Chapter Text
He’s not sure what draws him through the door. The look of it, perhaps, the twisted grain and the knotholes, polished to a patina by centuries of wind and rain and hands upon it. Some hands much like his own and others very different. He finds comfort in that, as he places his hand on the door. His hand.
His only hand.
On the other side of the door is a bookshop. He knew that of course, from the sign in the window, another thing tempting him inside. It’s far too long since he read a good book, too long since he let himself get lost in stories other than his own. He’s not quite ready for what he sees.
The shelves are made of the same wood as the door. Carved from it, it seems. Hewn might be the word. The knobbly, knothole-y wood that even his limited carpentry knowledge tells him could not form straight shelves. It doesn’t, yet they hold the books. Row upon row of them, dizzying rows. His head spins when he tries to look at them, like a kaleidoscope or a funhouse mirror, too many things, too many angles, too little space.
He blinks, and everything is fine again. It’s just a bookstore.
“It’s just a bookstore,” he tells the cat in the window, a huge grey tabby with long, silky fur and pale blue, unblinking eyes.
“Of course it is,” the cat replies. “What were you expecting?”
“I—what?”
“Meow,” says the cat.
“Can I help you?” asks a voice to his left and he turns, grateful for an excuse to look away from the cat.
“Yes, I’m looking for a… book…”
The woman gives him a faint smile. “Well, we do sell those.”
She’s an ordinary woman, quite stunningly beautiful but dressed in a plain ivory sweater and jeans, hair pulled back in a tidy ponytail and not whipped to a frenzy by eldritch winds as she raises her arms to call down the midnight sky. Of course it isn’t. He blinks and shakes his head, and when he looks at her again her smile is still in place.
“Any particular book you’re looking for?” she asks.
“Erm, no,” he replies. “Something meaty. Complex. But no politics or business or murder. Something… something that feeds the soul.” He has no idea why he says that, but the woman’s smile softens.
“That’s a tall order,” she says. “But I think I can fill it. Come with me.”
She leads him through the maze of shelves, muttering under her breath and pulling books from them seemingly at random. He tries to look at the books for himself but she moves so quickly he gets little more than a glimpse of their titles as he takes long strides to keep up. He recognises none of them.
They emerge into the back of the shop where a small cafe nestles into the wall. Its counter is made of the same knotted wood, its display case filled with cakes and pastries laid out beneath a curving pane of glass he’s somehow certain was hand-blown. It’s softly rippled with a pearlescent sheen and inside it the baked goods glow.
He blinks again and they are simple cakes.
Small tables and chairs are scattered throughout, wrought-iron painted eau-de-nil, and onto one of these the woman drops her armload of books. “Have a look through these and see if any of them appeal,” she says. “Take your time. I’ll have Ruby make you a coffee.”
“I—”
“Don’t be silly, Emma,” says another voice, that of a tall and sleek red-streaked brunette who saunters up from behind the counter. “He’d clearly prefer tea.”
“I—” he doesn’t really want either, but then it’s been so long since he’s had a book and a nice cup of tea, and so “I would,” he replies.
“And cake.” Ruby grins, wide and only a bit predatory. “Tea and cake.”
He doesn’t dare argue. “Thank you.”
“Coming right up.”
He sits at the table and opens the book at the top of the pile, glances into it, and is absorbed. It’s the tale of a lonely man, a wanderer without a home who finds his place in the hearts of those he meets along his travels. It grips him so entirely that he fails to notice Ruby as she sets a pot of tea before him, with a mismatched cup and saucer and a plate bearing a thick slice of cake, fragrant with lemon and dotted with plump blueberries. Absently he prepares his tea—a splash of milk, no sugar—and sips it as he reads. It has a bright, floral aroma but a rich flavour that reminds him of the Earl Grey his brother favoured, and he has to pause for a moment to allow the ache to pass. It does, faster than it once did, and so he risks another sip and sighs this time in pleasure. It’s delicious. He settles deeper into the chair and the book, sips the tea and nibbles the cake and doesn’t notice either one disappearing or the afternoon sunshine fading into twilight beyond the windows until Ruby comes to clear the table with a clatter of silver on porcelain.
He startles at the sound and looks up, frowning.
“Sorry to interrupt you,” says Ruby. She sounds the opposite of sorry. “But we’re closing soon. Can I get you anything else?”
“Oh. Sorry. No, I’ll just take this book. And… do you think I could get a list of these others? For reference?”
Ruby grins, and there’s something triumphant in it. “I’m sure Emma would write them down for you,” she says. “She’s at the register.”
“Thanks.”
She nods. “Come back soon.”
~
The woman—Emma—is waiting at the register, a large apothecary-style chest equipped with all the cash-and-card accoutrements necessary to a modern retail establishment. He wonders why this surprises him.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” she asks, with a professional smile and an undercurrent of something in her voice that he can’t quite put his finger on, a depth to the question that makes him hesitate before he answers.
