by S. A. Ravel
"You know, if you wanted to go up there, I'm sure the Council could arrange it. Special circumstances, you know?"
Lia scoffed. "I asked the day they found her. The council said it was too dangerous."
Nora's mouth hung open for a moment in shock. Indignation quickly followed. "They can't be serious. You and Branden were almost family."
"Almost doesn't count, and anyway they might be right. Arcane Affairs just blew into town."
It was Nora's turn to drain her wine glass, though she refilled it immediately. "Cora's gonna love this. What the hell are they doing here?"
"Probably just to make sure it doesn't turn into a blood bath. Wouldn't want the humans to hear about a massacre."
"They can't seriously think--"
"Who knows, but unless I wanna get on their bad side, I'm better off leaving Branden to his clan."
Nora opened her mouth to speak, but hesitated. "Okay, I promise you I didn't come over here to say this, but I'm gonna say it anyway. If you had some backing--"
"No." She already knew where Nora was going.
She continued. "With a coven behind you and a Supreme fighting for you--"
"I don't need a coven."
"--the Council couldn't issue a blanket order like that."
Lia poured herself another glass of wine. "They wouldn't have to. The Supreme could do it for them."
"So join my coven. Cora would understand how important it is for you and Branden to grieve together."
"The last I heard Cora's coven has their thirteen."
Nora waved a dismissive hand. "Anya's been itching to join her husband's family coven anyway. She just doesn't want to leave us in a lurch."
"I'm good on my own, Nora."
The woman shook her head, her black curls bouncing with each turn of her neck. "You may be fine, hun, but you're not good. Nobody in your position would be."
Lia leaned back in her chair, taking another sip of the wine. Historically, the Harper women kept to the family coven, unless they joined their husband's. Lia's mother had married into the Harper clan, but she and her husband decided to raise their girls elsewhere. When he died, she moved to his hometown, Belmont.
Eventually Melora followed, and in the years when Lia had been across the country finding herself and falling in love with Parker, her aunt, mother, and sister had served as the last surviving Harper witches. It took the death of her mother for Lia to finally follow her sister home. At the time, she figured she would stay until Melora married and joined her husband's coven. Now she was the last one standing.
Nora was right, she wasn't good. She wasn't fine or anything resembling it.
"Mel was willing to be the last of us, what would it say about me if I couldn't hack it?"
Nora reached for her hand. "You don't have to be Mel."
"My answer is still no, Nora." There was one Harper still alive, and as long as she lived, the Harper coven would too. She wouldn't let it be swallowed because of her own fear.
She sighed and drained her glass of wine. "I thought it would be. I'll tell Cora, but you know everybody in town won't let it go as easily as she will."
The hairs on Lia's neck perked up. "I'm not a solitary witch."
In general, solitary life was an anomaly among their kind. Groups might be familial or familiar, depending on the part of the country, but very few paranormals went through life alone. Over the generations, it took on a stigma in Belmont, where covens were usually forged by blood. Even the few newcomers to the town banded together for strength and voice. Whether they caved to pressure and joined a coven or moved on when cold shoulders and suspicious glances got the best of them, solitaries didn't last in Belmont Cove.
"Not technically, but until you marry into a coven, everyone is going to see you as one." Nora topped off both of their glasses and set the empty bottle aside. "Buckle up, hun. Recruitment season is about to start."
4
The residents of Blackthorn Mountain and Belmont Cove tried their best to be self-contained, but they still needed services which a small town couldn't provide. For hospital care, government licenses, and a few other trappings of the modern world, they had to go to the county seat, Eureka, California.
According to Ward, Eureka was an hour north on the highway. The problem was getting to the highway. That route could only be taken at a crawl in the dark with him at the wheel. Parker, he insisted, would never make the trip alive.
Parker didn't bother arguing. It gave him a chance to get the Sheriff's story. Though he knew Blackthorn well, Belmont Cove had always been a mystery to Parker. Little towns like Belmont were easy to peg once you knew the stories.
Ward was a Belmont local, born and raised. The witch's blood skipped his generation. He was the only one of his siblings to stay in their hometown.
"Technically I'm the Sheriff of Blackthorn too," Ward said half an hour into the trip. "But we usually let them police themselves."
"Most places do," Parker said. "The Agency encourages it whenever possible. The less paperwork generated the less of a mess there is to clean up."
"That's you suits, the world's best janitors."
They rode the rest of the way in silence.
It was half past seven by the time they got to the medical examiner's office. The interior lights were dim except for one office in the back. Inside a middle-aged man and woman sat waiting for them. Parker could tell they were both shifters.
He glanced at Ward, expecting the usual ruffled feathers when witches and shifters were in enclosed spaces together. Ward just smiled and extended his hand to the man.
"Evening, Mike. This is Parker Kane, the Arcane Affairs agent."
Mike shook Parker's hand. "Mike Nestor, nice to meet ya. This is Maria James, she's a midwife that works with the clans in the area."
"Whoa...midwife?" Parker's heart plummeted to his gut.
Maria shook her head. "Probably shouldn't have led with that Mike."
