Chapter 24

So the VanishingSpell really had worn off. That meant Grandmother and the others would’ve seen the destruction I’d left in my wake from battling the Big Nasty, would know I’d stolen the grimoire.

“You’re cutting it close, Mr. Chase. Five more minutes and I would’ve had to write you off as compromised. Or failed.”

“In all the years we’ve worked together, Iris, I would’ve thought you’d had more faith in me.”

Years? But Grandmother hated shifters. “Untrustworthy brutes,” she always called them. And yet, she’d entrusted one to track me down? Why not my father?

With a deliberateness that unsettled me, Lewellyn Chase turned his head to look me full in the face, golden eyes flashing. Then he wrenched his attention forward, staring at nothing but the interstate and its road signs. “Visual confirmed,” came his militant reply. “She’s in a nondescript sedan on the spur southeast of Indianapolis. She’s heading for the airport.”

“Do not lose sight of her. If you lose her in the air—”

“I never lose my prey,” he snapped.

“Careful,” came Grandmother’s equally sharp reply. “Call when you have her flight information.”

Lewellyn seemed to relax at that instruction, but his voice remained hard as he confirmed, “Yes, Matriarch.” He stuffed the phone into his pocket when the line went dead.

There was a beat of silence as that conversation sank into each of us, then green magic sprang to my hands. Ivy-green, the same color of my eyes, the same color of every Hawthorne’s magic when they called upon their heritage.

“Why you wolf in wolf’s clothing!” Flora bellowed at him.

“Easy!” Lewellyn barked, flipping on his turn signal to take the nearest exit. Crossing an intersection, he got right back on the highway, heading south. Back to Redbud.

“What are your plans, shifter?” I asked lowly. My voice thrummed with magic, with power that would overflow the parasite bracelet if it meant my freedom. I was not going back to the manor. Not until my own mission was complete. “Why are you doing this? Telling me it was my grandmother who hired you, lying to my grandmother about where I am?”

Lewellyn swallowed, drawing my gaze to the bob of his tan throat. “When you stay a wolf for as long as I did, without shifting back,” he said thickly, “that part of you can start to take over. You become more beast than man. And you… befriended him. Me. And”—he glanced over his shoulder at the garden gnome in the backseat—“you protected me from that one.”

“You’re lucky she did,” the garden gnome snapped. “I would’ve let the clematis take you!”

He snapped his teeth at her.

“Do not make me come back there,” I warned the garden gnome. Thistle thorns, I was already on a hair trigger. Grandmother had found me. Or close enough. Where did that put the trackers of the rival coven? Were the magic hunters their version of Lewellyn, outsourced help that kept their hands clean of it until the last moment?

“You’re not like any of my other assignments,” Lewellyn continued, voice subdued. Thoughtful. “Everyone I’ve been tasked to retrieve were criminals. Lowlifes. You… you’re a witch running a cider farm. You have friends, not hired thugs, though an exception could be made for the gnome.”

Flora, who had returned to her seat, lurched upright. “Hey—”

“And even though you knew what I was, though not why I was here, you could’ve confined me, tortured me,” he said. “Instead you made a deal. And even though I was basically your captive, you… respected me.”

The magic dissipated from my hands. “Well, you were holding up your end of the bargain.”

He shook his head. “The people who hire me… they’re not nice people, Misty. Sorry if that tarnishes your view of your grandmother, but why would she hire someone like me to hunt you down?”

I wet my lips, and Flora hissed, “Misty, don’t do it.”

“Because I stole our family grimoire,” I said in a rush.

Flora groaned.

“You stole a coven’s grimoire?” From the shock in the shifter’s voice, he knew exactly what kind of trouble I’d been hiding from.

“It’s been cursed. There’s a demonic half-heart embedded in the cover that’s been feeding off my coven’s magic and wiping their memories so they’re not even aware it’s happening so I stole it to find a way to stop it”—I flapped my hand at the garden gnome as she began to protest my verbal diarrhea—“which I can’t without finding the demon whose half-heart it belongs to and either force it to remove the curse or kill it. Which is why I need you. You’re a shifter and shifters have incredible strength and speed, right? I need you to train me. I can already fight, but not like that. Not in a way that I’ll survive.”

