Mom strolls into the house. “They don’t know we’re witches.”

“We do now.” Sin, shirtless with blood-stained gauze wrapped around his ribs, hair tussled from sleep and a lot of sex, shows himself in the hallway.

Mom’s step falters. Her eyes dart from Sin’s face, to his partly unzipped pants, then, with a tilt of her head, to me. She has quickly and correctly assessed the situation.

“Good morning, Mrs. White.” Willow calls from the kitchen. “Can I fix you some breakfast?”

The hazel eyes I inherited roll to the ceiling. “No, thank you.” She manages a polite reply despite her irritation.

“I’m so glad you’re here.” I smile at Mom and hug her. She’s shaking.

“Momma,” I whisper.

“Shhh.” She rubs my back. She releases me and steps back. “It’s been thirty-five years.” She slips her coat off her shoulders.

Her eyes rove her childhood foyer, lighting on the hall trees by the front door. She puts her faux fur on a hook before moving to the macramé dreamcatcher hanging in the hall. She moves forward to touch the black feathery fringe.

“Your great-grandmother and I made this,” she mumbles to me.

The animosity in Sin’s eyes fades.

“Well, I strung the beads.” She smirks while touching an oversized turquoise one. “She tied the knots.”

“Can I get you a cup of coffee, Liz?” Sin begins to turn away then turns back. “Or should I call you Mrs. White?”

“How about Mom?” Willow snickers from the kitchen. A small giggle comes from Madeline, too.

Mom blanches, her gaze coming right to me.

“That’s so premature.” I reassure her and close the door.

“Liz is fine.” With wary steps, Mom moves farther into the house. “And yes to the coffee. Just a touch of sugar, please.”

“Comin’ right up.” Sin goes.

I link arms with my Mom. Giddy, I raise my shoulders and smile.

I’m so so happy she’s here. I have a million questions for her. We follow Sin to the kitchen.

Willow wipes her hands on her apron. “Willow Wilde.” She holds out her hand.

Mom’s lips press together.

“Don’t judge us by our elders.” Willow’s hand stays out.

After a moment of thought, Mom nods and shakes Willow’s hand.

“Opal’s granddaughter?” Mom asks.

Willow nods.

“Sinclair Wilde.” He hands Mom a mug. “Grandson.” He dips his head.

Practicing a posture I taught her just minutes ago, Madeline rises from her seat at the breakfast table. Her form is almost perfect.

Mom’s the scout, but even I can see that the girl has nature talent to develop.

The girl ruins it, though, by strutting in awkward hip-forward steps.

Sin’s head tilts at the same time his jaw drops. Willow smirks.

I just smile. We’ll work on her walk. Mostly likely, though, runway is not going to be Madeline’s niche.

Mom does indeed smile at Madeline. And at me, impressed, I think, that I found a protégé.

Butterscotch purrs and rubs a greeting on Mom’s legs. Mom picks her up for a cuddle and pet.

“The rest of breakfast is served.” Willow serves up four plates piled high with potatoes, eggs, steak and toast.

“I’m not hungry.” Madeline refuses her plate.

“Since when?” Willow’s brows pull together.

Mom takes Madeline’s hand and pats it. “Would you like to know a little secret for managing your weight?”

Madeline eagerly nods.

“Sit.” Mom indicates the chair.

The girl obeys the order.

Mom puts the plate in front of her.

“What do you think is the most nutritious thing on your plate?”

“Um.” Madeline studies it. “The potatoes?”

Mom shakes her head. “Eggs.”

“So, I should eat the whites?” Madeline cuts off a bite.

“All of it. The white has the protein for your skin, hair and nails. But the yolks have the vitamin D which is essential to absorb calcium which in turn—”

“Promotes bone growth.” Madeline finishes with a smile.

Mom nods, happily in her element. “At each meal, especially formal dinners, eat the most nutritious items first.”

“Potatoes are nutritious,” Willow defends.

