Two weeks passed much like the first two nights after our "victory" over our enemies. About every other night, Ace and Dare would switch out with Abraham and Evander as Henry's caregivers, allowing Van and Bram a break. On his "free" nights, Van portioned off the early evening for me, and then the wee hours for Tavish, who was an early sleeper and early riser.
I visited Tavish during the day, and those visits were pleasant and cheerful. He told me stories of his life, and I told him stories of the future. But I rarely spent more than an occasional hour with him and Van together.
That time with all three of us was bittersweet and, to my shame, somewhat awkward. I felt like a third wheel—entirely unnecessary. For that reason, I was both sad and glad that Tavish had set clear boundaries around us becoming an intimate family of three.
"Give it time, lass," Evander said to me, but his words sounded hollow because we both knew Tavish's time grew shorter by the day.
Despite the slow start with Tavish, the resort evenings Evander and I spent in each other's company were more like a house on fire. More than ever before, he enjoyed the exuberant atmosphere of the resort. He coaxed me to dine, dance, and revel almost nightly. He accepted invitations to dine with parties of wealthy guests, proudly introducing me as "the future Mrs. Livingstone," with a wink. No one got the terrible pun but me.
"That's me, future girl," I would mutter into his shoulder as he held out my chair for me with an entirely composed face.
Meeting the wealthy and powerful Jazz Age patrons was entertaining, but I enjoyed the family nights more.
Evander included Minnie and the lads and several other Livingstone cousins in our revels more and more. He seemed to enjoy all his mundane family's company immensely, especially with the outrageous Abraham as a buffer. Abraham had a way about him of inspiring the lads to confidence and keeping Minnie's spirits upbeat during Henry's "purging"-though she had yet to be allowed to visit him.
Abraham kept her distracted, however, and Evander joined in the fun. He cheered and toasted when Abraham cajoled Minnie to dance on our family table in the Jazz club, and he cheerfully lost money when Abraham suggested the two of them and the lads throw some dice in the service hallway behind the kitchen.
As Evander laughed, enjoyed himself, and bonded with the youthful generation of his family, I fell even more in love with him. He seemed less like the family patriarch and more like the dazzling, twenty-something sheik of the Jazz that he appeared to be.
After the music and the dancing and the laughing, he'd take me to bed, and he'd turn our nights into something more magical than I ever realized was possible. I had never felt more excited by a lover—or more connected to one. I'd resorted to repairing our bedroom with spells, because the more we made love, the less he held back from his feelings, and everything in the room that was breakable—except me—was taking the brunt of his enthusiasm.
He fed regularly and never once came close to biting me during sex, but nevertheless, I'd had to shamefacedly ask Minnie to help me order a dozen sets of identical black silk sheets, because of all the blood. I could magic a lot of things, but I was a modern girl who couldn't help but feel like the blood he spilled during sex needed to be laundered away, not spelled.
Minnie's eyes had gone round when I explained the messy nature of sex with a vampire. "You just wait, you'll be in the same boat someday, Sister," I told her as her shock disintegrated into laughter.
"Will I?" she said wistfully, and there was something behind her words that I didn't understand. I didn't pursue it, however, because I had no idea how long or steep Henry's control curve might be. Given what he'd told me about his own making, I suspected Evander would compel a ban on Henry's and Minnie's intimate life for an amount of time that was going to make Minnie unhappy.
During the day, I slept past noon and spent the afternoons pretending as if Thacker and Troy weren't hovering around Minnie and me while she went about her actual job as the resort's event planner, teaching me a little about how the place was run and what she thought might become some of my hostessing duties, as Van's "mate." Sometime around mid-afternoon, Tracker and Trotter generally became true nuisances as they followed Minnie and me up to a small, isolated cabin that Evander had built in the late eighteenth century as a residence, but now had given to me for the purpose of my "witching," as he put it. I'd spend an hour or two before dinner introducing Minnie to basic witchcraft concepts. While she practiced what I taught her, and Tracker and Trotter obnoxiously joked about all of it, I tried to advance my own craft in a way that was entirely foreign to me—hedge witchery.
