Wildfire Witch (The Cursed Coven of Spells Hollow)

1. Nix

NIX

I didn’t come to Seattle to be yelled at for some minimum wage job. But life took strange turns, and no one understood that better than me, as the old gran at the bar waved her coffee around as punctuation for her ongoing tirade.

There were trails of steam leaking from her reusable cup. “Are you even listening to me?” she demanded, reaching a new octave of outrage when I steamed milk in the middle of her rant.

“That’s as hot as I can make it, ma’am,” I repeated myself to her in a dull tone. I wasn’t paid enough to start a Friday morning this way.

“Bull shit ! It’s barely warm!”

This is what I got for using my magic. Any time I saw her bedazzled monstrosity of a cup, with its glittery Agnes on the side done up with pink cursive letters, I prepared myself to sneak a bit of magic under the counter. Most of the time, I got away with it.

Agnes was a regular, unfortunately, noticing that her coffee was nice and nuclear hot when I was working. She had a terrible case of an old person’s mouth, able to tolerate temperatures that would melt a lesser woman.

But today, I couldn’t flash heat her beverage. My manager was not so secretly on her phone several paces away and I couldn’t risk her recording the spark of light in my palm. She bowed her head now, studiously ignoring Agnes. If I tried to get her attention for help, she’d just tell me to remake the beverage.

Maybe I should’ve done that, rather than square up over the inferior temperature of the café’s machines. “Look, ma’am, there are other people waiting for their drinks,” I stated.

There was a murmur of discontent behind her. Eight people were waiting, in fact, and I was the only barista making drinks while the inexperienced new hire manned the register and heated food.

Aiming to make it only seven people waiting, I placed the next drink up on the bar and shouted the recipient’s name. Clearly I’d misjudged Agnes’s caffeine-deprived rage, as she smacked it. The top popped off and hot coffee splashed the front of my apron.

I gaped at her, my anger mounting. “Make mine right, first!” She snapped.

Something within me shifted at that moment and my hands shook violently. The sounds of tired jazz from the overhead speaker faded into the white noise of an irritated customer jumping to my defense.

Someone’s cold hand landed on my shoulder. It was the manager, trying to push me aside with an expression of false sympathy. Her lips formed words, but I didn’t know what she was trying to say.

All I could hear was the whoosh of fire.

Flames unfurled their metaphorical wings within my chest, filling my lungs with char. I gripped my throat with sizzling fingers, choking on the taste of ashes.

Oh fuck, not now. Not in front of all these people.

My curse didn’t time itself for my convenience. I had hazy memories of other times this had happened. I’d burned to death in classrooms, while fast asleep in halfway homes, and during my ill-informed attempts to break my curse without proper protection.

I may no longer remember how many lifetimes I’ve experienced, but I knew they all ended the same way.

“Fire!” a man bellowed.

My free hand clutched the espresso machine and flames rapidly consumed it, accelerating as the magic flowed from my palm uncontrollably.

“Aodhnait! Wake up!” I shouted in my head…at the phoenix spirit trapped within my heart.

If she replied, this life could still be salvaged. I’d called her back from the edge before…but most of the time, she was so consumed by a mindless fervor that she was simply an unforgiving blaze inside me.

My manager sprayed my arm with foam from an extinguisher and I jerked. My hand and wrist stung with the familiar sensation of a painful burn, but I jolted back in control of my magic and stopped leaking flames.

“What did you do?” she gasped, dousing the machines to reduce some of the fire catching behind the bar. It flickered into the cabinets and spread, smothering us both with thick black smoke. Coughing, she grabbed my shoulder and dragged me away from the fire.

Aodhnait’s presence rose to the forefront of my mind as we abandoned the café. I could’ve smiled with relief, despite the situation, to feel her shift. Even though we often argued, she was a curl of warm and golden flame in the darkness of my thoughts; a point of safety in many lives plagued by uncertainty. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“I’m going to need a new job,” I told her.

