I hoped.
“Did you call Kaz?” he asked, his voice faint. “Wes is still at the other orchards.”
Thatcher piped up from behind my shoulder. “He’s coming.”
“Good. Listen for him, please.” I turned to Tanner and cupped his jaw, not liking the way his eyes were moving back and forth.
“Calli, I don’t know what went wrong. I know that spell inside out and in a dozen languages, and whatever he did…” He sighed, wincing when he shrugged. “Whatever he did packed some punch. I should have known. I should have—”
I pressed my thumb to his lips, shook my head, and finally got him to focus on my face. The dazed and vulnerable look in his eyes softened a notch. “I was married to him, Tanner, and he fooled me for fifteen years. At least now we have a better idea of what we’re up against. Wait. What are we up against?”
“Those two were disguised, probably by a glamour spell,” Tanner said. “They’re Fae.”
I rocked back and sat on my heels. “Fae?”
Tanner closed his eyes and nodded.
“Do you think they’re mixed up with what happened at the Pearmains?” I asked. Doug and Roger were the most competitive set of brothers I’d ever met. If they were in cahoots, whatever they were doing had to have some powerful reward at the end. As in money. Or land. Or both.
“Considering their strength and the fact that the orchardists have all been under strong spells, I think we have to consider that Doug’s connected to the…” Tanner left his thought unfinished as Thatch returned with a bag of crushed ice.
“Mom,” Thatcher whispered, as I wrapped a dishtowel around the plastic. “We need to see you upstairs.”
I shoved a throw pillow under Tanner’s injured knee, pressed the ice against his outer leg, and assured him I’d be back. Hustling up the stairs to Harper’s room, I ran down the list of possible injuries and came up empty. Neither Doug nor Roger had touched Harper.
Thatch opened and closed the door and moved to stand in front of me, his hands on my upper arms and his chest blocking my view of the room. “Mom, you can’t freak out, okay?”
When did my baby become such a tall, take-charge young man? And when did my baby get so good at calming me down?
“Thatch, sweetie? After the week I’ve had I don’t think anything could freak me out.”
“This might.” He held me in place and turned his head.
Harper’s eyes were wide and wet along the outer edges. He nodded, took hold of his T-shirt in the front, and pivoted.
“Help me out, Thatch?” he asked, his voice muffled underneath the cotton.
Thatcher released me and pulled the cloth away from Harper’s back as he lifted it enough to expose his shoulders.
“What the hell are those?” My knees jellied, and my back slid down the door until my butt hit the floor.
Evenly-spaced bumps ran alongside Harper’s spine. The largest were close to the vertebrae, and the vertical parallel lines grew less noticeable as they approached his sides and lower back. I wanted to believe it was a rash, a reaction to the stress of everything happening in our lives, but no rash I’d ever seen rose off the skin in such an organized and purposeful pattern.
Curiosity got the better of me. Harper flinched when I pressed one of the large bumps in the middle of his back. “Gentle, Mom. They kinda hurt.”
“Thatcher, get me a light,” I said.
A switch flicked, and a beam of white light hit Harper’s back. Thatcher said, “Found my camping headlight. You want to wear it, Mom?”
“What I really need are my reading glasses.” Fingertips tentative on my son’s back, I paused while Thatcher slipped the wide elastic over my head and adjusted the light. Leaning closer, I sucked in a breath. “Sweetheart, these look like feather follicles.”
“Feathers, Mom? Really? Feathers?”
“I could be wrong, I—”
“Fuck, I hope you’re wrong, because…feathers?” Harper pulled the T-shirt all the way off and flung it to the floor. The pain in his eyes went right to my heart. “But Tanner said we weren’t…I’m not— Does this mean I’m a…a bird?”
I shook my head. I wasn’t a fan of lying to one’s children to shield them from life’s challenges, and I wasn’t going to start now. But finding feather follicles on my eighteen-year-old’s back was beyond my growing but still woefully limited body of magical knowledge.
“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
