by WB McKay
He'd zoomed in on the screen while I talked. "There's so much detail here, even in the simple pieces. I think this headboard's my favorite."
I didn't have to look to know what he was talking about, so I turned my head away to avoid having him catch my blush. There were three headboards in my online portfolio, but Nathaniel would have chosen the one I'd designed with him in mind. "It's a good one," I said.
He asked more questions about woodworking, and I got a real ramble going until our food arrived. He knew I didn't like talking while I ate.
Garlic fries must have been created in a lab by an evil scientist. I wasn't sure what they wanted, but if they promised more garlic fries, I was likely to give it up.
This thought reminded me of The Inventor. Not that I considered her evil. She wasn't building weapons for a war against humanity; in fact, she was wary of the fae council discovering her research in fear of that very scenario. She was breaking all kinds of rules, though. As was I. Sitting across from Nathaniel, watching him slide half of his own garlic fries onto my plate, I wondered how wise it was to be seen in public with him. Would he want to be at that table if he knew the kind of trouble he could be in for associating with me? I didn't plan to be caught, but I didn't plan for all manner of things that happened anyway.
The Division of Protection Against Magical Corruption's public line was that they dealt with magical threats to magic. Nothing I did was a threat to magic. I could argue that point until I was blue in the face. The way The Inventor talked about them, though, it sounded like she had experience with the division, and it hadn't been good. She was of the opinion that they had strict views on the mixing of witch and fae magic. Of course, all fae did. It was a cultural taboo. All fae have their own magic—we are magic, in some fashion or another—and fae don't touch witchcraft, as a rule. While the division didn't publicly say so, The Inventor told me that rule was taken more seriously than any of us knew. Of course, everyone knows what they say about rules.
Nathaniel snapped his fingers in front of my face, like he had to go out of his way to grab my attention. I saw him sittin' there starin' at me just fine.
"Whatcha think' about?"
"Rules," I told him truthfully.
"Rules are meant to be broken." He leaned back in his chair and smirked. "Gimme another topic!" He sprung forward, both elbows on the table, and smiled all of two inches away from my own lips. "I'm a wealth of information, little lady."
"Is that so?"
"It absolutely is."
"Well," I said, searching my brain for a safe topic, "we've talked about me quite a bit. What are you doing for work these days? I saw you out in the Colton's field."
"Yeah, the pack takes on odd jobs as a group now and again, but I've got something different goin' on these days. Wanna see?"
"Absolutely," I said before thinking, and was rewarded with one of those unnaturally wide smiles of his. Oh, boy. I was in trouble.
I NEVER COULD DECIDE on a favorite time of day, but whenever the world went dark, I thought it was night. The cool air, the stars, the moon—the night contained all my favorite things, especially out in the country, and especially at home.
Nathaniel was driving. The truck still smelled like trees, and I realized without meaning to, I'd slipped into an impossibly good mood. I was relaxed. I could have sat perfectly still in that truck for the foreseeable future, without feeling antsy or desperate or having a trouble cross my mind. You should cut this out, I told myself, but it was lost under a fog of contentment.
Nathaniel made a show of rubbing his jaw line. "Do you think I should let it grow out?"
"It'd be easier," I told him. The human half of a werewolf grew hair much quicker than a mundane human would. It wasn't because wolves were hairy, though that was the joke. It was because we were exceptionally healthy. We healed faster. We metabolized food faster. Everything about our bodies happened faster. "You must shave twice a day."
"Three times if I don't want to get scruffy," he said. "What do you think about beards?"
"I'm a messy eater."
"Ha. Ha."
I didn't want him asking me questions about how he should look.
"I could pull off the mountain man look, right? I mean, I am a man of the mountain." He poofed out his lips when he said it, like he was blowing me a kiss.
"I saw this picture on Facebook a while back."
"Seriously woman, when are you going to friend me?"
"And there were all these men with well-groomed beards adorned with flowers."
