by Leela Ash
The world seemed to shatter on its very foundation. Jeanine staggered a little as she stared at both women. Her body shook a little as she stepped backwards. The Council of what now? Her grandmother was a witch? And a high-placed one, from the sound of it?
Jeanine looked from Dolly to Nana. She backed up several steps, “I need a drink. I can’t deal with this.”
“Stop. This is very serious, Jeanine Anna Lourdes,” Nana enunciated. “Your mother is telling the truth and we kept this secret from you for a long time, to protect you.”
Jeanine scoffed, “So you’re a witch, mum is a ghost and I’m the Queen of England. Whatever,” she laughed, turning to yank her bedroom door open.
“Inchile,” Nana chanted.
The doorknob vanished and melted into her door. Jeanine gaped at it. Then she glared at Nana, “Mere parlor tricks.”
She reached for the door again. It vanished completely, leaving only a smooth column of wall in its place.
“Hey! Put the door back!” Jeanine yelled her heart thudding in her throat.
Nana raised her hands, fingers spread, and did some funny sort of wave with both hands and the door appeared back in its place.
Jeanine reached for the knob again. It hissed and promptly turned into a snake poised to strike.
Dolly screamed and snatched her only daughter to her bosom. “Have you gone mad?” she demanded of her grandmother.
Nana’s eyes were cold and determined as she stared at her daughter and granddaughter, “That snake is poisonous and the antidote is only found in a cave in Asia. You will both sit your butts down and listen to what I have to say, because it’s extremely important. But if you’re going to walk out of here, ignorant as a newborn, then you might as well reach for the knob and let that snake bite you right now because you’re going to be dead anyway.”
Silence reigned.
“Sit down!” she ordered.
She didn’t sound like Grandma Nana, Jeanine thought as she and her mum obeyed wordlessly like little children. She sounded like some witch member of the ‘Seven Council’— all mysterious and authoritative.
She didn’t like it much, Jeanine decided, with a frown. Her mum and her beloved Nana hadn’t trusted her with something so important. True, she might not have believed them but if she had known she had a witch for a grandmother surely she could have had a few perks growing up. Like that time Andy Perkins had refused to share his ice cream and bullied her out of hers? She could have got Nana to put a hex on him. Or that time Bessie Lowdown had put a rubber snake in her knapsack and made her run out of the potty screaming with her panties down? She could have gotten Bessie back!
“I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t I tell you?” Nana started, her eye old and wise.
“The thought crossed my mind,” Jeanine intoned. “Don’t tell me you’re psychic too.”
Nana let that sarcasm slide, “I kept that secret all these years because I saw no need to burden you with it.”
“Really?” Jeanine demanded sweetly, still dripping sarcasm. “So why tell me now?”
Nana straightened to her full height of five-nine. She had always been a rather tall woman and like all the Lourdes women, not pretty, but rather handsome. “The moment I heard the Witches Conference was going to be held for the first time in a century and the town picked was none other than Weirna, I knew I absolutely had to be in attendance.”
“Weirna?” Dolly chipped in.
“The town you call The Angle is actually home to many supernatural beings because it is a tangent town. That means it’s a great portal for supernatural movement between different worlds. And its real name is Weirna,” Nana supplied.
Jeanine digested the information in silence. Then she speared her Nana with a look as cold as she could make it, “So, witches are having a conference of some sort in the area and you’re worried because…?”
“The mark on your neck, my dear. It was made by a powerful shifter. A shifter powerful enough to pose a threat to Nabradia, the current queen of the witches. And your shifter didn’t just imprint on you; he marked you in blood. That means, if I can sense it from afar, so can she. And if he’s a threat to her, the easiest way to get back at him would be through the woman he loves— you! She would try to kill you.”
Jeanine did the last thing her mother or grandmother expected— she laughed.
It wasn’t just the sort of simple laughter people employed when they wanted to give themselves time to come to terms with distressing news, it wasn’t even a nervous laugh. It was the sort of full belly laugh that said she had just heard the worst bullshit ever.
Her words soon confirmed it.
“Okay mum, I get you’re mad at me because half the town is talking about me buying a vibrator and checking into a hotel, but surely you and grandmamma don’t have to go so far just to teach me a lesson. You’re the one who’s been after me to get a date,” Jeanine said to her mother.
Dolly’s face was wiped clean of all humor as she looked back at her daughter. And when Jeanine grabbed her mother’s hands, they were ice cold.
Fear trickled through her, that familiar fear she had been tamping down since that lunch date with Bo’s family. The image of the bear and the wolf reared again and the fear curled all the tighter in her stomach.
She looked over at her grandmother. The snake had turned back into a doorknob. “Stop this this instant! You’re scaring mum.”
“I’m more scared than she is my dear because I know fully well what could happen. We could lose you or worse.”
“Something worse than losing me? Interesting. What could that be?” Jeanine demanded with a cocky smile that said she was sure of her place in her mum and grandmother’s heart.
“I see the strays littering the streets and I know only one possibility could lead Nabradia to attract strays here like this.”
