Chapter 27
Rhys had thought it was odd seeing Vivi in his father’s house, but that had been nothing compared to seeing his father in Vivi’s house.
Well, her aunt’s house, technically, but it might as well have been Vivi’s for as much time she spent there, how natural she looked sitting at her aunt’s kitchen table, a mug of steaming tea at her elbow.
Simon looked a little less natural, but then, to be fair, he was staring at a talking cat.
“Treats?” Sir Purrcival asked as he attempted to headbutt Simon’s arm. “Treeeaaats?”
“What on earth is this abomination?” Simon asked, drawing his arm back even as Gwyn rose from her seat and heaved the cat up off the table.
“He’s not an abomination, he is a precious baby. Although we do need to work on his table manners.”
“Mama,” Sir Purrcival purred, looking up adorably at Gwyn as she carried him out of the room, and Rhys saw his father give a shudder before reaching for the mug of tea Elaine had brought him. It got about halfway to his mouth before he seemed to think better of it, setting it back down so hard it sloshed over the side.
“It’s not poisoned,” Elaine said, coming to sit next to Vivi, briefly patting her niece’s shoulder as she did.
Sniffing, Simon pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed at the spilled tea. “Given this family’s predilection for harming members of my family, you understand my concern.”
“Da,” Rhys said, his voice low, and Simon flashed him a look Rhys had seen a thousand times before: that mix of irritation and warning, plus just the slightest hint of bafflement, as if Simon could not believe this was his son.
“Am I wrong?” he asked Rhys now. “Do you or do you not find yourself under a curse placed by this very coven?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Elaine said, stirring a spoonful of honey into her tea. “We’re not a coven. We’re a family. And this curse is very much accidental, as both Vivi and Rhys have explained.”
Simon sniffed at that, sitting up straighter in his chair. “There’s no such thing as an accidental curse. And now, thanks to this foolishness, this entire town, my family’s legacy, is apparently cursed as well. Now, from what I can gather, this has resulted in several accidents, plus a ghost being loosed, and also that living nightmare you call a cat.”
Gwyn had just walked back into the room, and now she leaned against the doorframe between the kitchen and the hall, folding her arms over her chest. “Seriously, dude, don’t care whose dad you are or how fancy a witch you are, keep talking shit about my cat, and I will personally kick you down this mountain.”
Simon started to go a little purple in the face at that, so Rhys stepped forward from his own spot near the stove, hands lifted. “All right, let’s all just calm down and focus on the matter at hand.”
Oh Christ, he sounded like Wells. What a nightmare.
Clearing her throat, Vivienne tucked one leg underneath her and looked across the table at Simon. “We’ve been doing all we can to get the curse reversed, Mr. Penhallow. All of us, even Gwyn. We’re trying to make this right.”
“And what exactly have you been doing?” Simon asked. His tone was still frosty, but at least he wasn’t shooting daggers from his eyes at Vivienne. Small mercies.
Vivienne pressed her lips together, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear before saying, “Well, we’ve been researching.”
“Books?” Simon asked, his brows drawing together, and Rhys frowned.
“Why are you saying ‘books’ like that? You love books. If you could legally make books your children instead of me and Bowen, I think you would. You’d keep Wells, obviously—”
“Because the answer to this sort of magic cannot be found in books,” Simon replied, shooting Rhys a glare. “Curses are complicated, complex magic. There is no universal solution. The cure is intimately wound up in the curse itself. The motivations behind casting it, the power used. All of which, I should add, I could have told you if you’d alerted me to what was happening here.”
“I tried to, remember?” Rhys said, shoving his hands in his pockets. “And you told me it was ridiculous to even think I’d been cursed.”
“Yes, well.”
Simon looked down, flicked an imaginary piece of lint off his jacket, and Rhys wondered if he was always going to end up wanting to scream in these little tête-à-têtes with his father.
“The point remains, once you knew what was afoot, I should’ve been informed.”
“How did you find out?” Vivienne asked, leaning forward a bit. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
“My brother,” Rhys answered, then looked over at Simon with raised eyebrows. “I assume that’s it, isn’t it? I told Wells, so he told you?”
“Lewellyn was worried about you,” Simon replied, and Rhys groaned, throwing up his hands, promising himself that the next time he saw his big brother, fratricide was on the menu.
“Should’ve called Bowen, I knew it.”
“You were not kidding about the dysfunctional family stuff,” he heard Gwyn mutter to Vivienne, who shushed her.
Rising from her seat, Elaine held her palms out, rings winking in the low light. “Who should’ve told who what when is not the issue right now. This is actually good to know about the curse magic. Gives us something to work off of.”
“Something more than books, yes,” Simon said, then looked up at Rhys, his expression grim. “You’ve been here for nearly two weeks, boy, what else have you been doing besides poring through useless tomes?”
Rhys kept his eyes off Vivienne because he knew if he even glanced her way, his father would understand immediately just what Rhys had been doing.
“We’ve also been working to reverse some of the effects of the curse,” he said evenly, and even Gwyn managed not to snort at that. And it was true, he and Vivienne had spent some time putting out various curse-caused fires.
But he knew it wasn’t enough. He knew they should’ve been taking this more seriously. It was just that it was so easy to get distracted by her, so easy to get caught up in how they were together, and Rhys has missed it too much to let it go now.
Even if he should.