“Aye,” he says after a moment’s pause, endeavouring a lightness he doesn’t feel. “This one sucked me in and I don’t think I can rest until I finish it. I’ll take it now, and, er, Ruby said you would also make a list of the others for me, so I can find them again?”
“I’ll do you one better,” she says. “I’ll leave them here at the register, and you can choose another when you come back.”
There seems to be no question in her mind that he will come back. He’s not certain he cares for the presumption, but he agrees with a smile. “That would be lovely, if you don’t mind keeping them from your other customers.”
She gives him an odd, sharp look. “It won’t be a problem.” She tears a sheet of paper from a pad next to the register and continues “If I could just get your name?”
Once again he hears a weight in her words that doesn’t seem to belong to them. It’s a simple enough question and the answer hardly a secret, and there is surely no reason at all to feel as though he’s giving anything away by replying.
“Killian Jones,” he says.
“Killian. Is that with a C or a K?”
“K.” He keeps the smile on his face as she writes his name on the paper and places it atop his stack of books, then tells him the price of the one he’s buying. As he reaches into his pocket for his wallet she flicks her fingers at his sleeve, the tiniest twitch of motion, barely noticeable even if he were watching her do it.
He doesn’t notice.
He pays for his book and gives her another smile, one that she returns warmly. He notices again how beautiful she is, how her green eyes sparkle, and feels foolish that he ever imagined that there may be something sinister in the way she spoke to him. She’s just a lovely woman who runs a lovely bookstore, and of course he’ll be coming back again why wouldn’t he?
He turns to go and finds the door is easily visible from where he’s standing. Of course it is, he thinks, why wouldn’t it be? He shakes off the feeling that his way to the back of the store was far more convoluted than his way from it, and takes his leave, ignoring the unblinking gaze and swishing tail of the cat in the window.
Emma watches him go, and once the door clicks shut behind him she takes the hair she plucked from the sleeve of his sweater and places it carefully on the sheet of paper that bears his name. She folds the paper several times upon itself until the hair is safely enclosed within it and puts it in her pocket.
~
The moon is high in the sky, round and luminous, when Emma lights the fire beneath her cauldron with a flick of her wrist. She tosses in a bit of this and a pinch of that, gives it a stir and lets it simmer as she consults a crumbling, leather-bound book.
The grey cat leaps onto her table, delicately avoiding the bottles of potions and powders that litter it. He sits on the edge and curls his tail around his paws, regarding her with his cool blue eyes.
“He saw you,” the cat says.
“I know.”
The cat flicks the tip of his tail. “He heard me.”
“I know, David!” Emma huffs in annoyance as she stirs the contents of the cauldron.
“Who is he?”
“That I don’t know.”
She tips a handful of bright blue powder from a glass bottle and into her palm, then tosses it into the cauldron. The contents bubble up with a hiss then settle into a smooth, flat surface. Onto which, when she drops the single dark hair upon it, resolves the image of Killian Jones.
“But I intend to find out.”
~
He’s back again three days later, having finished his book and found himself unable to stop wondering what other gems may be among the pile that Emma has tucked away for him. The one he bought was more satisfying than anything he can recall reading since his youth, when tales of adventure kept him awake late into the night, reading beneath the covers with a flickering torch so Liam wouldn’t see.
Killian knows now that Liam did see, but kept it to himself.
He feels so little these days other than tired, worn threadbare by stress and sadness, and a book that not only holds his interest but actively engages it is an inestimable treasure. These past few nights have seen him sleeping soundly through them, his mind too exhausted—in the good way this time—to keep him awake with remembering. And all because of a beautiful woman who found him a book.
This Emma has a gift, he thinks, and with it she’s given him one. He’s deeply grateful but he wants more. Needs more. Needs to know more about her.
The cat is not in the window when he arrives this time, nor is Emma anywhere to be seen. The shop itself is perfectly normal—he’s not sure why he thought it might be otherwise—with its crooked shelves standing straight…well, not straight precisely but lined up, er, in a line… He sighs. It makes sense in his head.
He heads back towards the cafe, which is empty save for the cat and a young woman with short, dark hair upon whose lap he’s sprawled, his pose relaxed but his gaze sharply observant. The woman is petite and very pretty, reclining in her chair at an odd angle to accommodate the cat’s generous size, holding her book carefully in one hand and stroking his head with the other while a cup of coffee steams invitingly on the table beside her. She casts the cup a longing look from time to time, but it’s too far away for her to reach without disturbing the cat and so she leaves it be.
Killian isn’t sure the cat would move even if she did disturb him. His purr is audible from across the cafe and his expression one of perfect, smug contentment. He regards Killian coolly, fluffy tail flicking, daring him to make something of it.
Killian raises an eyebrow and strides purposefully across the cafe, keeping his eye on the cat as he slides the woman’s coffee cup across her table. She casts him a grateful glance and he nods, smirks at the cat, and when he looks up again Ruby is there behind the counter grinning her wide grin.
“Hey, Killian,” she says. “It is Killian, right?”
