Chapter One Hundred and Sixteen

Havermouth, Present Time

Aislen rested her forehead in the hollow of Heath's throat. “I know,” she confessed shakily on the verge of tears, “you’ve said it before. I know.” It was not what he wanted to hear, not the answer he had hoped for in saying the words to her again. He wanted her to say them back.

He sighed into the embrace, and they stood, wrapped in each other’s arms, neither speaking, both of their minds twisted and convoluted with frustration, pain, and a fragile hope.

“Hello?” A man called from the open front door.

“Ah, Tyler,” Talen called out. “Come around the back. I’ll go get him,” he said, walking to the back door. “He will help paint in exchange for a share of pizza and beer.”

“Not pizza,” Heath murmured. “Cameron doesn’t eat it.” (Not since Aislen predicted that his mother would die whilst he was eating it.)

“Oh god,” she sobbed in a breath wetly. “I am so sorry for that.”

He sighed again heavily and shook his head. “You were right. And wrong. He wasn’t eating pizza that night, we ordered in Chinese instead. We ate Chinese, watched TV, and drank beer. And whilst we were doing that, his father was checking the fences at the far end of the property as heavy rain had softened the earth enough that the cows had flattened it and gotten into the neighbour’s land.”

“And mum was taking her own life,” Cameron stood in the kitchen doorway. “I didn’t eat pizza for almost four years, trying to change the future.”

“My grandmother always said that it was impossible to predict the future,” Aislen reached out an arm towards him and he stepped into the embrace, putting his arms around them both. “She said that it was only possible to see potentials. The future shifts and changes with each choice that we make.”

“Not eating pizza wasn’t enough to change it,” Cameron replied, and Aislen felt a tear strike her cheek. “But I didn’t really have much more to go on, and getting dad not to check the fences would have been like trying to stop the sun from rising. He would have thought I was insane if I said to him that my mate predicted that mum would die whilst he was riding the fence line and I was eating pizza.”

“He would have thought that I was insane,” Aislen corrected.

“You are insane,” Heath told her.

“Quite possibly,” she agreed, with a sad laugh. “I’ve spent the last ten years hearing other people’s voices in my head so loudly that I doubt my own mind. You can’t imagine what it’s like to have an opinion on something and not be sure if it’s yours, or something that you’ve overheard.”

“You can’t like… stop doing it?” Cameron wondered.

“Rhett told me to stop doing it once,” she remembered, shaking her head. “It’s not something that I have a great deal of control over. I have learnt a few tricks from the witches, which help, but my grandmother died before she could teach me everything, and although she handed down a grimoire, I think a lot of our heritage was passed along verbally, rather than in writing – something I am trying to fix by writing everything that I learn down…” Not that she had imagined herself with children in the last five years.

“Hi,” Tyler was older than Aislen had expected from Talen’s talk of him watching TV and eating pizza. A tall man with an abundance of chin length curly brunette hair, and what was either the beginning of an attempt to grow in a beard, or a week of ignoring his razor blade. He was dressed in a band t-shirt and jeans, with a twist of leather and beads around one wrist, and a leather collar tooled with the same design as Aislen’s gold collar, fastened with a small silver lock.

He deposited a slab of beer onto the kitchen bench. “I’m Tyler. Talen’s just bringing in the wine.”

Aislen stepped out of the embrace and held out her hand. “I’m…”

“Morgana,” his smile widened into a beaming grin as he clasped her hand. “You are precisely as Talen described you.” (Absolutely gorgeous. I can see why he’s nuts over her.)

Aislen felt a blush heat her cheeks. “It’s nice to meet you too. You’re not exactly what I expected.”

“What did you expect?” He asked with interest, without releasing her hand. His grasp wasn’t lecherous but rather because he was a person who was fascinated by people, and comfortable being physically intimate with them.

She shrugged slightly. “I had in mind… A university student on spring break, I guess. Maybe a member of a garage band? Possibly the drummer,” she continued, her own preconceived idea of him clarifying in her head as she spoke. “Acting as a blood… employee,” she corrected herself. “To supplement his income.”

Tyler laughed, revealing a set of strong, white, even teeth. “You’re actually not too wrong,” he said. “I am a university student, studying for my PhD in Anthropology and Archaeology, and I play keyboard in the band, which is less sexy than drums, and yeah, working for Talen not only gives me the opportunity to travel to weird and wonderful places frequently, which, as a bachelor of no fixed address, is awesome, by the way. It also more than pays for me to study to my hearts' content without having to worry about something so mundane as finances.”

“Ah,” Heath murmured in a knowing way.

Tyler chuckled. “Yes, I’m an eternal student with no aspirations to work,” he answered Heath. “And why the hell should I? Learning is a full-time job, and Talen will outlive me, so I’ll always have an income stream.”

