by Mandi Casey
As long as we were in the house, we were safe. I’d have to talk to her about moving her precious seedlings into the house proper for the time being. Another alternative would be for her to put wards around the entire property line. It would drive me nuts to be at the store while she was home working outside with her plants, and me not being able to get in touch with her.
“No, that’s really not necessary. We’ll be okay. It was a nice thought, anyways. Seriously, we don’t want anyone staying at the house. That would be crossing a line, as far as I’m concerned.”
Blake gave me a look that said he doubted our abilities to take care of ourselves. “This house is our sanctuary, Blake. No one is going to tarnish that.”
His demeanor changed in an instant, and he scowled, showing his displeasure at what I’d said.
“Is it me that you don’t want to stay here? We can arrange for someone else, if that would make you more comfortable.” He barely got that out through gritted teeth. His jaw was clenched. The skin over his mouth looked tense and white. His eyes began to change color.
I put my hand on his warm chest. The heat from his body soothed the aches and pains the rogue had caused.
“It’s not that at all, so don’t take it personally. We can take care of ourselves. It’s bad enough my life is changed, and not for the better. My aunt shouldn’t have to deal with someone else staying in her home because of me. We’ll be safe enough. I’ll call you if anything happens, just like I did today.”
He continued to frown, but his jaw started to unclench. “I’ll have to talk it over with my father. He said someone had to watch over you at all times until we find the rogues. It’s not going to be easy telling him you told me no.”
Blake was in a hard position. He wanted to do what his father, the pack leader, said to do. But he wanted to be with me, protect me, and do it while not being too pushy. He had my sympathy, but there was no way my being the Selected was going to affect my home life any more than it already did.
“You and your father can talk about it all you want. I’m not going to change my mind. Blake, this is our home, our safe haven. No one is going to bother us here, just trust me on this, okay?”
“Fine, I’ll figure something out with my father. But you can expect to see members of our pack checking out the area on a regular basis. If a rogue shows up one more time, there won’t be any discussion. You will have me as your houseguest until we find them. Understand?” Disbelief and frustration laced his words.
From the consternation I heard in his tone, I knew it would be completely futile to argue. We didn’t need him to force the issue, insisting that he stay with us right now. I gave him my ‘I’m so not going to let you win this, ever’ eyes.
“We’ll see what happens. Even if rogues do show up here, they can’t get into the house. And if they’re vampires, it’s not like we’re just going to invite them in and say ‘yes, vile fiends, please come in and suck us dry.’”
“Yeah, well, just be careful. Call me later tonight.” He grabbed my hand from his chest and held it, warming my fingers with his. “You gave me a pretty good scare, seeing you lying there like that, unconscious. I thought you’d been attacked. I wasn’t sure if you were alive. Sydney, my heart stopped beating when I saw your body lying on the floor. You were so still.”
Blake kindly didn’t mention the fact that when he found me, my hair was taking a bath in vomit. I’m sure the smell was pretty raunchy, too, especially to a werewolf with a super sensitive sniffer. Blake’s seeing me at my worst didn’t seem to affect him, or nullify his determination to get me to go out on another non-date with him.
Was Blake telling the truth? Did his father really say that he wanted to have someone stay with me and Aunt Judith? Of course, the obvious choice would be Blake. If it came to that, I’d definitely have to figure out an alternative solution.
Being around Blake wasn’t safe during regular circumstances. Having him live with me, and being at my side constantly, would be torture. We’d have to share the same bathroom. He’d have to stay in the bedroom Brianna used when she came to visit, which was next to mine. We might bump into each other with only our towels on. A vision raced in my mind’s eye of Blake, wet from his shower, bulging muscles glistening from the early morning sunshine. Realistically, a girl can only resist a man for so long, especially when said girl found him undeniably irresistible. Constant thoughts of him pressing his hot, hard body against mine didn’t help matters.
“I’ll call,” I said, trying to erase the images of a naked Blake from my mind. “You don’t have to worry. None of the rogues have tried to enter the house, and they haven’t tried anything more than scare tactics at the store.”
He raked his hands through his hair and said, “Sydney, you have to take this serious! Rogues are worse than any wild animal you’ll ever encounter or see on TV. They can act like a member of the werewolf packs or vampire covens. They want something from you. Until we find out what that is, you’d be wise to be a little worried about yourself and your family’s safety.”
I didn’t care for his tone. He spoke as if he were talking to a child who wouldn’t listen to the older, wiser adult.
Blake couldn’t have forgotten my Selected abilities made me a human rogue detector. There was truth in his words about my not being able to protect myself once the rogue was detected, but I planned on working on that. Eventually, I hoped to be in the same room with a rogue, and not bat an eye. There had to be something in Grandma’s journal with clues how to start training and building some type of tolerance to their effect on me. A rogue could do whatever they wanted if I kept on being incapacitated when they were close. Someday, the rogues would see me as a force to be reckoned with. I couldn’t just depend on Blake and how fast he got to me when I was danger. I had to learn how to deal with them on my own.
I grabbed a pillow from my bed, and put it over my chest to cover what the tank top did not. I got out of bed, stomped over to my dresser, and grabbed a bra and T-shirt.
