Authors: Eden Butler
He’d fought to the end.
The lines shot out from me, flooded from me as the panther pounced, but there was too much pent up magic, too much aggression and frustration from the lines to stop me from shooting hexes and spells and crippling injuries at the beast as it came at me.
“Leave, Joe,” I warned and still he continued, scratching at me with weak, ineffective grazes against my arms, my legs.
Every step he made, every charge was deflected, weakened by the force of the lines that pulsed and vibrated through me. They shot out wicked, old magic that the shifter could not take, that I, honestly, could barely manage to control. Perhaps I never really did control it.
He stopped fighting once I reached the Elam and when I picked it up, when I managed to crawl toward the trellis with Joe’s blood coating my fingers and smeared across that beautiful tortoise face, Joe stopped moving altogether.
“Merge,” I muttered, pushing the Elam back into the amulet.
The effect was immediate. Beyond the shield the Cove went still. The approaching mortals froze mid-trot. The firemen and emerging feds that slipped from their cars paused, eyes stopping in blinks, breaths held as the surge of magic waved over the town and the lines were once again tampered by the strength of the Elam.
Birds in midflight overhead went still, the water from the hoses, stopped in mid-stream and all the mortals around us simply ceased in doing whatever it was they were involved in, pausing where they stood. Wizards, witches and shifters, however, watched it all unfold, caught the quick flow of magic tampered and resettled once again as the Elam fixed itself right and took in that ley line energy.
My sister smiled, shoulders lowering as she watched me. My brother ran his hands through his hair, his features relaxing as Mai touched his arm. The tension left them quickly, easily and I offered them both a smile, relaxing until I shifted my gaze to Bane and knew, with one glance that he saw everything I’d kept from him for ten years.
It was all there shifting beyond the block he’d lowered, part of my memories. It came back in a flash, and passed just as quickly.
He kissed me, taking and taking until I could not breathe. It was an overwhelming, unbelievable moment and I prayed for the endlessness, for the seconds to twist and stretch and never stop. Bane was large and beautiful and tasted like something that would fill me completely. I was greedy for each touch, each taste and my heart became something that sped and pumped like I had just run a race and needed the extra blood flow.
“Jani,” he said again, eager to have me backed up to the wall with his mouth nibbling against my neck. “Jani. Damn, what you do to me.”
“Please…please don’t stop…” And he didn’t and that thick, warm tongue drew circles into my skin, his hands gripping and pulling and I felt needed, more wanted than I could have ever imagined.
“Touch me,” he said, moaning, happy, when I obliged.
And I did, just then, my nails down his neck, over his chest, my teeth skimming across the wide contours of his chest. He seemed to really like my fingertips against his hard nipples and my lips and tongue wetting down the center of his throat. There was a heat, some sort of spell cast between our bodies, a hum that mirrored the heartbeat of the earth, the faint, but constant hum of the ley lines pulsing through the Cove. That’s what zipped around the room, the sensation foreign to anyone mortal. Bane tilted me back, his large, strong hands holding my back, my head as he smoothed his mouth and nose down my neck, in the valley of my breasts and my hips moved, grinding against him, making our centers touch. Just then I felt it, him, long and hard and gloriously hot through my thin shorts.
We had let ourselves go on too far. There was too much touching, too many months of pent up attraction that we could not see the light flickering through our limbs or hear the slow thump of each other’s hearts beating beneath our skin. Bane’s low, hurried groan of pleasure, my eager, needy moans grew louder, stronger until that great whip of electricity between us moved hard and easy through our touching bodies.
“Shit,” he said, stilling completely when I slowed my hips so that my center rode his straining dick. “I…shit, Jani…”
And just then, I knew Bane would stop me. He wouldn’t let me have the only thing I wanted before I left Crimson Cove. He’d let me have a taste, but only a brief one.
“It’s okay,” I told him, already stuffing down my disappointment. “It’s fine.” But as I tried to disengage from him and step away to retrieve my bag, Bane pulled me against his chest with his large arm hooked around my waist. “It’s not fucking fine,” he said, burying his nose in my hair. “It’s not fine that I have sell myself to some girl I don’t know because your coven is…”
“Poor?”
He held me tighter, surer as though his touch would erase reality from the moment. He wouldn’t marry for love. He’d marry for power and my coven was small, too young to have any real clout. There was no way I would ever be suited for Bane.
