46. Daire
Daire
Goddess, we went to one of those huge stores with shelves of boxes all the way up toward the ceiling.
Drew, who’d put his dress back on in the back seat of the truck, was bouncing on the balls of his feet as he looked over the lower shelves out into the great box-shelved yonder.
“Come on!” He snatched up Viktor’s hand, which was kind of weird, as Viktor was clearly the least enthusiastic to be there, but he marched him off at a quick pace while Aleks looked on, a bemused expression on his face.
“Should we be worried?” Tristan asked, frowning.
Aleks snorted. “They’ll find their way back. Let’s get what we came for.”
And plenty else besides.
I couldn’t live out of Altair’s closet forever, but I only got a couple pairs of pants and shirts to get me through until I could get a new debit card.
It wasn’t like I’d ever had grand sums of wealth on my own.
I’d never had a proper job, and it wasn’t like I was paid for whatever administrative stuff the coven needed me to do, so I hadn’t been that worried about it when I’d been running for my life and left my phone and wallet behind in abandoned pants.
But if I was going to have assets of any kind, even if they were for the pack, I wanted us to be able to access them easily. Now that we were past the “will I die tomorrow” phase of leaving the coven behind, I needed to get my life in order.
And yeah, to do that, I might need some of my own pants.
Once we’d been through the clothes we went through the food section and got necessities, huge bags of nuts for snacking, and we got a bigger package of ground beef than I’d seen in my whole life.
Then again, buying for the whole pack meant purchasing in bulk was a lot more practical, and there was plenty we could get.
While we were shopping, we only caught glimpses of Drew and Viktor in the distance, Drew still dragging my sweet werewolf around by the hand, searching for something.
Aleks seemed endlessly amused, and Tristan, who’d never done much shopping for the coven, was staggered by the size of a package of M&Ms.
When we made our way up to the front of the store, Drew and Viktor finally caught up with us. Drew was wearing a broad grin, and Viktor looked vaguely uncomfortable.
“Look what we found!” Drew stepped out of the way and there Viktor was, holding a stuffed rabbit that was almost as big as his torso.
It was soft and white and fluffy, bigger than Mariah had been, but stuffed animals used to be smaller and denser than a lot of them were now. I reached out and touched the rabbit and it’s soft, marshmallowy fur.
When I swallowed, I got caught on the lump in my throat. “Is this . . . for me?”
Viktor’s jaw flexed. I couldn’t smell his feelings anymore, but I’d never been good at that to start. But I could see the nervousness at the corners of his mouth. “If you like it. It’s not the same as—”
“Mariah.”
He nodded.
They’d found me another stuffed rabbit, and while it wasn’t the same as the one I’d lost, my chest ached. It didn’t matter how cruel some people were, if the ones who surrounded me were this kind.
Eyes stinging, I blinked fast. “She’s really soft,” I whispered. “Is she—”
I reached for the price tag, and Aleks knocked my hand away. “We can handle one rabbit,” he said. “Evie’s right. Altair’s whole beautiful-man-lost-to-time schtick—”
“It’s not a schtick if it’s real,” Drew interrupted.
Aleks smiled. “Okay, yes. But I doubt the internet believes he is as archaic as he acts.”
Tristan shrugged. “Just because they don’t know vampires are real.”
“Anyway,” Aleks went on, “Evie’s right. He’s made more in a week on his phone than we used to pull in in a month. We can handle it. Put it on the pile.”
So we walked out with me holding a fluffy white bunny tightly, its legs bouncing against my thighs as we walked back to the truck.
Viktor, Tristan, and Aleks loaded up the back of the truck with most of the supplies, and we got back into the cab.
This time, Drew sat up front, so I bent my legs and leaned against Viktor.
Mariah Two sat in the bowl made by his legs and mine.
“Sorry if it’s silly,” Viktor muttered, a soft pink swelling across his cheekbones.
I shook my head. “It’s not. It’s one of the nicest things anybody’s ever done for me.
That’s why I kept Mariah, even though it was .
. . okay, maybe silly for a grown man to hold onto a stuffed bunny.
Just, when Aunt Ingeborg gave her to me, I was feeling really awful.
I was sick and miserable and—and just knowing she wanted to make me feel better was a lifeline. This? I—I think Mariah would approve.”