A hedgewitch wasn't an actual witch at all, but a modern pagan kitchen "witch" who was a bit of an herbalist, traditional cook, and wise woman all rolled into one. I figured from the modern perspective, every pioneering woman had been a sort of a hedgewitch, even if they didn't combine their skills with any true talent for magic or spiritual respect for nature.
Kitchen witching had never been my area of expertise. My talent for spoken spells was significant, and I rarely needed potions, tinctures, or oils to amplify my craft. But it couldn't hurt to brush up on the basics of kitchen witchery and natural herb-healing, I told myself. Minnie seemed more comfortable with that kind of witchery anyway, and I might need to know how to dress wounds, ease pain, and even make beer if I wound up in the eighteenth century, mysteriously bereft of my significant magical power.
I still couldn't quite believe it when Evander told me he'd never seen me work any magic back then, nor had he sensed that my blood ran to the craft after he was made a vampire. A whiff of Fae whimsy and mischief? Yes, I was definitely possessed of that when he met me, he'd said. Actual witchcraft? No, he assured me.
Maybe he was right, and the craft wasn't within me back then. Maybe time travel—or something else—had knocked the magical wind out of me. Or maybe I simply learned to conceal my nature for reasons yet unknown to me. But either way, I needed to learn a thing or two about how to use herbs and ferment all kinds of good stuff that could be eaten or drunk.
Just in case.
Hedgewitchery, however, wasn't going well for me. My father had instructed me in the basics as a young girl, but I was surprised by how little useful information I could remember. My poultices grew mold, and I fretted over my beer with no instinct at all to know if I had cultivated the right yeast strain. I couldn't even properly keep the sourdough bread starter I'd gotten from the baker in the resort kitchens, despite his instructions. It was a runny mess when it should be nicely clotted. I had no idea what was wrong with any of it.
I sniffed the beer barrel for the twentieth time and pounded the lid back on with the palm of my hand as I draped myself over it and cried, "I miss the Internet!"
Thacker, resplendent, as always, in the white linen daywear of the Jazz-Age wealthy, turned a chair around and sat down in front of me. "Yes, tell us more about this Internet," he said as he took a nip from his flask. "It sounds like a ground floor opportunity."
"You'll be dead by then," I said grumpily, as I cheated and pushed a little magic into the beer barrel.
"Not necessarily," Tracker replied and mimicked a vampire fanging out, and I laughed.
Minnie huffed in frustration at the bowl of moon water in which she was trying to scry. "Give me that." She swiped Thacker's flask and turned to the musty, threadbare cushions of a spindly, colonial couch. Dust motes poofed from it as she collapsed onto it, sniffed the flask, and made a face. "Nevermind, it smells like rubbing alcohol."
"Well, we've had to find a new supplier since the Alliance ended, and the vamps are no help at all. All they care about at the moment is Henry," Thacker explained. "Even though they say he's doing fine, and he'll be fit to test for human company soon."
"All this abundance of caution over Henry's supposed bloodthirst is ridiculous. It's Henry. He's not going to hurt anyone. God the smell, take it!" She shook the flask urgently, and Trotter took the offending rotgut. "Yes, Henry is doing remarkably well as a newborn vampire, and I'm a disaster as a witch!" she wailed.
I drug myself off the beer barrel and went to her, sitting down on the couch, which swayed a little under both our masses. "No, you're not. I'm a terrible teacher. The only spells I remember by rote are the couple dozen or so I use all the time because we modern witches always have access to our written spells and incantations on our mobile phones. We take pictures, we put them in notes, or we even look up ancient texts on the Dark Web—that's sort of a Red Light District of the Internet," I shoot the explanation at Tracker before he can inquire. "But the spells I know by heart are too advanced for you right now, and I've forgotten the basics. It's okay, though. I just realized what we need."
"What's that?"
"We need a grimoire."
"Where are we gonna get one of those?"
"We already have one. We are MacBanes, are we not? We'll just go ask Granny Maeve to have a peek at the family manual." I turned to Troy. "Get the Packard, Trotter. We're going on a field trip to Mystic Mountain."
