“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish—”
“It’s all right,” Zar cut in, touching my arm. “We’ll have our own prayers. Mostly, we just want to be with you, Cass.”
I knew that. It didn’t make me any less sorry for them.
“Zar? Would you like to browse the largest independent book store in the world?”
We sorted out a plan for the rest of the day while Kage massaged my feet and Andrew looked up the busses—I wasn’t driving into the Pearl District with that van.
Then a little bit of exploring together: Powell’s City of Books, doughnut ice cream sandwiches, and showing them to the Marquam Nature Park before we again parted ways and Andrew returned home with me. In a few hours we could head over to Stefan’s bar, Wendigo, and the guys could get buffalo wings and milk shots while I rummaged through his magical library. First, my own library. My own past. Ready or not.
Chapter 5
I cleared my desk and dragged the two storage bins from under my bed.
I was still standing in the middle of the room, simply staring at the purple lids, when Andrew stepped into the doorway.
“Tea?” he asked after swallowing the bite he’d just taken from a PayDay bar. “Something wrong, Belle?”
“No.” I looked around, distracted. “It’s too hot for tea. There should be cold brew coffee in the refrigerator.” I started toward him.
Andrew held up his free hand to block my path. “That fridge is a long way from your work, darling. Iced latte? I’ll bring it for you.”
“I can get it.”
He still didn’t move.
We looked at each other.
He had the most interesting eyes. Clear today, right there, because he had in his contact lenses rather than the glasses—which he’d needed to wear on the camping trip. His and Isaac’s eye color didn’t change like the rest when they put on fur. I loved seeing his eyes like this. Yet I liked his glasses also. They set him apart from the rest of the pack. Not that Andrew needed setting apart. With the contacts, he seemed … closer. Like the difference between facing someone through a window or without it.
I needed to talk to him. I hadn’t even thought of it last night. Wasn’t this exactly the chance I’d been waiting for with Andrew? Spend time together: talk. Not flirting or gossiping or discussing the pack or me and my problems. Talk about him—the one subject Andrew avoided.
“Wolf to Belle, come in Belle.”
“What?” I asked.
“You tell me.” He took another bite and offered the bar, tipping his head questioningly.
“I just ate ice cream.”
“Uh … I just walked down the hall.”
“I mean, no, thank you. I don’t need that. I already had my dessert for the day.”
He took another bite and spoke around it. “I’ll get your drink.”
I started to follow him to the kitchen.
Andrew stopped. “You and I seem to be experiencing static on the line, darling. You are working on your project at home. You have one day and a few hours left. That’s it. I am going to get your drink. I, unlike you, have nothing better to do.”
I bit my lip.
“Do we need a therapy session again?”
“Again?” I asked. “Have we had them before?”
“Over a quiche breakfast?” He jabbed the PayDay in my face. “Why are you procrastinating all of a sudden? Not usually one of your charms.”
“I’m not. I just—” I glanced around the hall, though there was nothing to see.
Hot. It was so, so hot. Windows open all over the place, curtains closed against the sun, duel fans in my room. An iced drink in there would help. Again, Andrew seemed perfectly comfortable. And he had seemed fine all afternoon out in it—unlike the sweating, panting rest of us. He’d meant it when he’d said he liked the heat.
“Andrew? I’m sorry about out in the mountains—when you were cold at night. I didn’t know. I gave you a hard time about the sleeping bag and I shouldn’t have. Sometimes I don’t understand how you—how any one of you—feels about something, and it leads to me doing things that are hurtful to you. I’m sorry. I’ve never meant to hurt any of you. But I’ve done it anyway.”
“Right… So…” Andrew took my elbow and led me through to the much hotter living room. “You lie back on the couch and I’ll grab a notebook and put my spectacles on so we get this right.”
“I’m not needing therapy. I just wanted you to know—”
“Sit or open those boxes. One or the other. I’ll get your drink.”
I sat.
