Chapter 19
Cat took a deep breath and approached the purple house slowly.
Mateo had a plan. She hated the plan because it involved crawling back to the family and groveling in mock surrender while Mateo stalked the woods as a wolf outside.
The only one who hated the plan more than she did was Mateo, which was the only reason she had agreed.
And if it all went to hell, maybe she’d have a little bit more time to grab more things from her room on the way out. She hadn’t exactly explained to Mateo that they hadn’t just rejected what she knew about wolves; they had rejected her, and she was currently homeless.
She knew he wouldn’t hesitate. He’d fold her into his life without a second thought, assigning her a room in that gigantic house and even hauling her back to New York.
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t be one more thing he had to take care of.
She hadn’t realized that the playful, nerdy dude who was so terrible at cooking and curious about the world was not the Mateo Amato that anyone else got to see.
He loved his family completely, but he was stoic, distant, and serious with his cross-continental calls and his perimeter defenses.
She knew that was also a part of him, probably the biggest part, but she couldn’t stand it if he became so invested in protecting her that he would never let her know him.
Now what? You’re so proud you’re going to sleep in the snow?
There was always Misty’s Airbnb, the one house in town you could rent on short notice. It was never booked this time of year.
She tried to imagine hanging around town, taking a job at the grocery store, or, heaven forbid, with Gary at the hardware store. Maybe she should move to New York.
She felt a hand on her shoulder and nearly shrieked. Mateo wrenched his hand away.
“Sorry!”
“What?” she demanded, looking around for danger. He was supposed to be a wolf in the woods, not a man on the sidewalk.
“You’ve been frozen here for five minutes. Is everything okay? What are you sensing?”
She blinked. “Nothing. Sorry.”
“What do you See?”
She was about to tell him it didn’t work like that, that she needed bowls and crystals and light, but with his hand on her shoulder, she flickered easily through images of the future.
She saw glimpses of the outraged faces of the twins, but she didn’t know whether that was at the beginning of the conversation or the end.
Then she saw the bloom of white fire so intense it blinded her, and she staggered until Mateo caught her up in his arms.
“Oh my god, what is it?” he demanded.
The aftereffects of that searing glow burned her retinas. She glanced around, surprised to see it was still dark and nobody had run screaming from their houses, terrified of the apocalypse.
“What?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
She tried to summon another vision, almost terrified of what she would find, and while it wasn’t as bright or painful as moments before, all she saw was a fizz of white.
“I’m blinded,” she said.
“What are you talking about?” Mateo asked.
“I saw a flash of light.”
He stiffened beside her. “Like you were dead and going toward the light?”
“No, I don’t know. I can’t see anything else but that. It’s fizzing every circuit I have.”
“What is it?”
She shook her head. “I don’t have any idea.”
He took a deep breath. “Do we abort? I can have you on a plane and far away from this in an hour. Or less if I call another helicopter.”
“Where the hell would they land?”
He spun in a circle. “The middle of Main Street. I don’t care.”
For half a second, she considered it, but their bigger problem remained. Her family was still planning a mass murder, or was it murder if you were only trying to kill animals? Slaughter? That wasn’t better.
“No, I’m fine,” she insisted. “Whatever it is, it’s not happening now.”
“But it could later?”
“I don’t know, so we’re just going to stick with the plan. It was a good plan.”
“I hate the plan,” he grumbled.
“It’s your plan.”
“I know.”
He took a deep breath, dropped his hand from her shoulder, and melted away. She almost cried out at the loss of contact but told herself she was going to have to live her entire life without it, and she had better get used to it now.
She also had to move. She couldn’t stand on the street outside her house for the rest of her life.
She considered the front steps and thought about all the booby traps between here and the front door with a gulp. They were set against wolves, not her, but they could keep out a witch, too.
“Only one way to find out.”
She took the first step. Nothing happened. She jogged up the steps. They hadn’t locked the spells on her.
She hesitated again at the front door, not because of another existential crisis, but because she didn’t know whether to knock.
It felt ridiculous to ask for permission to enter her own home, but it also felt impossible not to.
“The point is to make them happy,” she reminded herself and knocked. She was a chastened and lonely kid returning to the bosom of her family.
