Zane cleared his throat behind me. I glanced at him in the oval-shaped bathroom mirror. He was leaning against the doorframe with his arms and ankles crossed, looking back at me.
He was freshly showered, his thick, wavy hair damp and finger-combed back. He and Edward had halted their search for a home, thanks to all of this, deciding instead that it might be safer to remain at the Haunted Boot with Glenda and Oswald for the time being.
Glenda had warded her home with high-level fae runes and charms, keeping any and all whom she didn’t already know and trust away. It was probably the safest place for them right now, especially since I was already beginning to doubt myself.
I’d just come back from yet another town hall meeting. For the safety of all involved, we’d requested none of the banshees come this time, not that we’d expected trouble, but trouble seemed to find us lately. The reason for the meeting had been simple. After yet another cursing, the questions had come in fast and furious. Who had done this thing and why?
I’d been forced to tell everyone what I’d seen take place at the diner when Sage had come in. I’d wrung my hands, feeling strangely guilty about it, especially seeing her standing so silent beside my aunts. Not once had she looked at me or even tried to defend her actions, but even so, I was doubting that I’d seen what I thought I’d seen—that she’d somehow played an active role in all of this.
But Sage hadn’t acted like a dark witch ready to do battle at so easily being caught. There had been absolutely nothing in her manner to even implicate she meant anyone harm. In fact, most of her days were spent in my aunts’ backyard, looking up at the trees as she watched the ravens and squirrels play. She’d made no effort to befriend anyone in town and kept mostly to herself. Most days, it was just her and Malachite, and occasionally Zane when he popped in for a quick visit. I felt rather badly that I’d not yet introduced myself to her and that she actually knew more about Zane—who wasn’t even a true member of Blue Moon Bay—than she knew about anybody else.
Plus, I still had the nagging idea that every time we tried to get a feel for just what kind of paranormal creature she was, we hit a giant brick wall. Even though we could feel the eternal fire burning through her core, she was human. Or at least that was what all my aunts’ tests had suggested thus far.
Prior to tonight’s meeting, my aunts had run Sage through the gamut, hoping to determine just what she was so that we could make a more accurate judgment call. They’d started at the beginning and had worked their way down from most typical paranormal types to the atypical. First, they’d given her blood to drink, which she’d thrown up everywhere. She was definitely no vampire. They’d asked her to cast the simplest of spells—lighting a candle with thought, something even a kindergarten-level witch could do—and there’d been nothing but crickets. They’d stripped her naked under the light of the full moon and tossed down three slabs of raw beef heart. Zilch. Coco had told us weeks ago that she’d not scented shifter in the girl, but we’d been desperate enough to try anything.
I was fairly certain she was no fae since she could hold on to iron just fine. So what was she? Human? That was the only reasonable explanation we could give. Yet she certainly wasn’t that either. We could all feel it. Everyone who’d come around her had said the same thing—there was an energy about her, something that sparked and burned and pushed against us like a gently rolling wave. But that wave was misleading because though it appeared calm and peaceful, there was something expansive and endlessly bottomless just behind it where we couldn’t quite get a handle on it.
But none of us quite knew what it was either.
It wasn’t normal that a familiar like Malachite—the orneriest cuss I’d ever had the misfortune of calling my own—could have so quickly taken a shine to her. Familiars weren’t like regular animals. Not all felines, amphibians, reptiles, or even birds could truly be called familiars. Only those drawn to the fiery core within us witches were actual familiars. And as mean as Malachite was, he was certainly a powerful familiar. I was a strong witch, but even I hadn’t been enough to keep his esteem. So it made no sense at all that he would cling as he did to Sage unless there was much more to her than met the eye.
“You did what you had to do, Zinnia. You told the truth.”
I twisted my lips, releasing a bitter sigh. “I suppose, though the telling of it made me feel awful, like I was betraying her somehow, which makes no sense, I know.” I gave a soft, self-effacing laugh and shook my head. “I’m a mess, that’s what I am.”
