Devil's Frost, Spellspinners Series #3 (The Spellspinners of Melas County) (9 page)

Catching my eye to make sure he had my attention, he played with the flames, like he was their conductor. The licks of yellow, orange, and red rose high into the night sky, forming pictures in the darkness.

“Impressive,” I said, excitedly.

“Watch this,” he said. He dotted the sky with sparks like a constellation, which looked like a string of islands. “That’s the place,” he said. “That’s the map I saw on Chance’s chest.” He came to me finally, stretching his legs around me. I hooked my ankles in his and fell back into his arms, studying the map he lit in the sky.

Logan played with my hair as we talked about our plan: the search for the island, the dissolve of our covens, and how much our leaders had messed everything up. I remembered that other bonfire on the beach with Logan, when he had watched from afar and then come up and fought with Jonah. How we connected at such an intense level that night that I never wanted to be without him.

We were quiet for a while, smiling into each other, turning our attention back to the map, his fingers gently tracing the contours of my hand, cooling my skin down and heating it right back under his touch.

“So how are we going to get there?”

I lifted my finger and painted fire into the sky like he had.

“What is that? A circus tent?” he asked seriously, which made me laugh for the first time in forever.

“I’m a witch, not an artist,” I said with a wry eyebrow raise. Laughing, I filled in some shapes with smoke. “It’s a ship. Before sunrise we should sneak down to the yacht harbor South of Melas and stow away—or better yet, borrow a boat.”

“Not a bad plan except for the unfortunate fact that I have no idea how to sail.”

“This is where you are lucky, my friend—my dad taught me how to sail when I was a kid. I’m a pro.”

Sure we could swim, but the last thing I wanted to do was spend an indefinite amount of time underwater after what happened today. “We’ll sleep on deck chairs under the stars,” he said.

“We’ll cook fresh fish on a grill, sunbathe by day and, well, do other things by night,” I said suggestively.

His lips brushed against mine until my stomach weakened and I forced myself to break away.

He ran his fingers over my hair. “But what do we do with her?” Logan gestured toward the cave.

I tensed at the question. “Do what Jacob suggested. Bring her along.”

“Do you think she’s going to be okay?” he asked carefully.

“I don’t know. She’s gone through some terrible things. I’m not sure if the damage is physical or mental or both.”

“Don’t take this is the wrong way, Lily, but where we’re going, it’s not going to be easy. We have just tonight to protect ourselves from Carriag and Congression. Our spell won’t last. Are you sure we shouldn’t leave her behind? I mean, what if she wakes up and still wants to hurt me? Still wants to hurt you?”

Tears pinged in my eyes when I thought about what would become of her if I abandoned her. “I can’t leave her. She’ll die here all alone. And if they find her, they will kill her. You know their game.”

Logan nodded. I could tell he wasn’t happy but that he understood. This made sense. And he wouldn’t have abandoned Chance, either.

“Hey, we’re going to find what we’re looking for,” I told him, my voice full of conviction. “Chance is not going to die.”

He was quiet for a moment before he said in a low, weighted voice, “You know Congression won’t stop looking until they find us. They will do anything to get what they want. With Carriag on their side? The guy is a sociopath. What he did to Orchid back there, flinging her off the cliff with no regard, no hesitation? That was the tip of the iceberg. He’s…done things to witches and warlocks both. Things I don’t even want to tell you about. And Jacob…what was going on with him? Why did he help us escape and save Orchid?”

I answered as honestly as I could. “I don’t know.” I touched his hand. “I’m so incredibly sorry about your parents, Logan. I know that must be weighing so heavily on you.”

“I wanted to kill him today, Lil.”

“I know. And he deserves to die for what he did, but maybe that’s why he saved us. Maybe he feels guilty, finally, for all the horrible things he’s done to you.”

“I doubt it.”

“You’re so much better than he’ll ever be.”

Logan nodded once, looking off in the distance, uncertainty shadowing his features.

I touched his cheeks, forcing him to look in my eyes, to hear the words I knew were true. “Logan. I mean it. You are.”

He kissed my shoulder gently. “Thank God you’re okay,” he said. “When I heard about Chance…I thought maybe you were hurt too. When I saw you on that cliff…”

“I know. I felt the same.”

