CHAPTER TWO
Mellie worked long into the night, first cleaning up the mess she’d made earlier with the komodo dragon, then performing ritual cleansing as the new moon rose in the dark sky. She couldn’t see it, but she knew it was there. The magic of the moon was something she was very attuned to, as waxing and waning power of the moon in its phases influenced her work all the time.
The next morning, Urse came in, as usual, to open the shop downstairs. They’d agreed that Urse would take the morning shift because Mellie was staying up late each night working on her potions. The sisters would usually have lunch together then work side by side for a while in the shop before Urse went home mid-afternoon and Mellie stayed down in the shop until closing time. Then, she’d go back up to her lab and work on her pet potions.
They’d fallen into a routine over the past few weeks, and Mellie was glad of it this morning, as she got to sleep in, knowing that Urse was taking care of things downstairs. Mellie finally got out of bed a little before noon and made herself presentable. She put lunch on the stove so that it would be ready when Urse flipped the sign from OPEN to CLOSED downstairs and came up to share the mid-day meal.
There was a lot to discuss today, but oddly, Mellie felt reticent about sharing Peter’s family secret with her sister. That stopped Mellie in her tracks. She told her sister pretty much everything. Why, now, was she suddenly reluctant to share this?
It was Peter. That had to be it. Mellie had been shy about her growing feelings for the giant werebear because Urse seemed to gain a little too much satisfaction from teasing her sister about it. Mellie’s feelings about Peter were special…and private. Not for public consumption or ridicule.
Not that Urse had been mean about it. No, she’d just liked teasing her sister. Not in a cruel way, but in that older-sisterly way that sometimes drove Mellie nuts.
This, though, was a little different. The information Peter had imparted about his family history felt like a secret he had trusted her with. She wouldn’t betray that implied trust lightly. So, maybe Urse wouldn’t be hearing about the plans Mellie had for tonight with Peter and her potion room. Huh. That was different. She didn’t like keeping secrets from Urse, but this felt like the right thing to do. Quite a contradiction.
Mellie didn’t have more time to dwell on it, because at that moment, she heard Urse’s light tread on the stairs leading up to the apartment. Lunch was just about ready, so Mellie pulled the pan of chicken from the oven and set it on the table, just as the door opened.
“Smells yummy,” Urse observed, pausing to give her sister a quick hug hello.
The sisters ate and talked about the town and the people, not going near any of the more difficult topics. Mellie didn’t mention Peter at all. Not even to say he was coming over later that day. With any luck, Urse would have left before Peter showed up.
Mellie liked him too much to betray his confidence, and she wouldn’t really be able to explain his visit to Urse’s satisfaction without explaining about why he was now, suddenly, helping her with the potion. There was a small temptation to let Urse think that maybe Peter and Mellie were dating, or something, but that might be even worse because the teasing would probably know no bounds. Better to keep Peter’s involvement to herself for now.
The sisters went back downstairs together, after lunch had been cleared away, to work in the bookstore. They were redecorating the front display windows with a new selection of books. The business was doing surprisingly well considering the small population of the town. Most of the men were readers, though, which helped considerably. Apparently, werebears were more erudite than she would have expected before moving here. No wonder the bookshop had been second only to the bakery in gaining approval from the town council.
That, right there, pointed out the basic priorities of bear shifters in Mellie’s mind. First, they liked to eat—especially the sweets that the bakery specialized in, though they also served man-sized sandwiches on freshly baked bread. Right after food came books, for some reason.
She might have thought a gun shop would be the next priority after learning the entire town council and most of the residents had been Special Forces soldiers, but she supposed they were all still well-armed enough without adding any new firepower to their arsenals. Plus, aside from the gun collections all over town, the men could turn into deadly bears any time they wanted. They carried around their own weapons, built into their bodies, in the way of claws and teeth. Quite a few of them were into knives in their human form, as well, and wore them like women wore pocketbooks—with them at all times, an accessory to their lifestyle.
So, the second business to be approved had been a bookstore. Theoretically, all the men in town had officially retired from military service. Most of them didn’t follow any kind of schedule anymore. The town was supposed to be an artist’s colony, and the men lived a life, not of leisure, but of their own design. They woke when they wanted. Ate when they wanted. Dabbled in art, if that was their thing. And they read. A lot. More than the average person, Mellie thought, though she didn’t know precise figures.
Still, the bookshop was doing reasonably well, even in such a small community. Most of the men in town came in at least once every couple of weeks to pick up book orders. The shop wasn’t stocking loads of books on spec. It was more boutique than that. Mellie and Urse had decided to cater to their customers. Specializing in special orders was fast becoming their motto. If someone wanted a particular book, they just let one of the sisters know, and a few days later, it would arrive.
