CHAPTER ONE
Portland, mid-October
Ryan
“Would you mind repeating that, sir?” Ryan Rutherford barely restrained himself from bellowing at Cougar One.
“I said you are married,” Charles Rutherford reiterated dryly. “I know that it comes as a shock, but I have evidence.” He handed Ryan an envelope. “Please make a note of your witnesses, and the officiant.”
Ryan goggled. The wedding had been performed by Robin Fairchild, the fairy who owned and ran the Tidewater Inn. The fairy who was mayor of Mystic Bay. The witnesses were his own grandparents, Charles and Leona Rutherford. Even with cobra venom frothing in his blood, Ryan didn’t think he would have forgotten getting married. Or that Cougar One would have taken part in a secret wedding.
Sheer pride made him match Cougar One’s dignified calm. After all his grandfather was eighty-eight. If Grandfather could deal with this forgery without hysterics or a heart attack, so could Ryan.
“Do I know the bride?” he enquired politely.
“You must remember the Petersons?” Charles continued in that same dry, almost amused tone.
The Petersons were all witches and warlocks. “Dr. Peterson has a clinic on the island.”
For over a century, to the Rutherford Clan ‘the island’ had meant West Haven, Oregon, one of the dozens of tiny islands in the San Juans. They had summered at Cat’s Head Cove in their island compound since Cuthbert Rutherford had bought the land.
“Correct. Virginia is a physician and Tom runs a whale watching business out of the harbor. They have three daughters. They are all sorcerers. Claudia is the youngest.”
Ryan searched his memory. “A cute, little round kid with blonde hair? About so high?” He held his hand just below his heart.
Charles smiled. “All the Peterson women run to curves. But Claudia is a grown woman. Probably blonde.” He shrugged. “These days, who can tell? Your own grandmother has gone quite auburn with age.”
“Grandmother always looks fabulous.” Why was Charles shilly-shallying around? “Is there some reason that Robin Fairchild, who has always seemed like a perfectly reasonable fairy, and a pillar of the community, has faked a marriage between me and Claudia?”
“I’ll cut a long story short. Claudia has a three-year-old son. Jimmy carries the Rutherford Y chromosome. For certain that boy is one of us. On the strength of that, the Mystic Bay Town Council is about to vote away our title to Cat’s Head, unless one of us marries Claudia and provides Jimmy with a shifter father. They are apparently afraid of hybrid vigor.”
What the hell? “Hybrid vigor?” Ryan narrowed his eyes. “Which is code for what exactly, sir?”
“Don’t you remember your West Haven history? How Cuthbert Rutherford came to acquire our land on West Haven?”
“Didn’t great-great-I-forget-just-how-many-greats-grandpapa help to clean out a nest of rogue shifters and save the island of West Haven for peace, justice and sensitives?” Ryan asked lightly.
Charles didn’t smile. “He did. Only the Haverstocks, while rogues, weren’t precisely shifters.” Grandfather placed both palms on his desk and leaned forward. “They were grizzly-fairies. Haverstock was a grizzly bear shape shifter who shacked up with a fairy. He and Olivia Fairchild whelped an entire brood of psychopathic killers.” Cougar One paused.
Ryan nodded his understanding.
“They terrorized the islanders for two decades before Cuthbert stepped in with his hand-picked vigilantes,” Charles continued. “Haverstock and his whelps had wiped out every non-sensitive on the island and were working their way through the sensitives when old Cuthbert showed up with his posse of cats, wolves, dragons and bears.”
“And was rewarded with land on West Haven as far as possible from town.” Ryan finished the familiar tale. Cat’s Head was a bulge on the coast of West Haven. One hundred acres of forest and cliffs. Cougar paradise.
“Rewarded?” murmured Charles. “Not exactly. Cuthbert paid cash on the barrelhead for our land. Which we only hold at the sufferance of the town council.”
“Right,” Ryan said grimly. “May I sit down, sir?”
“Of course.”
He lowered himself clumsily into one of Charles’ two visitors’ chairs. “Okay. The town council doesn’t like shifter-fairy hybrids. Except that we know Quinn Drake, who was still a dragon shifter last time I checked, just married a Fairchild.*”
“Indeed. I think the marriage went through without protest, because the council assumed that the match would be barren. They assumed a fairy in her sixties was no virgin.” Everyone knew dragons could only have offspring with virgin mates who could be transformed into dragonesses.
Ryan smirked. “Moira was pregnant on their wedding day.”
Charles snorted genteelly. “The council isn’t forbidding a match between you and Claudia. They are insisting on one. They want the boy under the control of our clan.”
