Her Master's Hand Read online

  “Why? Why don’t you want me with you?” Samuel asked. “What will I do?”

  Samuel was an excellent speaker for a five-year-old, at least that’s what his parents had always said, but all Cole saw was someone who could annoy him earlier than scheduled. “I suppose you’ll do whatever you do when you’re not following me around everywhere, Samuel. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  “Want to play with my ball?” Samuel asked, which meant that he wanted to play football without a basket or any sort of rules. More like keep-away with only feet. Surely, if Cole had offered ‘Hot-Lava’ as an alternative, where the object of the game was to scoot around on the furniture and ignore the flooring just to annoy the housekeeper, Naomi, then Samuel would have taken it.

  “No, I don’t want to play anything. I’m going out.”

  Then Samuel began to cry, of course, because he was a spoiled brat who got everything he ever wanted.

  That’s exactly why Cole ended up allowing that Samuel could come with him, just as long as he didn’t talk or make a nuisance of himself. He helped Samuel put on his jacket, and then Naomi came in to nag, “Be home for supper, or else I’ll have your hide nailed to the wall!”

  “Madame, I would like to see you try,” he gritted, hating to be threatened. He hated that everybody thought he was always up to no good, or about to screw up.

  Cole had long ago concluded that whatever luck was in the universe had decided to completely pass him by. He was seventeen and had never even been allowed to play a sport in his life because he was one-quarter nymph and one-half Huxian, which would give him an unfair advantage above all the Earthside humans he went to school with. He didn’t even have impressive powers because Master Ashcroft had informed his mother as a boy that ‘no one should expect much out of a boy who only had one-quarter wizard in him.’

  Being Huxian was a curse moreover because his parents wouldn’t allow him to date girls. His mother and father didn’t trust him not to seduce women unfairly, since he was half-Huxian, and seducing came naturally as did a very inconvenient sex drive. Since long before puberty, Cole had liked girls, quite a lot. Maybe more than he should, honestly, but being kept away from them didn’t exactly help his urges to be around them all the time. He wanted to go into town and see about going to one of those peep shows his father forbade him to see. Samuel could easily wait outside with the other boys who were waiting on their fathers to come out of there.

  Cole didn’t want to lose the opportunity—his parents didn’t take private holidays very often.

  They walked along the path toward the village, which was only a couple of miles out when one knew all the short cuts to take. “Hurry, Sam. We need to get home before nightfall,” he reminded his brother, who decided to stop every two seconds, apparently looking for a very good walking stick. “That means that we need to get there before nightfall.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “No, you’re not,” Cole assured him. “You ate an hour ago.”

  “I am too. I’m hungry,” he whined, and Cole sighed. He had a feeling that they’d never actually get into the town at all. Samuel was exhausting when he was whining.

  There was a wind that suddenly picked up around them.

  “I’m cold,” Samuel now said, hugging his jacket to him.

  “Fine, fine. Let’s go back, then,” Cole sighed, defeated. Out of the corner of Cole’s eye, he noticed a head of beautiful, long blond hair.

  His head whipped around and he saw a woman by the tree line, smiling at him. “Hi there!” she said in a strange, foreign accent. He licked his lips—the woman was gorgeous.

  “Hello!” he replied, his mind barely working as he stared at her. “You’re sort of in the middle of nowhere—perhaps we can point you in the right direction?”

  “I know—we’re heading into town, but my brother twisted his ankle. Can you help?”

  Yes, yes he could. He could help a sexy blonde—she looked maybe one or two years older than him, but that would mean that she might be willing to ‘teach him a thing or two.’ He grinned mischievously, then pointed at the side of the road. “Stay there, Sam.”

  “Okay…” Sam said, seeming nervous and unsure.

  Cole probably got a whole twenty feet before Samuel came chasing after him. “Wait, wait! Daddy said not to talk to strange—”

  Just as Samuel approached him, a cage fell over them, crashing loudly about their ears. Cole dropped his body protectively over his brother, who screamed shrilly.

