Chapter One
The world slid sideways as the truck lost traction on the snowy hill, and there was nothing I could do to stop the momentum, not even if I’d been in the driver’s seat. Bear—my sweet boy— reached across and grabbed my hand with his much smaller one, his fear a tangible beast between us, his brown eyes wide. “Mom?”
“Dad’s a good driver.” I looked him in the eyes and gave him a smile. “It’ll be okay.”
Something shuddered underneath us as the truck careened faster and faster down the long hill. I clutched his hand tightly.
It would be okay.
Time slowed.
A flare of magic rippled around the truck, dark green and vibrating with a life of its own.
What fresh hell was this?
The question for me was not if I’d die of intense anxiety, but exactly how long it would take for the burning heat in my face to actually cause the rest of my body to spontaneously combust. Sweat dripped down my sides and clung to the inside of my long-sleeved sweater, and that sweat was probably the only thing keeping me from truly overheating. My hands itched to touch the grip of a gun to help me find my center.
Justin put his hand on my lower back as he guided me through the throng of people. “You’re doing great, sweetheart. Just keep moving. These are our friends and neighbors. These are our kind of people, you know that.”
I nodded, knowing there was more to the words. These were normals. Not a single supernatural in the bunch, which should have soothed me. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. There was one, but she hid it well.
Still, the crush of people on me was hard to take. Not because I didn’t know them, but because I knew the truth of human nature.
Normals or otherwise, human nature was an ugly beast.
Of all the people in my life—and not that there were many anymore—I trusted three. Justin. Bear. Zee. If nothing else, my past had taught me that trust was too easily given, and even easier to cast aside when the right deal came along.
A woman drew close with enough hairspray holding up her bouffant that the intense scent of Aqua Net curled through the crowd and up my nose long before I could see her. Princess Bouffant called out to us.
“Oh my gee-osh, you got her to cah-m! How lovely!” She drawled out her words in a pattern that had me fighting to keep the smile on my face. She was an abnormal, though of what flavor I wasn’t sure, and didn’t really care. The differences in her were subtle. She tried to cover up her scent with the Aqua Net, and the way her eyes darted with heavy amounts of makeup. Every abnormal was a little different in their tells, but they all had a smell that was part animal, part magic.
But that was not my business anymore.
I bit back the snotty retort that hovered on my lips, then caught Justin’s wink out the corner of my eye. The grin on the side of his mouth was all it took for me to follow his train of thought.
“Perv,” I whispered and gave him an elbow.
“Get your mind out of the gutter, Bea.” He pinched my ass, and someone called to him.
“Justin, we need to talk.” One of our neighbors waved him over. He gave me a pair of raised eyebrows in a silent request to leave me, and I rolled my eyes. “Go. I can deal with her. Make sure he isn’t wanting to use our pastures again.”
Here she came, the only abnormal in the bunch.
Goddamn it. I steeled my spine. I could do this. I’d handled tense, uncomfortable situations before. Hell, I’d dealt with shit that was beyond intense since I was a kid. But Zee and my other tutors had never trained me to deal with someone like Mary-Ellen Mayberry and her insatiable need to try and squeeze every, last drop of my past out of me.
Her hair was backcombed so she gained at least an extra three inches in height to her barely five-foot-five frame, which put her on par with me. She waved both hands, cheery as always. “I am so glad you came tonight, Bea. This time of year, it’s good to be with our loved ones.”
I kept the smile pasted on my face while I struggled not to bolt. Crowds were a bad place to be, a bad place to find yourself if you were looking out for someone else. Like a child who could disappear in an instant. Like my boy.
The grin held on my lips with great effort and I spoke through it carefully. “I’m so sorry, Mary-Ellen, but have you seen my son?”
She splayed her hands against her chest. “That precious boy of yours is upstairs in the rumpus room playing video games with the other kids. Don’t worry,” she took a step toward me and pressed her hand to my forearm like tiny sharp talons, “we don’t allow any violent or inappropriate games in our home. Movies, either, so you have nothing to worry about.”
“Of course not.” I fought to keep the words polite. Just because she irritated me, just because she was an abnormal didn’t mean I had to be a bitch to her. “Even so, I don’t think we will be staying long. We have a long drive back out to the ranch, and I have mares due to foal soon.”
Only a slight exaggeration, the mares weren’t due until spring, but she didn’t know that.
Mary-Ellen’s smile dipped. “Oh, that’s a shame. Shoot, we were even going to have Santa come in and hand out some little gifts to the kids. We hired him specially for tonight.”
She waved a hand at the big pane glass window that looked out into the yard, directing my gaze. True to her words, there was a man dressed in red with a big fake beard stuck on his face and a bag over his shoulder. He loitered around the vehicles, waiting for his signal to come in, no doubt. Every step he took had a slight sway to it, like he was drunk. God, a drunk Santa. Fabulous.
I opened my mouth to thank her and decline staying longer when the lights in the house flickered. A nervous roll of laughter went through the visiting friends and neighbors. My right hand shot to my lower back, clutching the small knife handle I kept there, always, no matter where we were. A ghost of green light touched the edges of the window, there and gone before I could be sure of what I was seeing.
“All day that’s been happening.” Mary-Ellen blew out a rather un-ladylike snort, but my eyes were not on her. The movement of the crowd, the sudden intense feeling of being watched roared up my spine like a spider scuttling along wooden floorboards.
Magic, and those who used it, were not my friends. I tolerated Mary-Ellen because she tried to be as normal as possible.
The lights flickered again, then came back on fully, this time with no green addition. The other normals barely seemed to notice the second flicker.
I had to be seeing things. It wouldn’t be the first time my paranoia got the better of me.
I took a slow breath in and out, but that did nothing to the sudden sense of foreboding that filled my belly, and it took effort to let go of the blade handle, my fingers unsticking from it one by one.
Leftovers of a past that never fully let me go still hovered at the edge of every day and on the cusp of every nightmare. Rationally, I knew nothing was going to happen to us here in the middle of Wyoming at a Christmas party with a bunch of teetotaler Mormons. There was no way my past would ever find us here.
The magical world didn’t like the interior of the country, which was why I’d chosen this place. A mantra began to roll through my mind.
We were safe.
I’d broken free, and for over a dozen years, I’d stayed that way.