“Especially deep fried and covered in chili cheese.” Sin winks at me.

Mom draws back her head, horrified contempt in her expression.

My body has a mixed response — taste buds water, but stomach lurches.

“This.” Mom reaches for Madeline’s toast and mine. “Is big burly man food.” She puts the liberally buttered slices on Sin’s plate.

He smiles.

I pout.

Willow stops mid-bite of her toast. Slowly, she lays it to the side of her plate.

“The steak is excellent, Willow.”

“Thanks.” She pushes the food around her plate.

I sigh, but put a dainty bite in my mouth. Knowing Madeline is watching me, I want to set a good example and not eat too fast.

What I really want is to inhale it. And lots of butter. I eye the toast on Sin’s plate. I want that butter.

Food. It’s love-hate for most women, I think. Not just models.

We fall silent, eating.

Mom studies the dishes in the hutch behind the table. After a while, she goes to the kitchen to refill her mug. Reaching for the sugar, she pauses for a second. It’s one of those old-timey dispensers with a flap over a spout.

“So, um.” Madeline swallows a bite. “You’re witches.”

Mom leans a hip on the counter and frowns at me.

It’s a long story, I try to convey with my eyes.

Later, I’ll tell her all about what happened last night. I turn to Madeline with the standard response on the tip of my tongue. And I stop.

Denial is the standard response. Has been for centuries.

Centuries.

For years, generations and generations, we’ve been taught that secrecy and denial are crucial for our survival.

But it’s not. Denial didn’t save one witch from being killed during the Burning Times. It doesn’t stop modern day hunters, either.

“Yes,” I say and keep eating like it’s nothing.

Mom’s mouth ovals just before her lips press together.

Madeline cuts off a tiny piece of her steak. “Uncle Harding says it’s bullshit.”

“Watch your mouth,” Sin says.

“That’s what he said.” Madeline’s indignant. “And you cuss all the time.”

She’s got a point. Willow and I both raise an eyebrow at him in punctuation.

“Is the energy from the sun bullshit? Is photosynthesis bullshit? No, they’re not. And neither are Mother Earth and the phases of her moon. Are neap tides bullshit?” I say all in a rush.

Well, this is new — defending the legitimacy of witchcraft. I’m surprised at the depth of my indignation.

“Neap tides?” Madeline asks.

“Google it.”

“Google the etymology of lunatic, too.” Mom drinks her fresh coffee and wanders into the hallway.

The two bear shifters glance at one another. With that look, I gather that the moon affects them in some way.

Mom sips and pauses at the first of the family photos lining both sides of the hall.

I go to her and wait until she’s ready. She knows what I want. Details.

Pointing at a family portrait of two young kids, she starts. “That’s me and your Uncle Earl.”

“I figured.”

“That’s years and years before we moved to Colorado.”

“New Mexico?”

Mom nods. “Santa Fe.”

“Why’d you move to Colorado?” Sin asks from the table.

Mom gets an attitude. “None of your business.” She moves down to another portrait.

“Gramma thinks witchcraft is how you got the old owners to sell,” Madeline says.

“Mads,” Willow hisses. She ducks her head and shakes it at her sister.

Mom laughs, but doesn’t answer. She just moves to the next set of pictures.

Down the hall we go, stopping at portraits and grouped collages of snapshots. Then we turn and come back, perusing the photos on the other side.

Grandparents. Great-grandparents. Great aunts and uncles. Distant cousins of hers in New Mexico. And, of course, a lot of pictures of Mom and Uncle Earl as kids.

Mom’s photos range from infant to teenager. I notice that Earl’s only go to about the age of twelve or thirteen. They stopped taking pictures of him when they came to Rough Mountain.

“Why—” I turn to ask Mom about it. I stop when I see the tears in her eyes.

