Despite all the coffee I’d consumed and my claims that I would be unlikely to sleep, I must have passed out the second my head hit that pillow. I didn’t even remember Wesley joining me, but when I woke up, I was wrapped in his warm embrace and feeling bittersweet.

“Morning, sweetheart,” he murmured from behind me, kissing my neck and sending shivers scuttling across my skin.

“Hey,” I whispered back, not bothering to open my eyes as I snuggled into his embrace. “How are you feeling this morning, you know, being back on Earth?”

Wesley chuckled softly, his warm breath stirring my hair. “Better than I ever imagined. There were some days I wondered if I would ever get back.”

“Will you tell me about it? Caora?” I asked, and he sighed as he kissed my neck.

“Later?” he offered. “I want to know about what happened after… you know, after you thought I had died.”

I groaned and rolled over to face him. “Later?” I echoed him. “I’m not really ready to revisit all of that. Let’s just enjoy the fact that we’re both here now. Alive.”

He smiled at me. “Sounds good. I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be anyway.”

Wrapping his arms around me, he pulled me tight, and I snuggled my face into the crook of his neck, taking a surprising amount of joy from just cuddling him. It wasn’t long before we were interrupted though, but that was the way of my life these days.

“Kitten,” River called out, tapping lightly on my door, then opening it just a crack. “Bridget has resurfaced. We thought you might like to know straight away.”

“What?” I scrambled out of my giant bed and snatched a bra from my floor. I never had been amazing at putting my clothes away. “I’ll be two seconds!”

“Bridget?” Wesley asked me with a frown, “The twins weren’t able to track her down this whole time?”

“Nope.” I shook my head, hooking my bra and tugging a purple tank top over it. “She just dropped off the face of the Earth for a while there. We tried reaching her at that hotel she told me she was staying at, and she’d left a message for me. It just said she had gone out of town but would be back soon.”

“Let me guess, the guys installed a tracker, but it’s probably a pretty basic one...” He trailed off as he yanked his own T-shirt back on, covering the stunning crow tattoo on his torso. “I will check in with the crows to see if I can get eyes on her, but that only helps if she is outdoors and within sight of a crow when I scan. So as well as that…” He started murmuring under his breath about wire taps and hacking the hotel’s security system, and I knew I’d lost him.

“Come on,” I said, opening my door and hurrying downstairs to where the guys were already up and preparing breakfast. “So, what’s the news? Did she call back?”

When we had first received her infuriating message, I’d left a very casual message for her to call back and left the number for a secured voicemail account. The fact that she’d even left a message with the hotel in the first place told me she’d been expecting to hear from me, which gave me hope. It also made me mad as hell.

“Yeah, about an hour or so ago. Just said that she was back at the hotel if you wanted to get in touch.” River handed me the phone and pursed his lips. “What will you say?”

“Exactly what we discussed,” I replied, shrugging. “Play dumb about the bracelet and ask if we can meet up.”

He nodded. “The twins can go and see if they’re able to apprehend her anyway—”

“Don’t bother,” Wesley cut him off, tapping on a laptop that I don’t even know where he found. “Looks like she’s just having her hotel room phone forwarded to an undisclosed location. Makes sense; if she suspects Kit’s onto her and she knows what Caleb is capable of, it’d be pretty stupid to stay there waiting to be picked up.”

“Well, let’s see what she says to meeting up, then.” I took the phone from River and dialed the number for the hotel in LA where Bridget had been staying. Holding the phone to my ear and listening to it ring, my stomach churned over in knots. The only parent I’d ever truly known had just died less than twenty-four hours ago, and here I was about to arrange a meeting with the woman who’d given me up as a helpless seven-year-old.

“Room seventeen-oh-eight please,” I asked politely when reception picked up, and there was a click as they connected me through.

It rang four times before she answered.

“Christina,” she greeted me. “I’m so glad you called back.”

“It’s Kit,” I snapped on instinct, then took a breath to control my inner bitch. “How did you know it was me calling?” Aside from the facts that you’ve set up a phone diversion and I’m probably the only one calling this number.

“Oh, just a hunch,” she replied. “Sorry I missed your call last week; I had some business to take care of with an old friend.”

I couldn’t stop my eyes from rolling at that one. Old friend, huh? Seemed like anyone we spoke to who knew Bridget was not a fan. Not even Nicholai, who for some reason still stuck by her, and certainly not Vic.

Frowning, I grabbed a scrap of paper and scribbled on it to the guys, “Have we got any leads on finding Vic again?”

To Bridget, I replied, “Uh-huh, that’s okay; it wasn’t urgent. I hope everything was okay with your friend?”

Bridget made a noise in her throat that I probably wasn’t supposed to hear. “It will be; he’s just lost his way a little. Now, you called me for a reason, I imagine?”

“I did.” I smiled, despite her not being able to see me. One of the lessons my stupidly expensive school had taught me was that people could hear a smile in your voice, even when they couldn’t see you. “I wondered if maybe we could meet. I have so many questions about who—what—we are and about those years that I can’t remember. Would that be okay? To meet?”

“Oh, that’s what you were calling for?” She sounded genuinely surprised. Had she really thought I’d call and accuse her of blocking my magic over the phone? She really didn’t know me at all. “Well sure, I guess we can do that. I’m about to leave LA though; would it be okay to meet up elsewhere? I imagine Caleb can bring you in a portal.”

