me longer than it should to recognize the new danger that’s coming right for us. That being Maeve Mather herself.
Maeve who is, among other things, the Joywood’s Summoner. Maeve is also the closest thing to a best friend the Joywood’s leader and Warrior, Carol Simon, has ever had. As far as anyone knows. Maeve is also a shocking attention whore who inserts herself into every festival the town puts on if there’s a spotlight to hog, one of the most unapologetically and forthrightly mean people in town, and the kind of grown-ass woman who likes to giggle and pout and make like a little girl, which I found nauseating even when I was one myself.
As she charges toward us on the sidewalk, Maeve squints at me, clutching her panda purse to her side. I can feel her magic slithering over me. I’m tempted to send out a little zap in return to make her jump, but Zander puts his hand on my arm.
No magic needed to zap me when it comes to Zander. Just his big hand, a great, glad warmth that holds me in place like an anchor.
“Maeve,” he says in a hearty sort of voice that is perhaps the fakest personality he puts on. “Imagine seeing you here without Carol. I thought you two were joined at the hip.” He barks out an obnoxious, frat boy laugh at that.
It isn’t him. It’s an act. One that threatens to make me laugh myself, rather than contemplate shooting daggers at Maeve. Almost like he knew it would.
Maeve sniffs. “Word on the street is your little group of deviants and outcasts is having a bit of a hard time finding a sponsor.”
I smile at her. Fatuously. “What streets are you working these days, Maeve?”
She glares back. “It’s a shame your parents couldn’t stay married. They’d be just the sort to stick up for your fool’s errand. Oh, but your father...” She trails off. Purposefully. Pretending like she forgot for a moment.
She didn’t. Not one member of the Joywood would ever forget my father is so resolutely human .
“Well,” she says, with great satisfaction. “I think we can all agree that your stepmother is very pretty. For a human.”
I can feel my temper skyrocket, and even knowing that’s what she wants doesn’t help me claw it back—
“Is it a shame my mother’s dead and can’t help us out too?” Zander asks.
That stops me and my temper mid-flare. The way he says that. The way it’s clearly what she meant to say next.
Maeve gets very huffy and pinched-looking. Her horrible familiar—a blind pigeon with flightless wings that sits in her bag, wearing a diaper and poking its creepy, red-rimmed eyes out—makes a malevolent cooing sound.
“Best watch out,” Zander says, sounding something like friendly when I know he would tear Maeve apart with his hands if he could. He’s probably imagining something like that right now. Then he nods at the scraggly pigeon. “Storm likes snacks.”
Somewhere above us, Storm lets out an affirmative screech.
Maeve clutches the purse closer to her side. “You’ll never find a sponsor. Your bid for ascension will be over before it begins.”
I let out a laugh at that, almost as hearty as Zander’s whole act. “Surely you’re not underestimating Emerson, Maeve. We all know how that ends.”
“What we know is that she’s over estimating you , Ms. Good.” Maeve smiles. Then she begins to walk past me. She says something as she does—and it’s quiet and crackling enough that I don’t know if she says it aloud in a weird whisper or sends the message into me.
You will be their downfall.
I know she’s messing with me. That’s what the Joywood do. Hit where it hurts, again and again.
Turns out knowing what she’s doing doesn’t make it hurt any less.
“I don’t trust that woman,” Zander mutters, frowning after her, clearly unaware of her parting shot.
“Oh really? You aren’t going to suggest we name our kid after her?”
I say that to make him laugh, but when he looks back at me, our gazes seem to tangle, and then drop to the belly I tucked away in the usual glamour before we left Wilde House—because telling my friends and mom is one thing, but the greater world where the Joywood walk and breathe is another—and neither one of us is laughing.
We move on instead, making it to the ferry parking lot—a little breathlessly—and he waves at Finn, one of the recent Guardian graduates of St. Cyprian High who voted for us at Litha. He was one of the votes that saved us from the execution the Joywood had planned, so we like him for that alone. We also like him because Finn picking up shifts on the ferry is the only thing that’s kept Zander and Zack from keeling over this summer.
Zander pauses before we head onto the low, flat boat. His hand closes over his Rivers pendant—three pieces of metal hanging from the leather chain that he always wears around his neck, except when he gave it to Emerson earlier this year. For protection.
The only other time he’s taken it off was when he tried to give it to me that Beltane prom. For protection then, too, but a much different kind. The setting free kind of protection.
It feels like stepping on another too-sharp memory.
Clearly for him too, because he says, in a low voice, “I know what happened the last time I tried to give this to you.”
