“Totally makes sense to me,” Mari said. She pushed up her glasses and rolled up the sleeves to her hoodie. “You should have him come over, be a part of this discussion.”
“He can be a part of it?” The question was out before Cleo could stop it.
Mari looked at her strangely. “Why not?”
“He’s not in the coven,” Cleo said.
Now Mari was staring at Cleo like she was an idiot. “Right. But this is important to you. Ian’s important to you, too, right? That makes him coven-adjacent, right?”
Agnes asked, “Ian is important to you, isn’t he?”
That was the crux of the issue, wasn’t it? Ian had somehow become important to Cleo. She relied on him for support, but more than that, she just liked him. She liked being with him. And a wild thought - Cleo liked who she was when she was with him. She could be weird and prickly and damaged, and he looked at her like she was the greatest thing. He was definitely weird and prickly and damaged, too, and Cleo didn’t care.
“Damnit,” Cleo said. Ian had been right. Maybe the issue wasn’t so much about what she could give. Maybe it really was more about what he wanted.
Grant snorted. “We’ll just stay here, eating your stuff.” He grabbed a handful of little black cherry tomatoes and began popping them in his mouth. He waggled his eyebrows, an unexpectedly playful expression on his aristocratic face.
Cleo left the house then, palms sweaty. She rubbed them on her jean shorts, then raked her black hair with her fingers. She rehearsed and discarded possible greetings and explanations on her way over to his murder shed. Cleo half-smiled, thinking of that first meeting.
To her combined relief and dismay, Ian wasn’t in his workshop. The air was unnaturally still without the buzz of the saw or the pound of a hammer. She turned around, looking at his projects with new eyes. He had another opulent game table in the corner. A collection of wooden salad tongs on the table to the left. Children’s toys were on the beat-up table on the right. In the middle of the space, the tables had been pushed back to surround a gorgeous set of double Adirondack chairs that waited to be stained.
Cleo hesitated, then sat in the chair for a moment. The slope was perfect. It held her comfortably, and she relaxed as much as she could with the pain radiating from her chest. She tried to ignore it, to keep moving, but it was undeniable - the constant pain ground her down. She was irritable and tired and so, so sick of it. Cleo was sick and tired of being sick and tired. She tipped her head back and relaxed fully into the chair Ian made with his capable hands. If she closed her eyes now, she might be able to sleep. Her mouth was always dry now, and as her face relaxed, she felt her lips crack and begin to bleed a little.
Her eyelids were heavy, but her house was too full of people for her to sleep. Cleo rose and walked to the desk with the piles of sticky notes. She grabbed one of the long ones, found a chewed on pencil and wrote Ian a short note.
She left it on the center of his desk where he couldn’t miss it.
Whether or not he came was up to him, but Cleo knew, no, she trusted that he would come. That trust wound itself around her shoulders softly, warming her like a favorite sweater. He’d come.
Now she needed to plan.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Ideally, they’d wait for the full moon to sweetly sing down upon them. They didn’t have time for that. Urgency gripped Cleo and spread to the rest of the coven. They prepared in her kitchen in near-silence, voices hushed and on the edge of frantic.
Cleo knew her appearance didn’t help. She’d stopped sleeping almost entirely now, the pain wrapping around her at night and keeping her awake. Improbably, the thorns on her chest had stopped looking like a particularly menacing tattoo and started to pierce her skin. It had happened deep in the night before. Cleo had gingerly rubbed the salve into the open wounds, hissing as the burn of the spells interacted with the angry welts on her chest. It felt like rubbing acid unto an open wound and Cleo flattened her lips against the rising scream of pain. Siobhan had taken off again, and Cleo wasn’t sure why she suppressed her screams. Pride, maybe. Or worried about just how good Ian’s preternatural hearing extended. Harsh little whimpers made their way past her teeth, and the tears mingled with sweat. Hand shaking, she’d taken a heavy scoop of the salve and put it over the wound. She covered it with a bandage and laid awake the rest of the night, waiting for morning.
Her coven met her at dawn, and Cleo knew how she looked. Her skin had taken on a sickly grayish cast, and the circles around her eyes were deep purple. She looked like she’d gotten punched and had lost the fight utterly. She kept her spine as straight as possible, as if to retaliate against the urge to lie on the ground and sleep.
Agnes handed her the travel mug with the tea. Cleo popped the lid off and inspected it. It wasn’t a tea anymore. Agnes had made it into a particularly disgusting soup. Cleo tried to swallow the herbs whole, but some got caught in the back of her throat. She coughed, choking a little on the taste.
“Chewing tea is wrong on many levels,” Cleo told Agnes. Agnes just raised her coffee mug like a toast