I glanced up at Caleb and raised my eyebrows at him, but he just shrugged. The guys were clearly leaving the decisions up to me in this circumstance.

“Yeah, for sure,” I replied and wrote down the address and time she gave me. “I’ll see you then.”

“Oh, and Christina? I’d prefer it if you only brought Caleb with you. Nothing against your other guardians, but I just don’t know them. You can understand, I’m sure. We can’t be too careful with so few of our species left in this world.” It was a weak excuse and one I wasn’t buying for a second, but I agreed anyway. It didn’t bother me to only bring Caleb. We already knew she was estranged from Vic and no one had so much as laid eyes on the mysterious Lachlan, so she should only have Nicholai with her.

Although we should also work on tracking this Lachlan character down. If Jonathan was right in that he’d escaped the geas Bridget was holding Vic and Nicholai’s silence with, well shit, he could be some serious help to us.

I’d add it to my mental list of things to do before the end of the world.

For now, from what we could tell, Nicholai was just a fox shifter and likely not a threat against Caleb’s blood magic. Right?

When the call disconnected, I looked to the guys for their thoughts. We had already come up with our rough plan a week ago when we first tried contacting Bridget, but maybe Wesley might have some other ideas.

“So, meet up with her and confront her about the bracelet... and then what?” Wes asked us, pausing in what he was doing with his computer. “I doubt she’ll fess up and take it off you.”

“I agree,” I nodded. “We had been thinking to place a magic tracer on her so we could get a better idea of what’s going on. She just popped back into my life right when this supposed war is about to go down, and it all seems really convenient, don’t you think?”

“You’re right that she’s unlikely to take the bracelet off,” Vali agreed. “She went to the trouble of putting it on Regina and then spelled it so it would be unnoticed, so there has to be something in it for her. Either she needs Kit powerless for something, or...” He grimaced, trailing off his sentence.

“Or she has some plan to steal my magic,” I finished for him. It wasn’t something we had ever really discussed before, but I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t crossed my mind about a thousand times before. “Granny Winter up in Harrow mentioned Bridget has been trying for years to bond more than three guardians, which could only be to make herself stronger. It stands to reason that this might be a play for the same thing. Power.”

Wesley nodded, chewing the edge of his lip in thought. “So, you plant a tracker and then just... let her go?”

“We’re open to suggestions, genius,” Cole snapped, but it was done in good humor.

Wes playfully flipped him off and then rubbed his forehead. “No, I don’t really have anything better. I mean, you’re right in deciding further information is more important than just grabbing her at the first chance you get. Something tells me she wouldn’t crack under torture, so you’d just be wasting an opportunity. No, this seems smart. Plant a tracer that won’t be affected by whatever is cloaking her whereabouts, and then we can do a little spying to see what’s going on. Do we think she’s working for someone else?”

I sighed heavily and snaked a piece of freshly buttered bread from the nearby plate. “I don’t know what to think. I really, really don’t want to believe my bio-mom is on the wrong side of all of this crap, but it’s looking more and more likely.”

“We’ve yet to meet anyone who has thought very highly of her,” Austin added, pushing his plate closer to me so I could access the next piece of bread after I finished cramming the first one into my mouth. There was something seriously amazing about fresh bread and butter. The only thing that could make it better was coffee.

“We should probably catch Wesley up on everything we learned while he was dead,” River suggested, “then check out this book that he saved from the fire in Ireland. See if there might be anything useful in there for Kitten.”

There was a tightness around his eyes that made me suspicious of that last statement. Not that I ever thought River would be duplicitous, but maybe he wanted to have a flick through and see if any of the other species jumped out as familiar. It was what I would do in his situation.

“Here,” Vali said in a quiet voice, placing a huge mug of coffee down in front of me and a slightly smaller one in front of Wes. “Got to keep you two addicts happy.”

I grinned but couldn’t speak thanks with my mouthful of bread, but Wesley gave Vali an appreciative nod.

“Thanks,” Wes said to the Romanian, taking a sip. “You seem more mellow with everyone. How are things going with the girls running your empire?”

Vali gave a little huff and shrugged. “I’m not too sure. Lucy missed our scheduled catch-up, so I might need to check my emails. Actually, do you mind if I do that now while you get up to speed on what you missed?”

“Sure,” Wesley replied, passing his laptop over the table. It was what Vali had just said about Lucy that had me worried though. She hadn’t picked up when I’d called her from Ireland or any of the few times I’d tried since then. I’d assumed she was just worn thin with Vali’s business and hadn’t checked our line. It happened. I knew I hadn’t checked it for almost a month before calling it.

Her not being in touch with Vali was a bigger worry. Maybe I’d try her again later, before going to meet with Bridget. Hopefully she’d emailed him or something. Maybe Elena and Finn had taken her away for a vacation.

For now, I needed to focus on getting Wesley up to date with everything we now knew. Jonathan’s plans for a supernatural army, his revelations that we had two enemies to keep an eye on, and most importantly, the strange stuff he’d told me before Simon killed him.

Based on what little he’d said, I could only assume his saving me from Suzette’s house of horrors was no accident. He’d been actively seeking me out… because he knew my grandmother?

I wish I knew more.

Fuck that, I needed to know more.