Then I waited some more.
Then some more.
Then I realized that the vampire or warlock was yanking Fay’s faerie’s chain and it was time for me to go home.
You cannot know how relieved I was.
So relieved I almost cried.
Then, out of nowhere, BecBec appeared before me and before I could make a sound, she had her finger to her lips and she pointed to the steps that led to Ladye Bay.
I watched Ash and Aidan jog down the steps and walk through the rocks to the water’s edge. They didn’t speak and their body language was so stiff you could feel the animosity, even where I was, stuck in the bramble on the cliff face looking down on them.
BecBec was under bramble cover, just like me, but then she shot out, just a smidge, to draw my attention to something in the sky.
A bat.
Holy shit.
A bat.
Did I like bats?
No, I don’t think I did.
Ack!
Couldn’t bats see in the dark?
Could it see me?
Crap… why didn’t I bring my cloak?
And then… you will not believe… as it reached the bay, it dipped low, lower then right before my very eyes it turned into a man.
Poof! Just like that.
And not just any man.
Douglas Fucking Addison.
Holy shit.
Douglas Addison was a vampire.
Ohmygoddess.
And vampires were our allies.
Right?
Okay, okay, I could deal with this.
This was okay, this could even be good.
He walked up to Ash and shook his hand.
They knew each other.
Ash never let on.
Why wouldn’t Ash tell me?
Is this what he and Mom knew?
Ash gestured to Aidan and Douglas and Aidan did that man handshake, grab-the-upper-arm-comrade thing.
Aidan clearly was not surprised at the bat-into-man-vampire display.
He knew, too.
Why didn’t he tell me?
I could normally trust Aidan to tell me everything.
Well, eventually.
The three of them had their heads bowed, talking, looking around furtively.
What were they doing?
What were they saying?
About five minutes later, Aidan turned and left, jogging through the beach stones and up to the steps – somewhat in a hurry.
Ash and Addison remained.
Ten minutes passed, maybe fifteen. My legs were hurting from being in a weird position.
Douglas and Ash had a lot to talk about. Addison did a lot of gesturing; Ash did a lot of listening.
I tried to think of spells to allow me to hear their conversation without letting Ash into my head via our mind-meld and to keep my mind off my palms which were digging in the underbrush.
Then BecBec burrowed in the crook of my arm, hiding her faerie light.
And I saw the broomstick against moon.
It swooped down and landed.
No.
Yes.
There she was.
The warlock was right.
There was Agatha Darling with Jeremy on the back of her broomstick.
No, no, no.
Please no.
I blinked.
There she was.
I closed one eye and squinted with the other.
It was still her.
Damn.
She walked right up and kissed Addison’s cheek.
Jeremy shook his hand.
Then she kissed Ash’s cheek and Jeremy shook Ash’s hand.
No, no, no.
Please no.
I watched, searching for something, some sign.
But everything seemed kosher.
Even…
Friendly.
Ack!
Of course Aidan would tell me Ash wasn’t a traitor.
Because they both were.
No wonder he was so very agitated when I asked.
One would father my children, one would die for me.
Bullshit.
I watched, tears in the back of my throat and stinging my eyes.
How stupid was I?
You could tell they were plotting by the way they stood, talked, looked around. This wasn’t the first time they met; there was a familiarity about them.
Then Ash looked toward my hiding spot and I could swear he was looking right at me.
Shit!
I hadn’t controlled Mavis’s mind-meld.
I held my breath, cleared my mind and didn’t move.
Then Agatha said something and he dipped his head to hear her, respectfully, attentively.
My chest started hurting.
But he didn’t raise any alarm.
I still did not breathe easy. Ash was highly trained. BecBec stayed hidden and I didn’t move a muscle, I barely breathed.
Not too long later, they all left. Agatha on her broom, Addison turned back into a bat, and Jeremy and Ash went up the steps.
I waited a long time to make sure they were gone before I left my hidey-hole. I wasn’t that stupid, I knew Ash would know if I was following him so I wasn’t going to try.
I kept BecBec with me, Ash could see faeries. I didn’t want her in trouble.
While I waited, I thought about things and how some of it made sense.
How Aidan and I just happened to be at the Swank Italian Place when Agatha Darling and Douglas Addison showed up. How Aidan took me directly to Agatha at the Community Centre and Ash appeared out of nowhere to help Aidan fight off the baddies in the end (and Agatha got away). How Aidan “found” the electric wand. How both Aidan and Ash were mysteriously lured to the bomb and how Ash knew so damn much about its workings and what it was intended to destroy. How Aidan told me “never to trust an oracle” when Althea drunkenly told me I had a traitor in my home. How, after years of animosity from Le Société and neutrality from The Institute, somehow they’d been talked into “working together” by two double agents. How, no matter how hard we looked, we could find hide nor hair of Jeremy Bligh.
But why?
I knew why, destiny said one of these two men could die for me. I knew that, at least, was no lie by the way my family immediately accepted them.
