Chapter 35
“Honestly, this whole thing is a very valuable lesson in why you don’t keep scary magical shit just lying around your house,” Gwyn said as she walked away from Morgan’s house, Wells next to her, Sam, Cait, and Parker clustered around her. “I really hope you three take that to heart.”
“So it just . . . ate them?” Parker asked with a shudder, and Wells sighed, putting his hands in his pockets.
“Not exactly. I believe what Morgan had was what’s known as a Soul Catcher. Sucks people into other dimensions, holds them captive there. Nasty bit of work.”
“Not as nasty as being eaten,” Sam said, and Gwyn had to agree with her there.
“Why didn’t it take the two of you?” Parker asked, and Wells shrugged.
“Soul Catchers tend to feed on negative energy, from what I remember, and there was an awful lot of it in that coven’s souls. Once it had all of them, I suppose it was . . . full.”
Gwyn couldn’t repress a shudder at that, even after all Morgan and her coven had tried to do.
“Well,” she said, trying to joke, “good to know that my soul is still relatively untainted despite that year I went to Burning Man. Oh, and the year I cut my own bangs. Actually, all of the years 2011 to 2014.”
“But big news is,” Cait said, practically skipping across the damp grass, “is that your magic is back!” Turning to Wells, she asked, “Did your brother get the spell to you in time?”
Gwyn paused, looking over at him.
Wells looked . . . well, he’d be handsome no matter what, there was no escaping that bone structure, but he was clearly exhausted, dark circles under his eyes, his beard shaggy, and now he met her eyes with a weak smile.
“No,” he told Cait. “She did that all on her own.”
“God, Glinda, you’re so badass,” Cait said, and Sam and Parker nodded, Sam slipping her arm through Gwyn’s.
“Best witch mom ever,” she said, and Gwyn laughed, tired but happy, leaning her cheek against Sam’s bright hair.
“I still ought to ground you for running into danger like that. Morgan and her friends were not fucking around. Promise me you won’t do something like that again.”
“We promise,” they all chorused, but then Sam gave Wells a sly glance.
“We also went to Wales. With magic.”
“And met Wells’s scary brother.”
“And he didn’t say it, but I think he was really impressed that we magicked ourselves there.”
The three of them kept talking over each other, filling Gwyn in on their adventures, and she listened and smiled in the right places, but her eyes kept drifting over to Wells, and his to her, and she wanted to smack him and kiss him and ask just where the hell he’d been, and she swore she’d do exactly that the second she got him alone.
But when, thanks to the Traveling Stone, they appeared at the foot of Gwyn’s porch steps, she realized that was going to have to wait.
“Gwyn!”
Vivi came flying out the front door, Elaine on her heels, and Gwyn thought her heart might burst out of her chest as she ran up the steps to fling herself into their arms.
“What are you two doing here?”
“We knew something was wrong,” Vivi said.
“Both of us. Practically at the same time,” Elaine confirmed, reaching out to smooth Gwyn’s hair, and Gwyn leaned into the touch, tears stinging her eyes.
When she’d thought about them there on that awful table, they’d felt her. They’d known she needed them, and they’d come back for her.
“It’s been a long night,” Gwyn said, “and it’s an even longer story, but I can tell some of it, and Wells—”
But when she looked behind her, Wells was gone.
It was the right thing to do, letting Gwyn have time alone with her family, Wells thought as he sat in his dark living room, alone.
She’d missed them and had so much to tell them, and he didn’t want to sit there, an awkward presence, while she explained what it was his father had done.
So yes. He was being gallant.
Noble.
“You’re being a fucking idiot.”
Sighing, Wells turned toward the front door. The porch lights were on, and he could see a figure standing there, a figure who now rattled the doorknob and called out, “I know you’re in there, feeling sorry for yourself, you ponce. Now let me in.”
Wells knew from experience that Rhys would not leave until he’d had his say, so he got up to unlock the door.
His youngest brother pushed his way in, looking annoyingly well rested and happy, and Wells glowered at him. “I’m not feeling sorry for myself. I’m giving Gwyn some space.”
“Did she tell you, ‘I want space’? Or are you doing that thing you do where you just assume you know better than everyone all the time forever?”
