Bombshell (Monstrous Ink #2)

Chapter 8

“ G ood job, Euphemia, that’s it!” Alexander crowed with delight, watching me with a bright smile as I passed the ball of fire I’d conjured from one hand to the other with surprising ease. “That’s amazing!”

Never in my nearly seventy years of life had I ever been capable of fire magic. I’d always figured it went against the half of my nature that was built up from the earth because, if there was one thing tree nymphs feared, it was fire.

Especially in the mountains of California where wildfires were growing increasingly more rampant year by year.

But now, as I watched the glowing inferno sitting like a docile kitten in my hand, I couldn’t imagine never using fire magic again.

There was a thrilling rush of adrenaline to feel the heat coursing through my veins. For once, I felt totally powerful as I tossed the ball up into the sky and squeezed my hand until it was the size of a pea but even hotter than it had been before.

The day we hired Byrne Leonidas and caught Fiero eavesdropping—as we usually did with the snoopy satyr— I found myself irritated and snapped my fingers almost without thinking.

Then we heard him yelp and run out of the shop. Later on, Daphne told me that the satyr’s fur on his legs had caught fire seemingly out of nowhere… but somehow I knew it was me.

And today? Today I managed to conjure fire. On purpose .

“Now try and put it out,” Alexander instructed as he put his hands on his hips, staring up at the tiny little blaze in the air.

I frowned because I didn’t really know how to do the put it out step, but something seemed to whisper in my mind, instructing me on what to do next.

Releasing my clenched fist, I brought the ball back down to me and imagined cutting off each of the threads—or the vines—of my magic until there was nothing left to feed the ball.

The sphere glowed bright for just a moment before disappearing into thin air, leaving only the echoes of its warmth behind on the palm of my hand.

“I was right ,” Alexander said, pulling my hands into his, his magic reaching out to prod at mine. It was the same thing he’d done before that night in the shop when we made our deal. At the time, my magic had shied away from him, almost like it was hiding from the bite of it. Now it seemed to reach out and yank at it, making the man wince and pull away.

“You were right about what?” I asked, crossing my arms over my chest.

Alexander blinked like I’d caught him saying something he shouldn’t have before he shrugged. “You are different from any witch that is living, but that doesn’t make you a dud. It just means you need to be taught differently. If I could go back and kick the elder’s asses I would.”

I frowned at that. While my father was the head of the North Coast coven, there was still a council of elders he was forced to answer to.

They called it checks and balances, but my father always referred to it as his leash and he did everything in his power to do what he wanted in the coven, with or without the elder’s approval.

“Then why didn’t you try to teach me like this when I was younger?”

Alexander ran a hand through his dark hair. “I had no proof that it would work—besides your magic had not matured yet so it probably would have been useless even if I had tried.”

It stung to hear that he wouldn’t have tried it just because he was my father and was supposed to protect me, but I pushed the sensation down.

Despite being in close proximity with Alexander again I kept getting little reminders of why I left in the first place and I needed to hang on to those before my brain turned into stupid mush.

“We’ll have to keep going with this, ah, instinctual method, yes we’ll call it that. I wonder if we can apply this to other adolescent witchlings—just imagine if they didn’t need words to cast spells at all. They would be unstoppable.”

Alexander had clearly moved on from praising me and was fully in scientist mode again as he began to scribble down notes in his notebook, muttering under his breath about the other elements and spells and what I potentially could or couldn’t cast with this ‘new method.’

It was clear he’d forgotten about my presence completely. We hadn’t even been in our lesson for an hour yet.

Rolling my eyes, I reached down to grab my bag.

“I’m going to go see Odette,” I told him and watched as he waved an absentminded hand at me.

“And I’m going to do it while naked and might strangle people with my vines for funsies,” I added, glaring at the man who was now too preoccupied to give me any attention. Typical Alexander Finch.

“Have fun,” Alexander called as he turned fully away from me to the giant chalkboard that lined the entire back wall of the library.

