Witches' Waves (17 page)

As he did, Meaghan spoke. “The sea's not angry anymore. I've seen ahead to tomorrow and the next day, and there won't be big problems because we accidentally screwed up the weather.”

Her words confirmed what he already suspected. “You're not just predicting what will probably happen based on what the ocean is doing now, like Kyle and I can,” he said in awe. “You're using visions. Controlled visions, not ones that come out of nowhere and hurt you.”

Meaghan turned toward his voice, and once again he was struck by how focused her blind eyes seemed. She nodded, her face pale and drawn from the energy she'd expended. “Is that all right? I'm not doing something wrong, am I?”

“Of course not! It's genius for someone with your powers. I'm impressed you were able to get that kind of control, and frankly I'm surprised you dared to try. Visions suck, from what I understand, and yours usually hurt you.”

She shrugged and seemed to struggle for words. After a long time silent except for mumbled
um
s, she said, “I was so scared there'd be damage or someone would drown because we both freaked out that I forgot to be afraid of the visions. I wasn't sure it would even work to try to see something specific in the very near future, but I could. And it didn't hurt.”

Deck tried to come up with something wise to say. Kyle, to his surprise, got there first. “Maybe it didn't hurt because there were no people in the vision, just water and waveforms and wind. No emotions.”

“Nothing that we can harm, and if it harms us, it's not out of malice.” Meaghan smiled and the smile made Deck shudder. It reminded him of Elissa's face when she talked about Shaw. “No one I can betray.”

The eerie smile faded as suddenly as it appeared. Meaghan's body sagged, and it looked like she was fighting off tears of exhaustion. Deck put his arms around her and she snuggled into his chest. Kyle wrapped his arms around her from the other side and Deck expanded his embrace to include the otter dual as well, as best he could.

“Ground,” he reminded Meaghan, partly because he'd almost forgotten himself. She nodded against his chest and he sensed her energy moving, some of the magic grounding out to earth and ocean. It was quiet except for their breath and the sound of the waves in the distance, a soft shushing now after the earlier crash and boom.

Deck's lack of control had kicked in what promised to be a major coastal storm—and Meaghan and Kyle had helped him get his control back and dissipate the storm before it became one for the history books. Part of Deck felt shattered by what he'd done, by how close he'd come to a real disaster.

But part of him felt more whole than he ever had. Sure, his family had jumped in to solve the problem—it was what Donovans did—but once they figured out what happened, he was sure he'd be hearing about his screwup for years because that was also what Donovans did. Meaghan and Kyle wouldn't do that.

And while they'd finished their work, his magic still twined with Meaghan's, Kyle's strong dual energy buoyed them both up, helping them recharge after expending so much power. Deck's skin tingled everywhere he touched Meaghan or Kyle. It wasn't sexual, not after what they'd just been through, but it was sensual on a profound level, sensual and exciting, like surfing on a warm, beautiful day when the water and air were both caresses. Like Meaghan's energy and Kyle's having a party on his skin.

Having a party.

Dancing.

And when he looked with his witch sight, slender silver cords connected him to both Meaghan and Kyle. Similar cords connected them to each other.

“Powers!” he exclaimed, fracturing the quiet.

“What?” Meaghan looked up. She looked mildly concerned, but her voice was mellow, as if she knew on an instinctive level what was happening.

Which she might, on some level, considering her powers and what he was about to say.

“My magic is dancing.” He repeated it louder, “My magic is fucking dancing on my skin. You two…you're making my magic dance.”

Over Meaghan's head, Kyle raised one eyebrow. “That's good, right? It sounds fun in an ‘it tickles but I like it' way, but you don't seem one hundred percent happy about it.”

“It's good. It's great. It's…complicated. But not like the Facebook status, because that usually means ‘messed up' and this isn't. It's literally complicated.” He made himself smile, though he wasn't sure whether he wanted to grin like an idiot, weep or both.

“Why is it complicated?” Meaghan asked. “It seems simple enough. I love touching you guys and being touched by you and I think my magic is happy about it too. So it's making my skin supersensitive and tingly. Has been for a while now. In fact, every time I kiss or touch the two of you at the same time I feel like I'm taking a bath in champagne.”

