Chapter 22. Blaise
There was something wrong with Caitlyn.
I mean—understandably so.
Her unsummoned, unsolicited, and entirely unready fated mate had randomly appeared in her life.
He’d put on a shockingly poor performance the first time they were intimate, admitted he was still in love with someone else—someone who happened to be his best friend—and, less than an hour ago, had promised to do his best to move on.
Only for that same best friend to turn up on her doorstep and announce that he was also her fated mate.
It was safe to say that Caitlyn was not handling it well.
And I had a horrible suspicion that the truth clawing its way up my throat—the one I desperately wanted to shout from the rooftops—was going to send her straight over the edge.
Because the moment I’d splayed my hand over Ambrose’s chest, I’d felt it too.
That thing that had always existed between us, hiding under the comfortable guise of friendship and the assumption that we were meant for other people. The thing that always had us gravitating toward each other since the very beginning.
Now, finally, it made sense.
Ambrose was my mate too.
And, just like Caitlyn, he didn’t seem to be handling the news particularly well either.
He followed Caitlyn into the kitchen, his dulled gaze flicking between the back of her head and glancing over his shoulder at me.
Maybe he hadn’t felt it yet. The bond between us.
Because the look he gave me wasn’t Oh, gee, Blaise, looks like Fate’s been quietly nudging us together all along! but far more How can my mate also be your mate?
Now I felt like laughing just as manically as Caitlyn.
Because how had I become the emotionally intelligent one in the group?
Caitlyn—alternating between breathless laughter and muttering mild curses under her breath—dropped her bags onto the kitchen counter. Creep sat there already, glass eyes narrowed, as though none of this was unfolding according to plan.
Ambrose’s attention snapped to the doll. “Wasn’t that thing just out there?” he asked, suspicion sharpening his tone. “How is it now in here?”
Caitlyn spun on her heel, her smile stretched a little too wide to be comforting. “Oh, that’s Creep. She’s the physical manifestation of the house.”
She gestured cheerfully at the doll.
“She enjoys pranks. Like trapping additional fated mates that no one knew anything about inside, so her witch has absolutely no time to emotionally or physically prepare for meeting them.” Caitlyn leaned down slightly, still smiling. “Say hi, Creep.”
Creep’s answer was an eerily slow swivel of her head toward Ambrose, who to his credit only flinched the barest amount, and a begrudging little wave.
Apparently unsatisfied with Ambrose’s lack of instant fear, Creep suddenly leapt off the counter.
Ambrose startled properly this time, complete with a full-body flinch, and the doll pitter-pattered sweetly across the floor toward the stove.
She scrambled onto a chair and peered into the pan of milk simmering gently for cocoa, as though she hadn’t just shaved years off someone’s life expectancy.
“You get used to her,” I said.
When Caitlyn shot me a narrowed look, I amended, “Kinda.”
Ambrose stared at me. Something in his expression softened, and for a heartbeat I thought, There it is. He feels it too.
Then he shook his head, as though physically dispelling the thought.
“Well?” Caitlyn prompted. Her smile was still firmly in place, but her Converse tapped against the floor in sharp, irritated beats.
“Care to explain how you showed up on my doorstep?” She tilted her head.
“I mean, I accidentally hired the first incubus-slash-fated mate, but I can’t quite work out how you stumbled across my threshold.
” She paused, but just as Ambrose opened his mouth, she continued, “Oh. Right. I momentarily forgot.” She ticked off a finger.
“Best friends.” Another finger. “Fucked.” A third.
“Presumably realized you’re in love with him too and came here to confess but accidentally acquired a mate instead. ”
Probably not the way I would have phrased it, but at least my mate had saved me the job of awkwardly stumbling through an I love you to Ambrose.
Ambrose blinked, and I knew immediately that the words hadn’t landed—lost somewhere between his hunger and Caitlyn’s manic rambling.
The confirmation came when he shook his head, offering no acknowledgement at all of her letting slip that I was in love with him.
“I have a message for the two of you,” he said. “And for someone called Purdy.”
Caitlyn scrunched her face in confusion, just as Creep’s head performed a slow one-eighty from her position at the stove causing Ambrose to visibly shudder.
“Is the doll always that creepy?” he asked.
“Yup,” Caitlyn said. “That’s why I called her Creep. Anyway, I have no idea who Purdy is. So, what’s the message?”