“You’re not a mess, Zinnia. You’re just stressed out. We all are. No one can blame you for feeling how you feel. This is confusing to us all.”
I twisted my lips but tossed him a grateful nod. “You’re too good to me, Zane Huntington.”
He smiled softly back, but his face was troubled. Though he was encouraging me, I knew he felt the tension of all of this too. No doubt he was worrying about his son and the possibility of this fate happening to them both.
“Edward will be safe, Zane, no matter what I have to do to make it so.”
He frowned. “I believe you, Zinnia.”
I swallowed. “Have you... have you thought of maybe leaving for a while? You and Edward? Just until this passes?”
His eyes locked on mine. His shoulders were visibly tense. “I won’t lie and say that I haven’t thought about it, because I have. I want to protect Edward at all costs. But I can’t leave you, knowing I run the risk of never finding you again if I do. I figure I was brought here for a reason, Edward and me. And if that’s the case, then we’re gonna be all right. We’re all gonna be all right.”
The last he said for me, and I nodded softly, feeling so guilty that I was the reason he was choosing to stay. A better woman would have told him to pack up and get out. But he was right. The veil could close over us at any time with no warning whatsoever. And if he were out of Blue Moon, he would never find his way back again.
“I should tell you to go,” I whispered. “If I was any kind of a good woman, I would tell you both to go.”
He walked over to my side and knelt beside me until his face was even with mine. I stared deep into his soulful blue eyes, and he shook his head slowly.
“Sometimes you just have to have faith, Zinnia. When I saw you and I thought you were gone for good, I knew I couldn’t leave you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
My heart trembled, and I held my breath, hardly able to take a steady one anyway. “I... I think so.”
He brushed his fingers softly down my cheek, and my pulse roared in my ears. “Good,” he whispered.
Wetting my lips from nerves, I looked back at my friend but couldn’t seem to stop from shivering. I was going to keep them both safe, no matter what. I would find a way to make sure Zane’s trust in me wasn’t in vain.
I patted Meri’s hand, watching the play of water upon her scales and how it made them twinkle like lambent diamond dust in the low-lit room.
Her gills breathed. The sound was oddly peaceful.
I gently replaced her hand in the tub and stood, rolling my neck from side to side.
My aunts had tried all their spells, and considering they were far stronger than I was, I knew any more attempts were positively useless on my part. There was nothing I could do better than them. Nothing. But I was stubborn, a streak I’d inherited from Aunt Hyacinth, no doubt. So I’d tried the meager spells at my disposal—animation spells, Illusion spells, transfiguration spells. They’d been completely useless. But if I could have gotten them to work, then maybe it would have indicated the sleeping curse was weakening.
Nothin’ doin’, of course.
After that, I’d held Lapis for an hour, hoping that maybe my touch would burrow through that spell and wake her up, sort of like true love’s kiss in the fairy tales. It was rather silly, I knew, but I was at my wit’s end and willing to try just about anything. But holding her was like trying to cuddle a chunk of unmalleable concrete. Gwenny was in full-on rigor, her long
neck and wings extended as they had been when she’d fallen, so holding her was an absolute no go for me. More than anything, I felt utterly miserable and useless right now.
Pulling me into his warm chest once I’d laid my kitty back down, Zane hugged me tight and kissed the crown of my head. “What are you doing right now?”
I snorted, melting into his soapy-smelling embrace as the tension of the day began to slowly melt out of me. He gave magical hugs.
“Not a blasted thing.”
“Let’s go to the diner, then. You always love working.” He peered at me, worry for me tight between his brows.
I shook my head. “I can’t. I just can’t. Twice now it’s happened in my diner.” I held up two fingers. “Twice, Zane. Going back into that place breaks me out in hives.”
“But you’ve caught her, right? It’s over, surely.”
“Did I?” I shook my head. “I’m not so sure. I just don’t know. Nobody really knows anything about Sage, do they? I mean you’ve talked with her. What’s her number?”
