Hold Tight (The Embrace Series) (15 page)

“This is a good thing, right?” I said.

“It confirms Isaac and Josh’s theory that she doesn’t want to be found,” Kaylee whispered so only I could hear.

“She’s still gone, and they—” Lauren gave a nod to a random group of girls walking by “—don’t even care.”

“But if she left,” I started to say but stopped when Sarah shook her head in a way that warned,
Don’t go there.
So instead I said, “I’m sure you’ll hear from her again.” And we dropped the subject.

Isaac gave me a ride home. We made a pit stop at the gas station. While he quenched his car’s thirst, I went inside the convenience store to grab us a beverage.

I waited patiently in the checkout line behind a woman in yoga pants and a bright yellow ski jacket. A guy with shiny blond hair and a red plaid jacket placed three liter-sized bottles of water on the counter.

“Reed?” I asked. He turned, letting me see it was him. “Hey.”

“Madison.” He motioned for the woman to go in front of him, and they traded places.

“How do you like working for my dad?” I asked.

“It’s been busy, but good. And your dad has plenty of tools, so at least I don’t need to buy any.”

Dad’s pickup truck was a mobile workshop, and being the person he was, I knew he wouldn’t expect his hired help to have their own tools. I looked down, noticing his Timberland boots. “Gives you more money for shoes,” I teased, remembering how he’d been shoe shopping when I’d run into him at the mall.

He laughed. “Did you get that dress?”

“Yeah.” The memory of his cold fingers brushing my shoulder blade as he untied the ribbons caused my cheeks to warm. I hoped I wasn’t blushing. To keep from having to meet his gaze, I scanned the candy selection near us.

“I still have some of that chocolate.” Reed reached into his pocket and then held out his hand, revealing two pieces of the brightly wrapped treats. “Want one?”

“Thanks.” My thumb had just scraped the fuchsia cellophane when it burst into flames and vanished. Flinching, I clutched my fist to my chest.

“You,” Isaac growled from behind me.

I turned, still trying to understand what had happened. He stared at Reed as if he were seeing a ghost. My gaze went back to Reed. A wicked smile flashed across his face.

Isaac continued, “I sent you back and sealed the door.”

The woman in the yoga pants glanced between Reed and Isaac. I was sure her confused expression mirrored mine. I didn’t know which question to ask first: Who torched a perfectly good piece of chocolate? Or, what door?

Reed shrugged. “Doors get opened all the time.”

The scent of steel and vanilla mixed together to create a nauseating stench and added one more question to my list: Why was Isaac—Mr. In Control—losing his calm now?

“We had an agreement,” Isaac spat.

“I assure you it hasn’t been broken,” Reed replied coolly.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, glad to have found my voice. “How do you know each other?”

As if just remembering I was there, Isaac stepped protectively in front of me. “The question is, how do you know him?”

“He works for my dad.” I tried to move next to Isaac, but he put an arm out to his side, stopping me.

Reed smiled, and for a moment I thought I saw his eyes go from pale blue to winter white. His hair appeared longer, and his high cheekbones looked as if they’d been chiseled out of marble. When I blinked, though, his features were no more remarkable than mine.

He held another piece of candy in his hand. Despite the fact the last one had burst into flames, I wanted it. Bad. I hadn’t even realized I reached for the tiny piece of heaven until Isaac lowered my arm to my side. An unexpected anger grew in me. That was my piece of candy. Isaac had no right taking it from me.

“
That’s my girl
,” Reed whispered, only his lips hadn’t moved.

But I wasn’t his girl. Was I? My mind became too hazy to think straight. I was sure the chocolate would make everything all right. Then something caressed my skin, wrapping around me like spearmint-scented silk, and I remembered Isaac. I was his girl, not Reed’s.

What the hell was going on? I opened my mouth to tell them both off, but my body had become weightless, and there wasn’t enough of me left to form the words. A second later, I was sitting in the Jeep. It took a moment for me to realize that Isaac had teleported me to his car. Confused and annoyed, I yanked on the handle, but the door didn’t open.

“Son of a bitch!”

I slammed my shoulder against the door. It still didn’t budge. By the time Isaac joined me, I was fuming and pretty sure the copper taste clinging to my tongue was my powers showing just how pissed I was. Isaac sped away without a word.

“Are you going to tell me what just happened?” I asked. When he didn’t reply, I stated the obvious. “You used your powers in front of a store full of people.”

He dragged a hand through his hair. “They won’t remember.”

My jaw dropped. “You cast a confusion spell on everyone in the store?”

“No, I cast a confusion spell on the cashier and a couple women who happened to be looking in our direction.” His fingers curled and uncurled around the steering wheel. “Have you eaten anything he’s offered you?”

“What?” I shifted in my seat so that I could see him better. “Isaac, stop the car and tell me how you know Reed or…or…”

He took a hard left, cutting off a guy in an SUV. “Or what? You’ll jump?”

I didn’t plan on going that far.

“Did you?” he bellowed, startling me.

“Yes. What’s up with that anyway, because back there—” I pointed at the small dot in the distance that was the convenience store “—I couldn’t think straight.”

Isaac replied with a stream of profanity that was obviously directed at Reed. I’d never seen him so upset, and I was still trying to understand why. All I could think was Reed had to be a dark witch; how else could he mess with my head so easily?

“How’s he here?” Isaac asked.