“You—” His brows furrowed as he corrected himself. “We need to leave,” Ambrose said. “Go back to the coven as soon as possible.”
Caitlyn snorted. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Please,” Ambrose said.
The strain in his voice set my teeth on edge. Without thinking, I reached out and grabbed his hand. He startled but didn’t pull away.
“What’s happened, Ambrose?”
His gaze flicked between us, as though he’d only rehearsed as far as the warning and not the explanation. “I... um...”
He was saved by Creep.
Apparently deciding this was the perfect moment, she began serving cocoa—excruciatingly slowly.
Cups slid from their cupboards and slowly hovered their way in front of each of us one at a time.
The pan of cocoa bobbed toward us at a snail’s pace before pouring the cocoa in a slow dribble.
Finally, marshmallows emerged from the pantry one by one.
As we waited, Ambrose stared into the distance, his eyes flickering as though he were weighing how much to tell us.
Finally—after the last marshmallow plopped into Caitlyn’s mug, after Creep dragged her chair back to the table with painful deliberation, after she climbed up, a cushion appearing beneath her so she could see over the tabletop, and fixed Ambrose with an unblinking stare—he exhaled and began to talk.
“There are some things I can’t tell you,” Ambrose said, “because I promised not to. And others because... a lot of it’s hazy.” He drew a slow breath. “But there’s a witch—one I think you already know—who’s planning to steal your house.”
“Priscilla—” Caitlyn ground out.
Creep shot her a warning glare, the shutters rattling violently against the windows in response.
“No. Not her,” Ambrose said. “A witch called Isadora.”
Both Caitlyn and Creep snapped their attention back to him.
“Pricilla’s mom?” Caitlyn said, at the same time I asked, “The witch who hired you?”
Ambrose nodded once.
Caitlyn shrugged, utterly unimpressed. “I can handle Isadora. She was never the brightest witch.”
“That’s the thing,” Ambrose said carefully. “She isn’t fully a witch.”
Caitlyn’s brows knit together.
“She’s part siren.”
Caitlyn’s eyes widened—but only briefly.
Almost immediately, dismissal took its place.
“Nope. Not possible,” she said. “We’d know if she was part siren.
Lily Cole would know. And besides, if Isadora were part siren, then Priscilla would be part siren too.
” She scoffed. “And if that were true, she wouldn’t have spent most of my life bullying me when she could’ve just sung a song and made me hand the house and my recipes over. ”
Ambrose hesitated, clearly choosing his words with care.
“I can’t speak for Priscilla,” he said at last. “But Isadora is definitely part siren.” He worried his lip, then added quietly, “Because she’s had me under her compulsion for the last week.”
***
If it weren’t for the fact that I could hear my pulse pounding in my ears, I would have sworn I’d blacked out.
Shadows so dense that even I couldn’t see through them plunged the room into a kind of black-hole darkness, and it took me a painful moment to realize they were coming from me.
I felt them creep up my arms, forming talon-tipped fingers that gouged into the table as if my body were trying to anchor me there, to force me to stay and hear Ambrose out.
But every instinct I had was screaming at me to move.
To find the witch—the siren witch—who had kept my best friend, my mate, under compulsion for the last week.
It wasn’t until a large, warm hand settled over mine, and a much smaller, delicate one rubbed my arm from the other side, that I finally began to calm.
My chest was still heaving as the darkness receded, the shadow-talons dissolving as my pulse slowly steadied.
All I wanted to do was pull Ambrose into my arms. To reassure myself that he was here. That he was alive.
And suddenly, I understood.
This must have been how he had felt all those months ago.
But I didn’t have time to sit with that realization—to wonder whether Ambrose’s reaction that night had been born of something deeper than friendship, if it was the reaction of a mate—because the sharp clank of ceramic on wood echoed through the room.
I glanced down.
Creep sat on her seat, a clenched ceramic fist braced against the table she’d just thumped, quivering with barely contained rage. Her other hand pointed accusingly at the deep gouges my talons had left behind, her glare snapping between me and the ruined surface.
“Sorry, Creep,” I muttered.
I half expected her to leap from the chair and retreat to the attic to plot her revenge. Instead, she crossed her arms, jutted her chin skyward, and glared pointedly at the ceiling.
“Creep, now’s not the time to plot murder over a damn table,” Caitlyn said.