When I got up, it was still dark out, but I padded down to the bakery to make double batches of batter and icing to lighten Bryn’s load on Sunday morning. The extra batter would keep for twenty-four hours, no worries. We opened early — at 9:30 a.m. — on Saturdays and always needed extra stock on the weekends.
While I baked the cupcakes needed for the day I thought about Mory insisting that Sienna was still alive. I wondered how wrong it would be to ask the fledgling necromancer to go down into the basement and try to talk to her. I hadn’t been anywhere near the basement in three months. I would have nailed the door shut if it wouldn’t have come across as utterly cowardly. Though I wasn’t just avoiding the site of Sienna’s death — I was hiding from the portal. Yes, hiding. Yes, like a coward. The magic and promises it contained, though invigorating at the time, freaked me out in hindsight.
It would be terribly wrong to drag Mory anywhere near any of that … Jesus, get your head out of your self-centered ass, Jade.
I boxed a dozen cupcakes for the trip, remembered Desmond would be with us — I thought — and boxed another dozen.
I fished my passport out of the small safe I kept in the tiny back office of the bakery. I tried to spend as little time as possible there, and I noted it really needed to be dusted.
“I’m totally messing around with Desmond,” I muttered out loud, not knowing why — standing there with passport in hand — that thought had just occurred to me.
Magic shifted behind me, announcing Kandy’s arrival. I felt the green-haired werewolf as she came in through the alley door, paused to steal something from the kitchen, then turned toward the office. I stuffed the passport in my back pocket and slammed the safe shut.
“I like these,” Kandy said. She was leaning in the doorway, nibbling on a dark chocolate cupcake that I was testing chocolate-cherry buttercream icing on. It was supposed to be a
Kiss in a Cup,
but it wasn’t gelling for me.
“Too sweet. Not cherry enough.”
“You’re just too picky.”
“Am I?”
Kandy looked up at me with a genuine grin — not her predator smile. “Life is short. You should enjoy it more.”
“Yeah, you’re really cutting it up. Hanging around here.”
Kandy shrugged and licked icing off her fingertips.
“See, it’s too moist as well. It dripped all over your fingers.”
She laughed. “I like it here with you, Jade. You make treats. Your magic is tasty too. Worth protecting.”
“Don’t you miss your pack?”
Kandy shrugged again. “Wolves are … conformist.” Ah, Kandy was anything but traditional or conservative.
“And cats?”
“Wolves are the dominant species among shapeshifters. Most of the pack alphas are wolves. Cats are rare. They’re dominant, but usually prefer to run alone.”
“But …” I definitely heard a ‘but’ in Kandy’s tone.
“Desmond is alpha.”
Alpha, spoken as if with a capital A. The subtleties of that were lost on me. “He makes the rules?” I asked.
“Sure. And enforces them. Cats might be loners by nature when they hunt, but you can’t be alpha without the pack. Desmond worked hard to achieve his position.”
“I’m not getting where you’re going, Kandy.”
“He won’t marry you.”
“What? You think I want to marry McGrowly?”
Kandy grinned at the nickname. “No, but I think you’re the marrying kind.”
I scoffed at the idea. Kandy shrugged her shoulders a third time, then retreated into the bakery kitchen. Todd, my other full-time employee/coffee aficionado, hadn’t arrived for his shift yet, though he wasn’t technically late.
“These the rejects, then?” Kandy asked while stuffing another cherry-chocolate-iced
Kiss in a Cup
in her mouth.
I nodded. Kandy happily boxed the extras, adding them to the two boxes I had already set aside.
It was only just after eight o’clock when I started arranging the cupcakes in the bakery display case. A few people tried the door, then glared disappointedly at the posted hours printed on the glass.
Crap. I had totally forgotten to text Joe last night. Damn. I fished my phone out of my pocket.
It was going to be a long day.
Actually, the trip was smooth and practically effortless. It had been a while since I’d traveled with Scarlett, and I’d forgotten how easy everything always was around her. No traffic. No lines at the border. No petty fights in the car.
Too bad I didn’t get any of that magic along with the indigo eyes.
We traveled in three cars. Scarlett, Kandy, and I drove in the green-haired werewolf’s SUV.
Kett inexplicably hopped into some sports car I’d never laid eyes on before, while Desmond thankfully drove in another beast of a vehicle. The idea of a vampire driving a sports car was hilarious for some reason. Then I realized the car belonged to creepy Hoyt, spellcurser extraordinaire.