“Er—yes.”
“Yeah. Emma said.”
“Oh.” He feels an odd thrill at the thought of Emma mentioning him. Thinking about him after he had gone. “Er, yes. Is she here?”
“She’s in the back. Is there something I can help you with?”
“Um.” He shoots a glance at the woman. Her attention seems wholly on her book, and though the cat continues to stare, Killian figures there’s nothing he can do about that. “Perhaps you can,” he replies. “I left some books here on my last visit, and Emma said she would hold them for me. I’d like to look at them, if I could, and choose another.”
“Killian Jones.” It’s Emma’s voice that speaks, from behind him and just to his left. The sound of it shivers across his skin in a way he’s not entirely sure he likes.
He definitely doesn’t not like it, though.
He turns to see her smiling at him. Her hair is loose today, curling over her shoulders in soft waves, bright against the blue of her blouse. She’s wearing jeans and sandals that reveal red-painted toenails and she looks completely unthreatening.
Of course she does. He gives his head a little shake to clear it.
“Have you come for your books?” she asks him.
“Yes. If that’s all right.”
“Of course it is. Let’s go have a look. Ruby, would you make him some tea?”
Killian doesn’t bother to protest. He accepts that the tea is inevitable, and actually he’s quite looking forward to it.
He follows Emma to the register where she retrieves the stack of books and watches intently while he looks through them and makes his selection. He watches her watching him, noting the subtle changes in her expression and body language each time he picks up a book to read the blurb on its cover. He lets her reactions guide him, and when he holds up his final selection her approving smile lights up the room.
He blinks and the light is as it was before.
Killian holds the book carefully in his prosthetic hand and scratches his ear with the other.
“Lass,” he says. “I hate to ask, but—”
“Can I hold the rest of these here until the next time you come?” she says, deadpan but with a twinkle in her eye. “Of course. It’s no trouble at all.”
“Are you this kind to all your customers?” he asks with a grin.
Her lips curve in response, into the most peculiar smile he’s ever beheld. “No,” she says. “I’m not.”
His heart thumps and for a moment he feels his old self again. “So I’m just lucky then,” he says.
“That remains to be seen.”
She holds his gaze a beat too long for comfort then turns away.
He takes his book back to the cafe where Ruby has tea waiting and a slice of cake. At first he’s disappointed to note that it’s a different cake than he had the last time and a different aroma emanating from the teapot but once he’s had a sip and a bite that disappointment turns to delight. The cake is soft and mildly tangy with a crunchy pecan topping and the tea is rich and malty and perfect with a splash of milk.
Killian sinks into it, into all of it—the cosiness of the room and the tea and the cake and the book, and the sunshine through the windows and the purr of the cat. He melts into the story as he reads, lets the pages enfold him and wrap him up in their embrace, and when the dark-haired woman eases the cat from her lap with soothing words and a kiss on the top of his head, he doesn’t notice. Nor does he hear the chat she has with Ruby or the petulant mewl of the cat, or sense her walking past him when she leaves.
Other customers come and go as well. There’s a slight man in round spectacles accompanied by a Dalmatian whom the cat, much to what would have been Killian’s astonishment had he been watching, seems to adore; they curl up together beneath the corner table as the man enjoys a cup of coffee and a slice of buttered raisin bread. There’s a haughty woman, sharply dressed, who sweeps in and holds a hissed conversation with Emma at the back of the shop then leaves with the same sweep and several parcels wrapped in brown paper beneath her arm. There’s a man in a tattered velvet jacket and a few too many scarves; Emma’s smile strains at the edges as she helps him and the flash in her eye has a dangerous edge. There’s a man who takes his coffee black like the typewriter he pecks at in an armchair beneath the window as Ruby rolls her eyes, and there’s a little boy with a bright, eager face and incessant chatter who drinks hot chocolate dusted with cinnamon and makes her laugh.
Throughout all the intermittent bustle and quiet of the day Emma watches Killian read. She watches as the tension drains from his shoulders and the frown fades from between his eyes, and as he gets lost in the story his expressive face reveals the sharp intelligence and wry humour that struggle valiantly beneath the weight of his burdens. Killian doesn’t notice her gaze but he feels it all the same and all the same it warms him, soothes him even when he sighs and leans back in his chair to roll his shoulders and rub his neck and it sharpens, just briefly, with something darker.
All too soon the day begins to fade behind the windows and when Ruby comes to clear his table he looks up at her with a smile.
“Closing time already?”
“It sneaks up on you sometimes, doesn’t it?” she replies.
“Aye.”
He stands and stretches, glances over to see that Emma is on duty at the register. As he approaches her expression softens in a way that makes his heart do a little skip in his chest.
“How was it?” she asks.
“Brilliant. I’ll take it.”
She beams. “I’m so glad. Ah, that you liked it, I mean, not that—”
“Aye. I know.”
She rings up his sale with a flush on the tops of her cheeks that captivates him, and when she hands him the bag her fingers brush against his. Killian gasps as the world explodes with colour and sound and light, but when he blinks it’s gone and Emma is smiling at him, the same as before.