“You mean when you were breaking up with me like a coward?”
His mouth firms. He doesn’t argue with me or come back with any sucker punch comments of his own. “It’s protection, and before you get all wound up, it’s about our kid, okay? Are you really going to argue about extra protection for our kid , Ellowyn?”
I almost have a vision of a child with his gray eyes and my—
But no. Summoners see the past, not the future.
I’ll take anything from him when it comes to protecting this kid. Particularly after last night. Particularly after running into Maeve and getting her creepy, sandbagging magic all over me.
I let him drop the pendant over my head. As soon as he does, I feel encased (embraced) in that warm, safe magic I recognize all too well.
Zander’s magic. Rivers magic. I shouldn’t look at him, but I’m only human.
Well. Half.
His gaze holds mine. Our whole complicated past swirls between us like a ghost. All those old hurts I swore I’d healed throb, like new scars marking me where I stand.
How am I going to do this parenting thing with him when we’re a never-healed wound?
I don’t ask him that, because that feels like a wound all its own.
“They can’t know about this,” he says, nodding toward my belly.
I don’t argue, which is some kind of record for us. This long in each other’s company without arguing or getting naked. Go us.
Instead, I consider what Zander’s saying. About protecting our baby from the Joywood. I think about Maeve Mather and her nasty, twisted little cronies—who I’ve always known hated me—and what they might do to my kid .
My mother had to get a special dispensation to raise me as a witch instead of letting me flounder about as a human with a few questionable “talents.” The Joywood allowed her to do it, but they never let it go. They still haven’t.
The current prevailing theory we’ve discussed in a million coven meetings since Ostara is that they could have exterminated us all at birth—especially Emerson and Rebekah, who came with a prophecy—but that’s not the Joywood way. They like playing games with the people they consider their prey. We weren’t supposed to get powerful enough to actually be a threat.
They’ll know about my baby at some point, of course. I don’t know what kind of energy hiding a whole pregnancy will take, but my guess is more than I’ve got. I start to tell Zander this, but stop when an even worse thought occurs to me. “What if they already know?”
He considers this with the kind of horror it’s due. His gaze never leaves mine, and all of this feels a little too much like teamwork. The kind we might have engaged in when we were still together.
“Say it,” he says.
It’s the real test. “The Joywood know I’m pregnant.”
Truth.
He sucks in a hard breath.
I’m not done though, because the timing of last night’s attack doesn’t make sense. Unless we’re missing something. Or... “The Joywood care that I’m pregnant.”
“Fuck,” he mutters.
“Why the hell do they care?” I demand.
He shakes his head. “I have no idea, but we’ll find out. We’ll figure it out and protect this baby.”
He’s so sure. So...determined.
“Come on,” he mutters, and I follow him up onto the ferry.
I stand by the rail as Zander goes to work, but no matter how I turn it over in my head, I can’t believe this is really about me . It has to be about Zander. I’m just the vessel for a powerful future Guardian and Summoner baby, that’s all.
I try not to think about it while I ride back and forth as Zander works his shift. As he flirts with all the women. Makes dad jokes with all the men. That’s not new. What is new is when he makes a random kid laugh or gasp in wonder as he points out Storm dive-bombing from above or Ruth waiting serenely in her favorite tree by the ferry terminal.
I try not to imagine him with our kid, but I do.
We stop over on the Illinois side of the river to let the waiting cars pull on—but there are only a few now that it’s mid-morning. I am more familiar with the ferry schedules than someone who isn’t a Rivers should be, so I know there will be a lunch rush soon enough. I know the ebb and flow of ferry traffic like a tide.
That annoys me, so when I find my gaze drawn toward the cemetery, I let myself look. It’s not unusual for a Summoner. We’re all about ghosts. Spirits. The past. All of those things tend to be more potent in the midst of a cemetery, and they always call to who I am, to that witchy thing inside of me.
I see a strange, fractured vision, of a dark world with no green growth fading toward autumn, no famous color-changing redbuds Emerson built an entire festival around, no shining graves—just black and crumbled stone.
I blink it away, because it isn’t the past, present, or future. It’s likely my anxiety playing tricks on me, but it leaves me feeling cold.
I look around to make sure no one is paying any attention to me. Then I reach up and curl my hand around the pendant, feeling the power and the protection of a Guardian.
My Guardian.
I don’t know much about the whole half-witch, three-fourths-witch baby connection, but I give it a shot, talking directly to the little life growing inside of me.
We’ll protect you with all we are. The both of us . Always.
Then I whisper it out loud, so I know.
It’s the truth.