Page 19

“Concentrate.”

“I am concentrating.”

“Concentrate harder.”

That was easy for Eve to say. As excited as I was about the opportunity to hone my skills, I was more than a little distracted by the impending disaster growing in my womb.

The more I thought about it, the more obvious it became.

I’d let him knot me twice, and while that didn’t guarantee pregnancy, it made it a distinct possibility.

I guess I’d just assumed my body was under so much other stress that a child wouldn’t take.

What I hadn’t considered was that he or she might be as stubborn as their parents.

What was I going to do with a baby? What was I going to tell Caleb?

What was I going to tell Ethan? Was he going to think I’d done this on purpose, that I’d failed to convince him to be my mate, and so now I was trapping him with a child?

Was I about to start a conflict between two islands who’d been allied for centuries, just because I couldn’t keep my legs shut?

“You’re not concentrating.”

She had me there. I shook the nagging thoughts away and tried my best to concentrate on the long shadow of a chair that Eve had planted in the middle of Xander’s yard.

Despite the fact that few shifters would dare to come onto the Alpha’s property, Ethan was lurking by the back door, keeping watch.

Would he want to see the baby when it was born?

Would our child split time between Ferris and Lapine, or just stay with me, waiting for their father to pay a cursory visit?

No. I wasn’t thinking about that. I was concentrating on the shadow of the chair.

Eve had said that re-shaping shadows was all well and good, but the most powerful Shadow Witches could actually make them corporeal, could pour power into a tendril of shadow until it was hard as a rock or sharp as a knife.

If I could do that, I’d be nobody’s burden.

Eve had promised that the technique wasn’t all that different from what I was doing already, only that instead of pulling and pushing the shadows within the space, I was pouring my power into them, like filling a balloon up with air.

That might sound simple enough, but in practice, it was difficult as all hell.

We’d already been out in the yard for almost two hours, and I didn’t feel any closer to making anything corporeal.

The shadow of the chair remained stubbornly intangible, consenting only to wiggle and stretch on my command.

I didn’t know how to fill something up with my power. I couldn’t even say what my power was.

I had told Eve this numerous times, but she insisted it was only due to my inexperience. One day, she promised, I would be able to feel my power the same way I felt my limbs. She was probably right, but admitting that meant I needed to work harder, and right now, I was feeling pretty worked out.

“Try closing your blue eye again,” Eve suggested.

There had been some debate about whether having my good eye open or closed was better.

According to Eve’s books, the Shadow Witches who had come before me were all entirely blind, not just partially, and the question had never come up.

Generally, I thought it was easier with one eye closed—there was less to distract me when I couldn’t see anything but the creeping shadows—but I didn’t want that to be the only way I could use my power.

I was tired of failing, though, so I shut my good eye, still marveling at how swiftly the shadows came to the fore.

I concentrated on the one in front of me, the legs, the seat, and the back of the chair, all casting their own pattern on the grass.

I tried to push my power into it, but I only pushed the thing away from me so that it stretched out at the wrong angle.

“Try again,” Eve said gently. If nothing else, that woman had the patience of a saint.

I took a deep breath and tried again, trying to fill up the shadow, to make it solid. This time, it spread like a stain across the grass, and I heard Eve give a thoughtful little hum.

“Okay,” she said. “What do you do when you move the shadows? How do you manipulate your power then?”

“I just—I mean, I think about moving them and then… they move?”

To my surprise, she didn’t look at me like an idiot or a child, but only gave another thoughtful hum.

“Have you tried that… technique with this?” she asked. “Just thinking about the shadows becoming solid?”

“No.”

“Well, then it’s worth a shot.”

She didn’t sound confident, but I supposed it was as likely as anything else to work. I was already tired from the morning’s work, and I was willing to try anything.

Another deep breath and I closed my good eye again, honing in on the shadow of the chair.

I was so sick of that chair. Instead of trying to reach inside to identify whatever nebulous part of me could be called my power, I concentrated with all my might on the shadow deepening, growing darker, so dark that it became a matter of its own.