I leaned on him. We leaned on each other. We sat and talked quietly awhile longer about tomorrow’s plan, about everything but Jacob and Iris, until he was too sleepy to keep his eyes open.

I waited until the moon was high in the sky and all the sea creatures were still and quiet. I kissed Logan’s sleeping cheek, moved a swath of hair from his eyes, and just stared. The last embers from our bonfire reflected off his chest, and he looked so gorgeous lying there, sleeping in the sand. I could barely turn away from the life of him. I knew half of tonight was him trying to cheer us up, to ensure us we were okay. That we were going to be okay.

But even when he smiled, even when he touched me, there was a distance, a grief, that I knew he had no idea how to bridge.

When I knew he was asleep, I snuck away and took a walk by the sea. When I was far enough away that I knew I wouldn’t wake him, I sat on the sand and opened up the journal Iris had handed me, the words that would reveal the rest of the secrets she’d started to share on the cliffs.

When I cracked open the book, I expected words to appear on the page like they had before, with Great-Great-Grandma Rose’s story. But these weren’t words. This was Iris’s face.

“Hello, Lily.”

Startled, I jerked back. “Mom? Where are you?”

“Somewhere safe.”

“And Daisy?”

“She is safe, too. And you are safe. Safe with Logan?”

“Yes. How are you in this journal?”

“An old spell I saved for this moment. You are alone?”

I glanced back; Logan was sound asleep by the fire. Orchid hadn’t left the cave. “Yes.”

“Good. Good. What I’m about to tell you will be hard to hear, Lily. I chose to wait until after your first Gleaning, because after a fight in the Stones, you are magically prepared to handle even the harshest of information. What I wasn’t counting on was just how hard tonight would be. But still I feel like I need to tell you the truth. Not just part of it. The whole of it.”

“I’m ready.”

“It’s about your father—it’s about Frank. He didn’t leave us. He was exiled.”

My heart seized.

“
Exiled?
” My pizza-schlepping, fountain-fixing dad? “For what?”

The look on her face made my blood run cold. “For not giving you up.”

I must have looked as confused as I felt. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s best if you listen to the whole story and don’t ask questions until I’m finished, because believe me, you’ll have a lot of questions. Let me try to get it all out, please?”

“Okay,” I said to this glowing young version of my mom speaking from the book’s pages.

“Frank was a peer of Jacob’s, a fellow member of the Academy and Jacob’s best friend. Jacob’s rapid aging—it started years ago, and with each advancement, he grew more impatient, more violent. He would rant that you were the key to saving the warlocks from this curse; he would stare at you as you slept in your crib, in a way that wasn’t…right. I knew we couldn’t stay with him any longer. You were bundled up; I had just the clothes on my back when Jacob caught me.

“We had a terrible fight, which left me badly injured and you screaming on the floor. Frank heard the fuss and ran from his quarters. He could see the injustice, the fact that Jacob was keeping us there against our will. “Frank faced Jacob and…” Her words trailed off. “In the end, there was nothing left of Frank’s magic. Jacob stole it all. But what was left was this beautiful human man, kind and brave, who took us under his wing to live like humans in town. Who protected us from Jacob’s prying eye.

“Because Jacob stole Frank’s magic, part of Frank lived inside Jacob, and so he couldn’t kill him. Couldn’t harm Frank at all. And since we were under Frank’s protection, he couldn’t harm us either.

“In fact, it seemed as if Jacob couldn’t remember anything about you at all. Or me. We stayed hidden, gratefully erased from his memory. Until you turned twelve. Our veil of secrecy was lifted the eve of your birthday. Jacob suddenly remembered everything, and a death warrant was placed on Frank’s head. I went to Jacob, begging for Frank’s life. He agreed, finally, that he could go into exile in exchange for…”

Fear choked my throat.

Iris’s face shrouded with shame. “Me agreeing to stay in Melas. To train you as a witch. If I agreed to let you fulfill your fate as the Leader of the Sisters, and in your seventeenth year, fulfill your fate as the Chosen, he’d let Frank go. He’d let him live. He said he couldn’t live with the fact that we were so close to him, yet we couldn’t be together, so he agreed to let me chain his memory of you, only to be released if you looked him in the eye the night of your first Gleaning. That’s why I warned you against looking at him. I was trying to protect you from him.”

