chapter Twenty-Eight
I awoke the next night in Holden’s arms under a tight canopy of mossy trees, and my first thought was, Oh, I must be dreaming.
A gentle clanging drew my attention to the corner space of the tree house where La Sorcière was stooped over a cauldron whispering words that definitely weren’t English while breaking off sprigs of fresh herbs into the bubbling broth.
So, not dreaming after all then.
When I tried to leave the root bed, Holden protested by snuggling me closer and nipping at the back of my neck. I elbowed him. “Wake up,” I demanded.
“Oof,” he replied. After he took a moment to chase the sleep away, he added, “Oh.”
The memory of the previous two days came back with the force of a physical blow, and I shuddered violently. Being able to sleep without fear for my safety or Holden’s had been the greatest gift these women could have given me.
Eugenia came through the door, her arrival announced by a sigh from the tree, and dumped a stack of dry wood next to the witch. The old woman asked a question by lifting her white eyebrows a fraction of an inch. “No, no problems,” Eugenia responded.
Amazing what kind of understanding formed between people when they were alone together for five years.
Seeing we were awake, my sister’s expression broke into a wide smile. She snapped her fingers once, and whatever phantom light had illuminated the space the previous evening lit itself again. It shouldn’t have surprised me that Eugenia had picked up a thing or two during her time with La Sorcière, but I still had trouble understanding how the girl could be both a werewolf and a witch. The two were such different forms of magic they shouldn’t be allowed to peacefully coexist in one body.
“Mémère told me who you were,” she said excitedly.
“What did she tell you?” I wasn’t sure how much the old woman knew, and I wouldn’t be tricked into confessing something the girl didn’t actually know.
“That you’re my sister.”
I nodded.
“How long have you known?” Eugenia asked.
“Do you have a watch?”
I explained my chat with Callum, touched briefly on my mother abandoning me and why Grandmere worried it wouldn’t be safe for me, which was why I hadn’t been with the pack when Eugenia and Ben were born. I told her everything, figuring she had earned my honesty. If not for her and La Sorcière, I wouldn’t be alive to tell the story. I admitted, finally, I was only there to take her back to the pack.
After I was finished I felt exhausted all over again. I needed to feed soon, and there weren’t a lot of options out here unless I wanted to hit an alligator up for a donation. Holden must have sensed the building tension in me because he reached out and stroked my hair.
“You want me to go back to Callum?” Eugenia asked, but from her tone she knew the answer to her own question.
It wasn’t an outright refusal, so I continued. “I know you left for a reason, and believe me when I say I understand what a bunch of uptight a*sholes the werewolves can be. But I’ve started to think Callum might have our best interests in mind. I don’t think he means to do us harm.”
“But he isn’t the only reason you’re here.”
“No. Without his blessing I can’t marry my mate. If we don’t get married, then the entire Eastern pack could be crippled by in-fighting and uncertainty. I’m pack protector. I can’t let anything jeopardize the pack.”
“And?”
“And someone is trying to kill me. Once Lucas and I are married, I think they’ll stop.”
“You think by bringing me back to Callum you’ll be able to get married, save your pack and save your life?” She had been sorting through bundles of dried herbs, tying them with bits of twine, but she stopped to ask me one last question. “That’s an awful lot of pressure, don’t you think?”
“I suppose it is.”
“Do you know why I left Callum’s compound in the first place?”
“I don’t. He said you became difficult after you were Awakened, and not in the typical teenage ways.”
“It was polite of him to put it that way.”
“How would you put it?”
“I blew things up every full moon.”
“You…blew things up?”
Eugenia wrapped up several sprigs of lavender. “You know most werewolf teens are Awakened when they’re thirteen, obviously. Do you know what age hereditary witches come into their power?”
“I’ll hazard a guess and say thirteen?”
“Bingo.”
“So you were turned into a werewolf and had magic powers spark to life at the same time?”
She nodded. “I wanted to be a good werewolf. Ben was a natural—he took to the change right away, he showed alpha tendencies early on, he was so good at it. I wanted to be half as good as he was. The problem is, moonlight heightens a witch’s powers. So when I shifted, my magic would react, but I couldn’t control it and manage the shift at the same time. The magic lashed out, violently.”
“And stuff blew up.”
“Yep. There were about twice as many cabins on the property before I started knocking them down by accident. The first time it happened I thought it was a coincidence. After the third full moon and the third flattened cabin, I knew it was my fault.”
“So you left.”
“So I left.”
“How did you know to come looking for her?” I asked, pointing to the witch who had done an excellent job of ignoring us up until now.
“I didn’t. She found me. She showed me how to control my magic even when I’m not in control of my human form. I can’t cast spells in wolf form, but at least I don’t blow things up anymore.”
