Magic Triumphs

CHAPTER 3

TWO BIG GRAY eyes regarded me from a round face, lit up by the morning light filtering through the kitchen window. Conlan pushed the oatmeal away. “No.”

“Yes.”

“Huny.”

I crossed my arms. “Did Grandma give you honey muffins yesterday?”

His eyes lit up. “Gama!”

“Grandma isn’t here.”

My son made nom-nom noises.

When I was pregnant, I tried to avoid doing dangerous things, which left me with a lot of time on my hands. I’d spent it reading baby books. Those books made it crystal clear that giving honey to your baby before he was a year old made you a terrible mother. The moment a spoon of honey would touch his lips, the words “Awful Mother” would appear on your forehead, forever branding you as a parenting failure. I had explained this to Mahon and Martha. They listened, nodded, and agreed, and then proceeded to ignore me. They’d been giving him honey and various honey-infused sweets since he was able to hold them in his tiny hands and then lied to my face about it. Werebear parents-in-law came with their own challenges.

“You’re not getting honey. You will eat oatmeal.”

“No.” He pushed the cereal away.

“Okay. Then you’ll go hungry.”

“Huny!”

In baby terms, my son was developing at the speed of light. At thirteen months, most babies had a vocabulary of three or four words. Mama, dada, bye-bye, uh-oh. The experts called this phase passive language acquisition. My sweet dumpling was making tiny sentences and arguing with me about honey. At this point, I wasn’t sure if I was proud or frustrated. Probably both.

“I have to do a lot of work today,” I told him. “And neither your grandparents nor your aunt can watch you, because they have clan business. So, you’re stuck with me.”

“Huny.” Conlan sniffled.

“I don’t negotiate with terrorists. Oatmeal or nothing.”

I put some oatmeal into my own bowl from the pot, added salt and butter, and spooned it into my mouth. “Mmm. I’m going to eat all this and be nice and full.”

Conlan watched the spoon travel to my mouth. One. Two . . . Three . . .

He pulled the bowl to him and dug in with his spoon. Hunger won again. My son wasn’t a shapeshifter, but he certainly ate like one.

I licked my spoon. Today was going to be a busy day.

The phone rang. I picked it up. “Hello.”

“Hey, Kate,” Luther said.

He didn’t call me a heathen or a troglodyte. Things were bad. “How did it go?”

“You were right. They extracted the bones.”

My mind took a moment to digest it. “What kept the bugs away?”

“We don’t know yet. The substance is magically inert, but not devoid of magic. It registers blue on the m-scan, but I can’t tell you if it’s due to human remains or the nature of the solution itself. Is your sensate around?”

“No.” Julie was still off with Curran. I wished they were home.

“A pity.”

“Did you find any inhuman blood in any of the houses?”

“We found hair,” Luther said. “Coarse, reddish brown, short. In one of the houses, someone tore a chunk of it out of their attacker.”

“DNA?”

“We are running it now.”

“Is it hair or fur?”

“Good question. It has an amorphous medulla, consistent with human hair, and a coronal cuticle, which can occasionally be found in humans but typically indicates a rodent, a bat for example. Human head hair continues to grow until we cut it. This hair exhibits synchronized growth, meaning at some point it stopped growing, like fur. It wasn’t cut. But it also exhibits a club root, which is typical to humans. It is inconsistent with shapeshifter hair in some respects and consistent in others.”

“Are you trying to tell me this is a human-bat hybrid?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Frustration spiked his voice. “I’m trying to tell you that I spent twenty-four hours digging in a jellied mass grave and then analyzing what I found, and I have nothing to show for it.”

“That’s not true. You have a sample for comparison.”

“I’ll let you know if I find anything else.”

“Thanks.”

“And, Kate? If you run across this again, I want to know about it the moment it happens.”

“That might be a little difficult, Luther. Last I checked, telepathy wasn’t among my talents—”

He hung up.

“Someone’s pissy,” I told Conlan.

Conlan didn’t look impressed.

I dialed Nick’s direct number. Usually I went through the proper channels, meaning Maxine, but he hadn’t called me back, and Biohazard wouldn’t notify them. The Order’s legal status as a law enforcement agency had always been murky; however, after the Wilmington Massacre, the knights were firmly outside the law. Some kids at UNC in Wilmington took a fun new drug that turned them into monsters. It also robbed them of their intelligence, because their monstrous rampage consisted of running around their dorm and growling at passersby. The Order was called in, and instead of securing the scene and waiting, the knights made an executive decision to go in and slaughter everyone they found. Midway through the slaughter, the magic wave ended, and the kids turned back into humans. The Order didn’t stop. When the blood stopped spraying, twelve young people were dead. At the trial, the knight-protector of the Wilmington chapter testified that he didn’t care if they returned to human form or not. In his opinion, they stopped being human when they took the drug. The national fallout was catastrophic.

