Chapter 1
June 1st, 1894
On occasion, an accusation of witchcraft has the power to set one on a wonderful, dangerous path. There is never any occasion, however, in which such an accusation lends itself to a positive first impression.
Case in point: my own damn wedding night.
Hostilities began when I dropped my new wife’s hand like it was an eye of newt.
“I beg your pardon?” I hissed down at her with narrowed eyes and false offense.
“You’re a witch,” she said it with even more conviction the second time around.
“Witches are women.”
It was an ignorant and dismissive statement, but I couldn’t help myself. The pulse in my jugular pounded out a rhythm of pure panic. I had been called a witch once before, and I had barely escaped a lifetime sentence to an asylum because of it.
“Not every witch is a woman,” she insisted.
I had no counter-argument to that. As far as the stereotype goes, it would shock no one to know that my mother had been a witch. But it was her father who had been such before her, and now me after them both.
I needed space. I moved away from my newly-wedded wife, until what was supposed to be our marriage bed stood between us. I eyed her from that much safer distance and wondered how on earth to distract her. I bought myself a few seconds of time with a rub of my hand over my ever-present five ’o clock shadow.
Ah, yes. She had admitted in our courting letters to being a Suffragette. Simple enough, then.
“If you don’t want to perform your wifely duties tonight, then just say so.”
As hoped, that did the trick.
“‘Wifely duties’?” her storm-gray eyes flashed. “Sheriff Pellar, I agreed to marry you because you claimed to be a forward-thinking man. Is that another thing you lied about?”
Well, then. Maybe that hadn’t worked half as well as I had hoped. Now I looked like an insufferable ass on top of it all.
“I haven’t lied to you about a damn thing.”
I ignored the irony of the fact that I was presently engaged in the very thing she accused me of doing in my letters. To the Cunning Folk from whom I was descended, “witch” applied to any practitioner of low magic, regardless of sex or gender.
“Omission is a lie!” she stomped her foot.
Despite the severity of the moment, I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. She snorted when she laughed and she stomped her foot when she was mad. I found both quite amusing.
“I can feel the magic in you,” she gestured at me and made a little noise of frustration. “You’re powerful, you know.”
I did know. I pushed aside my feelings on the matter and focused instead on the opening she had unwittingly granted me.
“Would take a witch to know one, don’t you think?” I forced a smirk as I crossed my arms over my broad chest.
Her face paled, which was not the reaction I had expected.
"I am not the witch in this room,” she drew herself up with an indignation that didn’t erase the sudden fear in her eyes.
I cupped my right elbow in my left hand as I again ran my fingers over my mouth. It was a nervous gesture of mine, a subconscious reminder to think before I spoke.
I had felt magic in her, too. In fact, I had intended to call her out on it seconds after our ungloved hands had touched for the first time. But my draw with words had never been as fast as my draw with a revolver, and she had beaten me to it. Given how the conversation had gone so far, I couldn’t call her out on her own secrets without admitting mine.
I sighed in defeat.
“Miss Vandiveer,” I began, then reminded myself that her last name was now my own.
As a result, I could call her by her first name without it being improper.
“Nora,” I amended. “Let us just say for argument’s sake, and only for argument’s sake, that I am a witch. What possible relevance would that have on the present?” I gestured toward the bed between us.
Her cheeks turned pink when she glanced down at the quilted coverlet. But when she lifted those captivating eyes of hers again, there was the sort of storm brewing in them that would have given even a hardened sailor pause.
“A witch has the power to take away all agency I might have in the matter.”
My jaw dropped.
Witch or not, I was quite certain that I could exist for all eternity and no such thought would ever cross my mind. I sputtered for a moment, and then my professional instincts kicked in. I fell silent and waited for her to look me fully in the eyes.
“Is that why you asked about marriage so abruptly? You needed to get away from someone?”
I had suspected as such at the time, but hadn’t dwelt on the possibilities. I had my own grim reasons for coming out West. I wasn’t about to judge Nora for hers.
“Yes,” she looked away from me and didn’t elaborate.
I considered where we were and how late it was. I was interested in learning more, but there was little need to pursue the matter tonight.
“No wonder you’re scared,” I said instead.
“I never said I was scared.”
She crossed her arms over her chest, and didn’t look up. I figured she was smart enough to know that her own body language contradicted her bravado, so I didn’t point it out.
“Look, sweetheart. I’m an experienced man, and even I’m nervous,” my low huff of a laugh was genuine. “We don’t have to be in any rush to start relations. I was about to tell you so, too, before you started talking about witches.”
I was a bit surprised by what she decided to take away from that. She gave me a coy look through her lashes, her entire face now stained pink.
“An ‘experienced man’, you say?”
“I’ve been married before, as you know,” I reminded her with a wry half-smile.
Nora closed her eyes with a grimace. Her face was so expressive, that I could watch her mentally kick herself for forgetting that I was widowed.
“I am so sorry, Sheriff -”
I cut her off, uncomfortable myself with any continued reference to the one woman I had ever loved.
“Cade, please,” I insisted.
Nora opened her eyes and looked over at me. The storm in her eyes had passed and the air between us felt lighter. Hopefully, all business about witches had passed as well.
“Cade,” she repeated with a hesitant smile.
“There’s no need to stand on formality anymore,” I assured her.
The room fell silent. I couldn’t think of how to steer the conversation toward the bed I desperately wanted to fall into. The day had been long and I was exhausted. To my surprise and relief, Nora followed my train of thought.
“Is there any need to stand at all anymore?”