“Does Callum know you’re a witch?”
“If he didn’t at the time, I think he figured it out when I started living with her.”
For the first time during our sisterly one-on-one, La Sorcière reacted. She snorted then muttered something. It sounded French, but it wasn’t Canadian French or Cajun French, so I was screwed when it came to understanding anything.
Eugenia—on the other hand—chuckled. “She says ‘Even the most obvious answers sometimes do not bite a foolish man in the ass.’”
Oh yeah. We were related.
“I won’t force you to come back,” I told Eugenia.
“You are strong, Secret, but I have the witch on my side. You couldn’t force me.”
La Sorcière clucked her tongue and waved her cane menacingly. I couldn’t tell if she was adding a visual element to Eugenia’s threat, or if she was scolding the girl for wielding grandmotherly power like a weapon.
Either way, Eugenia ignored her and plowed ahead. “If I come with you, it will be up to you to explain to Callum that me coming back doesn’t mean I’m staying. I’ve been out of the pack a long time, and I don’t know if being a lone wolf has screwed me up more than the magic did.”
“I’ll try to make him understand.”
Then she changed the topic. Drastically. “What’s she like? Our mom.”
“How much did Callum tell you about Mercy before you left?”
“That she was complicated. Wild. I always figured I was a lot like her.” Her faint smile made my stomach hurt.
“No. You’re nothing like Mercy. You have a soul.”
That knocked Eugenia on her proverbial ass. Her expression was that of a child learning Santa Claus wasn’t real. I felt like shit for being the one to kill her fantasy of who Mercy was. But if she ever met our mother, I didn’t want her thinking it was going to be a touching family reunion. Mostly because the next time I saw Mercy I would rip out her intestines and wear them as a sarong.
What can I say? Bitch not only tried to kill me, but my mate too.
I wanted to explain Mercy without tainting the story too much with my experiences. “Eugenia, Mercy isn’t complicated. She’s very simple. She loved my father and he died. When I was born, she got it into her head his death was somehow my fault and abandoned me. Her sadness never went away, and it made her go bat-shit crazy. Since then, she continues to blame me for everything she’s lost. She tried to kill me.”
“She…you mean metaphorically?”
“No, I mean she shifted her hand into a claw and made pretty solid effort of shredding the meat off my face. That was after she held a bullet between my ribs for six hours so I couldn’t heal.”
Eugenia’s mouth formed an O shape, her eyes wide and a little wet.
Now I had not only told her Santa wasn’t real, I’d told her the Easter Bunny went on killing sprees to eat the children who didn’t find his eggs.
“But…”
“I’m sorry.”
“Maybe—”
“I don’t want to be cruel.” I stood up and rubbed my hands against my back pockets to rid myself of the film of sweat that had accumulated while I told my story. “Once, there was a good Mercy. But that girl is gone. Our mothers are the women who raised us, not the woman who gave birth to us.”
A bunch of thyme hung loose in her hands, perilously close to slipping to the floor. Eugenia turned to La Sorcière. “Did you know?”
The witch shrugged.
“Of course you knew. You know everything.” The girl sighed. Shaking off the stupor, she finished wrapping twine around the herbs. Once she had set the bundle in a basket with the others, she placed her hands in her lap and took two deep breaths. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I’ll come with you.”
I had to sit down again.
“You’re right. The one who raised me is my real parent, and it wasn’t Mercy, it was Callum. I owe it to him to go back and try to be part of the family he made for me. And you risked your life to come here to ask me to come with you, not to force me… So yeah, I’ll come.”
La Sorcière tapped her wooden spoon against the side of the cauldron then teetered away from it. I assumed she would go to Eugenia, but instead she walked up to me. She was so small her height standing was still shorter than mine sitting. She grabbed my hands, turned them palm up and gave them a thorough once-over, dragging her fingernails over every bump and groove.
She paid extra attention to the lifelines, her nail skating along one, then the other, and then back to the short one. A low whistle escaped her lips, and her shocking blue eyes met mine. They were so, so blue. Finished with my hands, she allowed them to drop to my lap before she reached to my neck.
I flinched, my hand going protectively to the tiger’s iron I wore.
The witch slapped my hand gently, and I let her unclasp the necklace. I huffed out a breath and said, “Go ahead. It’s faulty anyway.”
La Sorcière shook her head then spoke in perfect English. “Nothing this stone can do will turn away the evil eye on you.” She slipped the tiger’s iron into a pouch on the front of her dress, then touched one finger to my forehead, grimaced and walked off muttering in her weird French dialect.
Eugenia looked confused.
“What did she say?” I asked.
“She said ‘Only when you know the way, will you be out from under the cloud that follows you.’”