Meaghan was feeling it too, which was simultaneously
oh wow
and
oh hell
. It wasn't some unusual magical side effect that had nothing to do with Meaghan and Kyle and the relationship developing between them.

Oh wow
and
oh hell
because having a committed relationship with one person was hard enough and it looked like destiny and his magic wanted him to have a committed relationship with two people.

Oh wow
and
oh hell
because the Donovans had a long tradition of monogamy, all tangled up in complex, and often valid, magical justifications. Deck enjoyed thumbing his nose at the more staid family traditions but he really didn't want that level of angst with his parents, who hadn't quite forgiven Elissa and Paul for winding up with two partners each.

Oh wow
and
oh hell
because he couldn't imagine two more wonderful people than Kyle and Meaghan to share the rest of his life—but Meaghan might not be there to share it for long unless his relatives could pull some magic out of the ether to cure her.

He realized he'd stayed quiet for far too long when Kyle slipped out of the group hug, circled around and smacked him on the back of the head. “Hey, asshole, you're freaking Meaghan out. You're freaking
me
out and that takes work. What's going on?”

Deck reluctantly relinquished Meaghan. “I can explain…sort of…but we should probably put our clothes on. It's easier to talk about clothes-off stuff with your clothes on. Less distracting. And this will definitely involve talking about clothes-off stuff.”

They ended up in the living room, Deck and Kyle perched at opposite ends of the couch, Meaghan curled up on the big, broken-down easy chair. Deck wanted them all on the sofa, or maybe sprawled on pillows on the floor in a big, loving pile, but he wasn't sure it was a good idea to touch them, not with red magic so potent in the air and on his skin.

Meaghan was wearing Kyle's shirt, since her own clothes were still sodden, and a pair of Deck's sweats. She looked like a kid playing dress-up in oversized men's clothes, and she still looked distractingly good, her hair in tangled ringlets around her narrow face. Kyle was shirtless and barefoot, and that was even more distracting.

But Deck soldiered on and explained about dancing magic and what it meant for witches: how it meant you'd found your ideal magical partner as well as a good shot at the right life partner. “I was disappointed when it didn't dance for you,” he conceded, looking at Kyle. “Once I decided I was ready to give you what you wanted, I hoped that my magic would chime in and say you were the one. But I guess it didn't because you're one of the two. Also it usually happens for the first time during sex and for us it happened after pulling off big magic. That makes more sense in some ways, but it's not how it usually happens. Maybe it worked that way because sex has always been pretty straightforward for me and magic isn't, so it was the bigger deal.”

He held his breath, waiting for a reaction. Kyle wasn't a witch. He might take it badly that the magic hadn't accepted him right away. Instead, he asked a smart question. “What do you mean about a ‘good shot at the right life partner'?”

“The old farts won't admit it, but you can have a good romantic match without the magic connecting. My aunt Bathsheba and her husband are a great couple but their magic doesn't sync, so they've never married by Donovan rite. So the fact the magic thing didn't spark with you didn't mean we couldn't have something good. It just wasn't guaranteed.”

“And since it wasn't guaranteed you were scared shitless of screwing up and hurting us both, and then of hurting the three of us.” Amazingly, Kyle's voice held only a hint of annoyance and far more compassion. After he said it, he leaned over and kissed Deck's lips, a fleeting, gentle contact that set the magic dancing again. He then took three steps, did the same to Meaghan and settled on the floor between the two of them, one hand on Deck's calf, one on Meaghan's.

His aura shifted closer to otter shaped, and Deck suspected Kyle's otterside was imagining the three of them as otters, floating together, paw in paw in paw, so the waves wouldn't separate them.

This was what Kyle had needed all along, only better with Meaghan in the mix. He might have a need to settle down, rare for his kind, but he was still a bi switch and two partners would definitely be better than one for him.

And frankly, it was the best of both worlds for Deck as well, even if as a bisexual Donovan, “the best of both worlds” romantically speaking had always seemed unlikely.