They never liked my choice in men.
Never.
Especially Viv.
(Then again, most of the men I chose were dicks.)
But why should Aidan and Ash die for me?
Some unknown, loopy American girl stumbles into their life and rocks their world and they have a fifty percent chance to “bleed” for her?
Ack!
I knew one thing for certain, Sebastian Quincy Wilding and Aidan Knightly Seymour were the type of men who would take destiny in their own hands and manipulate it how they saw fit.
I had a beautiful smile and smelled like oranges, my ass.
When I thought it was safe, I walked back to Viv and Su, BecBec with me the whole way, both of us silent and watchful. I held my wand at the ready.
My wand and I shook my sisters awake.
They didn’t get angry when they woke up, just took one look at my face and then led me back to The Gables.
They washed my arms and palms while BecBec talked to them in her mile-a-minute, dolphin voice.
Viv understood what she was saying.
“Do you speak Faerie?” I asked.
“Faeries speak English,” Viv told me.
I stared at her.
Viv explained, “She speaks ten times faster than normal, like a tape on fast forward. BecBec’s a young faerie, she hasn’t learned to slow down her speech and you’re a young witch and haven’t learned to speed up your hearing. It’ll all come together one day.”
Well at least that was sorted.
Kinda.
They left and I lay in bed staring at the ceiling.
BecBec lay on the pillow next to me, staring too.
Daphn
e eventually made it to bed when the sun started to rise. She walked right up my belly and lay down on my chest.
I dipped my chin into my throat, looked into her pretty black kitty face and her gorgeous green kitty eyes.
Aidan gave her to me for my birthday.
It was then that I finally started crying.
18 August
Viv and Su told everyone I had flu and I needed to be left alone.
What I really needed was time for the scratches on my arms to heal so no one would see them and wonder.
And time to think.
Su took some of Mom’s magical potion and added her own ingredients and put it on my scratches to hasten the healing.
Viv confirmed that what Ash and Aidan told me about Josie was indeed The Prophesy as she understood it, that Josie would change the world for the good.
So at least they hadn’t lied about that.
The Prophesies also mentioned Ash and Aidan and that one of them would die for me, one of them would marry me.
Viv went to the library to check with Elly and Mathilda’s Register.
Elly confirmed it.
One dead dude, one Dad dude.
(And quit calling me Elly!)
But even Elly couldn’t confirm that, in so knowing, one or the other or both could not also change destiny especially with the might of a powerful coven like Edwards behind them.
I spent a lot of time thinking.
I may be somewhat of a ditz and relatively new to this witch business but I wasn’t a total lame-ass loser. There was no reason why Ash or Aidan couldn’t confide in me that they were playing at double agents.
No reason unless they were double agents.
Even if they weren’t, I’d had too many twists and turns in the last year to be anything less than cautious.
Not to mention too many secrets kept for no apparent reason.
I finally made my decision and told Su and Viv what I intended to do.
We talked, we argued, we worried, we fretted – none of us wanted to distrust Aidan or Ash and none of us wanted to believe we’d been deceived.
But we had.
The whole thing sucked.
Last night, we cloaked ourselves and went to the Tower Room.
We drew the circle.
We cut the tips of each of our fingers and stood in the sacred circle – arms high, fingers touching, blood mingling.
And we made our vow of secrets and silence.
No one would know of Ash and Aidan’s deception. We’d keep even Mom, Gran and Mavis in the dark.
We couldn’t trust anyone. Not The Institute, Le Société, the Council, the coven, no one. We didn’t know who was in on it and the fewer who we actually trusted who knew what we knew, the better – all the easier to keep it quiet.
And in the meantime, we would plan for Josie, Rory and I to be safe so Josie could eventually save the world.
They were my Spellbounds and I was taking them home… to Denver.
In Denver, I was on my turf and Agatha, Jeremy, Ash and Aidan would have to follow me home.
And fight me there.
But in the meantime, no one must know we suspected.
So we’d have to go on as normal.
I’d have to carry on, besotted and boy-crazy… simultaneously falling in love with two men.
Or, at least, trying to convince them I was.
While Su and Viv quietly planned our get away.
Goddess, help us.
Chapter Eleven
The Month of September
1 September
Of course, deception wasn’t as easy as it seemed.
I mean, lying is hard.
Or, it was for Viv and me.
Su seemed to find it easy.
So we gave her most of the hard jobs.
Ash and Aidan both suspected something right away.
I know this because about two days after I resurfaced from my “flu” and after doing a twelve hour shift at The Dozen, I headed straight to Paulina’s house for a séance (we were just looking for some lighthearted entertainment and Antonia was pretty certain she could call John Belushi or Richard Pryor but all we got was someone telling us to, “Fucking leave me alone, you fucking bitches!” which could be practically any dead comedian from the last three decades).
Ash and Aidan were not pleased and both of them were waiting when Josie and I stumbled, exhausted, into The Gables later that night.