It shouldn’t have hurt my feelings. I was a big girl who could handle myself. I didn’t need him to love me, and yet as I crossed through the vast mansion to the east wing where Odette’s rooms were, the same old feelings that plagued me as a child started to tear away at the edges of me. His approval and excitement had nearly made me forget all of those years where I hadn’t been good enough for him.

‘It’s like you got the very worst parts of both of us,’ he’d once said to me after a particularly frustrating lesson that had ended with several exploded chairs and zero successful spells .

“Just a few more months then you won’t have to see him anymore,” I muttered to myself as I shouldered my bag more firmly on my shoulder and turned to climb up the staff staircase that would lead me to where Odette’s rooms were.

“See who?” a gratingly familiar voice asked from above me.

There, standing at the top of the stairs looking just as smug as he had when we were teenagers, was James Reid.

James was your typical wizard. Golden-haired, blue eyed, and infuriatingly debonair as he stood at the top of the stairs, leaning against the railing like some kind of Hollister model and trying to block my path.

“Long time no see, Finch,” he greeted and it took everything in me not to roll my eyes as I stomped up the stairs and brushed past him.

Most of the witches and wizards of the North Coast coven avoided the Wharf completely, turning up their noses at what they considered ‘seedy,’ so I rarely ever saw any of them.

But James Reid was a regular at the Dive and I saw his stupid face more often than I liked.

And just like how the local gargoyle clan denied Cash’s existence, James Reid had ignored me in a similar fashion for over fifty years.

“You see me almost weekly, asshole,” I muttered under my breath as I skirted around him and through the door that opened into the opulent hallway that led to Odette’s room.

“Yes I do,” James stepped in front of me again, blocking my path, grinning down at me with the same dimple that had, unfortunately, been enough to charm my stupid, prepubescent self. “But you weren’t back ‘in’ then, Finch, and now you are. So I can talk to you again.”

“You didn’t like talking to me before,” I pointed out, crossing my arms over my chest.

While I was the daughter of the head of the coven it was James who was the golden boy. Hell, I was pretty sure my father regretted not marrying James’ mother instead of mine seeing how talented the younger wizard was.

I never understood why he’d made the choice to seek out a tree nymph or why he’d gone against the coven elders in the first place. Not that I could blame him for not liking James’ mother. Delilah Reid had a dainty and delicate facade that hid a level of vitriol I’d rarely seen from anyone else. Alexander would have probably been miserable with her—just like how she spent the twelve years I lived in the coven making me miserable.

Most people in the coven avoided me like the plague—I was too different and my magic didn’t work so they tried to pretend I didn’t exist—but Delilah? She wanted me to disappear from the face of the Earth completely.

“I was young,” James said with a shrug as he reached out to touch a lock of my hair that had drifted over my shoulder.

When I was a teenager, this move would have done me in. Hell, any attention from him at all would have done me in. I’d nursed the biggest, dumbest crush on this egotistical wizard ever since my father brought me down the mountain and introduced us as playmates since we were so close in age.

But that was then and this was now. James was still just as handsome as ever and probably had more charm in his little finger than most people had in their whole bodies… but he wasn’t Dallan.

They were the opposite in almost every way and I found that when James Reid grinned at me in a way that I was sure he thought would work, I felt absolutely nothing.

Actually—scratch that—not nothing.

I felt disgust for the man in front of me.

My vines slipped out from underneath my blouse and shoved James away hard enough to make the wizard stumble back and nearly fall flat on his ass. It was only my vines wrapping around his arms and legs that kept his tailbone from connecting with the fancy herringbone wood floors.

“I see that’s one part of you that hasn’t changed, Finch,” James said, staring balefully at the vines. “Still haven’t cut those off yet?”

My back stiffened at the mention of it. It had been decades since someone suggested cutting off the eight vines that had lived on my back since birth. Many of the older witches in the coven used to whisper behind their hands wondering why Alexander had let me keep them in the first place.

