Chapter 2: Rage Against the Espresso Machine

Sebastian POV.

“Silas, why the f*ck would you give KingsCharm to Helena?”

My uncle levels a glare at me. I inherited the same blue eyes, the same smirking disdain, and the same last name as he did. King. The difference is that I alone inherited KingsGuard and its legacy when my father died last year.

I sit behind the desk. I have the final say. I have both ultimate power and, more importantly, responsibility.

Silas sits on the other side. He advises. He gets to take long weekends with his witch girlfriend, Helena. He doesn’t get to leak our newest R&D product to her and her cobbled together coven.

“Don’t talk to me like that, boy.” His eyes flick up from his glass of whiskey.

There’s a beat…I know he’s daring me to take it a step further: to let loose the temper also inherited by all King men. My father had it. My grandfather and great-grandfather too. My mother had called it a curse.

“Every time one of them was on the cusp of doing something truly great, it’d appear and ruin everything,” she’d told me once.

My father claimed it began when my great-grandfather refused to leave his wife for his witch mistress. That was back in the early days when the existence of witches was just being exposed to the world. A woman scorned, the witch allegedly cursed all King men to destroy their own legacies.

“That is why their power must be checked,” my father would say. “It’s why your great-grandfather started KingsGuard. To give humans power to protect our families.”

Which circles back to my choice to break my stare with Silas.

I’m not going to stoop to a pissing contest. I don’t believe King men are cursed, and I don’t believe in blaming a woman - witch or human - for whatever self-destructive choices King men have made over the generations.

Nor do I believe humans are powerless against witches.

What happened on Saturday at Canaries is proof of that.

“Silas, KingsCharm is for witches,” I say, “Not humans to out women serving coffee.”

That’s what happened at Canaries.

Turns out the three women who ran the charming coffee shop are witches. Who knew? Who cared? Well, they did because the man had outed them, customers picked up and left, and I watched the color drain from their faces.

One had started to cry. A second raised a finger at the man on the chair, chanting under her breath, but all she managed to do was hover a tower of paper coffee cups off the counter over his shoulder. Then her magic had sparked and the tower of cups caught fire.

The man and his friends chortled, and it felt like a scene from a bad Lifetime movie: flames, trembling witches, and a**hole men thinking they’re heroes.

I’d gotten two steps in their direction before bistro tables scratched across the tile to hold me back. I looked over my shoulder and that is when I saw her.

Beatrice, the most adorable witch I’d ever seen, advanced on the men with eyes black as night.

The lights in the coffee shop winked off. Windows filmed over in a black shadow that blocked out the blue Saturday sunlight. A wind from nowhere picked up. Napkins whirled in circles that seemed to dance as if what was happening were a party. Canaries hummed with power. I had stood slack-jawed at this glorious creature closing in on those a**holes.

The man on the chair trembled as he climbed down.

“Huntress, I located these b*tches for you. To aid you.”

A Huntress is a witch sent to drag runaway witches back to their covens. This man saw the power Beatrice wielded and assumed she was an ally.

He was wrong.

Beatrice smiled, “I do not need your help.”

She raised an open palm and all three men lifted into the air as if they were marionettes and she was the master. Energy slithered along the floor like a snake. It was as black as her eyes, and as I watched it curl around her ankles like a pet, a faraway, rational part of my brain reminded me I should be scared.

But I hadn’t been. I knew she wasn’t a Huntress sent to nullify these three women. I knew she wouldn’t hurt them or me.

It’d been the conversation between her and one of the Canaries witches about the locket that had first piqued my interest. Oh, I’d noticed her when I first walked into Canaries, but that’s because I recognized her.

She works for me. Not directly. She is somewhere in the IT department. I didn’t know her name. Her penchant for brightly colored dresses stands out whenever I address that department. Her intelligent, assessing gaze intrigues me.

So when I saw her at Canaries that morning I smiled. I was interested, but I don’t pursue any woman under my employ. The power imbalance is too great.

Then I noticed the locket around her neck. I recognized the design from the KingsGuard archives. It’s one of the original designs my great-grandfather created himself.

Only a handful was ever made and decades ago my father had bought all but one back. How had the single missing version come to hang around her neck?

My initial attraction shifted to something more interesting. Curiosity. So I eavesdropped, and I didn’t feel guilty for even a moment. Paying attention to her felt like releasing something I’d left caged too long.