The floor space in the store itself was devoted to several specialties. There was a section of books about art—helping to maintain the façade that the town was really an artist’s colony. Any tourists who might come through and browse in the bookstore would expect that. There was also a section of coffee table books about the Pacific Northwest. There was a cookbook section, and they had just decided to devote a small corner to children’s books.
In fact, that’s the project they had been working on for the past week. They’d repainted that corner and put up shelves in strategic places to create a little nook perfectly sized for little bodies to browse books shelved at their level. Right now, little Daisy Ling was the only child resident of Grizzly Cove, but as more men paired off with their new mates, the sisters had begun to think ahead.
Mellie silently thought Urse was already planning for her own children with John, but the sisters hadn’t really discussed it yet. That was something Urse and John had to figure out between themselves first. Mellie didn’t know, for example, if John was in favor of the large family Urse had always wanted. Would he object to the fact that some of their kids could be born without the ability to shift? Some, or all, might be born mages. Mellie knew for a fact that Urse was hoping for at least one little girl to carry on the strega tradition.
She’d asked Urse about it when she and John had first gotten together but hadn’t pushed for an answer, realizing she was getting a little too nosy. She’d always been able to ask her sister anything, but that was changing now that Urse was mated. Mellie was no longer her sister’s primary confidant. John had taken precedence in Urse’s life, as Mellie knew was the way it should be, but even so, she couldn’t help feeling a little bit left out.
As the afternoon wore on and the children’s corner took shape, Mellie began to worry that Peter might show up at any moment. She didn’t want to have to explain to her sister why she’d kept silent on the arranged meeting with the hunky Russian bear-man.
Mellie breathed a sigh of relief when Urse came into the main area carrying her coat. Mellie looked up to find John waiting for Urse on the sidewalk. He was talking to Brody, the sheriff of the town and John’s right-hand man. As Mellie watched, the two men parted, and John reached for the door handle to let himself into the bookstore.
“Just in time,” Urse said as she walked over to her mate. They shared a hug and kiss that Mellie politely looked away from.
“Hi, Mel. How’s it going?” John greeted her a few minutes later. Mellie looked up and smiled at her sister’s husband. He was a good guy.
“Can’t complain,” Mellie answered back. “How’s the mayor gig working out for you?”
John chuckled at her words. “Same old, same old. Sea monsters. Mermaids. Bears.” He shrugged, as if it were all old hat, and Mellie marveled again at the town she now called home.
“And, here, I thought San Francisco was weird.” She laughed as she said it. She’d loved growing up near San Francisco and still missed it—especially her nonna, who still lived there—but Grizzly Cove was truly her home now. It felt right to be here. Among the bear-men and their mer allies.
Urse and John left a few minutes later, and Mellie breathed a sigh of relief. Peter would probably show up any time now. She checked her appearance in the small mirror kept on the wall in the backroom. Not that she was vain or anything, but they had been painting and moving books around all afternoon. She didn’t want to present herself to Peter, of all people, with bright blue paint streaked in her hair or something.
Peter hesitated to go into the bookstore until he was certain the Alpha and his mate were long gone. He was a private man, who had learned to hide the things that mattered most to him growing up in the Soviet system. That had all been a very long time ago, and things in the motherland were very different now, but old lessons were hard to unlearn.
Peter had been making his home in the United States for several decades, and he still found it hard to take the freedoms here for granted. He’d grown up in a place where everyone was spying on everyone else and backroom deals were a matter of course. Black-market goods. Under-the-table payoffs. Outright bribes and middle-of-the-night raids had been the way to get things done in the old Soviet Union. Grizzly Cove, however, was something completely different.
Everything here was above board and out in the open. For the most part. That’s the way the Alpha wanted it, and among the shifters here, that’s the way it was. They still had to keep their existence secret from the rest of the world. Humanity wasn’t ready to discover a whole colony of bear shifters in their midst. Everyone agreed on that. Humans weren’t comfortable with the concept of magic, unless it was just a fairy story for children with no teeth.
The idea that shifter wolves, bears, raptors, big cats and creatures of all kinds lived among them while wearing their human forms would be a tough one to swallow for most humans. The rest of the supernatural world would probably be even harder to deal with. Vampires. Fey. And many other kinds of magical folk.
Then, there were the evil ones. The leviathan chief among them at the moment. Humans would totally freak out if they knew what was in the water, ready to terrorize the coastline and all the ships at sea. Sadly, while the leviathan was bad enough, Peter knew there were tales of much worse things that could be unleashed by the Destroyer if the worst should happen and she returned to the mortal realm.
