Chapter 11
Cat trudged wearily up the drive to the purple house. It had only been a few days, but it felt like a week. The kids were all recovering in a hospital in Denver from hypothermia and frostbite, but nothing more serious. They would all survive thanks to a wolf who had helicopters on standby.
She hadn’t seen him again. She had been trying to keep the kids calm and explain to Search and Rescue what had happened, and then he was gone.
She told herself it was for the best. Of course, he was gone.
There was no other choice for either of them, but she irrationally wished she could say goodbye.
No, she irrationally wished that she would never have to say goodbye again, but that would be beyond irrational. That was impossible and ridiculous.
The purple house was a three-story historical number one block west of Main Street. The house was a mansion, at least according to Colorado standards at the turn of the century. It looked vaguely Victorian, though everything was made of wood, put up by a newly rich miner to flaunt his success.
The purple paint had come later. Cat didn’t know if the twins were trying to be ostentatious, cultivating their reputation in town as eccentrics, or if they just really liked the color.
She still lived in her childhood bedroom on the second floor.
She loved the place and stayed partly because of that and partly because the only place in Silver Spring to rent if you were single and didn’t want to share a house with people you didn’t know were tiny apartments above businesses downtown.
She also stayed because this was the heart of the coven, the bustling, crazy center of all of Niamh’s experiments and Siobhan’s gardening disasters.
She’d never met another person who had more love for something she had less talent for than the older twin and her plants.
She couldn’t imagine leaving them, so she was surprised that she felt nothing but fatigue as she walked up the front steps onto the front porch.
The door burst open, and the twins flew out, squawking at her as they folded her in their arms. Siobhan nearly strangled Cat, her dark hair blinding her.
Witches with telekinesis tended to walk through the world like bowling balls.
In contrast, Niamh fluttered around, patting various body parts she could reach.
“We should’ve listened,” Siobhan said to the top of her head.
“We always listen,” Niamh said, tapping her elbow repeatedly. “We should have acted! You knew they were out there.”
“What would you have done?” Cat asked with a smile as she tried to free herself. “Then we would’ve all been stuck in the blizzard.”
“You’re a hero!” Niamh declared. “Everyone is saying so.”
“Come in, come in, you must be famished!” Siobhan added.
“I’m good,” she said, but allowed them to draw her inside, where she stopped short at the transformation of the front hall since she’d left two days ago. They’d been redoing the defenses, but now they looked ready for war.
Cat had never heard the story about why they were so obsessed with werewolves. She hadn’t questioned it when she was growing up. It was just a normal part of childhood to be dangling silver everywhere and to have a secret room in your house full of weapons and ancient spell books for defense.
It looked like they’d emptied the room and put all the weapons in the front hallway. This had never happened before. Crossbows and cudgels were leaning against a shelf full of defensive potions, delicate glass ornaments full of magic poison to throw.
“What is going on?” she asked, looking around.
Annie stepped out of the sitting room, a smirk on her lips.
“I can’t believe you didn’t foresee this,” Annie said.
“I can’t believe you didn’t say,” Cat countered in an old script between them.
It had stung a lot in high school. Annie was another stray.
They were the same age in the same grade and shared many classes, but Annie had lived most of her life on the streets and did not appreciate being relegated to a tiny town in the mountains, especially because she hadn’t realized she was a witch.
Annie’s talent was spellcasting. She could speak and get what she wanted, but learning to craft a spell with words that didn’t backfire took time, and for a while, she’d only grown more frustrated, especially surrounded by telekinesis witches who could point and levitate whatever they wanted.
Cat’s talent was even more powerless than her spellcasting, and she found a weakness.
Now it was just old banter.
“The Double Thirteen house is occupied. They came on the day of the blizzard,” Niamh said solemnly and reached out to caress the handle of an ax.
“It has to be an omen,” Siobhan echoed. “We’re preparing now. We spent the blizzard doing nothing but shoving spells into potions and decking out the house with defensive magic.”
“I don’t think omens work like that,” Cat said gently, given that her talent was literally reading omens. “The weather is just the weather.” Unless there was a weather witch around, but another of her sisters had long moved away.
“At any rate,” Niamh said primly, “now we’ve got to put up all the wards. That’s what we were starting.”