He frowned and shook his head. “What? I never asked. I don’t think she has a phone anyway.”
I chuckled. “No, I mean, what’s her measure? What have you learned about her?”
He led me into my aunty’s living room. Everything was as it had always been. The furniture was dusted and polished, but the couch cushions were a little faded with age. The shelves were full of antique books and leather-bound first-edition classics. There were knickknacks and rolls of parchment paper with ancient spells written upon them. Ink and quills covered every nook and cranny. Ravens were cawing crankily from their perches on the rafters overhead as they fought for the last bits of a field mouse they’d caught earlier. And Aunt Vi’s cauldron was bubbling away in the hearth, as it always was, but this time she wasn’t brewing a potion. She was boiling her underthings.
There was a comfortable familiarity that had never failed to soothe me before in this place, but it wasn’t tonight. Tonight, I felt restless, edgy.
And I hated it.
Zane sat me down in front of the fire then took the seat beside me. Wrapping an arm around my shoulders, he tugged me into his side.
“We can go for a walk if you’d like. Glenda said she didn’t mind watching Edward for a bit longer.”
I glanced at him. “She seems awfully keen on Edward, does she not?”
He nodded, but there was a soft smile on his lips. “You should see how she looks at him.” He smiled softly to himself, his eyes shining with something that looked a lot like affection.
I thinned my lips, not because I didn’t trust Glenda. I did. I honestly did. We all had our pasts. Witches were mistresses of the dark lord and liked to dance naked beneath the light of a full moon as they killed and slaughtered innocent children. At least those were the stories that had been told about us during the days of the great witch hunt. Of course, those accounts were preposterous and silly. The stories about witches were roughly ninety percent fiction and only ten percent fact. So much of who we were and what we really stood for was unknown to the general public.
But I happened to know that many of the tales told about the fae were actually true.
The story of the changelings was in fact very, very true. The fae would fall in love with a human child and, in order to keep them forever, would trade a sickly, weak fae child in exchange. The children would look exactly the same. The only difference was a small mark on the inside of the child’s wrist, the fae’s mark. And eventually that sick fae babe would wither away and die, leaving the parents bereft, never knowing that their true child lived on forever with a faery.
Blue Moon Bay wasn’t like that. We were no longer those kinds of creatures.
But we were now that the sleeping curse had begun felling those near and dear to me, one by one.
I dropped my head into my hands and groaned. “I’m utterly useless here. What am I even doing here? My aunts tried all they could. What in the blue blazes made me think I could do any better than them?”
“Hey now,” he said in a gruff tone, “look at me.”
I shook my head and squeezed my eyes tightly shut, not wanting to look because I knew he would tell me I could figure out how to help them. But he was wrong. I couldn’t do this. I simply couldn’t. Sometimes it felt as if everything I touched was doomed to failure. And this was just another reminder of it.
“Zinnia Rose Thorne,” he said sharply. “Look at me now.”
Thrusting out my chin mulishly, I looked from between my fingers.
He shook his head with a small, infuriating grin. “Witch, you are maddening, do you know that?”
I snorted. “Applesauce. Tell me something I don’t already know.”
He laughed, but the sound was a mixture of frustrated humor. “God above. Just give me your pretty hand already.”
I sighed but did as he asked. And when my palm slid into his, I felt myself grudgingly start to relax. What could I say? There was something calming about Zane even when I didn’t want there to be. Sometimes, it felt good to wallow, and it felt good to self-deprecate. That sounded terrible, but it was the truth. There were times I just wasn’t ready to be perky and cheerful, and this was one of those times.
But he was worried, and I didn’t want that for him either. Zane had lost so much in his life, and the last thing he needed was any more stress.
I tapped his chest. “Everything’s Jake. Don’t worry about me, professor. I’ll be just fine.”