My blue shorts were hot. My blouse was hot. My skin was hot and damp. I rested my hands on the couch instead of my lap to spread out. Andrew had rolled up his bedding against one arm so as not to monopolize the couch during the day. Had Preeda asked him to? Had he just done it? It seemed awfully polite.
Maybe, though, Andrew was more polite than I usually gave him credit for. Maybe a person could be a kleptomaniac and also polite at the same time? His adopted mother seemed like the type to teach manners. I’d enjoyed meeting Tabitha and Thomas. Perhaps I’d be seeing them again soon.
No … when we returned to London, would I have to stay there again? With Gabriel? Not with the Sable Pack? I couldn’t stand it. Not just because Gabriel, as kind and gracious as he was, was the most depressing person I’d ever known, but because I needed to be with my pack.
Surely I could stay on the pack’s territory for a night or two… What difference did it make as long as we weren’t staying? And we weren’t. Peter and his band of three other investigators, including Jason’s cousin Aaron, had gone prying into the affairs of other British wolf packs and gone missing. We couldn’t jump to conclusions, but I had to assume, given the current climate, that those four wolves were dead.
And that they’d been murdered by members of one of those packs?
Circumstantial evidence.
Get the scrying back first. Look into the matter. Return to England. Keep looking into the matter.
But, Goddess, we had so much more than circumstantial evidence, really. So many reasons to say this was wolves. So many ways everything was coming together. Could it be that I didn’t want it to be wolves? That none of us did?
One way or another, we wouldn’t be returning to sit in the mobile home park and collect our thoughts for a few weeks. I didn’t think they’d drive me out just for a couple nights. I could stay with Isaac, maybe. Or … probably safer with Kage and Jason again. Kage was Diana’s grandson, while Isaac was no more than a “foreigner” and former verge member—still an outsider in the pack. If Sables wanted to make trouble for me, staying close to Kage’s and Jason’s families should be my safest bet.
Anyway, I needed at least a bit of time there. I had to see Diana and Atarah. I had to catch my breath once we landed and, hopefully, go over all my notes and make new lists of all this trip had gained for us after I could reclaim my scrying.
This made me think of Zar’s having made notes about his shamanic journey in my notebook. What had the others seen? I wanted to know, even as I’d not been able to sort out all the images from my own.
There were two key things, it seemed, that we’d taken away from the shamans: the killers were a large group and members of the magical community in some way; and that special message to me: You already know.
I, or we, already knew of who they were. Which included not only the Aspens and the Greys, but the Traeth Pack in Wales and the Mountain Pack in the north. The latter two of which had been being investigated by Peter when he vanished.
Isaac was from the Mountain Pack originally. He didn’t know them well anymore, hadn’t kept in touch, and had said he only even knew of a couple spots where we might find some. The Mountain “Pack,” he claimed was a misnomer—that it actually included several families scattered in Cumbria and Scotland rather than families blended together like the Sables.
Yet, he had known them once. Surely he would have noticed if they were bent on de
stroying other British shifters, vampires, and the kindred which they supposedly revered. As far as Isaac knew, they were not. We’d talked about motives in the van yesterday. While Isaac couldn’t imagine why they would do something like this, I’d noticed he hadn’t defended them either—admitting he’d hardly known most of the pack.
This had made me curious, not for the first time, about his past. Why had he really joined the Sables in the first place? How could he have so few connections left in the Mountain Pack that he didn’t rush to their defense? What had happened there?
Isaac had once told me that he’d first come to Brighton following a job offer. Yet he’d been at university in Edinburgh. Now it crossed my mind what a very long way that was to move if one were leaving someone behind that one loved. Not much distance, however, if one wished to get away.
He’d been so evasive, giving short answers or saying he didn’t know, I’d quit asking about the Mountain Pack as long as we were in company. Something more there that we needed to discuss one-on-one. For now…
Circumstantial evidence.
One thing at a time.