Some states still recognized the Order’s semi-law-enforcement position, but Georgia wasn’t one of them. All cooperation between law enforcement agencies and the Order had ceased as of last year. I didn’t care for the Order’s methods or for Nick calling me and my baby abominations every chance he got, but the Order had accumulated decades’ worth of magic knowledge. If my going to Nick would help prevent another Serenbe, it would be worth it.

The message I’d left yesterday was short. It had only two words: “Call me.” He knew I wouldn’t come to him unless it was an emergency. Since he hadn’t called me back, I felt the need to make this one slightly longer.

That done, I sat Conlan down and got his fire truck out of storage. The truck was a gift from Jim and Dali for his first birthday. Large enough for a small child to sit in and climb on, it had a tiny enchanted water engine, which powered lights and a ladder during magic waves. It must’ve cost them an arm and a leg. Conlan adored the truck. He showed no interest in riding in it, but he liked to climb on the roof, which usually took him a solid minute and multiple tries. Once he ascended, he would wave his arms and make strange noises. Sometimes he fell asleep on top of it. Like his dad, my son enjoyed being in high places.

Conlan began his epic journey, and I pulled files on mass disappearances, landed on the floor close enough to catch him if he decided to swan-dive, and tried to review what little was known about people vanishing.

Of all the recorded mass disappearances, the Roanoke colony was the most famous, but there were others. Easter Island, whose inhabitants had melted into thin air, leaving behind only statues. Ancient Puebloans, who were once called Anasazi, meaning “ancient enemies.” The village of Hoer Verde in Brazil. That one was especially creepy. The theories said that the Easter Islanders might have starved to death and Roanoke’s colonists might have died of plague, but everyone was pretty sure something really bad had happened at Hoer Verde. Six hundred Brazilians vanished without a trace in 1923, leaving behind a gun that had been fired and a note that read, There is no salvation.

All those were pre-Shift. Post-Shift, disappearances increased in frequency but were usually eventually solved. Typically something had eaten the people or some magic disease had nuked everyone and burned itself out. One case listed mysterious blue lights floating in the air, which caused the population of a small town to strip naked and run off into the woods after them. They were eventually found by local sheriffs, confused and embarrassed. The worst injuries suffered amounted to scratches and severe cases of poison ivy exposure.

There was nothing in any of the files about boiled people or jellied mass graves.

The phone rang. I grabbed it, watching Conlan trying to scoot backward on the truck’s roof.

“Hello, Kate,” Maxine said.

That ass. Couldn’t call himself. Made his secretary do it. That was a new low, even for Nick. “Hi, Maxine. How is my nemesis?”

“We need your help.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“We need your help,” she repeated.

Conlan got to his feet and made a tiny hop on top of the truck, achieving a lift of about an inch. I walked closer to the truck.

“What can I do for you?”

“We’ve received a group from Wolf Trap.”

Wolf Trap, Virginia, housed the Order’s national headquarters.

“I believe they are here to remove Nikolas Feldman from his position as knight-protector.”

What? Nick was the first decent knight-protector that office had had in the last ten years. His predecessor managed to get the entire chapter killed.

“Why?”

“Nikolas has been rather vocal in his criticism of the Order. It has caused problems.” There was an awful, vulnerable edge to Maxine’s voice. In my time with the Order, she’d been unflappable. No matter what happened, Maxine handled it with her trademark efficiency.

“Within the chapter?”

“No, the knights of the chapter are devoted to him. In the past, we have become a refuge for . . .”

“Problem cases,” I finished for her. Atlanta always was the dumping ground for troublesome knights.

“Yes. Nikolas has a unique talent when it comes to helping people find their niche. He makes sure that they become useful. Most of them owe their lives to him in more than one way.”

The Order encouraged loyalty to the local knight-protectors, and the Atlanta chapter was no exception. In the few times I’d seen Nick interact with his knights, the relationships seemed to be based on mutual respect. They did what he told them to do, and they didn’t question him in my presence.

“The Order would have to have a reason for removing him,” I thought out loud. “One can’t just pull a knight-protector out of his chapter. Is performance down?”

“No. Our ratio of completed petitions is at an all-time high.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“He has been direct in expressing his frustration with their noninvolvement in the claiming of Atlanta and the general situation with your father.”

Oh great. I could imagine the reports filed with Wolf Trap. Are you aware that an abomination named Kate Lennart has claimed the city of Atlanta? Why are you not doing anything about the claiming of Atlanta? Are you planning on doing something about this matter in the near future? Could we have a time frame in which this issue might be resolved? When something got under his skin, Nick was un-shut-up-able, and the Order at large desperately wanted to ignore my existence. They didn’t have the power to do anything about me. I was pretty sure they hoped I would just somehow go away, and here was Nick, shining a big searchlight on the problem they were pretending to not see.

“They don’t believe he possesses the diplomatic flexibility necessary for the post,” Maxine said.

“How do you know that?”

“I scanned their minds.”

Whoa. For Maxine, that was a massive breach of ethics.