She heard shouting from inside the house and then stomping feet and barking.
She heard one person say, “How come nothing went off?”
“Ducky, you’re useless!”
The door wrenched open, and she saw her sister, Dylan, standing there with a frying pan in her hand. The twins clattered up behind her, gasping for air.
“What do you want?” Dylan demanded and crossed her arms; the frying pan now cocked in her elbow.
Cat clenched her teeth. Everyone else paid lip service to the fact that receptive magic was just as powerful and useful as active magic, but Dylan had never been shy about the superiority of telekinesis.
She joined the family in middle school, and Cat was kind of surprised she stuck around now, because she had a chip on her shoulder the size of a mountain and a suspicious streak almost as wide.
“I’m sorry,” Cat said softly, grateful they had no empaths because she was feeling nothing but raging frustration.
“What are you sorry for?” Dylan demanded.
“Never mind that, you’ll help?” Siobhan asked.
Cat’s jaw dropped, but she didn’t know why she was surprised. Siobhan had always taken for granted that the world was as she wanted it to be, especially with her family. What was it with witches and telekinesis that they just expected everything to mold to them?
Cat nodded quickly. “You were right; they’re dangerous.”
Niamh folded her in a hug. “What did he do to you?”
“Nothing! I mean everything.”
“What?” Dylan said. The frying pan wobbled.
“He threatened me!” Cat added quickly and regretted that they hadn’t spent more time on the plan. Mateo had been certain she would know how to convince her family, but she should have figured out something to say that didn’t paint him as a horrible werewolf.
“Come in, come in,” Niamh said and pulled her across the threshold. Nothing happened, and Cat breathed another sigh of relief. “We’ve been trying to put together enough power, but nobody’s coming home.”
They walked into the living room to find Beatrice, her twin brother Henry, and Hannah in the corner.
Cat took in the assembly. Hannah was doing her master’s online and never came out of her room except to work. Henry, a man without magic, never participated in their 911 drills. This was everyone who lived in the house, except…
“Where’s Annie?”
Niamh rubbed her hands. “We don’t know. She’s gone. She walked out a few hours ago.”
After Cat met Felix in the woods and he had asked her if she was Annie’s sister and if she was okay.
Cat bit her lip. She hoped Annie was where she wanted to be.
She shook that off and focused on the twins. “So, this is everybody? No one else is coming home?”
“Not yet,” Niamh said.
Siobhan just shook her head.
Cat sighed. A week ago, that would have incensed her—that all the women they’d raised were so ungrateful they couldn’t even stop by—but she understood a little more now. Sometimes the twins made it impossible to stay.
“So, what is the plan?” Cat asked.
Niamh pointed to the coffee table where the two grimoires sat innocently among the other books, and Cat took a deep, slow breath.
Siobhan opened one with a flick of a finger, seemingly reluctant to touch it. Cat thought working magic on the thing was scarier than skin touching it, but that was just her.
Siobhan flipped almost to the front of the book where the spell lay.
“There is a way to undo it,” Hannah said.
“You understand it?”
Hannah blinked at her. “Yes? Undo it, strengthen it, redo it, delete it. It’s common to write those options into big spells like this.”
Cat came around the table to look for herself, though Hannah would be right.
She was a scribe. Her magic lay in the written word.
She spent her days buried in the past, trying to pin magic down in words.
It was a type of pattern magic like Niamh’s potions, working power through a specific medium. It made no sense to Cat.
Dylan’s telekinesis was annoying, and Cat was totally jealous, but it was comprehensible. Hannah could not work magic unless she wrote it down. In traditional covens, they were the keepers of the grimoires, recording spells for posterity.
Cat noticed the Griffin Coven grimoire was nowhere to be seen. It was probably still safely locked up in the library. It had no spell for werewolves. Cat guessed most covens didn’t. She ran her hand down the page, reading over the bizarre chant at the beginning: two, three, six, twelve.
She skipped to the middle of the spell. She could almost follow how they put it into place, chaining animal magic into a charm into a living being dipped in healing magic.
The horror struck her all over again. What those witches did to those men was for their own selfish reasons.
“So you’re going to try to do the spell.”