Sort out the scrying. Sort out the visions and new list of suspects. Maybe ask the others for their journey input—what they’d seen.
Go home to England.
Find a killer.
Then what?
I’d wondered before.
What, exactly, would we do if we had them right now?
You’re all under arrest!
Right…
One. Thing. At. A. Time.
Andrew sat on the end chair, first resting my iced, cold-brew latte with a straw on the glass coffee table before me. He’d made himself comfortable in the kitchen. I liked that. What had Isaac said when I’d asked what he was afraid of? Cooking, right?
I smiled at the glass, reaching to hold the chill surface with both hands.
“So … Cassia…” Andrew sat back with his ankles crossed, tapping a ballpoint pen on the side of the magnetized notepad he’d snatched off the refrigerator. “Tell me about yourself. What brings you here today?”
I gazed up from my glass to him.
His lips were pursed, eyeing me critically as if over glasses.
“Andrew? What scares you?”
“I see…” He made a note. “A touch confused, are we? Now, remember, I ask the questions. You answer.”
“Okay.” I turned the glass and took a sip from the straw. It was strong. He’d probably been dubious about that coconut milk. I was used to coconut with coffee by now, though. It didn’t bother me. Funny, how we can get used to something so that it seems normal. “Go ahead.”
“Procrastination?” Andrew said. “Yay or nay?”
“Not a fan of it, usually.”
“Usually? So what’s happened lately? What is it you’re wanting to put off?” He tapped the notepad.
“Opening those boxes.”
“Do they scare you?”
I looked up from the ice blocks drifting together around my glass to his elegant face. “No. I don’t think so.”
“Then what is scary?” Andrew asked. “What’s so hard about those boxes?”
“They’re … uh … too much.”
“Too much of what?”
“Too much … emotion. Too much of my own past. Too much to deal with on top of everything else right now. They’re the kind of thing you tell yourself you’ll sort out and decide on and throw away when you have the time. But you don’t have the time because you’re never emotionally ‘ready’ to do it.” I paused.
I looked to the white curtains, hearing fans in my room, wondering why we were sitting out here instead of in the cool air stream.
“Lately,” I continued, “everything’s been too much emotion for me. I keep falling apart at stuff that … I don’t know. I didn’t think I was a big crier, but lately I am. I didn’t think I was ready to be a witch for the rest of my life, but lately I am. I didn’t think I could do what I’ve been doing … but I have. Not doing a good job. But we’re here. I suppose that’s something. I’ve learned so much in the past several weeks. I still am, still in the thick of it. So … what does that leave? I’m … full. So much to think about, figure out, worry about, process. I’m full up to the top and all I want to spend my emotional energy on is all of you, my pack. Protecting you, loving you, stopping these killers so your families are safe. Then I have my own troubles and I come here and…”
I paused again, looking into the glass. “Being here is so … personal. I’m sitting with you in my own apartment in Portland. I mean, Goddess … who’d have thought? It’s … um…” Blinking fast. “See?” I snapped and set the glass on the coffee table to pinch the bridge of my nose. “I don’t even know why I’m tearing up. This is not some tragedy. It’s just you and me and a box of old school papers.”
“No, it’s not,” Andrew said softly. “It’s a box of memories. Which is life, which is change, which is hard as hell sometimes.”
Curses. What is it about therapy sessions and crying?
Chapter 6
“Butterfly notebook?” Andrew held it up.
“That one’s too old. Check the handwriting. Yeah … that’s way before I was learning to scry.”
Andrew set it aside in the repack bin that would be returning under the bed without examination.
We weren’t using the desk after all. We sat, me cross-legged, him with his legs out, back against the bed frame, on the carpet. Folders, notebooks, books, and scraps of paper splashed around us on the floor and in plastic bins.
“These can go in there. All herb lore.” I passed him a green folder. “I never could remember that stuff.”
“Is this everything? Two boxes? Didn’t you have a computer?”