The shadow bent to my will. Or at least, it looked that way: when I was done, I could no longer see the grass beneath the shadow, as if there was a black blanket laid over it.

“Alright,” said Eve softly, as if she was trying not to spook me, “now I want you to try to curl it up, so it’s not flat to the ground. I’m going to go and see if I can touch it.”

I did as she asked, and the shadow did the same for me. One of the legs peeled away from the whole, curving upward into the air. I could see Eve’s shadow as she approached it, and I held the position as she reached out and touched the curl with the tip of a finger.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. My eyes flew open, and my good eye saw the strange curl of shadow snap back to its usual form.

She met my gaze, her familiar hazel eyes sparkling with excitement, but before either of us could speak, Ethan was striding toward us.

“Is everything okay?” he asked. All he’d heard was the shout and had naturally assumed the worst.

“Everything is more than okay,” Eve declared. “Your girl just made her first corporeal shadow.”

“Did she?” Ethan said as if he knew what that meant. “Sounds impressive.”

“It’s very impressive,” Eve assured him, “and very tiring. I’m going to leave it there for today. Make sure she’s fed and watered, now.”

Ethan did not need to be told twice. He was striding toward the house, probably about to empty Xander’s pantry to make a “snack”. I knew he was only doing it to make sure he brought me back to Caleb in good working order, but I couldn’t help smiling after him.

“It’s sweet of him to look after the pair of you.” Eve appeared at my shoulder, and I startled.

“The pair of—oh. Right.”

“I assume he’s the father?”

“Would you keep your voice down?” I hissed. If Ethan found out, when Ethan found out, I didn’t want it to be by accident. Somehow, I was convinced that he could hear us even through the walls.

“You haven’t told him?” Eve sounded mildly scandalized, the hypocrite.

“Not that it’s any of your business, but no,” I said tightly. Eve might be a great witch, but I was damned if I was going to let her judge my life choices. I flinched as she kissed her teeth.

“You won’t be able to hide it forever, you know,” she said, and I cracked.

“I was planning on just never telling him, dumping the baby on his doorstep, and then disappearing into the night,” I said, easy and conversational and brimming with anger. “How’s that for a plan?”

When I looked back at her, she’d turned pale, and I felt a little thrill of satisfaction.

“Did I not mention I was from Lapine?” I said. She shook her head, swallowing thickly.

“You didn’t, no.”

Silence enveloped us. I expected her to have questions—explanations, excuses, anything—but she only stood beside me, her lips shut tight.

“Do you want to know how she’s doing?” I prompted.

“Not really.”

“Wow, okay.”

Despite all I knew about her past, I’d never imagined that Eve was heartless. She seemed warm and kind and—well, motherly, though I supposed I was hardly the best judge of that.

“I’ll be back at the same time tomorrow,” Eve said, and the change of subject was so sudden it could have given me whiplash. “Now that you’re managing corporeal, we can try picking something up.”

I stared at her in disbelief. That couldn’t be all she had to say on the subject. We couldn’t just be done with that conversation.

“That’s it?” I asked, incredulous.

“Sometimes, when you love someone, it’s easier to keep them at a distance,” was all the explanation Eve gave. “When the world has been unkind to you, it feels safer to push away the people we care for, because then they can’t hurt us.”

I didn’t like how familiar that logic sounded. But Eve and I weren’t the same: I was guarding my heart from a man who had trampled over it repeatedly, while she had punished a child for being conceived.

“What if they love you just as much as you love them?” I countered. It might not be true for me, but Alyssa was sweet, kind, and strong. Any mother would be proud of her.

Eve only shrugged.

“That’s a risk, and you’ll have to decide whether to take it. I didn’t, and I regret it.”

She didn’t wait for my response to that; simply turned her back and walked away.

Eve might be the only woman on Ensign who could walk through town alone without issue, and she did it as though that privilege was simply her right.

In another world, I would have admired her deeply.

In this one, I tried to put her from my thoughts as I went to join Ethan in the kitchen.

