Chapter 8: The Trap of Nostalgia
The air in the bar wasn’t just thick; it was a soup of decades. Johnny O’Connor tasted it as he stepped through the temporal rift—stale hops, sour mash, the ghost of a million cigarettes embedded in varnished wood, and underneath it all, the bright, coppery scent of 2015. He adjusted the cuff of his wrinkled flannel shirt, his blue eyes scanning the room with the detached interest of a historian visiting a diorama.
There. Corner booth. The younger version of Oliver Stansworth was a revelation.
This Oliver’s blonde hair was a shade lighter, sun-streaked. His smile was easy, unforced, reaching his intense brown eyes which sparkled with genuine, uncomplicated pleasure. He was flanked by two women, a brunette in a little black dress and a redhead in jeans and a tight tank top. They were leaning into him, hanging on his every word, their body language screaming surrender.
Johnny moved to the bar, ordered a whiskey he wouldn’t drink, and sat with his back to the wall. He didn’t cast a spell. He simply willed the local timeline to thicken, to loop back on itself in a tiny, self-contained bubble centered on that booth. To anyone else in the bar, the trio would seem to be having a long, increasingly intimate conversation. In reality, they were now trapped in a five-minute moment Johnny was about to stretch into an eternity for one specific observer.
He took a sip of whiskey, felt the burn, and let his perception split. He saw the now, and he saw the fragile, frayed thread of Oliver’s present—a bitter, hateful strand vibrating with stolen power and Jan’s curse—and he hooked them together.
“Let’s take a look at the receipts, Ollie,” Johnny murmured into his glass.
In the booth, Young Oliver laughed, a rich, warm sound that made the brunette shiver. “I’m telling you, Clara, the way you hold your glass… it’s an art form. It’s like you know exactly how the light should catch the condensation.”
Clara, the brunette, giggled, a flush creeping up her neck. “You’re full of it.”
“Am I?” Oliver’s voice dropped, becoming intimate, a velvet rumble. Johnny saw the faintest shimmer of green around his fingers where they rested on Clara’s thigh. A simple, gentle pulse of Green Moon magic—not coercion, but an amplification of what was already there. A removal of doubt, a heightening of sensation. “I think you know exactly what you’re doing. I think you’ve been driving me crazy since you walked in.”
The redhead, whose name was Jess, bit her lip. “What about me?” she pouted playfully.
Oliver turned his head, his gaze capturing hers. “You,” he said, his magic weaving between them both now, a low hum of desire. “The way you laughed at my stupid joke. No one has a laugh that real. It’s like… sunshine in sound.” He let the magic seep into them, a warm, honeyed wave. It wasn’t theft. It was an offering. Feel more. Want more. Be more.
Clara sighed, a soft, surrendering sound. Her hand, which had been on the table, slid over to cover his. Jess leaned in, her lips brushing his ear. “You talk too much,” she whispered, but her voice was thick with want.
“Then make me stop,” Oliver breathed.
And they did.
Clara turned his face towards hers and kissed him, deep and hungry. Her tongue slid into his mouth, tasting of gin and mint. Oliver groaned into the kiss, his hand sliding from her thigh up under the hem of her dress, finding the warm, damp silk of her underwear. Jess’s hands were on his chest, pushing his leather jacket off his shoulders, then working at the buttons of his shirt. She kissed his neck, his jaw, her teeth grazing his skin.
Johnny watched, a neutral observer. He saw the pure, unadulterated joy on Young Oliver’s face. The thrill of connection, of mutual, consensual wanting. This was the Green Moon’s purpose. This was the gift.
“See?” Johnny’s voice was a whisper in the ear of the unseen, present-day Oliver forced to witness this. “This is the currency. You used to trade in it. You used to understand it.”
In the booth, Oliver’s shirt was open. Jess was kissing his chest, her hand sliding down his stomach, palming the hard bulge in his jeans. Clara broke the kiss, her eyes dark. “I need to taste you,” she said, her voice husky with magic and genuine desire.
She slid from the booth and onto her knees on the sticky floor without a second thought. Her hands made quick work of his belt, his button, his zipper. She pulled his jeans and briefs down just enough to free his cock, which sprang out, fully hard, the head already glistening.
“Fuck, Clara,” Oliver gasped, his head falling back against the booth.
She didn’t tease. She took him into her mouth in one smooth, wet motion, her lips stretching around his girth. She sucked hard, her tongue swirling around the head, her hand working the base. Jess, still beside him, kissed him passionately, her hand sneaking between Clara’s head and Oliver’s body to cradle his balls, rolling them gently.