He was getting ahead of himself, though. The mission, right now, was to help Mellie in any way he could to push the leviathan farther from shore. According to her clairvoyant grandmother, both of the Ricoletti sisters had a role to play in protecting the cove from the creature and its minions. The older sister had already done her part in a spectacular fashion. Rarely had Peter seen such powerful wards. That they were permanent wards, meant to stand the tests of time, was an unexpected bonus.
Now, it was Mellie’s turn, and she was having serious problems coming up with the right ingredients for her potion. She’d discussed her challenges with Peter perhaps more than any other bear. He got the impression she hadn’t even confided in her sister how much the failures to date bothered her.
He wasn’t sure why she was so at ease with him that she was willing to appeal to him for help—as she’d done when she was looking for a komodo dragon. She’d surprised him with that request. It wasn’t every day someone came into his butcher shop and asked for a live giant lizard.
He prided himself on supplying exotic meats for those carnivores in town who liked variety, but he wasn’t exactly a specialist in sourcing exotic animals. Not live ones, anyway. That Mellie had come to him for help touched something deep inside.
If he were honest with himself, he’d been attracted to her from almost the first moment they’d met. He’d tried to stay away except for those memorable times when the Alpha had asked him to watch over her safety while Urse was doing her spell work. Peter had tried hard to fight the attraction. He wasn’t a good man. He’d seen and done too much in his life to be deserving of a woman as pure of heart and innocent of the world as Mellie.
She was a breath of fresh air in his somewhat jaded existence. She was everything that was good and clean in a world that was too often tainted by dishonesty and deception. He liked her. A lot. Probably too much for her own good, but he was finding it hard to stay away from her.
The self-imposed prohibition on seeking her out had been shattered when she’d come to him, and now, everything seemed to have changed. He couldn’t stay away if he tried.
That didn’t mean he wanted every nosy bear in the cove to know what was going on. If anything, he was trying to protect her from the inevitable teasing and probing questions. He was taking his cues from her behavior. She hadn’t told her sister about the lizard, so Peter extrapolated from that the idea that she didn’t want everyone knowing—not even her sister—that she was seeking his help again.
Moreover, Peter didn’t really want the whole dragon-blood story going around the cove. The fact that his family line had once held a dragon shifter was a closely held secret in the family. He’d trusted Mellie with the information, but he didn’t want everybody to know. Dragon blood had been a curse in the old days. He wasn’t sure what it might mean now, but the fact that he’d never run across anyone, in all his travels, who claimed to be a dragon or even to have dragon blood meant that it was probably better to keep such things under his hat. He didn’t need anything else to put an even bigger target on his back.
He’d escaped the Soviets with enough of a price on his head. Although it had been many years now, such things didn’t just disappear because time passed. That was the reason he had never returned to Mother Russia. He didn’t want to stir up trouble for himself, or for what remained of his family who still lived there—particularly his babushka. While she might still be a very scary bear, his grandmother was definitely getting older, and he didn’t want to bring trouble to her doorstep.
Speaking of doorsteps… Peter took himself into the bookstore and deliberately let the little bell above the door ring out his presence. It wouldn’t do to sneak up on Mellie. She might turn him into a frog or something.
The humorous thought brought a smile to his face as Mellie looked up at him. She was behind the small counter, working on the computer, but she smiled when she saw him.
“Peter,” she greeted him warmly. “Thanks for coming. Give me a sec, and I’ll close up.”
Peter waited while Mellie went over to the door he’d just come in and flipped the sign from OPEN to CLOSED, then locked the deadbolt. He didn’t particularly approve of the single lock on the front door, but it wasn’t his place to critique security arrangements for the bookstore, no matter how much his inner bear growled at him to do so.
When she returned to him, she invited him into the backroom of the store where the sisters unpacked inventory, kept supplies, and had a private area for any behind-the-scenes work that needed to be done. This was also where the staircase that led up to the apartment above the shop was located.
He followed her upstairs, doing his best not to stare at her butt. It was hard not to focus on the delectable view. Hell, he was getting hard, just walking behind her as they went upstairs. This surely must be a form of torture reserved just for him.
Try as he might, Peter couldn’t get his mind off her. Kissing her. Licking her all over. Making love with her long into the night.
But it couldn’t be. Not now. Not tonight. Maybe never. There was just too much separating them. Years. Life experiences. Magic.
Compared to him, Mellie was almost like a child. Peter had already lived most of a century while Mellie wasn’t even thirty yet. He’d left his homeland and participated in wars and conflicts all over the globe. Mellie had left her home in San Francisco for the first time last year when she and her sister had moved to Grizzly Cove, just a few hundred miles up the coast.
