When the time rolled around to pick up Mom, I changed into a pair of Mom’s jeans, rolled up the bottoms and finished them with a belt. I found a button-down shirt and tossed that on over a loose white tank top. If I had to stay here longer than a few days, I’d have to pick up some new clothes. Or maybe sneak back to Mason’s and my house.
Sigh. I pulled out my phone. I’d turned the ringer off earlier so I couldn’t be disturbed at Bookish Journeys. Three missed calls and two texts. Ignoring him wasn’t fair, and I couldn’t keep doing it without causing problems in our relationship. If only I could have told him the truth about why I had to be here. If only. One text simply read, “Come home soon.” And then a half an hour later, he’d texted, “Love you.” And nothing else.
I punched in his number, and he picked up straightaway.
“Maisie?”
“Hey.”
“I’ve been so worried. You took off so fast you left shards in the sink and food on the stove.”
“I know. I know.” I chewed on my lip. A believable lie. I needed one. “Everything is fine. Just a false alarm.”
“That’s good to hear. Should I come there?”
“No!” I reined it in and tried again. “I mean, no, it’s fine. I haven’t been home in so long, and I was going to come home today, but Mom seemed so sad to have me leave. I think I might stick around for a few days and then we’ll see.”
“You think your boss will be okay with you taking off work without notice?”
I grimaced into the phone. His tone sounded a little judgmental, and I didn’t appreciate it. “Why wouldn’t she be?”
His breath sounded like static in the phone. “You said the floor’s short.”
“Well, I’ll take sick time if I have to. Or vacation. Whatever. I haven’t been home in nearly three years, Mason.”
“Okay. Calm down. I just meant I could call Bonnie and fill her in if you wanted me to. You know she likes me.”
“Oh.” Bonnie was my manager. “Well, that’s nice of you to offer.” I didn’t love the idea of him putting on the charm to get me some time off when my young manager clearly had a thing for him. She couldn’t stop batting her eyelashes or touching his arm whenever they spoke. It drove me crazy, but in this instance, I knew her interest in him would help me. So, yes, I swallowed my pride because it made life easier for me in the meantime.
“Anything for you,” he said.
“I miss you.” Talking to him reminded me of my life with him and how much I missed it. It was hard being here in some ways, but oddly easier in others. Here, I didn’t have to lie to people who knew me well. I felt like a different person, one he didn’t know.
“I miss you too. How’s your friend?”
“What?”
“Your friend?”
I almost forgot why I said I’d come home. “Oh, fine. Yeah, he’s fine.” He was very far from fine. He was dead. But if I told him I’d lost someone, nothing would have stopped him from coming here.
“He?”
“Um, yeah. Family, actually.”
“Family,” he said, repeating me. His sigh spoke of relief. For a second, he’d been jealous. “I’m glad he’s okay. Hurry up and come home, okay?”
“I will. I’m just off to pick up Mom from the cafe. I’ll call you later, and we’ll face chat, okay?”
“I’m on call so I’ll check in when I have a minute.” He was quiet for a moment. “Before I forget, do you think you’ll be home by next Friday?”
“Friday?” I thought about my calendar, but then, I wanted to laugh out loud. Who knew how long I’d be chained to this place. “Um…I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Well, Emma and Grant just moved in together.”
“That’s great.” Emma was a doctor he’d gone through medical school with. We hung out with her and Grant frequently. She was nice enough, but she bored me. I felt like a bitch for saying that, but a girl could only talk about brand name this and brand name that for so long and talk about trips to places I’d never been and would probably never go. All of them came from money, and they had lots of their own. I couldn’t relate.
“They get the keys on Wednesday, so they’re going to have a housewarming party. Nothing big. Just twenty or thirty people. I suggested potluck.”
“Right.” Potluck. New house. I wanted to scream into the phone. Noah was going to hell, and so was the man who’d taken him in and raised him. But I couldn’t yell at him for that because he had no idea what I was doing or what I was up against. I was being so unfair, and it made feel ugly.