He thanks her and starts to go, still all of a whirl, but something stops him. He turns back.
“May I ask you a question, love?”
“Sure.”
“How did you know? What books to choose for me, I mean? These two have been—well, exactly what I didn’t realise I was looking for. I’d never have found them for myself. How did you know?”
“I’m afraid that’s a trade secret.” She grins and taps the side of her nose. “Let’s just say I’m good at reading people.”
He clears his throat. “And what do you read in me?” he asks.
Her tone is light, draped over something deeper. “Would you really like to know?”
“Aye,” he says gruffly. “I think perhaps I would.”
She places her hand on his arm and this time the light is gentle, the sound is soothing harmonies and the colours soft as a rain-washed meadow.
“Another time,” she says.
~
It’s not long before the bookshop becomes a part of his routine, such as it is. Routine is important in recovery, so he’s told, and he does his best to set and stick to one. He gets up at the same time every day—early, as always, the habits of a lifetime are hard to break—he cooks and eats and exercises, and attends his meetings. And two or three times a week he stops by the bookshop for tea and cake and a new addition to his rapidly growing personal library. He makes a mild joke to Emma about affording all this luxury and she replies with a careful smile.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
And it is. His navy pension barely covers his expenses but although he buys a book each time he finds he’s never short on funds; rather he always seems to be discovering twenty dollar bills in trouser pockets and handfuls of change from things he can’t remember buying.
He adores the books, of course. They fill his lonely nights and give his mind the respite it craves, an alternative to painful memories or sluggish retreat. But they are not what draws him back to the shop, again and again. It’s also not the cake.
It’s the way that Emma smiles at him, the warmth that radiates from her and into him, that seals the fissures in his soul. The conversations he so treasures that begin with books and end in a pause, a we’ll talk more next time, but they never do. There’s always something new to discuss, next time.
He thinks about her often as he goes about his day, when he finds something he thinks she’d enjoy or sees sunlight dappled through the trees the way it is through her hair. He looks forward to the glint in her eye and the twist in her smile when she tells him she’s added a new book to his pile; he forces himself not to rush as he reads. The books will still be there tomorrow, he reminds himself, and the next day and the next, and he is determined to savour them.
Determined, though he knows all too well the fragile nature of this kind of happiness.
~
The greenhouse is lit by moonlight alone, the only light that doesn’t kill the Nocturnam dentifolia with its glow. Emma wakens the plant with a gentle stroke of her finger down its curled-up frond, and smiles as the frond unfurls and wraps itself around her palm in greeting. She begins harvesting tiny beads of venom from the plant’s sharp teeth, ignoring David when he leaps onto the table and sniffs the dentifolia in feline disapproval.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” he says.
“I’ve been harvesting dentifolia venom since I was ten years old—”
“You know that’s not what I mean. I hope you know what you’re doing with him.”
Emma considers dissembling but decides it’s not worth the effort. “I do,” she replies.
“Do you, though?”
“He’s lonely, David. And sad. He needs me.”
“And what about what you need?”
She shakes her head, willing away the thoughts of Killian and his crinkly smile and the pain behind his eyes and the way those eyes light up when they see her.
“I have everything I need.”
“Yeah? Then what about what you want?”
Emma focuses her attention on catching the venom in her vial, made of a hardened smoky quartz that won’t dissolve on contact with it. It’s delicate work, and requires concentration.
David hisses and the tip of his tail flicks. “You take too much on yourself, Emma.”
“I can handle it.”
“I know you can. But you don’t have to do it alone.”
Emma sets the venom down on the table with a sharp thunk. “So what do you think I should do, David? Force him to give up everything he knows—”
“I doubt much force would be required.”
“—drag him into an entirely new world—”
“Not entirely new.”
“—when he’s known more than enough suffering already in his own?”
“You don’t have to do everything alone,” David repeats. “Let him help you.”
“He’s the one who needs help.”
“You’re so damned stubborn, Emma. Don’t forget that I saw the same things you did in that cauldron—”
“Pah.”
“—I saw who he is, and who he could be. To you. All you have to do is let him in.”
“I’m fine as I am.”
David’s tail swishes as it whips across the table and his ears turn back against his head. He catches her gaze and holds it as he reaches out with his paw, a single claw extended, and with slow deliberation tips over the vial. They both watch as venom oozes out of it and through the cracks in the table, dripping down to burn a sizzling hole in the concrete floor.
“I’m going to spend the night at Mary Margaret’s,” he says.
~
As the days become weeks and then ease into months, Killian begins to notice certain things about the shop. They enter his consciousness in a slow drip, never too many at once, never more than he can handle. The shelf by the register lined with candles and powders and tinctures in crystal vials. The arcane symbols carved along the edges of the bookshelves and the ones formed of silver and set with cut glass that dangle in the windows and twist the sunlight into rainbow hues. The odd way that the time stretches, the depth and stillness of the shadows, how the tea is always hot. The glimpses from the corner of his eye, gone the moment he blinks, of Ruby’s smile baring dripping fangs and David’s crystalline eyes in a human face.