Turning to Elaine, Simon leaned forward, bracing his hands on the table. “Is there any extra power source a member of your family could’ve drawn from? An ancestor buried here, something like that.”
Elaine nodded, pushing her glasses up her nose. “One, yes. An Aelwyd Jones. She came over at the same time as your vaunted Gryffud Penhallow. But as far as we’ve always known, there was nothing special about her. Just another witch who emigrated here, and died of some random sickness, like so many of them did.”
Something flickered in Simon’s face, but it was there and gone too quickly for Rhys to know what it was.
“Very well,” he said.
Simon stood then, pushing back his shoulders. “I need to return home and consult my own sources on this. Rhys, I think you should come with me.”
Startled, Rhys rocked back on his heels. “What?”
“If you’re home, I will be able to keep an eye on anything the curse might do to you. It will benefit my research.”
The words were stony, detached, and he didn’t even look at Rhys as he fished in his pocket for the Traveling Stone, and even though Rhys knew—he knew—what a fucking cold fish his father was, it still hurt, even now. Even after all this time. He wanted Rhys to come home because Rhys would be an intriguing experiment in curse work, not because he was his son; he cared about it because it fueled his interest in the real thing he loved—magic itself.
“I want to see this through here, Da,” he replied, his voice surprisingly even, and when his father only gave a “So be it,” in response, Rhys told himself he’d gotten off lightly. After all, Simon had come all the way from Wales more or less just to chide him, and now he’d done that and was leaving. It had certainly been worse in the past.
But then Simon paused, his fingertips lightly resting on the table. “Hopefully my son’s presence will not distract you ladies from the important business of selling crystals and novelty T-shirts.”
“Da,” Rhys started, but Vivienne was already rising to her feet.
“We do sell an awful lot of crystals and novelty T-shirts,” she said, her own hands braced on the table. “We also sell fake grimoires and plastic pumpkins and pointy hats. The whole shebang, really.”
The lines around Simon’s mouth deepened, but he didn’t say anything, not even when Vivienne smiled and said, “And yet we’re still the witches who managed to curse your son, and you had no idea it had even happened. So maybe back off a little.”
She kept smiling, her eyes hard, her cheeks a little flushed, and truly, how could any man not be wildly in love with her?
Vivienne glanced over at him, and since Rhys was fairly certain he had cartoon hearts literally pouring out of his eyes, he stood up, nodding at his father.
“I’ll see you on your way, shall I?”
Simon was still looking at Vivienne, but after a moment, he nodded, heading for the door. Walking his father out, Rhys paused at the top of the porch steps. “Sorry for the wasted trip.”
Simon turned and looked at him, and Rhys saw the lines around his mouth, carved deep, the hollows beneath his cheekbones. “Rhys,” Simon said, and then he shook his head, the Traveling Stone already in his hand. “Take care of yourself.”
“I always have,” he replied, but the words were barely out of his mouth before his father was gone, blinking out like a light, leaving Rhys alone on the porch.
“Want me to follow you home?”
Ah. Not alone.
Vivienne stood in the doorway, still in her witch’s dress, the hat long since discarded, and Rhys nodded. “I’d like that, yeah.”
It took them only about three minutes to make the drive from her aunt’s house to his, and Rhys told himself he should be nothing but relieved that his father had come and gone so quickly. That he wasn’t staying here in the house tonight.
He dropped his keys on the table by the door, Vivienne just behind him.
“Thank you,” he said, turning to look at her. “Both for seeing me home like a lady, and also for putting up with my father.”
“He really wasn’t so bad,” she said with a shrug. “Way less scary than I’d thought he’d be.”
“Vivienne, you gorgeous girl, you are a woman of many talents, but lying is not one of them.”
She smiled a little at that, and then crossed the room to stand in front of him. “Do you want me to go?” she asked, reaching up to brush his hair back from his face. “Get some time to yourself?”
“Stay,” he said, taking her hand and kissing her palm, then her wrist. And then he was kissing her mouth, suddenly, desperately needing her, wanting her, and her hands were already at the button on his jeans.
“Stay,” Rhys murmured again, and he knew he didn’t just mean tonight, but rather than say that, he pulled her down onto the sofa with him.
“You know, the one place where this decorating scheme really works is in here,” Vivi said, leaning back against Rhys’s chest in the giant claw-foot tub that dominated the master bathroom. Like the rest of the house, it was done in shades of black and deep burgundy, but Rhys had to agree with her: in here, the mood was definitely more romantic than terrifying. Of course, that might have been all the candles they’d lit and the fact that he currently had Vivi, naked and wet, pressed up against him, but in any case, Rhys was suddenly very fond of this spot in the house.
“Thank you,” he murmured against her temple, kissing the damp hair there, and she tilted her head back to look at him.
“For complimenting your bathroom?”
“For all of it. For holding your own against my father.”
“He loves you,” she said softly, reaching down to tangle her fingers with his under the water. “Yes, he’s overbearing and kind of a lot, but he’s scared. Worried. And you can’t blame him for that.”
Rhys didn’t want to think about his father right now, and he didn’t want to explain to Vivienne that family didn’t necessarily mean people who cared about you. She had Elaine and Gwyn, she had warmth and love and home and all the things Rhys had always hoped Simon might be, but never had been.
She was lucky.
And he was lucky to have her, even if it wasn’t for much longer.