Hannah nodded vigorously, hair flying around her head. “Just the undoing part. You see, there in the end, the unravelling. It’s like a crocheted blanket throughout the body, and if you pull on a stitch, the whole thing goes.”
Beatrice shook her head, and Cat had a moment of hope. She was the healer, using her magic to help other beings. Cat couldn’t believe that she would agree to do so much damage.
“It’s not healing,” Beatrice said. For once, she looked short standing next to her towering twin. “Here you’re just removing the foreign substance.”
Cat bit her tongue. Mateo’s wolf was as much a part of him as his heart, but she’d tried the convince them of that, and that had failed. Now, she just had to stop them.
“Maddie and Sabrina are in Denver, so we’re going to wait until tomorrow so they can get here and then head out to the woods to try to make this happen,” Siobhan said.
Cat nodded once. “I will be ready.”
Siobhan squinted at her, and Cat tried to keep her face neutral, reminding herself again that Siobhan was the least sensitive witch she’d ever met. She had no receptive talent of any kind.
Siobhan nodded once, seemingly convinced of her innocence and regret, and gathered up the books. “I will just keep these safe until then.”
She disappeared, and Cat tried to lean casually into the corridor to confirm she was taking the books to her room.
She closed her eyes. That meant extra wards, extra defenses, and extra risk.
Hannah blinked as soon as the books were out of sight, and Cat realized she hadn’t taken her eyes off them.
“Is the meeting over?” Hannah asked plaintively.
“Yes, dear,” Niamh said and reached out, then yanked her hands behind her back. Hannah hated hugs. She scampered out of the room as quickly as possible.
“Did she eat?” Beatrice asked, and Dylan scoffed.
“Of course not.”
“Well, you have fun with your little werewolf project,” Henry said with a wave and headed toward the door. Cat jogged after him.
“Why did you come?” Cat asked.
He rolled his eyes. “All family meeting. I thought it was for something else.”
Men didn’t have magic. It was passed down to the women in the family. He was totally normal, or as normal as you could grow up in a house full of random witches.
She waited to see if he would go after Hannah. They’d always shared some connection between them in their love of books. He’d become a librarian, after all, running the tiny Carnegie Library in town, but he went out the front door, not up the stairs.
She always wondered if there was more between them, but so far as she was aware, he’d never crossed that line with any of his foster sisters.
He kept to himself and his books in town.
The only thing that didn’t square with his scholarly reputation was the fact that he was one of the best downhill skiers in the state.
He almost made it to the Olympics. Now six days out of seven, he was a quiet, studious librarian, and on Sundays, he drove over to one of the ski hills and took the hardest, craziest routes possible.
She turned back to the sitting room and stopped short when she saw Dylan standing in the archway, still clutching her frying pan.
“The twins may be constantly surprised when someone betrays them, but I’m not. A simple apology to get you back in the fold? I don’t think so.”
“I am sorry. Not just like morally sorry, but ‘I contemplated working for Gary at the hardware store and renting one of his apartments’ sorry.”
“Oh my god,” Dylan said with genuine horror.
“So you’re right; I am selfish. Where the hell am I going to go?” That at least was the bone-deep truth. “I knew a long time ago that staying meant buying into their werewolf project.”
“You don’t think it’s a good idea to get rid of them?”
“No?” Cat said. She couldn’t lie. “The twins are constantly worried about the shifter wars, but I think this is going to count as a provocation.”
“They’re dangerous!”
“I know,” Cat said. That was also the truth. “Which is why I’m going to help.”
“Get yours before they get you,” Dylan said.
Cat turned back at the base of the stairs. “I genuinely hope one day in the future you feel the warmth of human kindness.”
“It’s for suckers,” Dylan said and disappeared back into the sitting room.
Cat took a huge breath and vaulted up the stairs to her room.
She didn’t waste time. She grabbed her ultralight backpack she had taken to the mountains and started packing up.
She’d spent more than a month in the woods with nothing but this backpack, so it was easy to put together her essentials, but then she paused.
It wasn’t just about essentials. Her whole life was in this room, all her photos, her memories, and her crystals.
She got out a much smaller backpack for day trips and whispered, “If I never saw any of you again, what would I miss?”
Filling that backpack took a lot longer as the clock ticked toward midnight.