My life was like an incomplete puzzle. I figured that every time I died and was reborn, one of the pieces that made me, well… me , was incinerated. The one constant was Aodhnait, who died and came back with me. I knew her name like it was branded on me, even the spelling, though it was pronounced ay-neht.

She remembered more than I did. At least, that’s what she wanted me to think. Through her, I knew we were cursed to occupy the same body. Though she could perceive the world through my every sense and experience, she defined herself as a spirit stuck inside my beating heart.

But why ? Neither of us knew anymore.

I was by no means an ordinary witch, something that I had to hide. My magic was Aodhnait, and so I could wield raw flame until I burned out or some unknown trigger activated my curse. Then I died in fire and was discovered in the resulting ashes as a fussy baby with no family to claim me.

I’d regained some fractured memories at age twelve in this life and began speaking to Aodhnait soon after. At one point, we may have been best friends, but this hopeless cycle of death, rebirth, and retreading old steps for new hope had bred bitterness between us.

Her constant commentary was both annoying and reassuring. It was when she became quiet and too hot did I worry that my number was up. We’d made it to age twenty-five in this life and reached Seattle, but then fizzled from there, as we weren’t sure why it was so important to come here in the first place.

As I sat on a curb down the street from the café, waiting for the firefighters to arrive, I was consumed with dread. My manager knew I’d started the fire somehow and kept shooting narrowed glances in my direction from where she sat a few yards away with the new hire. A couple of disgruntled customers waited, watching smoke roll off the café’s roof.

I needed to skip town. Maybe in a past life, Seattle had been some kind of haven, but I was in for a dive into some deep shit if there was footage of my magic going out of control. The supernatural police would have a cell with my name on it for performing magic amongst the magicless, unless the ordinary police tossed me in one of their prisons for arson first.

An even worse group could also track me if my face hit the nightly news. My boogeymen, the Fire Brotherhood.

“So we are just sitting here…why?” Aodhnait asked.

“We’ll look a lot more suspicious if we flee the scene. Maybe we can work an angle here,” I said.

“An angle,” she repeated doubtfully.

“I’ll say that one of the machines threw off a spark. Besides, I got burned too.”

It’d been ten minutes at most since the café erupted into flames. Someone from a nearby restaurant had given me a cup of ice water and my right hand was submerged in it up to the wrist. I’d dabbed some water on my neck, but I knew from old experience that the sensitive skin I’d grabbed wasn’t burned as badly. A crowd murmured around us on the sidewalk and a handful of people checked in with the same question. Was I okay?

No, not really. But I smiled prettily for everyone who asked and said yes. It was the fastest way to get them to leave me alone.

A fire engine rolled in, followed closely by an EMT truck with all lights blazing. The firefighters got straight to work trying to salvage what they could of the café. “From my fire? Nothing will remain,” Aodhnait commented.

“That’s not good for us, you arsonist,” I muttered back. I had the feeling she preened.

One of the firefighters had climbed out of the truck and stopped, staring at me from across the street. He was fully suited up, mask and all, but something about him had Aodhnait humming in my chest. My ribs vibrated with the low thrum. “Stop that, someone’s going to notice,” I said quickly.

She made a joyful trill, and I raised a brow. I didn’t remember her taking such notice of another person before.

The firefighter caught the attention of one of the EMTs and pointed in my direction. The moment the firefighter turned away, Aodhnait stopped humming.

There were two EMTs and one was deep in conversation with Agnes and my manager, while the other strode across the street straight for me from where he’d spoken briefly to the firefighter. He lifted his gaze toward the watching crowd, urging them to move on if they weren’t injured and that “it was under control.”

Then, he addressed me. “Good morning, ma’am. I see you’ve gotten hurt. Will you come with me?” he asked. I blinked up at him, dazzled for a moment.

He was pretty darn cute in that uniform and filled it with a leanly muscled physique. Maybe he was an actor on the side, as that white smile was certainly sponsored by some toothpaste brand. His side swept brown hair made a fringe over his bold glasses frames and slightly magnified a pair of kindly creased eyes.

“Not going to hum for this handsome stranger?” I questioned Aodhnait.

“Why should I? You’re practically doing it for the both of us,” she said dryly.

