Chapter 1

This December

“Santa hat.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Santa. Hat.”

“Just repeating the words is not an effective argument, you know.”

“A hat in the style of Santa.”

“Rhys, I will chuck you straight out of that window if you come any closer to me with that abomination.”

Bowen had been in Graves Glen for—he checked his watch—about twenty minutes now, and this was the third argument his brothers

had had. The first had been over peppermint lattes (Rhys was in favor, Wells was not). The second had been about... well,

Bowen hadn’t really been paying attention until Wells and Rhys had gotten pissed off enough to lapse into Welsh, and by that

point, it had mostly just been insults.

Now Rhys stood on the other side of the counter at Penhallow’s, the magical shop Wells ran in Graves Glen, dangling a red-and-white hat at his eldest brother with a decidedly demented gleam in his eye, and Bowen wondered if he should get involved.

Of course, the last time he’d done that—the Yule Brawl of ’02—he’d ended up with a dislocated elbow, bright green hair, and

the unfortunate “talent” of only being able to speak in iambic pentameter. It had taken their father nearly a week to find

a reversal for that spell, and even now, Shakespeare made Bowen shudder, so yeah, probably best to sit this one out.

Luckily, there was another Penhallow happy to put a stop to this nonsense.

Just as Rhys went to lean in a little closer, hat still dangling from one crooked finger, it was snatched out of his hand

by the baby strapped into some kind of contraption on Rhys’s chest, and as the three brothers watched, Rhys’s son, Taran,

attempted to shove the entire thing into his mouth.

“Oh, no, fy machgen, let’s not do that,” Rhys said, tugging the hat from his son as Wells chuckled.

“See? The boy is clearly on my side.”

“He is not,” Rhys said, putting the now slightly mangled and damp hat on the counter. “He just doesn’t want us arguing on

Bowen’s first day back. A peacekeeper, my son. A pacifist. Isn’t that right, Taran?”

At the sound of his name, the baby tilted his head back, giving a gummy smile to his father before releasing what, to Bowen’s ears, sounded an awful lot like a banshee’s cry and flailing out with one adorably small hand to try to grab a handful of wands from the ceramic vase on Penhallow’s counter.

Both Wells and Rhys made nearly identical shouts of alarm as they reached out to steady the vase, but a few wands escaped

anyway, rolling to where Bowen sat perched on the arm of a velvet wingback chair.

He leaned down to pick them up, but before he could, one slowly floated up from the floor, wobbling a little before clattering

back down.

Taran gave another happy shriek, kicking his little feet and waving his arms, and Bowen got up and walked over to Rhys, crouching

down to look in his nephew’s eyes.

They were the same clear hazel as Vivienne’s, but the expression in them was pure Rhys Penhallow, and Bowen frowned as he

straightened up.

“One of you was really enough,” he said, nodding toward the baby strapped to Rhys’s chest. “Not sure I’m up for going through

this again.”

“First of all,” Rhys said, wrapping one arm around Taran’s middle, “I was a delight as a child. All my teachers said so.”

“You know the words ‘handful’ and ‘chaos personified’ and ‘perhaps actual demon, has your family been dabbling in sorcery?’

do not mean the same thing as ‘delightful,’ don’t you?” Wells mused.

He’d turned away, pulling a massive black ledger out from under the counter, so he didn’t see the deeply offended glare Rhys

shot his way.

“And ‘pleasure to have in class’ is what they say when you’re a stuck-up swot who will never know the touch of a woman, but you don’t see me pointing that out to you, do you?” Rhys replied.

“Stuck up, yes,” Gwyn, Wells’s girlfriend, chimed in, clomping up the stairs from the storage room, a cardboard box cradled

in her arms. “And I don’t know what a ‘swot’ is, but that does kind of sound like Esquire, so I’ll allow it. However!”

She dropped the box on the counter next to Wells, its contents rattling as she leaned over to throw an arm around his neck,

pulling him close even as he began to write in the ledger.

