Chapter Five: Butterflies & Warnings
Elle would spend the two weeks following that strange, cold moment at dinner splitting her attention so evenly between falling for Jasper Reed and quietly panicking about whatever her father wasn't telling her that she genuinely wasn't sure, by the end of it, which one had left her more breathless — though she suspected, if she was being honest with herself, that the two feelings had never actually been as separate as she wanted them to be.
That was a Thursday evening. First, there was the explanation Vincent finally gave.
The curse does not simply vanish, he had told her that night, after Jasper's car disappeared around the corner, sitting her down in his study with a seriousness she rarely saw outside of business matters. What you did at four years old, Elowen, was extraordinary beyond anything I have witnessed before or since. But a thing that old, that deeply rooted in this family's history, does not die all at once. It sleeps. Your magic, growing stronger as you do, occasionally disturbs that sleep. The candles tonight were the curse noticing you, the way a sleeping animal might twitch at a sound in another room. It is not yet awake. But it is aware, now, in a way it was not before, and I do not yet fully understand what that means for us.
She had asked, of course, what exactly could wake it fully. Vincent hadn't had a clean answer, only vague, unsettling theories about proximity, about emotion, about the specific, complicated alchemy of a heart opening itself to something it hadn't let in before. Elle had gone to bed that night turning the words over and over, wondering, with a chill that had nothing to do with the old house's drafts, whether falling for Jasper Reed was quietly, invisibly doing exactly what her father feared.
She hadn't stopped anyway. She wasn't sure, if she was honest with herself, that she could have.
The two weeks that followed had passed in a strange, doubled rhythm — ordinary school days stitched through with small, private worries she couldn't share with anyone but the family, and, running alongside that anxiety like a second, brighter current, the increasingly undeniable fact that she was falling for a boy with terrible bird doodles and a startling amount of patience. She'd caught herself, more than once, deliberately not thinking too hard about which feeling was winning, because some frightened, honest part of her already suspected the answer, and wasn't ready yet to examine what that might cost.
Dante had noticed her distraction almost immediately, though he'd been kinder about it than she expected, dropping the teasing entirely once he understood something real was actually worrying her. "You do not have to carry this alone, you know," he'd told her one evening, finding her staring blankly at her homework instead of doing it. "Whatever this is. Whatever is coming. This family has survived considerably worse than a curse's bad mood."
"You don't actually know that it's just a bad mood, though. Nobody knows what it actually is yet."
"No," Dante had admitted. "But I know you, Elowen, and I know this family, and I have never yet seen either of you back down from something simply because it was frightening." It hadn't fixed the fear exactly, but it had helped, a little, the particular comfort of being told plainly that whatever came, she wouldn't be facing it by herself.
"You've got the middle-distance stare again," Jasper observed, two weeks later, both of them sprawled on a blanket in the far corner of the town's small public park, textbooks abandoned in favor of the unseasonably warm afternoon sun. "Want to tell me what's actually going on in there, or are we doing the deflection thing again?"
They'd taken to meeting at the park most afternoons that Marco's schedule allowed, a small, stubbornly claimed pocket of ordinary time carved out of Elle's carefully monitored days, homework spread across a blanket that saw considerably less actual studying than either of them liked to admit to their respective families. It had become, over two weeks, one of Elle's favorite parts of any given day, the particular ease of simply existing beside someone who made no demands beyond enjoying her company.
"We're doing the deflection thing," Elle admitted, and found, to her own surprise, that she meant it more gently than usual, less like a wall and more like an honest request for patience. "It's not that I don't want to tell you things. It's that some things I genuinely can't, yet, and it's starting to feel unfair to you that I keep asking you to just accept that without explanation."
Jasper considered this with the particular, careful attention he brought to most things that actually mattered to him, propping himself up on one elbow to look at her properly. "Can I say something that might sound weird?"
"You say weird things constantly. I've made my peace with it." Elle nudged his shoulder with her own, grateful, not for the first time, that his particular brand of odd seemed to fit so easily alongside her own.
"I don't need the explanation right now." He said it simply, without performance, the late afternoon light catching gold in his dark hair. "I mean, I'm curious, obviously. Your family is clearly involved in something considerably more complicated than real estate, and there was a whole candle situation at dinner that nobody has adequately explained to me. But I like you, Elle. Genuinely, more than I've liked anyone before, and I think I'd rather wait for you to trust me with the real story than push you into telling me something before you're ready."
He's giving me an out, and somehow that makes me want to tell him everything even more. Elle felt something in her chest crack open slightly, warm and terrifying in equal measure, the particular vulnerability of being offered patience she hadn't known how badly she needed.