Even Ward seemed unpleasantly stunned. "Tell me you're not gonna say what I think you're gonna say."
Mike sat down behind his desk. "I'm not, but you sure as hell aren't gonna like what I'm going to say. Something about Melora Harper isn't adding up."
"What are you talking about?" Parker tried to look calm, but his heart rate ramped up.
"I just had a chance to look over the file thoroughly. We handle cases from all over the country. It gets backed up and since Miss Harper didn't have anything obvious connecting her to paranormals--"
"You palmed her autopsy off on an assistant." Wade said. There was no judgement in his voice.
Mike nodded. "She made the call on cause of death and I signed off. Based on the report I had no reason not to. I didn't question it until I looked at the photos she took." He reached for the file and passed it to Parker.
He opened it and found a picture of a woman's leg, raised blisters covered an inch of her skin.
"Miss Harper must have gotten this shortly before she died. My parents were herbalists for my clan. I know a reaction to oleander sap when I see it."
Parker rubbed his head. "Are you telling me Melora Parker was poisoned?"
"Mike, you gotta be sure about this." Wade said, leaning forward in his chair.
"I'm running the tests now, but I'm sure she came in contact with it."
"That doesn't prove anything," Ward said. "Half the herbalists in Belmont probably grow oleander."
"Which is why I'm telling you instead of just amending her death certificate."
Maria spoke up. "Melora may have touched the sap right before she died, but she had been sick for months.
Parker leaned forward. "Are you sure?" Neither Branden nor Lia had mentioned Melora having an illness.
"She came to me a couple of months ago because she had dizziness and vomiting," Maria said. "At first she thought she was pregnant, but I told her she couldn't have been. I ran her blood twice to be sure, both times it came back negative. She was so disappointed."
The image
Parker had of Melora in his mind, formed from the scant details he had about her, morphed to accommodate the new information. No witch would go to a shifter midwife, unless she thought her baby might be part shifter. The disappointment was the first firm proof he had that Melora had loved Branden too.
"In small doses, I'm talking real tiny, oleander could have that effect. Bradycardia would explain the dizziness; the toxin would explain the nausea."
"Is that what killed her?" Ward asked.
Parker knew the answer Sheriff Ward really wanted. With Melora dead and her marriage off the table, relations between Belmont Cove and Blackthorn Mountain were unstable, even if nobody in town wanted to admit it. That would change overnight if they had to start a murder investigation. It could get bloody, regardless of what suspect they found.
Mike rubbed his face with his hands. "You want my official opinion? Miss Harper's cause of death was drowning. Unofficially, I expect to add acute nerium oleander toxicity. Which would change it from an accidental death to a homicide."
Heavy silence settled on the room. Belmont was a small town; Blackthorn was even smaller. They could try to keep things quiet, but the second they started asking questions, people would line up the dots. Paranormal communities lived and died by their ability to trust one another. Parker had seen unsolved crimes rip stable communities apart. The Lost Coast was anything but stable.
"It's your jurisdiction, Ward," Parker said. "That makes it your case. But if you want me to work with you on it--"
"Leave Belmont to me," Ward said. "I know how to handle the covens."
"You think it was someone in town?" Parker asked.
Ward shrugged. "I don't want to, but a shifter wouldn't have oleander on hand."
"In the interest of full disclosure, Agent, I think I should warn you to tread carefully around the clans and crews on Blackthorn." Maria said.
Parker raised an eyebrow. "Why is that, Miss James?"
Mike answered. "Look at the next photo."
Parker opened the file and flipped to the second photograph. His winced. His gut twisted. As bad as things were, he didn't think they could get worse, but he was wrong.
Branden.
The tears. The pale skin. Branden wasn't a man wracked with grief. He was a man destroyed by it.
"What?" Ward asked.
He turned the photograph, showing the Sheriff a photograph of Melora Harper's shoulder with a healing bite wound in her skin.
From the confusion in Ward's eyes, Parker knew that the Sheriff didn't understand what he was looking at, but the Coroner and the midwife did.
Maria was the only one who could put it into words. Four words that blew apart everything they knew about Melora Harper.
"It's a mating mark."
5
There was a time when Lia would have been out partying until sunrise. Moving to Belmont, a town that rolled up the sidewalks after dinner, changed all that. Most nights she fell asleep well before 10 pm, on the couch listening to the radio or in her bed reading. Most nights... until her sister died.
As much as she wanted to work through the night trying to contact Melora, she didn't have the energy. It was a bitter pill, having to stop for rest after she finally made contact, but one she planned to manage by sipping tea and watching the stars.
The tea was tepid, and a thick layer of clouds hid the stars. The front yard was dark, apart from a beam of light coming from the lamp in the living room. All Lia had was the silence, the crushing empty silence that settled on the house. She sat on the porch, cold mug in hand, listening. The longer she sat the angrier she got, but where could she direct it? At Melora for leaving her? At the Council, for depriving her of the scrap of family she had left?
Thanks to Nora's visit, she knew the answer. A full-on campaign by every coven in town. Their mission? To get Lia to abandon her family coven and join theirs. If she didn't, life in Belmont would warp into a special new hell. A hell of a fight was coming; one she just didn't have the strength to fight.