Despite my best efforts to pretend otherwise, I was absolutely starving.

I was still trying to keep Ethan at arm’s length; the less time I spent with him, the less I spoke to him, the less likely I was to let something slip.

That afternoon, though, his enthusiasm was infectious, and I munched on the veggies he’d cut up for me while he grilled me about the morning’s breakthrough.

When I explained what this could mean, the possibilities for corporeal shadow, Ethan leaned back against Xander’s counter, whistling through his teeth.

“Forget Xander,” he said. “You’re the scariest motherfucker on the Nightfire islands now.”

He was genuinely excited for me; I should have basked in his admiration, but instead, it chafed at an old wound.

“Not just a burden anymore, huh?” I said, because fuck it.

“What?”

“You don’t remember?” I didn’t see why he would.

Throughout my life, I’d often found that hurtful words stayed with the one who was hurt far longer than with the one who did the hurting.

“After Dad died, when you guys all came over to Lapine—I asked you if there was anything I could do to support Caleb. You told me I was a burden to him, and the best way to help was to stay out of the way.”

There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of me crunching on a carrot stick.

I was trying, and probably failing, to seem cool about it all, to act like it was just a funny story and not a foundational part of who I was today.

Ethan clearly wasn’t buying it, because when I mustered the courage to make eye contact again, he looked devastated.

“That sounds like something I would say,” he admitted. Then, “I’m sorry.”

There wasn’t much else he could say, I supposed. For years, I’d fantasized about having him on his knees, begging for my forgiveness for underestimating me. It was so far removed from the reality in which I found myself that I almost laughed. Then Ethan spoke up again.

“Is that why you stopped…” he trailed off, as if regretting the sentence he’d begun.

“Stopped what?” I pressed, and almost immediately regretted it.

“When I carried you over the bridge,” Ethan continued reluctantly, “after the fight with Arbor, you were pretty out of it, and you said—you said you had a crush on me when you were younger.”

There was nothing to be done but cover my face entirely. I simply could not look at him, nor could I bear to have him look at me. I felt like I was twelve again, and I’d just walked into a tree I hadn’t seen on my blind side.

“I hate concussed me,” I said into my cupped hands. “She’s so embarrassing.”

“You also said that you got over it because I was an asshole,” Ethan offered, and I choked out an embarrassed laugh.

“Was I wrong?” I asked.

“No.”

We lapsed into silence again. I pushed the mostly-demolished plate of veggies toward him, and he took a stick of cucumber, bringing it straight to his mouth without even dipping it in the ranch, like a psychopath.

“The funny thing is, though,” he said. “I do remember some things about that visit. You uh—you came downstairs one morning with your hair up in a ponytail.” It was the morning after he’d told me I was a burden; it was because he’d told me I was a burden, but he didn’t need to know that.

He looked suddenly vulnerable in the afternoon sun as he confessed, “It was like I’d—I don’t know, like I’d never seen your whole face before; you were so beautiful.

I remember thinking that you were going to be a problem. ”

His voice was soft, and the moment felt dangerous, so I did the only thing I could ever think to do when faced with danger: crack a joke.

“You perv,” I said. “I was seventeen.”

“Trust me, I was aware,” he said ruefully. “Lock me up.”

He offered me his wrists, ready to be handcuffed, and I snorted an ugly, undignified laugh.

He smiled, and my heart gave a traitorous leap.

I couldn’t afford that now. For all that I could see, he was trying to make things easier between us, but I was about to throw a major spanner in the works.

I imagined telling him the truth, could see as clear as day the way his face would fall and anger would cloud his expression.

I could hear him asking me why, telling me it was impossible, and asking me what he was supposed to do with a baby.

The laugh died in my throat, and I watched his face fall as he registered my distress.

“Sorry. I’m tired,” I said, able to think of no better excuse.

“Julia—” his voice followed me out of the room and up the stairs, but I couldn’t turn back. I slammed the door of my bedroom behind me, only just in time. Then I was alone, and the tears came.