Chapter 2

“Son of a bitch!” Orion Murdoch yelled as he pulled the hard hat off his head and threw it against the trailer wall. Dropping his hands to his hips, he sucked in an angry breath and watched the plastic helmet rock slower and slower before stopping against the leg of his desk. A large crack ran from the back, up through the middle.

The third he’d broken this week.

He rubbed his fingers over the moonstone set in the leather cuff on his wrist as the stone heated against his skin and glowed—the energy seeping into his pores, working to calm him.

The whole damn thing made no sense. He was a bloody warlock, for fuck’s sake. He’d worked spell after spell to protect Murdoch Construction and its employees. He’d tried to never weave spells for unfair gain, and the minute guilt tried to worm its way in he reminded himself his workers were like family to him—and most were supporting families of their own, which he respected. As such, he did everything in his power, including using magic, to make sure each and every one of them returned home night after night.

Murdoch Construction wasn’t without its issues. Deliveries sometimes arrived late. There had been times when the wrong materials had been dropped off at the wrong sites. Payroll had experienced glitches. All little things that could be rectified easily and didn’t involve injury or death.

He never wove spells to protect against those annoyances, nor would he abuse his power that way.

But this latest situation had him at a loss. Ever since he’d bought Silver Meadow from Althea Westing’s estate, he’d struggled to break ground. Nothing penetrated the earth because everything broke the moment they aimed it at the dirt. The shovel met resistance as if it hit rock. The backhoe’s bucket seized. The drill bit snapped a second into spinning into the soil.

The one time the earth gave way as he expected had been when Orion had sifted his hand through the rich dirt at the tree’s edge. It gave way under his fingers, the damp soil wedging beneath his nails. In his frustration, he resorted to detonating a small explosive in the impression left by his hand to see what would happen.

He’d made sure everyone was off the site. He’d woven a protection spell for the surrounding area and then stepped outside the perimeter to light the fuse.

It went off with a thunderous boom, making the ground shake.

When he checked out the damage…nothing. The explosion hadn’t even marred the tracks of his fingertips in the soil.

That was the confirmation he needed to know something else was at work here, and it was time to find out what.

This land had pulled at him for two decades. There was magic there. The kind that illuminated the world. In this case, a power most would want to harness. A desire he’d felt within himself that he had been afraid to examine too closely.

The part of him that cherished that land as a place of wonder outweighed the dark urges buried deep within him to draw on that power, control it, and use it for his selfish purposes.

The life of a warlock, especially one in the Murdoch family, was a delicate balance of living firmly in the light and resisting the dark pull toward evil and mayhem that brewed within each of them. Well, most of them. There were exceptions. Like his father.

Generations of Murdochs had lived honorable lives to make up for the ancestor they shared. Unfortunately, no matter how much he dedicated himself, the temptation never quite went away. It danced just out of reach, waiting to take advantage of weakness.

At this moment, with his frustration reaching its peak, he understood the temptation to sway. He felt it calling deep within him now, like a lover assuaging him with all the things he wanted to hear.

“You can have everything you desire if you let yourself go, shed the confines, be who you’re meant to be,” it whispered from somewhere in the depths of his mind.

He never knew what it meant. Who the fuck was he meant to be?

Thirty years old and he hadn’t the first clue what fate was telling him. He itched with impatience, his shoulders rigid with tension.

This land was his. He had every intention of spending his life in the home he built there, if he could just figure out how to do it.

Something had to have a grip on the land. That pull he felt? He had always believed it to be a positive force, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he had been looking at this all wrong from the beginning.

Maybe something sinister disguised itself as innocence and light.

But why?

And what did it want from him in order to break ground?

“Boss?” Finn Tretter, his best foreman, called from just inside the door. Spotting Orion, he removed his hard hat and clutched it in his hands as he shuffled from foot to foot.

“What is it, Finn?” He shook his head and sighed at his abrupt tone. “Sorry. I’m frustrated and it’s not your fault.”

“I understand, Boss, and take no offense. I’d be spitting mad if I were you.” He scratched the back of his head and cringed.

Orion’s stomach sank. “What now?”

“Well, uh, I hate to have to tell ya, but the transmission is on its way out on the work truck you have me using,” Finn said.

“What? It only has fifty thousand miles on it. Are you sure?” A throbbing started in the base of his skull. He closed his eyes and focused his energy on the spot until it faded away. When he opened his eyes again, Finn watched him with wariness in his own clear blue ones.

And an understanding.

“I’m sure, Boss. I can take care of it, but since it’s still so new I figured I better check with you to see if you want it to go back to the dealership, or if you had a shop you like to use. I didn’t figure you wanted Stan to work on it, with everything else around here turning to crap. Most of our other repairs haven’t held, so…” His words drifted off with a shrug.