“I had no choice,” Maxine said quietly. “I’ve given twenty-five years to the Order. I’ve felt an entire chapter die one by one. I can’t do this again.”

She sounded at the end of her rope. “Let me guess, they are going to remove him because he isn’t diplomatic enough to work with me?”

“Yes.” Anxiety vibrated in Maxine’s voice. “He was invited to a lunch. He went armed. Before he left, he had a particular mind-set. You must understand, this chapter is all he has.”

Oh, I understood perfectly. Nick would go down swinging. They didn’t summon him to Wolf Trap, because he wouldn’t go, and they didn’t want to do this within the chapter’s walls, in front of the other knights, where he was at his strongest.

“You must understand, when I said that the knights are devoted to him, I meant that they are deeply committed to his goals.”

If Nick went down, the chapter would revolt. They’d picked a hell of a time for this.

Conlan balanced on the edge of the truck.

If I didn’t handle this right now, the chapter would collapse on itself. Nick would likely die, and that was the last thing I wanted.

“Where is this lunch?”

“At the Amber Badger.”

It would take me twenty minutes. It would take him at least thirty to get there from the chapter. These knights from Wolf Trap really wanted to put some distance between him and his people.

“When did he leave?”

“About five minutes ago.”

“I’m on it. Keep everyone calm, please.”

I hung up and lunged forward just as Conlan jumped off the truck. He landed in my arms and giggled. My son, the daredevil. It’s good that I have a short reaction time.

I hugged him and smooched his forehead. “Let’s go get dressed. We’ve got to save Uncle Nick Stupidhead from himself.”

I WALKED INTO the Amber Badger carrying Conlan. He hadn’t wanted to put on clothes. I’d successfully wrestled him into a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, but it took me ten minutes longer than planned to get to the restaurant. Here’s hoping I wasn’t too late.

The hostess smiled at me. “Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for a party of the Order’s knights. Armed, scary, probably scowling.”

“This way.”

The inside of the Amber Badger resembled a medieval tavern, with stone walls, scrubbed wooden floors, pendants on the walls, and sturdy wooden tables. It was half-empty, and I had no trouble spotting Nick and three knights at a table near the far wall. Nick’s face had that detached cold look he got just before his sword came out of its sheath. The other three, two men, one dark-skinned in his forties, one white and slightly younger, and a Hispanic woman about my age, held themselves with the ease of seasoned fighters. Not relaxed but not tense either. A half-full platter of pretzels with cheese and beer sauce rested on the table. Oh good, they were still on appetizers. They wouldn’t fire him until the main course.

I marched straight to the table.

Nick raised his head and saw me. His eyes widened.

I came to a stop by the table. “Knight-protector.”

“Yes?”

The three other knights stared at me.

“Can I steal a moment of your time?”

Nick appeared to waver.

Say yes. Say yes, you moron. I am trying to demonstrate rapport here.

“Sure,” he said.

“Oh good. Let me grab a chair.” I handed Conlan to Nick.

He took the baby and held him very carefully. Perhaps he was worried Conlan would explode.

“Can this wait?” the female knight asked.

“No,” Nick told her.

“Baddaa!” Conlan told him.

Nick picked up a pretzel and offered it to my son. Conlan grabbed it and stuck it in his mouth. I pulled up a chair and sat down.

“What is it?” Nick asked.

“Am I interrupting something important?”

“Yes.”

“Good. If you returned my phone calls, I wouldn’t have to hunt you down all over the city. A bit of professionalism, Nick. That’s all I’m asking.”

He leaned forward. “Oh, professionalism.”

“Mm-hm.”

“I’m supposed to offer a professional response to ‘Call me, you stubborn dickhead.’”

“Nick! Earmuffs.”

Nick clamped his hands over Conlan’s ears. “Sorry.”

“You are a dickhead. You know I wouldn’t call unless it was urgent.” At least I knew he checked his messages.

Conlan squirmed.

“What is this about?” Nick growled.

“Someone cleared out Serenbe. They went through, shot all of the dogs with sniper precision, rounded up approximately two hundred people, boiled them to extract the bones, and dumped the remains by the old Walmart distribution center.”

The table suddenly went quiet. Nick dropped his hands from Conlan’s ears.

“When?”

“The disappearance was discovered last Sunday. I found out yesterday, when we found the mass grave.”

“Who’s on it?”

“Biohazard and Teddy Jo. One of his faithful died and is now in that sludge.”

“Is it Roland?”

I shook my head. “It didn’t feel like him.”

Conlan must’ve decided that Nick needed cheering up, because he took his soggy pretzel out of his mouth and tried to feed it to the knight-protector. Nick gently guided the pretzel away from his lips.

“It was done with skill and precision. No survivors. Almost no evidence.”

“You think there will be a repeat performance.”

“It’s a safe bet.”

“Okay,” he said. “Who’s got it at Biohazard?”

“Luther. I called it in.”