I reached out, tracing a star around the white bunny’s eye. With intention and a thread of magic, I turned the fur within the star a soft purple that matched Mariah’s original color.
Then, I grinned at Viktor. “See? Mariah the Younger. She’s perfect.”
I squeezed her tight and crawled halfway into Viktor’s lap, even though we had plenty of space.
The days that followed were busy. I drove the truck to the bank to set everything up, and it turned out the administrative stuff I’d done for the coven wasn’t so useless after all. It let Aleks off the hook from making calls and paying bills, and none of that I minded.
Truth told, working with people outside the coven had always been easier for me than working within it.
Tristan was surprisingly helpful, just as eager to prove himself to the pack as he’d been to my Mother.
Of course, this time, I thought it was worthwhile.
He said he knew how lucky he was that they’d let him stay, hadn’t just finished the work the bite had done and left him for dead.
He even felt bad about how we’d treated Altair.
Truth told, I preferred werewolf Tristan to witch Tristan, and given the way his self-confidence seemed to have improved, I suspected he did as well.
We hadn’t had any trouble from the witches either. Once I replaced my phone, I called the coven house and got Ingeborg’s direct line. She was determined that she had things in hand, and I didn’t have to worry about them coming back onto pack lands.
Cash and the others were busy working on homes.
They’d finished the big house, which took a lot of the pressure off of finding housing for people whose old shacks had been damaged.
It’d be a while before they got around to building our house, but I didn’t mind living with Katya, Leo, Altair, Drew, and Tristan.
Getting some of us out of the house might make mornings a little less hectic, but it was nice to have people who cared so close.
Everyone took care of each other, and Henry, Evie, Cash, and Aleks were nearby.
Now, Cash perked up when I didn’t have any running around to do and came out to help with the job site. I wasn’t hauling around logs anymore, but I watched Viktor do it which was—well, it was a lot to take in.
Normally, Cash had me looking at tools, making sure they’d still function, seeing if there was anything I could do to make them safer. There were things he wanted to replace, but in the meanwhile, protection wards did a lot of the work of keeping everyone safe.
I was using a lot of magic, but Mother seemed to have been right—I didn’t tire like a mage or witch normally would. There wasn’t a limit from the magic I could use while I still had that tie between Viktor and me to draw on.
I tried not to latch onto his wolf and take it back, but when I got freaked out and was doubting myself, it darted in and out of my consciousness to assure me that I was doing the right thing.
It was getting easier every time, and I didn’t need the reassurance quite so often as I got used to the wolf just encouraging me to go along with what I already knew to do.
Still, the best times were when Viktor and I were close, and the wolf and magic flowed freely between us both.
As I figured out magic, Viktor came along.
Whenever I was worried about something being too much, he’d just .
. . do it. Seeing him succeed with magic that was ours was the most confidence-building thing I could imagine.
But I realized one Thursday evening when the house was empty and I’d been left to light the candles alone—meaning yes, with magic, because matches seemed a lot more likely to singe my fingers—that I’d never asked Viktor if it drained him.
I wasn’t worn out by my magic, but he could be, and I doubted he’d just come out and tell me if it was a strain.
I could hear him upstairs in our room, so I bounded up two at a time.
“Hey, I was wondering, are you okay with—”
At the door to our bedroom, I came to a stop. There was Viktor, in a clean black shirt and jeans, stretching over the bed to lay out rose petals in a messy but balanced spray.
There were candles lit that my magic hadn’t brought to life.
And yeah, no one was in the house with us. At this time of night, that was . . . weird.
“Where is everyone?” I asked as he stood up and looked at me.
“Dinner at Henry’s. Did you want to go?”
I looked around, taking in the sweet scene and the flickering lights and—
“Is this . . . for me?”
It certainly wasn’t for Viktor alone. He didn’t tend to care for this sort of stuff.
He cleared his throat, scratching the back of his neck. “I thought you deserved . . . ”
I stepped toward him, and he let me take his hand, slip my fingers between his.
That seemed to clear his head, because he met my eye and nodded. “I know our first time wasn’t the way you’d imagined your awakening. We can’t go back and do it again, but I wanted to give you something . . . closer.”
I stared up at him, my eyes stinging a little for just the right reasons. When I tugged on his hand, he came down easily, and I pressed forward to catch his lips. “It’s perfect.”