Darkness Falls

  I managed an Oh, please kind of nonchalant grin, my hundreds of years of lying to people, especially myself, coming in useful. “I wish!” I snorted. I waved my hand dramatically. “Shazam! That Oreo is mine!” I gave a casual little laugh.

  Meriwether looked at me for a few more moments, clearly replaying the incident in her head, wondering whether to pursue it, wondering if she had in fact seen anything. I kept my face unconcerned and went to fetch the broom and dustpan. She was gone when I returned, and I started sweeping everything up.

  But I was quaking, my panicked wail sounding loud to my ears alone. I had made magick outside of River’s property. Dark magick. It was very possible that someone, an immortal, could pick up on its energy and recognize me in its patterns. Someone like Incy.

  I tried to breathe normally. No, surely not, I reasoned with myself. It had taken half a second. It had been just a little thing. A little tiny thing. And I would be really careful in the future and never do anything like that again.

  I kept telling myself that, over and over, all the way home. But I couldn’t help looking in my rearview mirror, as if the devil were after me.

  CHAPTER 4

  It had been autumn when I’d first arrived at River’s Edge. The trees had been flame-colored, reds and golds and oranges, and the world had been just starting to shut down for the winter. Now as I drove my little beat-up car down the long, unpaved drive that led to River’s house, the trees were stark and bare, chilly skeletons with just a few brown leaves still clinging here and there. Two months ago the woods had seemed thick and impenetrable; now I could see twenty yards in. It would be beautiful in the spring.

  I stopped, the car rolling to a halt on the crushed gray rock of the drive, my hands on the steering wheel. I realized in surprise that I planned to be here in the spring. I wanted to be here, wanted to see the changes. That is, if my little screwup back in town didn’t have a butterfly effect and completely destroy my life and the lives of everyone around me.

  Hey, if I were a Merry Sunshine, do you think I’d be in this place?

  As I rounded the final corner, the house came into view, large and square and white. It had seemed severe and forbidding when I’d first come, but now I was aware of a gentle warmth inside my chest as I pulled off the drive and parked next to River’s red pickup.

  I sat in my car for a minute, “sitting with my feelings,” the way Asher had been trying to teach me. Which I hated so, so much. I am extremely skilled at suppressing virtually any emotion. Turns out, even if you suppress an emotion so successfully that you truly aren’t aware of having any, it is still there inside you. This had been one of the more loathsome realizations I’d had since I’d come here. All the emotion I hadn’t even been feeling was in fact curled up inside me like black bile, eating its way through my psyche until I was very, very close to being nuts. In the last two months, I’d experienced—and expressed—more emotion than I had in the hundred years before then.

  And while I could sort of wrap my head around the reality that it was actually better this way, healthier this way, I couldn’t get away from the deep-seated conviction that, really, it totally sucked.

  What was I feeling? I leaned my head onto the steering wheel and closed my eyes. Panic, of course, like I always felt as soon as my brain realized I was trying to face something instead of running away. Much more comfortable with running away.

  I was… glad, I guess, to be here. Especially now that Nell was gone and wouldn’t be waiting to spring her next ill-wish on me. I was looking forward to going inside and seeing everyone. Except Reyn.

  Liar. Your heart speeds up when you see him, your hands ache, your lips—

  See, this is why suppressing emotion is so workable for me. Who wouldn’t want to avoid that? I sighed, and then someone tapped on the window of my car, startling the hell out of me. I hadn’t felt anyone come up.

  My head whipped sideways and there he was: Reyn. Six feet of golden Viking disaster.

  The very first time I’d come here, I’d been stopped like this, resting my head like this, and Reyn had tapped on my window. He’d taken my breath away, in a surly, unfriendly, gorgeous, suspicious kind of way. Here he was, doing it again.

  But I wasn’t that same broken waif who’d practically crawled here this past fall. I took the keys out of the ignition and opened the car door briskly, almost whacking him with it.

  “You sure do like sneaking up on people,” I said snippily.

  “I was seeing if you had OD’d or something,” he said, mimicking my tone.

  “OD’d? Oh my God, are turnips that addicting?” I made my eyes wide. “I’ll be sure to avoid them even more from now on.”

