Found (Book One of the Castle Coven Series): A Witch and Warlock Romance Novel (2 page)

“Oh yes, they are so wise,” Beatrice scoffed. “And then you came, and look, all you wanted to do was study our books and peer at our old scrolls. What a monster!”

Hailey had to laugh at her friend’s offense. Beatrice’s skill was to make herself unseen. It always struck Hailey as a strange gift for a young woman who thrived on making her opinions, wishes and thoughts known in the most obvious way.

 
“Yes, I am a monster,” Hailey agreed. “Roar, I’m coning to eat your babies and to throw your maidens off the high cliffs!”

Beatrice frowned and started to say something, but she yelped instead when Hailey lunged for her, pushing her into the soft grass at the side of the road. With an offended yowl, the teenager fought her friend off, and stood a few steps away, smoothing down her long dark skirt with a fussy catlike expression.

“You are no monster,” she said sternly. “The people who laugh at you now are the same ones who were wetting themselves with terror just a few months ago. They simply do not like being reminded that they were afraid for so little reason.”

Hailey laughed ruefully.

“I wish everyone saw what you did. Come on, I’m sorry I ruffled your clothing. Let’s walk a little faster. It’s going to get colder the longer we dawdle.”

For a little while, they walked in silence, but then Beatrice glanced at her friend again.

“There is something going on, though,” she said thoughtfully, and Hailey regarded her warily.

“What doors have you been listening at?” she asked. “You’re lucky they haven’t caught you yet.”

“They will never catch me,” said Beatrice with a smile. “I am far too clever. And I’ve not been listening at doors. I’ve been watching. Have you noticed how angry Donato looks? Have you noticed how the elders of the coven are rustling like old books?”

Hailey paused, biting her lip. Despite Beatrice’s flair for the dramatic, the younger witch wasn’t wrong. There was something going on in the Angioli coven, and though she knew that she hadn’t been doing anything wrong, that had never stopped bad things from happening before.

She wondered if the coven had simply become tired or too stressed from her presence. This had happened before, and then it was only a matter of time before she was told that she had to be taken to a new place. There were excuses for it, and plenty of explanations. It was often explained as the best option for everyone concerned.

Hailey had grown up in the United States foster care system, however, and she was familiar enough with that speech that it stopped stinging. Mostly.

“No one’s told me anything about it,” she said firmly. “Until someone makes it my business, I don’t have to worry.”

Beatrice looked monumentally unsatisfied with this, but she shrugged, linking arms with Hailey again. Below them, the red roofs of the village could be seen. It was nearly as ancient as the monastery above, but Hailey knew that the village had modernized in many ways. It was a lovely place, and in the warmer months, it always hosted at least a few tourists who were charmed by its beauty. Most of the villagers simply assumed that the people who lived at the old monastery were members of a communal farm. The coven members were considered perhaps a little radical, but pleasant overall. The village had several stores, ranging from the bakery to the butcher’s, but what drew Hailey was the bookshop.

It was an ancient place, and she could imagine that it had looked exactly the same as it had for the last few centuries. It was a beautiful store, dark and dry, and the leaded windows let in gorgeous pinpoints of brightness. When the bell above the door rang, a large marmalade tom trotted out to meet them, winding first around Hailey’s ankles and then Beatrice’s.

The proprietor, a wizened man with only a few tufts of frail hair left on his bald head, smiled to see them. His English was quite good, which made their exchange much easier.

“Ah, signorina, what a pleasure it is to see you. I take it you are looking for the Liona di Orsini work that I promised you?”

Hailey grinned. If she could never get along with her own coven members, she could get along with ancient bookstore owners. No matter where she went or who she was with, she had always had more books than friends, and some things simply did not change.

“Yes, Mr. Vestri,” she said. “I’ve been looking forward to it, and the day was so beautiful that I simply could not stay away.”

“Ah, you are in luck then,” said the older man. “Let me go and get it for you.”

