“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 house 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?”