“Potluck sounds good. I’ll try to be there.”
“Great.”
We said our goodbyes, which included the customary end of call “I love you.” I hung up and wondered for a moment if I shouldn’t just go ahead and fill him in on my secret so he could understand. It would bring us closer. I’d been here barely a day, and I’d never felt so disconnected from him. To the point where he felt like a stranger. But a nagging feeling in my gut convinced me I shouldn’t. My mother loved me most, and if she couldn’t reconcile who I was, what chance did I stand with Mason?
I drove to Mom’s cafe. On the way, I passed our neighbor, Claire Fortune, mowing her lawn in leopard spandex—top and bottom. She looked in my direction, and I waved. I didn’t think she recognized me. She’d been my tenth-grade English teacher, and she looked like she had a bit of magic herself. She didn’t look a day older than when she’d taught me.
Then I passed Mr. Duggan’s farm, where two black horses were in the pasture grazing. Mr. Duggan walked to his barn with a limp and a feed bucket in his hand. When I waved at him, he waved back.
Mom’s bakery was just off the highway, so she caught travelers as well as locals. Though the store was small, it had a reputation of having the best baked bread in the province. I pulled into the gravel parking lot beside the yellow building. The cow bell above the glass door jangled when I entered.
Gemma, a blonde with gentle wrinkles and warm, brown eyes met me with a smile. I remembered her from the days I was in high school, when she and Mom had worked together at a cafe in town. That was a few years ago, before Mom had inherited some money from her parents. She’d used it a few years ago to buy this place, but I still hadn’t been here. I carried some guilt about not coming on her big, opening day. It had meant a lot to her, after all.
Mom handed a brown bag to a customer, Clint MacFarley, a surly man with wiry hair combed back like one of the lead characters from a sixties movie. He grunted at her and nodded to me before leaving.
“Well, look who the cat dragged in,” Gemma said.
“Hey, Gemma.”
She pulled the counter arm up and, turning sideways, she slid her ample bottom through the space and hurried over to me. She pulled me into an embrace, and I hugged her back. She smelled like lavender and vanilla, just as I remembered.
“It’s good to see you,” I said.
“Look how pretty she is, Grace,” she told my mother. “She must take after her father.”
“Oh, you!” Mom slapped her shoulder and they shared a giggle. “I’ll just freshen up and be right out.”
“I’ve put the pies you set aside in a bag in the back, next to the deep freeze. Though I still don’t understand why you’re going to a barbecue at your ex’s.” Gemma frowned at my mother.
“We’re still friends,” Mom said as she forced a smile. I’m sure Gemma saw through her lie as easily as I did.
“Mmhmm,” Gemma murmured.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” Mom said. She disappeared through the swinging half doors that swung open to the kitchen.
“Back in town after all these years. What’s the special occasion? Are you getting married?” Gemma asked. “Come on, you can tell me. I can keep a secret.”
I nearly choked on my tongue. “No, I’m not. And we both know you can’t keep a secret.”
She giggled. “Pregnant?”
“No!”
She laughed. “Well, I’m all
ears.”
“I just came for a visit.”
She grinned and I could tell she didn’t believe a word I was saying.
“You bring your fella?”
When I shook my head and my face fell, she appeared to assume the worst. “Oh, I’m sorry.”
“No, no. We’re fine,” I said with a chuckle. “I really just felt like I needed to come back for a visit. Mom comes to Gravewood from time to time, but I know she gets lonely. I thought I’d spend some time with her here.”
“That sure is sweet of you. You should hang around my son, Troy. Maybe you’ll rub off on him. He went out west to work on the rigs a few years back. I don’t suspect he’ll ever make his way back here.”
“I’m sorry, Gemma.”
“Ah, well. Circle of life. They have to leave the nest eventually. Enough of that, tell me all about life in Gravewood. Nothing exciting ever happens here.”
I smiled wide. Yes, this town seemed normal and quiet, but she didn’t know werewolves ran through the woods on full moons and when the mood struck. She didn’t know the girl in front of her was a witch.