"Yeah!" He laughed. "I've seen that. I'm not sure that's still 'the thing' anymore. It's been a while."
I wasn't sure if he was making the connection, but if he wanted an aesthetic that matched how I saw him, that was it. A man with a well-groomed beard and flowers braided through it, probably cuddling a puppy or two. My god, that man needed a puppy. Or not. It wasn't like making him more attractive was doing me any favors.
He pulled the truck over and parked half on the road, half in an empty field, and pointed across the street.
"Do you see that?" he asked me.
"See what?"
"The trees."
"What about them?"
"They're mine," he said. "Lonely Mountain Tree Farm."
"You own a Christmas tree farm?"
"I do."
"That's perfect," I said.
"I like it."
"No, really," I said. "That's perfect for you." Nathaniel had always loved Christmas. "Is it a lot of work?"
He proceeded to explain that it was summer, which meant he was trimming the trees and dealing with seedlings. It only took a few questions to get him into a good ramble of his own.
"It sounds like a good way to spend your days," I told him.
"I think so. The pack helps a lot, when they're not working on the farm." Gretchen, the alpha, and Everett, her husband, owned the farm. Part of being pack meant any of them could stay at the farm whenever they needed to. It was smart for an alpha to own something like a farm—it gave the pack work if they needed it, and could provide food in good times or bad. Being alpha meant you were responsible for the well-being of the whole pack. I'd always thought more packs would be wise to follow her example.
"So," I said, when we'd been sitting there too long, "are you planning on driving this truck or just sitting in it?"
"You got a problem with just sitting?"
I nodded, because I should have a problem with just sitting. I should definitely have a problem that I was doing nothing but basking in his company. No basking, my brain ordered from somewhere under the fog.
He returned my nod and put the truck in drive. We passed the rest of the ride home in comfortable silence. The whole night had been so comfortable.
He walked me to the front porch, though I knew he knew I always went in the back, and instead of walking me up the stairs, he sat down where we'd sat the night before. Without thinking about it, I sat down without teetering on the edge to keep distance between us like I had the previous time.
"I've missed you, Julia."
Emotion caught in my throat.
"It's good to see you," he said. "I meant to tell you thanks for helping with the pack the other night."
"Yeah," I said. "That was unusual."
"Sure. Vampires don't normally stop in these parts."
"Right. That was odd. I was actually referring to the fact that Rachel came to pick me up. I'm not pack."
"Did that bother you?"
"I… I don't know."
"You might decide before you talk to Gretchen. I'm assuming you still haven't seen her."
"I haven't," I said. "I don't really want to talk about all that right now."
"That's fine with me," he said. "I noticed Colton's horse has been hanging out by your fence."
"She does. I've taken to calling her Tilly."
"Good name," he said..
I nodded. The comfortable silence had taken on a tension I was picking up, but
I hadn't yet sourced it. My foggy brain didn't want to.
"It's good having you here," he said.
I nodded. He'd expressed this sentiment already.
He pulled off his hat and picked at the brim. Put it back on. "So," he coughed, "there was a woman spotted at the Miller crime scene."
I tried not to react, but the lack of reaction in itself was a tell. "Yeah?"
"Oh, give it up, Julia. You think I don't know why you're here?"
"Right. Well. That's not any of your business, is it?" I stood up and dusted myself off. It was clearly past time to call it a night.
"You're not going to let me help you, are you?"
I swallowed hard. "I can't trust you."
He jumped up and away from me and shouted at the mountain, "HOW MUCH MORE SORRY CAN I BE?" His body shook. When he spoke again his voice had calmed. "It's been a hundred years. A hundred years of you never letting me forget my regrets. Whether you're here or across the planet, I still feel you hating me."
"That's your problem, not mine."
"Okay, Julia. Okay." He stalked off into the trees, opened his truck door, whispered, "Good night, Julia," and closed the door. His truck drove out of earshot without stopping.