Young Oliver was in heaven. His hips bucked slightly, driving his cock deeper into Clara’s throat. He broke the kiss with Jess, panting. “God… yes… just like that. Your mouth is so fucking good.”
Clara moaned around him, the vibration making him curse. Her head bobbed with a frantic, eager rhythm, saliva slicking his shaft. Jess was now whispering filthy encouragements in his ear. “Yeah, let her suck that pretty cock. She loves it. Look at her. She’s dripping. I can smell her.”
Oliver’s hand fumbled between Jess’s legs, rubbing her through her jeans. “You’re next,” he promised, his voice ragged. “I’m gonna fuck you until you scream.”
The scene was raw, visceral, drenched in sweat and scent and sound. It was messy human connection, amplified by magic into something glorious.
Johnny took another fake sip of whiskey. The temporal bubble held, replaying the most intense moments, the peak of that joy, on a loop. He forced the consciousness of the present Oliver—the one hunched in some dark Chicago lair, clutching a dagger that held a stolen ghost—to see it, to feel the echo of it.
“This is what you had,” Johnny pressed, his mental voice cold and precise as a scalpel. “This warmth. This exchange. You gave them pleasure and they gave you joy. A fair trade. A good trade.”
In the loop, Clara gagged slightly as Oliver thrust deeper, his fingers tangled in her hair. He didn’t pull away. He held her there, groaning. “Take it. Yeah, swallow it all.”
“Now look at what you do,” Johnny continued. The scene in the booth froze, a lurid tableau of ecstasy. Johnny superimposed the mental image of Ginny and Molly, sitting vacant-eyed in the Sylvan Retreat garden. He forced a comparison. The vibrant, noisy, alive memory against the hollow, silent present.
“You don’t trade anymore. You steal. You drain. You leave husks. You took that beautiful, messy magic and you turned it into a fucking vampire’s trick. For what? A bit of power that isn’t even yours? To feel something when my sister made sure you can’t?”
The frozen scene in the booth shattered. The loop ended. The bar’s ambient noise rushed back in. Young Oliver, blissfully unaware, was zipping his jeans, pulling a laughing Clara back into the booth, promising them both another round of drinks.
Johnny stood up, leaving the full whiskey glass on the bar. His work was done. He had planted the seed, the corrosive, haunting memory of what was lost.
He walked out of the bar, the temporal rift shimmering in the alley beside the dumpster. Before he stepped through, he paused, looking up at the Chicago night sky, which was the same here in this past as it was in his present.
“He felt it, Nana Maeve,” he said to the empty air. “Just a flicker. Like a phantom limb. It’s going to piss him off something fierce.”
He smiled then, a thin, dangerous smile.
“Good.”
He stepped through the rift and vanished. The loop was broken, the memory sealed away in the past where it belonged, but its echo was now a ghost in Oliver Stansworth’s mind, a taunting reminder of a joy he could witness, remember, but never, ever feel again.
Back in his Chicago warehouse lair, surrounded by stolen Golden Wand tech and the cold, humming aura of the cosmic power he’d leeched, Oliver Stansworth gasped.
He dropped Beacon’s Edge. The dagger clattered on the concrete floor, the faint, trapped scream within its handle silent to all but him. He clutched his head. For a second—just a fucking second—he’d felt it. The heat of Clara’s mouth. The thrill of Jess’s whispered words. The soaring, perfect rightness of it.
Then nothing. A yawning, absolute void where the feeling should have been. It was worse than never having it at all. It was having it dangled and ripped away.
He screamed, a raw, furious sound that echoed off the bare walls. He swept his arm across a metal table, sending instruments clattering to the floor.
“O’Connor!” he roared into the emptiness. He didn’t know which one. The bitch who cursed him or the smug time-hopping bastard who’d just violated his past. It didn’t matter. They were all the same.
He bent, picking up Beacon’s Edge. The ghost in the metal seemed to pulse, a weak, sad rhythm. A husband’s love. Another thing he could twist.
“You want to play with memories?” he spat, his voice trembling with rage. He focused on the dagger, on the pathetic spirit trapped within. He pushed his stolen, joyless power into it, not to drain, but to corrupt. To use the love as a catalyst for hate. “Fine. Let’s give your family a memory they’ll never forget.”
He closed his eyes, channeling the cold, watching power of the entities that had freed him. The dagger began to glow, not with green light, but with a sickly, phosphorescent grey. He was weaving a new spell, a beacon of utter emotional desolation, using Marty O’Connor’s essence as the battery. He would broadcast it, a wave of nullity aimed at the heart of every O’Connor.
He was done stealing joy. Now he would annihilate it at the source.
