“I give up.” I took one cautious step back. “I won’t spy on Linus. Happy?”
The stairs realigned themselves, the light above me brightening with the glow of her approval.
Much to my delight, the commotion lured the groom-to-be out onto the landing.
Linus had secured his dark-auburn hair at his nape, and the black frames of his glasses turned his navy eyes a richer blue. He wore a fitted tee that all but concealed the ink covering his chest tucked into black tuxedo pants that did amazing things for his butt and made me want to run my hands over…the fabric.
Yeah.
The fabric.
A tiny smile perched on his mouth when he caught me ogling him. “What’s going on out here?”
“I heard a rumor you were half-naked and came to investigate.”
“I’m trying on my tux.” He gestured down his pants, which were zipped but not buttoned. “For the wedding.”
Zipped.
But not buttoned.
“Hmm?”
“Grier,” he said dryly. “My eyes are up here.”
“Darn stairs.” I tilted my head back, forcing my gaze higher. “I can’t help they put me at crotch height with you.”
The wood groaned beneath me at the weak joke, but it was Woolly’s fault I had missed the show. He probably zipped those pants before coming to investigate. A few seconds earlier, and I might have gotten lucky.
Literally.
“Tradition states the bride can’t see the groom before the wedding.”
I whipped out my best pout, the one that had let me get away with murder as a kid. “Not you too?”
Linus, who had known me since I was six, was resistant to my charms. “You don’t care about tradition?”
Slowly, I dragged my teeth over my bottom lip. “I care more about half-dressed grooms.”
For two years, he was a part-time fiancé. There was no helping it, and I didn’t hold his absences against him, but it was hard having Linus split his time between Savannah and Atlanta while he trained their respective potentates. We came out stronger on the other side of it, but I never wanted to do it again.
I was ready to start living a life where the longest we had to be apart were the four hours we spent at our respective jobs each night before we hit the streets to patrol. And even then, his tattoo studio—The Mad Tatter Too—occupied the top floor of the building he bought me for my ghost tour business on Abercorn Street.
A low moan came from Linus’s old room, and Cletus drifted to hover between us, obscuring my view.
“Not you too?” I curled the end of his tattered cloak around my finger. “Since when is it a crime to want to see your fiancé naked?”
Tempted to fib about checking on Oscar to slip past Cletus, I surrendered before trying my luck. Cletus kept tabs on all of us. He would have noticed the ghost boy had gone wherever it was ghost boys went to recharge. Oscar had big plans, secret manly plans I was too girly to know, and he wanted to have a full battery when Corbin arrived for the wedding.
Goddess help us all.
“We showered together at dusk,” Linus reminded me. “And then an hour ago—”
“Hey.” I huffed the bangs out of my eyes. “I can’t help if your clothes fell off halfway to the carriage house.”
Until we tied the knot, if anyone asked, he was living there. Though we used it for storage these days.
Tucking his chin, he cleared his throat. “The garden is lovely this time of year.”
“Isn’t it just?” I put my weight on a stair one step higher, but Cletus kept up the buffer act. “Spoilsport.”
Backing down the way I had come, I snickered as Cletus ushered Linus back into his old room to finish his solo dress rehearsal. At least I wasn’t the only one getting bullied around here.
I was trudging toward Neely’s office to report my failure when I heard the thud, and then…a moan.
The old house lit up in a panic, and I sprinted for the kitchen, skidding through the doorway in my socks.
“I don’t know what happened.” Leslie clutched her tablet to her chest, her eyes wide and her fingers trembling. “She was sampling Jordan almonds, and she…”
“Did she choke?” I hit my knees beside my unconscious friend. “Lethe? Can you hear me?” I checked her pulse. “Lethe.”
“S-s-she didn’t make a sound,” Leslie stammered. “She couldn’t have choked. She couldn’t have.”
Woolly brought Linus racing down the stairs, and he nudged me aside to examine her. “Call the doctor.”
Doctor? What doctor? No one treated gwyllgi except for…
Oh.
