Chapter 5
“Did you get it?”
Brandy had just closed the front door behind her and sagged bonelessly against the heavy wood when Rita hustled into the vestibule. “I got it.” The hairpin felt permanently bonded to her fist. Even tighter than her grip was the threat of tears in the back of her throat.
What was that about? And why had she thought about bonding? Never mind the maddeningly fantastical (and maybe utterly wrong) stories she and her sisters had managed to unearth about shapeshifters—no way was she getting entangled with any man. Or bear. Or whatever.
She pushed away from the door, away from the yearning to run back to the truck. “Where is he?”
Gin was peeping through the curtained window in the parlor that opened off the vestibule. “He’s just sitting there.”
“I’m not talking about Mac,” Brandy snapped.
“Oh. Just as well since he’s pulling away now. And I think he left a streak of rubber on the road.” Gin let the curtain fall back into place. “Not that he used a rubber last time.”
Brandy didn’t care, not about Mac’s retreat, not about her betrayal.
She repeated that several times as she stared down at the crumpled silk flower.
Balancing on one crutch, Rita plucked the flower from Brandy’s slack hand. “Aster’s fine,” she said with her perfect equanimity. “He’s in his crib.”
“Cage,” Gin said sharply. “He’s in his cage. Just in case you were maybe feeling bad about what you did.”
Brandy glared at both her sisters in turn. Which wasn’t fair. She shouldn’t get mad at them just because Rita was calm and Gin was honest and she herself wasn’t feeling either of those. “Where’s Aunt Tilda?”
“Her friends were here when we got back from the bar. So they hit the road.” Gin ambled over to peer at the bloodied flower Rita had taken. “They’ve got a ways to go before the solstice. I hope I’m still that excited about road trips when I’m seventy.”
“And she knows you aren’t comfortable with the others around.” Rita arched one mildly disapproving brow at Brandy. “Anyway, she wasn’t sure if you’d be home tonight.”
Brandy grimaced. “Where else would I be?”
Rita and Gin glanced at each other and then at her with identical shrugs.
With a strangled swear word, she kicked off her wobbly heels and stomped past her sisters toward the narrow stairs. Each creaking tread up to the second floor was like another complaint about what a terrible person she was: a selfish niece, a needy sister, a drunken cocktease who should be brought up on assault charges.
Not to mention a bad mother.
At the smallest bedroom, she eased the door open—silently, thank heavens and WD40—and slipped into the comforting gloam.
She followed the whuffle of breaths to the slatted enclosure in the corner. It was a crib. Oh, she was lying to herself now. It was a cage. Angling her arm between the bars, she rested her hand on the small, sprawled shape inside.
All the tears and aches and swear words in her vanished at the hump of Aster’s butt under her hand, her love swelling until it pushed out every other thought. His stubby limbs went all directions, as if sleep had caught him mid-gambol and dumped him on his nose. Which it probably had. He was a wild little boy.
A wild little bear cub.
Her breath caught so hard it seemed to crack her chest, exposing all the love in her heart to the fears that had haunted her since her beloved son first shifted.
What if he never shifted back? Or worse, what if he shifted uncontrollably, neither bear nor man? What would happen to him in a world that still had trouble accepting the differences between humans, much less the differences between human and shifter? She knew better than most how hard it was to be different.
She bit her lip to stifle a sob of despair. Though she would’ve given her life to protect him, she hadn’t saved him from this sneaking wild animal attack. Everything she’d tried—semi-patiently giving him time to shift again, letting him whiff some anti-bear spray (and hadn’t that been fun to hunt down in NYC?), showing him his favorite video game that wouldn’t work without thumbs—had failed. Now her beautiful boy was lost in the beast.
Though she hadn’t made a sound, he must have sensed her distress. With a muffled whimper, he rolled into a tight ball, trapping her hand between the curl of his furry belly and his short snout with his black button nose. The puffs of his breaths feathered against her wrist, and her own racing pulse echoed his agitation.
“Shhh, Mama’s here,” she whispered, more to herself than to him since he was a heavy sleeper. “It’s okay. You’re okay.” She kept murmuring nonsense until his taut little body relaxed again.
Except it wasn’t nonsense, dammit. She couldn’t expose him to clueless human doctors, but she wouldn’t lose him to a vicious animal. No matter what she had to do, she was going to make it all right.
She might not be a mama bear, but she was a bear’s mama. At least until she found the cure.
She smoothed his fur, the plush texture midway between finger-length strands of Mac’s hair and the bristle of his stubble, and the same rich, dark color except for some paler patches around his neck, chest, and belly like her own hair. If she’d known Macmahon Montero was a bear shifter, if she’d understood the power of the mating season and the spring full moon that drove the changes in their blood, she’d never have slept with him.
If she’d never stopped in Angels Rest…she wouldn’t have Aster.
She would get her little boy back.