“Something of this magnitude, he’ll bring in the GBI. He’ll probably go to Garcia. She owes me a favor. I’ll call her, see if they’ll bring us in on it.”

“It would help.” I took Conlan from him. “Say bye to Uncle Stupidhead.”

Conlan waved his hand. “Bye-bye.”

“Bye-bye!” Nick waved back.

I got up to leave. “Thank you for letting me interrupt your important lunch. You’re not planning on taking off somewhere with your friends, are you?”

“No,” Nick said, his face made of stone.

“Good, because the city needs you, and you don’t have a costume, so sending bat signals with floodlights is right out.”

I offered everyone a big smile. There. All professional.

“Mrs. Lennart,” the dark-skinned knight said. “I’m Knight-abettor Norwood. I would like to visit you at a later date.”

I glanced at Nick. “Who are the Holy Trinity?”

“They’re from out of town,” he said.

I shrugged. “You’re welcome to come by. Nick knows where to find me.”

“You seem ordinary,” the female knight said.

“Good.”

“I could kill you right now,” she stated.

I rolled my eyes, turned, and walked out.

I DROVE BY Cutting Edge to check my messages. When I pulled into the parking lot, a courier was sitting on my doorstep. She was about twelve, short, Latina, and armed with a shotgun. She stuffed a big yellow envelope with a Biohazard stamp in the corner into my hands, had me sign the receipt, and took off on her bicycle without a word. The envelope contained several typed pages with the analysis and brief write-up of the scene at Serenbe and a twelve-page list of names, one per line. The dead.

I glanced through the report. They m-scanned the houses in Serenbe. Blue across the board.

I brought Conlan in, checked my messages, which were nonexistent, grabbed the case file Derek and I had put together yesterday, loaded Conlan back into the car seat, took my paperwork with me, and drove home. I could just as well work from the house, and at least at home I had toys and a familiar environment to back me up.

Two point five seconds after being put into the car seat, my son started screaming. We didn’t even make it out of the parking lot. I got out and checked the car seat for hidden dangers. The seat was fine. Conlan was also fine, despite all of the squirming and pulling on the car seat belt. I offered him a sippy cup with juice, and he threw it on the floor.

“Oh no, is it tantrum time?”

It was definitely tantrum time, complete with wailing and real tears. I kissed him on the forehead. “I love you. We have to go home. I can’t hold you right now, but you’re safe.”

Conlan shrieked. I got back into the driver’s seat and headed home. I couldn’t really complain. Conlan rarely cried, but once in a while he pitched a fit, usually because he was tired and didn’t want to fall asleep. He was a baby and babies threw tantrums, because life was hard and not fair and their wishes were rarely taken into account.

The real question was, how long would it take him to figure out how to unbuckle himself? That day was coming, and then we would be in real trouble.

I missed Curran. I wanted him to come home. This whole thing was deeply disturbing, and it felt like a part of me had gone missing. I wanted him back, and I wanted us to all be together.

About fifteen minutes into the drive, Conlan gave up singing the sad song of his people and fell asleep.

The Serenbe nightmare bothered me. Two hundred people, families, children . . . That wasn’t just murder; it was an atrocity. I would’ve liked to think only something inhuman was capable of it, but the entire history of humanity proved me otherwise. All of the magic scans pointed to human magic. Was it some sort of massive human sacrifice? If it was, what the hell were they summoning with it?

Whatever it was, I would find it and kill it. And then I would find the ones responsible and make them regret not dying with it.

It took me roughly thirty minutes to get to our subdivision. Our house sat in the middle of a short, curved street tucked into the crook of the forest, which my husband bought and named the Five Hundred Acre Wood. Originally it was the beginning of a new sprawling neighborhood, but the woods proved too aggressive. The development barely got off the ground before it was cut short. Then we moved in, which made all but two human families find quieter accommodations. Now our street was mostly people who had separated with us from the Pack. The other two streets were settled by shapeshifters who, for work reasons, decided to live in Atlanta. Even when Curran tried to distance himself, the Pack still found him one way or another.

I didn’t complain. The place was a fortress without walls, and if I sneezed the wrong way, about forty spree killers armed with fangs, claws, and nasty dispositions would come running. Even so, I’d sunk so much power into the perimeter wards that the entire College of Mages would have a tough time breaking through. I had this recurring nightmare of my father teleporting in and stealing my son.

The driveway before our house was empty. Curran was still gone. Come on, honey. Time to come home.

I tucked the file and the envelope under my arm and picked up Conlan. He was still sleepy and draped himself over my shoulder, all warm and limp. I unlocked the door, walked inside, and dropped the file off on the table.

“Here we are,” I murmured to Conlan, hugging him to me gently. “We’re home. We’re going to go upstairs and take a nice nap.”

Conlan jerked in my arms.

“What is it?”

My son yanked his head back, staring at the door, his eyes wide and terrified.

The doorbell rang.

Conlan made a low rough noise. Alarm shot down my spine. Babies didn’t make those noises.