The pack’s healer. That’s who he meant. He was speaking in code because of the human gawking at us, and I was losing my cool because the off-white buttercream on Lethe’s mouth was darker than her skin.
“Okay.” I botched the number on the first try, got it on the second, then waited for Jaya to answer. “Lethe’s down.” Buzzing filled my ears until all I could hear was my best friend’s labored breathing. “I don’t know, I…” I lost my patience. “Just get over here.”
“Grier?” Neely ducked his head in the room then lifted a hand to his throat. “I heard…”
Thank the goddess for backup arriving in the nick of time.
“Neely, get Leslie out of here.” I fumbled in my pocket for the small knife I had stolen from Linus forever ago. “And somebody call Hood.”
“On it.” He grasped Leslie by the elbow. “Come on, sugar. I’ll walk you out.”
“I could—” The phone she wrestled out of her pocket shot through her fingers. “Should I call 911?”
“Grier just did.” He caught the phone, returned it to her, and nudged her along. “Help is on the way.”
“It’s going to be okay, Lethe.” I trusted Neely to get the baker out of the house, and I didn’t spare her a second thought after she left my sight. Blade pressed to my left palm, I cut my hand for ink to mark healing sigils across Lethe’s forehead and cheeks. “You’re going to be fine.” Drawing on the genetic memory passed down to every goddess-touched necromancer, and from my study of the Marchand collection, I set to work. “Be fine, and I’ll buy you your weight in bacon.”
“Hood is teaching a class today,” Linus said once Neely returned. “He won’t hear the phone ring, so I sent him a text.”
Since Hood and Lethe’s daughter, Eva, couldn’t attend public or private school thanks to her accelerated growth, he began homeschooling her. One thing led to another, and the pack had entrusted its children into his care as well so that she could make friends for every stage of her development and enjoy a more normal school experience.
I had never hated the no phones in class rule more than at this moment.
“Neely?” I kept going, the design well past intricate into obnoxious. “Run next door and grab Hood.”
The Kinase pack lived in a sprawling manor with extensive grounds, and the homeschool was set up as an all-ages classroom in the converted ballroom. He didn’t have to make it that far. One of the patrols ought to stop him. They could sound the alarm and bring Hood running on all fours.
“On it.” He pivoted on his heel and shot out the door.
“Closing the sigil.” I completed the design then braced my palms on her chest. “Clear.”
Linus dropped her wrist where he had been monitoring her pulse, and I jolted her with a dose of high-voltage magic, illuminating her skin and blasting light through her pores. Squinting against the brightness, I charged her with a second wave.
Lethe shot upright coughing, her eyes wild, her predatory instincts on alert.
“You’re okay.” I rubbed her back, drawing her halfway into a hug. “I’ve got you.”
“No,” she rasped, shoving at me. “Powder.”
“Powder?”
Her index finger shook when she pointed at a bouquet on the counter. “Bronze.”
Dread beat a tattoo in my chest as I sank back on my haunches. “Woolly, lock the ho
use down.”
Bronze was to gwyllgi what silver was to wargs. Not many had been aware of that fact—it was far from common knowledge—until the Kinase packs befriended the potentates of two cities, giving them dynastic control over gwyllgi in Georgia. That pricked one too many species’ pride, and the hunt for their vulnerabilities began. Now their greatest weakness was all too easy to exploit.
“I’ll text Hood an update, let him know Woolly has been quarantined.” Linus’s thumbs flew over the screen. “You two head outside.”
“Tell Neely to get a hotel room, wash up, and have Cruz meet him with clean clothes. He can charge it to me.” It was the least I could do. “Also tell him no funny business. This is serious. If he wants a love nest for the night, he’ll have to rent another room, preferably on a different floor.”
Dialing Neely, Linus brought the phone to his ear. “I’ll let him know.”
Since we were alone, Lethe let me help her to her feet and walk her to the back door. From there, she crossed the porch alone and took the steps down into the rear garden. Her thighs quivered as she folded her legs to sit on the grass, but you had to be close to tell.