Killian is a practical man, well-educated and vastly travelled, and he accepts the existence of things in this world that lie beyond his ken. He’s seen hints of them all his life, faintly on the misty edges of Cornish cliffs in his childhood and more clearly during his years in the navy, around corners he turned down on a whim and on the faces of those people whom most folk barely notice. The bookshop and its patrons are the clearest yet, unlike anything he has encountered before. This doesn’t trouble him in the least though it thoroughly intrigues him, just as everything connected with Emma intrigues him.
The last traces of spring have faded and the air is warm and fragrant, with the gentle weight and drawn-out softness of an early-summer twilight, on the day Killian leaves the bookshop and turns, quite without any intent to do so, around a corner that he’s never noticed before. He finds himself in a narrow alleyway far darker than the street, still and close and vaguely menacing, though he feels certain that it means him no harm whatever it may hold in store for other travellers. He follows it to where it ends in a stone archway and a rusty iron gate which swings open before he can reach out his hand to push it, beckoning him into the hazy gloom beyond.
This is how mortals end up kidnapped, Killian thinks, and yet he barely hesitates before stepping through the arch and through the gloom and into a garden bright with golden sunlight and riotous with colour. Woody vines and trunks of trees twist together to form a wall that marks its boundaries on three sides; those he recognises are apple and hawthorn and cherry and yew. Two greenhouses make up the fourth side, one a fairly typical model in his estimation and the other much the same, except its windows are all stained a smoky black. Together they frame a wild carpet of blooms in hues that range from bright white to deepest indigo, nodding atop stems and stalks in every shade of green.
It appears random, Killian thinks, but there is method in it, a species of order underlying chaos that is so familiar he feels no surprise at all when the greenhouse door opens and Emma emerges.
“Oh!” she cries and stops abruptly, staring at him. “Killian! What—how did you get here?”
“I... don’t know exactly,” he replies. “I’ve never turned down this path before.”
“No,” says Emma, “I don’t suppose you have.”
She’s annoyed, he thinks, though not with him. “Is all this yours?” he asks, indicating the garden with an expansive gesture of his arms. “It’s extraordinary.”
“Yes, it’s mine. It’s where I grow the ingredients for my—” She snaps her mouth shut and looks at him warily.
“For the things you sell in the shop,” he supplies, with an encouraging smile. “The candles and balms and… the like.”
“Er—yes.”
“You make them all yourself, then.” It’s less a question than a gentle acknowledgement, to let her know that he knows too.
She softens. “Yeah. It’s, um, kind of a family tradition.”
“And a lovely one. May I see it?”
She hesitates. “Do you really want to?”
“Aye, of course I do. I’d love to know more of your heritage.”
The look she gives him is both sweet and sharp, tenderness with an edge that makes his gut clench. She nods.
“Follow me.”
~
It’s those damned eyes, Emma thinks, as she leads him on a tour around the garden, stopping to introduce each plant and explain its properties and uses. They’re so interested, so intent on her and on everything she says, and the sadness ever lurking in their depths breaks her heart.
They’re shining now, though, as he looks around her garden, and when he looks at her she feels lit up from within, warm and glowing in a way she never imagined she could feel without using magic.
This is magic.
Emma ignores the whisper in her ear just as she’s been doing now for months. No cauldron is going to tell her what to do, she thinks obstinately. She’s perfectly capable of managing her own fate. And anyway, cauldrons are designed to observe, not predict. If she wanted to mess around with the Foretelling she’d get herself a damned crystal ball.
“And what’s in the greenhouses?” Killian’s voice snaps her back to herself, and she realises that they’ve made a full circle of the garden.
“Oh. Um. Just more things I use. For, uh, more specific needs.”
“For personalised spells.”
“Well, yes. Things that people request that need to be tailored to them and—wait, what?”
He turns to her with that dimpled smile and so much warmth in his eyes. “Emma,” he says gently. “I’ve been around the world ten times over and seen many things on the way. I know a witch when I meet one.”
“Oh.” She stares at him as he continues to smile. “And that doesn’t, um. Freak you out at all?”
“Of course not.”
He’s so close she can feel the heat of his body and she shivers despite it, and despite the warmth of the evening. He sees of course, just as he sees everything in her, and she hears the catch in his breath, feels the tension straining in his every sinew as he steps closer still. His fingers brush across her cheek and trace the edge of her jaw and she gasps at the sensation, grips tightly to his shirt to keep from falling as he whispers her name across her lips and she rises on her toes to meet his kiss.
~
Killian feels suffused in light, bursts of it behind his eyes and sparks that dance along his skin. He thinks at first that it must come from Emma but no, he realises, it’s within him, pouring out from him and into her.