“You don’t want him to turn you?” Rhett asked from the kitchen doorway, the conversation having drawn him from painting.

“Being a vampire has its disadvantages,” Tyler replied. “Doesn’t it, Tal?” He added as Talen entered, carrying a box of wine.

“It certainly does,” Talen agreed, as he placed the wine next to the beer on the kitchen bench. “Like most paranormals, nature balances advantages against disadvantages in order to prevent any one of us being supreme on the food chain of life.”

“Like not liking pizza,” Tyler was teasing him with the easy friendship of people who had known each other for a long time.

Talen’s lip curled. “Like not liking most foods,” he replied. “There is little nutritional value in it for vampires, as you know.”

“Nutritional value doesn’t affect your liking for wine, however,” Tyler opened the beer and began handing them out to Cameron, Rhett, and Heath, who declined, bringing three wine glasses from the cupboard.

“You broke a wine glass,” Heath commented to Aislen as he set the three glasses onto the counter. “There was four, before.”

“Yeah,” Aislen remembered weeping over the dishes after discovering that Rhett had a child with another woman. “These things happen.”

“Wine is a lot like blood,” Talen replied to Tyler as he selected a bottle from the box. “And is easier on the digestion than pizza.”

“Talking about pizza, what should we order for dinner?” Rhett wondered.

Heath pulled open the fridge and lifted his eyebrows. “Astounding. Aislen’s fridge is full of fresh produce. I could cook?"

Tyler looked over Heath’s shoulder and slid a look at Talen and then Aislen. “He fills my fridge with this stuff too,” he told her. “It’s some type of vampiric caring thing, to provide food for his food.”

Talen’s laugh was sighed out. “I seem to attract people who think that refrigerators are for decorative purposes only. I might not eat this sort of food, but I know enough about it to know what is good for you to eat and what is not. Humans existing on take-away are like vampires drinking the blood of the deceased. It is called the same name, but it’s simply not good for you.”

“I will cook,” Heath had continued his inspection of the fridge during the conversation. “The vampire is right – junk food is just wasted calories.”

“Yes,” Rhett sniggered, responding to Tyler’s grimace. “Heath is rigid on the concept of good and bad food. At home, we have one take out night a week. Otherwise, it’s balanced meals, heavy on the veg, all around.”

“I like your arses,” Heath replied, with a hint of maliciousness. “I want to keep them functioning properly. Plenty of fibre, fruit, and vegetables.”

“Well,” Tyler set his beer can down. “If dinner is under control, let’s get painting.”

“We’re down to an endless amount of skirting and trims,” Cameron told him. “We’ve done the walls in the dark grey, and the skirt and trim need to be – What the actual fuck?” He exclaimed as something crashed against the front porch. “Fire! There’s a fire!”

They all ran towards the front of the house as another crash sounded. As they reached the front door, the laughter and music rang out over a loud engine idling on the street in front of the house. Masked figures with hoods drawn tight around their faces lit Molotov cocktails and hurled them over the fence, the glass smashing over the gravel, creating small spot fires.

As the men burst out the door, vaulting over the still-wet paint on the porch floor boards, the assailants swore and dove for the car, which took off with a squeal of tires down the road. Aislen and Tyler stood in the door as the werewolves and vampire put out the fires, and brought the abandoned, unlit bottles that had been left on the pavement in front of the house to the bins.

“I’ll never get all that glass out of the fucking gravel,” Aislen cursed.

“That is what you take out of this?” Heath was furious, his wolf bright in his eyes. “Glass in the gravel! Aislen, for fuck sake, this,” he gestured to the road, “is precisely why you need to stop this Secret Keeper shit. You might think that only one or two people know that it’s you, but this is Havermouth. Word spreads. And someone has obviously decided that you need to be scared into silence.”

“Is that why it’s called Havermouth? Have-a-mouth, get it?” Tyler snorted.

Aislen smothered a giggle. “I don’t know, but if it isn’t, I’m going to be severely disappointed,” she replied to him under her breath. “Heath, the spray paint said Triquetra’s whore, not Secret Keeper. Maybe this isn’t about me after all, did you think of that? Maybe it’s one of your hundreds of crazy exes unhappy that I’m back in town and fucking you three again. So, instead of yelling at me about my poems, why don’t you ask yourself, which of the poor girls or guys that you fucked before and after me would be crazy jealous enough to spray paint my house and set my gravel on fire?”

“Charlotte,” Cameron murmured, and Rhett visibly flinched.

“Charlotte is under control,” Heath replied through his teeth.

Aislen raised her eyebrows. “Now, where have I heard that before?”