Page 12 of The Arcane Taste of the Witchwood Boys (The Witchwood Boys #4)

Marlowe

Tanner zips past on his broom, wearing undone leather pants and way too much blood.

I grit my teeth and turn back to the house, intending on retrieving my own broom. Brooks is right there, putting his hand on my broken arm and stopping me in my tracks. I flinch and the world spins. There’s definitely bone showing. Broke my radius or something.

“Christ,” I groan, swiping blood from my face as I glance over at him.

“Fuck is right,” Brooks mumbles, rubbing salve into my wound. He touches my naked bone, and I pass out long enough that when I blink myself awake, we’re both sitting in the grass. Brooks is looking up at the sky, and I know he can feel it, too, this storm of broken glass inside his chest.

Our coven bonds are stretching like taffy, pulling long and stringy across the sky. Spaghetti-fying, like we’ve stumbled into a black hole. It feels like being killed. I should know, since I killed myself for Kate. It hurt, but not as badly as this.

It’s hard to breathe.

My hat blossoms with spider and snake plants, like it’s trying to give me an oxygen boost or something.

“Sex should’ve helped ground her. Instead, Kate tried to kill Tanner.” Brooks pauses, mouth twitching in distaste. “She ate him.”

And she did. Our woman ate a piece of our Eastwoods’ neck, swallowed a mouthful of his blood.

“We’ll take turns keeping an eye on her,” Brooks continues as I rub at my arm. The skin is knitted, and the bone is hidden, but it still hurts. Doesn’t matter. The urge is to take off after Kate again, close this horrible gap between us. If our woman doesn’t end up eating us, then maybe our coven bonds will strike us all down as retribution for being too far apart.

“Take turns?” I repeat, hoping like hell that Tanner knows what he’s doing. Can he even stay on that broom without passing out from blood loss? We should be going after them.

“Yes.” Brooks turns to me, and I see that his eye patch has come loose. He reaches up with a gob of salve and smears it over the eyeball, stopping the spill of white goo down the side of his hat’s cone. “Chasing her around blindly isn’t going to do us any favors. Kate isn’t bound by the laws of nature anymore, but we are.”

I sit back in the grass, naked as the day I was born. Under better circumstances, I would love this. The whole world frozen and under our control? We could take over everything.

And yet, in the face of losing Kate, none of that matters. Incredible how that works, huh?

“Right.” I sweep my hand down my face, smearing blood. “We need to eat. Sleep. Take a shit.” I laugh, but it’s bitter, even to my ears.

“Exactly.” Brooks is pissed off, but he puts on that boss man face of his in an attempt to keep it hidden. He blames himself, but that’s ridiculous.

This is my fault. I dragged Katelynn into the Witchwoods. Me.

“We need to work on a spell,” Brooks continues, mind whirring. “Something to help Kate hold onto her humanity. Breaking the curse isn’t going to be easy, and we’ll need her full participation in order to do it.” He gestures with a bloody hand at the moss-covered street with its massive ferns, the hulking trees behind the Pink Lady, and the boats bobbing in the water alongside skeletal coral growths. “Not to mention this shit.”

There’s a long pause there as we look at each other. Brooks is the one to break the silence.

“Might be worth our time to wake up the white witches,” he adds with a snort, reaching up to adjust the brim of his hat. Brooks stands up and moves through the grass, retrieving his broom and tossing it into the air for his shadow to catch. “Go get your pants. Your broom. We’re heading back to the cottage.”

I do as he asks, but fuck it hurts. I can feel Tanner and Kate like they’re attached to me via my veins, my tendons, like pieces of me I can’t lose are being pulled taut. I could follow the length of them to where they are, but that won’t help us.

For the first time since we became a coven, we willingly separate.

And I hate it.

I want our life back, and I want it more than I ever wanted to leave the woods.

“Hey,” I say to Brooks as I catch up to him in the front yard. He’s standing with his head tilted back, all of the eyes on his hat closed. He opens the ones on his face, dropping his chin and turning to look at me. “For what it’s worth,” I begin, licking my lips and tossing my broom in front of me. My winged shadow swoops down and grabs hold of it, keeping it afloat. “I forgive you.”

He gives me an odd look, all six red eyes on his hat opening and blinking at me in confusion. The big one’s all healed up now, but the brim is stained with goo and blood. I scrub at the back of my head, breathing hard and hurting. Kate and Tanner have moved closer to us, but they’re still too far away. It’s uncomfortable. It’s painful. More than all of that, I just don’t like it.

“For everything,” I continue, before I lose my nerve. I’ve spent eight months just fucking hating and hating and hating. I’m so done with it. “For the woods. For this shitstorm we’re in now. Tanner, too. I … just in case this doesn’t go the way we want it to, I needed to tell you that.” I look him dead in the eyes in a way that I don’t often do, my emotional shields sloughing off. I’m stubborn, and I’m an asshole, but even I know when things are dire enough that only the truth will suffice. “I’ve been happier living as a coven with the three of you than I ever was before—and I had a happy life, Brooks. I did. But what we have is better.”

