The Whiskey siblings—Leslie, Paige, and Nick—all lived in the house along with their significant others and their kids. This meant that, when it was time to send kids to school, it took all of them, their cars, and no small amount of coordination to get it done efficiently. They’d accidentally left a kid at home alone before.
Paige had the twins strapped down in car seats only because they were currently sleeping in human form. It was her turn to take Leah and her tween niece, Mandy, to school. They were in the same grade, so they both went to the same school. Kate, her informally adopted elven niece, and Tyler, one of her nephews, were with Dexx, and Bobby and Kammy, her toddler nephew who had been born the same day as Bobby, were with Leslie. Car seats took a lot of freakin’ space.
Leah and Mandy were having some sort of debate. Leah was wedged between her siblings in the back, and Mandy rode shotgun. Paige had no blasted idea what either of them was even talking about. They were speaking in some code she didn’t get. They talked in texting short-hand, and the only thing she really got was LOL.
Was she getting old?
She pulled up to the high school—the mundanes’ high school—and the two tweens spilled out. Rai woke and decided it was time to shift into a kitten and escape. Which was…great.
Paige held up the drop-off line to wrangle her kitten-kid back into the car. It wasn’t a ton of cars, thankfully. The parents who were stuck behind her managed to hop the curb and go around. She waved apologetically. Most gave her tight looks in return.
However, a lot of the high schoolers drove. Paige didn’t even want to think about that. Having Leah and Mandy the same age was like having another set of twins. Those two were going to be driving at the same time.
Wendy Green walked out of the high school as Paige wrangled Rai back into her seatbelt. Wendy waved, flagging Paige to wait.
Paige gave her daughter a stern alpha warning. “Stay in human form until we get home.” She still wasn’t sure if Rai would obey because she was a baby. But Paige hoped her shifter spirit would provide a little guidance because when humans didn’t obey, they still survived, but when animal babies didn’t, they died.
Rai flapped her baby arms, slapping her hands against her bare thighs. Paige had barely gotten her into a diaper and a onesie before they’d left the house.
Ember was still out cold. Paige reached over and put her hand on his chest to make sure he was breathing. He was. He was just a good sleeper.
“Human,” Paige said, putting her finger on Rai’s little button nose and closing the door.
Wendy had made it to her by that point. “Paige.” Her tone was pleasant, but her smile said she had something to say. “Can I have a word?”
Paige really wanted to say no. She wanted to tell the tall, black woman that she didn’t have time. Not because she didn’t like Wendy. She really did. That woman had the ability to control raging teens, which, in Paige’s book, was a superpower. It was the fact that Wendy always brought problems Paige didn’t know how to solve.
Respect won out. She pasted on a smile and leaned against the car. “What’s up?”
Wendy bit the inside of her lip and leaned against the car as well. She pulled away quickly and glanced at Paige in askance.
She shook her head and gestured to the car with a shrug. “I’m not going to yell.” Dexx might have if anyone had opted to lean against his 1970 Dodge Challenger, but Paige’s car was just a sedan. Nothing special. It ran. It carted kids around. It took the bags to the airport. It got the groceries. It did its job.
Wendy scratched her eyebrow and leaned back on the rear door, glancing inside. Her expression melted a little. “They’re adorable. They’re getting so big so fast.”
She wasn’t lying. “They’re shifter witches.” Paige didn’t know what that meant because this was new territory. “They can shift into anything, and my theory is that’s the reason they’re growing so fast.”
Wendy pulled the corners of her lips down as she nodded. “I need to talk to you about clothes.”
Oh. Since Sven had tried to destroy the world, humans and paranormals were now forced to coexist knowingly. And one of the things they’d done was to get the paranormals and humans together in the same schools. When a shifter witch—like Paige, Rai, Ember, or Leslie—shifted, they kept their clothes on because of their witch abilities. “Normal shifters lose their clothes when they shift, and they practice certain aspects of their shift at school.”
Wendy raised her hand. “I get that. I do. But…”
Paige knew exactly what the “but” was. “Look, it took me a long time to get used to it too. So, we have cabinets stationed around our house for shifters to grab robes when they find themselves arriving unexpectedly. Because, trust me, they can stand in front of you completely naked and carry on a full conversation like it’s nothing.”
“But it is something.”
Paige had been saying the same thing for about a year now, but hearing it come from Wendy made Paige realize that maybe the mundanes were wrong. “Maybe the issue isn’t the shifters.”
Wendy rolled her eyes.
“Listen to me.” Because this conversation along with all the other things going on in the political news with the #MeToo movement was striking a chord in her that needed to be addressed. “The issue is that we’ve sexualized the body to the extent that little girls have to be careful of what they wear to class.”
“Not my classes.”
And that was reason one hundred and eighty-three why Paige respected the hell out of Wendy. “We can’t teach our shifters that they need to be embarrassed with their bodies. That they need to be scared. What we’re telling them is that others have more powers and more rights to their bodies than they do.”
Wendy thought about that for a minute. “I get where you’re coming from, but it doesn’t work that way in the real world.”
“Only because there are more people willing to sit around than there are those willing to make it a better place. This shit is hard. You’ve gotta make people uncomfortable, and we know how that goes.”
