“And it ends up irritating your throat after a while, doesn’t it?”
Danice’s eyes widened and she stepped up to the counter to watch Tess more closely as she dipped into several jars, weighing each addition to the parchment with precise care. “Yeah, especially at night. I used to just blame it on the cigars someone is always smoking on the steps of the courthouse, but they instituted the no-smoking-within-a-hundred-feet policy and it hasn’t really gotten any better.”
“It will, but smoke is a stubborn irritant. Plus you sound like you’re super-sensitive. It’ll take a bit for your lungs to recover from the exposure.”
“And in the meantime?”
“Well, if you like this tea, I’ll make up a batch for you to take home. But try these, too.” Reaching under the counter, Tess withdrew an opaque waxed-paper bag that rattled slightly when she set it on the counter. She smiled at Danice’s curious expression. “Horehound candies. They taste pretty darned good, and they’ll make your throat feel better and soothe your bronchi. Give ’em a try.”
Tess automatically poured her herbal mix into a small pan, added water, and set it on a portable burner, but her eyes were on Danice. The other woman broke the seal on the bag and shook out one of the small lozenges, examining the rather unappealing brown candy with its powdery coating.
Tess grinned. “They’re better than they look, I promise. The dust is powdered sugar. It keeps them from sticking together in the bag.”
Giving her a doubtful look, Danice took a deep breath and popped the small candy into her mouth. She sucked for a moment before her eyes widened. “Hey! These are pretty good. They taste sort of … maple-y.”
“I add extract to the syrup when I make them. The horehound itself doesn’t taste all that bad, but it’s not exactly exciting, either. Take the bag. They really will help your throat.”
“How much?”
Tess shook her head as Danice reached for her purse. “On the house.”
“That’s no way to run a business.”
“Don’t worry about it. If you like them, you can buy the next batch.” She grinned. “Besides, I can always overcharge you for the tea.”
Regina laughed. “Now I know why Missy likes you so much. You’ve definitely got the goods to handle … whatever crosses your path.” She cleared her throat. “You got anything behind that counter to help a woman deal with a ridiculously Alpha male husband?”
“Sorry, but I don’t think so. Well, not unless you want to try some damiana.”
Reggie leaned her forearms on the counter and watched as Tess filled the tea basket with loose, black leaves and set it in a ceramic pot. “What’s damiana do?”
“He’ll be so busy thinking about sex, he’ll probably forget about being king of the mountain for a few hours.”
Corinne laughed out loud. “Oh, yeah. That’s all Reggie needs. For Misha to have an even harder time keeping his hands off her.”
“I can always add some valerian. He won’t know whether he’s coming or snoring.”
Her offer met with a brief silence, then an explosion of laughter from every party in the room. Even Reggie appeared to be smiling just a bit. “Um, thanks, but I think I’ll pass.”
Tess thought about the potential results of feeding Rafe some damiana and shuddered. After last night, she’d have to be insane to try and up that man’s libido. Not unless she wanted to make it impossible for herself to walk for a week. “Right, then. That’s totally understandable.”
She grabbed the boiling kettle, half filled the teapot, then made up the rest of the liquid volume with the boiled herb mixture from the saucepan. A second teapot got a basket filled with pure Darjeeling, a few bits of lemon peel, and the rest of the water from the kettle. Carrying both pots over to the table in the back corner of the shop normally reserved for tasting, she plunked them down and crossed her arms over her chest.
“So,” she said, leveling a glance at Missy. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re really here for and how much of what happened last night you shared with your friends?”
She watched as the other woman weighed her options carefully and seemed to choose ignorance as a tactic. “What makes you think we’re not here for tea?”
Tess sat down at the table and poured herself a cup of Darjeeling. “You mean aside from the fact that you all are giving off so much nervous energy it’s like being trapped in a room with twenty thousand hamsters on meth? Call it a hunch.”
Missy paused for a moment before pulling out a chair and joining Tess for tea. “That’s a hell of a hunch. You get those often?”
“Not as often as you’re apparently going to try to avoid answering any of my questions.”