A few weeks before I ran away from home I’d actually considered it and had even tried to hack at one with a pair of manicure scissors but had stopped when it hurt too much. That vine still bore the scars from it decades later and it had been the beginning of the end of my time here in this mansion .

Shaking off the haunted memories I glared at him. “I’m not the same girl who you and your cronies used to bully, asshole.”

James’ lips thinned as he pressed them together. “Effie—”

His words were cut off by the sound of rapid footsteps coming down the hallway. “James, are you bothering Effie?”

Odette flew into view as she came from around the corner, the long golden plait of her hair flying behind her as she skidded to a stop in front of us, her blue eyes flashing with irritation at the wizard currently still wrapped in my vines.

“Clearly I’m not bothering her. Can’t you see I’m the one in vine bondage?” James asked dryly, grunting when the vines tightened even more. “Finch, I gotta say this is not something that turns me on, I much prefer being stepped on instead.”

I grimaced at that, my vines coming undone and curling back up underneath my shirt. “You are disgusting.”

“He really is.” Odette said as she slid her arm through mine and tugged me away from James and down the hallway toward her bedroom. “Don’t talk to Effie, James, she doesn’t like you and neither do I.”

As if to punctuate her words, Odette stuck her tongue out at him like a small child before her pretty wings flipped up and blocked James from looking at either of us.

“Oh, come on Odie, I get you’re mad but do you really need to do the wing privacy screen?”

Odette ignored him, pulling me into her bedroom and shutting the door with a snap .

I turned to gape at her. “Odie? Don’t tell me you’re actually friends with him? You used to hate him.”

“Well, when your father only lets a very small number of people in the mansion and even fewer are allowed to see you, then you make do with who you have to talk to,” Odette sniffed primly, turning her irritation onto me. She looked more stressed than I’d ever seen her—her usual fluffy sundress and ridiculously coiffed hair gone and in their place was a pair of yoga pants and a flowy top.

“You’re right, I’m sorry,” I surrendered, immediately feeling guilty because I’d been the one to leave Odette behind. “But, still, James of all people?”

When I felt lonely fifty years ago I’d been able to run away without Alexander dragging me back. But Odette? Odette was truly stuck in this mansion. There was no mistaking that Arsenio loved his daughter—in fact I was pretty sure she was the only thing the mayor actually cared about—but that also meant that he kept her in this very pretty gilded cage when most fae children were able to leave their parents after their first few decades of life.

Odette was only a few years younger than me, but she hadn’t changed much in the time I was gone and Arsenio was to blame for that.

“He’s not that bad,” Odette said, rolling her blue eyes as she returned to sit at the stool pulled up at a massive drafting table that had several layers of sketches strewn across it. “He comes to visit and tell me stories. Did you know he’s traveled to every country in the world to train with other witches? ”

I really didn’t care what James Reid did in his free time as long as he stayed the hell away from me.

But despite the decades between our friendship I did still care about Odette.

Or, at least I cared enough to change the subject to something lighter.

“Are these the sketches you wanted to show me?” I asked a bit too loudly, cutting off whatever she was going to say about James and his travels next.

Odette blinked because, while she was naive about most things in the world, even she knew when to let something go.

“Right, yes these are them!” Odette flipped the cover on the massive sketchbook and I immediately recoiled from the imagery on the page. It was the image of a man dragging his fingers down the flesh of his face, pulling his lower eyelids taut as he screamed.

Odette, oblivious to my shock, began to chatter excitedly about her art. “I go back and forth between drawing on my tablet and paper and pencil, but this week I’ve been working with charcoal…”

She continued to flip, showing gory image after gory image, her blue eyes sparkling with happiness as she talked about the composition and pointed things out to me.

Meanwhile I was too busy trying to reconcile Odette’s sweet image with the dark portraits in front of me.