“I did not miss you at all, let me just say for the record. In fact, I think you and Vivienne should take a second, much longer honeymoon. Possibly to the actual moon.”
Rhys grinned then, slapping him on the arm. “And miss this kind of excitement again? Never.”
There was a clattering from the dining room, and both he and Rhys turned to see Bowen standing there, swaying a little on his feet, but otherwise his usual grumpy self.
“Rhys,” Bowen said, and Rhys pulled a face, tilting back on his heels.
“What the hell are you doing here? Wait, is this some kind of intervention? Are we doing an intervention on Wells for being a sad bastard, and no one told me?”
“Shut up, Rhys,” Wells and Bowen said in unison, and then glanced at each other before looking back to their youngest brother.
“I don’t think the three of us have been in one room in five years,” Wells said, not sure he was sorry they were breaking that trend.
“Calls for a drink,” Bowen muttered.
In the end, it called for several. Not only did they have to talk about their father, but Wells had to catch Rhys up on exactly what had happened while he’d been gone, everything from Morgan’s appearance to a (very edited) explanation of where things now stood with Gwyn, and by the time he was finished, the last of their father’s good scotch was nearly gone.
“I knew Da was a prick,” Rhys said with a sigh, “but I didn’t think he’d do something like this.”
“I think losing the town affected him more than we knew,” Wells said, turning his glass around in his hands, and Rhys reached over, patting his knee.
“I’m sorry, mate. Me and Bowen, we never really got along with him. But you two were close. Had to hurt.”
“Hmm,” was Wells’s only reply, but he thumped Rhys’s leg in return, and his brother smiled at him.
“So what now?” Rhys asked. “Can sons disown their father?”
“Maybe not in the law, but certainly in the spirit,” Wells said, grim.
He’d loved his father. Maybe part of him always would. If we could stop loving people, life would be so much simpler, but Wells knew it didn’t work that way.
But there was no place for a man like Simon in Wells’s life, and he had made peace with that during that long week on Bowen’s mountain. He had his brothers, absolute wankers that they both were, and that was enough.
Well, almost enough.
He could deal with that later, though. For now, his father was the issue.
“Da, Simon, is more powerful than ever right now,” Wells reminded them. “And even if he can’t take this town back over, I’m sure he has some other plan in mind. The pub, maybe. The ancient Penhallow magic still there.”
“I’m going to need, at the very least, a nap and another stiff drink before I declare war on Da,” Rhys said, “but I’m willing if you are.”
Wells nodded, but to his surprise, Bowen drained his drink, standing up. “You two have shite to fix here,” he said, then pointed at Wells. “’Specially you.”
“St. Bugi’s balls, but I love this new world where Wells is the one everyone wants to get-it-to-fucking-gether already, and I—”
“Shut up, Rhys,” Bowen and Wells said again, and then Bowen put his glass on the coffee table with a thunk.
“I’ll deal with Da,” Bowen said, and Wells had no idea what exactly he meant by that, but having seen Bowen’s hut, he had no doubt his brother was well up to the task of any kind of magical battle.
“Good,” he said, and Rhys made a disbelieving sound.
“What, no lecture? No reminder of what Bowen should and should not do? No random insult to me just for kicks? You have changed.”
Wells flipped his youngest brother off, but he was smiling, as was Rhys.
Even Bowen might have been smiling beneath that metric fuckton of hair on his face.
“So that’s Da handled,” Rhys continued. “And I for once have no cock-ups to fix except that we were in such a rush to get back here that I think I might have magically sent our luggage to Georgia the country as opposed to Georgia the state, but Vivienne will understand. And as for you . . .”
He gave Wells’s leg another thump, and Wells sighed.
Yes, as for him.
Reading his thoughts, Bowen nodded toward the door and, Wells assumed, Gwyn’s cabin. “So she just got her magic back on her own, then. No spell needed.”
When Wells nodded, Bowen grunted.
“Never heard of such a thing.”
“You’ve never met Gwyn Jones,” Wells said with a small smile, and Rhys laughed, leaning back.
“Ah, the sound of a man completely clobbered by love. I know the feeling well.”
Wells didn’t bother to argue. He loved her, was completely mad for her, and surely that was obvious to everyone by now.
Everyone, he suddenly realized, but the one person who mattered most.