Chapter Two

  “Ugh! That was gross!”

  I jumped and dropped my phone on the sewing table as I spun around to see my sixteen-year-old cousin slouching into the living room. “Astrid! What are you doing—spying on me?”

  “Spying on you?” she said, her mouth dropping open in obvious distaste. “No, I wasn’t spying! I was on my way to the kitchen to get a snack and I had to see that instead.” She flung herself on the couch, shaking her head and sighing as if she were trying out for the part of Scarlett O’Hara.

  “See what?” I asked, frowning, as I crossed my arms against my chest and stood up.

  “You and… and him! And the two of you were…” She threw her hands up in the air. “It’s so gross, I can’t even get the words out!” Then she further glared at me. “How can you even think about kissing a vampire? It’s so… yuck.” She shuddered and groaned for extra effect.

  I turned my back on her to hide my burning cheeks. I wanted to say I didn’t kiss him, he’d kissed me, but then I figured I didn’t owe her any explanations. “My dealings with Lorcan are none of your business,” I managed. “I’ll handle him my own way.”

  “Yeah, by making out with him! How is that handling him?”

  “It’s… complicated,” I answered, feeling a flush overcoming my face. I immediately turned away from her so she wouldn’t see it. “Not that it’s any of your business, anyway, might I remind you!”

  “Yeah, yeah. By the way, I was so traumatized when I saw you both that I bumped into the hall table, and that lamp fell over and broke. It made a super loud crash. Did you even hear it, or were you so busy with that vampire that you didn’t notice anything else?”

  I whirled around to stare at her. Had the lamp fallen over and I really didn’t hear it? Hmm, I wasn’t that surprised. Usually, when Lorcan was around, he played center stage, the penis.

  I went back to sorting the goods on my sewing table. I had way too much to do to think about Lorcan. I tried to shove him out of my mind and gathered up the scrap material from the suit—Lorcan’s suit. Damn.

  “Well, did you clean up the mess from the lamp?” I asked, not bothering to look at her. “And, of course, I heard it breaking.”

  “Yet you didn’t even look over to see what was happening?”

  “No, I… I figured it was… just you.”

  “And… you weren’t worried about why I was in the process of breaking a lamp?”

  “I imagined you tripped.”

  “Well, I didn’t trip.”

  I looked up at her finally. “Then what happened?”

  She glared at me. “Nothing happened.”

  “What about the lamp?”

  “The lamp is fine… I was just making a point.”

  “Then there’s no broken lamp?”

  “No.”

  “So what was the point you were trying to make?”

  “That you have feelings for the vampire.”

  I dropped whatever I’d been holding to scowl at her. “As Tituba is my witness, I absolutely do not.”

  She immediately smiled, and it was a smile of victory—one that spread wide and slow across her irritating, little face. “Hey! Don’t get so worked up. Lorcan isn’t that bad a guy… for a vampire, I mean.”

  I snorted, trying to play it off. “I’ve had just about enough of this conversation.”

  “Why is it so hard for you to admit you have feelings and that you might… you know, like him?”

  “Because I don’t!”

  “Yet, you give him these googly eyes every time you look at him.”

  “I don’t possess googly eyes.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes, you—”

  “What are you getting at, Astrid? What do you want me to admit?”

  She looked up at me then and gave me a sad smile. “Nothing, I guess. I mean… I just think…”

  “What?” I asked when her voice faltered.

  “That you… you know… have feelings for him. And I think it’s silly you won’t admit it.”

  “I won’t admit it, because it’s not true!”

  I didn’t realize my hands were shaking until Astrid walked over and took the scraps out of them. “Let me help you clean up.”

  I studied her while she swept the pieces into the trash. “Why are you being nice all of a sudden?”

  “Because I feel bad for laying into you,” she answered with a smile. “And… it’s not like you’ve had much good luck lately… well, really ever since Lorcan turned you into a Blood Witch.”

  She was right—the only good bit of luck I’d had most lately was being able to move back into the duplex and even though Astrid and Hellcat were still living with me, Libby and Darla were now living in the other side of the duplex which was in two words: a relief. Previously, they’d been like my shadows. Now they were still my shadows, but relegated to another house.

  “And… on that subject…”

  “What subject?”

  “The Blood Witch subject.” She shrugged. “You’ve been driving yourself crazy trying to find a way to break the blood bond before Lorcan loses his head and does something dangerous and it… well, it just made me wonder what the big deal was anyway.”

  “The big deal about what?”

  “About you becoming a vampire.”

  I looked at her in shock. “That’s a very big deal.”

  “Why?” she answered with a shrug. “You’d still be the same person, albeit with some new comfort foods and some bigger teeth, but you’d still be Wanda. And it’s not like you have a coven to go back to, anyway.”

  She was right. After I’d been blooded by Lorcan, I was kicked out of my coven and shortly afterwards, Astrid was kicked out, apparently for sticking up for me.

  I looked away. “Regardless, I’m not ready to consign myself to the life of a vampire. And that means I have to undo the curse before he finishes what he started.”

  She scrutinized me. “Did you ever think that, just maybe, the blood is driving you toward him the same way it’s driving him toward you?”