He knew all this. Knew how innocent she was in comparison to him. But he’d be damned if he could stop himself from thinking about her in what were probably inappropriate ways, though it didn’t feel that way. His brain told him one thing while his heart—and lower regions—told a completely different story.
They entered the apartment, and Peter closed and locked the door to downstairs behind him. It only made sense. He wasn’t locking them in together so much as he was locking everyone else—and anything that might somehow threaten her—out. At least, that’s what he told himself.
It sure felt like he was locking them together in the tiny space of the apartment, and his inner bear, which usually bristled at confined spaces, was growling happily in his mind. It appeared it liked confined spaces just fine when Mellie was with him. Contrary bear.
“Thanks for agreeing to try this. I honestly don’t know what to try next if this doesn’t work.” Mellie was chatting as she led the way through her apartment toward the front of the building where she’d turned her sister’s old room into a potion room, complete with beakers and flasks in all shapes and sizes, along with a portable open-flame grill and various other equipment for her craft.
She had the burner set up near a window, and extra air-handling equipment had been added to help keep the smells down to a minimum, but overall, there was a surprisingly pleasant herbal quality to the air in the room that pleased Peter’s sensitive nose. All traces of the earlier disastrous experiments had been wiped away. No acrid scent of burnt grasses and flowers remained from what had happened the night before.
“You cleaned all this last night?” Peter asked, somewhat incredulously.
He’d expected to have to help her get things back in order before they could begin, but that was clearly not the case. Mellie might sometimes act like the irresponsible younger sister, but she wasn’t. In fact, judging by the evidence here, along with things he had noticed when he couldn’t help but watch her, she was every bit as industrious and conscientious as her older sister.
“First rule of potion-making: clean up after yourself. You can’t brew a pure potion with contaminated materials or vessels. Everything has to be as clean as possible, and blessed in the light of the Goddess’s moon, if possible. The new moon can work also—especially when beginning a new task, as I am here. So, last night was a particularly good time to purify everything so I could start fresh.”
Peter was impressed. He didn’t know all that much about witchcraft, though he didn’t hold any prejudices against Mellie’s calling. His babushka had occasionally resorted to consulting the ved’ma in their village. He remembered that witch fondly. She’d always had kind word for him and occasionally a sweet treat she’d baked in her kitchen. She had also been good friends with his grandmother and was known as a friend to the Clan.
Very few humans had ever been afforded such an honor, so the old magical woman had stood out in his mind. A good memory of an otherwise difficult childhood.
“We’re actually lucky Urse married and moved out. She can do her spell work and dream up her chants pretty much anywhere, but a potion strega has certain needs for sacred space—or at least space that she can consecrate and keep clean. Urse understood, thankfully, when I asked if we could turn her old room in to a potion chamber. Many siblings would not have been so accommodating.” Mellie talked idly as she reached for various components off the shelves she had installed along one wall of the room.
She had jars filled with all kinds of things—most of which, Peter couldn’t easily identify just from looking. Most of the jars held dried bits of grasses or flowers, at his best guess. A few held liquids of different colors.
Peter watched as she uncovered something in a large silver bowl. Immediately, the scent of the mixture in the bowl reached his nostrils. It was a potent combination of different herbs and other substances. He peered over her shoulder and realized that everything had been pulverized so that the contents of the bowl was a sort of gritty paste.
“I prepped the base of the potion last night so we don’t have too much more to do here. Just add a few wet ingredients and then see if your blood is enough to kick-start the magic,” she told him, placing the bowl on the workbench situated in front of the window.
He noted a cut crystal pitcher filled with sparkling water also waited on the countertop. There was a mortar and pestle, along with a few sprigs of what smelled like fresh cut pine twigs with needles. Several different varieties he recognized from the woods around the cove.
“I collected these last night. The idea is to unite the water and the land in solidarity against evil.” She turned toward the window, which faced the setting sun over the waters of the cove, and held each twig aloft, murmuring a prayer before she took three needles from each kind of twig she’d collected and put them in the bowl of her mortar and pestle set. She then began grinding them into a paste as she spoke blessings over them.
Peter wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do, so he just stood quietly and watched, adding his own silent prayers that this would work. He’d hate to see disappointment on her face again. He wasn’t all that confident that his blood would do anything special—his connection to his dragon ancestor was thin, at best—but he wanted Mellie to be happy. This potion thing was putting a lot of stress on her and had stolen the joy from the young woman who’d been so carefree and jovial just a few months before.
He wanted Mellie to be that way again. He’d do anything in his power to help that come about. It was his mission. Inside, his bear agreed with that thought, adding the beast’s sense of approval for his human half’s plans.