“What in the name of Tituba is going on?” I managed at last as I turned to watch Poppy place a bluetooth speaker on the mantel and a few seconds later, Christmas music began infiltrating my entire house.

  “Egad!” Hellcat yelled, shaking his head and then pawing at his ears. “Make it stop!”

  “Oh, behave, you!” Poppy said to him, surprising me because she could clearly understand the little reptile.

  I didn’t have time to comment or further consider it because the two strangers were now in my house, carrying an intricately carved wooden headboard and bed railings.

  “Where’s the bedroom?” one of them asked—with his longish blonde hair and immense height, he looked like a Viking and was clearly human.

  “Um, upstairs,” I answered sheepishly.

  Both men nodded and started up the stairs as I turned to Poppy, still trying to understand what in the world was going on. When I faced her, I found her decorating of all things! Marty, Poppy, and her son were busy twining garlands around the mantel, lighting candles, and stringing dried orange slices in preparation for Yule. They’d already pushed a dusty Christmas tree into the corner and I wondered if it was enchanted because I’d never seen it cross the threshold into my house.

  “Will someone please explain?” I asked.

  Poppy looked up at me. “Oh, we just… well, we wanted to do something special for you.”

  “Special for me?” I repeated, stunned, awed and not really sure how to react.

  She shrugged. “Well, sure, after you told us about all the bad luck you’ve had lately, we wanted to make things… better.”

  I swallowed hard, trying to keep myself grounded. So this was what the Grinch felt like when those ugly, little aliens continued to sing after all their presents had been stolen.

  None of this made any sense. Surely it was some sort of fever dream? Days didn’t turn on a dime like this, and especially not for me.

  The darker haired of the strangers walked back out to the U-Haul while the other grabbed a cardboard box and opening it, started loading thick leather tomes onto an ebony bookshelf that was suddenly taking up the far wall in my living room. Roy leaned against the wall nearby, smirking as the Viking man told him exaggerated tales of his recent Sasquatch hunt.

  “I think it might have been a female this time,” the man said, nodding emphatically. “The call was different.”

  “You don’t say,” Roy exclaimed, his expression never wavering. He had a damn good poker face.

  “Then he doesn’t,” I started as I looked at Poppy, but it was Marty who gave me a quick shake of his head. Apparently the Viking human didn’t realize that not only did Sasquatch exist, but he was talking to one.

  “Name’s RJ, ma’am,” the Viking human suddenly appeared before me and extended his mitt of a hand. I shook it with a couple of fingers and smiled uneasily.

  “Charmed.”

  “And you’re Wanda?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, welcome to Haven Hollow. Anything you need, you call me, okay?”

  “Yes, okay.”

  I watched them all come and go through narrowed eyes. There had to be an ulterior motive! They’d want me to repay this debt at some point? Or maybe I’d be slapped with a bill at the end of the month? One I couldn’t pay. Maybe they were all partners in a furniture company and they didn’t understand the meaning of ‘soft sale’, instead barging in on people? At ten at night!

  Except… none of this furniture looked new. I mean, it was beautiful and clearly finely crafted but… it didn’t appear to be newly purchased.

  “Why are they doing this?” I muttered, more to myself than Hellcat, even as the spawn of Satan appeared at my ankles, apparently having dealt with his aversion to the Christmas music. If Mariah Carey started mewling through the speaker or, equally terrible, Paul McCartney’s most wretched, ‘Wonderful Christmastime’, I would simply hex the speaker into exploding.

  Well, if I had my magic, that is.

  “I am at a complete loss, I admit,” Hellcat continued, shaking his head. “I certainly would not expend this effort on you.”

  I didn’t have the wherewithal to be offended. “No one would.”

  The man they called Henner emerged from the darkness outside with the footboard to the bed and paused in the entry. He smiled warmly at me, and answered my question as if I’d directed it at him. I had to wonder how he’d even heard it when he’d been… outside?

  “They like helping people,” he said. I struggled to understand if he was purely human. He looked and appeared human, and yet there was an undercurrent of something else—something magic. It was slight, but there, all the same. “I know it’s difficult to grasp when you grow up around witches, but not everyone is waiting to hex you.”

  I bristled. “What would you know about growing up around witches?”

  He smiled more broadly. “More than you’d think. Witches don’t really pay much attention to their sons or grandsons, but I saw things during my visits over the years. Great Aunt Tayir was a real piece of work. I think I understand why Grandma didn’t fight her expulsion from Crescent Circle.”

  And that was when my stomach dropped to the floor. This was the man who’d inherited the Tayir house and one of my… relatives.

  “So you’re the technomancer Stanley mentioned.”

  “That’s me. I’m Henner,” he answered with a big smile. “And, as I was saying, don’t feel weird about this.”

  “I’m just...”

  “Not used to kindness. I know,” he finished for me and then looked over at Poppy and Marty. “They’re the sort of people who want to help out because that’s just the type of people they are. And Roy looks tough, but he has a heart of gold. RJ is... well, honestly he’s one of the nicest guys around.”

  “And all this furniture?” I asked. “Where did it come from?”

  “Me,” he answered with a quick shrug.