“I’ll call the dealership. Then, when shit goes wrong, for once I’ll have someone concrete to blame,” Orion muttered.

Finn swiped took a swipe at his brow with the cuff of his flannel shirt. “About that, Boss, I was wondering, uh, couldn’t you just…” His voice trailed off and he waved his hands in the air in a swirling motion.

For the first time that day a smile tugged at Orion’s mouth. “I’m not sure what,” Orion mimicked the motion, “that is.”

Finn shuffled his feet, looking about as comfortable as a preacher after wandering into a biker bar. “Can’t you do some of that witchy stuff, you know, to protect the equipment and to break that ground out there?” he asked with a nod of his head in the direction of the lot.

Orion dropped into the chair behind his desk and pinched the bridge of his nose. “So, you know what I am?”

Finn’s eyebrows shot up. “Doesn’t everybody?”

Orion rubbed the scruff on his jaw. “Until now I thought I had done a good job hiding it.”

“Well, to be honest, it’s kind of known everywhere in the company. No one really talks about it anymore, because it’s kind of personal and all, but we know. We trust you, so we respect your privacy in the matter.”

And Orion appreciated it. He didn’t advertise what he was, he didn’t want to talk about it, it just was. He knew for a fact he had three shifters on his crew, but he never said a word about knowing, and just went about his business. As long as they did their work, they always had a job with him.

Since Finn seemed to be so free with the information at the moment, Orion decided to see how much more he could get out of him.

“So if the whole crew knows, what are they saying about our not being able to break ground?” Not that he assumed his crew was talking shit behind his back, but he had to wonder if this was shaking their confidence in him. Unless they actually believed that after not having any equipment issues, they were now having all the equipment issues, both manual and motorized, in one shot.

Yeah, he wouldn’t buy that bullshit either.

“Other than doing whatever it is you do to make stuff happen? They think you should research the property more, find out what might have gone on here,” Finn answered.

“Well, that right there is the problem. I’m not super tied in to life as a warlock. I practice it when I absolutely have to, I have family notes that I’ve never read. I have a Book of Shadows, diaries full of legends, all kinds of stuff, but I’ve never opened a one. I use the few things I learned as a child from my parents and that’s it,” Orion said.

“You mind if I ask why?” Finn said as he propped himself against the wood-paneled wall.

 “I’ve been too busy building this business. Immersing myself in magic takes training. As much as it does to build a viable company. There wasn’t time for both.”

Finn nodded and dropped his hard hat back on his head. “I can understand that. Well, I don’t want to wear out my welcome and ought to be getting back to work. Let me know where you want me to drop off the truck and I’ll have one of the guys follow me over.”

“Thanks, Finn. I appreciate it,” Orion said, pushing out of his chair, circling the desk, and reaching out his hand.

Finn took it and smiled. “All in a day’s work, Boss.”

Orion watched him make his way back to the truck and pull a few things out if it. His gaze drifted to the break in the trees just past the equipment and to the emerald green field just beyond it.

The sun danced over the moist ground, making the groundcover shimmer as if fairies had showered it with glitter-infused pixie dust.

This was his diamond in the rough, always just out of reach. He didn’t want to polish it and decorate it with a cookie-cutter house that could be found on every cul-de-sac in suburban America.

He wanted to ensure that didn’t happen by owning it for himself and putting the right kind of structure on it, designed by someone who recognized the magic.

He’d designed the perfect home for this land. A home that left everything intact, other than the ground the house would sit on, just in front of that magnificent tree where it could hang over the structure like a protective, gnarled hand standing vigilant over the home and souls within the walls. The back deck he’d designed to surround the base ensured the tree would remain an integral part of the home for years to come.

His thoughts wandered back to Finn’s question about why he didn’t do more.

The real answer? Because becoming more of a Murdoch left him with an acidic burning in his gut. He’d tried to talk to his father about what he sensed, but his father, one of the kindest, most jovial people he had ever met, had never given any indication that darkness spoke to him. Orion feared their differences and what those differences meant.

Something in his history, in his DNA, tempted him every day. And if he read those letters, studied those spells, and immersed himself in his family history, he had no idea what he would find. But deep inside a feeling of dread loomed over him, leading him to believe he’d unearth something he could never bury again and it might well suck him in and turn him into someone he no longer recognized.

But at this point, he didn’t have much of a choice. Something niggled at him. Something that told him whatever had happened on that land, everything that would happen in the future, had everything to do with him and his place within his family.

The idea of the dark seducing him away from the light cut him to the quick. He prided himself on his physical strength, and his strength of character.

But the dark? While it promised more strength, more power, and everything he wanted, he knew there had to be a price to get it. And in paying that price, he’d be weak.

Not on his watch. If the other Murdochs wanted to swim in that shit so be it, but not him.

Never him.