But that didn’t make me want him any less and it didn’t stop him from spreading his fingers over my stomach, along my hips. “Right now I don’t really care about anything but the way you feel against me.”
I leaned back, resting my head on his shoulder as I scrubbed my fingers through his hair. “God, neither do I.”
That growl did something to me, had my body clenching and pulsing and I couldn’t help but arch against him, kissing him again, desperate, eager and then, it happened again.
That quick, smooth light, the flow of magic from the lines, the red pulse of energy, our skin firing sharp, bright, and I shuddered. Suddenly I was being opened up completely, and in a blur of heat and energy, my nexus unfastened, colliding like a hammer with Bane’s, and he and I both laughed joyously from the thrill of it, from the notion that this had been waiting for us for years. This had been what we were meant to do, to be, from the beginning.
“I claim you,” he said, but it wasn’t his voice. It sounded foreign, unreal.
“And I claim you,” I mimicked, not sure why I sounded so sure, so ethereal.
And then, with Bane holding me tight, with our nexuses melding together, merging, in the red glow of togetherness, the door flew open and I felt myself being dragged away, torn from his arms, the sensation of Bane’s energy, his warmth slipping further and further away from me.
“No! Don’t take her!”
“No, son. Don’t fight me.” Carter Grant held Bane back as my father kept a tight arm around my waist. “Lundi, I told you this would happen. You promised. That was the only reason I let him stay in this damn class. You said you could control her pull.”
“And I will, damn it, Carter. I will.” Then my father was holding me, brushing his fingers over my temple, soothing. “Take the memory, Janiver,
mon petite bebe
. Take it from him so he will not suffer.”
Bane’s face was a mixture of shock and despair, and his uncle whispered continuously in his ear, words that sounded old, foreign. It had to be the only thing keeping Bane steady. “It’s for the best, Janiver,” Carter told me. But his smile was really a sneer and the way he looked at me, looked through me made my stomach twist.
“Janiver, please,
mon pet
. For the good of the Cove. Take his memories.” My father pulled me close, pressed his mouth against my ear so only I could hear him speak. “Stay with him and your life will not be your own.”
Bile rose quick in my throat and my father stumbled when I jerked against his hold. But he wasn’t wrong. Some part of me knew that, saw it in the fear and frantic way Carter held Bane. There was desperation in the old wizard’s features that I had never seen before.
And Bane, I could not take the fear working in his eyes. I could not let that shock, the horror that etched into his features settle too deeply. It had felt like bliss when our nexuses melded. It had been safe and home and secure, but who was I to take all of that and leave none for anyone else? My home was wherever my family was. My safety, my happiness would come only when theirs did. Who was I to take that from them? From everyone in Crimson Cove?
“Don’t be greedy,” Carter said, letting Bane come to me.
I glanced at the old wizard once, hating him, despising everything about him. “Leave us.”
“Janiver…”
“Papa, if you want me to take his memories, I’ll do it in private.” My father came to my side, stood next to Carter as both men glared at me. “Leave us,” I repeated, keeping my attention on Bane. Finally, they did.
“Come here,” I told Bane, and he obeyed, his head likely still compromised by whatever manipulative hex his uncle had done to him.
But Bane still kissed me, looping his arms around me, his mouth wide and eager against mine. For a few more moments, I let myself enjoy the taste and feel of him. He was mine, no matter what they’d make him do, who they’d make him marry, I would keep Bane in my heart, claim him. She, whoever she was to be, would never have him, not all of him.
And as he pulled me close, I flitted through the memory of the day, grabbing the mark of our melding, taking from him the touch and taste and feel of me against him.
There was a moment, small, microscopic, where Bane’s hands fell away and I stayed close to his chest. It was like watching him wake up…slow, confused until he blinked, his expression shifting from worry to alarm and then reorganization when his gaze landed on my face.
He lowered his eyes, until they stopped on my hand resting on his chest. I could still taste him on my tongue. My scalp ached where he’d pulled on my hair. My mouth was still swollen from his kisses. And now I had to pretend that none of these things were real. I had to ignore them completely.
“Jani?” he asked, frowning when he looked back up at me. “What’s happening?”
Hell, I’d never see him again and I would not walk away completely without him remembering at least something about me.
“I’m sorry, Bane.”
“For what?”
I exhaled, relaxing when he didn’t try to fight off my hand on his face. “This,” I told him and kissed Bane. I poured into that kiss everything that I’d felt for nine months, everything I’d keep safe in my memory from the afternoon we’d spent together in that classroom.