"On no, we're not," he crowed arrogantly, crossing his arms and moving to stand in front of the door of the cabin. "Evander wouldn't like that at all."
I more than chafed at his tone and his guard-like stance. I summoned a dark ball of get-the-fuck-out-of-my-way in my left hand, and then I tossed it from fingertip to fingertip. "You have two choices, fellas. Get the car in gear, or get hurt. I'll imagine Evander will be more irritated with you if he finds you both unconscious on the floor, because you refused to do as I asked, and I resorted to hexing you both."
Thacker rolled his eyes. "We're supposed to do what you ask as long as it doesn't endanger you. I'm pretty sure he would be more irritated with you if you hexed us and ran towards danger alone."
I rose, slinked to the chair where he sat, and propped myself up by one hand and as I twirled the ball of whup-ass in my the other. "Think about what you're saying. Evander is currently having the best sex of his vampire existence, every night, with me. How long do you think his irritation would last with me, versus you and your twin?" I leaned down in his face. "Don't you want to be a bloodsucker one day, Thacker?" He narrowed his eyes at me and I smiled wickedly. "Well then, suck it up and get the car.
His eyes narrowed even further, to slits. "You're evil, Celie Dunne."
I shrugged. "Black witch and all. Get used to it."
Across the room, Trotter laughed. "Ah, damn. We're bested, Thack, and you know it. The sooner we get there and get back, the better."
###
We had a successful trip to Mystic Mountain—so successful that we were there much longer than anticipated. Thacker raced the setting sun on our return trip, careening wildly around poorly graded and graveled mountain roads. The car was packed to the gills of things Minnie and I had gotten in Mystic Mountain. I had gone there for beginner spells but managed to barter for kitchen witching supplies as well. Minne and Troy were squeezed in the back seat among baskets of herbs and cases of concoctions and wine-makingL supplies. The trunk was full of other things the Mystic Mountain Witches didn't use anymore—a butter churn, a cheese form, a giant wooden washtub for mashing muscadines.
I was super pleased with what I'd managed to come away with, for what I'd given up. You know what they say—one witch's trash is another witch's scheme.
"Jesus Christ, Thacker!" I squealed as we narrowly passed another car whose terrified driver laid on the horn. "Slow down! Van can feel when I'm scared, you know! It's much better that he rise find me absent and safe versus absent than rise and sense I'm in fear for my life!"
My revelation of the spooky bond I have with Van did indeed cause Thacker to amend his reckless driving with a hard stomp on the brakes. "Christ, why didn't you tell me that? That he could sense you?"
"Because the nature of their bond is none of your business," Minnie said, as she leaned between us from the back seat. "But since you brought it up...how does that work? I mean, can you feel him, too? Is it just magical? Or does it have to do with the blood? Will it work like that with me and Henry?"
I shook my head. "No. It's not really...normal."
Tracker cast me a sidelong glance. "Not even for vampires and witches?"
I twisted so that I could see Minnie better, and as I did, the back of my knees came unstuck from the leather seat. It was nearing July and warm, and—horrors—I had been going barelegged in the day. Pantyhose and hot weather did not mix, but neither did leather car seats and a lack of air-conditioning.
"For us, it's complicated. From Van's perspective, I am his...thrall, I guess. Because of the nature of our relationship in his past."
"Wait, in the past, he made you a blood slave?" Troy asked, squeezing in beside Minnie.
"It was accidental. He said he wasn't given a lot of training from his maker. He didn't know that feeding and giving me his blood repeatedly would have that effect. But now, I know. So if I somehow still wind up back there, as his colonial wife, I can avoid that. Hopefully, I can avoid dying back there, too."
"I don't understand. It already happened. Van remembers it happening and turning out badly. If you went back there and changed it, wouldn't he remember that?" Thacker inquires as he made a slingy, right turn at the bottom of a steep grade that caused me to automatically reach for the "oh shit handle" that didn't exist in this jalopy.