“Trust me, he knows this particular woman’s touch very, very well.”

Wells smirked, finally lifting his gaze from the book. “Thank you, my darling,” he said, turning to press a kiss to Gwyn’s

temple.

Rhys’s hands hovered around Taran’s head, landing briefly over his ears before settling over the baby’s eyes instead, and

Bowen grunted in amusement.

“See what you did, being a smart-arse?” he asked Rhys. “Now we have to think about Wells shagging, and that’s on you.”

Rhys’s hands flew back to Taran’s ears, the baby giggling and kicking his feet again. “Yes, I realize that backfired on me,

now let’s all just stop talking about it before Taran’s first word is ‘shagging’ and Vivienne curses me yet again. Justly

this time.”

“It was pretty justly the first time,” Gwyn said just as Wells muttered, “You honestly did deserve that,” and Bowen added,

“Complete wanker behavior.”

Rhys straightened up to his full height, looking as dignified as a man could with a small child wearing a onesie proclaiming “Daddy’s Li’l Turkey!” strapped to his chest. “You are all horrible influences on my son, and I can no longer risk his potential moral degeneracy by staying in your company. Come, Taran. Let’s go see if the nice ladies at the Coffee Cauldron have one of those cake pops for you to mangle.”

With that, he left the shop, the bell overhead jangling.

“I don’t think I’m ever going to get used to Rhys being someone’s father,” Bowen said, watching his brother walk past Penhallow’s

window, one hand still firmly on his son’s stomach, his dark hair flopping over his forehead as he leaned down to press a

kiss to Taran’s head. It was strange, the way that casual, affectionate gesture made Bowen’s chest feel a little tight.

“The hell of it is,” Wells said with a sigh, “he’s really bloody good at it. No idea how he picked it up so naturally.”

Bowen glanced over at his older brother. The estrangement from Simon Penhallow had been necessary for all three brothers,

but Bowen knew Wells had taken it the hardest. Of course, Wells had been the most hurt by their father’s scheming in the end.

Wells must’ve been thinking the same thing, because he sighed and seemed to shake himself a bit before saying, “Anyway, his

propensity for chaos aside, Taran is a delightful child. Thank Rhiannon for those Jones genes, I suppose.”

“Aww, babe, you think I’m delightful?” Gwyn replied, then pointed at Bowen. “You are my witness, Bowen. He said it.”

Smiling slightly, Bowen lifted his hand in acknowledgment. “I was also witness to how absolutely shattered he was when he thought he’d fucked it all up with you, if you want to hear that story. Again.”

“You know I do,” Gwyn said with a wink, and the tops of Wells’s ears went slightly red. “Anyway,” she went on, “Esquire is

right about Taran being delightful. I’ve asked Vivi to start bringing him into Something Wicked whenever she can, because

he may be only ten months old, but that kid is a natural born salesperson. He’ll point at something in the store and start

cooing over it, and the next thing you know, everyone wants whatever it is he liked. It’s like...”

“Magic?” Bowen supplied, his eyebrows raised, and Gwyn’s smile faded.

“Shit. I’m letting a baby ensorcell my customers, aren’t I?” Then she shrugged. “Oh, well. He usually likes the cheapest stuff

in the store anyway.”

“So when you two have kids, are you going to make them split their time between the stores?” Bowen asked, but Gwyn shook her

head.

“Oh, kids are not for us,” she said. “We already decided that. A of all, we have the Baby Witches, and that’s all the parenting

we can handle.”

Bowen was fairly certain the “Baby Witches” Gwyn and Wells so often referred to were all people in their twenties, but he

wisely held his tongue as Gwyn went on. “And B, Sir Purrcival has very strong opinions about babies, turns out. The first

time Taran tried to pet him, he used words we didn’t even think he knew .”

“Right, but that cat can’t live—” Bowen started to say, only to immediately swallow the rest of that sentence when Gwyn— and Wells, to Bowen’s surprise—shot him a glare that should’ve incinerated him on the spot. “—that cat... can’t live... with a-a baby,” Bowen managed to get out. “That’s what I was going to say. Just agreeing with you. One hundred percent.”