  He fell into step beside me as I walked quickly toward the house. The sun had dropped while I’d sat in the car, and it was twilight, that magickal time between day and night. The time of day when it feels like anything could happen. Anything at all.

  “Just get back from work?” Reyn asked, and the whole scene was so incongruous that I laughed. He turned his unsmiling, slightly narrowed eyes on me.

  “Is that what your wife used to say when you came home?” My voice sounded brittle in the cold air, and even thinking that he’d probably had wives was like a sucker punch to my gut. “ ‘How was the sacking today, honey? The looting? Any good pillaging?’ ”

  Just like that, in a flash, Reyn was furious. I felt the change come over him even before I looked at his face, saw the tightness of his mouth, the downward V of his brows. An instantaneous alarm rang inside me and I wondered if I could make it to the house before him.

  When he finally spoke, it was clear that he was using all his self-control to not, say, throttle me. “That past is only a small part of who I am.” His voice was tense and measured. “Just as all of the stupid, selfish, destructive things you’ve done are only a part of who you are.”

  My face flushed. “But your past is so much worse than mine!”

  He paused, struggling again to keep his anger in check. “My past is worse than a lot of people’s,” he agreed bleakly, and then turned to look at me again. “How’s your present going? How does your future look?”

  Before I could answer, he strode ahead, and I was left behind.

  As soon as I stepped through the front door, I felt a general excitement and energy in the air. At Yule, the house had been decorated with evergreen boughs and mistletoe, but we’d taken those down a couple of days ago. I hung up my puffy coat in the hallway, glad that Reyn was nowhere in sight. River came out of the front parlor just as I passed the door.

  “Hi,” she said with her easy smile. River was one of the very few immortals I’d met with silver hair. Hers was shiny and straight, falling below her shoulders when it wasn’t held back.

  “Hi,” I said, trying to look calm and unrattled. “Just on my way to check the chore chart.”

  “Don’t bother,” River said. “No chores tonight for anyone. But upstairs on your bed there’s a list of things to get done before dinner. Not chores, exactly. Things to help prepare for the New Year’s Eve circle later on.”

  “Oh.” I still had a love/dread relationship with magick circles. “So… no fireworks? No champagne?”

  River grinned, her clear brown eyes lighting up. “There will be champagne at dinner.”

  “Fireworks?” I love fireworks. I’d seen some amazing displays in Italy and in China, hundreds of years ago. Before all those pesky safety laws.

  “No,” said River. “No fireworks. Not in these woods, despite all the dampness from the snow. But I bet you won’t miss them.”

  Because the circle would be so exciting? “Ooh, are we learning shape-shifting tonight?”

  She laughed and pushed me toward the stairs. “Very funny. Go get ready. Dinner’s at eight. Late tonight.”

  No shape-shifting. I’d been joking, but who knew what powerful immortals could actually do? I headed upstairs and made it into my room Reyn-free. I closed the door and turned the knob on my small radiator t
o warm the place up a bit. As promised, there was a note on my bed, next to a glass dish of salt and a little muslin bag that smelled like herbs. I picked up the note, recognizing River’s beautiful, old-fashioned handwriting. It said:

  Drink the mug of tea on your bedside table.

  Take a bath with the herb packet.

  Put on the robe hanging in your cupboard.

  Cast a circle with the salt and meditate inside of it for one hour. Think about the new year.

  Open your circle, scatter the salt along the floor, then sweep it all up and dump it out your window.

  See you at dinner!

  I picked up the mug and sniffed it. It was still quite warm. It smelled like—and I know this will shock you—herbs. Between you and me, I’d be so thrilled to just have a nice cuppa Lipton. If one can get sick of herbs, and I believe one can, then I was well on my way to being sick of herbs.

  Down the hatch with the tea. It wasn’t very pleasant, and a little shot of brandy would have gone a long way to improving it. But I got it down. Then I went and checked out the robe in the wardrobe. Quick aside: The word cupboard is about as descriptive and simple as you can get. It began, literally, as a board to put your cups on, way back in the day. And wardrobe? Ward-robe. It would ward, or guard, your robes. Your gowns. Interesting, eh? Stick with me—you’ll learn a lot. Not all of it reprehensible.

