The Ex Hex (Ex Hex #1)(62)

Oh Christ, he sounded like Wells. What a nightmare.

Clearing her throat, Vivienne tucked one leg underneath her and looked across the table at Simon. “We’ve been doing all we can to get the curse reversed, Mr. Penhallow. All of us, even Gwyn. We’re trying to make this right.”

“And what exactly have you been doing?” Simon asked. His tone was still frosty, but at least he wasn’t shooting daggers from his eyes at Vivienne. Small mercies.

Vivienne pressed her lips together, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear before saying, “Well, we’ve been researching.”

“Books?” Simon asked, his brows drawing together, and Rhys frowned.

“Why are you saying ‘books’ like that? You love books. If you could legally make books your children instead of me and Bowen, I think you would. You’d keep Wells, obviously—”

“Because the answer to this sort of magic cannot be found in books,” Simon replied, shooting Rhys a glare. “Curses are complicated, complex magic. There is no universal solution. The cure is intimately wound up in the curse itself. The motivations behind casting it, the power used. All of which, I should add, I could have told you if you’d alerted me to what was happening here.”

“I tried to, remember?” Rhys said, shoving his hands in his pockets. “And you told me it was ridiculous to even think I’d been cursed.”

“Yes, well.”

Simon looked down, flicked an imaginary piece of lint off his jacket, and Rhys wondered if he was always going to end up wanting to scream in these little tête-à-têtes with his father.

“The point remains, once you knew what was afoot, I should’ve been informed.”

“How did you find out?” Vivienne asked, leaning forward a bit. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

“My brother,” Rhys answered, then looked over at Simon with raised eyebrows. “I assume that’s it, isn’t it? I told Wells, so he told you?”

“Lewellyn was worried about you,” Simon replied, and Rhys groaned, throwing up his hands, promising himself that the next time he saw his big brother, fratricide was on the menu.

“Should’ve called Bowen, I knew it.”

“You were not kidding about the dysfunctional family stuff,” he heard Gwyn mutter to Vivienne, who shushed her.

Rising from her seat, Elaine held her palms out, rings winking in the low light. “Who should’ve told who what when is not the issue right now. This is actually good to know about the curse magic. Gives us something to work off of.”

“Something more than books, yes,” Simon said, then looked up at Rhys, his expression grim. “You’ve been here for nearly two weeks, boy, what else have you been doing besides poring through useless tomes?”

Rhys kept his eyes off Vivienne because he knew if he even glanced her way, his father would understand immediately just what Rhys had been doing.

“We’ve also been working to reverse some of the effects of the curse,” he said evenly, and even Gwyn managed not to snort at that. And it was true, he and Vivienne had spent some time putting out various curse-caused fires.

But he knew it wasn’t enough. He knew they should’ve been taking this more seriously. It was just that it was so easy to get distracted by her, so easy to get caught up in how they were together, and Rhys has missed it too much to let it go now.

Even if he should.

Turning to Elaine, Simon leaned forward, bracing his hands on the table. “Is there any extra power source a member of your family could’ve drawn from? An ancestor buried here, something like that.”

Elaine nodded, pushing her glasses up her nose. “One, yes. An Aelwyd Jones. She came over at the same time as your vaunted Gryffud Penhallow. But as far as we’ve always known, there was nothing special about her. Just another witch who emigrated here, and died of some random sickness, like so many of them did.”

Something flickered in Simon’s face, but it was there and gone too quickly for Rhys to know what it was.

“Very well,” he said.

Simon stood then, pushing back his shoulders. “I need to return home and consult my own sources on this. Rhys, I think you should come with me.”

Startled, Rhys rocked back on his heels. “What?”

“If you’re home, I will be able to keep an eye on anything the curse might do to you. It will benefit my research.”

The words were stony, detached, and he didn’t even look at Rhys as he fished in his pocket for the Traveling Stone, and even though Rhys knew—he knew—what a fucking cold fish his father was, it still hurt, even now. Even after all this time. He wanted Rhys to come home because Rhys would be an intriguing experiment in curse work, not because he was his son; he cared about it because it fueled his interest in the real thing he loved—magic itself.

“I want to see this through here, Da,” he replied, his voice surprisingly even, and when his father only gave a “So be it,” in response, Rhys told himself he’d gotten off lightly. After all, Simon had come all the way from Wales more or less just to chide him, and now he’d done that and was leaving. It had certainly been worse in the past.

But then Simon paused, his fingertips lightly resting on the table. “Hopefully my son’s presence will not distract you ladies from the important business of selling crystals and novelty T-shirts.”