"Good night, Nathaniel."
I SAT ON THE front porch, looking out at that big old mountain. I could feel her judging me, like Nathaniel judged me. The story was simple. I never understood when he acted like it wasn't.
When I got the best lead of my life, I trusted it to the love of my life, and he betrayed me. That was the simplest version of the story, and though I knew it should have made me sad, I found it freeing. I owed Nathaniel nothing. He'd betrayed me. It was done.
When I let the story get longer, that's when things got complicated. That's when I got sad. That's when Nathaniel managed to get into my head. My mind never could keep it short and simple.
My family had died and I was a young, unwed, woman. Of course, I'd been newly given some special abilities that the fuckers of the world had not accounted for.
As things went, folks kept trespassing. They wanted to take my land or my trees. The lumber business had been booming at the time, and they saw no problem with taking what they wanted. As it turned out, they had a difficult time with it. See, every time some greedy little sneak tried to make their way onto our land and sift through my family's things, well, some kind of ghost or monster or some such attacked 'em and drove 'em off. They said it was a growling shadow, racing through the dark.
I don't know how that happened.
Well, honestly, I only know half of it. In the tangled mess that was my grief and the changes to my body and the unfamiliar impulses racing through any new wolf, well, I can't say I was a hundred percent aware of my own actions a hundred percent of the time. It was hard to remember what I did, and even then, what was a conscious choice and what was just... animal instinct.
But I drove the price of the land down, by a whole heck of a lot.
And then I met Nathaniel.
And for a minute there, people called me Julia Thatcher.
Technically, they still could, if they knew the name, but those who do would never say it. It wasn't something even Nathaniel joked about, meaning it was never brought up at all.
I would have liked to say it was as though we didn't remember we were married at all, but in truth it was this huge, pulsing thing between us, shoving and screeching and sucking the blood from my chest.
There was nothing to it but to keep the hell away.
I knew that. I knew that. I'd just have to make sure I remembered it mattered, no matter how he looked at me, or grinned, or how bright his light shone. Brightness like that would never understand the darkness in me.
He'd said as much when he'd broken my heart.
It hadn't always been bad. In fact, before the betrayal, it had been wonderful. We'd hunted down leads together. He'd become as invested in my quest for revenge as I was—or, so I'd believed. He'd tell me, "You're my family, and that makes them my family, too. And nobody hurts my family and gets away with it."
If you'd asked me then, I'd have promised you that he was as invested in my goals as I was. We were in it together, for life, a hundred percent.
The day it happened, we'd been hunting down information about the murder of my family, as we always did. It was a delicate game. The best leads came from networking. It required sharing details of what we were looking for with people we thought we could trust, but not so many details that it would get back to the killer that we were looking for them. I was more careful about that in the early days than I was in recent times.
We were waiting for a train when the middleman approached us. He wanted money—simple enough—and said that someone with information about who we were looking for would meet us at 4 o'clock in a bar downtown. The middleman warned us that the contact would only speak with Nathaniel—no women allowed. This wasn't unusual, but it never failed to tick me off. All the same, I needed the information, and I trusted Nathaniel. We'd been hunting together so long. If I hadn't trusted him, I could have found another man to do it, or disguised myself, or come up with another plan—that really rankled in the years to come—but I trusted him. And he just… didn't go. He returned to the train station two hours after the appointment and said, "We can't do this anymore."
"What are you talking about?"
"It's bad for you, Julia. It's time to put this plan behind us and move on with our lives. We need to give this up."
"What are you saying?" I'd asked. "What happened with the contact?"
"I'm ending this," he said. "We need to move on."
And that was that. He'd gone off to that appointment, telling me not to worry, and returned two hours later, someone I didn't recognize.
When I let myself think about it, I struggled to pinpoint the moment where that changed. Had he always, secretly, hated the mission? Was there a moment where I said something wrong? Was there a lead that put him off the whole thing? What had I missed? When had it happened?