After six months of correspondence, I knew very little about Nora to form any strong opinions about her. Nevertheless, her wit had shone through in her letters, and that had endeared her to me before we had even met. I now offered her a full, genuine smile, delighted yet again by the way she used words.
“I don’t believe so. Are you tired?”
“Extremely,” her tone was just shy of desperate.
I chuckled, not unkindly. She sat down on the bed, but the second I did the same, she shot back up.
“We’re going to sleep in the same bed?”
“Seein’ as it’s the only one I have, yes,” my own tone was dry. “We can sleep together without sleeping with each other, you know.”
The purse of her bow-shaped lips told me that she thought otherwise.
“How do you propose that we sleep together, then?”
She delivered her question like a challenge. It was almost as if she knew that I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I usually had two or three backup plans in any given situation, but I hadn’t thought past my own dick in this instance. I prayed to God that she didn’t force me to admit that out loud.
“Well,” I drawled in a way I knew came off as flirtatious.
In reality, I was just drawing out the word to buy myself some time. I knew she was asking about our states of dress beneath the covers. I didn’t have a solution for that problem, so I just went with the most obvious, and uncomfortable, answer.
“I don’t see any reason why we have to sleep any differently than we’re used to.”
Nora gave me the sort of look I had come to associate with outlaws when they’re dead to rights.
“And how are you accustomed to sleeping, Sheriff?”
She was bound and determined to hide behind that damn title. It irritated me, so I lied again just to get a rise out of her.
“Exactly how God made me.”
“Naked?” Nora blurted out, her eyes wide with disbelief.
I lifted a reddish-blond eyebrow in response to her blunt use of such a crass word. Her face turned beet-red. For a moment, she seemed torn between embarrassment and indignation.
Indignation won out.
“I am not sleeping with you naked!”
"You don’t have to be naked.”
“You know exactly what I mean, Sheriff -”
“Cade.”
“God in Heaven!” her voice rose sharp in exasperation. “Would you at least have the decency to wear a pair of drawers?”
In truth, that’s what I usually wore to bed. But now I was committed, whether either of us wanted me to be or not.
“Nope.”
I tossed my socks to the floor next to me and stood up to glower yet again at my reluctant bride. She was beautiful, funny, and intelligent. And yes, so help me, I wanted her. We’d met each other in person only twelve hours earlier, yet there was something about her that drew me to her. The feel of her bare hand in mine had been exquisite, and had brought something to life in me that I had thought buried.
But of course, she was as stubborn as a damn burro.
It became a game of “who’ll blink first” as I yanked off my blue-and-white striped satin vest, and then my black cravat. Nora’s eyes grew wide and her complexion began to resemble a tomato as I opened my white dress shirt right there in front of her.
“This is absolutely uncalled for, Sheriff.”
I’d had it with the titles. I threw my shirt on the nearby chair and stalked around the corner of the bed. Once I got to her, I put my hands on her shoulders. She was so shocked by my behavior that she didn’t resist when I spun her around.
“What is absolutely uncalled for, Enora,” I enunciated her full first name with painful precision as my blunt fingers unbuttoned the back of her cream-and-yellow dress. “Is the fact that you can’t seem to accept the inevitable realities of marriage.”
“I did not give you permission to undo my dress,” her voice shook.
I glared over her head at the mirror across from us. Her face hadn’t lost any of its color, so she wasn’t scared. She also wasn’t putting up a fight, except with her words. She stared back at me in the reflective glass and even in the dim light of a lone oil lamp, I could tell that her pupils were wide.
I had no desire to push things along tonight. I respected what she had admitted earlier, and while I could be a lot of things, a rapist would never be one of them. But, given her body language in the current moment, Mrs. Nora Pellar only thought she wanted to resist our consummation*.
“You can’t unbutton this damn thing without help, and you can’t tell me you’d sleep in it.”
I popped the last button free, then reached up and swept my palms beneath the shoulders of her dress. We both gasped the second my calloused fingers brushed her smooth skin.
“You can’t tell me that you don’t feel that,” Nora whispered.
She clutched the front of her dress with both arms crossed, and stared back at me in the mirror. I bit my lip hard to keep my composure. The feel of her was like an electrical current straight to my groin, true, but it was more than that.
I thought I had left my magic behind in Pennsylvania a decade ago. But my new wife was right. I couldn’t look her in the eye and deny that when our bare skin touched, I felt my magic yawn and waken.
So I didn’t look her in the eye.
Instead, I said nothing and unlaced her corset. By the time I finished and looked back up at the mirror, most of the color had drained from her face. She was afraid of me, and that was why I was loath to admit the truth of who I was.
Fear had killed an old man and driven a young boy away from his home. My mother had once explained to me the difference between malevolent and benevolent witches. But that difference hadn’t mattered to my father, who had forbidden magic in his American home. That difference also hadn’t mattered to the neighbors who had shouted for me to hang.
Nothing good came from the label of “witch”. The last thing I wanted was to acknowledge my messy, complicated birthright.
But, I also didn’t want my marriage to fall apart from a lack of trust. I left Nora to finish undressing, and went back to my side of the bed. I lay down on my back, folded my arms beneath my head, and turned my eyes up toward the ceiling. I kept my gaze on the rafters even when the bed beside me dipped, and I moved only after she stopped fussing with the covers.
I reached over to the dresser beside the bed and turned down the lamp wick until its flame vanished. Then I made my confession to the dark.
“You’re right, Nora. I’m a witch.”
I turned to her and prayed that she would respond to the earnestness in my voice.
“But I don’t practice it. I haven’t practiced it in years.”
Her only answer was a damning silence.
Believe me when I say that I have never spent a more uncomfortable night in my own bed.