“Why? If he’s a psychopath, what the heck could we do about him? Besides, it’s a stretch to assume that any match between shifters and sorcerers will automatically produce psychopaths,” Ryan pointed out. “Like there’s some sort of curse on interbreeding.”
“Not shifters, son, hunters.”
On West Haven, calling a cougar a hunter was supposed to be some sort of insult. As if. “And marriage will take away the threat that the kid will become a psychopath?” Ryan asked.
“They probably assume we’ll execute the boy if he turns out evil,” Charles said bluntly. “It’s nonsense genetics, of course, but I am not going to risk this coming to a vote. Not with so much at stake. It’s not just Cat’s Head either. Adam and Paige just bought the old lighthouse.”
Ryan knew an order when he heard one. Grandfather was head of the Rutherford clan and had to be obeyed. “Yes, sir.” Married! To a fricking stranger. Father to the love child of one of his own cousins. There was a recipe for a happy marriage. Not.
But Grandfather was still speaking. He tapped the marriage certificate that Ryan had thrown onto the desk. “Robin and Deputy Mayor Gordon Sullivan are also working to prevent Claudia and her son from being thrown off the island.”
Poor kids. “Isn’t banishment a little harsh?” He supposed it was less harsh than killing the boy. But still. Fear made good people do bad things.
Charles nodded. “Yup. But frightened people do stupid things. You know that.”
“Yes, sir. But why me? It’s not like I even know Claudia. I’m not sure I’ve even spoken to her since I was a kid.”
Cougar One raised perfect gray eyebrows over amber eyes that were still bright and fierce. “You’re a bachelor, Ryan. Last one in your cohort. Besides, the islanders already think you’re the father.” Grandfather paused. “Or they say they do.”
Ryan went cold. Which made a pleasant change from the fire in his veins. “I hope I don’t have to assure you that I’m emphatically not, sir?”
Charles shook his head.
Ryan pressed home his point. “Maybe we need some more DNA testing, sir.” The idea that his family thought him capable of dishonorable behavior mingled with the nausea caused by the cobra venom. He mopped his forehead and tried to think past the brain fog.
“And maybe we don’t.” Charles paused to emphasize the gravity of what he was about to say. “That boy is my great-grandson. All my other grandsons are married. Whose marriage, whose children, do we sacrifice, Ryan?”
“But I’m expendable?”
“You know how important Cat’s Head is to our clan.”
He did. Cat’s Head was where generations of Rutherfords had run free in cougar, exercising their inner cats and getting them well integrated with their human side. The idea of his children, or those of his siblings, growing up exiled from West Haven was unthinkable. Not that he was going to survive long enough to have any kids. Not with this damned venom weakening him more every day.
“There’s something you should know, sir.”
“What?”
“That cobra bite I got in Arizona is slowly killing me. I’m not likely to be Claudia’s husband for long. What happens then?”
Charles’ face lost its healthy color. “Are you sure?”
Ryan shrugged. “Of course not. I’m by way of an experiment. Every other shifter bitten by that cobra died within minutes. I got antivenin. Not cobra shifter antivenin, the regular stuff. But the punctures still haven’t healed. I’m burning up from the inside. It’s only a matter of time, sir.”
“No.” New lines bracketed Charles’ patrician face. “We’ll get you better medical attention.”
“I’ve seen the best of the best, Grandfather. There isn’t a cure. And amputation won’t help. We have to face facts.”
“I knew you should have stayed away from those shifter policers.”
Once again Ryan tried to explain why he took assignments from the FAs. “Someone has to deal with the rogues, sir. It’s in my blood. You might say that the FAs are doing what old Cuthbert did a hundred plus years ago.” The FAs dealt with rogue shifters who were invulnerable to the official authorities.
Charles’ chiseled features distorted. He passed a trembling hand over his eyes. He swallowed hard. “Do your parents know?”
“No, sir. I haven’t told anyone but you.” Not even his brother Adam who was closest to him in age and his best friend.
“Well, don’t. Let’s not advertise it. If the worst happens, Claudia will remain part of our clan. If she finds the boy too much of a handful – and apparently she is already finding him difficult – we can step in.”
Ryan picked up the marriage certificate. “How can a three-year-old be difficult?”
“Sorcerers,” growled Charles. “Bunch of damned sissies. Probably Jimmy seems a little hyperactive, or he wants to wrestle, instead of learning his spells or polishing his wand.”
Ryan thought of his young nephews and nieces. From when they got up in the morning until they fell asleep exhausted by their day, they were living balls of energy. Typical healthy cougar cubs. He couldn’t imagine them growing up in a world where they were expected to be quiet. Cougar cubs were only peaceful when they were asleep or ailing. The rest of the time they were vigorous, muscular packages of mayhem.
“So when do I get to meet my family, sir?”
*Desired by the Dragon