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She frowned as we sat on the couch together. “Is something the matter?”
“No, Mom. It’s just…” I dragged in a breath. “I know you care a lot about seeing me pursue my passion for art, just like Dad has always been wrapped up in his music. You want me to find someone who’s going to be my support, like you’ve been for him.”
“Of course,” Mom said.
“And that’s fine. But I think—” My mind drifted to the forms I’d done with Rose, that dance of magic where we’d seemed to move in perfect harmony with each other, and a rush of warmth filled my chest. “I think maybe I’ll be happy sometimes being the supportive one for someone else. I want that kind of relationship in my life, one where I’m helping someone else achieve what they need to, too. So I don’t want you to worry that just because I’m not setting off to indulge my creativity all around the world every other month that it means I’m losing my art. I’m always going to have that passion. I don’t want to chase it quite the way Dad does; that’s all. Okay?”
Mom looked at me for a long moment. Then she clasped my hand with a quick squeeze. “You’re a good boy, Jin,” she said. “No, I should say a good man. You know what you need in your life. You go chase that, and as long as I can see that joy in you, I’ll be happy for you.”
The tension in my chest loosened. For a moment, even with everything I’d just learned, the battle ahead of us didn’t feel quite so hopeless.
Chapter Twenty-One
Rose
“Is it okay if everyone stays?” I asked Jin. “I want the other witches to start feeling like more a part of what we’re doing.”
My artist glanced across the family room to where my guests had gathered. Lesley was perched at the edge of one of the sofas, her hands clasped on her lap. Imogen sat at the other end, her arm dangling over the side. Thalia hovered behind them. Every minute or so she paced a few steps, as if she didn’t feel comfortable staying totally still.
“I guess we’re a little past the point of total secrecy,” Jin said with half a smile. He dropped his voice so they couldn’t hear. “I don’t think anything I want to talk about should conflict with the oath. And maybe they’ll have some insight that’ll help us.”
He’d called my remaining consorts together here in the manor too. The twins were sitting on the other sofa, Seth’s forehead furrowed and Kyler’s foot tapping against the floor nervously. Damon was slouched in one of the armchairs. His dark blue eyes looked even more shadowed than usual. Jin hadn’t said yet what he wanted to talk about, but it was clear he thought it was important. And when the most carefree spirit of our group got serious, it was hard not to worry.
The manor’s cook had baked fresh tarts for this get-together, but even with the crisp lemon-sugar smell drifting off their plate on the coffee table, no one had moved to take one. I guessed we were all too tense.
Everyone’s eyes followed Jin and me as we moved from the doorway to join the group. I sank onto the sofa between Seth and Ky, taking comfort in their presence, and Jin dropped into an armchair.
“I might as well get right to the point,” he said. “In the last week or so, my mother has been making comments about Rose—the time that I’m spending with her, how committed I might be to her… Comments trying to convince me that I shouldn’t be seeing her.”
My back stiffened. “Jin,” I started, but he held up his hand.
“You need to hear all of this,” he said. “It’s not as bad as it sounds—and, well, maybe it’s worse too. I thought there must just be a lot of gossip going around town, and that must be provoking a side of her I hadn’t really seen before… But I brought a painting with protective magic to her house this afternoon. As soon as I got it up on the wall, she couldn’t even remember what she’d been upset about. She went back to sounding like herself.”
Not as bad and also worse, he’d said. I could see what he’d meant now. “She wasn’t really upset,” I said. “There must have been magic acting on her that the protective spell interfered with.”
Imogen’s eyes widened. Thalia had stopped in the middle of another pacing moment, leaning her arms on the back of the sofa. On either side of me, the twins exchanged a glance.
“That’s what I have to think,” Jin said. “And I have to think if our adversaries were trying to stir up her paranoias, they probably went after all of our families.”
That wouldn’t have applied to Gabriel, since his dad was dead and he had no contact with his mother. But the other guys…
Ky shifted on the sofa, his head ducking awkwardly. “I didn’t want to talk about it, because it didn’t change anything about how I felt,” he said. “But my mom started hassling me about how much time I’ve been spending up here a couple weeks ago.”
Seth grimaced. “She’s laid into me too. My dad even made a few harsher comments the last time I saw him… If the spells are directed at the house, that makes sense, since she’s home a lot more than he is.”
My heart squeezed. “You didn’t tell me they were giving you a hard time.”
“Like Ky says, there wasn’t any point,” Seth said. “You’d have felt bad about it. We knew it wasn’t going to be possible to avoid rumors altogether. We were prepared to get some comments.”
“I’ve heard my grandmother talk about a spell like that,” Lesley put in, her voice quiet but steady. “She told this story about how when the Assembly wanted to help a lot of unsparked people during an approaching emergency, one quick way was to make them feel more fearful, so they’d react to the earlier smaller signs of danger and get out of there faster. But sometimes that could backfire and they’d end up freaking out over totally unrelated things.”
Thalia was nodding, her mouth tight. As if she knew of those spells but couldn’t talk about them. Because she’d seen or heard her husband and his associates using that strategy?
I gritted my teeth. I couldn’t talk about the oath in front of the other witches, but that explained how the Frankfords’ people could have gotten around it. A general spell to increase apprehension could be framed as something helpful, not harmful. But they could easily have guessed that the guys’ parents would be sensitive to rumors of a strange relationship with a woman who wasn’t really part of the town.
It wasn’t just paranoia. If that was the sort of spell that’d been used on the guys’ parents, then it was feeding off concerns they really did have about me, deep down. How much were those concerns exaggerated and how much had their comments been truths they simply wouldn’t have said otherwise?
“I was working on the tokens to lay around the property,” Jin said, “but I’m thinking I’ll put that on hold to get a bunch more paintings done for you all to bring to your parents’ houses. Maybe their workplaces too? We’ll just need to talk about what they’d be willing to display, or if I need to make smaller ones that you could just tuck away somewhere, that sort of thing. I can get a bunch done tonight and tomorrow if I don’t get too ambitious in size.”
