Chapter 2
Maggie
"Not a date," he said, and the corner of his mouth did that dangerous almost-smile again. Sharp teeth caught the light.
"Tragic," I muttered, and immediately wanted to take it back. Who flirts with a horned stranger after face-planting in the toy aisle? Apparently me. Because apparently my survival instincts had been replaced with gallows humor and a deep, treacherous attraction to velvet-skinned monsters.
Bram glanced once at the door. The crowd noise outside had dwindled to the hum of retail, beeps, wheels, and the occasional child wail that could have been a banshee or a sugar crash. He looked back at me. “You can stand?”
“Define stand.” I swung my feet off the couch.
My knees argued, my pride rallied, and I got vertical.
The room did a lazy tilt. Bram's hand came up, steadying my elbow with cool fingers that felt like blessed relief against my still-overheated skin. He waited until my spine remembered how to do its job, then released me like I was a delicate piece of glass he didn’t trust the shelf with.
Not because he thought I was fragile, but because he thought I was worth setting carefully down, worth not breaking.
“Okay,” I breathed. “That was… something.”
“Hot flash,” he said, like he was cataloguing it with price guns and spill kits.
"First one," I admitted, fanning myself with the mangled coupon flyer. "Thought I'd be thirty-nine forever. My body had other plans."
Something shifted in his expression, not pity, but understanding. Like he knew what it felt like when your body decided to betray you in public. “I’ll walk you out the back. Fewer… princesses.”
“Bless you,” I said, because I had no idea how to explain to the front of the store that Merida was alive and well and contemplating arson.
He cracked the office door and ghosted down the corridor in that quiet way of his, moving with an unnatural silence for someone his size.
Long stride unhurried, tail flicking once before settling into a lazy curve.
I followed, trying to tame my hair and dignity.
An employee stocking paper towels blinked at us, took in Bram, took in my damp shirt, and decided she hadn’t seen a thing.
That was the effect he seemed to carry with him, like he bent the world around his presence, made people look away or bow their heads, even if they didn’t understand why.
At the loading bay, he paused. “You left a tote. I had someone secure it.” He touched the comm clipped to his collar. “Jen, the canvas bag from aisle thirteen?”
A minute later, a harried teenager hustled over with my tote cart. She didn’t look at me. She looked at Bram like he was the moon telling the tide what to do. “Here you go, boss.”
“Thank you,” he said, his voice gone softer. The kid beamed and evaporated. That voice, gentle and warm, could level a battlefield if he wanted. No wonder she looked like she’d just been knighted.
I grabbed the handle and immediately realized that pulling my life up the bus steps on gelatin legs was going to be comedy or tragedy, and I wasn’t in the mood for either. Bram looked at the tote. Looked at me. “Bus?”
“I like public transportation,” I lied. “It builds character.”
“I’ll drive you,” he said again. Not pushy. Just final, like the sky announcing rain.
“I don’t—”
"It's safer," he added, and something in my ex-cop bone marrow stopped arguing.
Old instincts recognized that tone, the one that said I've already assessed the threat level and you're not equipped to handle it alone.
Not condescending. Protective. The kind of certainty you only got from experience, and the kind I'd used myself a hundred times on patrol. It wasn’t a suggestion.
It was protection disguised as logistics.
And God help me, it felt good to be on the receiving end of it for once.
“Fine,” I said, because I am a strong, independent woman who makes reasonable choices after fainting. “But if this ends with me in a freezer, I’m haunting your break room.”
He opened the steel door to the back lot and let in a slice of afternoon: gray sky, gulls, the tang of the ocean even this far from Seaview.
He rolled my tote one-handed like it weighed nothing and led me to a plain dark sedan that looked like it filed its own paperwork.
Practical. Clean. The interior smelled faintly like coffee and something darker, smoke?
Suede? Cedar from before, and underneath it all, just him.
I stopped and looked at the car. Then at his horns, which were… spectacular. Not ram curls, but upward, sweeping, bull-strong, catching the flat light and throwing it back in a dull shine. “So,” I said, deadpan. “Headliner or windshield?”
