Page 26 of Brimstone and Broomsticks
Bronwyn nearly ran off the road. “You saw Marcus? Did you guys get naked? Should I be looking for a wedding registry in the near future?”
I shot her a sideways glare. “I didnotget naked, although Marcus did answer the door dripping wet from a shower and wearing only a tiny little towel around his loins. No screwing. No getting back together. Just business, then I got out of there so he could go get ready to prowl and hook up with whatever ‘ho he managed to score for the evening.”
Ugh. Bitter much? Not that Bronwyn noticed. My sister was eyeing the road ahead with a lewd smirk on her face.
“Man, the idea of Marcus’s loins… Damn, Cassie. You’re killing me. I might need to pull over here. Wet, glistening, almost-naked Marcus….”
“I know.” No sense in denying it. “But he’s a total sleaze. Don’t make my mistake and jump in bed with the gorgeous hot guy who fills your head with promises of love and adoration.”
“Are you kidding? Promises of love and adoration? Gorgeous hot guy? Sign me up, girl! Maybe not Marcus, but I’d be happy to have some man use me, even if just for one night.”
I winced. None of us were short women, but Bronwyn was a hair over six feet, and had always been heavily muscled for a woman. You’d think in a town full of powerful supernaturals, men would love an Amazon who could rock a forge and welding torch, but Bronwyn’s stature combined with her blunt, tomboyish nature and loner personality meant men were more willing to sling back a few shots with her than head for the bedroom. I’m pretty sure she was still a virgin. The only one who’d expressed any sort of interest physically in my sister was Alberta. Bronwyn had thanked her and told her that as she was a “sausage and eggs” girl, she’d need to decline.
Sausage and eggs. Bronwyn was freaking hysterical with her odd dry humor. She didn’t have my anger management issues. She didn’t have Ophelia’s depression or Adrienne’s wild side. She was just as quirky and fun as the rest of us. Why couldn’t some man see that in her and fall in love? Why couldn’t Bronwyn ever seem to find a happy ever after?
Not that I could find a happy ever after either. Maybe we Perkins witches were cursed that way.
I reached out to squeeze her arm, thinking that the hard muscles under her shirt rivaled Marcus’. “You’ll eventually find someone, Wynnie.”
She snorted. “I have. He’s called ‘The Vibrator In My Bedside Table’. Now back to the subject at hand, there’s trouble brewing with the werewolves in case you didn’t notice. We need to decide what we’re going to do about it.”
My eyebrows shot up. “First, that was not the subject at hand. We’d been discussing a half-naked Marcus and whether Lucien was a demon, not werewolves and their squabbles. Secondly, even if there is something going on with the werewolves, I’m not going to do anything about it. Not my problem. We have a sheriff.”
“We’re the witches, Cassie. This is our town. And you’re the eldest. You can’t dump everything off on Sheriff Oakes. The poor guy is up to his leaves in stuff as it is. The residents did a great job holding things together after Grandma died and Mom bailed, but it’s not fair to ask them to continue to run this town on their own. Temperance Perkins made a promise when she set the first wards. It’s our duty to keep that promise.”
“No, it’s not,” I snapped. “I’m here. I didn’t move away like Babylon. I stayed and I help maintain the wards. That’s as much duty as I owe this town. I was left to raise six little girls at the age of thirteen. I’m done cleaning up other people’s messes. I’m not responsible for anyone or anything besides myself. It’s bad enough that the law firm gives me every case in Accident. It’s bad enough that I have to run out at sunset on a Friday night, abandoning a perfectly good pint of ice cream to reset the wards that some idiot broke.”
“And yet you continue to have the whole family, cousins and all, over every Sunday for dinner, just like Grandma always did,” Bronwyn reminded me. “You live in the old family house in town, when no one would have blamed you for selling it and leaving. Cass, I’m grateful for all you’ve done. If it hadn’t been for you, we would have been divvied up between foster homes across the state when Mom left. You took charge. You cast that awe-inspiring spell that convinced a family court judge to emancipate you atthirteenand let you be guardian to six younger sisters. I was eleven. I remember that ritual. Holy shit girl, I still get chills when I remember the power you pulled to do that.”
