Chapter 20
Rhys hadn’t had any really solid plans for his evening. Mostly he’d thought about sitting on the horribly uncomfortable couch his father had bought for this place and drinking a bottle of red wine. Somewhere in there, he’d planned on making time for both some half-hearted googling of “curse removal,” and feeling sorry for himself, but he’d only just opened the bottle of Syrah he certainly hoped Simon had been saving for a special occasion when his phone buzzed.
Vivienne.
Many things went through his head when he saw that she was asking him to meet her near midnight, giving him just an address, and only 80 percent of them were filthy.
Clearly, he was growing as a human being.
So he grabbed his coat, plugged the address Vivienne had given him into his phone and hoped his rental car would hold up this time.
It did, but when he came to a stop on a dirt road barred by a metal gate, he kind of wished he’d blown a tire near the house and had just called it a night, gone back to his original plans.
Vivienne was standing by the gate, dressed all in black, her hair pulled back in a tight French braid, and as Rhys stepped out of the car, he took in her outfit, complete with black leather gloves.
“Have you brought me out here to murder me?” he called. “Because that probably would solve your problems, but I have to say, I object on both moral and personal grounds.”
Shaking her head, she came closer, and Rhys caught another whiff of that damnable scent, sweet and heady against the crisp and smoky autumn evening. “We’re going on a kind of . . . quest.”
For the first time, Rhys noticed the satchel she had strapped across her chest, the torch—flashlight, he reminded himself—in her hand.
“A curse-breaking quest?” he asked, and she frowned.
“It’s curse-related.”
Well, that was promising at least.
Tapping the flashlight she held, Rhys asked, “Don’t trust your little illumination spell?”
The flashlight blinked on, and he could finally see her face clearly. Her pupils were huge in those hazel eyes, and she looked a little pale. Nervous, too.
“Didn’t think it was worth the risk.”
Reaching into her satchel, she pulled another flashlight out, handing it to him. “Come on.”
With that, she turned and headed back toward the gate, vaulting herself over with an ease that shouldn’t have turned him on nearly so much, but then, he was becoming used to finding literally everything Vivienne did erotic. Walking, jumping over fences, liking polka dots . . . all of it was immensely appealing, and if Rhys took a bit of satisfaction when he noticed her own eyes glaze over a little as he placed one hand on the gate and easily hopped it, well . . . he was only human.
Which also meant that the second his feet crunched on the dry leaves littering the road, a shiver of apprehension raced up his spine.
They were in the middle of nowhere, in a forest, at—he checked his watch—11:47 p.m. The night was so black it felt like it was pressing in on him, and he stopped, catching her elbow with one hand.
“All right, I pride myself on being the sort of bloke who rolls with the punches, but seriously. Where are we going?”
Vivienne nodded up the road. “There’s a house up there. Well, a cabin, really. Several of the witchy students at Penhaven have rented it in the past.”
Pausing, Vivienne fiddled with her flashlight, and Rhys prodded her foot gently with his toe. “Go on.”
She cleared her throat. “Including Piper McBride. The ghost we saw in the library, and now we have to catch her.”
Vivienne went to continue walking back up the road, and Rhys caught her elbow again.
“I’m sorry, did you say we’re going to catch a ghost?”
Blowing out a breath, Vivienne threw her hands up. “Not catch, exactly. We just have to—hold on.”
She fished in her satchel again, and Rhys wondered if it was some sort of Mary Poppins bag. What was she going to pull out of that thing next? Sword? Houseplant?
“We just have to light this,” she said, and Rhys squinted at the silver candle she held.
“A Eurydice Candle? Where did you even get that?” Rhys had only seen one once before, in a locked cabinet in his father’s library, and Rhys was pretty sure Simon had threatened him with bodily harm if he ever touched the thing. They were rare to come by, and the magic they used was powerful stuff.
“Amanda,” Vivienne said, and when Rhys just kept looking at her, she shoved the candle back in her bag. “She’s one of the college witches. Dr. Arbuthnot sent her to my office with the candle. Apparently, all we need to do is go to Piper’s house, find the spot where she kept her altar back in the day and light the candle. Then the candle will—”
“Pull her spirit into it, trapping it within the candle, which can then be lit somewhere else, releasing her more safely.”
“Right,” Vivienne said with a nod. “And then the college witches can rebind her.”
Overhead, an owl hooted, and Rhys tilted his head back to study the night sky. The moon was nearly full, skeletal trees reaching up for the stars, the perfect night for summoning up evil ghosts, and Rhys knew deep in his gut this was a terrible idea.
“Why can’t they come do it themselves?” he asked, and Vivienne sighed, pushing a stray bit of hair off her forehead.