“Odette, when did you even start drawing stuff like this?” I blurted out, cutting her off as she was explaining the drawing of a woman’s spine cracking open and growing flowers and vines. This was the only image that had any color, each petal of each flower covered with thick acrylic paint as they burst free from the woman’s back.

Oddly enough… I was pretty sure that this was supposed to be a drawing of me.

“Oh, you know,” Odette said with a shrug, tugging on the end of her long golden braid. “Daddy finally took all of the parental controls off of the streaming services and I find that I really like horror movies—besides that I sometimes have dreams where these images sort of appear .”

There was a lot to unpack with Odette’s words. For one, Arsenio keeping parental controls on his adult daughter’s devices was actually insane, but that wasn’t what piqued my interest.

“You have dreams about this kind of stuff?” I asked, continuing to flip through the pages as an idea began to form in my mind.

A man screaming at the edge of the Wharf as a massive wave crested the horizon, a tiny woman fitting in the palm of someone’s bloody hand, the face of someone that looked suspiciously like Cash twisted with grief.

Each image was more disconcerting than the last, especially seeing as there was very little chance that Odette had been to the Wharf let alone seen Cash’s face.

Odette pulled her bottom lip in with her teeth, nibbling on it nervously before she forced a bright expression on her face. “ Yeah, but it’s nothing. Alexander just says I have an overactive imagination.”

I held in my snort.

Alexander Finch didn’t believe in overactive imaginations. No. The man had literally created a nymph halfling by sheer force of will and the kind of magic no one should ever use.

No, there was definitely more to Odette’s dreams, I could feel it on the edge of my instincts like my magic was trying to tell me something.

But I’d never heard of a faerie with prophetic dreams—their magic tended to stay within the natural realm of things and seership was definitely not a part of the natural order.

It was Odette’s turn to change the subject now as she held my hands in hers. “Are you going to go with us to the charity gala at the end of the month? Just like old times?”

The annual Port Haven charity gala was famous on the West coast. It was a night where all of the most affluent monsters gathered to raise money to help support the ‘more unfortunate of our ranks’ as they put it.

Really it was to gather money to continue lobbying for more power within the American government because, even nearly sixty years after the Accords, there were only a handful of supernatural creatures in high government positions and Arsenio wanted to change that… without actually doing any of the real work of course.

Arsenio Sidhe always preferred to be the puppet master pulling the strings, so human governance was not his thing.

“No.” The response rolled off of my tongue automatically. There was nothing I’d hated more than being trotted out by Alexander at formal events. In private I was his disappointment, but in public? In public I was his greatest achievement and something for him to show off. Especially now that I could use my magic? The man would be positively insufferable.

A shudder rippled down my spine at having to go back now that I’d tasted what true freedom felt like.

Odette’s pout was almost automatic. “Oh, come on, please? I hate going to these things and now that you’re back at least I won’t have to be at them alone.”

That she disliked going to these parties was news to me. Odette used to count down the days to her father’s public appearances because it was the only time she was able to get away from the mansion and actually go down into Port Haven and mingle with us common folk.

“Didn’t you used to like these things? Getting all dressed up and getting to meet new people? Get out of the house for a bit?”

I watched as Odette’s normally cheerful visage melted away into a frown as the remaining sparkle in her eyes from talking about her art winked out completely. She crossed her arms defensively over her chest, her eyes shifting away from mine.

“I did ,” she muttered, reaching up to close her sketchbook and finally covering the grieving man’s face. “But these past couple of years Daddy has been… auditioning people. ”

“Auditioning them for what?” I asked, frowning with confusion even as my brain started to connect the dots behind her words.

Odette shifted uncomfortably on her stool. “He’s been bringing faerie men to the galas to see if I like any of them.”

“And you don’t…?”

The last time we’d talked about boys, Odette was still in her Prince Charming era—which if we were being honest—fits most faerie men to a T. I was actually pretty sure that stereotype came from them in the first place.

