Chapter 15
15
WE END UP at my mother and Mina’s rambling house. It was owned by humans before them and thus fell into disrepair because the humans were convinced it was haunted when it’s simply enchanted.
Mina loves a fixer-upper. I once mentioned this to my mother as a joke. Mina laughed. My mother did not.
Mom leads us inside, then directs Zander to his room for the night. She offers him one of the small, cramped rooms on the main floor. He blinks at the peeling paint, the caving ceiling, and the window with duct tape over a spiderweb crack, but doesn’t say a word.
These are all things he can magic away easily enough. And no doubt he will, no matter how much of a guy he can be when it’s his own place, but he’s going to give my mother the illusion that he will be uncomfortable. In turn, my mother will uphold the illusion he can’t solve all these issues with the snap of his magic. Or she couldn’t, as his host.
I cannot fathom why this silent interchange makes me want to weep.
Though I don’t.
“I imagine everyone needs to get to sleep after all that,” Tanith says brightly. When she usually doesn’t do bright , except to mess with someone.
I assume that someone is Zander, but Mina’s hand is on my mother’s arm—and I don’t know what they’re communicating to each other, but it’s something that seems to smooth out Tanith’s considerable edges.
“We’ll have breakfast in the morning, kids,” Mina says with a kind smile. “Good night.” Then she gives my mother a tug, and they’re headed off without showing me to the—refurbished and comfortable—room they keep for me here. They know I know the way.
What I’m focusing on is Mina calling us kids . I’m almost thirty, but I think I’ll always feel like a kid here, even when I bring my own.
Our own .
I look at Zander. I’m not sure Mina was precisely giving us the go-ahead to do something stupid—the kind of stupid that got us here—but she’s giving us the privacy to have a discussion. And my mother is letting that happen.
So, really, the Undine isn’t the only wildly unforeseen and impossible thing that’s happened tonight.
“I think I will find elsewhere to retire,” Zachariah says with an injured sniff before wafting away. I’m only a little surprised when Elizabeth doesn’t follow him and stays by my side instead.
“Enjoy the accommodations,” I offer Zander, but I’m smirking.
He returns the favor. “She’s going to send mice, isn’t she?”
“Mice?” I blow out a breath. “Don’t think small. Try rats. Snakes. Rabid flying monkeys?”
He glares at me, and I find myself grinning happily as I leave him to figure out how he’s going to magic himself a bed big enough for his oversized frame in the tiny room.
If being a mature adult means you can’t ever laugh at a man’s misfortune, particularly when he’s your ex, then I want no part of it.
I go up the beautifully renovated staircase to a hallway that looks like a war zone. I think my mother might have tried to wallpaper recently, but she very clearly gave up. I’ll never understand witches who like to do this sort of thing without the magic we have at our disposal.
I head into my bedroom. Not a guest room , as they always remind me. My room is always here for me and always has been, even though the two of them bought this place when I had already moved into my apartment over the tea shop.
Elizabeth is wafting hot on my heels, so I turn to face her. Despite what I’ve been through tonight, I feel great . Better than great. My magic still isn’t quite right, but the Healing or the Undine or maybe a little truth-telling with Zander has me amped .
It’s like witch steroids. I’m sure I’ll crash eventually, but until then, why not enjoy myself?
“What were you and Zachariah up to?” I demand of my ghostly shadow.
“I beg your pardon?”
“After the meeting. You disappeared, and when you reappeared, you looked a little...rumpled. So what were you doing? Banging it out?”
She frowns at me, clearing not understanding my meaning.
Or possibly she doesn’t want to understand me, so I keep going. “Horizontal polka? Bumping uglies? Hanky-panky?”
Elizabeth looks more and more puzzled with every ridiculous term.
“Sex, Elizabeth,” I say at last. “Did you and your husband have sex ?”
I can’t magic her a bed tonight, not with my powers at such a low ebb, but she doesn’t ask. She settles herself on the little cushion that sits on the bay window, but she looks so stiff and prim I almost feel bad for teasing her.
Almost.
“What we did in private, Ellowyn Sabrina Good, is absolutely none of your business,” she says reprovingly as she gazes out into the night.
She’s right, of course, but... “You were holding hands.”
It was sweet. Kind. I feel like I have to understand what it was all about.
For reasons.
Elizabeth turns her gaze to mine, cool and dismissive. “Are you not recovering from near death? Shouldn’t you sleep, child?”
I sit cross-legged on my bed and study her. “I’m fine. The meeting is a little bit fuzzy, I grant you, but Emerson will have detailed reports upon reports. Jacob said it went well. You two did good.”
