4. Tara #2
“For years, I think. Since before she left him. Maybe since before she met him.” Grandmère waved her hand over the water, and the image dissolved.
“That’s why she was always so tired, chère.
Why she felt empty. It wasn’t just what he did to her mind.
He was taking something else. Something she did not know she had. ”
Tara stared at the now-still water. All those years watching Serena fade. All those phone calls where she sounded exhausted, diminished. She’d blamed Marcus, and she’d been right, but she’d thought it was psychological. Not literal feeding. Not a monster wearing a man’s face.
“How do we find her?”
Grandmère moved to the cloth bag beside her chair and upended it onto the table. Small bones scattered across the worn wood, yellowish-white and polished smooth.
“The dreams show me pieces, the scrying showed me a little more, but not enough. Not where she is. Not how to get to her.” She gathered the bones, her movements ritual and precise. “I need something more. Something or someone who already has a connection to her, stronger than the charm.”
“Use me.” Tara held out her hands. “We’ve been friends for a long time now.”
She touched her granddaughter’s face, and then plucked a strand of hair from her head, dropping it into the scrying bowl. The hair sizzled as it struck the surface, but the image remained unchanged. Grandmère clicked her tongue in disappointment.
“Is no good, chère. We need a much stronger bond. Like family, blood…”
“Like pack?” Tara asked. “The Voss brothers. She’s been living with them for months.”
“Is rare for wolves to make pack bonds with a human.” Her grandmother’s dark eyes found Tara’s. “They have strict laws.”
Tara thought about the way Serena talked about them. The heat in her voice. The way she’d started to glow when she mentioned them, like something inside her was finally waking up.
“But is she human? Would they have recognized her gifts? I mean, she was getting close to them, you know, and wolves are protective of their own.”
Grandmère nodded slowly. “Maybe, maybe no, but we could at least ask.”
She threw the bones. They scattered across the table in a pattern Tara couldn’t read, but Grandmère’s breath caught.
She gathered the bones again.
“Magnolia Creek is no far from here, and the bones say we will be there soon—”
A sound from outside cut her off. Tires on gravel. An engine cutting out. A car door slamming.
Grandmère’s head snapped toward the window. Her eyes narrowed. “We have company.”
Tara was on her feet before her grandmother finished speaking, moving toward the door. Through the window, she could see a black truck parked behind her car. A man was climbing out of it, tall and broad-shouldered, moving with that fluid grace she’d learned to recognize many years ago.
Wolf.
But not one of the Voss brothers. This one was bigger, darker, with a scar running along his jaw and an expression that suggested he ate nails for breakfast.
“Stay here,” Tara told her.
“No, child.” Grandmère was already reaching for something on the shelf beside the door. A jar of something dark. “That be Dex Fontaine. He runs with the Voss boys.”
Something about him set Tara on edge. She didn’t wait for more explanation. She pushed through the screen door and onto the porch, putting herself between the wolf and her grandmother’s house.
“That’s far enough.”
He stopped at the bottom of the porch steps, looking up at her with eyes that were more gold than brown. Assessing. Dismissive. It made her blood boil.
“I am looking for Celie Toussaint.” His voice was a low rumble. Not friendly.
“And you are?”
“Someone who doesn’t have time for games.”
He took another step forward, and her hackles rose.
“I said that’s far enough.” The anger in her own voice surprised her. The reasonable part of her brain knew she needed to make an ally of this wolf, but everything about him was freaking her out. She couldn’t let him pick up on that.
His jaw tightened. “Listen, chère, I don’t know who you are, but—”
“I know who you are.” Tara came down one step, then another, until she was close enough to see the gold flecks in his eyes, the tension in his shoulders.
“Dex Fontaine. Packless wolf who attached himself to the Voss brothers. Does their dirty work. Runs their errands.” She let her smile sharpen.
“You’re the attack dog. And right now, you look like you’ve lost something important. ”
Her hands tightened on the porch railing.
For a long moment, he just stared at her.
The anger radiating off him was a tangible thing, the barely contained violence.
As she had marched down the step his eyes had gone pure gold.
Wolves didn’t like being challenged, especially not by humans.
But Tara had her own ways. And she wasn’t about to let some growling alpha-wannabe intimidate her on her grandmother’s porch.
“Rowena sent me,” he said finally, biting off each word.
That Rowena had not come herself told her things were worse than she had let herself imagine.
“We believe the mystic arts are at play here, blocking our natural senses.” The words came out rough. Frustrated.
He went still. His eyes moved past Tara to the doorway, where her grandmother had appeared, the jar of dark liquid clutched in her hand.
“Something is interfering with our bonds.”
“You’ve lost more than one, no?” Grandmère tilted her head and raised an eyebrow.
Dex’s brow furrowed and his voice lowered to a growl. “How do you know that? What do you know?”
“I am Celie Toussaint.” Celie turned back toward the house. “Come inside. Both of you. If we’re going to find her, we need to work together.”
He pushed past her up the stairs, close enough that she caught his scent. Wild and woodsy, but not at all the canine undertones she was expecting. Something that made her pulse jump in ways she absolutely refused to examine.
Stamina. The word banged around in her head like a game of ping pong. Tara sucked in a breath, but it came out as a growl.
He stopped on the top step.
He wasn’t smiling, but he wasn’t not smiling either.
For one reckless second, Tara considered punching the smug look right off his face.
No. Absolutely not. She was not going to give him the pleasure. Nor was she going to be attracted to this arrogant, dismissive, insufferable—
He continued across the porch. His head turned, not all the way. Just enough that he was looking at her over his shoulder, his eyes on her face for the length of one slow breath. Whatever wolves heard with their noses, he had heard it. He was not pretending he hadn’t.
“You coming, chère?” he said over his shoulder. “Or you just gonna stand there looking at me like that all day?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Call you what?”
“Chère. I’m not your anything.”
He grinned, slowly. Like a man who’d decided something he wasn’t going to say out loud.
“Whatever you say, chère.”
He disappeared inside before she could respond. Tara stood there for a moment, fists clenched, heart pounding with an emotion she refused to name.
This was going to be a problem.
She made herself walk back into the kitchen.
Dex was at the table. Not sitting. Standing over the bones the way he had stood over her on the porch — looking at them like he was solving a problem he had no intention of voicing. Grandmère had taken her usual seat and was watching him.
His phone went off in his pocket.
He pulled it out, glanced at the screen, and answered without preamble. “Yeah.”
A pause.
“I’m with Toussaint and her… kin.”
Tara smirked. His nose was good, but not omniscient.
Another pause. Longer.
“Come again?”
Tara’s stomach went somewhere cold. The same somewhere it had gone earlier on the porch.
Dex’s eyes lifted and found Grandmère’s across the kitchen. Grandmère’s hand stopped moving on the table.
“We’ve done nothing to provoke —” Dex stopped. Listened. His jaw worked once. “All right.”
He ended the call.
For a beat, no one in the kitchen spoke.
Then Grandmère pushed her chair back from the table. Slow. The way a woman moves when she is not sure her legs are going to hold her but is not about to let anyone in the room see.
“Beaumont or Devereaux?” she asked.
“Beaumont.” Dex confirmed.
“This is going a bit far, even for them.”
Tara looked at her grandmother. Then at Dex. Whatever this was, Tara thought, she was the only one in the kitchen still in the dark. And she did not love that.