Outside, high above the city, a Phoenix of flame and fury circled, its golden eyes seeing the gathering, greying stain of malice in the warehouse below. Its passenger, a woman with fire in her hair and ice in her heart, touched the blackened stone at her throat.
“Almost there, my love,” Shiv whispered to the pendant. “Hold on.”
The Phoenix descended through the Chicago night like a falling star, its flame-wreathed wings brushing soundlessly against the dark. It touched down on the gravel drive of The Lodge with the grace of a cat, the heat of its form dissipating into the cool air until only the large, eagle-sized bird of prey remained, and then it was just Larry, fluttering onto Shiv’s shoulder with an indignant squawk.
She strode inside, the blackened pendant a cold brand against her chest.
The grand foyer was a tactical map come to life. Jan was pacing, phone to her ear, her free hand gesturing sharply. “No, Brigid-Bear, listen—Mike and Casey are fine. Better than fine. Hank says they’ve been locked in their bedroom for six hours making up for lost time.” She listened, a tired smirk touching her lips. “Yeah, Rick might get a sibling out of this whole fucking mess. Molly and Ginny? Still nothing. Vegetables.” Her voice hitched on the word. “Tell Will and Sarah I said thanks for sitting with them. Yeah. Love you too.”
Johnny was already there, leaning against the massive stone fireplace as if he’d been there for hours. He looked up as Shiv entered, giving her a faint, grim nod. “Mam.”
“John Patrick. Report.”
“Oliver took the bait,” Johnny said, his voice flat. “He tried to track me through the timelines. So I led him on a merry chase and dropped him right into a memory loop of his own. Made him watch himself back when he wasn’t a total fucking waste of skin.” He pushed off the fireplace. “He felt it. The joy. For about two seconds. Then Jan’s curse slammed the door. He’s not just pissed. He’s cataclysmically offended.”
Jan held the phone away from her face. “Brigid says the Sylvan Retreat is on lockdown. Masters Feng and Ilya are…” She never finished the sentence.
A silent, grey scythe swept through the room.
It had no sound, no light, no physical presence. It was pure emotional nullity, weaponized and sharpened on the whetstone of a stolen ghost’s love. It passed through walls and wards alike.
Jan gasped, a wet, ragged sound. She clawed at her chest as her legs gave out, dropping her to her knees. It felt like a vacuum had been applied directly to her soul, sucking out every spark of warmth, every flicker of happiness, leaving behind only the raw, bruising memory of their absence. It was Jan’s own curse, reflected and amplified, aimed at the very core of what made her her.
Across the room, Johnny’s casual slouch vanished. He stiffened, his blue eyes widening in shock. He didn’t cry out. He simply folded, collapsing into a wingback chair as if every bone had turned to liquid. His face went ashen, his hands gripping the armrests so hard the fabric tore.
From the phone on the floor, now lying by Jan’s knee, a tinny, distant scream echoed. Brigid’s voice, strangled with pain. Will’s shouts. Sarah’s frantic pleading in the background.
The front door, which Shiv had left open, framed her silhouette. She had felt it too—a chilling ripple, a wrongness that scraped against her senses. But it was a wave breaking against a cliff. It seeped in, cold and hateful, but it found no O’Connor blood to poison, only the formidable, granite fury of a Siobhan O’Connor by marriage.
She took in the scene. Jan on the floor, curled around herself, teeth gritted against a scream. Johnny in the chair, shuddering, sweat beading on his pale forehead. The agonized cries of her youngest emanating from the discarded phone.
Shiv’s face, already set in grim lines, underwent a terrifying transformation. Every trace of mischief, of weary resolve, vanished. What remained was something ancient and tectonic. Her green eyes, the same as her children’s, went flat and dark as a peat bog.
She reached into her handbag. Her fingers closed around the carved bone handle of her great-grandmother’s scian. She drew it out slowly. The old blade caught the lamplight, not with a green glow, but with a cold, patient gleam.
“First my husband,” she said, her voice so low it was almost inaudible, yet it cut through the moans of her children. It was the sound of stone grinding against stone. “Now my children?”
She looked up, her gaze sweeping the room, seeing not the distressed faces of Fatima, Bethany, or the novices, but a future event painted in blood.
“I will have his head,” she stated, each word a nail driven into a coffin. “And his skin.”
Fatima, who had been rushing to Jan’s side, snapped her head towards Shiv. She saw the absolute, unhinged certainty there. This wasn’t a threat. It was a statement of fact. She turned to Bethany, her mind clicking into a cold, tactical mode.