“Because you did.”
She does not say this with a kind smile or an attempt at comfort. She says it like it’s an indisputable fact. I did good. I want to say it out loud to test it, but I can’t bring myself to do it in front of her.
Besides, I’m seized with the need to find out what happened between the only other Good and Rivers union I’ve ever heard about. “Ever since you got here, you and Zachariah have sniped and argued and fought like you spent your entire marriage hating each other—before and after death. He told us what your parents did.”
She plucks at her skirt. “Yes, well.”
“I’m sorry—”
She pins me with a glare. “There is no need for you to be sorry. My grief is my own. It is not yours to carry. Besides, it has always been tempered with happiness, whether that’s clear to you during our afterlife or not.” She frowns, and I wonder if she’s having a moment like I had in the linen closet at Wilde House, finally considering how her relationship appears from the outside. If she is, she keeps that to herself and focuses on me. “I am happy for you, Ellowyn. Another Good woman in the world is always a good thing.”
“Always?”
“Always,” she says firmly. As if she has no doubt or ever could.
I want a little of that.
What I should do is curl myself around that certainty and sleep. Let my magic heal up. Recover for what’s coming, as the Undine promised. (Threatened?) I’ve never been good at should . “What happened with you and Zachariah, Elizabeth?”
She looks out the window again. She’s quiet for so long I wonder if she’ll just ignore me until I fade off into sleep, which I don’t think will take long. I can already feel that amped feeling beginning to ebb away.
Eventually she sighs, still plucking at her skirt. “Sometimes a woman, even in spirit, gets tired of being angry.”
That lands hard. I’ve held on to my anger so long. Those edges. The armor that keeps me from crumpling under the weight of it all. Because I have no idea what might happen if I let go of being mad.
Earlier this evening, what Zander told me, the way we didn’t fall into old angry habits—I know that’s a good thing.
That’s about our baby girl, though, not any real desire to mend fences.
I tell myself that in my head.
“Anger doesn’t serve you. Not really,” Elizabeth says.
“Are you sure?” I ask on a whisper. Elizabeth feels like the only safe person to ask. Because she’s got to leave sometime...doesn’t she?
“Well, it took something like two hundred years to get there, but yes. I’m sure.”
“I think what your parents did is probably worth being angry about,” I argue. “For eternity.” Because it wasn’t like my cursing. It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t meant to help in some twisted way.
“Maybe,” Elizabeth agrees. “I used that anger as a crutch. Sometimes a weapon. If they hadn’t cursed me, Zachariah might have listened to me and not gone on his fool’s errand. He might have stayed if we’d had a child, or one on the way. He might have lived. I survived the rest of my life on that anger. At them. At him. For what?”
I blink at that. I have a million for what s and can usually list them all without missing a beat, but I can’t seem to think of a one right now. Because at the end of any day...it isn’t the anger that gets me through, love it though I do. It’s my friends. My business. My mom.
Even my half sisters, if I’m getting soft about it all.
I prefer being angry. It keeps me safe, it protects me, but...
For what?
“I lived a miserable life, angry at a dead man I had once loved enough to defy everything my parents wished for me,” Elizabeth tells me quietly. “Then I crossed over and stayed angry in the afterlife. As if love was a lie all along.”
Something shivers down my back at that, and I remember that vision of Rebekah’s from long ago. Love is the only lie you tell, but it will claim you in the end. It already has.
Though what’s claimed me, I think then, is the love turned inside out. The anger I’ve made out of it and decided is my whole personality.
Ouch , Ruth says from her perch outside the windows.
Owl stew , I shoot back at her, but my heart’s not in it, and she hoots because she clearly knows it.
“I’m not unique, certainly,” Elizabeth is saying in that same quiet way. “Many of us can’t let go of what held us back in life.”
What held us back.
I don’t like how that feels either. This time I ignore the owl commentary.
“It has been so long,” Elizabeth says on a sigh. “What I failed to consider across all these years—because he died, I imagine—was that he lost something too. For the first time this evening, I suppose we acknowledged what we’d lost together.”
It’s like my conversation with Zander tonight. Acknowledging we weren’t alone in old hurts, in curses real or assumed, in anger.
I lie back on the bed and look up at the ceiling. “Maybe the Good legacy is just being mad. At everything. Forever.”
“Maybe,” Elizabeth agrees easily. Too easily. “But legacies are choices, Ellowyn.”
She floats over to me and perches herself on the edge of my bed. She has violet eyes like my mother and grandmother. She is a Good, her life marred by a curse. A particularly vicious one.
