“We need to show this to Tanner,” I said, opening the bedroom door. A not-unfamiliar male voice had added itself to the conversation filtering out of the living room. “C’mon. Kaz’s here too.”
Harper pulled a flannel shirt off a hanger and gestured to the door. “Lead the way, Mom.”
“Kaz, I have another patient for you,” I said.
Kaz looked up from where he was sitting near Tanner. “Who?”
“Harper. Can you come take a look?”
We walked closer to the couch, and I motioned at Harper to turn around. Kaz stepped away from Tanner and gave a low whistle.
“Feathers,” he said, shooting me a concerned look. “Haven’t seen anything like this in a long time.”
“But you have seen this before?”
He nodded.
“So why now?”
“It could be a stress reaction,” said Tanner, piping in from his horizontal position on the couch. “It could be that Doug’s been dampening Harper’s abilities through some means and now that his glamour’s been lifted, maybe the connection to his son is also loosened—or broken.”
“Do they hurt, Harper?” Kaz had him lean over the dining table and scanned his back under the pendant light.
“They itch more than they hurt,” Harper admitted.
“Are they only on your back? Did you see them anywhere else, or can you feel anything like this happening on other parts of your body?”
“No, just my back,” he answered, his voice muffled by his folded arms.
“I’m going to put a little numbing cream on the bumps and see if we can get you some relief.” Kaz opened his medical kit and placed a jar of ointment on the table. “You have any Q-tips, Calliope?”
“I’ll get them for you,” said Thatcher. He hustled to the downstairs bathroom and returned to hover near the head of the table, seemingly intent on finding ways to get his brother to laugh.
I left them to Kaz’s care and turned my attention to Tanner. His face was a better color, and some of the stress lines across his forehead were less prominent.
“How’re you?” I asked, sliding a raggedy multi-hued quilt over his bare leg.
“I suspect my knee’s wrenched. There’s too much swelling to really tell, but I should be okay until I can get an herbal poultice on it.”
Shit. That reminded me Belle’s bag of tinctures was sitting on my bureau. I had to take my first dose before bed. “No more leaping off my porch deck or chasing my exes through the woods for a while, okay?”
“Probably not until tomorrow morning, at the earliest,” he replied, a pale twinkle lighting his tired golden eyes. The same twinkle had been there in the orchard, only much stronger. And if Tanner and I had been the only ones in the house at that moment, I might have kissed him. That’s what stress did to me—made me want to kiss strange men.
“What’re you thinking?” he asked, stroking my hand where it rested on the couch beside his hip.
“Nothing.” I shook my head, clearing the memory of his mouth devouring mine and the way every element of the landscape around and under us had urged me on. “It’s been a week for the history books.”
“It’s not over yet. You haven’t said anything about the ritual.” He rubbed his thumb over the top of my hand and slid his palm under mine, interlacing our fingers. “But start with filling me in on what’s going on with Harper.”
“Tanner, I—”
“Calliope.” He squeezed my fingers and peered at me from under his lashes. “Something big is happening here, on this island. And it’s affecting me and you and your sons and maybe even others like us. I don’t want to leave you, and I can’t go back to my office in Vancouver after what just happened with your ex.” He pulled my forearm across his chest and drew me closer. “I can’t pretend I didn’t kiss you in the orchard. Damn near every hour, there’s some new revelation or incident, and you’re too close to—if not directly within—the center of it all.”
I left my hand in his and turned away from the intensity of his gaze and the truth in his words. “Harper has feathers. Or what look like enlarged follicles, like what a chicken has after molting and the new feathers are starting to come in.” I shrugged. “Not weird, not weird at all. Just another normal daily occurrence in the Jones household.”
“Given his affinity to winged creatures, I’m not surprised,” he said, his voice soft enough only I could hear. “I think you and your sons have been under Doug’s influence for a very long time. For Harper and Thatch, possibly their entire lives. The coming days and weeks are going to be very interesting.”
I wiggled my arm from underneath his and leaned away. “You think there’re more interesting reveals on their way? Because if you tell me Thatch is going to start taking all his food to the stream to wash it before he eats and might grow a bushy tail and become even more nocturnal, I might lose it. Seriously, Tanner, what more could happen?”
“Nothing you can’t handle, especially if you three stick together and allow help from those of us who are used to dealing with this kind of a thing.”
Tanner’s touch lit the fires of my erotic imagination while his words poked at my indignation. I neither needed nor wanted a man to try to take charge of things right now. Offer assistance? Sure. Take over? No way.
“Are we like your latest case studies?” I kept most of the sarcasm out of my voice. But not all.
“In a purely observational way, yes. But I can’t look at you, or them,” he said, tilting his head toward the trio at the table, “without it being very personal too. Wessel. Kaz. River. They’ve become family. There are fewer and fewer of us druids and witches and other Magicals, so when we find others, the tendency is