She’s staring at a photo of herself and a young man all dressed up. Mom’s wearing the gaudiest wrist corsage I’ve ever seen. I’m thinking it’s her senior prom. The guy has whiskers under his nose. I look back at Mom. It’s the young man in the photo that has her attention.

One tear escapes.

Abruptly, she swipes at it, wraps her free arm around herself, and moves to the big window in the great room. There, she stares out — at nothing.

Sin meets my eyes and shrugs a question.

I shrug back.

Willow moves, quickly stacking the empty plates. “I’ll wrap the leftovers for later.”

“Thanks,” I say to her.

She clears her throat. “And then we need to go. Gramma called a family meeting.”

Sin’s eyes narrow.

“You, too.” Willow insists. She turns on the water at the sink.

“You should go.” I nod at him.

Arm still holding herself, Mom turns from the window. “Yes, you should. My daughter and I have some things to discuss.”

* * *

With the Wildes gone, Mom puts on a fresh pot of coffee.

“It kind of late for breakfast isn’t it?” She flips the on switch.

While the coffee brews, we move to the couch. I tell her what happened last night — my ritual, the shifters. I don’t share what Sin and I did. None of it. Those are my memories to cherish.

I finish with a question about bear shifters. “How long does it take them to heal? I’m worried about Sin’s wounds.”

Mom shrugs. “I don’t know much about the bears other than they’re pricks.”

“Momma.” I chastise her and ask the question of the century. “Why do you hate them so much?”

The coffee maker beeps.

She unwraps her legs and stands.

“C’mon. Every time I’ve tried to ask about your past—”

She goes to the kitchen.

“See!” I call after her.

“The coffee’s done!” she hurls back.

I sit and wait, knowing it’s futile to follow and hound her — about anything. She takes her sweet time pouring and fixing our cups. On her way back, her eyes focus on mine.

“The Spanish Peaks region has become a refuge for shifters. All kinds of ‘em.” She hands me a cup and sits with hers.

After three sips, Mom leans back into the cushions. Deep breath, her shoulders relax and she looks at me. “Your Uncle Earl wasn’t born with the gift.”

She means witchcraft.

“Mom and Dad were thrilled, of course.”

They wouldn’t have to go through the cruelty of stripping him.

“Then, he hit puberty.” Mom shakes her head and closes her eyes.

“What, Momma? What happened to him then?”

“Witchcraft came to us through the French side of the family. Charette was your grandmother’s maiden name. She married your grandfather, Jerome Crowe, thinking he was ruck.”

I’m taken aback. A ruck and a witch? That wasn’t even done back then, was it? Witches only ever married wolves or stripped warlocks. It was safer than living with someone clueless about special talents.

“Dad thought he was ruck, too.” Mom sips from her mug. “He wasn’t. He carried a latent shifter gene that your Uncle Earl inherited.”

“What?” My jaw drops to my chest.

“Earl was a crow shifter.”

She goes on to tell me that he developed symptoms like feathers sprouting randomly on his back or his foot spontaneously morphing in the middle of the day.

He shifted fully for the first time on a full moon. It wasn’t a purposeful or controlled changed, either.

“That scared the hell out of everyone.” She swirls her remaining coffee. “That’s when Mom and Dad started looking for help.”

“And they found out about Spanish Peaks,” I surmise out loud.

“Yeah. From Dad’s second cousin, once removed.” Mom nods. “Earl needed privacy and space. The city, even a small one like Santa Fe isn’t safe for a chaotic shifter.” She takes another drink of coffee. “That’s what these people are, Fallon. Chaotic shifters. They are not at all like wolves. Many of them have limited control over their animals.”

Living out here in the middle of nowhere makes sense for folks like that.

Mom’s attention drifts to the prom photo.

I go to get it. “Tell me about him.” I lift it off the wall.

“His name was Julian.” Her focus is on his face as I sit back down with the frame in my lap. “My first love.”

More than first, I gather. From the obvious heartbreak in her glassy eyes, I’d say he was the love of her life.