A man stepped out of the trees twenty yards from the house. Even in the dark, she could tell it was Parker. She'd been so busy grappling with her future in Belmont, she'd forgotten all about her ex-boyfriend's sudden reappearance.
She climbed to her feet as he approached. "What are you doing here?"
He stepped into the beam of light at the bottom of the stairs. A slight smile came to his lips. "Damn, it's good to see you, Lia."
Lia wasn't having it. "You weren't welcome two hours ago, what makes you think you're welcome now?"
Hurt flashed through his eyes and quickly disappeared. "Does it have to be that way, Lia?"
She rolled her eyes. "You're a sonuvabitch. Arcane Affairs? Did you forget to tell me a couple of things?"
"I could ask the same question," he said, putting his foot on the first stair. "I had no idea Amelia Harper was you. If I had known, I would have refused the case."
The statement took some of the wind out of her. She hadn't realized until that moment that she assumed Parker had taken the case to see her again.
"Don't worry your pretty little head about it," she spat. "In two days you can hop back in your rental car and drive back to Headquarters or wherever the hell it is you came from."
She turned to go into the house, but he caught her arm.
"Remember, woman, you're the one who walked away, not me." There was a something in his voice that she'd never heard before. Something primal, animalistic.
"Holy shit...you're a shifter."
Parker sighed and let go of her arm. It was the first time he had touched her in three years--hell, the first time any man had touched her--and now it was over. The feeling of loss surprised her. She'd had her share of suitors among the warlocks in Belmont. Some of them had even offered to take her on a date, instead of just asking for her hand in marriage. But the sad truth was Lia already had the love of her life. There wouldn't be another, and she didn't see the point in faking it.
"I was going to tell you, I swear," he said. "I couldn't until I was sure, and when you left--"
"I had to," she whispered. "The coven needed me."
"Did you think I didn't?" He asked. The voice that came from his lips was full of more emotion than she'd ever heard from him.
The urge to settle in his arms was almost overpowering, but she forced herself to stay where she was. If Parker was a shifter, that made him off limits now just as much as it would have then. Their relationship was always doomed, not that knowing made it any easier to cope.
"My being here is against policy," he said. "If I'd known it was you before I came, I wouldn't have been able to come at all. I didn't come here to fight."
"Why did you?"
He raised an eyebrow. "There's...some things that are going to keep me here for a while. I thought we needed to talk through a couple of things if I'm going to be in your space."
"Things like what you are?"
Parker hesitated. "Things like the fact that you're my mate."
Lia tilted her head to the side, struggling to assimilate the unbelievable information. "I can't tell if you're joking."
He shook his head, the look on his face told her that he knew exactly how he sounded. "My bear chose you years ago."
Lia scoffed and rolled her eyes. "You mean the bear you didn't bother telling me you had? If you're a shifter you shouldn't even be here." The words sounded bitter even to her ears, but she couldn't help them. What was she supposed to say when a man basically told her he loved her, needed her, but could never be with her?
"I'm not the only one who kept secrets, Lia."
"So now it's my fault?"
"It's nobody's fault!" The animal sound returned to his voice. Was that the bear beneath the surface? "I never claimed you and you don't owe me anything. When I leave here, we can both go back to our lives."
He hadn't claimed her. He never would. Oh, how badly she wanted to go back to her life. To Mel's giddy whispers about her wedding. To the small details of ru
nning their business, keeping the house together, planning the future of their coven. All of that was lost. She couldn't go back to it, any more than she could erase all the reasons why she and Parker couldn't work.
So why did her gut clench at the idea of him leaving? She knew it was necessary.
"How long will you be here?" she asked.
"I don't know." He looked down, as if the next part was difficult for him to say.
"It's Mel, isn't it?" she asked.
He nodded. "She...it might not have been as straightforward as we thought."
Lia stared at him, again trying to make sense of information that didn't make sense. "What does that mean?"
In response, Parker took her hands, holding them in his. Familiar warmth spread over her skin at his touch, but it did nothing to calm her racing heart.
"Lia, I promise you--"
"What does that mean?" she demanded, that she already knew the answer.
"That I will find out what happened--"
Tears sprang to her eyes, blurring him from her vision. "No... Parker that's not right. It can't be! Stop!"
It couldn't be right. Nothing in the world would ever make sense again if she let Parker finish his sentence. Even with tense relations between the covens and the clans, the Lost Coast was a sanctuary for paranormals. The rational part of her mind knew that if change was coming, whether violent or peaceful, nothing Parker or anyone else did could stop it. But the rest of her, the part that carried a secret horror that Melora had died loved, but alone couldn't stand to hear the words.
Parker moved forward, pulling her into his arms and rocking her as the first sobs tore through her. They stayed there for a while, Lia sobbing, Parker holding her to him, as if his touch alone could save her from the pain.
As her tears passed, instinct took over. Anything had to be better than this fear, this pain. She stood up on her toes and leaned forward to press her lips against his.
The warmth that spread over her body as their lips touched was intoxicating, the most beautiful thing she'd ever felt and yet completely familiar. Just like their first kiss.