Bram blinked at the roof, as if he’d genuinely forgotten the prominent architectural features of his skull. He thumbed a switch. The sunroof slid back with a neat little whirr.
“It’s only cramped when it rains,” he said.
I barked a laugh that startled a gull off the lamppost. "Of course it is."
He tipped his head just so, easing one horn into the open space, and leaned a fraction toward me to check the angle. His shoulder brushed mine, solid and cool even through his shirt.
A spark went through me, low and electric, and it had nothing to do with menopause.
I suddenly understood every woman who'd ever written bad poetry about forearms, or in this case, horns and the careful way a man angled them to avoid hitting you in the face.
He was all blunt strength and careful edges, and my body betrayed me by cataloguing every single detail like evidence I wanted to pull out and examine later. Alone. Possibly in the bath.
“Guess I’ll start carrying an umbrella if we’re ever carpooling,” I said to cover the flip in my stomach.
“Good idea,” he said, as if we’d just scheduled it.
I climbed in, tugged the seatbelt across my damp shirt, and tried not to watch his hands on the wheel.
Big. Long fingers, darker nails. Not claws, just not the pink human kind.
The tail settled along the console, then, as if remembering itself, curled away with almost courtly politeness.
Even his tail had better manners than half the men I’d dated.
We pulled out with the kind of careful acceleration that made me think he’d studied Driver’s Ed manuals like holy texts. He checked mirrors, scanned exits, eyes flicking in a pattern that looked like math. I knew the type. I used to ride with the type.
“You’re very… alert,” I said.
“It’s my job,” he answered, but I got the sense he meant more than manager.
The highway unspooled, strip malls giving way to scrub pines, then to the low sweep of marsh before the coast. My shirt cooled. My skin stopped trying to audition for a lobster festival. The world steadied.
"I'm Maggie," I said into the quiet.
He cut me a glance, those amber eyes catching the late afternoon light. "Maggie," he repeated, like he was filing me alphabetically. Or memorizing me. "Maggie who makes soap."
“You remembered.”
“You smell like rosemary. And salt.” A beat. “And sugar. From the candy aisle.”
“Tragic,” I said again, but softer this time. “Lavender and sugar is my signature scent.”
“Hm.” It might’ve been agreement. It might’ve been appreciation. It sounded like both. And my traitor heart read it as: I like how you smell. Like you.
We passed a billboard for Seaview's Halloween Parade, cartoon bats, a skeleton band, WITCHES WELCOME in festive lettering. Underneath, someone had spray-painted in aggressive block letters: BUT CHECK OUR BYLAWS. I snorted.
Bram's eyes flicked to it, then back to the road. "Your town has good signage," he said, deadpan.
"My town has good grudges," I corrected.
"The older families are still mad about things that happened three hundred years ago and things that happened last year.
The Convergence didn't help; turns out opening portals to other dimensions and flooding the world with supernatural beings makes people even more set in their ways.
" I rolled the window an inch and let in sea air. “They can handle a broom. They’re still learning how to handle horns.”
He didn’t react, but I saw it in the line of his mouth, something old and resigned.
We crossed the causeway. Seaview rose in salt-bleached shingles and Halloween bunting, tidy porches lined with pumpkins and cats that might have been cats and might have been witches keeping an eye on the neighborhood.
People noticed the car. People noticed the horns. A pair of boys on bikes gawped and steered directly into a hedge. One of them popped back up, pointing and shouting "Cool!" before his friend yanked him back down.
Mrs. Quimby from the tearoom narrowed her eyes so hard I felt the draft. I bristled like my hair had opinions and flipped her the bird.
"Friend of yours?" Bram asked, his voice utterly neutral.
"She thinks I'm a bad influence on the neighborhood. She's not wrong."
"It's a good town," I heard myself say, as if I needed to sell it to him. "It just… takes time to warm up."
"I don't need warm," he said, and then, after a beat, almost so low I missed it: "I need useful."
The way he said it made my chest tighten.
Like warmth was for other people, and he'd settled for utility.