She thought of every careful lie she'd told him already, small and necessary, and found herself, for the first time, genuinely resenting the distance those lies kept between them rather than simply accepting it as the unavoidable cost of who she was. It wasn't fair to him, this careful, curated version of herself she kept offering instead of the real, complicated whole. She just didn't yet know how to give him more without risking everything her family had spent twelve years protecting.
"That's either the most mature thing a sixteen-year-old has ever said to me, or you've been secretly reading a lot of self-help books."
"Little from column A, little from column B." Jasper grinned, easy and unguarded, and reached over to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear with a gentleness that made Elle's pulse stutter audibly in her own ears. "For the record, whatever the secret is, I'm not planning on going anywhere because of it. I've had two weeks to notice the weird stuff, honestly, the candles and the way Marco appears out of nowhere sometimes and the fact that your house has more security cameras than my entire school. I've decided I don't actually need the details to know I trust you. Just so you know that going in, whenever you're ready."
The space between them had narrowed without either of them quite deciding to close it, warm spring air settling around them, the ordinary sounds of the park — a distant dog barking, kids shrieking with laughter near the swings — fading into something soft and unimportant at the edges of Elle's awareness. She was abruptly, acutely conscious of exactly how close his hand still was to her face, of the particular warm brown of his eyes catching afternoon light, of a low, insistent flutter building somewhere beneath her ribs that had absolutely nothing to do with magic and everything to do with sixteen years of never once having let herself want something this simply, this ordinarily human.
"Elle." Her name in his mouth came out rough, uncertain in a way his usual easy confidence rarely allowed, his eyes flicking briefly down and back up like he was working up courage he genuinely wasn't sure he had.
"Yeah."
"I really want to kiss you right now. I've wanted to for about two weeks, actually, possibly since the vending machine, which I realize is a deeply unromantic place to fall for somebody, but here we are."
Elle laughed, soft and a little breathless, and found she didn't have a single clever, deflecting thing left to say in response, her whole chest gone warm and light in a way that had nothing to do with magic at all. "Then kiss me."
He did, slow and careful, one hand coming up gently to cup her jaw like she was something precious he still couldn't quite believe he was allowed to touch, and for one full, suspended moment the whole complicated weight of curses and candles and careful family secrets simply fell away into something warm and uncomplicated and entirely, wonderfully ordinary — a boy and a girl on a blanket in a park, spring sunlight warm on their skin, nothing more dramatic happening anywhere in the world than two people finally admitting how they felt.
It was, Elle thought distantly, somewhere beneath the warm, dizzying rush of the moment itself, the single most purely happy she had ever let herself feel, sixteen years of careful caution falling away all at once into something that felt, for exactly as long as it lasted, entirely, uncomplicatedly safe.
Then the temperature dropped.
It happened all at once, violent and impossible, the warm spring air turning bitter and sharp in the space of a single heartbeat, every blade of grass within ten feet of their blanket frosting over white and brittle, the nearby dog's distant barking cutting off into a sudden, uneasy whine. Elle broke away from the kiss gasping, her whole body flooding with the same cold, unmistakable prickle she'd felt at dinner two weeks before, except magnified now, urgent, alive in a way it hadn't been before.
"Elle?" Jasper's voice had gone sharp with alarm, staring at the frost spreading rapidly across the grass around them, at his own breath suddenly fogging visibly in air that had been warm and golden thirty seconds earlier, his hand still loosely wrapped around hers from the kiss, unwilling to let go even as the ordinary world around them tilted into something neither of them had words ready for. "What is happening right now?"
Elle scrambled upright, heart hammering, magic surging hot and frightened beneath her skin in a way it never had before, not once in sixteen careful, controlled years, and looked up to find the golden afternoon light around them had dimmed, not into evening exactly, but into something greyer, thinner, wrong, like the sun itself had been momentarily muffled by something that didn't belong anywhere in the ordinary world at all.
Across the park, the few other visitors who'd been enjoying the warm afternoon had gone still too, several of them glancing around in visible confusion at the sudden, inexplicable cold, though none of them, Elle registered distantly, seemed to notice the frost creeping outward from her and Jasper's blanket specifically, radiating in a pattern too deliberate to be ordinary weather. Whatever this was, it was reaching for something. Or someone.
"I don't know," she said, which was true, and also the single most frightening thing she'd said out loud in longer than she could remember. "But I think we need to get out of this park right now."
Jasper didn't argue, didn't waste time demanding further explanation, simply grabbed her hand and their scattered textbooks in one motion and pulled her up off the frosted blanket, both of them moving fast toward the park's distant parking lot while the strange, muffled grey light pressed in closer behind them, patient and unhurried in a way that felt, somehow, far worse than if it had simply chased them outright.