He hustled to the back room, and given how messy she knew it was, Hailey was prepared for him to take some time. She glanced over to see that Beatrice was already perusing the books on ancient astronomy and leaned down to pet the cat. The bell of the door tinkled, followed by a chill like an omen.

Hailey looked up and found herself staring at the man in the doorway.

He was dressed all in black, and though Hailey was a little cold in her hoodie, he looked comfortable in his button-down shirt, the sleeves folded up to reveal forearms that were corded with muscle. He was tall––tall enough to tower over her. In that moment, with the afternoon sun behind him, he looked like a god of the mysteries, something mysterious and foreign come to earth.

Then he stepped forward, and she breathed a silent sigh of relief. He was only a man, though one that was strikingly handsome. With sleek black hair and the high cheekbones that signified Slavic blood, there was not a hint of softness to him. At least, that was what she thought until he set eyes on her. His lips curled into a small smile, and startled, she smiled back.

“Are you American?” he asked, and she was startled to find out that his English was perfect, though slightly accented.

“I am,” she said hesitantly. “Is it so very obvious?”

Hailey was aware that Beatrice was watching everything avidly from the cover of the shelves.

“A little. I’ve only been in Italy for a few days, but I already miss understanding what’s going on around me.”

“It’s not so bad,” Hailey said with a slight smile. “I find that I can get around well enough.”

He started to answer, but then the shop owner came back, a green leather-bound book in his hands. The spine was quite gone, and the stitching was all that was holding the pages together, but Hailey still smiled to see it.

“Is this really it?” she asked, and Mr. Vestri smiled, passing it to her reverent hands.

“It is, and it was not so easy to get.”

Liona di Orsini was a woman written about in history books. Though many historians wrote about her, very few of them knew that she was a witch of some renown. Her own work, an untitled volume distinguished only by the illustration of a stained glass rose window on the first plate, was considered a minor work of mysticism, but when it was a witch or warlock reading it, it revealed much more.

Hailey opened the book to see the signature rose window, and she knew that she was smiling broadly. She was not expecting to have the book plucked out of her hands. With a startled yelp, she looked around, only to see her precious book in the hands of the man who had come into the store. He was looking at it curiously, turning it over and over, and she stifled the urge to snatch it back from him.

“That’s not yours,” she said, her voice just short of a snarl.

“It’s not yours either, is it?” he asked casually.

He opened the book, looking at the same page that she had been examining, and one dark eyebrow lifted.

“Liona di Orsini? What kind of work are you doing?”

“What does it matter? That’s my book that you’re holding, and I will thank you to give it back.”

He ignored her, flipping through the pages with a carelessness that made her grit her teeth. There were very few reproductions of this volume. It was not precisely valuable, because the interest in it was so low, but it was difficult to find. She couldn’t imagine what this tourist could want with it.

“It’s not in amazing condition, but it’s not bad,” he allowed.

To the proprietor, he turned and pulled out a wad of euros. Both Hailey and the bookseller gasped to see how much it was. The tourist smiled slightly.

“I’d like to take this book off your hands,” he said.

Hailey could have stomped her foot with rage.

“That’s…” she started, and then she stopped.

The amount of money in his hand was far more than the book was worth, and he seemed willing to pay simply to make her angry. She bit her lip, and made her decision. If he wanted it, he would have to pay.

“Signore,” she said. “I insist that you sell that book to me. I am willing to offer you four hundred euros.”

“And I’ll give you five,” the man said.

The old man glanced between them, clearly distressed.

“Six,” she offered, but the man raised her another hundred without pause.

She chewed her lip as if debating, and when she said eight hundred euros, the tourist offered a round nine hundred without hesitating. Hailey wondered if she could have pushed it further, but her nerve broke, and she only scowled.

“I don’t have any more,” she muttered, doing her best to look downcast and beaten. She would miss the Liona di Orsini, but there were other books anyway.

The tourist smiled at her, and she lifted her chin angrily.

There was a strange tug to his smile, something that pulled at her in a strange and yearning way. Then she remembered the book and pushed the feeling aside.

