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Chapter Thirteen
Tamsin
I eat breakfast and then take a nap for a couple of hours since I’d been up half the night. When I wake up, I check on Luciana and the others to see how they’re doing after the injection of serum earlier. There are no major changes yet. I bite my lip and pace the room. My magic flares around me, pulsing in my fingertips and buzzing through my bones.
Nessa. I need her to take care of this magical nuisance once and for all. One less thing to worry about.
I find the caretaker in the greenhouse outside, tending to the herbs. “I need you to bind my magic again,” I say.
She doesn’t look up from the rosemary she’s watering. “No.”
“No?” My brow wrinkles.
Now she does raise her gaze to mine, and her expression is fierce. “You’ve got the Night Guild on your heels. Your magic may come in handy.”
“But it’s becoming a distraction,” I say, my tone exasperated. “It keeps getting stronger, and I can’t focus. Nessa, I need it gone.”
“What you need is to stay safe,” she says sternly. “And I won’t take away your sword before a battle. My answer is final, Tamsin. I won’t be swayed.”
I let out a groan of frustration and turn back toward the house.
“Try using your magic, woman, if you don’t want it to build up like that,” she calls after me.
I know she’s only trying to help, but I still don’t like it. I don’t like being back here, with everything bombarding me at once. The house, the hills, Blake, my magic, and my sorrow all churning together in a maelstrom that brings back the pain I’d tried to avoid. The pain that threatens to unravel me entirely.
I can’t be in the house right now. With a sigh, I grab my jacket from the hook by the back door and head out toward the moors. I stroll past the hedges at the back of the house, then walk over to the horse pasture. None of the horses from my childhood are still alive (apparently only Thistle got a magical boost), but Ainsley had shown me the three they currently have the day before. As I approach the fence, frigid air sweeps across the open land and I pull my jacket more tightly around me. The cold slides across my bare cheeks like razors.
My eyes scan over the field and I see two of the horses grazing a ways off, a chestnut and a black mare. But I don’t see the third. I turn and sweep my gaze back and forth, but the third horse isn’t inside the fence line. Shit. That can’t be good.
I walk around the perimeter of the pasture, wondering how it got out. The horses aren’t exactly exceptional jumpers, so it seems unlikely it went over the fence. Most of the pasture is bordered by stone walls, but the backside is wooden rails. When I reach that section, closest to the lake, I find my answer: a couple of the rails have fallen in one section, leaving only the third and lowest rail. It would have been easy enough for the horse to step right over it.
I’m able to heave the top rail back into place so the other two horses can’t escape before we can nail it back in properly. When I turn back around, I catch movement across the moorlands, about a half mile away. It’s the missing horse, a black-and-white paint gelding. He seems to be heading toward the hills on the other side of the lake.
I jog back to the other side of the field and grab a halter and lead rope hanging near the gate, then I head out after him. This wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I came out here to take a break. But I need to catch that horse before he injures himself or wanders even further.
He doesn’t seem to be moving fast, mostly walking, sometimes trotting, but he’s got a big head start. The icy air spikes down into my lungs as I jog across the open land towards the runaway. I have to detour frequently to go around boggy spots. My body quickly warms up, which is a perk, but I’m not used to jogging over terrain this rugged, and my calves and lungs soon begin to burn.
And then I catch sight of it in the distance. The church where my parents are buried.
It’s a small stone structure, old as the earth beneath my feet. It sits at the end of a dirt road just a ways off the moorlands, a slight veer off the path I’m currently on. The graveyard sits behind it, surrounded by apple trees which are now skeletal and bare in mid-winter. Trees I’d last seen in full bloom the day that Blake and I made love beneath them. Right before the tragic accident that changed my life forever.
I don’t want to see their graves again, but I’m pulled as if by a magnet. My feet travel down the dirt road of their own accord, and I wander past the church and into the grassy yard beyond. No one is there. It’s abandoned, not used for services anymore. The wind from the hills pushes me from behind as if urging me forward.
My boots crunch through high grass that hasn’t entirely thawed out from the freeze of the night before. Snow dusts the tops of the stone head markers, but it hasn’t really come down much yet, despite the heavy clouds that have been gathering since yesterday. It takes me a moment to locate the right graves, because I’ve only ever been here once before. The day of the funeral, and the hour before I left for New York.
When I do find the graves, side by side of course, I sink to my knees and wipe a gloved hand over the stone. It’s weathered so much, as if a century has passed, not just twenty years. But the weather here is harsh, the wind and rain and storms unforgiving. It’s almost as if this place has claimed them, embraced them, called them back.
The tears come without warning, grief doubling me over onto the frozen ground. All the pent-up emotions of the last two decades come pouring out of me. It feels as if I’m being ripped open by a savage animal, the things I’ve kept inside spilled out of me like blood. I fight it for a moment, but then I open my mouth and a scream flies from my throat, slicing the wintry sky. I surrender to the pain.
I lie there, huddled in the grass, for a quarter hour. When I finally get up, I kiss the stone at the top of each grave. Something inside of me has shifted. It still hurts intensely, but I’m no longer wrestling with myself. No longer at odds with my grief. And it feels like maybe, after all this time, my healing has finally begun.
Slowly, I walk back out toward the moorlands. I need to get back to finding this horse. Scanning the fields in the direction he’d been going, I catch sight up him right at the edge of the hills, then lose him as he moves behind an outcropping of rock. I let out a curse and begin to jog. The horse seems to have traveled into a narrow canyon with boulders on either side.
When I reach it a few minutes later, I head through the passage and race down the length of it. I’m flushed and panting, my hair a windswept nightmare, when I come around the rockface at the end of the pass, right into the midst of a group of warlocks.
Blackstock Clan, naturally.
“You looking for this?”