“Wait here.”
After dressing in the bathroom down the hallway, I went back to the bedroom. Blake had returned to the chair he’d pulled up to the bed to watch me sleep. I couldn’t properly chastise him if he was busy staring at my nipples calling out to him through the soft white cotton. I hoped he wasn’t the one who put me in bed. If he was, he already saw way too much of me for my liking.
“Listen, Blake. It’s possible one of these freaks of nature is going to hurt someone important to get to me. Yes, it’s a possibility. I refuse to let them make me walk around in total fear. No, I’m not going to try and scare my aunt into doing it, either. What you did earlier, not telling Aunt Judith about the rogue on the property, well, that was great. She knows they’re out there. She probably knows more about what’s going on than we think. Heck, my drunken mother probably knows more at this point. But I’m the Selected now, and I’m going to handle things in my own way. The time has come for me to buck up and make decisions of my own.”
Blake sat back down on my bed and looked up to see me with my arms crossed over my chest standing in front of him. I stuck my chin out a bit, silently challenging him to further his ridiculous speech about me not knowing what was good for my safety. Rogues couldn’t breach my home, so he didn’t need to worry. I didn’t want to break Aunt Judith’s trust and tell him what she was capable of with the wards. So he’d just have to take me for my word.
He put his hands on his knees, but his shoulder muscles remained tense, despite the relaxed pose he was trying to accomplish.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll stop pushing. You get it. You get what threats and dangers are out there. But you can’t blame me. I’m just worried.” He got off the bed and strode over to me. His hands were resting at his sides, then they were on my arms before I could bat an eye.
Freaky.
Blake’s werewolf speed was still a bit disconcerting. He rubbed his warm palms up and down my arms. And so help me, the feel of his skin created
tingly sensations up my arms, over my chest, and down to the hot center of my being. He was temptation to the max, and his heat soothed the aches throughout my body. The problem was, he was creating other parts of my body to ache and swell.
I hoped my body’s reaction to being near the rogues would decrease in intensity, pain, and length. Having to endure such torture on a regular basis would literally drive me insane. Blake may not always be around to make me feel better.
“You’re still running a bit of a fever. You should rest for a while.” He leaned over and kissed me on the forehead.
We could be just friends, right? Yeah, from my body’s reaction to his slightest touch, that might not be possible.
“Just make sure you call me later tonight,” he added.
“Yeah, fine.” I swatted his hands away and headed out of my room. I needed to distance us from my bed.
After Blake left, I went and found Aunt Judith in the kitchen, leaning over the stove, and stirring a batch of homemade chicken soup.
“Hello, dear. I’ll get you a bowl. This will make you feel much better.” She ladled soup into one of the handmade blue-clay bowls Meredith, Aunt Judith’s best friend, had made. The aroma of the broth made my mouth water. Aunt Judith’s cooking had mystical healing powers. They say if you cook with love, anything you make will turn out right. That was true with everything she made.
Now that werewolves and vampires had been revealed to me, my curiosity and suspicions turned to my aunt. She was knowledgeable about growing and using herbs in her teas and food. She was also very good at creating protective boundaries around the house with wards and charms. I suspected she might be a witch, with special abilities. I wanted to ask, but she always veered away from such discussions. Which got me to thinking. Did my mother also have abilities of her own?
Chapter 17
Brianna texted me during the night, telling me to call her in the morning from the store. She had something she wanted to ask me. My body stiffened. Did she know?
As I headed to the bathroom to wash up, I felt like I’d recently been in a bad fender bender; my muscles were sore all over, and my head pounded. The hot shower loosened some of the tension in my back, but the second the cold outside air hit, my body stiffened up again.
I picked up a caramel mocha coffee at Mountain Bean and headed over to the store. Hopefully, the caffeine from the coffee would get me over the terrible grogginess hovering over me like a dense fog. It was definitely going to be a long day.
The door chimes jangled when I opened the store’s front door. I figured I might as well open the store early. I wanted to give the customers the most opportunity to shop. Every penny made from the store was money in our pockets. The purpose of electronically cataloguing the inventory in the store was to track what the more popular items being bought were. I wanted to expand our purchases of more products in those lines and be able to see what items weren’t budging from the shelves.
My plan was to keep those items that weren’t selling to a minimum or to offer such items through special order only. The local Wiccans and Celtic practitioners had my full respect and support. But in the end, I had a business to run, and a profit had to be made. We had bills to pay, and I was willing to do as much as possible to make our lives more comfortable. I was driven to prove myself capable of running the store, alone.
I had done some research on the web. According to the financial planning advisor on the Internet, free samples would increase customer traffic through the store. More traffic equaled more sales. I planned on making recipe cards to be given away with every purchase of the recipe’s ingredients. That was my agenda for the day.
We needed to get more customers in the store. It was important to make the store my own. I wanted to show Aunt Judith that by making changes, such as moving the financial and inventory aspects into the electronic world, I was capable of making productive business decisions.
After finishing the cataloging, we would have a webpage, made with an open forum discussion area for trading ideas amongst the customers. Customers knew what they wanted, and our store would be the one who provided it for them.
