I couldn’t open my locker because I didn’t have any hands. Just fins. And then I laughed at myself because I thought, ‘Silly. Why would a fish need a locker?’ The laughing made lots of bubbles.” Amusement lit her eyes but dimmed at once to worry. “Do you have dreams like that?”
“Sure. When I was your age, I had them all the time. Swimming, running—but on four legs, right?— burrowing, flying . . .”
Maria leaned toward me. “Flying dreams are the
“Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s like—”
The kitchen door swung open. “How’s that coffee coming?” Gwen stopped and stared at the two of us. From the heat that rose in my cheeks—and from the way Gwen watched us through narrowed eyes like we were conspirators plotting an assassination—I knew we looked way guiltier than a girl and her aunt sharing some cocoa.
“What are you doing up, young lady?” Gwen asked Maria.
“Um, I . . .” Maria’s round eyes implored me for help.
“She came downstairs for hot chocolate,” I said. “It sounded like a good idea, so I made us each a mug. She helped me load the dishwasher, too.”
“Well, you get back to bed now, Maria. I’ll be up in a few minutes to tuck you in. Again.”
“Okay. Night, Mom. Night, Aunt Vicky.” Maria gave Gwen and then me a peck on the cheek. She fled up the back stairs.
I put the empty mugs in the dishwasher and got a carton of half-and-half from the fridge.
“So, what were you two talking about?” Gwen took the half-and-half and poured it into a cream pitcher, which she set on a tray. The tension was back in her shoulders, and her hand shook. That was Gwen. When upset, make things even more perfect.
“Oh, you know . . .” I
“She’s having dreams, isn’t she? Preshifting dreams.”
“They’re just dreams, Gwen. She said she had a couple of odd dreams lately—flying, swimming, stuff like that. Norms get those, too. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
“But it might.” Gwen’s biggest fear was that her daughter would become a shapeshifter. That was a big part of why she’d married a norm; she’d hoped human DNA would make her children something other than Cerddorion, something closer to “normal.” But as Maria grew, so did Gwen’s fears. It didn’t help matters that a crazy scientist with an ambition to map the shapeshifter genome had tried last fall to kidnap Maria and use her as a lab animal. I’d brought Maria home, but Gwen’s protective instincts had kicked into overdrive. Yet she couldn’t protect Maria from herself. She couldn’t shield the girl from her own nature—whatever that turned out to be.
“We’ll have to wait and see,” I said. “There’s no point in worrying yourself sick about it now.”
“We’ll talk about this later.” Gwen’s tone made the words sound like a threat.
I held open the door as she carried the coffee tray into the dining room. She’d forgotten the tiramisu. But it didn’t matter. The evening was over. Not even Kane could pull Gwen back from whatever dark place she’d gone in her worries about Maria, in her anger and hurt that Maria had chosen to talk to me—not Gwen—about what she was going through. Within fifteen minutes, we were saying good night.
4
“THAT WENT PRETTY WELL,” I SAID AS WE PULLED OUT OF Gwen’s driveway and headed back to Boston.
“Are you kidding? If that had been a trial, and the jury was starting its deliberations—like your sister and her husband are doing in their living room right now—do you know what I’d be doing? I’d be pacing the hallways, chewing my nails until they bled and trying to figure out how to tell my client we were going to lose.”
“Oh, come on. It wasn’t that bad. Okay, there were a couple of tense moments. But Gwen likes you. She gave me the secret signal.”
He scowled like he thought I was teasing him. “I wish you’d told me not to mention your aunt.”
“I should have. I’m sorry about that.”
But even if I hadn’t been distracted on the drive out here, I might have neglected to bring up the issue. In my mind, Mab’s household and Gwen’s family existed in such completely separate spheres that I probably wouldn’t have thought to warn Kane. Of course, without that warning from me, he’d think bringing up family would be a natural icebreaker. He’d probably expected that saying he liked Mab would win him points with my sister, not send him three giant steps back.
“What happened between them?” he asked.
“I don’t know, exactly.” The animosity had started nearly twenty years ago. “When Gwen was thirteen, she went to Wales for her first summer of demon-fighter training. Or that’s what was supposed to happen—she was home within a month. When I asked her why she came back, she burst into tears and told me to leave her alone. She never said what went wrong. But whenever anyone mentioned Mab’s name, Gwen would shout, ‘I hate her,’ and run out of the room.”
Gwen’s rejection of Mab had changed our family. No more Christmas visits to Maenllyd, Mab’s manor house in north Wales. Gwen flat-out refused to go. And all those summers I spent in Wales, Gwen never once asked about Mab or acknowledged that I’d been away. She hadn’t invited Mab to her wedding; she hadn’t sent announcements when her children were born. Because of Gwen, Mab hadn’t attended my father’s funeral.
“Do you think the training was too tough for Gwen? Your aunt isn’t exactly a softie.”
I shook my head. “It was more than that. Mab wouldn’t speak of the incident, either.” I’d asked her about it when I began my apprenticeship. “She told me it was none of my business. That I was there to focus on my own training. She said so in a way that made me think it would be a bad idea to ask a second time.” Mab never said she hated Gwen; she never talked about her at all. Whatever had happened, it erased each of them from the other’s world.
“Families can get so complicated,” Kane said. “It’s easier being a lone wolf.”
“Oh, yes? Should I stay at my place tonight, then, and let you do your lone-wolf thing at yours?”
He gave me a sidelong look, and then made a sharp right into the empty parking lot of a closed mini-mall. He stopped, turned to me, put his hands behind my head, and pulled me to him for a kiss. All the tension, all the pent- up frustration of the evening, was transformed into the urgent pressure of his lips against mine. A thrill went through me. The kiss deepened, making my heart pound. Then Kane sighed and rested his forehead against mine, his hand stroking the back of my neck.
“I said easier, not better.”
Whichever. Right now it all felt pretty damn good. I tilted up my face to kiss him again when his cell phone rang.
He groaned. He pulled out his phone and checked the number. “Damn. I’m sorry, Vicky. I should take this call.” He ran a finger along my lips as he pressed a button and put the phone to his ear. “Alexander Kane.” He listened for a couple of seconds. His finger stopped moving on my mouth. “Hold on.” He muted the phone and turned to me.
“It’s about Juliet. She’s in Goon Squad custody.”
My heart lurched. The Goons had Juliet? At least she was safe from the Old Ones. But she was being held by the cops who police Deadtown—and that wasn’t good news.
The Old Ones weren’t the only ones looking for Juliet. She was also wanted for questioning in connection with that Supreme Court justice’s murder, the one that had derailed Kane’s paranormal rights case. Witnesses had seen Juliet in Washington on the night Justice Frederickson was killed. But what the cops didn’t know—or wouldn’t believe—was that the Old Ones had been there, too. Kane had seen them. Three Old Ones had tried to prevent him from reaching his werewolf retreat that night, the first night of a full moon, and force him to change in the middle of the city. They’d almost succeeded, too.
When Justice Frederickson’s body was found, her throat ripped out, Kane was initially the prime suspect. But the D.C. cops hadn’t been able to charge him because of his airtight alibi: Just before moonrise, he’d made it to a