Wendy bowed her head and then looked up at Paige briefly before pushing off the car and standing. She swung her arms a few times and then clapped her hands together. “Cabinets and robes.”
Paige pushed off the car as well. “I see woodworking projects in class.”
“Agreed. Okay. Have a good day.” She gave the twins a sweeter smile and waved as she disappeared back into the school.
Well, at least this time was an easier issue.
With the older kids dropped off, she went to the grocery store—which was now more like a circus event with the twins in tow than a chore—and then went home. She was exhausted. She’d had to alpha-will both kids so many times just between the produce and the meat departments. And everyone had cooed at her kids like they were well-behaved humans when they were, in fact, the most outrageously difficult—
She didn’t even realize she’d fallen asleep until she was awakened by a loud noise.
Merry Eastwood stood beside her, a cool smile on her villainous face, her fingers perched on the rather large volume that was now resting on the side table beside Paige’s head. “Nice nap?”
Paige wanted to throttle that woman until her dark hair turned grey. Two-hundred-year-old witches were a little hard to strangle, though. They had a lot of tricks hidden up their sleeves. So, she grimaced and got up instead, looking for the twins. One day, she’d get Merry Eastwood back in paranormal prison where she belonged. But for now, she was a needed ally.
The twins were in the dining room, tangling their tiny bodies around the feet of all the people invading their home.
She went to gather them, but Faith, their regional high female alpha, put her hand on Paige’s arm and steered her to the kitchen instead. “We’ve all raised young ones before. We won’t step on them.”
Faith’s soft tone was at war with the harsh scar over her eye. Faith had seen more battle damage than Paige—
Act
ually, by now, that probably wasn’t even the case. But Paige was able to hide her scars because hers rested in her bones.
It was going to take Paige a long time to realize that she was an equal in this mix of high-ranking, powerful people.
She grabbed her coffee and went to the table. Their dining table was L-shaped and custom built. Families their size weren’t the norm. Along with the Whiskey family, Dexx’s pack lived out back, and they all sometimes shared the kitchen and dining room. Their family was a small community.
She stopped Elder Yad before everyone sat down. “Why is everyone in my home and why am I leading this charge?” The Elders, him especially, had been pushing her toward this since she arrived in Troutdale two years prior.
Elder Yad raised his bushy eyebrows and stared at her hard. “You’re the one they saw on national news taking down Sven.”
The unbelievably powerful demon who’d attacked her and the town just a few weeks ago. “Okay. That doesn’t mean I should—”
“Who else do you think it should be?”
“I don’t know. Someone who knows what the fuck they’re doing?”
He shook his head, serious. “You’re the best we have, and, in this time, you need to learn why. I could tell you it’s because you’re so powerful—and you are—and I could tell you it’s because you’re destined—because you are.” He gripped her shoulders, his intensity high. “We’re here because none of us want to be in your position, and you’re taking this because this is who you are.”
But was it? Really?
After getting the twins situated, Paige banged an empty sippy cup on the table and took her seat.
She’d at least seen most of the people there before. They were the high alphas and the most powerful elementals of their region. And she was one of them. At some point, that was going to have to stop surprising her.
It was time to get this party started. “Tell me you’ve all seen the news.”
Elder Yad looked like that wizard from Legend of the Seeker. He kinda sounded like him too. “We’ve been watching and the time to act is now.”
“Great.” But Paige was tired of hearing words and sentiment, which was usually what people brought to her because she was the person of action. “I think it’s high time to hear what the Elder Council has in mind.”
The Elder Council—for all that Paige had been able to gather—had been around since almost the time paranormals crossed over to the Americas. They “managed” the paranormals who swore fealty or whatever to them in Central and North America, but she was pretty certain their reach stopped there.
In all this time, though, Paige never knew or understood what their intent was. It wasn’t to keep the paranormal secret. Or maybe it was. But that had been the job of the Shadow Sisterhood, who might work for them? She wasn’t even certain at this point. But the council liked to gather information. They didn’t’ typically share it.
Yad rubbed his eye and nodded as if making a decision. “We need to gather our people and provide a united attack.”
“On the government.” Paige hoped he meant something else. They couldn’t be talking about a revolution. There had to be a peaceful resolution in there somewhere. “You want the paranormals to rise up against the U.S. Government.”
“I do.”
Whoa. That’d been sarcasm.
Faith shifted in her chair, anxiety tinging her dark eyes. “Do you even know what this means?”
Yad took in a deep breath and laid his heavily age-spotted hands in front of him. “The president started this. We are merely reacting to her actions.”
Merry just rubbed her finger against her lips, deep in thought, her frown troubled. Leave it to the villain of the group to realize this was a bad idea.
Everyone else looked like they were working their way into accepting it.
“That’s not good enough,” Paige said because for fuck’s sake! Seriously. “This would be an act of…treason?” She didn’t even know. “It’d be civil war at the very least.” That was huge and, frankly, inconceivable. This shouldn’t be the first thought. It shouldn’t be an easy conclusion. They needed to exhaust their efforts. “Has anyone talked to senators? Government representatives? Lawyers? People who understand this?”