He catches her startled gasp with his lips and takes the kiss deep, slowly savouring the taste of honey cake and of mint tea—a sweetness and a burn that’s so very her—until the noise she makes at the back of her throat nearly ends him. With a growl he pulls her closer and just for a moment she goes, melting into him and firing his blood, but then she shoves hard against his chest and breaks the kiss and the light is gone.
She stumbles backwards, staring at him with a tangle of emotions in her eyes, apprehension and longing and the heat of both passion and pique. “I felt—” she whispers, raising a trembling hand to touch her lips. “I thought—but you can’t—I—I—”
“Emma,” he says softly, taking a hesitant step towards her, but she holds up her hands and backs away.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “It’s too much. You can’t—we can’t do this. I’m sorry.”
“Emma!” he calls after her as she turns and flees across the garden, heedless of her precious plants, but the name returns to his ears in a hollow echo when she slips through the solid wall of trees and then is gone.
~
He gives her space, and time. She needs both, he knows, and plenty of them. Emma is not a woman who accepts lightly, or deals easily with things outside her control. When the time is right to return to her he’ll feel the pull.
It doesn’t come for nearly a month and when it does he goes without hesitation. His arrival finds the shop empty of customers and eerily silent, a still, expectant silence so deep that the swish of David’s tail along the knotted wood of the windowsill is deafening.
Emma is standing where she was when he first beheld her, beneath a tall window and swathed in moonlight, though the sun is high in the sky. Her hair is loose and wild around her shoulders and she wears a flowing crimson gown. The same gown he saw her in, that first time. The same gown and the same moonlight.
“You see me,” she says.
“Aye. Of course I do.”
“No, but—” she breaks off as her eyes turn to David, now standing in front of the window in soft leathers and silk, very stern and very human. “You see me, I mean.”
Killian nods. “I see you both.”
Emma sighs and the scene around them melts away, gently as chalk in the rain, and the bookstore is as normal. The swish of David’s tail is drowned out by the bustle and hum of customers, and Emma is dressed in jeans and a sage green sweater that brings out her eyes.
“Emma,” he says, stepping closer and taking her hands, the bright magic that flares up at their touch familiar now. “What does this mean?”
“I don’t entirely know,” she admits. “Magic doesn’t always have an explanation. Sometimes it just is.”
“And what magic is this?”
“True love magic,” says David, and Emma flushes.
“True love?” Killian repeats as he twines his fingers in hers. He imagines this should feel like a revelation, but it does not.
“Maybe,” she says, biting her lip. “I mean, it’s possible, or maybe more like potential.”
“Potential true love?”
She nods. “The seeds are there,” she whispers. “We only have to let them grow.”
“Growing seeds is something you do remarkably well, love,” he says with a soft smile. “What will we need to nurture these ones into full flower?”
She huffs a little breath through her own, reluctant smile. “Don’t torture the metaphor,” she retorts, and then her face grows solemn. “It’s not as simple or straightforward as nurturing something until it grows,” she says. “Magic isn’t for everyone. There are dangers—”
“I’ll face them,” he assures her, tightening his hold on her hands. “Whatever may come, I’ll face it with you.”
She shakes her head. “You don’t understand, Killian.”
“Then explain it to me.”
Emma pulls her hands from his and twists them together anxiously as she speaks. “We can’t talk about this here,” she says. “Come with me.”
She leads him back to the corner of the shop where the register sits beneath a tall window and opposite an archway of precisely the same material and shape as the one that brought him to her garden, though this one is fitted with a sturdy wooden door. He’s seen her pass through this door a hundred times, into ‘the back,’ as it is known, with no other name nor explanation ever given. The door swings open as Emma approaches and he follows her through it, David at his heels, and if anyone finds it odd that he’s gone with Emma into a place where no customer before has ever been, they do not show it.
“Ruby,” Emma calls. “Bring tea.”
The room they enter is long and narrow, with the same tall windows that grace the bookshop on either side. Along one windowless wall is a cluttered wooden workbench and the other is lined with shelves that stretch from floor to ceiling, crammed with supplies. There are ceramic bowls of all different sizes, glass vials and stone ones, herb bundles and crystals and lumpy leather bags, and, Killian notes to his amusement, no fewer than three cauldrons, one copper and one iron and one that appears to his untrained eye to be carved from moonstone.
Beneath the nearest window two armchairs sit, deep and inviting ones made of worn brocade. A table like the ones in the cafe nestles between them, and onto this Ruby, appearing quite suddenly through a smaller doorway that opens up from between the shelves, places a teapot and three cups.
She flashes her feral grin at Killian and saunters away. Emma gestures for him to take one of the chairs and he does, watching wordlessly as she settles herself into the other and pours the tea. David leaps onto the arm of her chair and sits like a sentry at her elbow, accepting the cup she balances in front of him with regal grace.
She hands Killian the second cup and takes the third for herself, and the three of them sip in silence for a moment. A dozen questions clamour on the tip of Killian’s tongue, but he holds them in. He waits.