  “No!” I snapped. “That’s impossible.”

  I stormed to the couch and flopped down. Exhaustion overwhelmed me all of a sudden. This was the last conversation I wanted to have right now, especially with a sixteen-year-old who didn’t understand… anything.

  “Think about it,” Astrid countered. “Maybe you find Lorcan appealing because the blood bond is pulling you both together with equal power. Maybe it isn’t just driving him crazy and making him want to be with you. Maybe it’s working on you the same way.”

  “Who says I find Lorcan appealing in the first place?”

  She laughed. “Please! It’s written all over your face whenever he’s around.”

  “Yeah, well, I think you’re seeing things you want to see.”

  “Why would I want to see that? It’s… it’s kind of gross.”

  “Because you’re a troublemaker, that’s why.”

  She was quiet for a few seconds as we just stared at each other. “You think I’m right.”

  “I don’t think you’re right!”

  “But, you’re thinking about it and it’s starting to make sense to you.”

  “Lorcan isn’t driving me crazy for the reasons you think,” I fired back. “And the blood bond isn’t making me want to be with him. I don’t want to be with him! I want to be as far away from him as possible.”

  “Hmm…”

  “In fact,” I continued, completely bent at the thought that Astrid believed I had a… a crush on Lorcan! “I’d like to find a way to destroy him. Then I’d be free of the blood bond for good.”

  “Destroy him?” she frowned. “That is completely and totally a lie.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “That’s what you think! And… and… that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

  “What? Kill Lorcan?” she asked with a little smirk that said she absolutely didn’t believe me.

  “Yes! When he leaves Haven Hollow to go see Rupert, I’ll come up with a way to destroy him in case the meeting doesn’t go well.” I clapped my hands together. “Problem solved.”

  Astrid leveled me with one of her I’m-a-red-headed-witch-so-don’t-mess-with-me looks. All at once, she shrugged and sauntered to the couch and took a seat. “Not funny.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be funny.”

  She yawned. “Anyway, I didn’t come in here to give you a hard time about the corpse you’re hot for.”

  “Then just what did you come in here to give me a hard time about?”

  “I need help with my homework.”

  She surprised me so much I almost gave myself whiplash as I looked at her. “Homework!”

  She burst into a brilliant grin. “That’s what I said. I need help with my mundane homework…”

  Since getting kicked out of the coven, Astrid was living with me and, as such, I’d enrolled her in the local high school, much though she’d fought me every second.

  “And you think I can help you with mundane schoolwork?”

  “No,” she laughed. “But, I’d thought maybe Lorcan could… well, before he left anyway.”

  “You came out here to ask Lorcan to help you with homework?” I asked, amazed.

  She nodded. “Yeah. It’s biology and I figured he probably had to study something similar to become a dentist, right?”

  I cocked my head to the side. “I mean… I guess?”

  She nodded. “Well, it’s a moot point now,” she said, and then looked at me with another little smile. “I meant what I said before,” she went on. “Lorcan is a pretty good guy, as vampires go.”

  “A pretty good guy? He’s a no-good, arrogant leech!” I spat. “If he’d left well enough alone, I wouldn’t be in this mess now.”

  “If he’d left well enough alone,” she returned, “you would’ve died in that car wreck and I would’ve had nowhere to go when I left the coven.”

  “You didn’t have to leave the coven in the first place,” I countered. “If you’d kept your big mouth shut, you’d still be there.”

  “I doubt it. I would have shot off my big mouth about something else and gotten myself kicked out one way or the other. And my point still remains—if Lorcan hadn’t intervened in your life, then you’d be dead and we both would be worse off. I probably would have ended up with Maverick and whatever floozy he’s with now.” She rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “I still can’t get used to calling him Maverick. Why can’t we just go back to calling him Charmin like we used to?”

  “Because he legally changed his name and now, we have no choice but to pander to his psychotic wishes. I don’t like it any better than you do. I vote we never mention him again and then we never have to use that moronic name at all,” I answered. Charmin aka Maverick was Astrid’s no-good brother and my no-good cousin. Recently he’d challenged my right to live in Haven Hollow through a fight of magic and even though I’d won, I’d also conjured up Libby the zombie, in the process.

  “And you wouldn’t have ended up with Maverick if you left the coven. You would have found somewhere else to go. You would’ve bounced back and landed on your feet. Red-haired witches always do.”

  “Don’t try to change the subject by talking about me,” she said with a laugh, further irritating me. “We were talking about you and Lorcan.”

  “No, we weren’t.”

  “Yes, we were.”

  I scowled at her. “Let’s get one thing clear. There is no ‘me and Lorcan’ or ‘Lorcan and me’. Those two things don’t exist in the same sentence, let alone anywhere else.”

  She pretended not to hear. “You could have done a lot worse. You could have gotten someone like Maverick as a sire. He wouldn’t be tiptoeing around, asking you for dates and trying to help you break his own curse. You might not like what happened…”

  “Of course I don’t like what happened! My own familiar calls me an abomination to my face. Who in their right mind would want to live like this? My whole family and even my own mother thinks it would be better if I’d died in that crash.”