  “You?” I didn’t mean to sound so surprised, but as far as I understood, he was a bachelor so I wasn’t sure what he was doing with beautiful heirlooms unless…

  He shrugged. “It’s all my Grandma Tayir’s. I’ve been trying to sell it for years, but no one wants to pay for it. Ordinary folks think it’s cursed, and none of the supernaturals here in Haven Hollow will touch any of it either.”

  “Then it’s not cursed?” I asked, suddenly a bit concerned. I was already cursed, so the last thing I needed was furniture that was cursed too.

  He laughed. “Not as far as I know. Guess we’ll find out though.” I looked at him, my eyes going wide. “That was a joke,” he explained, and I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

  “Why does everyone think it’s cursed?”

  “Grandma Tayir was a Blood Witch.”

  And my heart plopped down to my toes all over again. “What?”

  Mother had said I was the first Blood Witch to survive in over four centuries. If what Henner said was true, then there had been another one a hundred years ago. And just like that, the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place: Betanya Tayir hadn’t been sent away for trying to usurp Mother. She’d been sent away to save her life, so the coven wouldn’t order her death.

  “Why didn’t I know any of this?” I asked, shaking my head. “No one ever mentioned a word about it… all these years.”

  He shrugged. “Grandma Tayir didn’t keep in contact with the coven once she moved here. They shunned her and both her sons, even though they were teens when the banishment happened. No chance for contamination, you know? But no one wanted them.”

  I exhaled my own feelings of guilt. Back then, before I became a Blood Witch, myself, I doubted I would have vouched for Betanya’s boys either. Boys almost never manifested power. Thus, no one wanted to bother with them.

  And now no one wanted to bother with me, either. Perspective was a real witch sometimes. I looked back up at Henner.

  “What happened to your grandmother?”

  He shook his head. “No one knows, for sure. She disappeared not long after her oldest son, my father, married and moved out,” he explained. “Some say her sister killed her. Others believe the vampire who blooded her came to finish the job.”

  That gave me the chills. “Could that vampire have been Lorcan Rowe?”

  Henner laughed and shook his head again. “No, it wasn’t Lorcan.” Then he motioned to the footboard. “Better get this upstairs.”

  I nodded and watched him start up the stairs. “Henner,” I said, and he paused to look at me. “Thank you.”

  ***

  After another hour, my duplex looked completely different. I now had two silk upholstered Bergere chairs, a coffee table and matching end tables, a bookshelf full of leather-bound books, a new dining table and chairs, as well as four bar stools, a pair of gilt frame mirrors, three persian rugs, a four poster bed, bedside tables and a vanity. All dusty, but in otherwise good condition.

  The place actually looked habitable.

  All the furniture I’d purchased from the thrift store had been loaded back up in the U-Haul to be returned right where it had come from. And that was more than okay with me.

  Finding the most in common with Henner, I walked upstairs and found him assembling the Queen-size, four-poster-bed. At the sound of my footsteps, he turned to face me.

  “Oh, hey, Wanda.”

  “Hey.”

  “You want to balance this for me so I can screw the footboard to the rail?”

  “Sure,” I answered and held the footboard in place as he attached it.

  “I heard Lorcan’s been giving you trouble,” he said, ever so casually.

  I took a deep breath. “You could say that.”

  He nodded. “He’s been a little different lately.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Recently he’s been... off, and I didn’t understand why until I met you.” I gave him an expression that said I didn’t understand, and he nodded. “I think Lorcan’s obsessed with you.”

  “Yeah, I noticed.”

  If Henner noticed the thick edge of sarcasm in my voice, he chose to ignore it.

  “I think it’s sort of the nature of the beast, given what I’ve read in Grandma’s journals.”

  “Care to explain?”

  He nodded. “When the transition from witch to vampire is incomplete, it seems to drive vampires to distraction. From what I’ve read in her journal, the vampire after Grandma Tayir seemed even more unhinged than Lorcan has been lately.”

  “What happened?”

  “Their courtship, or whatever you want to call it, went on for ten years. It started off normally enough and then got... weird.”

  “Weird as in?”

  “Poetry written in blood, dead animals as gifts, and then eventually nice gowns... with dead women inside them.” He looked at me and nodded. “Weird.”

  “Yeah, hopefully Lorcan doesn’t start bringing me dead chicks.” I couldn’t handle it if he did. I could barely even handle him now.

  “Personally, I think Grandma’s vampire killed her.”

  “You do?”

  He nodded. “The journal entries just stopped on October 31st, 1930.”

  “Hmm…”

  “Yep. RJ’s loading them onto the bookshelf downstairs right now. I thought you might want to read them—but I’ll warn you: there are a bunch of them and some of the stuff isn’t exactly… easy to read.”

  I couldn’t help a shiver. I definitely wanted Bettanya’s journals, and her Book of Shadows if I could manage it. Mother had always said Betanya was a wily and talented witch. I could probably learn a lot from her.

  “Does that happen a lot?” I whispered, rubbing at my arms. The goosebumps wouldn’t go away. “Do vampires just snap?”