He didn’t fight me, didn’t pull away and I tried not to smile or think too much about how fiercely he kissed me back. I pulled away before Bane could reject me, taking three steps back with my gaze planted firmly on his features.
“What was that?” he asked, smirking.
“That,” I said, picking up my bag from the floor, “was me saying ‘have a good life, Bane Iles.’”
He frowned, disappointment and confusion keeping him immobile, and I turned and left him in that classroom, alone with only the scent of my perfume and the memory of one single kiss.
The movement around us shifted and my shield dropped as the time sped back up. Before I could blink, before I could walk to Bane and explain why I’d let my father and his uncle convince me to take his memories, my sister and brother were at my side, hugging me, holding me and Ethan and Trevor ushered Bane away from the crowd, passing along explanations of a missing panther from the parish zoo as they left the town center.
He paused only for a second, glancing back at me and I hated the expression on his face. It looked like anger. It looked like pain. It looked exactly like goodbye.
The house was a hundred years old Victorian that sat on the edge of Crimson Cove. Outside what had been my childhood bedroom on Lake Pontchartrain and the shoreline that dipped close to Mandeville dotted along the horizon. Even as October ended and the cool snap of fall brought the drop in temperatures and the holiday season, the Cove shone like something picturesque—a Thomas Kincaid wet dream of perfection that had nothing to do with good fortune and everything to do with the pixy dust and fey charms planted in the ground and along the Cove over two hundred years ago.
Charmed herbology or not, I’d always loved the view from my old bedroom window. That had not changed since I’d been gone.
“I wish you’d stay.” Mai’s voice carried from the door where she leaned against the frame. She looked pretty that morning with her hair around her heart shaped face and the light breeze from the window in front of me blowing her bangs against her forehead. My twin walked into the room, pulling her sweater tight around her thin waist and reached for the opened window. “You don’t have to worry about Papa. You can stay with me.” Mai closed the window, locking it before she sat on the seat in front of the white frame. “I had the electricity turned back on and took it off the market.”
“Not selling?”
She shook her head, shrugging when I smiled at her. “It’s a nice little place, just big enough for me and, you know, anyone else who might come along.”
“Anyone like…”
“No one in particular.” But I caught the quick blush on her smooth cheeks and had heard her talking until three a.m. on her cell just outside the ledge that joined her room and mine. The name Lennon and a few giggles had flowed frequently from her mouth.
“You’re a terrible liar, Mai. Just god awful.”
“It’s not serious,” she promised stopping me when I tried walking away from that view. “And you didn’t answer me. Stay with me. Don’t go back to New York just yet.”
She let me pat her hand but didn’t stop me when I returned to the bed and the open suitcase sitting on top of it. “There’s nothing for me here or there, sis.”
“We’re here.”
“And you’re wherever I need you, Mai.” The bed shook when I sat on it and let my sister watch me fold and unfold my socks. “Me not being in the Cove doesn’t stop me from having you or Sam in my life.”
“And Papa?” Mai’s voice was low when she asked that, as though she knew she shouldn’t but still needed to. “He’s your father, Jani and he loves you.”
“I’m not so sure about that.” Almost on cue, the creak behind me at the door brought my attention away from socks to the old wizard who stood at the threshold with his hands deep in his pockets looking between me and Mai.
Papa looked a good deal older that morning than he had when I’d returned less than two weeks before. He seemed to walk slower, take steps that were more cautious, and I didn’t know if that had anything to do with the drunken phone calls or half-attempted visits Bane had made a few days after the Elam was restored to the amulet. Bane had made threats, I’d heard a few of those myself and, according to Sam, they were all leveled at Papa.
“
Chérie
,” Papa said to Mai, “let me speak to your sister for a little bit.” And the little coward left me alone with the old wizard, not bothering to shoot an apologetic smile my way as she left. It didn’t matter. I’d be gone in the morning and wouldn’t have to bother with hearing his excuses again. They’d come, I knew, but I’d make certain this would be the last of them that darkened my ears.
“Say what you will.”
“
Bebe
…”
“Don’t bother with sweet talk, Papa. It won’t work.”
He stood next to me, not watching, not doing anything but keeping his gaze forward, like mine, on the horizon and the shoreline beyond the window.
“I have made many mistakes, Janiver.” This wasn’t new information and it wasn’t something he hadn’t already said to me. “Samedi, Mai, what they did to you, was for your protection.”