  “Well, I’m your family, too,” Astrid insisted, “and I don’t think it would have been better. I’m glad you survived. I wouldn’t have turned against you even if Lorcan had turned you into a vampire.”

  My head shot up. “You wouldn’t?”

  “No,” she murmured, “and I won’t turn against you if he ends up turning you into a vampire. I would rather have you undead and here than not.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say for a few seconds. I wasn’t good with emotional conversations and this one was quickly headed in that direction, if it hadn’t already arrived. “Is this the sort of thing you said to the coven? No wonder they threw you out.”

  The color washed over her cheeks. “I might have mentioned it to a few people.”

  I stood up and walked back to the sewing table, for lack of anything else to dispel the tension. This attitude of hers was unheard of in the world of witches. If Mother or Astrid’s mother, Tabitha, heard her saying something like that, they’d react in the worst possible way. Well, I guess they already had in kicking her out.

  Regardless, Astrid was right. A red-headed witch always bucked tradition. If she didn’t get expelled for this, they’d have thrown her out over something else.

  I busied myself by straightening out the jacket and pants of Lorcan’s suit. If I could just figure out how to put Betanya’s theories into practice, I could reverse the blood curse. Then everything would be fine.

  Astrid meandered over to the table and watched my hands move over the material. “Maybe you could let me help you enchant this suit.”

  “And why would I want to do that?”

  She shrugged. “Because I’m already better at potions than you are.”

  “Hmm,” I grumbled. It was really no secret that I was crap at brewing potions. I’d never been any good, but luckily I had Poppy, so I didn’t need to be.

  “Maybe, once you see what I can do,” Astrid continued. “I could work part-time at the store as part of my lessons. What do you think?”

  I had to smile at her gumption. She was really coming into her own. She never would have had the confidence to suggest an arrangement like that when she first came to stay with me. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll let you help me out with the suit,” I answered, interested to see just how good she was with potions. Poppy had been tutoring her, and I had to admit I was curious to see how far Astrid had come. “If you can keep your grades up at Haven High, I’ll consider giving you a job.”

  “Yay!” She jumped up and down in an explosion of glee and then reached out, throwing her arms around my neck as I tried to fight her off. “Thank you so much, Wanda! You won’t regret this. I swear it!”

  “Great, now you march straight to your room and get that homework done. If you can’t figure it out, we’ll call Henner and RJ. If they can’t figure it out, no one can.”

  She beamed at me. “Thank you. I’m gonna make you proud of me. You’ll see.”

  I had to smile back at her and even considered giving her a hug, but I was still Wanda Depraysie with standards to uphold.

  “I already am proud of you,” I managed.

  Chapter Three

  Standing in my clothing store, Wanda’s Witchery, I took a bite of the fast-food hamburger that served as a poor substitute for dinner, then I put it back into the paper wrapper sitting on the counter. I wiped my fingers on the napkin before I went back to putting the clothes from the changing room back on their hangers.

  The clock on the wall said it was ten minutes to five. With all the potential customers going home for the evening, I had the store to myself. I could finish cleaning, folding, steaming, and pressing and be ready to lock up on the stroke of five o’clock.

  Astrid had already gone home with Poppy earlier. Poppy had started closing her shop, Poppy’s Potions, early these days so she could spend more time with her son, Finn. More often than not, Astrid went home with her because Poppy tutored Astrid in potions at least three times a week.

  Recently, I’d hired Roy Osbourne to remodel the garden shed for Hellcat. That shut up Hellcat’s incessant threats, and as soon as Roy finished the work, Hellcat would be out of my personal space—hopefully for the majority of the time. As long as I didn’t hear passionate yowling at all hours of the night, I didn’t care what the little beast did out there.

  I finished putting the clothes on the hangers and carried them to the rack in order to hang them up. The rack was standing between me and the front door when the door swung open. I looked up and my heart stopped.

  The man standing there was strikingly handsome—just as handsome as Lorcan, maybe even more so. His jet-black eyes held me frozen to the spot as he sauntered across the store in seemingly slow motion.

  “Wanda, I presume?” he asked, his voice as decadent as chocolate ganache. If I had to guess, I would have thought he was in his late thirties, early forties.

  Short, dark hair tapered down either side of an olive face chiseled as if out of granite. The faintest hint of a tattoo peeked out from underneath his casual white shirt, twisting around his broad muscular arms. Was it a dragon?

  I struggled to return my attention to the rack, but try as I might to break the man’s penetrating gaze, I couldn’t look away. It was as if there was something… hypnotizing about the way his gaze held mine. And his energy—his aura erupted out of him in a wave of power that circled him, fanning out into the air. That meant… that meant he was some sort of supernatural creature. But, just what type? I wasn’t sure.

  His lips curled into a smile, but it was a smile that left me feeling nothing but nervous.

  “Y, yes, that’s me,” I answered, feeling suddenly wobbly even though both my feet were planted firmly on the ground. Jeez, what had gotten into me.

  “Good,” he answered and his voice purred through my ears, making me wonder if he’d actually spoken aloud or had the response come from inside my own mind?

  “I’m Dev.”

  I just stood there, like I was stupid.

  Do something, Wanda. Say something.