  “No idea. Most Blood Witches back in the day were killed within days of their blooding, so there aren’t that many written accounts about them or the vampires that created them. Besides Grandma Tayir, I’d never heard of a witch who had long-term exposure to the one who blooded her. From what I can gather from her writings, though, there seems to exist a strong bond between witch and her vampire sire.” He grew quiet for a few seconds as he turned to attaching the other side of the footboard to the rail. “For all I know, the vampire who tried to turn her might have been unstable to begin with.”

  “Is Lorcan unstable?”

  “Um… I’m not sure,” Henner answered honestly. “He’s kind of a weird guy.”

  “Kind of?” I snickered.

  He heaved a sigh and shrugged. “Just be careful. I know we don’t know each other well, but you’re family, however distantly.”

  “Gah, and now you’re going to get maudlin,” Hellcat announced as he appeared in the room, and I wondered how long he’d been eavesdropping. Clearly, he was going to report all of this to Mother. Well, not if I could help it. Maybe I’d have to threaten him with declawing, but I’d do what I had to. Mother couldn’t find out any of this—not until I got to the bottom of it first.

  “I think I’ll go be sick on your shoes,” Hellcat finished, whipping his tail reprovingly toward Henner.

  “Is he really going to barf on my shoes?” Henner questioned me.

  “You can understand him too?” I asked, even though it was a silly question. “I guess you can. And, yes, you should take all warnings the little beast gives you because he usually follows through.” Then I looked at Hellcat. “But, if he tries anything, I’ll have him defanged.”

  “You wouldn’t!” the nuisance replied.

  “I would.”

  Henner stood, apparently finished with assembling the bed. Then he motioned to a mattress in a plastic wrapper that I hadn’t noticed leaning against the wall.

  “Wait, that mattress looks… new,” I started, looking at it and then him.

  He shrugged. “Who wants a used mattress?”

  “But… mattresses are expensive!”

  He shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. We all pitched in and got this one on sale at the home furnishings shop in town. It was a floor model, so we got it for a steal.”

  I took a deep breath. “I don’t even know what to say.” And that was the truth.

  “It’s okay, Wanda,” Henner answered and nodded at me as I gave him a smile. I wasn’t good at accepting charity, but I was grateful, even if I had a hard time showing it. Maybe I could return their kindness with… something. Enchanted clothing? Maybe. A spell or two? That might interest them more.

  Henner and I unwrapped the plastic and placed the mattress on the bed. “Now it just needs sheets,” he said and looked up at me. “And we forgot that part.”

  I laughed. “That I can manage.”

  He nodded. “Well, it was nice talking with you, Wanda. I hope you’ll consider having lunch with me some time. It’s been a while since I’ve caught up on coven gossip. Your information has got to be fresher than mine.” He took a breath. “And you’re the only family I’ve got left in this town now.”

  “Lunch sounds fine,” I agreed automatically.

  Roy and RJ were still deep in conversation when Henner and I came down the stairs. My entire living room was now covered in Christmas decorations, and I had to admit it looked—charming.

  I crossed over to the bookshelf, trying not to smile as RJ ardently explained bigfoot mating practices to the sasquatch, himself. Poppy had turned an interesting shade of pink and was busy covering her son’s ears.

  Finn casually twisted out of his mother’s hold and walked over to lean against the wall next to Marty. At some point both of them had acquired eggnog (don’t ask me from where) and each was nursing his cup as they watched RJ and smiled.

  ***

  After another hour, I had the place to myself again. Well, and the sewer rat with whom I shared my living quarters.

  I’d thanked everyone as best I could and even though it was beyond difficult for me, I’d pasted on a smile and waved and carried on as best I knew how. I just wasn’t sure how to bond with my inner emotions. This was all so new—I’d always been reprimanded whenever I displayed anything other than control.

  Truth be told, I was glad to have everyone gone. I just needed time to process, to understand why it was so hard for me to trust people.

  Before I knew it, I found myself standing in front of the bookshelf as I reached for the first leather-bound journal on the shelf. Then I snatched a glass of eggnog from the kitchen and returned to the window seat, clutching the glass between my knees as I unfastened the leather snaps that held it shut. When it finally sprang open, the smell of paper and old ink wafted out, tickling my nostalgia to such an extent, I actually grinned. I had creature comforts, something to drink, and what promised to be an engaging read open on my lap.

  Perhaps my luck was starting to change?

  I thumbed through the first pages of doodles until I reached Betanya’s first journal entry. Her cursive was cramped and difficult to read, a far cry from the perfect penmanship in Mother’s records. The margins were almost non-existent. Her sentences bumped the ends of the page often, and what wasn’t filled with text was covered in runes or nonsensical drawings. There was a sense of impatience to her prose, and her personality washed over me like a deep, exasperated sigh from the old woman herself.

  Tues. Dec. 21st, 1920

  Beverly Wynn has been dead three months, but you’d not have known it when she turned up on my front stoop this morning...

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Get up this instant!”

  The vaguely irritating voice filtered through the fatigue and headache threatening to squeeze the gray matter out of my ears. I was beginning to think the dozen sparkling apple cider sangrias I’d downed after last night’s strange misadventure had been a bad idea.

  “You have drooled and snored quite long enough, ogress!”