My parents were in love, I guess, when they got married and had me. It didn’t last, though. They split up when I was a toddler. Mom dated over the years. A few of the suitors got serious about her. One even proposed. She said no and sent him on his way.

Now I know why.

Was. She said was.

“Mom, what happened to Julian?”

Mom sighs a sigh for the ages.

She sets aside the mug and stands to stare out the picture window. I get that she’s forcing her vocal chords to work.

“He was murdered,” she chokes out.

I gasp.

“His alter-ego was a mountain lion. I wasn’t supposed to know that.” She shrugs and turns back to face me. Tears trickle down her face.

“The shifters around these mountains are extremely secretive. Had you not revealed their true nature last night, you would never have known. I wouldn’t have if Julian hadn’t been honest with me.”

I think Sin would’ve told me. Eventually.

A pleasant memory flits across Mom’s expression. “We were going to get married after graduation. As far as his people knew, I was a normal. That’s their term for ruck,” she explains.

“Julian made the mistake of telling other people about our—” a sob takes the rest of her sentence.

She hugs herself tight — grief must be ripping her to pieces. A steady flow of tears drips from her chin.

Oh, Momma.

I go to her, rub her back and cry with her — just like she did for me after Butch.

My Mom is the most stoic person I know. I’ve never seen her cry like this.

After a while, her tears ebb.

“The shifter community made Julian choose. Them or me.” Her grief turns to rage. “He chose me.”

That’s as it should be.

“And he died for it.”

“What?” I breathe.

“They banished him. All the shifters — lion, bear, fox. All of them, shunned him. His friends wouldn’t speak to him. He got kicked off the football team, lost his part-time job at the lumber yard.”

Geez.

“Even his family. Julian’s own family kicked him out of the house and disowned him. He wasn’t even eighteen yet. Dad let him stay in the bunkhouse.”

That’s horrible.

What kind of creatures do that to their offspring?

Marvin and Fillmore’s kind, that’s who.

Their hatred of me last night was undeniable.

“Julian was devastated,” Mom continues. “We went to the next elder meeting. Together.”

“Was Opal an elder then?”

“She was a fifty-something. Not quite old enough.” She shakes her head no. “She was there, though. We found out later that she was with those who turned Julian in.”

So, Opal’s a tattletale.

“What about Marvin and Arthur?”

“Yeah. They were there with the others.” She nods faster. “Only Arthur voted to reverse the banishment. The rest wouldn’t even listen to us. Threw us out of the meeting.”

Memories take her gaze to another time and place.

“One night, Julian and I were at the bunkhouse together.” Mom’s voice is barely there. “When they arrived.”

“They?” I hold my breath, not wanting to hear the answer.

I know in my bones that this truth she’s about to reveal is going to ruin everything. I brace myself for it, steel my psyche to stay centered and not fall apart on me.

“Vigilantes. Shifters of all shapes and sizes who took it upon themselves to mete out justice on a lion who fell in love with a normal.”

Flashes of last night cycle through my mind — of Sin defending me, of Fillmore and Harding slicing Sin’s bear without remorse. The foxes shredding his shoulders, angling for his throat.

They all ganged up on him.

Had Mother Earth not granted my request —

I swallow hard.

“They ripped him from my arms,” Mom says.

They ripped open his ribcage.

“I screamed and screamed for help.” Mom closes her eyes and shakes her head so slowly. “No one came.”

Opal just stood there last night.

Giant tears roll unchecked down her blotchy face. The collar of her silk blouse catches the drops in big splotches.

“I never saw Julian, again.” She swallows and opens her eyes. “Not alive anyway.”

I don’t know how long we stand like that looking out the window seeing absolutely nothing.

What if Sin chooses me?

He would. I know he would. The way he looks at me. The way he made love to me. My heart — filled with the tender possibilities we started last night — breaks in huge shards.

Mom recovers first — spent of her tears, at least for now. She sniffles and clears her throat.