“Magic,” Emma says finally, “is a capricious, tricksy thing. It doesn’t sit comfortably in the world you know.” She sets her cup down on the table and folds her hands together in her lap. “It can exist only at the edges of it, deep within crannies and around corners and on certain people, a part of those things but also outside them.”
“Beyond them,” says David.
“Yes. It extends beyond what most can perceive and into a place that’s much wilder and less ordered. One that’s run on arcane powers and ruled by the people who wield them, and wielding them sometimes requires a darkness and a sacrifice that changes those people, makes them less than human. Dangerous.”
Killian nods. “But such people exist in my world too,” he points out. “The ones who sacrifice their humanity for power. The difference, it seems to me, is only in the nature of the power.”
Emma frowns as she considers this. “I see what you mean,” she says. “But. I’d guess that the people who wield power in your world don’t take any particular interest in you?”
“Decidedly not.” He can’t hold back a bitter laugh. “I’m quite insignificant, really.”
“In your world.”
Killian looks at her sharply. “But not in yours?”
“No.”
“But—how can that be?” He scowls. “How can I be of importance in a place I’ve never been?”
Emma picks up her tea again, and her fingers tremble as she wraps them around the cup. “Killian, why did you come into the shop, the first time?” she asks.
“I wanted a book.”
“Was that all?”
“Aye… although perhaps not.” He frowns, trying to remember. “The shop just—appealed to me, in an odd sort of way.”
“Odd how?”
“Like it was beckoning to me, almost. I’d been down this street dozens of times before, hundreds even, and never noticed it. Then one day I did.”
Her expression doesn’t change, and he realises she was expecting this very answer. “And why did you keep coming back?”
His mouth quirks. “To see you.”
She huffs a short sigh, though her cheeks flush faintly. “And?” she presses.
“And, well, I suppose it kept beckoning.”
“Did you never think to wonder how?” David interjects. “Or why?”
“David!” snaps Emma, but Killian replies calmly.
“No, mate, I confess I didn’t. I’ve learnt not to question any good fortune that happens to come my way. I prefer to simply enjoy it”—he pauses as he thinks of Liam—“for as long as it may last.”
“Are you happy now?” hisses Emma, glaring at David. “Do you have anything more you’d like to contribute?”
David looks away from them and begins to wash his face.
“It’s a reasonable thing to ask, though, love,” says Killian. “Why didn’t I question it? Should I have?”
Emma gives him a searching look, as a sunbeam from the window falls across her face. “Would you have stopped coming here if you had?”
He wishes he could say no, but “I’m not sure,” he answers truthfully. “Perhaps.”
She nods. “That’s why you didn’t question it.”
“But I still don’t understand,” he says, setting down his empty cup. Emma refills it without asking, and without thinking he takes it up again and sips some more. “Why did the shop call to me? Why me?”
“True Love magic is extremely rare,” David says, ignoring the scowl Emma turns on him. “And powerful. It behaves as it must to draw together the people capable of sharing it.”
Something in his voice, a bleak sort of yearning, catches Killian’s attention. “You, and the brunette,” he says. “Mary Margaret, is it?”
David’s tail swishes, and though he doesn’t clench his jaw he gives the impression of it. “Yes,” he replies. “And we have suffered for it. Magic that powerful can do incredible things, so you can imagine there are many people who seek to harness it for themselves.” The light bends and he shifts, from cat to man and back again. “By whatever means necessary.”
“That’s the danger you spoke of,” Killian says, looking at Emma. “You’re worried something similar might befall me.”
She nods. “Or worse.”
“But not necessarily,” says David. “You have to tell him everything, Emma.”
The anxiety is back on Emma’s face, evident in the wrinkling of her brow and the way she bites her lip. She replaces her teacup in its saucer with a clatter and clasps her hands again, digging the nails of one into the flesh of the other.
“Killian,” she says, “I'm so sorry to unearth the painful past with this, but—what do you remember about your mother?”
He blinks in surprise. “Er—not much. She died when I was very young. I remember that she was beautiful. Blue eyes like mine but red hair, a dark auburn red. Her name was Alice. Alice Pendyr, as she was born.”
“Pendyr,” Emma repeats, her expression sharp and sorrowful. “Cornish?”
“Aye. Meaning end of the—”
“—land,” Emma finishes. “Alice of the land’s end.”
“Aye.”
She pauses and the silence builds, settling like snow upon their shoulders. “But,” she says softly, “of what land?”
Killian starts, and stares at her. She meets his eyes calmly, though her hands remain tense and twisted in her lap. He makes a fist of his own.
“How can you know to ask that,” he whispers. “No one outside my family ever learned of it.”
“What land, Killian?” Emma presses, gentle and implacable.
He forces his body to relax, unclenches his fist and lays his hand flat against the arm of his chair. “Nobody knows,” he replies. “She was found in a basket on the edge of a cliff, wrapped in a blanket of a weave and fibre none had seen before, less than one day old. The couple who found her raised her as their child but with her own name, a name for her origins, they said. They were called Chenoweth. I—” he frowns. “I don’t know why no one ever questioned that. The difference in names, I mean, when they always called her their daughter.”