  When the dust cleared, Cole pulled himself up. He still couldn’t think what could have possibly happened, and he couldn’t process that the thing that fell around them that resembled a cage was a cage, and it was one with openings that he couldn’t pass through even in fox form.

  The girl was just outside the cage. “I’m sorry,” she said, biting her lip.

  Just then, several young men stepped out from the tree line, dressed in colors that made them blend into the forest behind them.

  “Don’t try to go anywhere, Huxian, or else we’ll have to kill you.”

  “We don’t want to hurt a… a child,” the girl said, tears beginning to well in her eyes. “Please, don’t make a fuss—”

  Yet Cole yelled and tried to break down the wooden walls surrounding him until a stick crashed across his face, hard, blurring his vision before laying him out flat. “Alright, let’s get them in chains. We’ve got them,” one of the men said.

  “But… but…” He looked at the blond girl, feeling betrayed, even though he didn’t know her. He shouldn’t have trusted her to begin with, of course, but she was so pretty… “But why? Why us?”

  “Because we must,” the girl said, then shocked him by saying. “I am sorry, Cole and Sam Miles.”

  Cole leaned back against the leaves, his brother trying to grab at his shirt to get him to sit back up. He didn’t know how to admit to his little brother that he’d gotten them both kidnapped because of a pretty girl, and so he let the pain in his head overtake him into unconsciousness.

  Chapter Seven

  “The one problem with Damen is that he wouldn’t just sit out and have a smoke with me,” Hoel said, tapping the end of his burning cigar so that the ashes fell to the ground. “A man should be able to relax and enjoy the finer things in life.”

  They were watching from Hoel’s study’s balcony, which was on a small cliff that overlooked the bay below. There Maili was actually swimming in a bathing suit amongst a rather large grouping of selkie maidens. Maili was the only one there with her breasts covered, and yet Ashcroft had to hide the hardness that was beginning to overwhelm the front of his trousers. The fabric of her suit seemed to cling to every inch of Maili’s front.

  She was a beautiful young woman, indeed—the prettiest woman there, for certain. The selkie maids were beautiful in their own, wild way, but Maili’s skin was softer, less sun-touched, and her face was undeniably sweeter. While most of the selkies were light brunettes or blondes (on their heads, while they did have furry seal-like bodies from the belly button down), Maili’s coal black hair contrasted them greatly.

  “She’s a pretty girl, isn’t she?” Hoel asked, and Ashcroft forced his eyes away from her. “She was a little ragamuffin when she came to me, but honestly I thought she’d look prettier this way.”

  That explained why she looked more like a doll version of his wife. That being said, it was surprising that Hoel could be so candid about changing a girl with magic.

  “Originally I’d taken her in as a pet for my wife, honestly. A little doll to entertain herself with. But she’s so childlike, and she was so addlepated and lost back then that we began to teach her things, and then before very long at all, we realized she meant more to us than a pet would.”

  “A pet?” Ashcroft replied, nearly dropping his cigar. How could anyone confuse Maili as anything less than a woman?

  Hoel grunted and then continued, “Well, hell! When Maili came, she was like a frightened little animal. She was ou
t of her wits, confused. She didn’t remember her own name, or where she came from. She hid behind the sofa for the first week. But when she became more settled, we realized that she was more of a person than a pet. Anwen’s motherly instincts came out—and thank goodness, too because she was quite unbiddable before that happened—and she took to Maili like a mother to a daughter. She wanted to set a good example for the girl. It took me slightly longer. I thought she was still more of a little doll my wife liked to baby.

  “But,” Hoel said, raising a finger, “when Maili reached her immortality, she almost didn’t survive the illness that came with her change. It was so incredibly severe that we thought we’d lost her. There’s no cure for the changing sickness—only the strong survive. Even I couldn’t find a spell to help heal her. And so when she eventually turned the corner, even I realized that she had become family to me, not just a pet. When the palace finished that summer, and when we hired on our servants, we told them that she was our daughter. Nobody argued.”

  Ashcroft relit his cigar, because he’d let it die as he processed the story. “Why tell me all this?” he asked simply.

