Page 43 of What The Hex (The Family Spells)
Grace sat and I followed, ignoring the flowers that nipped at my ankles as I moved. Flowers in Hael were always hungry, but if you made friends with them, they remembered. This field would remember Grace and her honey for more than a decade.
Recently, I’d returned to this same spot to find it razed to the ground.
Cabal Ungeist, Coven Wyrmwood, the demon king … they were utilizing every resource at their disposal to catch the Witch Queen. For it was the Witch Queen’s blood that determined the fate of Hael and everyone who lived there. The black tulips were fantastic amplifiers for many different sorts of spells and had been overharvested recently by the cabal, the coven, and the royals.
I sat on the blanket, one knee propped up, wings folded carefully behind me, and watched as I once did, nearly sixteen years ago when the romance between Grace and me was still pure.
Well, relatively speaking. It’d always been dirty. I simply meant before. Before I’d discovered what loving me would cost her. Her, and her soulmates, and the almost exquisitely simple future that she dreamed of.
“Why the long face?” Grace asked, which wasn’t at all what she’d said to me on the actual day this memory occurred. No, this was the current Grace, dreaming of a happy moment but interpreting it in her own way. “Are you not happy here with me?” She pursed her lips and looked away, across the gently waving tulips and strands of silvery grass.
The woods surrounded us on three sides, the ocean on the other. The constant shush of the waves was a pleasant backdrop to a conversation long gone and forgotten. Whatever it was that Grace had truly said to me on this day, I didn’t remember.
It didn’t matter.
I remembered the important things: the way she tasted, the feel of her fingertips as she leaned forward and brushed hair back from my face, the heat of her body as I entered her for the first time.
“No long face, love,” I said, resisting the urge to call her by my favorite nickname—Everen Sinnes, always a lover. In this memory, she was not a lover. Yet. Would I let it go that far or should I wake myself up? “Vin ajest roe waverian.” I’m just watching you, in the demon tongue.
She smiled at me, and the effect was devastating. I set the basket I was carrying aside, the one stuffed with demon wine, ripe kirsche fruit, and the nuts that I dug up from beneath the charcoal-like soil near my house, the ones that tasted like cinnamon and nutmeg.
I closed my eyes as Grace rose to her knees and leaned in toward me. The gentle breeze tangled the long strands of my hair with hers, and I felt myself giving in when her hand came to rest on my cheek.
It’d been so long.
So long that I’d finally convinced my pathetic, broken soul that I no longer cared.
Instead, I cared too much.
I lifted my own hand up and covered hers. Grace jumped as I opened my eyes to look at her.
“Don’t do that,” she said, slapping at me with her other hand. The left one was still trapped against my cheek, warm and comforting in a way I hadn’t experienced in years. For over a decade, I’d been alone, working on a project that would ensure Grace could continue to live the life she so desperately wanted, rather than the one fated to her.
I smiled. In the true version of this memory, Grace had not slapped me. She’d been too young, too shy. I was only older by three years, but we’d lived very different lives.
“Do what?” I inquired, wondering if this would be the only civil conversation we’d be allowed for the remainder of our lives. It was possible. Once Grace woke up to find that I’d spirited her and her lovers away and blocked the coven’s access to them, she’d be furious.
The kids I’d left behind. I knew if I’d brought them along, things would get even more complicated. I ached to know them, but they did not know me. They would never know me.
“Use your pheromones on me,” she chastised, but I just smiled at that.
“Love,” I said, my voice a growl, “if I were using my pheromones, you would know it.”
I relaxed the silver-white veins crisscrossing my skin, releasing a heady, intoxicating scent that had even the flowers leaning in toward me. Grace’s mouth opened in an O, and she purposely ran her hands down both of my arms. I was shirtless, as I’d been on that day—a favor that Grace had asked of me.
She rubbed the skin of my arms before moving her hands to my chest, and I inhaled deeply, closing my eyes and savoring the feel of her working the musk from my body and into her own flesh.
