The COMPLETE Witching Pen Series, Boxed Set (64 page)

“What about you?”

“Me?”

“You’ve been through a lot.”

He shrugged. “We all have.”

Her eyes dropped to the drawer again, and shit – he really didn’t want to talk about it. It made his heart hurt, because he talked to Elena about everything – always had – but this…

“Maybe if you—”

“Elena—”

“But—”

“Don’t.”

Annoyance flashed through her eyes, which made him feel even worse. In all their years together, they’d never argued about anything that he could think of.

“Look, I don’t know what to say, okay? I don’t know how to talk about it. Nothing I say can change anything – it can’t fix the past or the way things are. I’d rather not wallow in something I can’t change.”

Her hazel eyes softened. “Would you change it if you could?”

He exhaled. “And where would I start?” Angrily, he shoved his underwear off, irrationally annoyed at the absence of pockets, and made for the shower – might as well greet the day head on. “With the mother who got herself killed, the father who killed her, or the
other
father who could have stopped it all if he’d actually given a damn.”

He slammed the bathroom door harder than he’d intended, ignoring the little upset sound that came from his girlfriend.

No, not just his girlfriend: his soul-bonded.

… was the precise moment I knew your role…
 

He ignored the faint knocking of the bathroom door through the streaming of the shower hose.

…I would not be the only one to protect her child…
 

“Karl.”

…the only one to protect her…
 

“We need to talk about this.”

He turned up the power of the jet. It did nothing to drown out the whispering.

…my son…
 

“Karl!”

He heard mild expletives, something about being childish and not being himself, and then the bedroom door shut behind her.

He breathed a sigh of relief, although he couldn’t deny that his chest remained tight with an ache that he suspected was a little bit of guilt and a whole lot of hurt. Still … he couldn’t go there.

…protect her…
 

He didn’t know
how
to go there.

…my son…
 

Because what the fuck was real anyway.

~*~

“Good morning!” chirped Paul, a.k.a. Etienne, a.k.a. Elena’s grandfather. He beamed his smile as he collected mugs, coffee, tea, bread and jam from the kitchen cupboards, and Elena wasn’t sure whether to feel glad that someone was showing positivism – no matter how forced – or pissed off that it was her grandfather, out of all people, seemingly able to take the apocalypse in his stride.

But if there was one thing she’d learnt from it all the past three weeks, it was that she didn’t want to wallow in crap that she bottled up and refused to let go of – the crap being her feelings towards her grandfather. So, she smiled back. “Good morning.”

Amy wandered in from her bedroom looking bleary-eyed.

Her mother hadn’t come back out of hers yet, and Karl was still in their en-suite bathroom.

Paul had taken the room nearest to Amy’s. He seemed to always be the first one up and Elena wondered if he’d always been an early riser.

“Morning?” yawned Amy. “Mornings still suck post-apocalypse. And you’re making coffee? That’s just mean.” She glared at Paul.

He pointedly ignored the stare and grinned wider instead. “Sorry, darling, but the masses still want coffee.”

“
I
want coffee.”

“I can make you a weak one, but just one, okay?”

“I like it strong,” she all but growled, then looked murderous when he chuckled.

“Six decades hasn’t tempered your passion for the beverage. You know, that stuff cost a bloody fortune back then – or it did the way you liked it, freshly ground.”

Elena looked away from them and studied her fingernails. She never quite knew what to say when they talked about ‘the past’. The whole thing still freaked her out if she was being honest, but maybe she wasn’t the only one, because she caught the slightly bewildered look on Amy’s face before she masked it.

Paul had his back to her and didn’t notice. “So, would you like me to make you a coffee?”

A pause, before her softened tone reached all ears – soft, but determined not to be outdone. “Will it be as good as Gina’s used to be at the Moka Bar?”

An electric silence followed, until Paul broke it with a, “I’ll do my best,” his voice a shade thicker than a second ago.

Clearly, Elena wasn’t privy to whatever used to happen at this monumental ‘Moka Bar’.