“How did she die?”
“I—” He shakes his head. “I’m not certain. As I said I was very young. One day she was fine and the next—we went for a walk.” He blinks again as the memory, so long forgotten, returns in vivid force and he is there again—there on the wind-whipped precipice, clinging to his mother’s leg as clouds swirled above them and rocks churned the sea into a lather far below their feet. “We walked right to the edge of the cliff and she told me the tale of how my grandparents found her there, on that very spot where we stood. Then she… she stared out at the sea for the longest time, and when she looked at me again her eyes were so sad. She said it was time to go home. I held her hand the whole way back because I didn’t want her to be sad, and she laughed and hugged me, as she always did. But then… the next day she was gone. My father told me she had taken ill in the night and died before sunrise.”
There are tears in Emma’s eyes, and she clears her throat before she asks “Was there a funeral?”
Killian’s frown deepens, and he rubs his temple. “I—I don’t—I don’t remember one.”
Emma smiles, a small smile full of heartrending empathy. “I see.”
“What—what are you saying?” Killian demands. “That my mother didn’t die?”
“She did not,” says Emma gently. “She went home.”
“Home. You think she was from this magical world.”
“Yes I do, and I don’t think that it truly surprises you to hear it,” Emma replies, and he swears the earth tilts as she speaks, telescopes around her until she is all that he can see, her voice the only sound in his ears. “It explains a lot that’s never quite made sense to you, I’d bet, like why you’ve always felt slightly out of place wherever you are and why you spent so long wandering. Why you are able to see more than you should.” Her gaze is intent now, her face and form aglow with the moonlight that empowers her. “Because you do, don’t you Killian?” she says softly. “You’ve always seen things others don’t, seen and accepted them without judgment. You embrace the world in all its strange and wondrous tapestry because deep down you’ve always known that there is more to it than meets the eye. Haven’t you?”
“A-aye.” Killian clears his throat. There’s light behind his eyes and on his skin and in his very bones. “I believe I have.”
“You wandered for years observing that world and seeking your place in it,” Emma continues, “until the time was right and you were called here, to a haven for the lost and the cursed.”
He nods. He can feel her words, and he can feel the truth in them, a truth he’s always felt but never understood. “Why was the time right now though?” he asks, a wealth of pain behind the question. “After so many years, why now?”
“Because now is when you truly needed it.”
“I needed it before—” he chokes, but she shakes her head, tears shimmering again in her eyes.
“Now is when you truly needed it,” she whispers. “And I—I need you.”
She takes his hand, smiling as he catches his breath at the magic that leaps between them. “It won’t always be like this,” she says. “If you come to me, eventually our magic will settle. Right now it’s really new and you just—excite it.”
He smiles at this, and at the flutter in his chest. “I excite your magic?”
“Mmmm,” she replies with a wry smirk. “Among other things.”
David swishes his tail and gives a hacking cough.
“Hairball?” queries Emma sweetly.
“But love.” Killian turns his hand in hers so that their fingers entwine, shivering at the power that crackles between their palms. “What do you mean if I come to you? And why do you say our magic?”
“You don’t think that all this only comes from me?” Emma gestures at him, at the silvery light from his hand that mingles with the golden glow of hers. “You have magic too. It’s what had me so scared that day in the garden. I had been shown your origins and the True Love potential, but not the magic. There’s so much in you, Killian. If you come to my world, you’ll learn just how much.”
“Come to your world?” He stares at her in awe. “I can do that?”
“If you wish.” She smiles at his expression, then her own turns solemn. “But it’s a one-way journey. Once you go, you can never come back. Not fully.”
“I’ll go.”
She shakes her head. “This is a big decision. You need to think about it.”
“I don’t believe I do.” Killian feels as he is sure a ship must, when docking at last in her native harbour after a journey long and fraught and rife with loss. It’s a homecoming he has never known, not truly. Not until now.
“The world I’m in holds nothing for me now,” he says. “Everything I once had is gone—my family, my career, even my bloody hand. I was barely living anymore... until I met you.” He draws their clasped hands to his lips and presses a kiss to the back of hers, and their magic sings. “If we have True Love, or the potential for it,” he continues, “if there’s a chance I might see my mother again—well, I don’t have to think about either of those. I want them both, and if there is danger to be faced in the pursuit of them, I’ll face it. I’ll go.”
The light of Emma’s smile holds no surprise for him this time nor does the joyous dance of their magic through the air, though David’s approving purr does rather take him aback. Emma stands and he follows, their hands still joined, by touch and by magic and by choice.
“Come, then,” she says.
As she speaks the shimmer between their hands brightens to a glow that spreads out from where they stand, silver light entwined with gold and curling open as a spring bud unfolds, until it reaches the arched doorway that leads to the shop. The light bursts—blinding for a moment—then it fades into a gentle gleam and the door swings open.
Emma’s hand tightens in his, and they step through the doorway together.