“Sometimes boring is a good thing.”
She made a face at me. “You sound like your mother.”
I raised my eyebrows. I’d never been accused of that ever. The door opened, and the bell jingled. I turned my attention backwards and sighed. Deputy Shawn MacGregor and Gavin Coldwell.
I nodded to each of the police officers dressed in their blue uniforms. I knew both from when I lived here before. MacGregor had been a sergeant. Tall, lean, and bald with eyebrows consistently drawn inward, he looked exactly as I remembered him. We’d had more than one interaction when I’d lived here. All of them tense.
Now Gavin…I hadn’t known he’d joined the police force. He’d been a few years older than me in school, older than even my brother. The star hockey player. With soft chestnut brown hair, baby blues that sparkled, and a tall muscular frame he’d drawn the attention of most of the girls at school. I’ll admit I’d thought him nice to look at, but I’d been too preoccupied with my family drama to have ever taken notice of him. And I’d also been too hung up on Noah.
“Maisie Lewis.” The way MacGregor said my name made it clear he liked me as much now as he had when I’d lived here.
“Sure is nice to see her pretty little face, isn’t it?” Gemma said after putting an arm around me. She squeezed and jostled me a bit, and it helped ease my nerves. I always felt tense around MacGregor. Always waited for the ball to drop and for him to see me for what I was and burn me at the stake or send me to jail.
“Why aren’t I surprised to find you here?” He slid his fingers in the front holes of his belt loops and straightened. He tipped his head to the side.
“It’s good to see you too, Deputy,” I said sweetly.
“Mind your manners, Shawn,” Gemma told him in her sternest of voices.
He cleared his throat and rocked on his feet. “Town’s sure been quiet since you left. Then we find a body in Bear Woods this morning and all of a sudden you’re back in town. Or is that just a coincidence?”
“Those hikers went missing months ago, and she hadn’t been here for that. You want to try and pin those on her too?”
“How do you know the body isn’t one of the hikers?” he said.
“Is it?” Gemma asked.
“No.” Gavin answered for him, earning him a stern look.
My jaw hung low. Hikers? Body? “What body?”
“It was on the news this morning. We caught it during the dinner rush,” Gemma said. “I thought I better let your mother tell you.”
“Who was it?” I said quickly. Had another werewolf died while I was gone? Was it Noah? Was I too late? I swallowed hard and my gut twisted at the thought. Dying was one thing, spending forever in hell was something else entirely. I couldn’t stomach the thought of the lifeless body being Noah’s.
“Well, family’s been informed so I guess I don’t need to keep it quiet any longer,” MacGregor said.
Gavin bumped his arm with his elbow. “Easy, Shawn. She’s his family too.”
“Well, not by blood,” the deputy said coolly.
I eyed MacGregor.
I hadn’t expected Gavin to take my side. I barely knew him at all. Not to say I wasn’t grateful. For years, MacGregor thought I was a serial arsonist. He wasn’t far off on his theories, but he’d never had enough evidence, because well, how do you find evidence to incriminate someone who could set fires with their fingers? No paper trail, no receipts, no kerosene, no fire starters… Nope, he could never prove I did a damn thing. And to be fair, there had probably been five fires in that time period and only three of them were caused by me. A hormonal teen with little control over her magic, sometimes my temper got the better of me. It had been the reason Laird and the others eventually found out I was a witch. I’d gotten into an argument with Noah and set fire to his car…while he was still in it.
“Who was killed?” I raised my voice, my patience running thin. First, he accused me of being a killer, and then he took his time telling me someone I was close to, or had been close to, was gone forever.
“Shawn, be respectful,” Gemma said. She removed her arm from my shoulders and propped them on her hips.
“Marco Newberry.”
I opened my mouth to speak but snapped it shut. Then I let go of a long breath I’d held and felt the quick pulse in my neck finally slow back down. Of course, it had been Marco.