“Sure, I did some work on the computer. But it wasn’t like Nana had WiFi. I didn’t have a laptop until I was in high school. Then that’s what it was for. Not my homeschool work. I couldn’t look up the stuff she was teaching me online anyway.”
Andrew was giving me a look.
“What?”
“And here you are all critical of our pack for lack of adequate smartphone distribution.”
“Well, give me a break.” I sighed. “This was one little old witch who lived alone in the mountains with her cat familiar and taught her granddaughter to be a witch. She didn’t care that I got a phone and a laptop. It just wasn’t her jam. You guys have a whole collective of people—young people—who’ve never used a touchscreen.”
“This looks sophisticated.” He held up a notebook covered in kittens and filled liberally with kitten, cat, horse, and rainbow stickers.
“That was from home—learning from my mom.”
Andrew added it to the return to storage pile.
“Do you have anything like this from your family?” I asked. “From your biological family, I mean? Mementos?”
“Nothing of any note. Couple marbles…” He gave a little shrug, flipping through a plain purple college notebook.
“That one could be something.”
He handed it to me and I set it in the keep stack.
“What about your dad? Is he still in the Sable Pack?” Had this never come up? It seemed odd suddenly that I didn’t know, or remember, the answer.
“Nah, no idea where he is.” Andrew grinned at a watercolor painting of an imprecise nature. It might have been a sunset, or a rainbow, or maybe a landscape.
“You don’t?” I hesitated as I’d been reaching for my glass of melted ice and coffee on the floor beside the fan. “What do you mean? He went back to the Aspens?”
“Not that I know of. Took off years ago.”
“Wait … how can this not have come up? He just disappeared? Like Gabriel?”
Andrew shook his head. “Gabriel had been plotting to go. My first dad just packed his bag one day. He told the elders he didn’t need the space anymore, had another job offer. Mum said could I stay, that they wanted to look after me as their own, and that was it. He walked off.”
&
nbsp; “And you never heard from him again?”
“Nope. Not like any of us were exactly gutted. He wasn’t tops in the paternal instincts department. I hardly knew the wolf.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Oh … ten years? We’ve told you before that some wolves vanish. That female in London? She came from somewhere. And Gabriel? It happens. It’s not natural for us to be trapped in such large packs so close and bunched up as we are these days, you know that. Some wolves wander.”
“It’s only … I don’t know… That doesn’t seem more important to you? More like a big deal? Never call, never write? Maybe Gabriel really did want to cut himself off, start a life as a human. But surely that’s incredibly rare. Your dad wouldn’t have done that, would he?”
“Wouldn’t be surprised.” Andrew set loose drawings, notes, and other bits back in the storage box. “Dedicated worm-servant. Never had much time for his family. I could see him fitting in no problem.”
“So you think all these wolves who vanish from the Sables, or any South Coast Cooperative packs, if it’s others, all just go to live human? And never get in touch? You don’t think anything … suspicious is happening to them?”
“It’s not common. Besides, you’re talking about disappearances spread over decades. So what difference does it make? Is it going to effect our investigation? Even if they’ve been murdered, what would that mean to us?”
“No … it’s not that I’m thinking they were all murdered. It’s … do you remember when we first started? I saw the stone circle and we found the druids and the druids led us to…”
“Wolves in London?” Andrew looked at me.
“They were so hard to find and it wasn’t getting anywhere. But … it’s someone …we know about. So it could be someone who that very first scry led us to. Before anything was tampering with my scrying.”
Andrew raised an eyebrow. “So you think Gabriel and Omri have teamed up in London to bump off wolves because they’re so set against shifters now?”
“No, but I do think there are a lot of missing wolves, which brings us back to urban wolves, which brings us back to something we know, which raises the possibility that there’s another pack to consider with all of these shifter concerns. Not just south and Traeth and Mountain. London also.”
Moonlight Lovers: A Reverse Harem Shifter Romance (The Witch and the Wolf Pack Book 7) Page 3