“You wanted forever from the start. That's scary enough for any guy, but as a witch I should be able to know if I can promise forever and I didn't. I'm still scared shitless, but at least I know the magic agrees that we're a good idea.”

Meaghan managed a shy giggle. “Although after that storm, I can see why you're nervous about trusting the magic. I'm not so keen on trusting mine right now either, because apparently you bring Shaw or the Agency up and I go nuts and we're going to have to talk about the Agency if we're going to beat them.” She did that freaky thing again where she turned from Deck to Kyle with uncanny accuracy, not quite meeting their gaze, but getting closer than you'd expect a blind person to do. “But if that dancing feeling is my magic hitting me with a clue-by-four that I've met the right people…that would explain why I had a vision of being with the two of you before we'd even met.”

“What?” Deck and Kyle exclaimed simultaneously.

“I had a vision of making love with the two of you in the water. I thought it was just a vivid dream at the time, because I'd been listening to a book that had two guys and one woman in a relationship. When I met you both, I suspected it hadn't been a dream, but I couldn't trust the way I felt. I was so happy you were all having naughty thoughts about me, but knowing it's more…wow.”

She smiled like a floodlight illuminating the room. And then she began to cry, but though tears poured down her thin cheeks, she was still smiling. “I can't promise you forever. But I promise you what time I have. And if magic or medicine has a way to make that time longer, I'll seize every minute I can so I can share them with you both.”

“You better. You damn well better,” Kyle growled. “Or I'll find a shaman who can jump to the Otherside and spank you.”

Through her tears, Meaghan laughed. “Maybe I'd like that. The spanking part, not the afterlife part or the random shaman part. Game to try sometime.”

Kyle looked at Deck and whispered, barely audibly,
“What the… After what she's been through…”

“I can hear you,” she said, “Blind people tend to hear better than sighted ones, I think, so whispering doesn't help.” By now she wasn't crying, and when she stood and put her hands on her hips, Deck couldn't help thinking their waiflike witch looked as kick-ass and stubborn as any of his female relatives. The look on her face, in fact, would have done his late great-aunt Jocelyn proud, and she was so stubborn her ghost regularly popped in to keep plaguing her living relatives. “I know you're worried about me and sex because of Shaw. And if I get cured of the thing that's eating my brain literally, I promise I'll get therapy for the things that may try to eat it metaphorically. That's what you do when you've been through trauma, right?”

Deck started to nod, remembered she couldn't see him and said, “We usually work with shamans, though. Normy therapists don't understand when your trauma involves three-headed kangaroos from another dimension trying to destroy the world.”

Meaghan looked like she wasn't sure if she should laugh at that or take it seriously. Which might be her inexperience with humor or might be that at some point the Agency
had
dealt with dangerous alien kangaroos. “Okay, a shaman then. But I'm not going to let Shaw own my body and my heart in the meantime. I'm not naive enough to think that having good sex with people I love will miraculously erase manipulative sex with a bad man, let alone my whole fucked-up past. Sometimes something will trigger memories and you guys will have to talk me down. But good times will start balancing the bad ones, even if they can't erase them. And, damn it, I've earned some good times.”

Love. He and Kyle had talked around the word, both with each other and now. He'd made a commitment to them both without actually saying that scary four-letter word. It seemed too soon, even with the magic doing the tango all over his skin.

But Meaghan said it as if it was the simplest thing in the word.

And that made him believe it was.

“You are so brave,” he managed to say. “Oh Lord and Lady, I barely know you, Meaghan, but I love you. And, Kyle…I'm sorry. I ran so hard because I was falling for you and it scared the shit out of me.”

Kyle squeezed his ankle. “I think I knew that even when we were apart, but I couldn't say anything without scaring you even more. Humans make everything so complicated. But let me explain this in short words even witches can understand. I'm crazy about you both. I'm yours, Deck. I have been since the first time you touched me. Meaghan, the ocean gave you to me, so I feel like you're mine. And you and Deck love each other too. Anything else is details.” He shrugged. “Huge, terrifying, life-threatening details, sure, but we can get back to trying to figure those out in the morning. I want to hold you both. Want to sleep in a big, tangled pile. Maybe wake up around dawn and make love.”