By Flame Read online

  BY FLAME

  The Witches of Portland, Book Two

  T. Thorn Coyle

  Copyright © 2018

  T. Thorn Coyle

  PF Publishing

  Cover Art and Design © 2018

  Lou Harper

  Editing:

  Dayle Dermatis

  ISBN-13: 978-1-946476-06-7

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, events, or locales is coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved.

  By Flame

  He forges justice from the fires of love.

  Tobias's life looks perfect: perfect herbalism business, perfect household, perfect coven. But it isn't. His favorite client has just died, and he fears that he failed her, that he's not the healer he wants to be more than anything in the world.

  Then Aiden, a shy and gorgeous man with a passion for serving the homeless, stumbles into Tobias's arms and asks for help…

  This is a standalone book in a linked series.

  The series can be read in any order.

  1

  Tobias

  Tobias had been fighting his demons since childhood. Fighting the voices that told him he wasn’t good enough, and would never fit in. That he was stupid. Lacked ambition. Cried like a girl. And then, as he grew older, fighting the opinions that he was wasting his life.

  The demons sounded an awful lot like his father.

  Tobias stared out the window, past the shaking needles of the towering pine, at the rain-slicked street and cars shushing by. The morning’s soft rainfall had increased, smacking harder on the window of the office space he rented in a large, three-story Craftsman. He turned from the window.

  The office was small, but suited his needs. Tobias had settled in here six months ago, and it was finally starting to feel like home. He looked around his cozy space, at his favorite chair, dark brown, stuffed just right, and comfortable. A client chair, a wingback in deep blue and chocolate stripes, faced it across a small coffee table. The desk where he wrote up his notes and worked with his herbs was a long slab, a heavy oak door that he’d rescued from a sidewalk and propped up on two old filing cabinets. There were plants and jars of herbs on shelves everywhere, and seedlings under a grow lamp.

  Between the herbs and the incense he burned at the office altar, the room always smelled good. Rosemary and thyme, verbena and datura, and the sharp undercut of vervain and some of the other nightshades, the herbs that grew in darkness under the light of the moon.

  Usually just the scent of herbs made him want to work, but not today. Today, he felt restless, fractious. Brittle. He’d barely gotten through his meditation practice this morning, and had finally given up, deciding to just head to work, hoping that the change of scene would help.

  Always awkward, often angry, Tobias stuffed his emotions down, deep inside himself, and simply got on with his life as best he could. But the emotions didn’t go away. They just remained in hiding. And they still had way more control of Tobias’s life than he wanted, even after an aborted attempt at therapy and after working with his coven for years.

  It was getting ridiculous, and he knew it. Anyone else would say his life was perfect now. Perfect coven. Perfect home, with perfect housemates. Perfectly good herbalism practice.

  “Go back to therapy, Tobias,” Selene, one of his favorite coven mates, would say. “You were barely scratching the surface when you quit with Dr. Greene.”

  Selene was probably right. But still, Tobias didn’t go. He was frightened of what he might find if he poked the shadows too often, or too hard. He had worked with Dr. Greene two years ago, when anger at his father started choking off his ability to tune into the herbs. It had helped. His healing ability had returned, at least.

  But now? The demons seemed to be dancing around him again, and he wasn’t even sure why.

  That’s a lie, he thought.

  He fingered a small sunwheel made of woven straw. A Brigid’s cross. He’d been making them all week, in honor of the Goddess he was dedicated to. It was her time of year.

  The little solar cross was a distraction, but no comfort. Tobias was angry again; it simmered on a low flame, deep inside his stomach. All because his father had called, all politeness and judgment. Battering him down. Subtly sneering at his life. At the fact that he had housemates, instead of a down payment on a Pearl District condo.

  Reminding Tobias that in his father’s mind, he was a failure, and always would be. Oh, his dad said he was okay with Tobias being gay. He was a good liberal, after all. But he’d beaten Tobias for any perceived slight or weakness.

  His father insisted on using his belt on Tobias’s bare skin. It was more humiliating that way. The beatings had started because of Tobias’s crying, but continued even after the tears had stopped for good. Tobias still had a scar, slightly raised and pale, where his left butt cheek met his thigh. One day, after Tobias had failed a biology test, his father had reversed the belt, smacking him—just that once—with the buckle. His mother intervened that day. The only time she ever had.

  Bitch. His father was a grade-A major asshole, but his mother was frankly not much better. They were both snobs. And neither of them liked him very much.

  So yeah, his life was perfect to anyone looking at it from the outside. Raised rich, with every advantage, in a fancy Eastmoreland Tudor. Reed College for his undergrad. Pre-med.

  But Tobias? He doubted that perfection every day. Not only had he rejected the family wealth, he kept waiting for the moment when someone would stand up, point, and shout “Imposter!” at him, revealing him to be what he was: just a mid-twenties white guy who didn’t know what the hell he was doing.

  He hid it well, most of the time. He had to. People didn’t want to come to an herbalist for healing if the healer was a damn mess, seething with anger and unexamined emotions.