“I know that, Papa.” I could no more stay mad at my siblings than I could at Bane. All of them made efforts to protect me despite what I’d been convinced of doing. Sam wanted me with Bane. He wanted us both happy because he had known what that meant once. My brother had held something perfect, a few months of bliss that I would likely never get the chance to understand. He’d still wanted me to have a taste of that. “To see what that feels like,” he’d told me the night before. “I wanted you to know what I still dream about every night, sis.”
Mai only kept what she knew from me because she knew how it would hurt me to know what our father had done my whole life, just to keep Carter Grant happy.
But my father, I could not forgive.
“You’re angry with me, I know this. You may well keep that anger for a long time,
bebe
.” His gaze felt heavy on the top of my head but I wouldn’t look at him. I wasn’t sure I could keep from lashing out if I did. Instead of pushing the issue, my father sat behind me on the bed and the mattress dipped when he rested his elbows on his knees. “I came here trying to build a life, trying like hell to make something of myself. The only way I knew to do that was to serve the higher covens, to hide away the accidents our folk made from the mortals. I suppose I’ve grown so used to serving them, to doing their bidding that I forgot what it was not to agree when they ask too much.”
“Even if it means your child’s happiness?”
Papa turned to me then, quick, as though my question was an accusation he hadn’t prepared for. It was a long while before he answered, before he moved at all but finally, the bed shook again and the springs creaked when he stood. “
Oui
,” he said, sounding defeated. “Even then.” His feet tapped against the hardwood as he headed for the door but Papa stopped short, just near the threshold. “One day, Janiver, I hope you forgive me.”
“One day, Papa, I hope I won’t need to.”
When that door closed behind him, when I knew that Mai would leave me to my packing, that no one would bother trying to convince me not to leave, only then did I let the tears start and leave quiet tracks down my face. I came to the window seat wishing I could swim out into that lake, that the lines would still sing to me out there as loudly as they had just a week before. There was quick comfort in their song and the temptation that song offered. But I had quieted the music by replacing the Elam, tempering the chaos the lines promised to bring. I missed it, that wild, raw energy. I missed the sweet crackle of its power as climbed closer and closer toward it in the woods.
And gods how I missed Bane. His smell, his touch, that sweet, thick laugh of his. I missed him like an amputated limb, like something I always had but never really thought to appreciate until it was gone.
Since he’d shown up drunk and in a rage on my father’s front stoop, only to have Trevor and a few coven guards dragging him off to parts unknown, I hadn’t heard from him at all. Neither had Sam. Neither had anyone we knew.
Hamill, who apparently hadn’t been a traitor after all, but had been responsible for the sledgehammer in the store window, had taken, a bit begrudgingly, a position with my father’s business; comeuppance, Mai mentioned Papa saying, for the awful way Ronan had handled the Donaldson arrest. But even in the brief moments Hamill had passed me in the kitchen two nights ago, he hadn’t mentioned Bane or what had become of him.
It wasn’t until this morning, in fact, that I knew what the day would bring or why the town had gone so busy with activity.
“A wedding,” I’d overheard Mai telling Sam as they sat down to breakfast. “Last minute.” And then my sister saw me watching her, saw what must have been likely a bit of devastation on my features because she darted to me, pulled me to her chest and held me. “Oh, Jani,” she said, “you are the only person I know who makes heartache look good.”
I hadn’t had a drink in weeks. Not since the night Mai and I watched Trevor leading a drunken Bane away from my father’s house. We’d destroyed a bottle of Bourbon and I hadn’t bothered with it since. It burned too much now.
When I looked away from the shoreline of Lake Pontchartrain, when the bells from St. Andreas sounded, ringing in another joined upper coven match, I felt sick. We had not been invited, luckily, and as the bells echoed around the Cove and the voices beyond this old Victorian laughed and congratulated each other and went on as though nothing was out of sync, as though my heart wasn’t fracturing into minuscule pieces so vast, so varied that it had no hope of ever being repaired, I packed my bags and decided to leave. Not for the city where my nexus would be blocked from the sweet, constant heartbeat of the ley lines, not for my sister’s cottage on the outskirts of the Cove where on any given day I could happen upon the man my fractured heart wanted so desperately to claim over and over.
I packed my bags and made for the beach and the tiny cottage I renamed L’Abri Reach. The Shelter Reach.