Like that was all he was allowed to ask for, all he thought he deserved.
A year in our world. A year of making himself useful to anyone who'd let him, and maybe that was the only way they let him stay.
Something in my chest ached. I turned to study him, the long line of his throat, the clean geometry of his jaw, the horns catching a last milky ribbon of light.
A year in our world. A year of making himself useful to anyone who’d let him.
I knew that kind of bargain. I’d made it with the city and my badge and a basement full of soap.
"You're more than useful," I said, and immediately wanted to choke on the earnestness. Too much. Too raw. I backpedaled. "I mean, today. You kept me from becoming a cautionary tale on Aisle Thirteen. That's at least one step above useful."
His mouth made that almost-smile again, as if he were trying it on. “You were very red,” he said, solemn as a judge.
“Thank you. I pride myself on dramatic color stories.”
We turned down my street, Tudor Revival cottages with shuttered eyes, hydrangeas gone papery, porches sporting tasteful ghosts.
He eased to the curb in front of my place, and for a ridiculous second, I saw it the way a stranger might: half-timbered charm, climbing rosemary, a small workshop tucked behind like a secret.
My house. My stubborn, hard-won life. And for the first time in years, I wondered what someone else saw when they looked at it.
Not just the house, but the life I'd built in the ruins of the old one.
Bram cut the engine but didn’t move. He scanned the street, porches, parked cars, the alley that cut behind the row.
He cataloged threats only he could see. It should have been unnerving.
It made my shoulders drop an inch. For once, someone else was scanning the exits.
For once, someone else was on guard so I didn’t have to be.
“Do you want me to—” He stopped, glanced at my tote. “I should carry that.”
“I’ve got it,” I said on reflex, then relented when my knees chimed in from the cheap seats. “Okay. Maybe you can take one end.”
We wrestled the tote up the short walk like partners moving a couch, and I realized two things in fast succession: 1) he was deliberately letting me take some of the weight, and 2) his skin felt cool even through the brush of our sleeves. Cool and smooth, even in the late afternoon warmth.
He wanted me to feel strong, even when he could've lifted the whole thing with one hand. He wanted me to share the burden, not just be carried. And damn if that didn't make my chest do something complicated and inconvenient.
On the porch, I dug for my keys while he cast that slow, methodical look across my little slice of the world. His tail made a lazy arc, then tucked along the rail, patient as a rope.
“Nice house,” he said.
“Thank you. She leaks in the nor’easters, and the plumbing makes sounds like a haunted oboe, but she’s mine.” I unlocked the door and propped it open with my hip. "Workshop's out back. Where I make the soap that apparently smells like rosemary and questionable life choices."
The corner of his mouth twitched. Interest, definitely. Not wishful thinking.
We parked the tote just inside, and I turned, suddenly aware that I'd brought a horned, velvet-skinned stranger to my threshold like some ancient folklore story, only reversed, the witch inviting the beast in.
Except he didn't look like he wanted to eat me.
He looked like he was waiting for permission to care whether I made it through the door without collapsing.
“I’m fine from here,” I said, because boundaries were important, and also because my pulse had climbed into my mouth and set up a drum circle.
Bram looked at me. Not through me, at me, with that steady, evaluating attention that had nothing to do with my hair being a disaster and everything to do with whether I'd make it through the next hour without face-planting again. He nodded once, accepting my boundary like it was law.
"If you need anything," he said, reaching into his pocket, "you can call.
" He produced a small, slightly bent business card: BARROW'S SUPERMART in block letters, a store number, and below it a name written in neat, uncompromising handwriting.
Bram. Just that. Like he didn't need a last name or didn't have one to give.
I took it. His fingers brushed mine. Zing, again, low and deep, like my body had started saving up sparks to fling at me when I least expected it. If this was what sparks felt like after forty, maybe spontaneous combustion wasn't the worst way to go.
“I’ll bring an umbrella next time,” I said, and immediately wanted to walk into the sea.
“Good idea,” he said, failing once more to recognize a joke as a joke, and yet by some miracle not killing it. “Rest. Drink water. Avoid toy aisles.”