  The robe, which I hadn’t seen before, was of heavy white linen, washed to be very soft. It was simple, like a nightgown, and had runes embroidered in white thread around the neckline. I saw kenaz, which meant revelation, knowledge, vision. Algiz, as a ward-evil. Laguz—water? I had just relearned all this. Right—water, dreams, fantasies, visions. Berkano was the symbol for female fertility, growth, and renewal. Fabulous. I turned the gown in my hands and saw dagaz, daybreak or dawn. Awakening, awareness. Finally, at the back of the neck was othala. I let out a breath. Othala stood for one’s heritage—literally, the land or estate that one inherited, one’s birthright.

  The estate that I was the sole inheritor of had been destroyed, razed to the ground, when I was ten. I saw its rubble when I was sixteen. Had never been able to bring myself to go back after that.

  I passed Anne on my way to the bathroom. She came out, face flushed from steam, dark, fine hair sticking wetly to her head. She smiled when she saw me and kissed both of my cheeks as if she hadn’t seen me in a long time.

  “I love New Year’s Eve,” she said. “I’m very glad you’re with us.”

  I was still unused to all this open expression of feeling and replied with an embarrassed, troglodyte mumble.

  “Tonight will be very exciting,” Anne said, not put off by my cloddishness. “Be sure to wear your new robe to dinner—everyone else will.”

  “What will we do at the circle?” I asked.

  “A New Year’s circle is usually designed to help us clarify things in our past and give us an inkling of what the future holds for us,” Anne said. “People often have visions of events that have yet to happen.”

  “Ew,” I said. I myself almost always had visions during magickal circles, and they were pretty much always heinous.

  Anne laughed. “It’ll be okay,” she promised. “We’ll all be there together.”

  I nodded somewhat glumly and went to take a ritual bath.

  CHAPTER 5

  My post-bath hour of meditation was a failure. I’d been spooked by Anne’s prediction of vision-seeing tonight, and was still all jangled and raw-feeling from last night’s nightmare about Incy, remembering my family today, the at-work incident that I was done thinking about, and the whole ongoing Reyn thing.

  Still, obedient Nastasya made a circle with salt, lit a candle, and sat there till my butt was completely numb. Finally I sighed, blew out the candle, and sprinkled the salt everywhere as instructed. I got the broom from down the hall and swept my room, then dumped it all out the window.

  I looked at the robe lying on my bed. I would feel stupid wearing this. It was so… clichéd, the robed witches dancing around a fire at midnight. Maybe I would suddenly come down with something. Stomach flu. Maybe I should just go to bed and stay there all night. Maybe I should—

  Knock knock.

  It was Brynne—I felt her vibrant energy.

  “Yeah?” I called.

  The door opened. Brynne stood there, beautiful in a scarlet robe. She was our only black member—we weren’t an incredibly diverse bunch (I mean here at River’s Edge; immortals in general were of course plenty diverse—just about every culture has them)—and to me looked the most teenagery. Her finely boned face was beautiful, and she was long and lean, like a Brâncus¸i sculpture. Only smoother. I felt short, pale, and plain next to her.

  Seeing me sitting on my bed, she laughed. “I knew you were in here being a chicken!”

  “What does one wear under this?” I asked, holding up the robe. “I’m thinking long underwear.”

  Brynne grinned. “Why would one wear anything?”

  My eyes flared in alarm. “Oh, no. No, I’ve got to have something on under this.”

  Brynne tucked her hands under her arms. “Bawk, bawk, bawk,” she chirped.

  “It’ll be freezing,” I pointed out.

  “You won’t feel it,” she promised.

  “You don’t really mean naked under this?”

  Brynne made obnoxious clucking sounds and left. I heard one final bawk! as she went down the hall.

  I gritted my teeth.

  At dinner I felt stupid and self-conscious in my robe, despite the fact that everyone there was wearing one. They were in all colors: River’s was silvery gray, like her hair; Anne’s was a deep cerulean blue. Daisuke’s was a dark charcoal. Charles’s was emerald green. Brynne’s of course was red, and she raised her eyebrows meaningfully at me as she took a long sip of her champagne. I scowled at her.