I put my bag under the counter, grabbed Grandma’s journal, and placed it next to the register. Among the many other things on my list to accomplish for the day, reading more of the journal was tops on my list. I used the cell Blake had given me and dialed Brianna’s phone number. She answered on the second ring.
“Hey, what did you want to talk to me about?”
“Sydney, it’s about Michael.” The background noise of wind in the phone told me she was outside.
“What about Michael?” My stomach dropped to my feet. A decision regarding what Brianna should know about Michael, or any of the werewolf/vampire business that was going on, had not been made yet. It was convenient, and a relief, that she was nowhere near the city of Kenosha most of the time. If she lived in Kenosha, she would have to be told. She’d become a constant target of my enemies. For now, keeping everything on the down low when she came to visit, which luckily wasn’t too often, was what we’d been doing so far.
“I don’t know. He just gives me this vibe like something’s up, like there’s something he’s not telling me. It’s driving me nuts.” Concern laced her voice. She really liked Michael, and unfortunately, she was right. He was hiding something from her. She wasn’t just being overly paranoid. But it was nothing even close to what she may be thinking.
A girl who liked a boy worried about the normal stuff, like the boy seeing someone on the side. The girl may also worry if the boy was just seeing her because she was willing to have sex with him, or that the boy was waiting for the right opportunity to break up with her because he found someone else he liked better. Instead, Brianna’s boyfriend was a werewolf, and he had to participate in pack activities in which he had to hide from her. And I, the big sister, knew all about it. I felt guilty as sin for not telling her myself, especially since I knew she was feeling really insecure. If she knew the truth about Michael, she wouldn’t have to worry about where he went, and what he was doing when she wasn’t with him.
I sighed into the phone. There was only one thing to do. I’d have to call Blake, and have him tell Michael to talk to Brianna about their being werewolves. He would have to bring her up to Kenosha to do it, and I would be present, too. If he wasn’t willing to tell her the truth, then I’d have to.
When men go around hiding information from women, keeping their phone calls secret, making mysterious plans with family members while making sure she knew she wasn’t invited, well, those things led a girl’s imagination to go running wild, and not in good healthy directions. My sister didn’t deserve to suffer by thinking her boyfriend was out doing something nefarious when he was just doing what all of the werewolves did when the full moon rose.
“Brianna, you should just ask Michael, and tell him what’s been bothering you. The sooner he’s able to put your mind at ease, the better.”
If Michael told her he had no control over turning into a werewolf when the moon was full, it wasn’t likely to put her mind at ease. It would probably do the opposite, and then she’d be able to know about my being the Selected. My motives may not be purely innocent. It may be best for Brianna to stay in the dark about everything that was going on, but it would make my life less complicated. There wouldn’t be all the lies. I wouldn’t have to sneak around going to vampire and werewolf events when she came to visit. Maybe someday she would be able to come with me. Yeah, that would probably be a bad idea.
The door chimes sounded, and Blake walked into the store.
“Brianna, a customer just came in. Just talk to him, okay?”
“You’re probably right. The thought of him thinking of me as being too invasive worries me, but we’re getting pretty serious. When he has these family meetings up at Uncle Morris’ house, and doesn’t want me to go with him, it makes me worry. That’s all.”
“I know. Just talk to him, and hopefully everything will be better. Talk
to you later.” I hit the end-call button on the cell phone and stowed it back in my purse. I really appreciated the gift of the phone Blake had given me, even though I gave a good fight before accepting it.
When I looked up, Blake was sitting on the couch next to the lit fireplace. Our eyes met, and he patted the cushion next to him with that sexy mischievous grin that curled my toes.
I grabbed my coffee and went over to sit next to him. The heat rolled off his body. Even without physical contact between us, the heat still warmed my skin just by sitting next to him. By being in the same room as him, the air took on a heated, sensual quality. His silence made me a bit nervous. He was usually Mr. Talkative.
“So, what’s up?” I said, my voice too bright.
“How are you feeling this morning?”
I eyed him. He was all business, and trying to read him sometimes was like trying to open a new CD case with very short fingernails.
“I feel fine. Did something happen?” Straight and to the point. I had things to do.
“There’s been another sighting of a rogue. Two rogues, in fact. My father’s hunch was correct. At least two rogues are working together, maybe more.” That’s when his grin took on a devilish touch. “Our pack found some creeping around our hunting grounds behind the den. They ran off before they could be identified, but at least two different sets of paw prints were in the snow. The patterns their prints left proved they were hunting together.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. So they were hanging out in the forest. Isn’t that what wolves like to do? So far they haven’t done anything really alarming. When that rogue came to the store and made those threats, it was only a one-time thing. He hasn’t been back, and I’ve talked to both the wolves and the vampires since. So, his threat was empty as far as I’m concerned.” A chill ran down my spine, making me shiver. The rogues were becoming more confident, and the danger was mounting.
“My father would like to impose upon you, for your own safety, to have someone stay at your house. He said to tell you that if you don’t allow someone to stay with you, then he’ll be forced to organize the pack to monitor your property, or wherever you happen to be. You don’t really want to make the wolves have to take shifts and hang outside your house in the cold, do you?”