  “A lot of folk don’t trust those who can do magic. Power? Sure. Politics? Absolutely. Magic? Not so much. There are a lot of people who would fear me if they knew the full extent of what I can do.” He sighed. “What do you do to keep your servants from being afraid of you?” he asked, his tone sad and frustrated.

  Ashcroft could only lift up his hands and shrug. “I don’t do anything. I have a steward who seems to do very well in keeping my staff somewhat happy, even though they’re working for a wizard. They don’t have to trust me—they trust him. And he knows me.” He scratched the side of his neck, neglecting to mention that he hadn’t seen Moriarty for over ten years now. They exchanged letters about once a year, saying what they’d been up to on their own ends, but that was all.

  “What is your steward? Mortal?”

  “No,” Ashcroft replied. “Huxian.”

  Hoel laughed. “They trust a Huxian trickster over you?” His gold eyes twinkled and he shook his head. “I see I’m not alone in my distaste of wizards!”

  “No. Except wizards seem to be quite popular among the Earthside mortals now. There was this book about two little half-lings and a magic ring that took the world by storm nearly a century ago, and it’s all everybody’s been talking about since.”

  “Well, Earthside mortals are a strange bunch, aren’t they?” he smirked.

  “Indeed.” Ashcroft watched one of the selkie women hand over a selkie pup to Maili, which were arguably cuter than an actual baby seal because of the childlike faces. He smiled as he watched Maili hold up the child and then playfully dip down with it into the water, smiling theatrically to entertain it.

  “She’ll make Damen a good wife once she settles down,” Hoel said, apparently observing the same thing. “A good mother. She’s a social creature—she’ll make him a good partner, a good match. He’s the brooding, silent sort.”

  Ashcroft felt a small spike of jealousy. Everybody seemed to be finding good matches. The only woman who ever suited him was murdered unnecessarily—his brother just didn’t want Ashcroft to know one damn moment of happiness. Even those selkies seemed happier than he was, and all they did was muck around on the beach all day and stuff themselves on salmon.

  Eventually, the men retired back into the study where they had a bit of an intellectual debate until Ashcroft generated a headache. He excused himself from dinner and went to lie down.

  He closed his eyes, and for a moment he had a dream. He’d had similar ones—there was a large part of him that wouldn’t put up at all with the fact that Charlotte was gone.

  In the dream, Charlotte was massaging his temples with her fingers, humming one of her more favorite tunes in her soft, kitten-like voice.

  “I love you, Charlotte,” he told the ghost with a sigh. “And Gods above, I miss you.”

  “Oh, Ash. Really. Don’t get mushy on me,” Charlotte said, then continued to massage him. He felt his headache begin to dissipate.

  “I miss… I miss everything about you,” he said, reaching for her hand, then bringing it up to his nose. He breathed her in. Cinnamon and vanilla. He missed the smell of her, especially after making love with her all afternoon, which they had done often there toward the end. He used to bury his nose in her copper-colored hair and breathe her in.

  She pulled her hand back away from him, making a chiding sound. “Ashcroft, you need to wake up and eat something,” Charlotte lectured, cupping his once-aching temples with her soft, warm hands.

  “Why can’t I move on?” Ashcroft asked her, feeling his throat clench slightly from the pain of just remembering her. His chest felt like it was literally aching. “Why can’t I let you go?”

  “Don’t let me go. You said you’d always love me. No matter what. No taking it back,” she chided, but in a good-natured way, as if she knew what he was talking about, that he wasn’t in a memory but a dream.

  Suddenly, the room around them turned into a storm, haling its change with a low rumble of thunder. Wind and rain hammered on his face. He was suddenly standing, chasing Charlotte as she screamed for him as she slid across the courtyard as if grabbed by a large, invisible hand. She was too frightened to scream, she just reached out for him. “Charlotte!” he screamed, thinking that if he caught her this time, he could keep her. But his feet felt like they were paved into the stone. He clawed to the edge of the cliff, where she and Lachlan were falling. Charlotte’s eyes were wide with fear, and Lachlan was… pleased.

  There was a flash of lightning and then they were gone from his sight.