“No!” Odette hissed, scrunching her little nose. “They’re all so boring and they just want to marry me so that they can inherit all of Daddy’s wealth. That’s what James and I were arguing ab—”

Odette stopped herself, her blue eyes widening as she realized she’d brought the wizard up again.

Faerie Prince Charmings aside, I had a sinking feeling that whatever she was going to say next was going to make me want to light James Reid on fire with my newfound abilities.

I couldn’t help but prod her for more information. “Why were you arguing?”

When she shook her head, color rising in her pale cheeks, I reached out to slide my hand into hers. “Odette, I may have been a shitty friend for fifty years, leaving you here to the wolves, but I’m back now and you can talk to me.”

She was being cagey, just like how Daphne was when she first came to work at Monstrous Ink. I didn’t even know Odette was capable of such an emotion. My previous view of the faerie was that of a too-sheltered and too-innocent woman. To even be able to think of anything past bouts of loneliness outside of her life of relative comfort and adoration was strange to me.

Odette’s thin shoulders sank as she finally gave in. “James told me to marry him instead and he’d chase them all off.”

I recoiled back from her, my mouth agape as her words registered like the heavy slam of a hammer.

“You can’t do that!” The words burst out of my mouth in a shout that echoed off of the high ceilings of Odette’s bedroom.

Memories that I’d long since shoved deep down into my psyche came bubbling up to the surface along with a healthy dose of nausea. Suddenly I was sixteen and listening to similar promises from a boy who spent most of his time pretending I didn’t exist in exchange for fleeting kisses that made my stomach turn to even think about.

Odette looked at me like I was crazy. “I know that, Effie. I don’t want to marry James either.”

Relief was like ice coursing through me, and if not for my vines snaking out to hold me up, I would have slumped to the floor with it.

“Effie? Are you all right?” Odette’s warm, dry hands came up to my face as she pressed her palms to my forehead and cheeks. “You just got really pale—well paler than normal.”

“Fine,” I said airily, gripping the edge of the drafting table as I forced myself to stand up straight on my still wobbly feet. “Why don’t you want to marry him? ”

“Well for one, Daddy would have a shit-fit,” Odette’s tongue seemed to struggle with the curse word, like she wasn’t used to using it, “And for two… I don’t want to marry just anyone I want to be in love with my person! The kind of passionate love where you aren’t sure if you want to set yourself on fire or if you want to throw yourself off of a cliff for it!”

Odette’s sparkle was back as she spoke, her hands dancing through the air as if to enunciate her point.

“I want to find him. The man of my dreams,” Odette finished with a happy sigh, her eyes far away.

Despite still feeling a little queasy, I couldn’t help but huff a short laugh. “What if it’s not a man?”

“I’m not opposed to women, Effie, you know Fae are mostly ambivalent about gender when it comes to relationships. But I just know it’s a man who’s tall and fierce. He almost glows golden—like he’s got a halo of fire.”

My brows lifted with surprise. “That’s oddly specific for a hermit who never leaves the house.”

Odette shrugged one shoulder, a half-smile on her face. “I have an overactive imagination, remember? And for your information I do leave the house, thank you very much.”

Just not without parental supervision, I thought silently as she continued on.

“Anyway, don’t think I’ve forgotten why we’re having this conversation in the first place, Euphemia Finch. Please say you’ll go with me to the next gala? Or else I might actually have to rely on James to help beat the faerie men off of me. ”

I definitely didn’t want that. James was the next in line to lead the North Coast coven after Alexander stepped down and now had seemingly set his sights on Odette.

His sudden consolidation of power was… concerning and I made a note to talk to Alexander about it the next chance I got.

“I’ll think about it,” I finally said with a sigh as Odette squealed and threw herself at me.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you!” Odette sang as if I’d agreed to go outright—which I guess with my track record I basically had agreed.

I just hoped she’d also foot the bill for a dress because my usual vintage style was definitely not going to cut it for something as swanky as the Port Haven charity gala.