Now she’s a ghost who seems to know too much about me and the things I never say out loud, inexplicably here doing things a ghost shouldn’t be able to do.
Like rest her hand on my cheek and encourage me, without words, to sleep.
Which I do without meaning to, thinking about legacies, only to wake to the sun streaming on my face.
I sit up in bed, a little achy. Like I used muscles last night that I never do. I stretch a little, glamour myself presentable, then head downstairs, following the smells of breakfast. When I step into the cozy kitchen, I see my mother and Mina, hip to hip at the stove. It makes me smile.
I’m not saying I loved Mina from the start, or that my mother having a serious relationship after everything with my dad was easy for me. But I was an adult at that point and out of the house. It wasn’t my life or my decision to trust again, it was hers. And these days I love Mina like part of my family, because she is, but I don’t often get the chance to really think about the two of them as a couple. To observe them together, here in this home they’re redoing together, with their own hands.
They make each other happy. I’m not saying there’s no spark between them—I choose not to pay the slightest attention to the possibility of any sparks involving my mother— but what I notice is that they’re partners. A team. There’s an obvious, enviable contentment about them. The few times I’ve seen them fight, it’s something small. A moment of frustration that they always make up quickly.
I’ve never heard any shouts or seen any tears. They never seem to hold on to bitterness or start in with recriminations. As far as I know, they always talk it out.
Almost like you can learn something from these small failures and thereby avoid the big, systemic ones.
That’s not something I want to think about too closely.
Not now, anyway, because it’s not just Mom and Mina in the kitchen this morning. My grandmother, and her mother, sit at the kitchen table. Great-Grandma Good has shrunk down into a tiny little thing, violet-eyed and immediately scowling at my belly, but she’s still here. She’s still alive .
The way Zelda isn’t, I can’t help but think. That makes me realize Great-Grandma Good has to have been born in the mid-1800s.
“Elizabeth Good,” I say with no preamble. “She married Zachariah Rivers. You must have known her.” As if saying her name summons her, Elizabeth is suddenly at my elbow.
Great-Grandma raises a scraggly eyebrow over a sunken purple eye. “Aunt Elizabeth? I suppose I did. Mean old biddy.”
Elizabeth makes an affronted sound and glares at her niece. “I was nothing but kind to Esmerelda and the rest of her kin. Is it my fault my sister raised a bunch of ruffians?”
Before I can respond to Elizabeth, assuming there’s a response to be made, Zander shuffles in. He looks rumpled and gorgeous as he comes to stand beside me just inside the kitchen doorway.
He smiles lazily. “Morning, ladies.”
I imagine entering any kitchen full of women might make a wise man pause, but Good women are next-level. There are a lot of violet glares and muttering that sounds a lot like spells.
Or curses.
“Better put the armor on,” I say cheerfully to Zander, who pretends not to hear me.
The only one who returns his smile and greeting is Mina, who is not a Good and is better for it.
Granny Good launches into an anecdote about my grandfather, long-lost and unlamented by her reckoning, and the way he seemed to believe he could win over any group in every room by the power of his smile alone.
I’m sure it’s a randomly chosen story, not pointed at all.
I find myself smirking. “It must be hard, not being able to win us over.”
Zander turns his gray gaze on me. “I know how to win you over.”
I shiver, very much against my will.
Mina starts carrying platters of pancakes and eggs over from the stove. Then we all sit down with the grandma convention, and it’s not exactly awkward. Not that Mom doesn’t give it her best shot, just to be ornery, but Zander manages to make even Great-Grandma laugh before I make my excuses to get to the store.
I stand up, but freeze when Zander stands with me.
“Pairs,” he reminds me, with an innocent look on his face and a thunderstorm glint that’s just for me. “Like Emerson said.”
“That’s good thinking,” Granny Good says with a sage sort of nod as she takes the last of the sausages. “You never know what might happen when you back the Joywood into a corner. Known for their harsh retaliations, that lot.”
“Granny. Do you remember the last ascension?”
She frowns a little, clearly thinking back. Eventually she shakes her head. “It’s all fuzzy. Must have happened when I was too young to care.”
It’s more than that though. It’s as Frost told us.
There’s no one who remembers because the Joywood want it that way. Which means we’ll have to rely on ourselves as we charter these unknown waters that only the Joywood know.
Zander and I walk down Main to Tea & No Sympathy in what feels a lot like the contentment I saw back at the stove in Mina and Mom’s kitchen. I could let that settle in me like panic, like anger, but maybe I’ll just have to accept that next to Zander is where I feel safest.