“It’s oka—”

My son rammed his forehead into my mouth. I tasted blood. He threw his entire weight back, tore out of my arms, landed on his feet, and ran for the stairs.

What the bloody hell? I dashed after him in time to see his feet disappear into our bedroom on the third floor. He’d cleared the entire staircase in about a second. The lock clicked shut. Our bedroom door had a custom door handle that locked when closed. You had to push a switch on top of it to open it, something Conlan hadn’t yet figured out.

Okay. Door first, son later. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, pulled Sarrat out, and slid the small viewing window open.

Grass, a maple tree, and driveway. No fire-spitting monsters. No vicious killers. The tech was up.

I listened.

Quiet.

Yeah, there was probably a terrestrial man-eating octopus crouching on the wall just above the door waiting to pounce.

It’d been a long time since we’d had fried calamari. Technically, calamari was squid and not octopus, but as long as I fried it, who cared about the details?

I didn’t have time to mess around. I needed to get this sorted and figure out why my son was freaking out. I swung the door open. The front lawn was empty. A wooden box waited in front of the door. About two feet long, a foot wide, and maybe eight inches deep. Plain untreated wood, probably pine. Two metal hinges on the left side.

Someone had waited until I came home, then dropped it off on my doorstep. They were in our neighborhood, watching our house, and I didn’t notice when I came home, because I was a moron. I’d gotten comfortable in the past eighteen months. Sloppy, Voron’s voice said from my memories. Yeah, I know.

I stepped outside, carefully padded past the box, and jogged to the end of the driveway. The street was deserted in both directions. I didn’t feel anyone watching me. Whoever had delivered it had come and gone. Didn’t bother to stick around to see if I got it.

I turned back. The box looked perfectly harmless. Right, and as soon as I touched it, it would sprout whirring metal blades and carve me to pieces.

I crouched and poked the box with Sarrat. The box didn’t seem impressed.

Poke. Poke-poke. Shove.

Nothing.

Fine. I slid the tip of my blade between the lid and the box and flipped it open. A thick layer of ash filled the box. On it lay a knife and a red rose. And that wasn’t freaky. Not at all.

The knife was about twenty inches overall, with a fourteen-inch blade, sharpened all the way on the left and to a half point on the right side. Plain wooden handle, no guard. Simple, efficient, brutal. Reminded me of a skean, an Irish battle knife.

The rose was burgundy red, the color of merlot. Or blood. Long thorns. I sheathed my saber and picked up the box. It smelled faintly of fire. Not sulfur or smoke, but that particular heated scent when the wood got very hot just before it was about to burst into flames. There was something else, too. The hint of a darker and sharper odor I couldn’t quite place.

I took the flower out, picked up the knife, and shifted the ash with the blade. Nothing hidden in the ashes.

Was this some sort of threat?

Whatever it was, it seemed inert enough for the time being. I’d have to deal with it after I found my son.

I went into the garage, got a plastic bin, put the knife and the rose back into the box, placed the box into the bin, and carried it to the shed in the back. The shed served as my depository of weird crap I didn’t want to have lying around the house. I set the plastic bin in a salt circle on the floor, locked the shed, ran back inside, washed my hands, and bounded up the stairs two steps at a time.

It was quiet. Way too quiet for comfort.

I unlocked the door, stepped inside, and locked it behind me. From my vantage point, I could see through the arched entrance to the small nursery area Curran had sectioned off from our room. Conlan’s crib was empty, his blanket hanging halfway over the wooden rail. The bathroom door on my left remained shut, secured by a small latch bar only an adult could reach. That was the only way to keep Conlan out of the bathroom. He kept trying to eat soap and then cried when he realized it didn’t taste delicious.

The only good hiding place was under the bed. Curran liked to sleep high, and our bed was a massive beast that rose a full eighteen inches off the floor, not counting the box spring and mattress. Plenty of space.

“Conlan?” I called. “Where is my boy?”

Silence.

I moved forward on my toes. Curran and I played hide-and-seek with him all the time. Usually one of us would grab him and hide while the other one counted. Conlan was ridiculously easy to find, because he cracked up when you got close. To stay quiet wasn’t in his nature.

A step toward the bed. “Where is Conlan?” I sank right into the rhythm of the game. “Is he in the corner? No, he isn’t.”

Another step.

“Is he in his crib? No, he isn’t.”

Another step. “Is he under the bed?”

A clawed paw shot out from under the bed and swiped at my leg. I jumped a foot in the air and three feet back.

It couldn’t be.

I dropped down on the floor. A pair of glowing gray eyes stared at me from under the bed. Gold light rolled over them, the telltale shapeshifter fire. I’d seen that gold glow just five days ago, when our idiot poodle tried to throw up by Curran’s chair.

“Conlan?”

A low growling noise answered me.

Oh crap. Crap, crap, crap.

He’d shifted. He’d turned into a baby lion.

Oh my God.

I stared at the eyes. Maybe I was imagining it.

“Conlan?”