Corinne flipped an empty teacup over and nudged it toward Tess to be filled. “It’s a matter not so much of ignoring your questions as of easing into the answers.”
“Is that what you call it?” Tess poured for Corinne, then lifted the other pot and poured a cup of the herb-and-tea mixture. She handed it to Danice. “I was just going to call it annoying. I mean, my first reaction is naturally to tell you to mind your own business, but since I think that’s probably kind of rude—and since I also think I might genuinely like you all with a slightly better acquaintance—I figure rude might not be my best strategy.”
Missy sighed. “Don’t be mad, Tess. I really didn’t tell them all that much about last night. I just mentioned that you and Rafe seemed to have a … connection of sorts. That’s all.”
Tess raised her eyebrows. “And for that, you all came down to the East Village in the middle of a workday in the rain? What makes this thing you seem to think Rafe and I have that important?”
“It’s Rafe,” Corinne announced. “He’s been driving us crazy, so we’ve been keeping an eye on him.”
“Well, it’s Rafe, and the fact that we really like you,” Missy added.
“And the fact that Rafe seems to really like you.” Danice grinned over her teacup. “Or so I hear.”
Regina nodded. “And then there’s the fact that whatever you had to talk to Rafe about affects the Council as a whole, which means it affects our husbands.”
“But really, it all boils down to the curse.” Ava dropped that bombshell with her usual aplomb, then sat back in her chair and crossed her long legs. She saw her friends glaring at her and raised one elegantly arched eyebrow. “Well, it does.”
Tess shook her head and looked at each of the women. “Okay, in order. One, why is Rafe driving you crazy? Two, it’s not really anyone’s business how much he likes me. Three, I know nothing about what I had to talk to Rafe about. All I did was deliver the message telling him the Witches’ Council wants to meet with him. And four, what the hell? What curse?”
Missy shifted in her seat and set aside her teacup. She folded her hands neatly in front of her and said, “Look, Tess. Let me be blunt. I like you. I liked you from the minute I set eyes on you yesterday. I also like Rafe. He’s one of my husband’s best friends, and he’s a wonderful man to boot, but he is driving us all crazy.”
“How?”
“He won’t settle down. Well, he seems to think he can’t. What man wouldn’t resist the idea of finding the right woman when he has such a perfect excuse not to?” Corinne rolled her eyes. “It’s the dream of every male non-Lupine on the face of the earth.”
Tess groaned and got up to throw handfuls of two new herbs into her brewing pot. She set it on to boil. “Okay, not only have you lost me again, but now you’re giving me a headache. So please, speak slowly and use small words. At least until my willow bark is finished brewing.”
Ava hooked one arm over the back of her chair in what should have looked like a sloppy, masculine sprawl. Instead, it looked like a Vogue cover pose. “I think we need to backpedal a little. The first thing we need to find out is how much our little Tess knows about shapeshifters in general and the Felines in particular. Then maybe we can pick the proper small words to get our points across.”
“I know about
as much as I found out talking to Missy last night. Which had more to do with human–Lupine procreation than with social customs.” Tess saw Missy blush and smiled at her. “No, it was really interesting. It just didn’t exactly leave me in the know.”
“Didn’t you learn any of it in school, or something?” Danice asked. “I mean, you’re a witch, right? So don’t you all just grow up knowing about all this supernatural stuff?”
What? Did they think she’d gone to Hogwarts or something?
Sometimes Tess forgot how ignorant humans could be not just of the Others, but of magic users as well.
“Afraid not. Witches are a bit … xenophobic, as a group. They know that a lot of things exist, but they don’t see any point in actually going and meeting them. I’d heard shapeshifters existed, but the only things I’ve ever learned about them are from books and movies. And somehow I’m not sure Rafe has all that much in common with Nastassja Kinski.”
“He’s got a better body,” Ava countered. “But no. I think we can safely assume that Hollywood has yet to render an accurate portrayal of any shapeshifting breed.”
“Well, then I’m in the dark. Who wants to enlighten me?”