“I suppose Emerson will want to have a meeting tonight,” Zander says conversationally as I unlock the front door of my shop.
I snort at that. “Please. She would have sent a ten-page agenda by now if she was going to call a meeting. She’s probably too busy drowning in Wildes.”
“Then come to the bar with me tonight.”
He says this casually. Like he might have before our first Beltane prom. Like we just hang out. As friends. Or more.
I know there isn’t anything casual in the offer. Or how badly I want to take him up on it. I move around my usual opening routine, giving myself that time to breathe, to think. To push myself beyond feeling .
Beyond panic .
“I can’t. I have plans.” I could leave it at that. I could let him think I have a date, the way I normally would. “Brynleigh’s cheering at her high school’s football game tonight. It’s her first time, so I promised her I’d go.”
Because I have a relationship with my half sisters that has nothing to do with my dad. Like it or not, and mostly I like it.
Or maybe I like that he doesn’t like it, and sticking knives into good old Bill Wallace—the metaphoric kind because humans are so breakable—is one of my favorite parlor games.
Zander nods. “I’ll go with you.”
I want him to come with me, and that’s a truth I don’t feel like addressing. “What about the bar?”
He is watching me a little too closely. A little too intensely. “Grandma Rivers has the cousins jumping in to help since they’re here. She said Dad and I are required to take three days off ferry and bar duty and let them handle it.”
He’s clearly a little irritated by this, but he shrugs. You don’t argue with Grandma Rivers, this I know. She was the only reason Zander had any time off around Litha, or after Zelda’s death.
“Emerson wants us in pairs,” he says, so innocently. As if he’s spent his entire life up to this moment doing exactly what Emerson—or anyone else—tells him. His eyes get grayer. “Besides, if you’re going to tell your dad and Stephanie about the baby, I should be there.”
I hadn’t exactly been planning on that. For one thing, I can hide it from them easily enough. It’s not like we’re in each other’s pockets. They live just far enough away, over by Lake St. Louis, that I only have to worry about the occasional weekend ambush here in the store.
From Stephanie and my sisters, not dear old Dad. He never sets foot in St. Cyprian if he can help it. He doesn’t have to remember that his ex is a witch to know he doesn’t want to run into Tanith.
As Zander stares me down, looking entirely too patient , it occurs to me that trying to hide the baby in the first place wasn’t, maybe, my best idea. I really do love my sisters. It would hurt their precarious little teenage and preteen feelings if I didn’t tell them. No matter what memory spells they’ll be under later, they’ll remember if they had to find out by accident.
“Fine,” I say, begrudgingly. “Okay.”
Zander takes his time grinning at me, and he can still light me on fire. Just like that. Just...that easily.
There’s not a lot of thinking when he’s around, and less by the second.
There’s that look on his gorgeous face and that grin and all the thunderstorms we make together, one rolling into the next and the two of us all alone here in my shop on a quiet morning.
And me made of nothing but deliriously jumbled thoughts and wants and yes —
But Zachariah and Elizabeth pop through the walls then, as if they’ve been hanging around in the alley outside.
I take that as the freaking life preserver it really is, letting me break the spell that’s always been my downfall where Zander is concerned. That bright, hot fire between us that I wish really was a spell, because spells can be broken.
This thing between Zander and me, on the other hand, is eternal.
Maybe that was why we fought about it and around it so much, back when we were kids and it about flattened us.
Whatever it is, I take the life preserver and duck back behind my long counter, happily using it as a barricade and not caring that, judging from the way Zander’s mouth curves, he knows exactly what I’m doing.
“I told you she was a merchant,” Elizabeth is saying to Zachariah, like she’s settling a bet. Then they start arguing about what constitutes a merchant , but there’s no animosity to it. They’re smiling, and there’s a little sparkle in Elizabeth’s eye that I recognize all too well.
“I suppose we need to talk about sending them back,” I say, because they’re starting to freak me out. I think the bickering was better. Easier.
Better than hope that tends to crash and burn when it’s just within reach.
Zander says nothing for a few moments, watching them waft about the store, arguing about which teas are better. I wait for him to jump on what I said. To say we should give it a shot right now and be done with them.
For reasons I don’t choose to examine, the thought of letting the pair of them disappear into the ether of the afterlife makes me think I might...sob, maybe. Just like the notion that Zander will want to send them away, because I brought it up.
Because I am nothing if not the architect of my own despair.
He shrugs instead. “It can probably wait.”
“Yeah,” I say, though I have to clear my throat. “It probably can.”
And when he looks back at me, he smiles.