When I recovered my speech—and my stomach—I responded. "That's the million-dollar question, isn't it? All I know is that I saw Cutter turn Nick—Kid, I mean— into a werewolf in the future, and now Cutter is dead so that obviously can't happen. But yet Nick is still a werewolf and we are still here in the past as a direct result of that night. And from what Kid said the night Cutter was killed, he still remembers Cutter making him, in the future. So we must be in some sort of...time bubble, he and I. Or we've caused the reality we are in now to...jump the track and..."
"And now there are two timelines? The straight-line and the detour you've created?" Troy suggested, gesturing at me with a gimme signal.
"Maybe," I shrugged. I passed the flask we'd refilled in Mystic Mountain over to the back seat. I'd bartered for many useful things, including some decent gin. "You should write science-fiction for the talkies, Troy. Big future in that, you know," I gave him a wink, and he blushed. He was always reading and writing in a leather journal, though he was private about it.
"So maybe that means...you won't go back in time at all," Minnie suggested. "Maybe you'll just stay here with us. Maybe we'll all grow old together."
"Grow old?" Thacker interjected. "Hardly. I'm planning an alternate lifestyle, like Henry. Speaking of that, Min, you do realize your fiancé is going to live forever and never get a day older, don't you? You're going to have to up your black witchy ways to stay young and pretty for him. You're practically an old maid already, cousin," he teased her.
She grinned at him. "Maybe you'll be my first human sacrifice."
He considered. "Actually, that might work. If you slit my throat, and my faithful twin begs Evander to save me from bleeding out..."
"You're assuming I would," Troy drawled and handed the flask to Minnie. She sniffed, winced, and passed it back to me. Her reluctance made me double-check the contents. I thought the quality was much better than what Thacker had earlier, but Minnie did prefer fruity cocktails. I guessed the straight, hard stuff wasn't her thing.
I shrugged, took a swig, and denied Thacker as he gestured for the flask. "You're driving is scaring me plenty without any more booze. Also, scaring me? What you just said. Don't go getting yourself mortally hurt just so Van will make you. To be honest, I'm not sure he likes you that much. He might let you die and be relieved of it."
Minnie and Troy crowed as Thacker rolled his eyes, but he knew it wasn't true. In the last few months, Evander had become much more approving of both Thacker and Troy. They'd acquitted themselves well in the fire-fight in Lycombe that had occurred when Nick staked Van. Not to mention they'd proven resourceful in filling the hooch hole left by the destroyed Alliance. And they were doing an annoyingly good job of being my protection detail. Somehow, Van was beginning to rely on them in the family business as he did Graham and Jesse and Stan and Minnie. And they were rising to the occasion.
As we cruised into Sanguine Springs and up the gravel road that lead to my witching hut, Thacker's headlights flashed across Evander, who was sitting the porch steps of the cabin. He was dressed rough—like the night I met him—smoking a cigarette calmly. The loose hold on the cigarette belied his calm because his eyes glittered, and he bared his fangs as the light panned over him. It was hard to tell if it was the bright light that offended him or my absence when he awoke.
I grabbed a case of mason jars filled with bread and cheese starters and bounced out of the Packard.
"Hi, honey! I'm home," I teased him as he rose to greet me.
"I'm glad to see you and glad that you're thinking of this place like home," he said calmly, but I could tell now he was irritated with me.
"We went trading with the Mystic Mountain coven," I said, as the others pulled various baskets, bags, and boxes and made their way toward him.
Evander imposed on the steps like a disgruntled bouncer, halting our progress. But as he looked over my witchy haul, his eyes seemed to soften as his gaze landed on the butter churn hoisted upon Thacker's shoulder. Probably some memory of me using one in the past was buttering him up for me because he gave me a crooked grin as he took my box of bread, cheese, and alcohol cultures and sniffed.
"I know you're a modern witch without a lick of farm sense, but you realize that in order to make goat cheese, you have to be in possession of goats, don't you?"
I smiled sweetly at him. "I know a very indulgent, very wealthy vampire who will buy me a goatherd if I ask."
"Do you, now?" he murmured softly. "Because I know a vampire that might just as easily tan your hide for giving him a scare when he awoke from his torpor. I couldn't feel you at all. For a moment I'd worried that you'd...gone."
