Page 14 of The Alpha and the Baker
“You okay there, little man?” I asked calmly as I quickly strode over to him. If there was one thing I’d learned about kids, it was that they were fairly indestructible, and often they only cried after tumbles as a reaction to adults freaking out.
Bobby slowly righted himself and sniffed, his chin quivering as he very clearly tried to pretend he was all right. Oh dear, that wasn’t good. “I’m okie.”
“Here, buddy, let me tie your shoe for you. We’ll get a Band-Aid on your battle wounds, okay? Then you can tell everyone how tough you are.”
Unfortunately, I could scent his blood in the air, meaning he definitely got a scrape. I couldn’t see anything yet, though, meaning that wherever it was, it wasn’t grievous. But it did make me wish that kids had the same healing abilities as us grown shifters did.
“Okie.”
As I approached, I saw blood beading up from a scrape on his knee, and his palm definitely had an abrasion from a rock. Definitely not the worst, but certainly not comfy. Instantly, I was swamped with guilt for putting him off, but I really was worried about accidentally exposing the existence of our kind to a random human woman. But I wasn’t going to rush the kid, so I tied his shoes for him—again—then picked him up with his permission and took him to the main house—my mother’s house—and dropped him off with an aunt there to tend to him, making sure to remark how incredibly brave and cool he was.
With that handled, I went back to the tent, walking in a way that hopefully told people that it wasnotthe time to ask me for random tasks. But sure enough, once I got there, Felicia wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
What, did she turn invisible? I could swear I smelled the faintest hint of her pomegranate shampoo, but every time I saw someone with dark hair, they’d turn around to be someone else.
“Hey, has anyone seen the baker woman?” I asked as I approached a group of older folks sitting around one of the tables closer to the spread and idly chit-chatting.
“Baker woman?” Gammy McCallister asked, and honestly, I was surprised she heard me. We shifters tended to live long lives because of our ability to heal, but Gammy wasexceptionallyold at a hundred-and-twenty-three. She was half-blind, mostly deaf, but still as sharp as a whip. As long as it didn’t involve those aforementioned senses.
“Yeah, she’s about yea tall,” I said, gesturing before remembering belatedly that she couldn’t see my hand. “Black hair. Brought the cakes in.”
“Weren’t we just talking to her?” Claudia said, looking up from the crossword she’d been working on.
“You mean Melodie?” Gammy half-shouted back. “She was just telling me about how she made the cakes!”
Melodie? As far as I knew, Melodie had gone back to her parents’ home to cool off and was now playing frisbee with some of the other kids before food time, so I highly doubted she was hanging out with the elders.
“Why do you think you were talking to Melodie, Gammy?” I asked slowly, making sure to enunciate.
“I’d smell that jam and cream anywhere. I might be old, but flour is flour, and butter do be butter.” That last part was a nearly perfect imitation of her great-grandniece, and it would have been amusing if I wasn’t rapidly putting together how wildly my pack had just stepped in it.
Somehow, in the wild story that was my life, the veryhumanbaker had been mistaken for a pre-shifted werewolf and had spent the past half hour or so just chilling right in the middle of our family reunion with none the wiser.
Nothing could ever be simple.
“That wasn’t Melodie, I’m afraid,” I said with a sigh. “That’s the baker who pitched in to help because the cakes were burned this morning when Arietty shifted in Auntie Letitia’s kitchen.”
“Arietty? But she’s far too young!”
“Don’t I know it,” I muttered before getting back to the matter at hand. “But where is she, if she’s not here?”
“Oh, she asked to use the restrooms, so Elizabeth showed her where they were.”
“You mean the porta potties?”
“Yup!”
I was incredulous, but the logical part of my brain supplied that she must have headed there when I was taking care of Bobby. What were the chances?
Looked like it was back to the toilets to me. Thrilling. I bid my goodbye to the group and hurried to find the raven-haired baker that turned out to be as elusive as the Loch Ness monster.
Except, perhaps predictably, she wasn’t there. I even went so far as knocking, but each door swung open. What was going on? I felt like I was in the middle of a Scooby Doo montage or the world’s slowest Benny Hill chase scene.
Okay, Cas, think!
Claudia had said that Elizabeth had shown Felicia to the bathrooms. As far as I could recall, we had three Elizabeths in our pack, with one of them being a toddler. And the nineteen-year-old preferred to go by Lizzy, so that left the older Elizabeth, who I called Mrs. Parker.
Right, so if Felicia was with Mrs. Parker, where would the woman make any stops? I knew Mrs. Parker was incredibly proud of her collection of ceramic plates with cats on them, but I didn’t see the baker being willing to go into a random stranger’s house while she was waiting to get paid.