  He was brooding again, when he should be working. Turning toward his office space, he looked around, trying to decide where to even begin.

  A long row of woven solar crosses lined the back of the desk, leaning up against the white wall. He set the cross in his hands down in the empty spot he’d taken it from.

  He didn’t doubt the power of the herbs. Never had. The plants had wisdom he would never gainsay. He just doubted his ability to heal, to use the herbs the way they whispered that they wanted and needed to be used.

  Because he couldn’t heal himself.

  Couldn’t heal the aching in his heart that said he’d always be alone. Couldn’t heal the anger that burned so many layers down even he could forget it was there half the time. Couldn’t heal the alternating disregard and active disdain he got from his parents, and the dismissal from his aunt, who had set up a trust to fund his medical school tuition, when he told her he wasn’t going after all.

  “I want to study herbal medicine,” he told her. Aunt Lydia had scoffed and told him he was on his own. She hadn’t spoken to him since. Fine with him.

  Well, here he was, at twenty-seven, and his business had just barely tipped over into the black. Like the plants in his greenhouse, it was starting to thrive. He’d even been able to open his own small practice, not attached to the naturopath’s where he had worked for a couple of years when he’d finished with herbalism school. New clients kept arriving, rain or shine, to ring his bell.

  These were all things that should have proven the voices were wrong. That he had a chance to grow, and to heal. That maybe, just maybe, now was the time.

  Tobias sighed. This introspection would keep for another time. He really needed to get to work now.
r />   Everyone said what a great healer he was. “You have a way with herbs,” Brenda, his coven mentor, said. “It’s a real gift Tobias. Don’t squander it.”

  Well, he wasn’t so sure about that. All he knew was he had to keep working.

  At any rate, today was another day. He had clients to see, formulas to concoct, and emails to answer. But first, as always, Tobias started his work day with prayer.

  He turned toward his altar and took a deep breath, preparing to center himself. “Every act begins with breath,” Brenda had told him when he first joined Arrow and Crescent. Ever since that day, he’d tried to be more conscious about it. To make breathing itself a practice.

  The altar was a small, salvaged table covered with a white cloth, with a cast-bronze Brigid’s cross that came from Ireland, a bowl of water, a small dish of salt, and whatever plant he was working with in the moment arranged on top. This week, the plant was thyme.

  Okay, let’s get on with this. He took another breath, snicked a match to flame, and lit the fragrant beeswax candle. He found his center, the place of stillness deep inside of him, his guiding post, his north star. Tobias reach out with his mind and felt the elements around him: earth, fire, air, water. He dropped and opened his attention, to feel the ground beneath him, the sky above him.

  Silently, he prayed to Brigid to help him in his work. To center him. To make the anger go away.

  When he finished, he felt calmer; at least, enough to shove aside the emotions and get to work.

  He sat at the desk and flipped open his laptop. He always checked email to see if there were last-minute notes from clients before he started in on mixing new formulas from the tinctures he’d already prepared. He got to work, surrounded by the scent of the herbs. He scrolled through, clicking past advertisements, dragging things into the trash, and then he saw the notice.

  The subject line just read “Sara.” Sara was one of his clients. But he didn’t recognize the email the note was coming from. He clicked, and his breath caught in his throat. It felt as though his heart would stop.

  Oh no, Sara, oh no.

  He knew it was possible of course; Sara had been very ill. She’d been working with Western doctors for years.

  Tobias had helped her manage some of the side effects of the medications she was taking, and he knew he’d helped to ease her pain. But he’d really hoped, unspoken, but infused in every tincture, that this time he could save her. He’d hoped he would come across the right combination that would strengthen Sara to fight the disease that had her in its clutches. It hadn’t worked.

  “Sara died peacefully in her sleep last night,” the note read. “I know she loved you, and loved working with you, and would have wanted you to know. Please let us know if there were any outstanding bills; we will pay her debts for her. She gave us so much in her life; we’ll do everything we can for her in her death. I’ll keep you updated on services. Best wishes, Jane—Sara’s sister.”

  Tobias closed his computer, put his head in his hands, and began to weep, softly at first, then great gusts of tears and sound, loud enough to drown out the rain.

  It was the first time he had cried since he was twelve.

  2

  Aiden

  It was a busy day at the soup kitchen. Aiden finished chopping up the last round of onions and went to wash his hands at the small sink by the long, white coffin freezers that held turkeys and hams. He dried his hands on the green apron he always wore.

  “What do you need?” He turned to talk to Stingray, the crew chief. Stingray was a short, stocky Black woman, with a dark brush of hair crowning a square face.

  “Why don’t you go check out the floor?” she said, “I think the kitchen’s pretty well done. We have plenty of people to serve the soup and salad today and some extra volunteers chopping up fruit for later in the afternoon. So we could really use another experienced body out in the courtyard, checking in with folks.”

  “You got it,” he said.