"Oh," I said, realizing he wasn't irritated, so much as working down from a momentary fright. It didn't occur to me that to his vampire senses, he might think I had disappeared from this time and place if I simply took a day trip. "You couldn't feel me at all? What's the range on our bond, do you have any idea?"
He shook his head. "It's not the range, but the place you went. The coven has Mystic Mountain well shielded. Once you entered their territory, you were undetectable to me. You simply disappeared from my senses and it woke me up with a jolt. But then I asked around after you, and one of the valets said you'd gone off in high spirits with Minnie and the lads, like a raiding party. Since you're fond of sneaking off to visit with Maeve, I guessed where you had gone. I see now that I was right."
"I see." I stepped up to his step and planted a kiss on his cool, chiseled cheek. "I'm sorry, Van. It was inconsiderate not to leave word of where I'd gone. I honestly didn't think we'd be gone so long."
He pressed his lips together, refraining, I thought, from further scolding in front of Minnie and the lads, but he picked up a large picnic basket at his feet. "I thought we might have a quiet moonlight stroll, you and I. But let's get all your goods situated first."
There was quite a bit of stuff and supplies, and Evander's mood relaxed as I stocked the cabin. "Seems like old times," he murmured as I stretched to hand large bundles of dried herbs from long hooks protruding down from the ceiling. He sniffed a bundle of dried dandelion. "We could expand the kitchen gardens so that you can grow your own if you like."
"Let's see if I can figure out if any of it's actually useful, first. I've always been more of a charmer than a potion-maker," I teased him.
"You charm me," he agreed as he hung another bundle of herbs for me. "But what in the hell did you trade Maeve for all this?"
I grinned. "All this plus a ton of beginner MacBane spells for Maeve! As to what I traded?" I shrugged and smirked. "Stock tips."
Evander cocked his head and returned my smirk. "Stock tips! So you're telling me that among all your other talents, you've a head for speculating as well? Or is this another vision, this one set on Wall Street?" Thacker brought another box to the small wooden table and Van fished the flask out of Thacker's back pocket. He unscrewed it, sniffed, made an approving sound, and helped himself.
I took a deep breath. When I first came here, I was afraid that my knowledge of the future might make me a valuable hostage. But now, all I wanted to do was protect the people that I cared about. Trading Maeve some insight into the future was a bit mercenary, but for Van and our family, I would now give my knowledge of the future fully and freely.
"It's a very big tip, but it has nothing to do with my trading knowledge, and everything to do with my knowledge of history. Impactful events. Happening soon." I turned from arranging small bottles of various tinctures on a bare wood shelf and met Van's full attention.
"Ooooh," he nodded and crossed his arms. "Yes, I was wondering when we were going to get around to the future. Go one, paint us a vision in broad strokes," he smiled, but he was a bit tense.
My fingers were clasped together near my chest, and I hadn't realized it. Very deliberately and put them by my sides. "The Roaring Twenties hit the wall on October 29th, 1929. The biggest stock market crash in history takes place on that day, which will become known as Black Tuesday. Many wealthy people who are fully invested lose everything, and even worse than that, the crash sets off an economic depression that affects the working class. There are runs on banks, they close their doors, even regular folks find their meager savings...nonexistent. And then there's a drought in the Midwest that disrupts farming for most of the decade, too. Unemployment, homelessness, and hunger are terrible in the 1930's. Thousands of families become drifters and live in shantytowns. To history, the 1930's will be known as the Great Depression."
That is not what any of them expected to hear.
"That's not...possible, in this day and age," Troy said slowly.
"Not true," Evander shook his head but his face was expressionless. "Everything changes and nothing stands still."
I considered his words. "Plato?"
He shook his head. "Heraclitus." He upgraded his expression to a grim smile. "Don't worry, lads. Our fortune is always conservatively protected, and there's plenty of time to make it more secure. Geordie might find it amusing, exchanging our assets back into gold."
"Maybe that's a good idea because if you do that, you'll definitely have a chance to make up for the stagnancy that's coming. The government fixes the price of gold during the Great Depression but during the mid-thirties the price sky-rockets. War breaks out in Europe again—Germany starts invading its neighbors again—"
"Son of a bitch. Again?" Troy exclaimed.