“Yes,” Elder Yad said, holding up his hand with a tired sigh. “But we’ve been informed that this isn’t their matter.”
“Not their—” Paige wasn’t sure she could trust the Elders. “Maybe someone else should try who actually wants a solution instead of war.”
Yad shook his head like he was biting off a nasty comment. “We already know how this is going to play out.”
But did they? This wasn’t history on replay. This was the twenty-first century. “We’re U.S. citizens.”
“They’re not seeing it that way,” Yad said, his tone equal parts patient and cutting, “and we all know it.”
Leslie pressed her fist to her forehead as if trying to push her frustration back inside her skull. “What do we think the president will do next?”
No one answered.
“Let’s look a’ wha’ was done in the bloody war, why don’ we?”
Paige frowned at the red-headed man who looked like a really tall garden gnome. “Who are you?”
“Duglas Maclellan,” he said in his—it could have been anything because Paige sucked at accents—accent.
“Lead water elemental for the region,” Faith said softly to Paige. “Became a citizen after being here for a decade. Elder Council brought him in. He’s the strongest water elemental we could get for the council, but his loyalties?” Faith shook her head with a sigh.
Water elementals were strange people. “Great. Thanks.” Knowing names and people was seriously going to have to become a superpower Paige honed. “Which war?”
“The World War. Ya know the one. Where they killed off a bunch of people wha’ got in their way of a perfect world view.”
World War II and the Jews. “The president isn’t a Nazi.” She’d better not be. Paige’d voted for her.
“She isna?” Duglas clapped his lips into a thin line before speaking. “Ya really thin’ we’re not headed to that event? First, it’s her tellin’ the nation and the damned world that it’s ‘us against them,’ makin’ a right ruddy mess of it too. Turnin’ neighbor against neighbor. Friend against friend. They’re already forcin’ us to register so they know who ta fear.”
Paige frowned. The U.S. had racism. There was no hiding that fact. That didn’t mean they were being run by Nazis. It just meant they had a lot of really loud assholes.
“Then, they’ll start tellin’ the humans tha’ we’re diseased. Start callin’ us animals.”
Paige could easily imagine that.
“After tha’, they’ll create special groups of people to ‘handle’ us lot.”
They already had DoDO, an organization funded by the government to deal with the paranormals. Paige had already had run-ins with them that hadn’t gone well.
“Then…” Duglas pointed to the living room where, presumably, the TV was. “They tell the other side to be afraid o’ us. They turn the mundanes against us.”
Which was exactly what the president had just done.
“Next step? Relocation, which your ruddy fuckin’ president just said she’d be doin’. Don’t think they’ll do it because they’re no’ bloody Nazis? Well, what about wha’ they did to the bloody natives? The Japanese. Or the damned immigrants tryin’ to just get into this fuckin’ shit storm of an ass-swell country?”
The man was making entirely too much sense, and Paige didn’t like where it was leading.
“Then, they’ll start stealin’ from us. Rapin’ us. Killin’ us. Mass massacres in the name of all that’s ‘safe.’”
A cold chill swept down Paige’s spine. This was turning out to be a dark, dystopian novel. But this was her life. Their lives.
This was real.
“And then? What’s to stop them from outrigh’ killin’ the lot of us? Sto
p the fear then and there. Kill us all to protect the mundanes and meanwhile, they’ll tell the world they’re big bloody heroes doin’ only what needed to be done and that they did the best they bloody well could with the situation they’d been handed.”
Paige couldn’t believe they’d ever go that far. They lived in the United States of fucking America for crying out loud. “We can’t act out of fear,” Paige said quietly. “We can’t escalate this too soon. What if they’re just scared? We could inform them who we are.”
“The president already knows,” Yad said, his tone final.
“But the American people don’t.” Paige wouldn’t entertain the idea of taking things this far this fast. “We teach them. We talk to them. Just look at Troutdale. Our kids are going to school with human kids. Right now.”
Faith took in a deep breath, releasing it slowly as she looked over the faces of the people gathered around the table. “We can start—”
The front door banged open. “Paige!” Dexx came through the door, his eyes wide. “You weren’t picking up your phone.”
“DND.” She always put her phone on do-not-disturb when she was in a meeting, especially now that she wasn’t a detective. “What’s wrong?”
Dexx’s green eyes were wild. “DoDO has arrived and have put up roadblocks around the town.”
They what?
“They’re blockading us in.”
Yad met Paige’s gaze. “It has begun.”
3
As much as Paige enjoyed the Mortal Kombat reference, she didn’t enjoy how close fiction was to reality.
She needed to see just how bad this was.
Paige grabbed her keys but then thought differently. She and Leslie could just shift into whatever shape they chose and get to the location quickly. That would leave Dexx in a tight spot as he would either have to shift and lose all of his clothes or drive. However, the man drove like a maniac, so she was fairly certain he would get there quickly one way or the other.
Dexx seemed to have caught on to what she was thinking. He shook his head and gave her a look of warning. “Let’s not make a scene.”
Whiskey Storm (Whiskey Witches Midnight Rising Book 1) Page 2