I worked very hard at not letting myself think about it. That was easier when he wasn't jumping on my cattle gate or cooking me breakfast or grinning at me over dinner. Sometimes, in those moments, I almost forgot what he did. It took work to remember the most important thing—the betrayal—and forget the rest. It took a lot of work to hate Nathaniel Thatcher. It was all so much easier when he wasn't looking me in the face.
CHAPTER TEN
The next morning, I didn't touch my research. I drove up to the studio, shut the garage doors, and got to carving. I expected silence. I demanded it from the damn universe.
The universe does not care about demands.
"Damn it! I do not have an open door policy. This is my private workshop. Tell your buddies: leave Julia Grayson the heck alone! Understand? Out! Out!" I didn't care who I was talking to or what they wanted. They needed to go.
"There's been another murder," said Graham, beta of the Lassen Pack.
"I don't ca—wait. What?"
"The vampires didn't leave."
"Shocking." I slammed down my tools. "They killed someone else?"
"Yes."
"Was the crime scene like the last one?"
"Huh?"
"Was it bloody and messy? Did they leave the body at the scene? Was there any evidence of blood drinking?"
"It was like the last one."
"Was the victim a witch?"
"I don't know," he said. "We'd like you to track the vampires for us. We need to find where they den if we're to end this."
I dropped my head to my workbench and considered slamming it down a few times. I knew Graham had been appraising me when I'd said I was a good tracker. Why did I have to tell him that? I bumped my forehead against the wood a few times.
"You didn't appear to have a problem with dead vampires the other night," he observed.
I didn't bother explaining my feelings to Graham, beta of the Lassen Pack. He had his priorities. He didn't care about mine.
One of those priorities is staying on good terms with the pack so they don't run you off their territory, I reminded myself. Plus, even if working with the pack wasn't ideal, this was more information on the very lead I was chasing. This wasn't a bad thing. This isn't a bad thing, I told the burning rage in my gut.
"Fine. I'll get back to you."
"You'll track the vampires for us?"
"Sure. I'll work on that." At some point. Probably. Finding the vampires' den wasn't my priority, especially not before I had some more information on what I was walking into. Getting revenge would be awfully difficult if I was dead. Also, Graham didn't understand that he was basically asking me to drive around the greater Redding area, sensing for magic that didn't have a scent. I could do it, but it would be easier with more information first. "Do you have any ideas on how they're choosing their victims?"
He shrugged his large shoulders. "They're blood drinkers."
Right. It was that simple for him. "You're dismissed."
"Excuse me?"
"You're excused," I told him. "Out!"
He growled, but he left. He was asking me for a favor, he could handle a little shove out the door.
I opened my laptop, checked the news, pulled the name of the latest victim, and started digging for a connection between the two. It didn't take long. They were fucking Facebook friends. It was a long shot, but I checked their groups to see if they were members of any groups called "Witches of Redding". I'd seen stranger things. Witches weren't concerned about exposure like fae were. For one thing, they were human. For another, these days, if a witch stood on the corner and shouted their existence to the world, humans by and large would ignore them.
The witches in Redding didn't seem as casual as all that—assuming there were witches of Redding, and at that point, it was exactly what I was assuming. I didn't know the new victim was a witch for certain, but it made sense. Especially if the case was going to lead me to answers about the murder of my family.
"Witches of Redding, where are you?" I asked Facebook. My computer didn't respond.
Tess still hadn't replied to my last text. It had officially been forty-four hours, and while I'd promised myself I'd leave her alone until it hit forty-eight, I gave her a call. She was driving home from the end of a case. "One more monster down," she said, but not as though she was celebrating. She was worn down from lack of sleep and a difficult day on the job. I hated to tell her why I was calling, but she already knew from my texts—she didn't have any information about witches in Redding. I told her that was fine and to get home safe. "Don't forget to text me the address if you go see about any witches," she reminded me at the end of the call.