The Ex Hex (Ex Hex #1)(6)

He waved one elegant, long-fingered hand. “You are dismissed.”

“I fucking am not,” Rhys countered, and Simon straightened up. Rhys was over six feet, but his father, like Wells, had him beat by an inch or two, something Rhys felt profoundly in this moment. Still, he held his ground.

“Da,” he said, reverting to the name he hadn’t used since he was a child. “You know their whole ‘Founder’s Day’s’ thing has nothing to do with us now, right? It’s basically a Halloween party. They sell pumpkins, for Christ’s sake, Da. Little painted ones. I think there are stuffed bats involved. It’s nothing that requires our presence.”

“And yet our presence will be felt because you will be there,” his father said. “Every twenty-five years, a Penhallow must return to strengthen the ley lines, and this year, that Penhallow shall be you.”

Bollocks.

He’d forgotten about the ley lines.

A hundred years ago, his ancestor, Gryffud Penhallow, had founded the town of Glyn Bedd in the mountains of North Georgia in a spot where the veil was weak and magic was strong. Naturally, the town had called to witches over the years, and the college there, named after the Penhallow family home, taught both regular classes to humans and the arcane arts to witches.

Not that the humans who attended the college knew that. They just assumed the Historical Folklore and Practice major was exceedingly hard to get into and also accepted a fuckton of transfer students.

Rhys had been one of those transfer students nine years ago, just for summer classes, and he had several reasons—well, one very big one—not to want to go back.

“How do you know that, by the way?” his father asked now, narrowing his eyes slightly. “About Founder’s Day. You didn’t stay long enough to witness it the last time you were there.”

Because I occasionally have one whisky too many and see what The One Who Got Away is up to and she still lives there which is why I definitely don’t want to go back was the truth, but, Rhys suspected, not the answer to give here.

“That town is our family legacy, Da,” he said instead. “I’ve kept up with what’s going on there.”

Rhys was certain the look on his father’s face wasn’t pride because he was equally certain that Simon taking pride in anything Rhys said or did would cause a rip in the fabric of space and time, but at the very least, his father didn’t look actively irritated with him, and that was something.

And he hated that that still mattered to him. The last time he’d tried to win his father’s approval, it had ended up costing him Vivienne.

All right, so part of that had been his own utter idiocy in not bothering to mention that he’d agreed to let his father find him the perfect witch bride, but all of it had felt so far away, and Vivienne had been right there, real and immediate, not some abstract concept of a woman, and it had been so easy to put off telling her.

Until it wasn’t and she had, quite rightly, called him every name in the book, including some he’d never heard of, and stormed out.

And now his father was asking him to go back.

“Do this for your family. Do this for me,” Simon said, coming over to lay his hands on Rhys’s shoulders. “Go to Glynn Bedd.”

He was nearly thirty years old. He ran a successful business that he’d started all on his own, lived a life he loved, was a goddamn adult and did not need his father’s approval.

And still Rhys heard himself say, “Fine. I’ll go.”



“I told you not to go to a Solstice Revel, I told you they were nothing but trouble.”

Head still on the bar, Rhys lifted a hand to give his brother a double-fingered salute.

He heard Llewellyn sniff. “Well, I did.”

“Yes, and I ignored your brotherly advice to my peril, thank you, Wells, very helpful.”

He’d made his way back to the pub after his chat with Simon, and this time, he’d actually managed to have that pint.

Which was probably the only reason he’d confessed all to Wells. Not just that Da was sending him to Graves Glen, but about that summer nine years ago.

About Vivienne and all the ways he’d mucked it right up.

Rhys lifted his head to see that Llewellyn had moved over to the taps, pouring another pint that Rhys very much hoped was for him. This was clearly a Two Pint Conversation.

“Did you love her?” Wells asked.

Rhys fought very hard not to squirm on the barstool. His family didn’t usually go in for this sort of thing, talking about feelings and such. Wells didn’t even have feelings, as far as Rhys could tell, and any emotions Bowen might have were reserved for whatever it was he was doing out there in the mountains.

“I was twenty,” he said at last, draining the rest of his lager. “And it was summer, and she was beautiful.”

So beautiful. And so bloody sweet. He’d felt like someone had hit him solidly in the chest when he’d seen her there at the Solstice Revel, standing under a violet sky, a flower crown crooked on her head. She’d smiled at him, and it had been . . .

Instant. Irrevocable.

A fucking disaster.

“I . . . felt . . . ,” he said now, remembering, “as though I might . . . have loving feelings.”

St. Bugi’s balls, that had been hard. How did people just go about talking like this all the time?