“Yo dudes… later,” I said, cool as a cucumber as I passed the Plush Parlor they’d just walked out of.
Ha!
Aidan caught my bicep as I tried to pass and I looked up into his narrowed, angry blue eyes.
“Where have you been?” he demanded to know in a low voice.
Uh-oh.
I’d never actually seen Aidan angry. Well, not at me anyway, around me, maybe.
Seemed kinda scary to have his anger actually directed at me.
“Séance… we were going for Belushi but I think we got Bruce,” I told him.
Aidan’s narrowed eyes narrowed more as they roamed my face. “Are you drunk?”
“Kinda, but Josie was driving.”
That was a lie. I was dead sober. And Josie’s driving was scary, as in scary-slow and granny-like.
“Have you lost your mind? You made your Spellbound your designated driver?” Aidan again demanded to know in a voice that was, again, low.
“Er…” was my answer.
“Why didn’t you tell Wilding or me you were out for the night?” he clipped.
“I did,” I lied.
“You didn’t,” Aidan countered.
Mm.
He was right.
I shrugged then stated, “I’m dead on my feet, Aidan, you wanna let go and give me the third degree in the morning?”
He let me go but he did it less in a way that he was doing as I wished and more in a way that if he didn’t, he might shake me.
Ash watched me over Aidan’s shoulder. He was being annoyed broody (rather than just unhappy broody or broody broody or thoughtful broody, I’d begun to be able to categorize his broodiness) but he didn’t say a word.
I looked from one to the other, waved lamely, said, “‘Night,” and then hightailed it out of there.
See?
Real smooth.
Ack.
They totally knew something was up.
Lying is not for me.
The only way I could figure to get around it was to avoid them.
Until I worked out how really to avoid them.
Because I didn’t think I could go through with my part of the plan.
That is, pretend I was still in love with them.
Though I was still in love with them but now I was in love with them and my heart was breaking.
That was the problem.
It was all too complicated.
So I worked all the time and when I wasn’t working I was creating and researching in my Tower Room, pottering in the greenhouse, trying new recipes in the kitchen, at lessons with one of the coven, sunbathing if there was even the slightest hint of rays to be caught or meditating at my tree.
In the meantime, Su was putting her network of friends to work.
Thank goddess for a quasi-criminal sister.
9 September
Today I was summoned to Mavis’s Magic Room.
“What’s going on?” she asked even before I could grab a custard cream and sit down.
I tried innocence.
“What?”
She didn’t say a word.
“What?” I repeated.
She studied me.
“What?!” This time it was louder.
“You need a vacation. I’ll send you and Ash –”
“No!”
Her eyes widened.
“Oh, well that’s a surprise… you and Aidan then –”
“No, no, no… I don’t need a vacation.” I had to think fast. “I need a mini-break.” Oo, that’s a good idea. “I need a m
anicure. A facial. A massage. I need a sauna, a Jacuzzi, at least a swimming pool. I need a Johnny Depp marathon starting with Edward Scissorhands and ending with Pirates of the Caribbean. That’s the closest I want to come to testosterone for days.”
I’d hit on something believable.
Mavis nodded.
“I see,” she said.
“I want time without magic,” I was on a roll, “without incense up my nose and the War of the Supernatural World breathing down my neck. I want to feel safe without someone watching me every second of the day. Can you do that?”
“I think something can be arranged.”
“Good.”
“Do you want Josie and Rory with you?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll see to it,” she decreed.
I’d bought some time.
Shoo.
But now what do I do?
13 September
Am in a lovely spa on the banks of Loch Lomand outside Glasgow (which happens to be birthplace of delicious Gerard Butler (Glasgow that is, not Loch Lomand) so already happy place as any birthplace of hot guy had happy aura attached as everyone knew but hot guy as hot as Gerard Butler meant aura stretched to Loch Lomand and therefore I was rethinking theme of movie marathon I intended to have).
Am also trying to find something for an eight year old boy to do and trying to convince myself that not everyone around me was a secret agent here to watch me and report back or worse, kill me and drag my lifeless body into the lake.
Yes, paranoia had set in. If Aidan and Ash could (potentially) betray me then anyone could be an enemy.
Mavis agreed that I should “spirit away” and not tell Ash or Aidan where I’d gone or they’d want to follow me so she made this so.
Upon turning on my mobile after arriving at the spa, this is what I got:
First ring (Aidan): “What are you playing at?” (This was said somewhat tersely therefore very, very pissed-offedly.)
Second ring (Ash): “Where the hell are you?” Pause while he read my mind. “I’ll be there in two hours.”
Ack!
Obviously location popped into my head and communicated itself via mind-meld.
Mavis must have worked her mojo because they both stayed away (so far, now over the two hour mark and no sign and I was hoping Gerard Butler Happy Aura would keep me safe rather than communicate exact position to his hot guy brethren.)
* * * * *
Now over three hour mark.
Mavis mojo worked.