“There’s another Green Moon initiate here,” Fatima said, her voice tight. She pointed a finger, sweeping it across the room. “Jan. Me. The Twins.” Her finger moved to Britney and Sydney, who were crouched beside Johnny, their faces pale with fear and helplessness. “The novices. Five in fact.”
“Six.”
The new voice was calm, weathered, and carried the scent of wildflowers into the tense air. Arlene stood in the doorway to the library, having arrived via some unseen path. She looked older than Shiv, her silver hair in a braid, her face a roadmap of gentle wrinkles, but her posture was straight, her eyes sharp. She wore simple, earth-toned robes.
Shiv’s gaze flicked to her. The woman who had once competed for Marty’s heart. The one who had taught her daughter, and also the monster now hurting them. For a heartbeat, the old rivalry crackled in the air, a ghost of perfume and youthful jealousy.
Shiv dismissed her. Her eyes returned to the middle distance, to the vision of Oliver’s demise. Arlene was not a person in that moment; she was a tool, or an obstacle.
Arlene understood. She gave a slow, regretful nod, not to Shiv, but to Fatima. “She’s past reason. He’s using Marty’s essence as a focusing lens. That kind of violation… it unmakes a woman’s patience.”
“We need to restrain her,” Fatima said, the plan forming even as she spoke. “Just long enough. We need to get that dagger back from Oliver. Reverse the curse on Stacy, Ginny, and Molly. And release Marty from that fucking prison.”
“Agreed,” Arlene said, her eyes softening as she looked at the writhing forms of Jan and Johnny. The pain was starting to subside into a dull, throbbing ache, but they were far from functional. “He’s declared open war on an initiate’s emotional core. The rules are void. We call everyone.”
Fatima was already pulling out her phone. “Since Oliver is attacking Jan directly, our allies are clear of his immediate wrath. We bring them in.” She tapped the screen, putting it on speaker. It rang twice.
“Aaron,” came the steady voice of the Fair Bargain mage.
“The Lodge. Now. Bring Annie. Mara and Zack too if they’re safe.”
“Understood.” No questions. The line went dead.
Another call. This one was answered with the sounds of a bustling street and a low, electric guitar riff. “Katie.”
“Boom Boom. Lodge. Now. Bring Vivian. Collect Yukio, Amy, and Jason.”
“Is it smashy-time?” Katie’s voice was eager, gothic glee evident.
“It’s defensive perimeter and potential extraction. Hurry.” Fatima hung up.
Lady Eleanor’s translucent form floated forward from near the fireplace. “I am of limited physical use, my dears,” she said, her Victorian cadence polite as ever. “But I can pass through walls and observe without being observed. Shall I go and… scout the gentleman’s whereabouts?”
Rainbor hefted his massive axe, the runes along the blade glinting dully. “I will set traps. Non-magical ones. Triplines, deadfalls. He may sense spells. He will not sense a two-hundred-pound log swinging at his face.” He looked at Stacy, who had observed the entire emotional assault with detached, analytical eyes. “You. Soldier. You understand mechanics. You help.”
Stacy nodded once. “Efficient use of resources. I will assist.”
Bethany was already moving, her Golden Wand device in hand, tapping at its screen. Silvery lines of light erupted from it, skittering up the walls and across the ceilings, reinforcing the Lodge’s existing magical wards with a crackling, technological lattice. “Liam!” she barked.
Her boyfriend snapped to attention, his usual poetic demeanor gone. “Aye?”
“The novices.” She nodded towards Britney and Sydney, who were helping a shivering Jan to a sofa. “You stick to them like glue. Whatever happens, whichever one of them might be needed to grab that fucking dagger and use it, they are the priority. You keep them safe.”
Liam’s face set in determination. He moved to stand between the two young women and the main doors, a human shield with nothing but his fists and his heart.
Shiv ignored the flurry of activity. She stood in the center of the room, the scian held loosely at her side, staring at the wall as if she could see through it, across the city, to the warehouse where Oliver Stansworth sat with his stolen knife. Her lips moved silently, forming old words, promises of retribution not written in any Green Moon text, but in the older, darker tongue of a wronged woman’s heart.
Jan, breathing heavily on the couch, looked from her mother’s terrifying stillness to Fatima’s frantic planning, to Arlene’s sad resolve. A weak, pained laugh escaped her. “So. Party at The Lodge. Just like old times.”
Then she grimaced, a fresh wave of phantom pain echoing through her. Johnny met her gaze from his chair, his face still sweat-slicked. He gave her the faintest nod.
The hunt was converging. The prey had become the hunter. And in the middle of it all, a mother sharpened her knife, waiting for the storm to break.