  Glancing around, I saw I was the only one in white. As well as the only one with a fine wool scarf wrapped closely around her neck. I saw River glance at my scarf, but she didn’t say anything. She knew I wouldn’t go without it.

  “Pass the chickpeas, please,” said Jess, on my right. His voice had been shredded by his various excesses, and I didn’t know if it would ever recover. His robe was black. I wondered about the symbolism.

  “All of these dishes are traditional, meaningful New Year’s foods,” said Solis. “If you eat a bit of everything here, your new year will be lucky, prosperous, healthy, blessed, and full of good fortune!”

  I was too busy feeling like a Halloween ghost wrapped in a sheet to focus on what he was saying, but other people laughed and clinked glasses. I saw my champagne and grabbed it. Champagne is meant to be sipped, but I hadn’t had any alcohol in almost two months, and I drained that sucker.

  Asher grinned and refilled my glass. “Now, sip it,” he admonished. “Make it last.”

  I took a ladylike sip and set my glass down, pretty sure it was eighteenth-century Venetian handblown crystal. It was gorgeous, imperfect, and as delicate as a butterfly’s wing.

  Someone brushed against me as he stepped over the bench to sit down.

  I knew without looking up that it was Reyn. My face froze as I caught a glimpse of his robe, a deep amber color. Quickly I took some sautéed greens from the main bowl and glopped them onto my plate.

  “You’re late,” said River, but she smiled at him.

  “Sorry,” he said shortly. I swear, that man could charm the skin off a snake!

  “Well, now that we’re all here, let’s talk resolutions!” Asher rubbed his hands together. “I will, of course, resolve the usual.”

  I was about to ask what his usual was, but Anne said, “To make the perfect chèvre?”

  “Yes! This will be the year!” Asher practically glowed, and everyone laughed. I’d walked past the wheels of curing goat’s milk cheeses in the root cellar but hadn’t thought much about them except, Hoo, boy, glad I don’t have to mess with them.

  “Next?” River looked at all of us.
br />   Daisuke spoke up. I knew him the least well of all the students. I knew he was one of the more advanced students and often studied one-on-one with River. He was pleasant but shy. “I, too, resolve the usual,” he said in a soft voice. “To achieve enlightenment, free myself of all want, and become one with the god and goddess.”

  Judging from the understanding smiles and nods he got, he was actually serious. He was trying to achieve enlightenment. I was such a loser.

  And so we went around the table. Some resolutions were small or funny, like to eat less sugar or pat the farm cats more, and some were larger, like to be more patient or more kind. River resolved to be more understanding and accepting, which IMHO was like water trying to be more wet. I didn’t see how she could possibly be more of those things.

  I was racking my brain trying to come up with something that wasn’t insulting, like resolving to match my socks more often, but not too ridiculous and ambitious, like to be a genuinely good person someday. My turn got closer and closer, and I started to feel panicky, wondering if I could abstain but knowing that I would be the only one lame enough to need to skip, and here was one more thing that I sucked at, and why was I trying when I barely had any excuse for even living—

  “Nastasya?” River’s brown eyes were—yes: understanding and accepting.

  I gulped down some champagne to buy another few seconds—I was such a waste—and then said the first thing that popped into my mind. “I resolve to… trust more.” I had no idea where that had come from. Out of thin air.

  All eyes were on me, and I was self-conscious. River looked a tiny bit surprised, her head on one side as she gazed at me. Surprised and thoughtful.

  “That’s an excellent resolution,” Asher said in the silence.

  “Yes,” said Anne. “Lovely. Good for you.”

  Now I felt even more self-conscious. That resolution had appeared out of freaking nowhere and yet… I uncomfortably recognized that I meant it. I trusted nobody, not even myself. Not my decisions, my emotions, my plans, my work ethic, my sincerity, my looks—nothing. The one thing about me that seemed rock solid, that I could completely and utterly count on no matter what, was my ability to screw things up. That was as inevitable as the proverbial sun coming up tomorrow.