My skin crawled with goosebumps. L’Runa was a force of nature, and her words drove home the message I had been getting ever since the day I first stepped onto the Pearmains’ property and was met with hollow silence.
L’Runa did not let up much during the next five or so hours, aside from giving us breaks to use the bathroom, stretch our bodies, and get what food and drink we needed. Every time we reassembled, she delivered more information, while regularly reminding us of our individual and collective responsibilities to hold the knowledge and use it well.
The last lecture covered menstrual blood. She added insights that expanded my scant knowledge of the meaning and purpose behind the Blood Ceremony. L’Runa emphasized the importance of the monthly Moon ceremonies and spoke openly about including the transgender and others who identified as female but who might not have the physical equipment required to produce menstrual blood. I made notes to ask Tanner if the mentoring session he and others ran were making similar changes to their curriculum and structure to accommodate everyone, no matter their gender identification.
By the time the class wound down, my head was filled and overflowing with the magical and the practical.
Chapter 16
I said goodbye to my classmates and signed out of the classroom. L’Runa sent me a private message with her email and phone number and urged me to contact her if I had any questions or wanted simply to talk.
I had many questions. The marrow in my bones prickled with the sure knowledge answers to some of those questions lay in the cellar below my feet. Before I descended into that dank space, I would switch my witch’s hat for my scientist’s collection bag.
But first, another landscape waited. I swiveled my chair to face my bed, interlaced my fingers, and stretched my arms overhead, twisting to each side to get the stiffness out of my spine.
Tanner had tiptoed in at five and asked if he could nap. He lay on his side, his back to me. The same pair of cut-off sweats I’d pulled from the boys’ pile of clean laundry the morning after the party covered him from his hips to above his knees. He wore an oversized bleached white T-shirt. The loose way the shirt draped over his shoulder and ribs did nothing to quell my imagination.
I gathered my bowl and spoon, dropped my things in the kitchen, and made another stop at the bathroom. I’d sensed the house growing quiet during the final hour of L’Runa’s lecture, and the note on the counter explained why.
“Mal and James invited us for dinner. We took Jasper. The house is yours until ten.”
Three and half hours for questions and answers. I’d take it.
Dried yogurt and flakes of oatmeal wouldn’t rinse out. I left my bowl to soak, shook the scrunched up dishrag someone had tossed in the sink, and draped it over the faucet.
The house was profoundly quiet. I poured a tall glass of beer, savoring the hoppy tang on my tongue, summer’s warmth on my skin, and the complete lack of human noise. I walked the inner ambit of the house. The front door was locked, as was the sliding door to the back porch. I flicked the lock and stepped out to survey the results of the activity I’d tracked in the background of the hours-long video call.
I set my glass on the deck, held tight to the railing, and leaned over to see if I could figure out what was going on underneath the back porch. For years, the shaded space had been a catch-all for yard tools, wood scraps, the kind of stuff most homes accumulated without knowing how it got there, stuff you didn’t want to throw out, just in case.
Freshly poured concrete formed a floor, complete with a French drain. The rectangle didn’t look like it would house more than one bed, but who knew what the guys were planning. At the far end of the yard area, stakes and string marked the footprint of a larger structure.
I’d have to remind Christoph and Wes to get a proper building permit, especially if they were planning on adding electricity to whatever was going up in that spot. Or maybe the outbuilding would wear a magical cloak.
None of the building activity mattered when the man who’d snuck up behind me glided his hands down my arms and circled my wrists. I wanted to snake my free arm behind me and press his front to my back, but words came first.
“Why did you leave me at the Pearmains’ without telling me where you were going and why?”
Tanner pressed his forehead to the back of my head. “Do you want the long answer or the short answer?”
“I want the truth.” I wriggled one wrist loose, bent to retrieve my glass, and sipped at the beer. My taste buds soaked in the cool liquid’s memories of summer days spent curling up and around the tall string trellises supporting row after row of hop plants. I took another sip, grateful for whatever I’d done to deserve this new ability to taste a food or drink’s lineage.
“My ability to shift in and out of my wolf at will was compromised by my relationship with Jessamyne. The choice I made to pursue her without you was made by wolf, not by me.”
“Don’t you have an override mechanism?” I asked, genuinely curious. My knowledge of shifters was scant.
“She hurt him, and he wants retribution.”
Tanner rested his lips against the side of my neck, made a line of kisses to just underneath my ear lobe, and lavished the same amount of attention on the other side.
“I