Then her coffee bubbled and the pages of her notebook flipped on their own. Her laptop scuttled toward the edge of the table as if it had feet. And my curiosity grew roots.

She was a witch.

A witch working at KingsGuard.

When her phone flew across the floor to land at my feet I took my chance. I knew from her skirting eyes that she wasn’t doing it on purpose. I could feel her fear of being discovered, and I wanted to know her whole story.

I wanted…something I couldn’t quite name.

So I introduced myself as Bash, which is what my sister Gigi actually does call me. I hadn’t lied about that part.

I’d waited for her to recognize me. It didn’t feel egotistical. By my memory, we’d been in the same conference room at least three times and twice in the same very crowded elevator. And, technically, I was her billionaire boss, at least 14 times removed once the layers of departments and managers were taken into account.

But she hadn’t figured out who I truly was to her. That was evident in her slow, dismal response to my flirtation.

But when I dared her, silently, to take a chance and let the stranger in the coffee shop buy her a drink…she’d come alive. Her color heightened and she smiled true, and for whatever reason, the fact that she responded to me. Bash, and not me, Sebastian King, even in the most basic way — an invitation to coffee — flipped my stomach.

It still does now sitting across from my uncle. The memory of her grin right before everything went to sh*it feels like a spell cast over me. I haven’t experienced much magic firsthand in my life, but whatever power Beatrice Hathaway has feels far from ordinary.

“Marketing says the witches won’t trust anything KingsGuard tries to sell them,” Silas states.

“Marketing needs to do their job. Figure out how to sell KingsCharm to witches. We made it for them.”

Silas threw up his hands, “They’re asking the same question I’ve had for months. The same one the board has. Why? Why after three generations of protecting humans from witches are we suddenly trying to protect witches?”

I lean forward on my desk. My uncle and I don’t see eye to eye on much, but I can’t deny his question made sense. But also did my answer. An answer I’ve been repeating for months.

“My parents died because an unknown group of witches lost control of their power last year.”

“The Yuletide Massacre is the witches’ problem,” Silas snaps, “That’s been made very clear by the courts.”

I bow my head, “Yes, it makes a great headline: the covens have a year to produce the witches responsible or face deportation.”

Silas sighs, “I know it seems harsh, but public safety has to be the priority.”

I think of Helena, Silas’ girlfriend and ad hoc leader of the B*itches Coven. She isn’t my favorite person, but her citizenship and that of every witch, excommunicated or not, would be threatened if someone didn’t pay for the Yuletide Massacre.

“KingsCharm is about the safety of witches.” I say quietly, “Including Helena. It’s how Gigi and I have chosen to honor our parents’ memory.”

Magic is emotion made tangible through action. That’s the basic science every human child learns in school. KingsGuard’s best scientists in R&D have explained the science in detail to me a dozen times. It’s quantum physics and non locality and the observer effect. All of it feels like water running through my fingers.

But the bottom line is clear: for some witches, too much practice of magic unravels their emotions. It makes them mentally unstable and unsafe both to themselves and to others. The who of the Yuletide Massacre may be unknown, but the why is clear.

KingsCharm is a bio-sensitive tattoo ink that sits on the sub dermal layer of the skin where the endocrine system regulates hormones. Tattooed onto a witch it gives her unprecedented control over her emotions and in extension her magic. It’s how Gigi and I ensure nothing like the Yuletide Massacre happens ever again.

Silas knows all of this. The board does too. What is unknown is how to convince witches to trust KingsGuard. That’s why what happened at Canaries is so damning.

Helena and her B witches tattooed those men in the coffee shop with KingsCharm. On humans, the effects are the opposite: emotions are heightened rather than quelled, and the human awareness of magic increases. That is how these men were able to single out the Canaries witches.

After Beatrice lifted them into the air like puppets the thread holding their clothes together went black like the energy snaking around her. It fell away and the gleam of the KingsCharm ink shone like oil on water. The chest pieces swirled across their skin until the whorls formed a single word in a font too distinct not to recognize: B*tches.

They’d been tattooed in the same branding the B*tches coven uses to market their services. Immediately, I knew what had happened. Silas and Helena.

Hell, I want to tip my hat at how Helena’s free advertising, but now, sitting across from my uncle, the memories of Canaries press on me like a stamp. I feel the weight of my inheritance. It’s more than a company. It’s to protect those who cannot protect themselves.

And to do what needs doing I know I will need help. I will need her.