She finally stopped talking, her words ringing in my head. Now the question blared, a siren whose answer I didn’t want to know but had to. I didn’t recognize my voice when it seeped from my lips. “Why was Jacob there when I was a baby? Why were we living with him?”

Iris’s glowing face in the book didn’t answer at first.

“Mom,” I pressed. “I listened to you without interrupting once; now it’s your turn to answer me. Why were we living with Jacob?”

The weight of her silence was as heavy as the flat of Chance’s sword against my chest. Crushing. And so sharp I felt it twisting into my heart, ripping into my soul, tearing out everything inside that was good, everything that was pure. Everything that was me.

“Jacob is your biological father, Lily.”

My
father?

When her words finally came, they were razors slicing into my entire history, bleeding out everything I thought I was—light, good, worthy—and replacing it with darkness and rot and wickedness. I hated Iris in that moment. Hated her for lying to me for all these years, but mostly for creating me with a monster.

“How in the world? How did you get together in the first place? Why was that allowed to happen?”

“He thought I was a human. The elders got wind of the fact that a community outside of Melas had been burned and a small child, rumored to be a Roghnaithe, had been kidnapped and brought to the Academy. The coven sent me in the guise of a hired nanny, one of the Academy’s ‘mothers,’ to find out for sure. He had just adopted Logan and needed a caretaker for him. Logan cried all the time. Missed his own mother so…I felt so sorry for him…It’s so wonderful seeing him now, so happy, so grown-up.

“Jacob and I would take long walks through the forest and in the gardens with the baby. Jacob would talk mostly; I was protecting my secret. And I’d listen. After a while, it was clear he was growing fond of me.

“I, of course, knew what he was. That he had stolen this child and killed his parents. But there was something about him…something vulnerable under his wicked exterior. And he was funny! Boy, did he spin a yarn.”

Jesus. My mother was…

“Yes, Lily. I fell in love with him.”

“Okay, I’m going to go ahead and interrupt and puke my guts out now. How could you fall in love with that murdering freak?”

“He was different then. I know this is so hard for you to hear, but you need to understand why he’s been so manipulative with you and Logan. Why he saved me on the cliffs.”

Disgusted, my blood burned with anger I couldn’t contain. “I can’t hear any more. Do exactly what I say,” I said, my voice methodically creepy. “Do what you should have done for
me
. Go protect my sister,” I said. “She
is
my sister, right?”

“Of course!” Iris said, her image in the book like shattered glass. She looked frightened, too. Like she was scared of her own daughter. I understood why. My eyes sparked flames; their reflection simmered on the sand below me. This was why she chose to tell me via this book. So I couldn’t do anything to her when she broke the worst news in the history of news. I choked back sobs when I thought of the repercussions. Logan. Oh, goddesses, no. No. I glanced back at Logan, relieved he was still asleep. “Wait. If Logan was a toddler, and you weren’t pregnant with me, Logan isn’t sixteen at all.”

“Right. Logan is eighteen. At least. We aren’t sure his exact age.”

That explained why his body and mind were so much more mature than other sixteen-year-olds’.

“Lily, please don’t hate me.”

My palms were in the air. They were bright orange, glowing. “So am I’m the Chosen One or am I a monster? I can’t be both.”

Mom blinked. “You aren’t a monster. You are my l-little girl.”

My face held no expression as the flames on my palms fizzled. “No wonder I killed Chance,” I said, my voice bruised and beaten. “I am just like
him
. I’m just like Jacob.”

Iris apologized again, over and over. She told me she loved me. She said a thousand other things that I wanted to believe but couldn’t. How could she keep this from me all these years? How could she willingly sleep with a man she knew murdered a child’s parents in cold blood?

My mother wasn’t who I thought she was.

And the young girl in this book was a stranger to me.

Her words were letters and breath and broken promises drifting from the pages of an old book into the sea air. Her desperation caught on the wind, proclamations crushed against the rocks at the edge of the sea.

“How can I face Logan, knowing what I know?” I glared at her image. “I’m the daughter of the man who killed his parents. How could he ever forget this? Not to mention this makes us”—I could hardly say it—“stepsiblings.”

“No. No, you aren’t. This shouldn’t change—”