Oh. My fingers grasped his shirt where they’d been resting on his chest.
“What?” he said.
“My aunts,” I said. “Ky thinks Ginny is keeping my secret—the part she knows, anyway—right? If we wait until tomorrow, give it a whole day and there’s still no sign that we need to worry, maybe it’s time I tell her the whole story. See if she could shelter us, at least for long enough for us to do the ceremony.”
“Would that work?” Gabriel asked. “Her shielding it?”
“I think so. Any witch should be able to mask my magic. And the Levesques are a powerful family.” I drew in my breath with a shiver of nervous anticipation. “I’m going to have to trust someone sometime. We can’t keep running on our own.”
Chapter Seventeen
Rose
My house back home on the Hallowell estate had always felt like a castle, all that old stone and the turrets rising from its walls. The main building on the younger Levesque estate was more of a proper country home, with a sweeping covered porch around its robin’s egg blue body and big airy rooms boasting huge windows and pale hardwood floors. The furniture was all in muted earthy tones, and the smell of hay and fresh mown grass drifted through those windows, stirred by the ceiling fans overhead.
“Both my husband—Owen—and I had older sisters,” Aunt Ginny had told us when she’d escorted us inside. “So neither of us had an estate to inherit. Instead, we’ve built a new one of our own. I think it’s turned out rather well.”
Not that we’d spent much time talking about her house. No, the morning had been dedicated to explaining my rather unusual situation first to her in another park meeting, and then, when she didn’t recoil in revulsion, coming here to lay it all out for the rest of the younger branch of my mother’s family. My aunt, reasonably, hadn’t thought it fair to offer her property to harbor theoretical criminals and theoretically criminal magic without running it by the rest of the relatives.
So now the five guys and I were sitting on linen couches in the house’s bright living room while Ginny’s husband, her two daughters, and the older daughter’s husband took in our story. I’d asked the guys to let me do most of the talking, and I didn’t think they’d minded. It was intimidating enough for me to be explaining this to four members of witching society who all looked as though their eyes were ready to fall out of their heads.
“There is a precedent,” I said, my hands clenched together on my lap. “At least, I think there is, for having multiple consorts. I’ve seen etchings on an old witching building on the Hallowell property showing it, and a witching historian confirmed she’s seen them elsewhere, but that the Assembly goes out of their way to destroy that evidence.”
The older daughter, Naomi, laughed a little breathlessly and glanced at her husband, Greg. “Can you imagine?” she said with a playful glint in her light brown eyes and a swish of her chestnut ponytail. “Maybe I should add a couple more to my entourage.”
From Greg’s grimace, I didn’t think he liked the idea of sharing his wife and consort at all, but he managed to answer in a similarly teasing tone. “I don’t think you’d ever win the cover-stealing contest if there were three of us to contend with.”
“Hmm. That would be a concern.” She turned back to me, her expression still amused. From what I’d gathered, Naomi was a couple years younger than me and only recently married. She didn’t seem fazed by my unusual consorting at all.
Owen, Aunt Ginny’s husband, looked more perplexed than anything. “And your spark is kindled?” he said. “Even though none of them is from a witching line? Are you sure there isn’t any witching blood in your families?” His gaze skimmed over the guys on either side of me.
“It is kindled,” I said before they felt any pressure to try to answer on their own. “And I suppose it’s possible one or two of them might, farther back, but I can’t believeallof them do. It would be too huge a coincidence. My spark reacts to all of them. But that’s not the point. This faction of the Assembly doesn’t approve of our consorting either way.”
“I don’t understand,” the younger daughter, Stella, spoke up. Like Naomi, she’d inherited her father’s chestnut-brown hair, but her eyes were green like her mother’s. Her waves had been cut at an ear-length bob that made her thin face look even narrower. She was only nineteen, not yet consorted or close to it. “Why should it matter to them? If your spark is kindled, it’s kindled. If your consorts accept witching society, why shouldn’t witching society accept them?”
“Very good questions,” Jin said with a smile, leaning back against the couch.
My uncle Owen gave him a wary look. “We’ve kept to our own for good reasons. Witches and the unsparked don’t have the most pleasant history of mixing.” He turned to me again. “I can’t blame you for the decisions you made. The pressure you were under, the threat you were facing—but taking this route would be hard even if the Assembly wasn’t interfering. Your consorts have ties to the unsparked world. How many people will know about your magic by the end of this? How aretheirpeople going to react to this relationship?”
“We’re not going to go sharing Rose’s secrets with the rest of the world,” Damon said. “Give us a little credit. And who and how I hook up with anyone is none of anyone else’s business.”
Seth and Kyler exchanged a look. “We wouldn’t talk about the magical side of things around anyone else either,” Seth said. “Our parents, well… Like Damon says, they don’t need to know those details.”
“I don’t have anyone to hassle me,” Gabriel said. “But it is a small town. I see your point. People will notice something. They’ll gossip. But we can deal with that when it comes to it. We’re never going to come to it if the Assembly keeps attacking us and Rose.”
“Youdidcast illegal magic,” Greg said to me.
My chest tightened. “I did. But only what I had to in order to save myself. I’ll gladly face prosecution for that—ifthe crimes committed against me are also recognized and given due weight. And if they leave my consorts out of it. The guys have never hurt anyone at all.”
Damon shifted beside me at that, and the echo of gunshots passed through my mind. Well, that was one more thing we’d deal with when we came to it, if we ever got to.
Aunt Ginny was shaking her head with a wry smile. “I can’t imagine what your mother would have made of all this. But I think she’d have been proud that you found your way out of that trap your father set for you, no matter how. She’d be proud that you followed your heart. I can see how much you care about all of them—and how much they care about you. So…” She threw her hands in the air. “I say, who are we to judge?”
Naomi cocked her head, her gaze turning a little more serious. “It’s not just about judgment, though, is it? You wouldn’t have come to us and told us all this unless you needed something.”
A flush crept over my cheeks. “I would have wanted to reach out anyway. It’s only that I wouldn’t have taken the risk right now if our situation wasn’t so dire.”
“Oh, that’s absolutely what I meant,” she said, waving off my embarrassment. “Not intended as a criticism. Just a question.”