“Rawwr rawwr rawwroo.”

Nope. Not imagining it. He’d shifted.

I reached out and Conlan scooted back deeper under the bed.

Crap.

“Conlan, come out.”

“Rawrwr rawr!”

The phone rang. Maybe it was Curran. I grabbed it.

“Kate Lennart.”

“Hello,” a saccharine male voice chirped. “I’m calling from Sunshine Realty. Are you interested in selling your home?”

“No.” I hung up and dropped down again.

“Rawrrawr!”

“Conlan Dilmun Lennart, do not growl at me again. Come out from under the bed.”

He backed farther into the darkness, squeezing himself against the far wall. The bed weighed a ton. I could probably heave an edge of it up for a few seconds, but that was it. A fat lot of good that would do me.

I could get a broom and poke him with it. It would be long enough. But then that might just panic him more. Maybe if I sat on the floor and waited?

The doorbell rang. If the delivery boy was back, Sarrat and I could give him a piece of my mind.

I jumped to my feet, walked over to the window, and carefully edged the curtain aside, just enough to see. A Pack Jeep sat in the driveway.

“Don’t go anywhere,” I told Conlan.

The doorbell rang again.

I left the bedroom, shut the door, ran downstairs, and jerked the door open.

Andrea grinned at me. “I finally got away. Lora called me ‘Andrea the Merciless’ to my face. Can you believe that bitch? Wait until I tell you what she did. I should’ve given her a month of rock hauling. We can have lun—”

I grabbed her and pulled her inside.

“Okaaay,” she said. “Hello to you too, sweet cheeks.”

“I need you to help me catch my kid.”

“A one-year-old gave you the slip. How the mighty have fallen.”

“He’s hiding under the bed. I need you to help me get him out.”

“Why did you let him crawl under the bed?”

“Shut up and come with me.” I dragged her up the stairs.

“Okay, okay.”

I unlocked the bedroom door and dropped by the bed. Andrea dropped flat next to me. “What am I looking at?”

Two shining gold eyes stared back at us. “Arraawrooo rawrrawr.”

She opened her mouth. It stayed open.

Conlan backed into the wall again.

Andrea sat up and pointed under the bed, her blue eyes opened as wide as they could go.

“Yes,” I told her.

“When?” she squeaked.

“Just now.”

“What does he look like?”

“I don’t know. You can see for yourself once we get him out from under the bed.”

We both looked under the bed again.

“Okay,” Andrea said. “Okay, he shifted, so he should be hungry. Do you have meat?”

“All the meat is frozen.”

“What’s wrong with you?” she demanded.

“Curran is off on one of his hunting trips. It’s just me and Conlan. I’ve been eating salami sandwiches and ramen for the last three days.”

“Why would you do this to yourself?”

“Because it’s easy?”

“What do you feed him?” She pointed under the bed.

“Chicken, oatmeal, apples, vegetables . . .”

Andrea stared at me. “Do I even know you? What do you have for a treat?”

“Cookies.”

“Your son is a lion.”

“I know that!”

“Cookies aren’t gonna cut it. Do you know any lion hunters who bait their traps with cookies?”

“I don’t know any lion hunters, period. And you know what, apple pie worked for me.”

“I’ve got news for you, it wasn’t your apple pie Curran was interested in.”

She had me there.

“Do you have any salami left?”

“No.”

Andrea growled. “Go get the cookies.”

One minute later we sat on the bed, staring at a plate on the floor with two chocolate chip cookies and a small puddle of honey.

“I don’t think you understand the whole predatory cat thing,” Andrea informed me.

“He likes honey.”

We sat in silence.

“This isn’t working,” I growled.

Her eyes sparkled. “You should try calling, ‘Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.’”

“I will kill you and nobody will find your body.”

She chuckled.

Another minute. Sounds of muffled chewing came from under the bed.

“He’s eating something. What could he be chewing under there?”

Andrea frowned. “Electric cords. Old tissues. Dead bugs.”

Kate Lennart, mother of the year. What do you feed your son? Dead bugs he found under the bed, of course. I jumped off the bed. “We need to get him out now.”

Andrea rolled her eyes. “Have I told you that you’re a helicopter parent?”

“I’m going to be the Wrath of Hell parent in a minute.” I crouched by the bed. “You lift, I grab.”

“Okay.” Andrea gripped the edge of the massive bed and jerked it up like it weighed nothing. A black lion cub the size of a small Chow Chow darted toward her. I lunged for him and missed. He snarled and locked his teeth on Andrea’s shin.

“Ow!”

“Don’t drop the bed on my kid!”

I grabbed Conlan by the scruff of his neck and yanked him back.

“Get him off my leg!” Andrea howled.

I slid my arm under Conlan’s furry throat and squeezed, sinking steel into my voice. “Let go. Let go right now.”

Andrea snarled and the noise that came from her throat was pure hyena. I squeezed harder, applying a choke hold. Conlan released the bite and gasped. I rolled out of the way, moving my son so I landed on top of him, and Andrea dropped the bed. The floor shuddered.