Once she got settled, I joined her, dropping beside her on the lawn. I leaned my shoulder against hers to shore her up without making it obvious she was leaning on me. “You okay?”
“What if Eva had been the one to smell the flowers?” She wiped her face with her shirttail. “A dose that strong for a kid her age? It might have killed her.”
This had happened once before, to Hood, but Odette had been responsible. She was dead and gone, and so was her lover, my grandfather, Gaspard Lacroix.
“I hate that they targeted you in my home.” As bad as I felt, Woolly was equally mortified. She loved Lethe and adored Eva. Her guilt and worry pulsed in the back of my mind like a headache. “Any guesses as to why?”
“I’m a new alpha.” Lethe coughed until I worried for her lungs. “The pack is barely three years old. Most don’t stabilize until they’ve hit the decade milestone. Any challenger who defeats me inherits the pack and all its holdings. Everything I have will pass to the next alpha. God willing, that will be Eva.”
“I’ve called the cleaners,” Linus announced as he strolled across the porch. “And the, well, actual cleaners.”
Meaning he had called the people in charge of collecting evidence for supernatural crimes as well as a maid service to sterilize Woolly from top to bottom.
“Four of us were exposed.” I twisted to see him better, to put my heart at ease, not that bronze powder would have harmed him. “Lethe, Neely, you, and me.”
Leslie too, but she was human. I couldn’t very well hunt her down and demand permission to sanitize her. Even as the Potentate of Savannah, a title she wouldn’t recognize, my reach didn’t extend that far. I would have to invent a mundane excuse. Toxic black mold? She had witnessed Lethe’s collapse, so it wouldn’t be that weird if I suggested she scrub off a few layers of skin and burn her clothes, right?
“We need to rinse off and ditch our clothes.” I plucked at my tee. “We can’t risk cross-contamination.”
Not just for Eva’s sake, but for all the gwyllgi children who loved to run up and hug their alpha.
“Let’s hit the creek.” Lethe rose on wobbly legs after refusing my help. It wasn’t pride. It was protocol. If this was a destabilization tactic, she couldn’t afford to appear weak. “We can rinse off there and have someone run clothes down to us from the house. The runner can also experience the joy of telling the kids the water is off limits for a few days until the contamination threat has passed.”
I stood as well, hating I couldn’t offer her more than a morale boost. “You know what this means?”
“Hell, yeah.” She pumped her fist. “Grownup sleepover.”
Laughing, I sought out Linus, who remained on the porch, and my heart gave a twinge that he still doubted his welcome at odd times. Good thing I was about to marry him. Then the poor sucker couldn’t escape me. He would be mine forever, and one day he would believe I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I curled my finger, and he took the steps without further hesitation, smashing the barrier his anxiety had erected between us.
“Maybe there’s something to the superstition.” I fisted his tee when he got close. “I saw you in your tux. And now this.”
One of his masks slid into place, this one a hybrid of my Linus and Scion Lawson he retreated behind whenever we bumped heads. “Do you want to postpone?”
“Hey.” I tugged on his shirt. “No masks. Not between us.” I yanked again for good measure. “I was joking.”
The tension holding his spine rigid didn’t loosen. “Are you sure?”
“Linus.” I cradled his face between my palms. “You agreed to marry me.” I patted his cheeks. “You’re not getting off the hook.” I pulled him down for a lingering kiss that set off fireworks in my lower abdomen. “Make your peace, Mr. Lawson. You’re going to be my husband this time next week. Then you’ll never be rid of me.”
Eyes closing, he rested his forehead against mine, and his lips twitched up on one side.
Reaching behind his nape, I freed his hair, sliding it through my fingers. “How can you still doubt that I love you?”
“Have you ever had a dream so vivid that when you woke, you believed—just for a second—it was real?”
“Yes.”
“That’s how I feel.” He opened his eyes, and they were dark and earnest. “Each time I wake with you beside me, I’m disoriented until my brain convinces me you’re really there, that you’re really mine.”
I thumped his chest with a knuckle. “What about your heart?”