Touché. I wished I could’ve lingered there looking at him, but he’d come over here to do a job. He turned and walked me back to the EMT truck.

I lifted my hand out of the now-lukewarm water and flicked the droplets away. I didn’t question the cute EMT’s intentions until he got into the truck and gestured for me to do the same. When I hesitated, he whispered, “We have to talk about your magic.”

He held his hand out. The water from my cup flowed up in ribbons, twisting around one another in a midair dance before finding a new shape as a sphere balanced over his fingertips. My jaw dropped. He was a witch too, performing magic practically on the street!

I got into the truck and he dropped the water back into the cup I held out. “Someone could see,” I rasped, my throat raw from smoke.

He closed the doors and turned on an overhead light, maneuvering around me in the cramped space with old experience. He gestured for me to sit in the chair against the wall and kneeled to search through a bag of medical supplies. “Did anyone notice you start the fire?” he asked.

“That’s a mighty big assumption you jumped to,” I said defensively.

He considered for a moment before flashing that disarming smile. “You can trust me.” He put a hand over his chest. “My name’s Seth. I’m a Moortide…my family’s been erasing little supernatural blunders from the minds of humans for generations. A touch of the fae, they say.” He flicked his free hand, sending out a shower of multicolored sparkles.

“My fire was not little ,” Aodhnait protested.

“You’re right. It was a huge mistake,” I said.

That didn’t explain why Seth immediately thought I’d committed arson. But if he truly had a pinch of fae blood, he could save my ass. “My manager and at least one customer saw. They’re out there right now, waiting for medical attention.” I answered him honestly.

“Point them out to me in a moment.” Seth was busy unscrewing a pot half full of ointment. “This is the good stuff, blessed by a green witch and everything.”

I let him take my hand and slather it in a generous coating. The magic within the cloudy paste went to work, cooling the blistered skin, and I let out a small sigh of relief. He wrapped my wound in a bandage.

With him bent over me, I suddenly felt a little self-conscious. “Thanks. It’s not every day I meet another witch.” Most hung out in various supernatural cities across the states, but my instincts, influenced by past lives, screamed for me to stay away from those locations. “I’m Nix.”

“Nix?” he repeated, surprised.

Well, that was a weird response. Usually if someone had a question about my name, they were asking if my parents were mythology buffs. But Seth seemed like he was expecting me to say something else.

Someone opened one of the truck’s rear doors. Standing there was a firefighter who’d stripped off his helmet and loosened his protective mask to wear it like a heavy necklace. The humming in my chest began again, and I pressed my fingertips over my heart to get it to stop.

“At last,” he said in a delighted tone. There were tears shining in his eyes as he took me in. “My Verity.”

Who the fu…

My eyes widened and flames crackled in my ears. I barely heard Seth say, “She’s panicking. Good going, Cer.”

Verity . I recognized it. That was my name, many lives ago. Maybe the original one, whispered over me back when I’d had a family to love and no phoenix trapped within me.

Just like that, this stranger had taken a missing piece of my lives and slotted it back into place. It was a gift, a bit of my identity back. “Who are you?” I asked with hushed awe.

The joyous expression he wore dimmed, brow pinching with confusion. He climbed into the truck with us, further crowding the small space. When we were shut in together, his features blurred like a heat mirage. I gaped. Seth’s little trick with the sparkles didn’t hold a flame to the glamor of the full-blooded fae who revealed himself.

And he was…gorgeous. Handsome in a way a human man could hardly compare to, flawlessly masculine to the point that he was nearly pretty. His skin tone was icy, with full, pale lips set in an angular face. Lengthy, pointed ears emerged from a head full of blue-tinged silver curls.

Though his irises gleamed like polished nickels, there was darkness there, hidden depths I could’ve gotten lost in, if it weren’t for his answer to the question I’d promptly forgotten upon his surprise transformation. “I am Ceridor Farrick of the Wind Court.” His voice was reminiscent of a breeze, refreshing to my fire-stung ears. “And your husband, Verity. You don’t remember me?”