“A werewolf could just walk up to our door, and you wouldn’t know right now?” Cat asked, quietening old fear.
“It’s terrifying,” Annie said flatly. “Because werewolves are just beating down our door day and night. How will we know?”
There was a bitterness in Annie around the subject of werewolves that Cat had never understood.
“However will we?” Cat deadpanned. “But first, I’m going to grab some food.” She wasn’t particularly hungry, but hopefully it would switch Niamh out of warrior mode.
Sure enough, the shorter woman squawked and threw up a hand. She left the ax alone as they all headed down the hall toward the back of the house, where the kitchen stretched across the back of the ground floor.
They passed the library where a hidden swinging shelf led to the secret werewolf library. The shelf was closed, and it just looked like a normal library with a couple of chairs. Their giant wolfhound, Ducky, was asleep on the rug.
“Thanks for being happy I’m back,” she told the lazing hound with a smile.
When she got to the back of the house, she saw her sister Beatrice at the stove.
A few years older, Bea was Niamh’s only biological daughter, a quiet woman with the power of healing.
In a coven full of unusually strong personalities and active talents, she had become the family peacemaker.
Her twin brother had coped by spending his childhood on a ski hill.
Beatrice dropped the spoon into the soup, ran over to Cat, and folded her in a hug. “I’m so glad and I’m so sorry and I’m so happy.”
Cat patted her on the back. The effusiveness was definitely unusual. She was the least demonstrative of any of her sisters. “It’s okay? I’m fine.”
Beatrice pulled back and squinted at her. She matched her mother with strawberry hair and freckles. “Truly?”
“You can scan me.”
Beatrice nodded once and closed her eyes. Because they didn’t share blood, Cat couldn’t feel her healing.
Beatrice’s hands moved over her automatically. She had a business in town as a masseuse and a naturopath, taking clients above the Cauldron and Broom. The herbal remedies and massages were just a cover for her healing talent, which didn’t take any kind of intervention.
“You are good. Hmmm, you’re better than good,” Beatrice said after a minute and let her go. Cat blushed and turned away, wondering what she had sensed.
Niamh gently shifted them out of the way and tried to fish the spoon out of the cauldron.
“I was, um, inside,” Cat said. “We had a stove.”
“We?” Siobhan said sharply as she shoved her sister away from the cauldron and used her telekinesis to rescue the spoon herself.
“Me and the Search and Rescue team,” Cat said quickly. “I’ll take a bowl of soup, that’s fine.”
Niamh tittered. “This isn’t soup. I thought I could make a chunky potion, then gradually increase the chunky part until it was solid.”
“Great,” Cat said and backed away from the stove.
Niamh worked all her magic through liquid concoctions, emphasis on liquid. She was always running experiments to try to make a solid potion. She had not succeeded yet.
“It’s just criminal that we have solid charm magic and liquid potion magic but no solid magic we can eat,” Niamh said as she let the potion gloop back into the cauldron.
“Yes, how dare magic work like that?” Annie said as she followed them into the room.
The vagaries of what talent did what seemed to be an accident of genetics, but Cat loved that the twins were always trying to push what was possible.
“There’s cold soup!” Siobhan declared from the fridge, holding up a Tupperware with a vaguely red substance in the bottom of it. Cat looked from that to the cauldron. “Toast is good.”
Toast hadn’t been good for almost a month when Niamh was experimenting with doughs. Cat could never tell if she was getting a failed potion or regular bread, but now that Niamh was on soups, she could go back to bread for a while.
She made herself some toast on the sideboard, and Annie immediately stole one as she said, “I forgot!”
“What?” Cat asked as she put another piece of bread into the toaster. “Anyone else? Burned bread?”
Annie shuddered. “You don’t have to call it that. Words matter, you know?”
Cat snickered. Words didn’t matter to Cat nearly as much as they did to Annie.
“It’s accurate, though,” Cat said. “First, you bake the bread until it’s perfectly done, and then you re-bake the bread until it’s brown.”
“I forgot to tell you.” Annie leaned over and started digging through endless papers on the huge kitchen island in the middle of the room, big enough to seat everyone on rickety stools around it.
Annie pulled out a couple of booklets the size of a regular piece of paper in glossy colors.
“What is this?” Cat said as she tried to swipe one.