Given that he’d obviously driven up, why the hell Hoyt had bitched about driving rather than flying was a mystery. Many Adepts preferred to not fly — magic often didn’t get along with technology — but that had never stopped Scarlett from globe-trotting.
Later, I discovered that Desmond’s pickup truck belonged to the young werewolf attending UBC who Sienna and Rusty had killed. It was this murder that had brought Desmond and the pack to Vancouver. Kett as well. Desmond had left the vehicle for Kandy, but the green-haired werewolf didn’t want to drive it. He was returning it to the pack now.
I’d never thought about him settling the estates of his murdered pack members. I’d known that Hudson’s body had eventually been shipped back to the Midwest, but now I realized that I’d mourned him for three months and didn’t even know his last name. Now was not the time to ask. There never was a right time to talk about any of it, actually.
As we’d loaded into the cars in front of the bakery, I thought I tasted Mory’s magic. Hoyt had been sullenly waiting, all blurry-eyed and sallow-skinned. He had only flinched — but not protested — when Kett took his keys. Desmond hadn’t bothered getting out of the idling truck as Scarlett and I settled in with Kandy. I was sure the young necromancer was fast asleep somewhere, and I’d just been imagining things. Surrounded by Kandy, Scarlett, and Kett, I wouldn’t be able to pick up any other magic, anyway. Hoyt didn’t even register on my senses.
I demanded we stop at the first See’s Candies store we passed after entering the United States. We pulled off the I-5 at the outlet mall in Burlington, just before Mount Vernon, and spent far too much money. Kandy and Desmond included. Desmond had used his NEXUS pass to breeze through the border even faster than the rest of us, and was bitchy about having to wait the extra five minutes in the mall parking lot.
The clerk calmed him down instantly by offering him a second sample of their scrumptious
Dark Cocoanut
, a creamy soft center with angel-flake coconut covered in dark chocolate … yum. She was smart enough to guess his wallet matched the size of his appetite. With my custom box packed and paid for, I contentedly commenced consuming and snoozing as we continued through Washington State toward Seattle.
Kandy’s music taste was eclectic but road-trip worthy — Maroon 5 to Marianas Trench, Flo Rida to Paul Simon, Fleetwood Mac to AC/DC. Scarlett was poring over some spellbook in the front passenger seat. I’d never seen her study before. Her magic kept flaring, as if she was triggering spells but not following through with them.
I sprawled out in the back seat and attempted to slip into a chocolate coma. I would have been more successful if I hadn’t been forced to eat lunch in Seattle. We stopped just off the highway at a diner I didn’t recognize, but the fries were tasty so I was appeased. Desmond and Kandy each ordered two meals, then cleaned off Scarlett’s plate, then cleaned off mine.
Kett and Hoyt didn’t join us for lunch. Unfortunately, I ran into the spellcurser and his day-old magic outside the ladies washroom. He’d more than obviously been waiting for me.
“They keep you pretty covered at all times, don’t they?” Hoyt’s tone was oily around the edges.
“You might want to wonder whether that’s for my protection or yours, Hoyt.” Yeah, rude of me, but the spellcurser bothered me. I didn’t like the nothing taste of his magic.
Hoyt smirked. “I know a lot about you, Jade Godfrey, and none of it has anything to do with you being dangerous. Though I hear your cupcakes are to die for.” His eyes flicked down to my chest on the word ‘cupcakes.’ Moron. My necklace was far more interesting than my breasts. And it wasn’t nearly as interesting as the knife I wore at my hip, though the spellcurser was nowhere powerful enough to see through Gran’s invisibility spell.
I ran my fingers along the hilt of the afore-mentioned invisible knife and turned to the parking lot exit. I knew I should probably interrogate Hoyt — under the guise of flirting — to find out what exactly he knew about me, and what to expect when I met Blackwell. But instinctively, I knew he was a bluffer. He knew nothing of value, but was probably great at reflecting people’s reactions back at them — thus appearing more knowledgeable than he was. Plus, I couldn’t even pretend to like him. His dull magic soured my stomach that much.
“You’re not scared of me, are you, Jade?” Hoyt jogged a couple of feet behind me, out the glass front door and into the restaurant parking lot. “Is that why I’m riding with the vamp? Because I wouldn’t hurt a hair on your pretty head.”