Everyone looked at Missy. She sighed. “Right. That’s my job.” She paused for a bracing sip of tea. “Okay, first of all, I should say I’m not an expert in Feline society. I’m not even an expert in Lupine society, and I live in that one. Part of the problem, though, is that Felines don’t really have a society to begin with. The lions live in their prides, of course, but the different Feline species don’t do a lot of intermixing. I suppose it’s like us and the coyotes or jackels. All canines, but not all the same.”
Tess reached for the willow bark tea and used it to warm up her Darjeeling. She nodded at Missy to continue.
“Just like wolves stick with wolves, the Felines mostly stay away from one another and maintain their independence, even when their territories overlap. In modern times they’ve gone ahead and appointed leaders in all the major cities just to keep the peace. They call each one a Felix, and he acts sort of like a Lupine Alpha. But that’s where the commonalities end. I mean, we’re basically wolves, and like most canines, we tend to live in groups with similar pack structures and social systems.
“But the cats are totally different. From what I’ve been able to pull out of Rafe and Graham, there are as many different kinds of Feline as there are big cats. Lions, tigers, panthers, leopards. They’re all distinct species, and their Feline equivalents are all distinct groups as well. And just like the cats, werelions are the only ones with any sort of group dynamic among them. The others, like I said, tend to be loners and live separately. Which is probably why Rafe is the only Feline I’ve ever met.”
Tess supposed that made a sort of really disturbing sense to her. Then again, maybe she was going off the deep end. “What kind is he?”
She winced, thinking that question sounded awful, but Missy didn’t seem to take offense.
“A jaguar,” the blonde answered with a smile. “I’ve only seen his cat form once, but he was beautiful.”
“Careful,” Regina teased. “Remember, you’re a dog person, Miss.”
“Okay, so that’s the basics of Feline society,” Tess said. “But what does it have to do with Rafe, me, and curses?”
“It has to do with … context.” Missy shifted in her seat and fiddled with her wedding band. “When I say most Felines other than the Leos are loners, I mean it. There’s some degree of variation, of course, but it’s unusual to see more than one at a time without a fight breaking out, especially between males. And it means that Feline mating habits are different, too.”
Tess fought down a wave of heat at the memories of the Feline mating habits she’d encountered so far. Praying her cheeks weren’t on fire, she tried for a casual tone. “What do you mean by that?”
“Well, wolves mate for life,” Missy pointed out, “and Lupines do, too. In fact, Graham says that in a lot of the shifter clans, there’s some sort of permanent bond established between mates, even if it’s a little less intense. From what I hear, the bears mate for life, too, and even most of the cats do it at least most of the time, like Leos and even tigers. Though I’ve heard the Tiguri—that’s what they’re called—form more political alliances than real mate bonds. Still, they stay with the same mate for life, according to Graham. But there are a few Feline breeds—like the leopards and cheetahs and, well, the jaguars—where they don’t take real mates. They stay alone their whole lives.”
Tess paused, digested. “Then how do they have little baby Felineses?”
“Not very easily,” Ava said. “Which is where the curse comes in.”
That little interruption earned her a glare from Missy, but Ava just shrugged, leaving Missy to explain.
“The curse is … ancient,” Missy finally said. “It’s a legend, really. No one remembers if things were any different before it happened, so…”
“Just spit it out.”
“The legend says that things did used to be different with the Felines. According to the stories, all Felines used to mate for life, just like Lupines do. At that time their human and animal natures combined in such a way that they loved with the ferocity of the beast and the devotion of the man. But that was before. At some point so long ago no one is sure if it’s fact or fantasy, a Felix from one of the spotted clans—some people claim it was a jaguar—supposedly met and became infatuated with a non-Feline woman. They had an affair, and the woman fell deeply in love with him. But after the initial burst of passion faded from their relationship, the Felix realized that he wasn’t really in love with this woman, and he began to worry that a non-Feline mate would be unable to bear him the healthy cubs he wanted. So he left her to find a mate among his own people.”
Tess felt her stomach twist a little. “Let me guess. She got kinda pissy about that, right?”