“I can’t trust it not to tell me that what I want, what I’ve always wanted, is real.”
“I never should have let you commute to Atlanta.”
The idea he must have woken alone in his loft in the city some nights and wondered if all this, if we, had been a dream… It pretty much ripped out my heart and stomped it flat as a pancake.
“I’m serious.” I gave his hair a playful tug. “I should have bought that ball and chain like I threatened and anchored you here, where you belong.”
A loud whoop jerked my attention past his shoulder to where Lethe struggled with her boots.
“I’m done waiting on you losers.” Clothes flew into the air as she stripped naked. “Last one to the creek is a rotten egg.”
“I’m all for skinny-dipping with the proper motivation.” I lifted a hand to block the view of Lethe’s toned backside. “But I’m not running nude through the woods.”
Chiggers and ticks in my lady bits were much scarier than any necromantic rites, in my opinion.
Linus teased his cool fingers under the hem of my shirt, caressing the skin above the waistband of my jeans. “What constitutes proper motivation?”
Leaning closer, I returned the favor, tracing the defined edges of his abs, the muscle hard and chill beneath my fingers. “You’re definitely on the right track.”
“The game is only fun if we all play.”
Peripheral vision clued me in to what I would see if I turned my head, so I didn’t. “Lethe, you’re buck naked.”
“Did you miss the dare? The creek and the rotten egg?”
“I’m not a huge fan of flashing my goodies, even if Mother Nature is the only one watching.”
Except we all knew gwyllgi patrolled my property line as well as theirs. Just because I couldn’t see them, didn’t mean they weren’t there.
“How about if I strip down to my underwear?” I could debase myself that much. “Will that work?”
Panties and a bra weren’t any different than a bikini, and we had pool parties at Lethe’s all the time. That had been the one modification she made to the property after purchasing it. She had an Olympic-sized inground pool installed, along with four twelve-person hot tubs. I was shocked she gave up that much land, but she was quick to remind me she, and therefore her pack, had plenty of room bet
ween her property and mine.
That was friendship for you.
What’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is mine.
Friendship with Lethe anyway.
“This is why I’m in charge of your bachelorette party.”
“Wait.” I swung my head toward her. “Neely told me he was in charge of planning.”
“Um.” Pivoting on her heel, she sprinted for the trees, buns jiggling. “Gotta go.”
“Lethe.” I bolted after her. “Get back here.”
“Kiss my shiny heinie,” she yelled over her shoulder. “Oh, right. You’d have to catch me first.”
Tempted to exploit my connection with the land, with Savannah, to send Lethe into a sprawl, I sucked it up and let her beat me to the creek. I allowed her victory dance, which, for the record, was impressive. I’d had no idea she was that flexible. Even the packmate who brought us clothes stopped to watch, though it might get him bitten later.
Noticing her audience, she waded into the water and dove under to rinse out her hair.
Having finished my quick wash, I was waiting when she surfaced, and I dunked her so fast she never saw it coming.
Lethe came up growling and sputtering, choking and flailing, but I was already gone.
“You’re on your own,” I called to Linus from the bank as I wrapped myself in a towel.
Only then did I pull on Savannah to lend me speed to reach the den before she caught me. I was taking my life in my hands, but I couldn’t deny it was worth it when her garbled swears for revenge chased me up the hill.
Three
Sunlight gilded the hardwood in Lethe’s guestroom when Linus’s phone screen flashed with an incoming text. The reflex to snatch it up itched his palm, but he wasn’t on call anymore. It would take time to get used to that. Grier was the potentate now.
Grier, whose head was a warm weight on his chest, thawing the cold that forever seeped into his bones. He angled his chin to indulge in one of his favorite hobbies, mentally sketching Grier during her unguarded moments. Now his fingers twitched for charcoal and paper to sketch the sharp line of her jaw, the soft part of her lips, the way her bangs fell to one side, exposing a faint starburst scar she got from fencing with oak switches when she and Amelie were kids.
How to Kiss an Undead Bride Page 2