“It has to be us. We’re the ones who set her free, so we have to capture her. But the candle does all the work. We just have to light it, wait for her spirit to, you know, get”—she lifted a hand and made a kind of swooping motion—“sucked into it, and then, done!”
She smiled at him, possibly the fakest smile Rhys had ever seen in his life. “Easy as pie!”
“You mean one of those kinds of pies they used to stuff live birds in, I take it? Because nothing about this strikes me as particularly easy, Vivienne.”
“Amanda said it would be.”
“Oh, well, if Amanda said it would be, then no problem at all! Our old friend, Amanda.”
Rolling her eyes, Vivienne turned away. “Maybe I should’ve come on my own.”
“Maybe neither of us should have come, and you should have told that witch to bugger off. I thought you didn’t like the college witches anyway.”
“I don’t,” she agreed, her boots crunching over the dried leaves as they moved deeper into the forest, and Rhys raised his shoulders, tugging at the collar of his jacket. Wasn’t this the South? Wasn’t the South supposed to be warm?
“But Amanda was nice, and she wanted to help, and since it’s my fault this ghost is out—”
“It’s our fault,” he said. “This entire thing is very much a disaster caused by two, Vivienne.”
She stopped then, turning around again. “Well, if it’s your fault, too, then maybe you should stop whining about helping.”
“I’m not whining,” he insisted, but then realized that it was almost impossible to say that sentence without sounding like you were whining, so he cleared his throat and said, “I just think that at a time when, as has been established, magic is on the fritz, maybe lighting a Eurydice Candle is a bad idea.”
“Ah!” Vivienne pointed at him, but since she did it with the hand holding the flashlight, Rhys was momentarily blinded.
He threw a hand up against the glare, and Vivienne immediately lowered the flashlight.
“Sorry. But as I was saying, ah! I thought of that, too. But there are loopholes. One, we’re not doing any magic ourselves. No spells, no rituals. The candle is doing all the work, and two . . .”
She crooked a finger at him, and Rhys was dismayed by how quickly he felt that gesture like a tug in his chest.
He felt it lower, too, his cock eager to follow wherever she wanted, and Rhys thought again of that kiss in the library, the feel of her under his hands, how quickly she lit up for him.
“Rhys,” Vivienne said, and then dammit all, she crooked that finger again. “Come here.”
He was truly an idiot, just the most besotted wanker in the entire world, because there was that tug again.
Keeping his hands in his pockets as he walked over to her, Rhys raised his eyebrows. “What?”
Placing one hand on his shoulder, she lightly pushed him a few steps to her right, and then looked up at him with that sunshine smile.
“I forgot to tell you. Aunt Elaine figured something out. The curse? It only exists within the town limits. Probably because the magic only fuels Graves Glen.”
“Gryffud was a very specific bastard from all accounts, so that makes sense,” he acknowledged.
“Right,” Vivienne said. “And as of right now, we are officially two . . . no, three steps outside the town of Graves Glen.”
With that, she lifted the hand on his shoulder and wiggled her fingers.
That little ball of light she’d conjured up his first night back in town sprung to life, and hovered there. It didn’t immediately explode into a ball of flame that took his eyebrows off, so Rhys assumed she was right. The curse didn’t extend this far.
That was a relief at least.
“Now, come on. We have a ghost to catch.”
Aaaaand moment of relief over.
They continued up the road for a few more minutes, the trees getting thicker, the path narrower, and while Rhys didn’t have the same sense of foreboding he’d felt in the library, he still wished he were anywhere but here.
And then, as the path narrowed even further, Vivienne’s shoulder brushed his, and suddenly being on a road through the woods, headed to a haunted house, was not really that bad. Maybe he didn’t want to be back on his sofa alone. Maybe he—
“Oh, fuck me running.”
Rhys came to a sudden stop, staring up at the house that suddenly rose up in front of him.
If you looked up “haunted house” online, he thought, this was the picture you’d get. It looked like something out of every bad horror movie he’d ever seen, and he was less afraid of ghosts than he was catching tetanus as he took in the crooked steps, the shutter slumping from one window, the front door hanging drunkenly on its hinges.
“Maybe the library needs a ghost,” Rhys said, studying the house. “Maybe we just leave it there. Bit of character, you know?”
Next to him, Vivienne sucked in a deep breath. “We just have to go in and light a candle. I bet we can be in and out in, like, three minutes.”
“That is about four minutes longer than I want to be in that house,” Rhys replied, but then he looked at her, saw her tug her lower lip between her teeth, and knew they weren’t leaving until this was done.
So, taking a deep breath of his own, Rhys held out his hand to her. “Let’s go catch a ghost.”