“You always did make a good coffee,” replied Amy, gently.

Elena bit back an exhalation. She
had
to get out of here. Her succubus had been persistently hungry recently, and she knew it was to do with all the emotional (and obviously sexual, even if neither of them wanted to admit it) tension flying about between these two, not helped by Amy’s pregnancy hormones. But all the extra … er … sex with Karl she’d been having, which she needed to pacify the demon in her, just seemed to agitate him at the moment. That cut her deeply, but he was going through stuff, so she let it slide and hadn’t brought it up with him. Who’d have thought a man would get annoyed with too much sex. Sheesh.

“Karl and I are going back to the house this morning.”

Amy threw her a curious look as her grandfather continued making the breakfast. “You are?”

“Figured it’s about time – can’t hide up here forever, as nice as it is.” And it
was
nice, with a twenty-four hour concierge, a gymnasium on the ground floor, complete with a residents-only, heated, indoor swimming pool, games room, cinema room, and a very posh cocktail bar spanning the whole of the 48
^th
floor, which was one floor above Gwain’s apartment. “What about your flat in Croydon?”

“If it survives the riots, someone else can have it for £800 a month.”

Elena grimaced. Despite Karl’s house being ransacked, Wimbledon had faired better than Croydon in the days following the apocalypse.

“Besides, I’m loving the swimming pool,” she grinned. “I’m heading there after breakfast.”

“You are?” frowned Paul, as he brought the cafetière over.

“Yes, and I’ll be fine out of your sight for sixty minutes,” she snapped.

His frown deepened and Elena winced, actually feeling sorry for him for a fraction of a second. Amy and pregnancy were proving to be a mercurial combination, not to mention explosive.

He cleared his throat and changed the subject. “I’ve contacted a doctor who used to work for The Council. He’s had some experience with more unusual pregnancies and he has an appointment free at eleven o’clock. I’ve booked it. I think we should go.”

Amy fidgeted in her seat, suddenly looking a little pale. “What will he do?”

“An ultrasound, I suppose.”

“But I’m only six weeks gone. Isn’t that a little early for a scan?”

“Not if you want an actual diagnosis.”

“Paul, I
know
I’m pregnant.”

“So do I. We all do. But this isn’t a human child. It’s only sensible to … make sure everything’s okay.”

“Of course it’s human,” she stated, indignantly.

And this time, Elena threw in her own frown. “Er ... and also a shifter and part-demon, its conception made possible by fairy magic via a time loop. Amy – go see the doctor.”

The blonde witch stared at Elena, and then at Paul, and alternated between the two a couple more times before finally throwing her hands up in defeat. “Fine. But I’m swimming on my own,” she said, aiming those words directly at Paul.

He clenched his jaw. “Fine. But I’m reinstating our magical connection so I’ll know if you’re in trouble.”

She opened her mouth to argue, then seemed to think better of it as she placed a hand across her abdomen. “Fine.”

“I take it everyone’s fine then,” came her mother’s wry tone from their right. Dressed for the day, she made her way towards them … the way an eighty-year-old did.

Elena bit her tongue before her frustration could make itself known.

“Katherine.” Paul rose from his chair and took her arm to guide her down into her own seat, and wasn’t that one freaky, eerie sight: him young, her old.

“Thanks, Dad,” she said.

Yeah. Eerie.

The door behind her to her left opened, and Karl walked out, blond hair damp and tousled, white T-shirt showing off the contours of his chest; casual jeans bringing out the blue of his eyes.

The succubus in her all but squealed in delight and almost catapulted her out of her chair and onto him. Good God, restraint was getting harder.

She glanced up at him and smiled.

He avoided her gaze and nodded his good morning to the group.

Elena’s heart landed at her feet with a thump, then carried on beating right there on the ground.

Did he just blank me? He did
not
just blank me!
What was this about? Why the hell had he started to go cold on her the last few days?

Finally, he looked her way and returned her smile with a small, tight one of his own. It did nothing to make her feel better. And suddenly, she’d had enough.