  The horror from the incident, now uncomfortably fresh, filled him as it had when it really had happened. “Charlotte!” he screamed. He was so close to her. He was so close, but too far away… “Charlotte!” He grabbed his face with his hands. “Ah, Gods!”

  “Ashcroft! Ashcroft!” Charlotte’s voice was in the air, as if on the wind itself. “Ashcroft! Stop it! Wake up! You’re sleeping! Wake up! It’s only a dream!”

  Ashcroft woke up, sitting up, his arms flailing. For a moment he had no idea where he was. The room was dark, candle-lit, and he was covered in a cold sweat in a featherbed.

  “Ashcroft, are you alright?” He was certain that the voice was hailing from his dream. He could still smell the cinnamon and vanilla from Charlotte’s skin; he could still hear her purring tones.

  When he looked around, though, he saw only Maili, who grabbed his freezing hands into her warm ones and made eye contact. Her hauntingly blue eyes stared back at him. “Are you alright? You were having a nightmare.”

  It was too much. Her eyes were too much like Charlotte’s… even the voice and the smell in the room seemed similar to his dream. “Go! Go away!” he demanded. She dropped his hands immediately and he put them over his eyes. “Go away,” he moaned, feeling pained. His head was blazing with pain now. It was even worse than before he had fallen asleep.

  “Ashcroft, you’re not well. Drink something, at least.” When he looked up, she was bending over him with a glass of water in her outstretched hand.

  “I’m fine,” he grumped, but he pushed himself up on his elbows and grabbed the water from her. He was thirsty, after all. He wiped some cold sweat beading on his forehead with his wrist and then gulped down the cool water. He looked up at Maili, who had a water pitcher pressed to her chest with one arm. She was waiting to refill it for him. “Why are you here?” he asked firmly.

  “I was told to come up and check on you,” she explained, a little defensively. “Papa said you looked ill before you went upstairs. He wanted to make sure you weren’t dying or something.”

  “Well, I’m not dying.” He wiggled his fingers toward the door, pressing the fingers of his other hand against his temple.

  She put down the pitcher of water on the table next to her. Instead of leaving, to his horror, she leaned over his shoulder and touched her fingers to his temple.

&nb
sp; He twitched back. “What are you doing?”

  “You have a headache,” she replied stubbornly, reaching for his head again.

  “I know I do, but what are you doing?” He moved away from her again.

  “I’m trying to be nice. My life depends on you just a little bit,” she said, as if she was greatly understating his importance. “So stop being stubborn and let me just help your head.”

  “Don’t touch me,” he demanded, but she eventually grabbed his head and pressed her fingers into his temples. The feeling of relief was almost instantaneous. In fact, he couldn’t help but emit a groan. She forced him back onto the pillow with a firm tug. “I hate this,” he said, loving it. He liked it better when Charlotte was doing it, and not this stranger, despite that Maili was arguably doing a far better job.

  She was quiet for a long time, and just massaged his temples. Eventually she cleared her throat. “Ashcroft?”

  “Hm?” he grunted.

  “Who’s Charlotte?”

  He opened his eyes and stared up at her. He would have been angry with the question if she hadn’t asked the question so innocently, as if she was a child who wanted to add a new word to their vocabulary. “Just someone I used to know,” he said, trying his best to brush off the question. Charlotte was still a fresh wound, even after so long. Maybe it would never heal.

  Alice used to wonder if Ashcroft should try to locate the body so he could get ‘closure’—or whatever the fancy term they were using on Earthside nowadays to get someone to hit rock bottom. Tracking Charlotte might have been easy, but he didn’t want to. Even after a day her body would have been horrible to look at after being in such a wild sea. She had probably been eaten by crabs and had been completely deteriorated by the salt water by now. He didn’t need proof that she was dead; he’d seen her fall over two hundred feet. There was no surviving something like that. He didn’t need to look at the body so that salt could be rubbed into the wound.

  Alice and Moriarty would have suggested anything to get him to ‘move on’ from her. But what did it say that the first girl he looked at in years—in the way a man looks at a woman—only made him miss Charlotte even more?