He laid down the euros on the table, making the proprietor’s eyes bug out. With book in hand, he turned to Hailey.

“Thank you for an interesting afternoon,” he said.
 

Hailey would have made a bitter retort, but then he was gone.

“Oh signorina, you waited so long for that book,” the bookseller said sorrowfully. “If you had but allowed me to speak, I would have given it to you.”

Hailey smiled a little. Beatrice came out from behind her shelf then, her arms full of books.

“Well, now that awful man has his book, Mr. Vestri here has nine hundred euros, and everyone’s happy.”

“Not you,” Beatrice pointed out.

Hailey could only shrug and sigh.

THE WALK BACK to the coven grounds was a long one, and by the time that Hailey and Beatrice got back to the gates, Hailey was tired out. Not only was the hill steep, she had to deal with Beatrice’s fascination with the stranger.

“Say what you will about his manners, Hailey, he was handsome, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know, I think I was a little too irritated with what an ass he was making out of himself to really see if he looked like a movie star, you know?”

“Ah, now you are joking,” Beatrice insisted. “Don’t you remember little boys pulling your hair to show you that they liked you?”

“No,” Hailey said firmly. “What I remember is little boys pulling my hair to bully me. Beatrice, that man wasn’t interested in me. That was something else.”

Beatrice tilted her head, looking at Hailey curiously.

“What do you mean?”

Hailey wouldn’t have put her feeling to words if she hadn’t been talking to her friend, but now that she had to, she could tell that what she felt was correct.

“That wasn’t flirting, and if it was, the guy’s a total psychopath. No, it was something else.”

She teased it apart in her head. She thought of the way that the man had confronted her, the way he had snatched the book out of her hands. With a start, she realized that the man’s bright blue eyes had been on her far more than they had been on the brown pages, and it wasn’t a look of lust that she had seen. There was something frankly challenging to his gaze, something that wanted to see what she was going to do.

“He was testing me,” she said at last. “He wanted to see what I was made of and what it took to push me.”

Beatrice stilled, and from the way her hand tightened a little on Hailey’s arm, Hailey could tell that she understood.

“Why would he do that?” she asked, sounding terribly young, and Hailey shook her head. She was only a handful of years older than Beatrice, but in that moment, she felt much older.

 
“Because that’s what predators do,” Hailey said firmly. “They push, and that’s why it’s important not to give an inch.”

“You didn’t get the book,” Beatrice pointed out, and Hailey grinned.

“I was a lot happier with Signore Vestri getting all of that lovely money. I couldn’t give it to him, and I don’t need the book as much as I think he needs the cash.”

The Alpine sky was shading to violet when they made it back to the coven grounds, and Hailey was unsurprised when Luca ran out to meet them. He was a slender boy, as fair as Beatrice was dark, and like her, he had lost his family to Templars. Now he wore a tight and pinched look on his face as he waved them down.

“I’m sorry. I got distracted and your tutor was pretty mad when you disappeared.”

Beatrice made a face, but ruffled his hair affectionately.

“Well, it worked for a while, and I got to run down to the village with Hailey. Don’t be so worried, eh?”

Luca shook his head and looked at Hailey.

“Donato’s been looking everywhere for you, and no one could find you.”

Hailey blinked in surprise. She was a member of the coven like everyone else, and that meant that she had free reign of the place. She had some duties, but she wasn’t really shirking them when she left to go to the village.

She remembered what Beatrice had said, and she felt a cool heavy resignation sink on her shoulders. She had expected to last longer at Angioli, she really had. She had only been there for nine months, and it really had felt like people were getting used to her. Then she remembered the whispers of the other witches in the library and realized that perhaps she was wrong.

Hailey straightened up and squared her shoulders. So it had turned out that they didn’t want her. So be it. She had heard that news before, and chances seemed good that she would hear that again. She turned to Beatrice who was looking at her with concern, and she pulled the other girl into a warm hug.

“This sounds like goodbye, my friend,” she said softly, and with a soft cry, Beatrice wrapped her arms around Hailey as well.