He grinned, leaned forward, and kissed my forehead hard. “I love how odd you speak, but you will not sway me tonight, Zinny. I’ve seen you going out of your mind with worry the past few days, and enough’s enough. You hear me? You are a freaking brilliant witch.”
I lifted my brows. “If that were true, I’d have woken them up by now. I’d have at least made some kind of progress.”
He shook his head hard, clutching my fingers tight. “You can’t put that kind of pressure on yourself. It’s not healthy. I did that when Elle died. If I’d only caught the signs sooner, maybe she’d still be with us. If I’d only loved her more, harder... surely I’d have known she was dying right in front of me. Maybe I just hadn’t loved her enough. Maybe—”
I twisted in my seat to face him and shook my head. “Zane, that’s not true. You know that’s not true. I saw you when you found the echo of her in Illusion. You loved her fiercely. You still do. Sometimes bad things just happen...” My words trailed off as I realized what he’d been doing, and I thinned my lips at his smug look.
“My point exactly. You are a damned fine witch.” He traced my cheek with his finger.
I trembled at his touch even as guilt filled me.
“You gave me what I didn’t know I needed,” he said, his voice whisper light. “You gave me closure. You helped me breathe. That doesn’t happen for all of us. Sometimes people get sick, and they die, and we never get the chance to tell them that last goodbye or let them know just how much we love them. But you gave me and Edward the impossible. You. Not your aunts. Not anyone else. But you...”
He continued talking, but my mind had begun spinning, thinking about that night and just how much things had changed for us both since then.
What he’d seen had not been Elle. At least I was ninety-nine percent certain of that. But whatever it had or hadn’t been, the end result had been the same. There’d been closure for him, a resolution and a place for all that pain to finally be let go.
For him and Edward both.
And as I thought of Elle, I thought about another resident of Blue Moon—Annabelle Lee, who’d only just recently found her own mate. She was a ghost and had been stuck in the haunted house on the hill ever since her death because she too had been unable to let go of her past.
Aunty Cinth and I had had to create a spell that would take her back into her memories so that she could confront the demons holding her bound, making it possible for her to finally decide to stay or go.
I frowned, curling my hands in my
lap, feeling a fissure of a thought trying to worm its way loose in my mind. Excitement spiked with adrenaline through my veins.
I blinked, trying to figure out what it was I was missing.
“Sometimes, it’s just the past that holds us bound, you know?” Zane was clearly not aware that I’d checked out a while ago.
“Past that holds us bound,” I muttered.
“Hmm? What?” He went still, tipping his chin forward, and I felt his eyes press hard into me.
I looked up at him, on the cusp of solving the impossible riddle. I wet my lips and jumped to my feet. Zane looked at me as if I’d lost my ever-loving mind.
“Zinny?” he whispered.
I shook my head, pacing back and forth. “The past. It’s the past, Zane.” I smiled, then I laughed, relief washing through me so hard that tears started to squeeze from the corners of my eyes. “Dear gods, you’re brilliant!” Leaning forward, I took his cheeks in my hands and planted a hard smack right on his kisser.
He laughed, wrapping a loose arm around my middle. “You’re welcome?”
“Eureka! Goddess above!” I helped him to stand and twirled around him, causing the hem of my skirt to loop about my calves in a silky undulation. “You did it. I think you’ve cracked the code. I know what to do.”
“Wait.” He cocked his head, looking adorably confused and perplexed by my sudden and no doubt odd behavior. “What did I crack exactly?”
I clapped my hands as I slid my stocking feet back into my black heels. “The past, Zane. It’s in the past. By the bloody gods, there’s our answer. We go back in time—”
“Through Illusion? Like what you did for me with Elle?” He scratched at his chin with his long fingers.
“No.” I shook my head, brushing a loose strand of limp auburn hair out of my eyes. “No. Not Illusion. Mirror can’t help us with this. Mirror isn’t grounded in reality. What we need is the real thing. You remember a couple of weeks ago when I went to Annabelle Lee’s house and helped my aunty craft a spell to unlock Annabelle’s past?”