“Why do you ask?”
“Because you were making this . . . whimpering sort of noise?”
Oh.
“Just, you know, not a huge fan of the dark. Or the woods. Or walking through the dark woods.”
Bowen chuckled, tucking his arm closer to his side and pulling her in so that their hips bumped. “Can’t imagine the great Tamsyn Bligh is afraid of much.”
“I realize I give that impression, but trust me, terrified of lots of things.”
“Such as?”
“Snakes, that’s a big one,” she said, stepping over a thick root in the path. “And ghosts, we’ve established that.”
“And the dark and the woods and the dark woods,” Bowen added, and Tamsyn nodded.
“Those, too. Ooh, and weird dolls. Those scare the shit out of me. What else? Paintings of kids where the eyes are too big. Opening a can of biscuits.”
You. How I feel about you. How last night might have ruined me for any other man, and you didn’t even touch me.
For once, Tamsyn’s inner monologue stayed where it belonged, and she didn’t say any of that out loud, but she wondered if he could feel the words hanging there between them, because he didn’t say anything for a long time.
Around them, the trees grew thicker, bare branches reaching up into a deepening purple sky that just looked cold.
Shivering, Tamsyn tucked herself deeper into her coat and said, “So you think Lowri is right? We have until Yule to get back home?”
“I’ve learned that when incredibly old witches approach you in a pub and tell you something, you should probably listen,” he replied, and she looked up at him even though it was hard to make out his face in the gathering darkness.
“And this happens to you a lot?”
“You’d be surprised.”
That made her laugh at least, which kept her mind off the way the wind eerily whistled through the naked trees and how even if there had been a moon, the clouds overhead would have blotted it out. They were mostly making their way by feel now, and once again, she thought of last night, the dark, the bed, Bowen’s groan when he came, how wrecked his voice had sounded, how she would’ve given anything to look at him in that moment and see if what she had been feeling was there in his eyes.
Dangerous thoughts, even if they did do a good job warming her up, so she decided to put her brain back in much less sexy territory. “If Lowri has never heard of Y Seren, maybe it didn’t have anything to do with what’s happened,” Tamsyn said, and Bowen grunted.
“Is that an ‘I agree, Tamsyn, you are a genius to point that out’ kinda grunt, or is it ‘You are a stupid human person who doesn’t understand witchy business, of course that ugly piece of jewelry is why we’re here’ noise? I’m usually good at interpreting, but maybe the time travel fucked with my skills.”
Bowen made another sound, this one she had no problem identifying. It was that half laugh thing he did when she’d genuinely amused him.
She loved that one.
“It’s neither,” he told her now. “It was more ‘Not sure I believe it wasn’t involved, but more open to the possibility at least, although I still wonder why Carys isn’t here, given that she’s the one who did the damn spell in the first place.’”
“That is a very verbose grunt, Bowen,” she replied, and overhead, an owl hooted.
They walked on in silence for a few more moments, Tamsyn’s hand still comfortably tucked into his elbow, and then she said, “Speaking of Carys, we’ve got a good twenty minutes or so of walking still ahead of us. Is this a good time to ask you about her fiancé? The one who died, I mean, not that Ken doll she was marrying.”
Bowen didn’t answer for a long time, long enough that Tamsyn was about to rush in and apologize for even asking, when he said, “She was engaged to my best mate, Declan. Met him at university, roomed with him for years.”
Again, Tamsyn wished she could see him, but maybe, like last night, the darkness made this easier for him, so she just waited for him to go on even as her chest tightened at the grief in his voice.
“Declan is—was, fuck, I don’t even know anymore—a good lad. Best lad, really. Takes the piss out of me all the time. You’d like him.”
“I’m sure I would,” she said gently, giving his biceps a small squeeze. “But . . . he’s . . . he’s dead, right?”
“Yes and no,” Bowen said with a sigh, and even though he was just a silhouette against the deep purple sky, Tamsyn could see him lift a hand and rub it over his face briefly.
“Back at college, Declan and me . . . we were always looking for arcane spells. The really old, ancient shite no one had messed around with in ages. Mostly we just wanted to study them, see why the witches who invented them came up with them in the first place, figure out if they’d ever worked, if there was any kind of alteration that might make them work now or make them safer. It was supposed to be . . . academic, I guess. Or a way to show off to our teachers at Penhaven.”
Tamsyn still couldn’t see him, but she could hear a smile in Bowen’s voice as he said, “Course, most of our teachers thought we were mad, and it made more than a few of them pretty hacked off that Declan might actually be a more talented witch than any of them.”
Tamsyn smiled, too, and rubbed his arm. “Must’ve been nice for you, having someone just as obsessed with weird old magic as you are.”
“It was,” he said, and there was a heaviness in his voice now that Tamsyn recognized as grief. “Until I found this one spell. Christ, I was so proud of the thing. Hunted it down from five different books because the witch who had made it had hidden it like that. Pieces of the spell spread throughout different grimoires from different centuries, nearly impossible to reassemble.”
“But you did,” Tamsyn said, lulled by his voice and their footsteps. It was full dark now, the clouds parting enough to reveal a smattering of stars overhead.
“I did,” Bowen said, and those two words were filled with so much pain that Tamsyn couldn’t stop herself from leaning her head against his shoulder, pressing her cheek to the damp fabric of his coat.
She kept her face against him as he continued: “I never meant for anyone to try it. Certainly not Dec, brilliant as he was. We weren’t even sure what the damn thing did. Declan thought it was some kind of powering up ritual, increasing your natural magic. He was already plenty strong enough—so was I—so I didn’t see any reason to attempt it. I just . . . Ah, fuck it, Tamsyn, if I’m honest, I was just showing off. Sticking it to my teachers a bit, maybe proving something to my da, I don’t know. I was only twenty-one. Lads are stupid at that age.”
“Girls are, too,” Tamsyn told him, lifting her cheek from his arm. “I dated a DJ at that age. A DJ, Bowen.”
He gave that huffing laugh again, then shook his head. “True, suppose lads don’t have a monopoly on foolishness in their twenties.”
“But my foolishness just resulted in my TV being stolen and a remix of ‘Evil Woman’ with my name randomly spliced into it being played at clubs around my college,” Tamsyn told him. “Seems like yours went worse.”