A red stain spread through her jeans.

“Your son bit me!”

“Sorry.”

Conlan bucked under me. I held tight.

“He bit me!” She pointed at her leg.

“He can’t help it. You smell like a hyena, and you’re scary.”

“I’m not scary. I’m nice! I’ve babysat him like twenty times. I gave him ice cream! Ungrateful brat!”

The brat gave up on trying to throw me off and went flat on the floor. I got up. Conlan shook himself. He looked just like a lion cub. His fur was black and velvety soft, with faint smoky stripes, and his ears were round and fluffy. He blinked at me and twitched his ears. I cracked up.

“He’s adorable,” Andrea said. “I’m still pissed off, but he is so fluffy. Baby B used to be that fluffy.”

“Rawr rawr,” Conlan told her.

I reached out and popped him on the nose with my fingers. “No.”

He recoiled like a chastised kitten and blinked.

“You bit Aunt Andrea. We don’t bite our friends.”

Conlan noticed the plate and wandered over to it. A pink tongue slid out of his mouth. He licked the honey.

“Now I’ve seen everything,” Andrea said. She hiked her jeans leg up and showed me a red wound on her shin. “I felt his teeth scrape bone. He’s got a hell of a bite. That’s a lion right there.”

“Sorry.”

“Oh, you’re going to have to do better than ‘sorry.’ Your son assaulted the alpha of Clan Bouda.” She wrinkled her nose at me.

“It’s already closing, you big baby.”

“It will close better if you buy me a late lunch and some margaritas.”

Conlan licked the plate clean, crawled into my lap, and draped himself over me. He had to be at least thirty-five pounds. Probably closer to forty.

“Lunch might have to wait. I’ll tell you what, give me a crash course in shapeshifter toddlers, and I’ll give you some of our homemade sangria.”

The sangria started as an experiment. Before the Five Hundred Acre Wood formed, someone in the area must’ve grown grapes in their backyard, because we came across a clearing with several old vines. Christopher mentioned that he grew up on a vineyard in California, I asked him to teach me how to make wine, one thing led to another, and now I made forest sangria. I had also planted some of the vines in the backyard, but they were too young to produce fruit.

Andrea’s eyes lit up. “Did you make a new batch?”

“I did.”

“Deal. Usually they shift at birth and then about once or twice a week, so you get a chance to get used to it. But your boy never turned before, so your mileage may vary.”

My mileage always varied. “How long does it last?”

“He’ll shift back when there is something he needs hands for or when he gets tired. Same rules as an adult shapeshifter: one shift, maybe two per twenty-four hours, and after that second, he’ll need a nap. The babies don’t know their limits yet, so be prepared for him to try two shifts in a row and flop right on his face. It’s kind of funny. They just go boop and fall over.”

The last time he fell over and got a knot on his forehead, I drove him to Doolittle like a bat out of hell.

Andrea sat next to me. “Cheer up. Babies are easy. It’s the adolescents who make problems. Before you know it, he’ll be a teenager and Curran will start teaching him half-form.”

“Stop.”

“The worst is over. He’s well formed, he’s proportionate, no weird bones sticking out anywhere . . .”

“I mean it, stop.”

“Okay, okay. So what else? Oh, he will have a bit of a learning curve figuring out what he can do in each shape. Some things are instinctive. Like if he is chasing something, he may shift without thinking. But a lot of times, they’ll try to bite things while in human form or change shape and want their sippy cup. Baby B carried her spoon around in her mouth when she turned into a hyena. It was the funniest thing. I’d cut up meat for her and she still wanted me to put it on the spoon and feed her. Wait until I tell Raphael.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“What? Why?”

“Because your husband gossips like a church lady.”

“Please. Don’t insult me. Church ladies line up around the block to take gossip lessons from Raphael.” Andrea grinned. “No, seriously, why?”

“Because if you tell Raphael, the entire Pack will run over here to gawk at him, and I can’t do this right now. I have shit to deal with.”

“Is it Roland?”

“No.” I told her about Serenbe.

“Well, fuck,” she said.

“Yep.”

We sat quietly for a while. Conlan was sprawled on my lap, making a low rumbling noise. It was almost like purring. It felt oddly comforting.

“If you had to shoot a dog in the eye with an arrow from a regular bow, what’s the longest distance you could do it from?” I asked.

“Regular bow, I could guarantee a shot at forty-five yards. If it was a highly trained archer who wasn’t me, maybe thirty, but an eye is a small target and dogs like to move.” Andrea sighed. “It can never just be peaceful, can it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. The past eighteen months were pretty quiet.”

She snorted. “What about the Cherufe burning down City Hall two months ago?”

“It only scorched City Hall.”

“And before that there was the Raijū thing. And before that . . .”

I held up my hand. “Okay, yes. But you know what I mean. All these were normal. This thing in Serenbe isn’t normal. This is magic on a massive scale.”