I stopped and turned back to him. He stumbled. Yeah, I could move faster than a human. “Call him vamp to his face,” I said, then offered him one of my total-bullshit-but-still-blinding smiles.
This confused him — like I said, he was a moron — and I turned away to continue cutting through the first row of parked cars toward Kandy’s SUV. The green-haired werewolf was lounging against the front side of the vehicle — she’d reversed into the spot, total show-off — and enjoying the Jade-disses-Hoyt show. Scarlett was two cars over chatting to Kett, who’d found the only tree-shadowed spot in the lot.
Desmond had already left. He was in a super chatty mood today. He hadn’t looked at me once during lunch, not even when stealing fries off my plate. But he wasn’t pouting like a jilted teenager. He was just his stoic self.
“Trouble?” Kandy asked as I approached.
I laughed, but her gaze stayed locked on Hoyt as I climbed into the back seat and she crossed around to the driver’s side.
Kett flashed me a grin over Scarlett’s head as she turned to join Kandy and me. Underneath his baseball hat and sunglasses, even with his white blond hair, he looked All-American. It probably helped that he’d obviously — by his skin tone — recently fed. I didn’t like the implication of the grin, or how the vampire watched Hoyt as the spellcurser crossed to the sports car. Hoyt kept his eyes on me. The moron really had to sort out the predator ranking and his priorities more quickly.
∞
Though I’d never spent any time in Portland, Scarlett took Sienna and me on a road trip down the Oregon Coast when we were eleven, and we’d driven through on the way back. I didn’t remember much, though. As we approached, I immediately saw what Mory had meant about the bridges. I could see at least four spanning the broad river that cut directly through the city.
Almost trapped in the seriously congested four-lane I-5 traffic, we drove by each bridge until Kandy turned us onto the very last one. We looped off, around, and along an underpass to pull up to a boutique hotel on the south bank of the river. A large patch of struggling-to-be-green grass stretched along the riverbank walk to the west, while a marina occupied the eastern section.
The grassy area — which turned out to be a narrow but long park — was currently filled with large white tents. The park, and therefore the river, ran through the city along the edge of the downtown core. It wasn’t nearly as pretty as Vancouver, but it was close.
“What are the tents for?” I asked Kandy as we climbed out of the SUV. She’d stopped in the guest unloading zone by the main doors of the hotel.
“Jazz festival,” Kandy replied as she hustled Scarlett and me inside.
“Wait,” I said. “My bag.”
“Let the valet get it.”
“But …” Then I noticed the ‘valet’ looked suspiciously like Jeremy, a tall blond teenaged werewolf I’d met three months ago in Vancouver. He flashed me a grin and caught the keys that Kandy threw at him. I turned to question my green-haired werewolf friend/bodyguard only to find her smiling as well. There were suddenly too many smiling predators around … though I guess I should have been used to it by now. Speaking of which, Desmond and Kett obviously had other destinations, because neither of them had followed us into the hotel.
We entered the lobby. As the SUV pulled away behind me, I noted that Jeremy wasn’t even wearing a regular valet uniform. We turned toward the reception desk only to be intercepted by Lara of the bee-stung lips — another werewolf I’d met in Vancouver, who pulled off purple like it was her natural skin tone. Yeah, I was jealous.
“I’ve checked you in. A suite on the fourth floor. River view,” Lara said, addressing Scarlett and me.
“Great,” Kandy said. “Let’s get on with it.”
Lara pouted prettily, which further agitated Kandy. I imagined that was the point. Werewolves weren’t naturally prone to pouting.
She led us toward the elevators but then cut off to one side and opened the door to the stairs. Um, okay. I guess I looked like I needed the cardio.
The stairs led down.
“Err,” I said. Maybe I’d eaten too much chocolate, though that usually sharpened my thoughts rather than dulled them.
“We’re leaving,” Kandy said. “Clandestinely.”
Yeah, okay. I wasn’t a complete idiot. I could add two and two. I just needed the complete equation. I had dropped algebra as quickly as high school had allowed. Same for geometry, actually.
“Where are you taking us?” I asked, attempting to keep up to Kandy and not trip on the stairs. I had chosen my aqua Assured sandals from Fluevog — of course and always — for the trip. The color was perfect for me, and the two-and-a-quarter-inch leather-wrapped heel was cute yet completely walkable. Scarlett practically floated down each step beside me. Her slight smile was permanently in place, and there was never even a hint of whining in her voice. I needed to adopt her as my new role model.