Lewellyn’s jaw actually dropped.

“Please?” I quipped.

“Jumping hop-toads,” Flora exclaimed. “Is that the reason you had us help you weave that spell? So you can use it to go hunt down a demon and die trying to kill it?”

“The plan is not to die,” I replied sourly. “With his help. If you’ll give it… Lewellyn?”

The shifter was still stunned. He opened his mouth once or twice, lips moving but no words coming off. Then he coughed and forced out, “You betrayed your family… to save them?”

My skin grew hot at his accusation. “Wouldn’t you do the same for yours? For your pack?”

“We’re not that breed of wolf, but, after a fashion, yes.” Checking his mirrors once more, he took the exit that would shuttle us off towards Redbud. Then he held out his hand over the center console, palm up, as if we were on a cross-country road trip and he was feeling snacky and needed a handful of potato chips. “I will help you, Meadow.”

From the solemn way he said it, I knew he wanted me to put my hand in his. I did, and felt the prickle of magic pass between our palms that had me yanking my hand back to shake it out. “Thistle thorns, what was that?”

“A mark of my promise. I will give you what protection I can, as if you were my own pack mate.” He replaced that second hand on the steering wheel. “But as far as the training goes, it’ll have to be an accelerated program. You do not know the oaths that bind m— Your cuffs!”

The runes of my iron cuffs stoked to life like sleepy coals, crimson flickering to a ruby color that would quickly bloom to the yellow-orange of a conflagration.

“It’s not me!” I yelped, my hands free of their green telltale glow.

Lewellyn yanked the car off to the shoulder, and in the next second, he was practically wrenching the door off its hinges and hauling me outside. I could do nothing but stare down at my cuffs, mind reeling as I fought to sort through everything I’d ever learned about these cuffs and runes and find a way to shut them off. No solution rose from that maelstrom of thoughts, and then I was being roughly shoved to my knees, Lewellyn thrusting my hands into the icy murk of a drainage ditch. Before I could protest, or remove my hands from the muck, he was sloshing through the ankle-deep water, ripping up this and that from the banks.

I gagged at the stink as the shifter coated my cuffs and hands in a mixture of mud and pulverized roots, weeds and—I thought, with a shudder of revulsion—mashed-up cricket. Though that could’ve just been collateral damage instead of an intentional ingredient.

“Misty!” Flora had peeled herself from where she’d squashed like a bug against the window and was hurrying down the slope to where I stooped on hands and knees in the drainage ditch. Had it been spring, such a furrow would’ve been teeming with wildflowers and butterflies, but in November, it was just a collection of decomposing leaves and stagnant water. “Jumping hop-toads! What on earth is going on?”

Panting from his frantic foraging session, or maybe from nerves, Lewellyn crouched down and lifted my disgusting hands from the ditch, his thumbs tentatively smearing the muck from my cuffs.

The runes were black. Dormant.

He sucked a breath in though his teeth, hissing. “She must’ve thought I lost you in the air when I didn’t call back promptly enough and activated your cuffs to find you herself. Impatient woman. Let’s hope they didn’t waken enough for her to get a good read on your location.”

“How did you know how to stop it?” I gasped.

The shifter stood, a smug smile on his face. “I know how to hide tracks better than I know how to find them, and I’m very good at finding them. Keep that paste on your cuffs until we get back to the house. I’m sure you have everything we need to make a fresh—and neater—coating at home.”

With my muddy hands pooled in my lap, we returned to Redbud. The cuffs never flared again, but in my heart, I knew the damage was done. The Hawthornes—Dad, in particular—wouldn’t need their shifter tracker anymore. They knew enough to triangulate my position now, from Lewellyn’s report of Indianapolis, from the cuffs flaring, from the rumors of a strange burst of white light.

They were coming. There was no doubt in my mind about that.

And they would be here soon.