Gwyn gave a firm nod. “That’s what I assumed you were saying. But just in case it wasn’t, your punishment is to wear this to family dinner tonight.”

Reaching into the box she’d brought up from the storage room, Gwyn pulled out a bright red sweatshirt and tossed it at him.

Unfolding it, Bowen stared at the demonic face sneering back at him, bright green script underneath its curling tongue reading

“Christmas Really Krampuses My Yule.”

Bowen grunted.

“In retrospect,” Wells said with a frown, “it was a mistake to let the Baby Witches design a holiday shirt for the stores.”

“It’s possible we’ve neglected pun skills when it comes to their education,” Gwyn agreed, then put her hands on her hips and

fixed Bowen with a determined look. “But you’re still wearing it.”

She snapped her fingers, and Bowen felt a draft of cold air before looking down to see that somehow, the perfectly normal

black jumper he’d been wearing was now on the floor, and the forked-tongue Krampus was snarling up at him from his chest.

“At least it’s comfortable,” he grumbled, and then, almost without thinking, reached into his back pocket and pulled out his

phone. Snapping a quick picture of himself in the sweatshirt, he was halfway through his text to Tamsyn when he realized the

store had gone uncomfortably quiet.

Looking up, Bowen found Wells and Gwyn both staring at him like he’d grown an extra head. Worse, actually, because that had happened to Bowen when he was thirteen, thanks to one of Rhys’s pranks, and Wells had looked significantly less disturbed then than he was now.

“What?” he asked.

“Did you... Bowen, did you just take a selfie?” Wells asked, and Gwyn grabbed her boyfriend’s arm, her eyes wide.

“Wells, he took a selfie of himself wearing a stupid novelty sweatshirt . Who are you sending that to? Are you putting it online? Do you know how online works? Is there, like, a secret Facebook

for witchy mountain men? Or! Oh! ”

Practically levitating, Gwyn pointed a finger at Bowen, who could feel blood start creeping up his face.

“That is for a woman . You are sending that to someone because you like her .”

“It’s not like that,” Bowen heard himself say, but Gwyn was on a roll now.

“Or a guy! I guess it could be a guy, I’ve never even asked you about that kind of thing, Bowen, because frankly I was more

concerned with whether or not you were a werewolf than who it is you bang. Which”—she wrinkled her brow—“are you? A werewolf?

You can tell me now, we’re family.”

“I’m not,” Bowen replied. “They’re not actually re—”

“Okay,” Gwyn went on, waving that away. “Good to know. But point is, you are sending that to someone because you are into them .”

“I’m sending it to a mate,” Bowen corrected. “As a joke.”

“Nope,” Gwyn said, shaking her head. “You angled that phone, Bowen. You almost smiled. I saw it. Or at least I think I did, the beard really remains insane, dude.”

Scratching at that beard, Bowen studied the selfie on his screen, the still unsent text to Tamsyn underneath.

Since you like making fun of me so much, some new material.

Fuck, he had angled the phone, and yeah, definitely a hint of teeth there.

He’d just delete it. Bad enough to have a crush on someone who’d flat-out said she wouldn’t get involved with him so long

as they were working together. Even worse, bringing up the mistletoe the other night.

But it had been late and he’d been lonely, and seeing her message pop up in his chat had made him so bloody happy for some

reason.

Talking to her always did that. Even when he was fucking it up, even when he was wishing there was some way to un say the stupid shit that tended to fall out of his mouth, any conversation with her tended to be the highlight of his day.

Which was... pathetic.

The past year had been good. They were a solid team. And that’s all they were, all they should be. He was a fucking mess and in no shape to offer anything to anyone. She was smart and beautiful and sharp as a fucking

obsidian blade. Best to leave her to find someone who actually knew how to be a person.

A human.

Bowen knew all of that.

But he still hit send.