“She cursed him. Not just him, but all the spotted Feline clans. She vowed that if one male could be so fickle, so would they all. And until one male Feline of the same clan could change his spots and find a non-Feline mate to whom he could remain faithful for a year and a day, they would bear fewer and fewer children until all the spotted clans withered away.”
“Gah! Did she sow their fields with salt while she was at it?”
“She does sound like quite the bitch, doesn’t she?” Ava drawled. “Even I was impressed.”
Tess shuddered and lifted her herbs off the boil, straining the liquid into a mug and adding a dash of straight tea and a lump of brown sugar. She stirred thoughtfully. “Okay, so I get the gist of the curse. I’m just still not sure what any of it has to do with me.”
The five women at the table looked at one another, seemed to reach some sort of unspoken agreement, and turned back to Tess. She felt a little bit like a science fair project, some sort of strange bug pinned to a corkboard. She sipped her tea while she waited for an answer.
It was Missy who finally spoke.
“Well, you see, Tess, the woman who cursed the Felines … she didn’t just make it a non-Feline who could break the curse. She wanted her justice more poetic than that. She wanted a Felix to have to mate with someone just like her.”
Tess arched an eyebrow and took another sip of tea.
“Tess, she was a witch.”
Ten
It took Tess all afternoon to clean up the tea she’d sprayed everywhere after hearing Missy’s final bombshell. She spent the whole time with a bottle of Windex in one hand, a wad of paper towels in the other, and a dazed expression on her face. Bette had tried to get her to confess what had upset her, but Tess just shook her head and kept cleaning. She didn’t even really understand it herself; there was no way she could explain it to anyone else.
She went through the rest of her day on autopilot, filling orders and serving customers. And when closing time rolled around, Bette had the doors locked, the register counted, and the kitchen area cleaned before Tess even knew it was five.
&n
bsp; “That’s it, then.” Bette shrugged into her coat and pulled out her key chain. “Everything’s put away. I locked the back door, too, but if you’re staying late, I can go run and unlock it.”
Tess’s head snapped up, and she shook it to clear away her fog. She glanced at her watch, saw the time, and shook her head. “Um, no, that’s okay. I’m having dinner with my grandfather tonight, so I’ve got to run home and get ready before I head over there. I’ll leave with you now. Just let me get my stuff.”
She hastily put away her cleaning supplies, grabbed her jacket, patted the pockets for her keys, and then followed Bette out the front door. She started up the stairs and stopped when her assistant called her name.
“Hey, Tess! Earth to Planet Menzies. Were you planning to lock the front door tonight, or did I miss the sign saying, BURGLARY SPECIAL! COME ROB US NOW AND SAVE?”
Tess swore and jogged back down the stairs, but Bette was already using her key to lock up. “I’m sorry, Bette. I don’t know what’s with me today.”
“Me, either.” Bette pocketed her keys and urged Tess back up to the sidewalk. “At first I thought it was the aftermath of great sex last night, but now I’m not so sure. You seemed even weirder when I got back from lunch than you’d been when I left.”
“I know. I’m sorry. It’s just been … a really strange couple of days.” Tess skipped right over the mention of great sex and hoped Bette would, too.
“Hm, well, as much as I’m dying to question you about that, and about the potentially great sex you had last night, I can’t. I’m meeting my roommate at Veniero’s for dessert debauchery before the show tonight. Her boyfriend’s in a band. Along with the other three-quarters of Lower Manhattan.” She gave Tess an assessing glance and sighed. “But I’m on tomorrow closing, so I’ll get it out of you then. Just see if I don’t. Bye!”
She hurried off down the sidewalk in the opposite direction from Tess’s walk home and disappeared into the crowd. Tess sighed in relief. Right now, she had more than enough worrying her as it was. She did not need the Bettish Inquisition adding to it. Not when she was still freaking over Missy’s news and scared half to death about the idea of having dinner with her grandfather and the high chairs of the Witches’ Council. That seemed like plenty of worry for one person at one time.
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