She rose sharply from the table, squeaking the chair across the floor with the force of her movement. Grabbing two blueberry muffins from the table, she threw one at Karl. “Wimbledon awaits,” she said, without compromise.

He caught the food. “You want to go
now
? At seven-thirty in the morning?”

“Yep. We can eat on the hoof. Need another muffin?”

He didn’t look pleased – he never looked pleased nowadays – but still reached for his keys and black, winter trench coat whilst holding the muffin between his teeth. He shook his head at her in answer.

With her own things gathered, Elena swivelled and made for the door.

“Good luck, Ellie.”

She wondered if her mother was wishing her luck with the house or with Karl. “Thanks, Mum.” Karl slipped ahead of her and she shut the front door behind them both.

Oh, yes. They were going to have it out. This was Karl, for goodness sake – she knew him inside and out, and whatever he was going through, he wasn’t going to fucking blank her.

Chapter Five

As the sun rose over the horizon, Morgana leaned forward over the glimmering water and let the word travel along the surface with the power of her breath, all across the span of the entire river, from the trickle in the west, to where it met the sea in the east.
“Neesa…”
 

Once would do it.

She stepped back onto the concrete that made up the bank of the river. She despised concrete. What an awful creation – a tomb for all things living. A tomb for the Earth.

Her body still ached from where Lucifer had…

She pulled her cloak tighter around her. It wasn’t because of the November cold.

How irritating that her body did not mend as easily as it had before the Bleeding. She had said it to humans a million times:
human bodies are easy to mend
. Yet, if she heard it right now she’d want to slap the person who spoke it. Humans lived with pain day in and out, didn’t they? They didn’t know peace at all. Not one moment went by after birth in which the body was devoid of all aches and pains and gripes, from growing pains as a child, to dying pains when old. Humans
thought
they knew no pain, but they didn’t. If they could have just five minutes in the body she
used
to have – just five minutes – they would be shocked at the total absence of pain; the calm weightlessness of
ease
.

She was learning the hard way. A grudging admiration for the race she had grown to consider inferior had found its way into her being, and with it, the almost unbearable sadness that she would never know true peace again in this world. Not when her body felt like this. Maybe what was worse, was that given time – a few hundred, or thousand years – she knew she would forget altogether, and assume that the best state she could feel with this body
was
peace.

A break in the tide of the water signalled the arrival of the one she had called. The surface parted and up from under rose Neesa, Queen of the Undines.

Morgana sighed with affection, a rare smile tilting the corners of her mouth. “Beautiful Neesa … my old friend.”

Neesa was an elemental.

Fairies were the ones who had breathed consciousness into the elements and created the elementals: Sylphs that ruled the air, Gnomes that guarded the Earth, Salamanders that directed the fires and the Undines, masters of water.

“Morgana … such a long time,” came Neesa’s tinkling voice, all droplets and vibrations. “To see you so … solid…”

“I know. Millennia spent only sensing each other, and now we can all connect once more. Come.” She held out her hand and the Undine sped towards her on the gentle tide of the river until her wet cheek rested on the palm of the fairy queen’s hand.

“You suffer, my friend,” stated the elemental, studying her with large, translucent eyes.

“It will pass. This world is not quite as I expected.”

“There were always going to be consequences. I remember the world when it first bloomed into creation with the very first drop of the ocean, and I see it as it is now. Change is the only constant, my friend.”

Undines had the longest memory of all beings, even remembering their time as an element before consciousness was given to them – water held memory, after all. Neesa had warned her centuries ago against bringing the veils down and waking the Dragon.
“The past is past,”
she had said.
“Gods come, and gods go … and so do we, my friend.”
 

“I can’t give up now, Neesa. I’ve come so far. Tír na nÓg deserves better, has always deserved better than what it was subjected to; the way its life-giving energy was raped, violated, at the hands of—”

“Do you not do the same now, my queen? It is an old story, this one.”

Morgana studied her long-time adviser. She stroked the swell of the Undine’s cheek then let her hand drop away. “I do it for the better.”