Ever After (Rachel Morgan)

then shocked me when he opened the gas oven and pulled out a heavy lockbox. “I have a curse I was going to inflict on her next time I found her sleeping.”
    The box hit the floor with a thud, and I jumped. He wasn’t listening. “Pierce.”
    “Here is the wicked thing!” he said, having opened it up. “That’s a demon killer if I ever saw one!”
    “Pierce, stop.” He had stood, and I took his hands, folding them about whatever ley line charm he’d made. Eye to eye, he squinted at me in mistrust, and I slowly let go. “I’m not going to confront Ku’Sox in a test of magic. I’m not afraid of him,” I said when Pierce took a breath to protest, “but everyone else is and I know my limits.”
    “Rachel . . .”
    “I know my limits,” I said again, silent until he brought his sour expression back to me. “I don’t have to kill him, just prove that he’s the one who unbalanced my line.”
    Pierce frowned, looking capable and disappointed in the fake sunlight coming in the window. It was foggy past the blue curtains. It would always be foggy. “Then why are you here if you’re not seeking my help to kill him?”
    Heart pounding, I brought out the rings. “These,” I said, and he picked up the largest one. “I need to reinvoke them. You said it was possible.”
    “They’re deader than a three-day possum,” he said dryly, handing it back. “What do they do?”
    “Create a bond between two people. They’re elven chastity rings.”
    Pierce started, his blue eyes jerking from me to the rings and back again. Shoving the “demon killer” ley line charm in a deep pocket, he slid the box back into the oven. Smooth muscles moved under his thin cotton shirt, and I remembered the feel of them under my fingertips. He was a beautiful man, but I didn’t trust his decisions, especially when they impacted my life in a big way. “Chastity rings?” he questioned when the oven door shut.
    The rings felt heavy in my palm. “I think I can fix the line, but I need a spotter to pull me out if I get lost. And since the rings make a connection between two magic users . . .”
    “An all-fire close one, I’d think,” he muttered, his manner closed as he wiped his fingerprints off the oven door with the towel drying on a cabinet knob.
    “Can you do it?”
    His eyes flicked up to mine. “I’d rather kill him.”
    My sigh was heavy, and I waited. I needed his help, and I knew he wouldn’t let me leave without it. I hadn’t been able to love him, but he had loved me.
    Head down, he gestured, and I jumped when a circle tinged with his green aura rose up around us. It was a great deal stronger than I remembered—his time with Newt had done him good. Perhaps I’d misjudged him.
    “Does she often make her kitchen look like mine?” I asked as I came closer, the corner of the center counter between us.
    “Only when you’re on her mind. I’m powerfully concerned for you, Rachel.”
    I wasn’t embarrassed by asking for his help, but it was hard knowing that I meant more to him than he to me. “Thank you,” I whispered as I put the rings on the counter.
    “The trick is to not flood them,” he said, ignoring my guilty look. “You can’t use a ley line. That would break them for sure. Even your aura is too much when it’s all together, but if you splinter it . . .” He picked up the rings, positioning the smaller inside the larger. “Fill them with one resonance before allowing the rest in, you can make a pie of it.”
    He set the rings in my palm, cupping his hands about it. A shiver went through me, and he smiled. “It’s much like a rainbow is the sum of visible light. You first put in the red, then shift it to orange, then yellow, then green, and so on until you finally get all the colors singing together and they melt into a white light and the charm invokes.”
    He was standing close; his warmth and the scent of coal dust and shoe polish were bringing back memories, good but uncomfortable. “Show me?” I asked, and we both looked at the rings in my hand, his cupping mine.
    “Push your aura off your hand,” he said, and my head snapped up. “That’s why the circle,” he soothed. “Go on, do it.”
    My face puckered up, but I imagined my aura going thin at my fingertips, peeling back from my fingers, soaking into my skin and vanishing to leave a huge gaping hole in my first line of defense. Cold pinpricks stabbed my hand. My aura wanted to return, but I held it off.
    “Good.”