He gives me the space to talk, even if we don’t have the time to spare. I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but I look up to Brooks. I respect him.

“Marlowe, I’m not going to let the three of you suffer. No matter what. I’ll give up my soul to make sure that, in the end, you’re safe.” He reaches out a hand and clamps it onto my shoulder, and I clench my teeth, slapping him off.

“Don’t do that. We end this together, Brooks. Together. Whatever fate awaits us, we go as a coven.” I’m breathing hard now, fists clenched at my sides. I take a small step forward, and he doesn’t move back. He doesn’t seem surprised when I put my arms around him, bloody and exhausted and standing in a yard filled with sleeping people, a dozing flash-toad we should probably kill, and trees bigger than the tallest buildings in this town. “I know you’d follow me into the woods, too. All three of you. Thank you for that.”

Brooks hugs me back, which I’m not sure that I expected. Damn. This is deep.

“You’re my brother-in-arms, Marlowe. You’ve come a long way from that scared boy in the forest.” He draws back and gives me a look with all eight of his eyes. “You’re a man that I’m proud to have in my coven, and only one of two souls that I would ever share my wife with.” His lip quirks at the edge, and mine does the same.

They’re not happy smiles. They’re just in case smiles. They’re if we die, I wanted you to know smiles. But fuck it. Feels good to open up like this and let him know how I feel. Seems like he feels the same. Brooks might be the leader, but even the boss needs a shoulder to lean on.

“And you’re right: we do this together.” Brooks moves over to his broom, still suspended effortlessly by that antlered shadow of his. “Let’s go wake the good witches up and get this done.”

It’s eerie as hell, to fly through our neighborhood and into the trees, straight to the cottage that I called home for eight long, dark months.

We land at the front door and let ourselves in.

Kate’s best friend, Georgia, is slumped at the base of the stairs with a machete in her lap. Her head is lolled against the wall, snoring and clutching the hilt of the blade at the same time. The weird kinky girl with the pink hair is curled up on the couch with a grimoire snuggled in her arms. The brunette is slumped over the table while the other one—Talia, that brat I saved—is lying on her back in the middle of the living room floor.

The fire continues to crackle in the hearth, a remnant of Brooks’ magic, permanent and safe. That was the best part of waking up here, climbing out of bed to find a fire waiting alongside breakfast.

I swipe my hand down my face as we examine the sleeping women in their silk bathrobes, skin decorated with blood, feet bare. Smart move, hiding in the cottage. Kate shouldn’t be able to get inside anymore … I don’t think.

She was in here before though, wasn’t she? Maybe the tree’s protection only works against her when she’s the full-ass owl. I have no fucking clue.

Brooks waves his hand and tomes spring to life, collecting on the table in two stacks. It’s an awful mess in here, and it smells terrible, like death and blood. It’s all over the floor, ours and Kate’s, a stain of red that soaks into the floorboards, wicks up the back of the couch, pools and puddles in glistening seas of red.

It makes me sick, looking at it. The crushed Witchwoods bees. The bones ground to dust. The spot on the floor where Kate’s cooling body lay. The knives we plunged into our hearts.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

I turn away, moving up to the side of the table as Brooks flips through grimoire after grimoire, looking for a spell that might be able to wake the women from their supernatural sleep.

“Are you sure there’s a way to wake them up at all?” I ask, closing my eyes against that horrible twisting in my gut. Kate and Tanner, running around town and making me hurt. Goddamn.

“We’ll need our full coven,” Brooks murmurs, casting a look at me with the eyes on his hat. His antlered shadow squats in the spell circle we left behind and weeps. Mine does the same. Neither of us acknowledges them. “Here.” He taps his finger on a page inside the book, written up in his mentor’s handwriting instead of his own.

This is an old spell, something he didn’t bother adjusting for our use.

“Takes six days to execute,” Brooks continues, standing from the chair and taking the book with him. He hands me a list of items to grab. “But if we add some orgasms in, we can make it happen tomorrow.” He nods his chin at the women. “We’ll leave them here until the spell is ready. Can’t risk Kate eating them before we’re prepared to cast.”

“Yeah, alright,” I say, loading up a bag with everything we might need. Brooks is the one who braves that shameful stain on the floor, picking up the dead toad from the mess. Huh. Wonder how it died? I wouldn’t know. There I was as a ghost, holding onto it—still very much alive and squirming—and then I was coming back to life.

“Interesting.” Brooks tucks the corpse into his own pack.

I join him in the living room and we spend a few seconds together in silence.

“We should hurry,” Brooks murmurs, more to himself than to me. His shadow is skittering up the stairs on all-fours. “We have one month to fix this before the world wakes up. I don’t give a shit about everyone else, but I don’t care to see what humanity will do when faced with the impossible.” He purses his lips, but I know he’s right.

If the world wakes up, it’ll be chaos. We can hide in this cottage, but it’ll be a bloodbath.

Up the steps and into the darkness of the woods we go.