Jeanine felt a frisson of awareness as though she were standing on the edge of a paramount shift in all she had ever known. Grandmother was right about this one thing: the strays. There was no plausible explanation for the influx of strays into The Angle. And now she thought about it, it had struck her as odd how much Bo and his family had wanted the strays gone.
“What possibility is that Nana?” she inquired through a dry throat.
“Alabad,” Nana whispered with something remarkably like fear in her eyes.
14.
Jeanine was still reeling as she drove to work the next morning. She hadn’t slept a wink last night. She had been regaled with tales that had sounded like folklore but had been proven true at each and every stage with Nana knowing things she shouldn’t have known. And that was nothing compared to the strange things Nana had been able to do after muttering words in a language Jeanine had never heard.
Even Dolly had seemed fascinated watching her mother, but Jeanine had easily read the truth in her mother’s eyes. Nana had not been lying. Nana, it seemed, had lived for several centuries and had children in every one of those centuries.
She didn’t believe it until the woman had dug out pictures from ancient times with herself in every one of them.
Jeanine’s hands tightened on the steering wheel as the realization hit her afresh that her Nana had not lied to her. The man she had let into her body and into her heart had lied to her. He and his whole damned family! They had lied and used her and he had fucked her and marked her for some revenge-hungry witch to find!
She had given him her body and her heart—
Her heart? Her hands tightened on the steering wheel, turning white as she admitted to herself the truth that had been staring her in the face for so long — she had gone and fallen for Beaufort Kent like a glorious idiot!
Of course she had! When had Jeanine Lourdes ever been smart in the romance department? If she wasn’t dating men whose wives frog-marched them to her doorstep to renounce her the next morning, she was dating losers who were half-man, half-animal.
“I hate my life!” she groaned in despair, as she turned
into the compound of AniVets.
Her customary parking space was occupied by a large blue truck and she gawked at it in disbelief and anger. She had already had a thoroughly bad morning so far; the last thing she needed was to squabble over her parking space too, when everyone knew better than to take her spot.
With a muttered oath, she swung into the only other available parking space, which happened to be Megan’s, and swung from her car, her strides long and angry as she marched into the building to find out who had left their house determined to ruin her already bad day.
“Morning Ms. Lourdes,” the receptionist chirped as soon as Jeanine’s foot crossed the threshold. “There’s someone here to see you.”
The way the receptionist was blushing and preening reminded Jeanine of the little puppy she had run over and how it had preened and clung to Bo’s stupid shirt.
“Let me guess, 6 feet 2, dark hair, smoldering dark eyes, and thinks he’s God’s gift to women?” she ground out.
The receptionist started to nod with eagerness until she caught the raw angry fire in Jeanine’s blue eyes. She leaned back in fear as though to get away from the blast and wisely subsided into silence.
“Was this Adonis also by any chance driving a small sports car meant for the crap heap but which suits him just fine because he’s trash like the rest of the car?” she demanded with an angry toss of her auburn curls.
The receptionist swallowed through a dry throat as she offered a tremulous smile, “No ma’am. He drove a big blue truck.”
Jeanine’s eyes hardened into shards of ice at this confirmation that not only was Bo here, he was the one whom had parked in her spot. Typical. She spun around on her heel and spotted him watching her, his eyes cool and measuring and calculating.
His gaze was piercing, as though he were trying to read her thoughts and now that she thought about it, maybe he could. If he could turn into an animal on command, it stood to reason he could also do things like read minds. Her grandmother could make knobs turn to snakes, so why not?
She marched towards him, anger in every step. When she was standing right in front of him, she offered a brittle smile, “Good morning Beaufort.”
Surprise and confusion flashed in his eyes as he started to return her civil greeting, “Good mor—”
That was as far as he got before she hit him. She had learned from the last time when she had elbowed him after he got both their cars towed, she had almost broken an elbow. This time she flattened her palm and made it a slap.
The slap resounded in the hallowed walls of AniVet and Jeanine listened to the echo with sharp satisfaction.
Bo’s eyes went dead, but he didn’t try to retaliate nor did he try to reach for the spot she had hit in that automatic gesture most people would have made. But he wasn’t most people, was he?, she thought with bitterness. He was not even human!
She stalked around him without another word and slammed her way into her office.
The door opened behind her almost at once, but she kept walking until she reached her desk. She didn’t have to turn around to know it was Bo who had entered the room. Something about him always made an entire room shrink in on itself as though he had sucked all the energy from the room. It was a bit weird given that he was in fact the shortest of his brothers.
“You’re mad,” he ventured, as politely as though they were discussing the weather.
Jeanine ignored him. She shrugged out of her coat and thrust it onto the coats hanger then she ripped the scarf from her neck and flung that too.
“Was it something I did?” he asked.
Silence. She turned on her laptop and sank into her seat behind the safety of her desk.
“In hindsight, I shouldn’t have said you were mine just like,” he said.
It was his own version of an apology, she realized. He was not apologizing for imprinting on her without her consent or knowledge, nor was he apologizing for fucking her every which way and yet keeping such a powerful secret from her.