  Aiden grabbed a rag, just in case he needed to wipe up any spilled tea or milk, or crumbs from day-old muffins that some of the guests would bring in to share around. It always amazed Aiden how generous people could be—folks you’d look at and would think had nothing were often the first to share.

  He walked through the brick-walled dining room, through the rust-colored metal doors, and out to the courtyard. There was an overhanging shelter with benches underneath it and a small patio area just outside with containers of plants and flowers and some herbs. He breathed in the scent of the wet plants and the rain, looked out at the stream of water drenching the flowers, and the leaves, and the concrete. Aiden gave a small prayer of thanks to God that he was alive another day.

  Aiden had come to De Porres Catholic Worker as a lost young man. He’d run away from home because his parents couldn’t stand that he was gay and he couldn’t bear their rejection anymore. Their attempts to change him into something else. Their insistence that if he just prayed hard enough, God would change him back.

  As though there was any “back” to change to.

  Oh, they hadn’t kicked him out of the house, and they never would. He knew they loved him in their way, but they didn’t really love who he was, and he couldn’t stand that anymore. Besides all of that, school had sucked. He came home bruised half the time and was sick of that, too.

  Small-town Oregon life wasn’t easy on freaks and losers, and Aiden was a bit of both.

  So he’d run from Bend to Portland and found this place, this haven. It truly had felt like an act of God that brought him here. Out of all the missions in the city, the first place he tried was a place run by radical anarchist Catholics under the banner of the great, late Dorothy Day. They welcomed him immediately. After a long night of conversation, they figured out he was seventeen going on eighteen and convinced him to call his parents.

  He told his parents where he was and that he wanted to stay, and they’d given their permission.

  “At least you’re with Catholics,” his mother said. If that was what it took for them to not drag him back to Bend, so be it.

  So he’d enrolled in his final semester in a Portland high school and had been with The Catholic Worker ever since, sleeping in his tiny room in the communal household, with its single bed and narrow dresser. He worked in the kitchen five days a week, opening the wooden gates each morning, letting the guests in, and serving them hot tea to drink while they waited for lunch. Then he would return to the kitchen to chop mounds and mounds of potatoes and carrots and garlic and onions and whatever other great things came in to add to the soup. He loved De Porres House. It was peaceful, and just what his soul had needed.

  Even though sometimes he wanted more. Those days, he would go out to bars, just to be around other men, occasionally getting enough cheap beer into himself to risk a kiss or a dance.

  Sure, it was a little weird, he guessed, for a twenty-two-year-old gay man to be working in a soup kitchen, but it was no stranger than any other occupation, and it felt right, like maybe he had a calling and that calling had been answered. Other times, he wasn’t sure.

  He still woke in the night sometimes, terrified, afraid of being beaten by the bullies at school. There’d been too many of those. His parents hadn’t known how to stop them—they just told him over and over to pray harder and maybe God would make him not be gay anymore. As if. It was kind of unbelievable that people still thought that way, but plenty of them did. Not here at the kitchen, though. Here, he felt accepted.

  “Hey Barry,” he greeted a long time guest, a Black man who always carried spices in his back pack to liven up the soup. The soup was always tasty, but they couldn’t make it too spicy—too many guests had stomach troubles. Living on the streets caused ulcers, he supposed. “How are things going?”

  “Hey Aiden.” Barry went to the tea urn, then settled on one of the long benches placed around the overhang walls. Aiden followed. “You know, cops been hassling the camp lately. Hope we don’t need to move on soon. It’s
a nice spot.”

  “I hope so, too, man.” One Heart was a long-established camp, where folks did their best to take care of the space and each other. They had community agreements and a loose structure, and had been successful at providing a home for the houseless for at least five years.

  Aiden saw Mary Jo then, a white woman with layered sweaters under a long brown coat, and a sleeping bag rolled neatly at her feet next to a small backpack. She huddled over a book at one of the long tables, straggly brown hair falling over her face. The hair didn’t quite cover the bruises on her weathered skin.

  Aiden swiped his rag at some muffin crumbs, then shook it over a trash can and plunked the rag into a bucket of warm water on a cart near the rust painted doors. Then he headed to the metal tea urn himself.

  Taking two of the heavy plastic cups, he filled them with the fragrant chamomile and spearmint combination and sat down in an empty chair across the table from Mary Jo.

  There were other guests at the opposite end of the long table, but not close enough to listen if if Aiden talked quietly.

  “Hey, Mary Jo, I brought you some tea.”

  Her brown eyes flicked up from the paperback, then back down again. She didn’t lift her head.

  “I just wanted to see how you were doing, and if you needed anything.” He slid one of the steaming cups across the laminate wood table.

  A pale hand with blunt fingernails snaked out from beneath the layers of sweaters and shiny brown coat and pulled the tea toward Mary Jo. She still wasn’t looking at him.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Usually Aiden wouldn’t ask. Guests were very private about their lives most of the time. They had to give too much up to social workers, police, hospitals, and shelters. Everyone had an opinion, but not many people had answers.