Page 1 of Blood and Magic
CHAPTER 1
Maeve
NOVEMBER
I’d never given much thought to dying.
My mother passed when I was eleven, and though I understood all things must come to an end, I didn’t fully comprehend the precarious tightrope upon which we mortals walked until the Grim Reaper gave mine a good shake.
“Do you think Percy will retaliate?” my twin, Ava, asked from across the dining room. She pushed salad around on her plate, her eyebrows scrunched together in a scowl.
“I don’t see how he can,” I replied. “Guin and Sol have him backed into a corner. Even if he comes out swinging, there isn’t much he can use to his advantage.”
Ava nodded and glanced back at her food, but neither of us had an appetite.
Our father, Uther Vanderbilt, had finally succumbed to cancer mere weeks ago, and in a move we all should have seen coming, our despicable elder brother, Percy, had made a play for the family business. We were the Vanderbilts, the wealthiest and most powerful family in Helena, Montana. In order of birth, Ava and I were smack in the middle: Guinevere, Percy, and Liam on one side, Isolde and Galahad on the other. We owned over five thousand acres of land where we raised cattle and trained horses, and that said nothing of the wind turbines and natural gas companies we used to sell energy back to the national grid. Our grandparents had made us wealthy, but my father had turned it into an empire.
“Do you think the Royal Bastards will help us?” I asked, bringing my sister’s gaze back up to me.
She shrugged. “Sol seemed pretty sure.”
Our family and the Royal Bastards had been enemies for years. A land dispute had started it, but the feud escalated when my mother died on their property and my father blamed them for it. He said the Bastards ripped her to pieces, leaving nothing but a bloody patch in the snow. We never found her body.
After Father died, Percy stepped in to take over, and our ranch hands left us, refusing to work for that spineless coward. I didn’t blame them. Percy had always had more ego than brains, and he’d never once worked the ranch. Why would they respect him? This had put our dear brother in the frustrating position of having to make a deal with one of the local motorcycle clubs, the Bloody Scorpions. In exchange for our sister’s hand in marriage, the president offered his men to help us.
Isolde, whom we affectionately called Sol, had taken a drunken sojourner into the mountains and returned with a lover named Orion from a rival motorcycle gang, complete with the entire Royal Bastards crew behind him. Ava and I had helped her hatch a devilish scheme to bring our dear brother back down to earth, and when he realized he’d been outmaneuvered, he’d sulked off to greener pastures.
It had been hilarious to watch his precious plans crumble around him. I absolutely loathed what he’d done, so I was thrilled to see him sink so low. That had been a few days ago, and none of us had heard from him since.
“I’m not sure I believe Sol when she says they’re not responsible for our mother,” Ava said. “There’s something wrong with them, something off.”
“I agree.” I sipped my wine, choking back the Cab Sauv despite how much I loved dry reds. The thought of the Bastards always set me on edge. Rumors circulated through Helena that they were vicious beasts that turned into animals on the full moon. It was small-minded folklore, of course. Shapeshifters didn’t exist. “Sol seems different now, too. Doesn’t she?”
Ava nodded. “Definitely. I don’t know what happened to her at that cabin with the Bastards, but?—”
“It’s her eyes,” I said. “I look into them now and see something else staring out at me.”
Sol was only eighteen months younger than Ava and me, by all rights our Irish triplet. We were best friends, the three of us. No one else could be trusted, no one who wasn’t family. I’d tried to have friends, of course, and I’d even made a few at boarding school. But money corrupted everything it touched, and I could never be sure if they really liked me or my daddy’s wallet.
“It was like when Guin started dating that ranch hand. What was his name?” Ava narrowed her blue eyes in concentration.
“Van,” I said, recalling the tall, attractive biker with sandy blond hair and dark brown eyes who used to smile at me from under a cowboy hat. “Beautiful Van.”
“Right.” Ava laughed, drinking her glass of wine. “Of course, you’d remember his name.”
I balked and feigned offense. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Despite being genetically identical, I fear our taste in partners is quite the opposite.” She smirked and let out another loud giggle.
“Precisely,” I agreed. “I’m a hot-blooded woman, and you’re a frigid prude.”
She dropped her jaw, half insulted, half laughing, and threw her napkin across the table at me. “Just because I don’t screw anyone with a pulse doesn’t mean I’m a prude.”
“I’m not shaming you,” I said, attempting to ease her ire, but a strange tightness in my chest stopped me. My lungs seized, my stomach lurching as a sudden wave of anguish shot down my torso and up my throat. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think.
Panicking, I clutched at my sternum and gasped for air.
“Mae?” Ava said, pushing to her feet. She scrambled over to my side of the table just as I lurched to the ground. My vision blackened, the world going blurry, my head both light and the weight of an anvil.