She glared up at him determined to cut through all the bullshit. “Let’s be clear: are you apologizing for imprinting on me or for fucking me again without telling me who you really are?”
His head reared back as though she had slapped him again and his black eyes flashed golden fire at her, “What are you talking about?”
Jeanine slapped both hands onto her desktop as she surged to her feet, goaded by anger beyond words. “Oh, let’s not even go there. Cut the innocent act. I know, okay? I know what you are.”
He stared at her in silence and in a flash she realized he could read minds and he was even now trying to read hers.
“Get out of my head,” she ordered.
His eyes flashed back at her and she noticed he didn’t bother denying it. “So what should I do? I don’t know what you are talking about. Should I shake the truth out of you? In case you haven’t noticed, violence isn’t my style.”
It was a reaction, at last, to the slap. A back-handed reprimand.
“Yes, it is my style. Sue me,” she spat.
“Who told you about me?” he asked.
It seemed really important to him. She decided to be perverse. She placed both hands flat on either side of her laptop on her tabletop and leaned forward as though she were going to impart the greatest secret ever. He leaned closer too, unconsciously, and she gave him her answer with such a bright smile that it took a few moments for her words to register, “A friendly neighborhood witch of course. Who else?”
He looked ready to throttle her.
“This is serious. If someone knows my secret and they told it to you, you could be in danger. So could I. So could—” he caught himself just in time.
But she knew what he had been going to say and she finished for him with an arch look, “So could your entire shifter family, huh?”
His eyes kindled with satisfying panic as he realized she knew about his family too.
Before he could ask she supplied the answer, “Remembering how you changed into a bear and Luke into a wolf kinda clinched the whole thing for me.”
He was so staggered he actually sank into the seat across from hers, “You remember? But you were compelled. No one can break a compulsion except a very powerful—”
He stopped and stared at her in dawning horror, “Nabradia. You’ve been talking to Nabradia, goddammit!”
Shock surged him to his feet and Jeanine leaned back enjoying the show. She didn’t know this Nabradia person, but she was beginning to think it was time she met the chick, if she could evoke such a reaction in Mr. Cool.
Bo came around her desk, incensed, as he grabbed her by the shoulders and gave her a slight shake, “Why would you do something like that?”
Jeanine couldn’t help noticing that he was careful not to shake her and he was careful not to grip her too tight. How had she never noticed that he was always careful of how he held and touched her? Even in the heat of passion, it was almost as though he feared his own strength.
She had been such a fool. All the signs were there. They had always been there but she had just been too stupid to notice.
Well, who could blame her? An average American girl didn’t walk around expecting her booty call to have the ability to morph into some animal at will. She hadn’t noticed the signs because she hadn’t been looking for them. Now, everything made sense, even the strange color of his eyes. Black with flecks of gold that turned more gold when he was in the throes of passion. Evidently, he was closer to his bear side in the throes.
Anger burned inside her like acid. He had only befriended her because she was a damn vet and she could help them round up strays to prevent the damned Alabad from being unleashed on their collective heads. And it hadn’t been enough for him and his family that they were fooling her and using her. He had had to fuck her too and like a fool she had fallen for him and had turned into a quivering mass of arousal ready to fling her legs open at the first flick of his fingers.
She was so angry, she felt nauseated and s
he shoved his arms off her shoulders and pointed at the door. “I can talk to whomever I damn well please. Now, you had your fun, Bo! So fucking get out and don’t show your face here again!”
It was the first time she had ever called him Bo and instantly he missed the sound of his full name rolling off her tongue. He wanted to cradle her against his chest and apologize and explain but what could he possibly say? He couldn’t very well tell her that he had not trusted her with his secret because he mistrusted all humans. That wouldn’t go over too well.
She had turned away from him to face the windows behind her desk. He could see the angry tension in every line of her body, and he was half-afraid she would deck him again if he dared to touch her.
He started to reach for her anyway, then at the last minute retracted his palm back into a fist and dropped his hand with a sigh. He allowed himself one minute of regretful stare at her rigid, unforgiving back. He had brought this on himself, he should have trusted her with the truth. But then the truth was dangerous; keeping her in the dark was the only way to protect her. Even now, she was in danger, even though she didn’t know it.
With one last sweep of his gaze down her figure, he memorized every line of that svelte form and tortured himself with how good it had felt to hold her. He memorized how she looked so lost and forlorn standing alone. He memorized this moment that felt a lot like heartbreak. Then he turned and walked away.
As the door clicked shut behind him, Jeanine expelled the breath she had been holding in. In spite of herself, she had been praying he would touch her just once more and try to explain and at the same time, she had been cursing herself for making that prayer.
But as the doorknob twisted into place behind Bo, she felt her heart twist painfully in her chest. He hadn’t even tried to explain to her.
What more could he say though?
“Bound to be more lies,” she hissed, as she returned her attention to her laptop. It was either that or dash over to the windows like a lovelorn idiot to watch him drive out of her life.