Andrea sighed.

As if on cue, a magic wave rolled over us. Conlan raised his head, shook himself, and lay back down on my lap.

“I need Curran to come back,” I told her. “He was a baby lion before. It would really help.”

“What is up with your lion anyway? This is what, his third one?”

“Fourth.”

Curran once explained to me in excruciating detail how he hated to hunt. According to him, he was a lion, he weighed over six hundred pounds, and the last thing he wanted to do was run through the woods chasing after deer. But since Conlan’s birth, he and Erra had hatched a plan to extend the Guild’s reach past Atlanta for a strategic advantage when my father eventually came calling. Usually this strategic outreach involved hunting some sort of monster on the outskirts of Atlanta. It took Curran three or four days to catch it, and my aunt insisted on going with him.

“He takes Erra with him. That’s the most puzzling part.”

“Maybe they’re bonding.”

“My aunt, who continuously reminds me that I married a barbaric animal, and my husband, who thinks she’s an insane murderous bitch, are bonding?”

“Stranger things have happened.”

Andrea reached out and petted Conlan’s head. He sniffed her hand.

“You remember Andrea,” I murmured.

“Of course he does. He was just a little scared. Changing is confusing. So, what triggered it?”

I looked at her.

“Baby shapeshifters turn because they get scared. That’s why a lot of them shift at birth. Leaving the womb is scary. He didn’t turn even when Doolittle terrified him. There had to be some sort of severe threat. What were you doing when he shifted?”

The box. That had to be the thing.

“I was answering the door. Someone left a present for me on my doorstep.”

“Was it a nice present?”

“No.” I got up. “I’ll show you, but I think we’d better leave him here.”

We locked Conlan in the bedroom and went downstairs. I got out two bottles of sangria and poured Andrea a glass. She tasted the wine.

“Mmm, I can’t understand why you won’t drink this stuff.”

Because at some point in my life, I was a borderline alcoholic. “Why do you drink it? You can’t even get a buzz.”

“Because it’s delicious.” Andrea pulled one of the bottles to her and refilled the glass.

I left her in the kitchen to get the box. It still sat where I’d left it. I picked it up and walked back to the house. The moment I stepped through the kitchen door, Andrea put down her drink. The content smile melted from her face.

Something thumped upstairs, followed by a loud snarl.

“What is it?”

Andrea bared her teeth. “I don’t know. It smells bad.”

“How bad?”

“I can’t explain it. Bad like something really big that could eat you. Like something you should get away from. I’m a former knight of the Order and I really want to go back to my vehicle and take off just so I don’t have to smell it. No wonder the little guy flipped out.”

Andrea flicked the box open. Her expression grew long. She took the rose out and waved it at me.

“I know,” I said. “It may or may not be romantic.”

“It’s red.”

“Yes, and some cultures believe that red roses sprang from spilled blood.”

“Aha, keep telling yourself that.”

“That’s my line.”

Andrea whipped toward the door. “A car is coming. Sounds like one of your Jeeps.”

Curran. Finally.

Something crashed upstairs. It sounded like splintered wood. Not good. I walked to the stairs. “Conlan, your daddy is home.”

A thing perched on the stair rail. It was furry and upright, with oversized arms and curved black claws. Gold eyes stared at me from a face that was half-human, half-lion.

“Holy shit.” I stumbled back.

“What is it?” Andrea reached me and saw the thing. Her eyes flashed red. A shrill hyena laugh broke out of her mouth.

The small fluffy monster with Rottweiler fangs gathered himself for a leap. This should not be happening. Toddlers couldn’t maintain half-form. That was not a thing.

Calm and soothing. Calm and soothing. Mother-of-the-year voice.

“Conlan.” I started toward him one step at a time. “Come here. Come to Mommy.”

Andrea moved into the foyer from the kitchen, slick and quiet, ready to cut off any attempt at escape.

Step. Another step. Another foot and I could grab him.

The front door swung open and Julie stepped inside.

“Shut the door!” I barked.

Conlan sailed off the rail, bounced onto Julie, knocking her down, and shot outside.

Damn it!

I ran after him, leaping over Julie, and almost collided with Curran. Grendel bounced around us, barking up a storm, because my life required a giant hyper poodle right this second.

“What the hell was that?” my husband snarled.

“That was your son!”

“What?”

“Which way did he go?”

“Into the woods.” Julie rolled to her feet.

My aunt manifested next to the Jeep, a slightly translucent apparition in blood armor. “I told you,” she said. “I told you not to marry a shapeshifter. You did it anyway. Now this happened.”

“What do you mean, it’s our son?” Curran demanded.

“What is going on with this family?” Julie brushed off her jeans.

Derek sprinted into the driveway. “I heard yelling.”

“Will everyone shut up!” I snarled.

Sudden silence descended on the driveway.

“There is an eighteen-month-old running around in the woods in half-form. I’m going to get him. Help or get out of the way.”

I turned and ran into the woods to find my baby.