One more caress—more for herself than him—and she straightened. Though she hated leaving him in the cage/crib, he sometimes woke in the night, and his teeth and claws could do a surprising amount of damage. And he must never get out where he might be seen, not by people, not by other shifters. She’d check on him again, but first…
She marched downstairs, then down another flight to the basement.
Her sisters were in the spellatorium.
They didn’t call it that, of course. Aunt Tilda just called it a workroom, as if that hid the fact she did magic down there. As if an otherwise unsuspecting person would look at the herb bundles hanging from the rafters, the baffling array of glass jars and canopic urns and padlocked treasure chests, the actual real-live bubbling cauldron in the middle of the bare earth floor, and say, “Oh, so you’re really into potpourri and canning?”
Nah, it was obvious: The Wick women were witches.
Not Brandy, though. After too many untethered years skipping from town to town as neighbors got weirded out by strange noises in the night and inexplicable smells at all hours, she’d walked away from all this. Or run, actually, all the way to a nice, normal, numbers job in New York City. Until she’d realized she was pregnant, of course.
She crossed her arms low over her belly, wishing she had a sweater to counter the cool basement air. Maybe a big denim jacket…
She shoved away the regretful thought. She wouldn’t waver in her resolve, no matter what. Mac might be Aster’s father, but neither of them could ever know it.
Witches from her line never initiated men into the circle. Even when a witch chose to risk the tricky path of bringing a child—always a daughter—into the legacy of magic, she knew she’d be doing it without a man around. Uh, other than for the obvious part.
Brandy getting knocked up so easily after one sexual encounter, and having a boy, had greatly interested the circle council. Since she’d been greatly uninterested in sharing the specifics (they might be witches, but they were still women so it wasn’t that hard to figure out!) she’d shut down their nosey nonsense with a quickness. But she had to get Aster back before people, bears, or witches started asking questions she couldn’t answer, to keep him safe from the secrets that had plagued her own childhood.
It was this place messing her up and bringing back painful memories. Growing up in one small town after another, always keeping ahead of the whispers, she’d renounced the circle to live her own life. Even though the spellatorium was clean and well-ordered (Aunt Tilda said a messy workroom meant messy spells; not so different from Brandy’s own spreadsheets) a hint of that old chaos seemed to lurk in the shadows.
Or maybe that was just the shed dragon skin coiled in the corner. Because a witches’ circle might be smart, strong, and shipshape, but magic itself was untamed. As wild as a wild animal, as wild as the love that made her heart a monster to protect her little boy.
She grimaced, her teeth clenching hard enough to grind.
Oh wait, that was just the sound of Rita’s mortar and pestle. “I don’t need you for this part,” her sister said from over by the heavy butcher block island. “I know you don’t like it down here, and you’ve done everything you need to do.”
She hadn’t done everything, though, had she? Or her son wouldn’t be a bear.
Cautiously, averting her gaze from the blurping sludge coming to a slow boil in the cauldron—she did not want to know—she joined Rita at the altar that had been in their family for generations. She shuddered to think what sort of history the inscribed hollow block had seen.
Gin was perched on a stool at the end of the counter, carving at a small piece of wood with a very large, very shiny, obviously very sharp knife. Practically a sword. Probably part of that sketchy history.
Brandy had sworn to rescue Aster from the beast that had trapped him, and if that meant reclaiming at least part of her Wick heritage too, so be it.
“Did I get enough?” She peered down into the bowl where Rita was mixing bits of who-knew-what with the remnants of the hairpin flower. “The red silk made it hard to see his blood.”
Gin snorted. “Probably a good thing, considering how queasy you get.”
“Not everyone has to like the darker arts just because you do,” Rita said mildly.
“But Bry doesn’t like any of it.” Gin flicked a glance at her, sharper almost than the knife. “Never has. Never will.”
Brandy made a face at her sister. Was Gin ever going to forgive her for wanting a real life, one that didn’t include newt eyes or whatever?
“There is no never,” Rita said. “And no always. It’s all balance, all a spinning wheel.”
This time, Brandy and Gin shared an eye roll.
“Must be so nice, knowing everything as you do,” Gin snarked.
“Yes. It’s delightful being the eldest,” Rita shot back. “Are you done playing with that?”
Gin tossed the knife across the table, and Rita caught it neatly by the blade, her graceful fingers pinching the symbol-etched iron to avoid the cutting edge.
Brandy closed her eyes. Aster must never see this, once she got him back. He’d been a daredevil from the moment he figured out how to crawl. She didn’t want him knife-juggling.
Oh god, what if he never had hands and fingers again, only paws? She caught back a despairing sob and turned it into a growl instead. “Quit playing around, you guys. This spell has to work.”
Because she didn’t think she’d have another shot at Mac. Whatever Rita might have learned from her studies with Aunt Tilda and the rest of the circle, Brandy knew she’d never see Mac again.
And to her dismay, she suspected she’d always remember his kiss.