"The poor peace makes that inevitable," Evander responded with a shrug. "The Treaty of Versailles has ruined Germany's pride and their economy."
I look at him, surprised. "Yes, that's exactly what many historians will say in hindsight. Anyway, because of the Depression, we stay out of Europe's troubles for a long time, but the US gets involved in 1942, after Japan—allied with Germany—attacks a US naval base in Hawaii on Dec 7th, 1942. Almost six times as many American soldiers will die in what becomes known as the Second World War as the first—what you now call the Great War. And Europe...I don't know their casualty numbers, but it's much much worse. A generation of men lost. In preparation for the war, the US government starts requiring men to register to be drafted sometime in the early forties. It's not just young men, either. It's all men, up to the age of forty-five," I say softly. "Things start to change. The government starts to keep track of everything and everyone."
Evander follows my gaze to Troy and Thacker, but I say what he's thinking. "They'll be thirty-eight the year the US enters the war. They will by no means be too old to be excused."
He nods. "If we go, lads, you'll go as I did in the last war. As vampires. You can do more good for more mundanes that way."
Troy looked startled, but Thacker immediately pressed his advantage. "That's almost two decades from now. I don't want to wait until I'm ancient to be changed."
"I wasn't suggesting you wait that long." Evander raised his eyebrows.
"Is that a promise?" Thacker asked.
"Or a threat," Troy added.
"I won't make you if you don't want it, Troy," Evander said with a touch of concern on his face. "But you have that long to decide if you will choose eternal youth. Immortality won't wait much longer than that if you wish to remain this side of forty. It must be well before, or sometime after, the great, embroiling war on the horizon. You can't learn to vampire in the middle of a bloody war if you want to come home from it."
"So when war comes, I can be a vampire, in the dark of night, behind enemy lines, or I can be a poor mundane bastard that gets blown apart in the light of day?" Troy retorted.
"You can be whatever you like," Evander says. "You must answer to your own conscience, Troy. That's the mark of a man. That's what I ask of you. Nothing more. Nothing less."
Troy returned Evander's gaze, then finally nodded slowly. "Okay. I'm not as convinced of my path as Thacker. But I'll...consider my options."
Evander smiled at him. His smile faded as he leaned both hands on the table and looked at me. "You're sure? Absolutely sure about your predictions."
"From everything I've read about major events in history since I've been here, they are exactly the same as the history I have learned in my own time, up to this point. I'm ninety-nine point nine percent positive of what will come."
"Alright." He bowed his head. " Five years to discreetly liquidate the Livingstone assets and become truly cash and gold-rich—rich enough to see our mundane community through the coming hard times. Less than a decade for Troy to consider his path. Also, less than a decade for Thacker to screw up royally and cause me to withdraw my immortal offer—"
"Ha-ha-"
"Oh, I'm not joking, you're in a probationary period," Evander shot back. "And...as for Minnie..." he turned to smile at his granddaughter. "Perhaps one more day, until you see your man? After his feeding this evening, I plan to test Henry's fitness for human company. If it goes well, we'll arrange a visit for tomorrow night?"
She flew at Evander, catching him around the neck. "Oh, thank you, thank you." She peppered his face with kisses.
He laughed at her, but gently disengaged her. "Yes, but don't do that to Henry—attack him with affection. If the visit comes to fruition, you must move and behave exactly as I will instruct you."
Minnie's face looks troubled. "Will he truly be that dangerous?"
"He will not seem so, no. But beneath the control he will exert, he's feral, lass. There will be nothing more in this world that he will desire than your blood and your...complete submission of it, as his mate. You must not allow him the opportunity to create your submission or he may not be able to resist taking it, aye?"
He said these things to Minnie, but he gave me a casual glance, and I knew the caution was aimed at me as well. He returned his attention to Minnie and gave her a pat on the back. "Get ye gone, Lass. Take these two cretins with you. My time is a bit limited before I attend to Henry's next step, and I'd like to spend a bit of time with Ceciliadh."
As they departed with knowing winks and smirks, I was already focused on Evander.
And he on me.