“You don’t look surprised to hear his name?” The deputy rocked on his heels. “Why is that?”
I was surprised, but not in the way he thought. I hadn’t known they’d gotten rid of the body yet. Not, at least, in a way in which he could have been found. Because that’s the only way the police would have found him. If the pack had meant for him to be found.
It made my life a little harder. I needed to see Marco’s body to see if he’d been marked. If he had, it meant he’d done something to attract a hunter’s attention. He was targeted, and that meant the others were safe unless they were marked too. If he wasn’t marked, then that was the trickier of the two. It meant a lot more questions, for which Laird would likely force me to find the answers for. Was he killed accidentally even though Jenkins had said that never happened? Did someone else kill him with a hunter’s bullet? If so, why? Who? And what could we possibly do to prevent an attack on another pack member? Regardless, I had to see the body. Now I had to deal with the police to get a peek. I wished the pack had talked to me before they’d left him to be found. It didn’t surprise me that they hadn’t, though. They’d never included me on any decisions that mattered.
“He was so young, and he was loved. I didn’t know he was sick,” I said, trying to sound as ignorant of his cause of death as possible.
“He wasn’t, as far we know. The death is suspicious. Now, tell me, Miss Lewis, where were you the night before last?”
Ten
Did he seriously think I had something to do with Marco’s death?
“That’ll be enough of that,” Mom said, appearing behind the counter. “We have to go meet with our family to absorb the news, Deputy. You have questions for my daughter, you talk to me or you talk to my lawyer. She’s welcome in this town. And she certainly didn’t kill Marco. You’d have the good sense to realize that if you got your head out of your ass.”
“Hey now, you can’t talk to me that way.”
“I just did,” she said. She lifted the counter arm, walked through, and then picked up her bag of pies. “Let’s go, Maisie. Our family needs us.”
When we reached the door, he called out to her. “I thought you and Laird Marshall were separated?”
Mom clucked her tongue at him. “Have a nice day, Deputy. Gemma, give the nice officers some coffee on the house. Make sure they’re to-go.”
Mom kicked the glass door with her foot because her hands were full. I couldn’t control the slight grin on my face. Mom hadn’t always been this feisty. She’d changed
a great deal since marrying Laird. I think because he was so protective and controlling that she had to learn to be stronger or risk drowning in their relationship. He’d tried to control me too. For the longest time, I’d let him. He’d intimidated me. It wasn’t until everything went down with my stepbrother that I’d finally spoken up against him. We’d be fighting tooth and nail ever since.
Outside, I took the paper bags from her so she wouldn’t have to carry them all. “Thanks, Mom.”
“You’ve been here less than forty-eight hours and he’s already trying to blame you for a murder. Unbelievable.”
“It’s fine, Mom.”
“No, it’s not fine. I’ve had it with him.”
“Just be cool. The more we piss him off, the closer attention he’ll pay to us, and I can’t have that right now.”
She took a deep breath and blew it out. “He infuriates me.”
“I know. Me too. Let’s just go to dinner and have a good time.”
She stopped dead in her tracks and stared at me. Then we both started to laugh. Laugh or cry, right?
“How’d today go?” she asked.
“Um…” I wrestled with knowing what I should and shouldn’t tell her. “It was good.”
“You saw Jenkins?”
“Uh huh.”
“Was he helpful?”
“Mmhmm.”
Mom regarded me thoughtfully. “I see. Well, I’m glad he could help. Did he…tell you why your father spent so much time at his store? I asked him after your Dad died. He told me nothing. Said your father came to relax and read with a coffee. Was that it?”
I didn’t know what she wanted to hear, what would make her hurt less. After everything she’d hidden from me, I wondered if she really wanted to know. If it was better to keep her away from everything magical, like my father had.
Mom and I got into the car. I dragged my seat belt across my chest and fastened it. I took a breath and met her eyes. “No, he wasn’t there for the coffee or the books. Well, maybe the books, I didn’t see all he had there.”
Pack Witch (Captured Souls Book 1) Page 9