I’ll admit I had a smug sort of satisfaction when I thought of it. I’d been desperate and angry. More than angry. Full on rage, is what I’d felt when I’d realized Mom had left and the future we were facing as wards of the court. I’d poured every bit of rage into that ritual, kept our little family together, and at the age of thirteen, suddenly became an adult responsible for six children. And I hadn’t come up for air until Babylon had turned eighteen six years ago.
“The town didn’t expect you to do more than raise us all those years,” Bronwyn continued. “But once Babylon turned eighteen, they were expecting something more from you than fixing the wards and occasionally defending a goblin or selkie in court.”
“Well, they were expecting wrong.” I set my jaw, determined not to let my sister guilt me on this. She was the closest to me in age. We’d shared a bedroom growing up. Of all my sisters, Bronwyn was the one whose opinion of me mattered the most. The faint disappointment in her voice was killing me, but I wasn’t about to let her know that.
“Full moon starts tomorrow night,” she told me. “Dallas Dickskin has challengers to his status as pack alpha. There’s going to be trouble this weekend.”
“Dallas Dickskin has had challengers to his pack every full moon the last six years,” I replied. “As long as they don’t interfere with Sunday’s family dinner, they can do whatever the hell they want up on that mountain.”
“Ophelia says this moon is going to be bad. She says this time it’s more than two werewolves brawling in the moonlight for control of the pack. She said what happens this weekend is going to be huge. It’s going to change the town forever. And you’re in the middle of it.”
A chill ran over my skin, and my heart stuttered. Ophelia and Sylvie were twins, so similar in appearance that even our grandmother had struggled to tell them apart. But where Sylvie had the gift of granting luck—both good and bad—Ophelia’s power was divination. It was all she had. The woman was a skilled paramedic, but when it came to magic, divination was it. Go figure that with the name of Cassandra, I couldn’t divine my way out of a paperbag, where my sister rocked that skill. Sadly, her premonitions were often so vague that they were useless, but this one was eerily specific. And disturbing.
“Change the town how?” I scowled. “Like maybe the Dickskins kill themselves completely off? Or kill all the werewolves off and we no longer have to deal with their problems? Because that’s the kind of change I’d like to see.”
“The werewolves aren’t all horrible,” Bronwyn chided. “And neither are the Dickskins. A few bad apples, you know.”
She was right. And I too worried that the change Ophelia had prophesized wasn’t going to be a beneficial one for the town. Or for me. Why was I in the middle of it all? Did it have something to do with this mess between Clinton and Lucien?
Whatever it was, that was happening tomorrow night, where right now Bronwyn was parking off the side of a dirt lane, her headlights pointed toward a huge deadfall.
“Here?” Duh. Bronwyn knew her stuff. We’d reset the wards around this deadfall five years ago when a storm had brought down a bunch of trees. It was easier to move the wards then try to get an emergency backhoe out here to clean everything off. Hopping out of the truck, I surveyed the area, assuming the trees had shifted and dented the flow of energy.
But Bronwyn had said a break.
I walked over to the deadfall and stood on my tip-toes. It was definitely disturbed, like something large or heavy had climbed over it. If they’d knocked a bunch of branches down on the other side, it might have broken the line of sight of the wards. They were set up so a quick temporary disruption in the flow of energy wouldn’t set off any alarms—so people traveling to another town, or deer roaming the forest wouldn’t disturb them. Actually, the magic should have gone through trees or stones. A break? That usually meant magic. As in two incompatible magics shorting each other out.
Standing here wouldn’t tell me anything. One of us was going to have to climb over this shit and check the ward. And it wasn’t going to be me.