I took a deep breath. One of us had to remain rational. “Maybe if you tell me what’s going on and how you know Reed, we can figure that out.”

“He’s a manipulative, self-serving faerie, and I sent his ass back to his realm last year. I sealed the door myself.” Isaac slammed his palm against the steering wheel. “It doesn’t make sense. Faeries can’t open the door between realms on their own, and they have to be invited to ours before they can enter.”

“Reed’s not a faerie.” He couldn’t be. He worked for my dad.

“I assure you, he is.”

I thought again to how I’d seen his eyes change colors and heard his voice in my head though his mouth hadn’t moved. “But I only summoned one.” I couldn’t have brought Reed into our lives too.

Isaac’s shoulders stiffened, and the muscles in his jaw twitched. “You did what?”

I hadn’t meant to say that out loud. “I needed some help around the house. Your mom was the one who said faeries like to do housework in exchange for cream—which is a myth, by the way. Not only do they not drink cream, they don’t like to clean.”

“I could have told you that.”

Isaac pulled into the fifteen-minute parking lot at Annisquam Lighthouse. His frustration rippled off him, tainting the air with an acid metallic taste that stuck to my tongue right alongside the copper already there.

“Madison, Reed being here is bad. I believe his last words to me were, ‘Pray our paths never cross again.’”

In the confines of the Jeep, our powers suffocated me. I got out. Isaac did too.

The air smelled of fish and salt from the bay. I couldn’t tell if the energy surrounding Isaac was rage, fear, or irritation, but it scared me. It warned me to keep my distance until he managed to get his emotions under control. He paced back and forth from the Jeep to the large rocks that created a barrier between land and water. Over and over. Sometimes he just breathed in long deep breaths. Other times, he mumbled to himself so quietly that if I hadn’t seen his lips moving, I wouldn’t have known he was doing it.

I waited by the Jeep, fidgeting with my rings and listening to the sounds of the water slapping the shore. I was dying to know how one faerie could be such a threat. Slowly, the taste of power leaking from Isaac’s pores changed from steel to vanilla and spearmint.

“Where’d you get the spell?”

“From your book on Fae,” I confessed.

He punched the front quarter panel of the Jeep, creating a fist-sized dent that pushed its way out until there was no evidence of the damage. Recomposing himself, he said, “The book I asked you not to read.”

Technically, he hadn’t asked me not to read it—more like alluded to it, which, to be honest, sparked my curiosity. No way was I going to point that out.

“I didn’t see the harm in doing one spell,” I said in my defense. “And it’s a spell your great-aunt has done.”

Isaac held his hand in front of him.
The Fae
appeared. He opened the book, flipping through the pages until he found the one he wanted. Holding it so that I could see, he asked, “You cast this spell?”

“Yeah.”

“Trust me, my aunt never cast this spell.” He turned the book around so he could read it.

“But that spell summons one faerie, and Reed is not the faerie I met.”

He looked at me. “Who’d you meet?”

“Brea, and she hasn’t asked for anything. As a matter of fact, she’s nicer than some humans we know.”

“Did you read every word of the spell exactly as it’s written here?”

“Yes.” I had been very careful to follow the instructions to a T.

“And you called upon Dellis and Rhoswen Reedsnap?”

“Called upon? Those are names?” I’d figured it was gibberish like
neverwhere
.

“The faerie at the store was Dellis Reedsnap of the Seelie Court.” Isaac closed his eyes. “I guess I should be thankful there aren’t any Unseelie names in this book.”

I shook my head, still not convinced I had summoned Reed. “The spell grants me Sight. It allows me to see who I summon.”

“Apparently it only allowed you to see one of them.”

“But everyone at the gas station could see Reed,” I said, confused by the Fae’s rules.

“Because he’s allowed us to see him.”

“Oh…and he’s wearing a glamour so that he’d fit into our world.” Like Brea had done when she’d explored Gloucester. “But how’d Brea get here? Her name isn’t in the spell.”

“My guess is she’s really Rhoswen.” He strolled toward the rocks and took a seat.

“Reed’s sister,” I said, the proverbial light bulb going off above my head. She had said she had a brother; it would have been nice if she’d told me he was here.

I thought back to the day I’d met Brea. Her attention had been fixed on something near the window, and I had assumed she’d been gazing outside, but what if she hadn’t been? What if someone had been talking to her? Her comment,
‘You will owe me,’
made more sense if she’d said it to Reed, Dellis, whatever his name was.

I joined Isaac near the rocks. “Why do you think he’s pretending to be human? Why work for my dad?”

“Take your pick: because it amuses him, to get close to you, to make you trust him.”

The knot in my stomach bet all of the above were correct. Isaac flipped forward a few pages and held the book so that we could read it together.

“Brea’s a princess,” I said matter-of-factly. “That would make Reed a prince.”

Isaac gave me a sidelong glance. “Does it make you feel better to know a prince has wormed his way into your life?”

I rolled my eyes in lieu of a reply. After a few minutes, I pointed to a paragraph in the book.

“It says here that as long as you know a faerie’s name, they can’t harm you. It gives you some type of control over them.” I looked at Isaac. “That’s good, right?”

“It would be, if we knew his name.”

“Dellis Reedsnap.”

“Trust me, that’s not his full name.”

I gave that a moment’s thought and decided since “Brea” wasn’t even in the spell I’d cast, it made sense there was more to their names than Dellis and Rhoswen Reedsnap.