“Lord have mercy.” Her fake southern drawl comes out. It’s her way of dealing with embarrassment. She swipes at her face with a tissue, smearing mascara all over. “I’m going to clean up.”

I nod. “My makeup remover is in the master bath.”

“Thank you, honey.” She hugs me tight.

Then, she grabs her purse and goes down the hall.

I turn back to the window. This time I see the panorama. It felt like home. It really did.

Uncle Earl’s prized Suri dot the nearest meadow. Buck and Roo lounge nearby, covertly keeping a sharp eye out.

Two hundred mommies and, come spring, two hundred babies. Oh, I really wanted to see those curly haired babies.

I scan the vista one last time.

The Spanish Peaks.

Mount Mestas.

And Rough Mountain.

Sixty-five hundred acres.

What the hell was I thinking?

* * *

I roll my carry-on through the wide corridor, my heels clicking in time with the luggage wheels on the tile. The orange lights of the restaurant are right around corner.

DeSoto is already there. He’s seated at a window table. I roll right past the hostess, ignoring her attempt at a greeting.

“Fallon.” DeSoto stands as I approach. His striking dark eyes light up with a smile.

“Thank you for meeting me on such short notice, Mr. DeSoto.”

He smiles. “Please, I’d like to be friends. Call me Seneca.”

“Seneca.” I repeat.

I can’t return his smile. I just can’t make my facial muscles do it.

The dining room is mostly empty — one couple talking quietly in the corner — so I take off my sunglasses.

“Oh my. Is everything all right?” His elegant smile is replaced with elegant concern.

No.

I nod my head feverishly, refusing the threat of tears for the millionth time.

“It will be.”

As soon as this is over. As soon as I’m in the air. As soon as I’m back in Italy. As soon as I’m out of Sin’s life.

I sit just as a waiter approaches. “Nothing for me.” I wave him away and turn back to Seneca. “Do you have the papers?”

He reaches into his designer suit jacket — a Brunello this time. He extracts a packet from an interior pocket and unfolds the pages.

I somewhat rudely snatch them from him. An elegant eyebrow arches.

“I’m sorry. I don’t have much time.”

“Understood.” He nods.

I drove like a mad woman to catch this flight — the last today from Denver to Italy. Typically a three hour drive from La Veta to Denver, yet I did it in two and half. I remember none of it.

“This is only the first step to begin challenging your late uncle’s will,” Seneca explains. “These documents give my attorneys permission to proceed on your behalf.”

“Perfect.” I scan through them quickly and dig a pen from my bag. “Here?” I indicate the bottom line.

“Yes,” he says.

I quickly swirl my signature. Lift the corners and do it three times more. I push the papers back to Seneca. “Thank you.”

“We’ll be in touch when it’s time for the next step.” He refolds and re-pockets the papers.

“Please go through my mother for the rest of the sale. I’ll be out of country and she has a financial power of attorney.”

He squints, but nods. “As you wish.”

The airport speaker crackles on. “British Airways Flight 5831 nonstop to Milan now boarding first class passengers at Gate A30,” a pleasant female voice says.

“That’s me.” I stand.

Seneca stays me with a hand at my elbow.

“Are you sure this is what you want to do?” His eyes scan mine.

No.

“Absolutely.”

But I have no choice.

The friendly voice repeats the announcement for my flight.

“It’s for the best.”

There’s something on the tip of Seneca’s tongue. In the end, he just sighs and draws back his hand from my arm.

“Have a safe journey, Fallon.”

I replace my sunglasses and grab the handle of my carry-on.

I go numb.

I can’t feel anything.

Not as I say goodbye to Seneca. Not as I walk out of the restaurant. Not in the corridor to the gate.

Not while the agent scans my ticket. Not down the boarding bridge. Not while the flight attendant stows my carry-on. Not when I sit. Not when I buckle in.

Roni never feels anything.

That’s her niche.