“You’re hurt. Jenny!” he screamed. He wasn’t giving up. Bevan refused to accept it. “You can fight it. You just need to have the will. Concentrate on me. Damn it!”
But it didn’t matter. My body tumbled back and fell back into my old world, where I hit the floor and pain shot through me. I was in our living room in our house in St. Augustine and Bernard and his mother were both looking down at me.
“Get up,” Bernard growled. “Get up, you stupid toad. Why did you leave Mom alone, huh? Answer me, Jenny!” I struggled to my feet like I was a marionette and he was tugging my strings up. I wobbled, brushing my hair out of my eyes, and he hit me.
“Don’t hit her,” Mrs. Franch said behind me, in a small voice.
“She needs to understand that she can’t just leave you like that!” he shouted.
A lump rose in my throat. I wanted to cry. I felt so wretched. My hand was stinging from the oath I gave to Bevan, and I clenched my hand into a fist so he wouldn’t see the cut.
“I’m sorry I struck you,” Bernard huffed. “But you understand that it’s your fault for abandoning the family. What kind of girl would do something like that? You would just leave my mother all alone? Answer me. You got anything to say for yourself? No?”
“Don’t hurt Jenny,” his mother said.
“She isn’t Jenny!” he screamed at me. “Jenny would never hurt you like that. She’s a selfish little brat.”
Now his mother started to cry.
“Look, you made her cry,” he growled.
“Bernard, please…I’m sorry,” I said.
Then I hung my head in shame, as it all felt like before, only worse. I had ruined what little I had, and when I was faced with my warlock, I still felt a pressing desire to please him. But Bevan sounded so sure when he said I didn’t have to give him anything, and I wished I felt that was true, but what did I have of my own? If I didn’t give my love and attention to the Franches as I had done all these years, they would just take it from me. This, I now understood.
Chapter Nine
Bevan
“Jenny!” I screamed.
But she was gone. So no use screaming her name.
“Fuck,” I said instead, and kicked the wall. I didn’t usually curse like that, as I had a little streak of old-fashionedness, but it seemed like a good time to try it out. Feels about right.
My shoe dented the plaster. I sat on my bed, still warm from her body, and felt the covers with my hands, trying to hold onto that last bit of her.
I looked at the cut on my palm and then made a fist. I had never felt helpless like this, and it wasn’t a good feeling. I was very proud of my place in the world, but that feeling was slipping away from me now. I was starting to question that place. Helena and I were a good team, but she also didn’t need me that much, and I wondered how she would feel if I broke away from her.
I did make a promise to Jenny…
I sprung to my feet and started looking around, trying to think. Jenny said she lived in St. Augustine. That was an old witch town, but famously hostile to familiars, because of a taboo relationship that occurred there many generations ago. So if I went there…hmm. I really should pose as a warlock. I didn’t like the deception, but it was their fault for being assholes, wasn’t it? I was getting pretty worked up.
I still needed to ask Helena, though. I couldn’t just go. And when I thought of that, I wondered if I was asking as a friend or as a servant. I felt like a friend, but I had to ask her. She had to release me. So I was actually a servant, really, even if I had the respect and kindness of the person I served. I was realizing how messed up this was.
Of course, Helena was not to blame.
“I think I’m in love with Jenny.” I just told her. Actually, I wasn’t sure I knew what I would say until I was there asking if I could go after her, and I saw the look in my witch’s eyes, reflecting my feelings back at me.
“Sometimes you just know,” she said. She smiled at me, wishing me nothing but happiness. “Bevan, I release you from…” She faltered a moment, but it wasn’t because she wanted to keep me there. It was just hard to part. “I release you from our bond. From…this covenant. I don’t want you to die when I die. I want you to…”
“I didn’t mean it like that. You didn’t have to release me from the covenant forever, Hel. I just need to do this.”
Suddenly she threw her arms around me. I was startled at first. Helena and I were never touchy-feely. “I love you, Bev. But we don’t need each other. We haven’t, in a long time. Love never dies, though, and it isn’t dependent on need. It doesn’t matter if we go our separate ways.”
“I knew you’d say something like that,” I said softly. “I’m glad.”
“I know too much about familiars now,” she said. “I don’t want to hold you to me. We can still team up when we need to.”
I nodded, but it wasn’t easy. I loved her in a way that reached beyond sense, and I wondered if Jenny loved her cruel warlock the same way. “Don’t die,” I said. “You’ve managed not to die on so many rooftops and it would really be stupid to end the streak now.”
“I’ll try.”
I went back to my home and started working on the spell that would change the feel of my magical field so I could walk into the magical side of St. Augustine without anyone realizing my true identity. It was going to take a little time, and it had never been so difficult to be patient. I wished I knew a good way to check on Jenny in the meantime. I didn’t have a clock, because time rarely had much meaning to me in Etherium, but now I found myself glancing around for one as the sun set and the hours went by.
I suddenly felt a little wobbly. My vision blurred. Or was it the room blurring around me?
My entire body was tugged out of my own room and into a dimly lit basement somewhere, in the midst of a fight between Helena and her cousin Piers. Piers Nicolescu had always been trouble. As a kid, he was the kind of nerdy and studious wizard with a chip on his shoulder, and now he was on the council. The power was going straight to his head.
I had appeared on my hands and knees and I felt strangely paralyzed.
Okay…I’m going to guess something in this fight is going very wrong. This is a really bad time for it to involve me, though.
“Relinquish!” Helena said. She was trying to get a tablet of stone Piers had in his hands. I felt a connection between my body and the stone tablet, although I had never seen it before.
As if the stone was crushing me. As if, in some way, the stone was me, and as long as Piers was holding it, I was trapped.
What the hell is that thing? Why can’t I seem to move?
“Relinquish the covenant!” Helena cried. She was brave, but she wasn’t a terribly strong witch, and I could sense that she was scared—for me.
That’s the covenant?
That tablet definitely had something to do with my own fate, and the way my life was entwined with Helena’s. Even after she let me go, the ancient words had somehow dragged me back, and apparently she was in the middle of trying to free me once and for all. I wanted to help her fight and I felt like I was being clenched.