Trinkets, Treasures, and Other Bloody Magic (26 page)

“Don’t eat the paper,” I said.

Too late. Desmond inhaled the entire cupcake. He reached for a second one. I slapped his hand with my icing-smeared spatula. “I’ll ice one.”

Audrey lunged for me — her eyes blazing green — and smacked into Kandy like she was a brick wall.

Desmond licked the icing that had splattered on the back of his hand. “Mmm, good.”

“Not too sweet?” I asked, ignoring the growling woman attempting to dart around Kandy, who kept sidestepping to block her.

“You always think it’s too sweet,” the green-haired werewolf said.

“It has to balance out the cake. More cocoa, maybe?”

“Just put some on a damn cupcake,” Desmond said. “And calm the fuck down, Audrey.”

“She … she … smacked you —”

“She has touched me many times, and I have suffered no damage … other than the need for a cold shower on occasion.”

All the fight went out of Audrey. She alternated from staring wide-mouthed at Desmond to gawking at me, disbelief etched across her face. Jesus, it wasn’t like I was some hideous monster … wait, maybe that was the problem.

I frosted a cupcake. Desmond watched my hands intently as I did so.

“You usually put on more than that,” he said.

“I’m not done, and I thought you were in a rush.”

“I can be patient.”

I laughed. He grinned.

I got that we were deliberately not talking about something and didn’t push it. The neck and armholes of his T-shirt were stretched out, and he was wearing track pants again. The kind shapeshifters stored in places like the trunks of their cars.

I passed Desmond the iced cupcake, and frosted a second for Kandy. Then, with only a moment of hesitation, I made a third for Audrey.

I licked the frosting off the spatula. It was on the edge of being too sweet.

Desmond watched me with hooded eyes. I grinned, wishing briefly that we were alone with the bowl of icing.

“What will you call these ones?” he asked. His gaze was on my mouth.

“They aren’t ready for a name yet,” I answered, sauntering over to the sink to wash the spatula. “So you had to go all McGrowly?”

“What?” Desmond asked. He grabbed the cupcake I’d iced for Audrey. Kandy hadn’t eaten hers either.

“Your shirt is stretched out,” I said. “You went all man-beast for some reason while meeting with Blackwell?”

“He wasn’t there,” Kett answered from the living room. His gaze was still out the window.

Ah. I added a quarter cup of cocoa powder to the icing. Lara had picked me up some Valhrona cocoa powder that was only 21 percent cocoa butter. This pleased me. It would also cut the sweetness.

“Blackwell left a gift,” Kett continued. “I gathered you were the one who was supposed to open it. The shifter disagreed.”

Desmond grunted. Kett’s implication was that Blackwell’s gift had hurt McGrowly and he’d transformed to speed his healing. I’d seen him heal easily without needing the magic of the transformation, so it must have been a hell of a gift.

“What about Scarlett?” I asked as I offered a taste of the amped-up chocolate icing to Kandy.

“She didn’t go with us,” Desmond answered. “Some witch thing.”

The green-haired werewolf carefully directed my extended hand and the icing-filled spoon toward Desmond. He didn’t bother taking the spoon from me. He simply ate the icing off with one lick.

“A witch thing?” I asked.

“The local coven is missing a couple of members,” Kett answered.

“Sienna.” I had managed to turn my sister’s name into a swear word.

“It seems likely,” Kett replied.

“Where’s the gift?”

“We’ll have to take you to it.” Kett pulled out a cell phone and began texting. It always wigged me out when I saw the vampire using technology. I guessed he was texting Scarlett.

Desmond smacked his lips. “Yes. On the cupcake part now.”

His language skills were degrading rapidly. But then, great chocolate had that effect on me as well, so I couldn’t judge.

I began to systematically frost the remaining cupcakes. I was surprised that Desmond didn’t snatch the first one I put down.

No one spoke while I finished frosting. Desmond just watched me with that stoic, granite look of his while the other three busied themselves. Or slipped into a fugue state in Kett’s case.

I wiped my hands on a tea towel and plated the cupcakes on a pretty, seventies-inspired, earthenware serving platter I’d found. It came with a matching set of side plates that looked like they’d never been used.

I set these down in front of Desmond. He looked over the cupcakes and nodded his approval. Then he looked up at me.

Kandy shifted anxiously. I was missing something.

Desmond waited, his face giving me no hint. Kandy toyed with the spoon she’d guided me to offer to Desmond.

He wanted me to serve him the cupcakes? I opened my mouth to say something snarky, then paused.

Desmond lifted his eyebrows questioningly. I remembered how he’d countered my offer to cook dinner. Food was significant to shapeshifters. Kandy displayed that every time she was with Desmond. He always ate first or got first pick.

Kett’s phone pinged. “Your mother is on her way.”

I picked up a side plate and put a cupcake on it. Then I topped the cupcake with a few fresh blueberries and scattered more around the plate.

I placed this plate in front of Desmond. His eyes crinkled around the edges. His approval was obvious. I was playing some hierarchy game I didn’t understand, but I made up five more plates anyway. I started to place one of the five in front of Kandy but she shook her head sharply and looked briefly toward Audrey.

I crossed around the kitchen island into the dining room and placed the plate on the table beside Audrey. She bobbed her head in thanks, but I could tell by her tensed jaw and averted eyes that it took every ounce of discipline to do so.

Then I served Kandy. Desmond bit into his cupcake. Kandy and Audrey followed suit. They made appreciative noises while they ate. I took a bite of my cupcake as I noted the two extra plates.

“Where are Jeremy and Mory?” I asked Kandy once I cleared my mouth.

Kandy shrugged and kept eating.

I glanced at the clock on the oven. I couldn’t recall seeing them since lunch. I reached out with my dowser senses to find Mory’s magic. She wasn’t near.

“Did they go to the graveyard?” I asked.

“What?” Desmond replied.

“Jeremy and Mory,” I said around the last two bites of my cupcake. “They were talking about some shapeshifter cemetery.”

“What have you done now?” Desmond’s tone said so much more than his words. It implied I’d been nothing but a headache for him for many, many years … and really, it had only been three months.

I stared him down. He never liked it when I did that. Then I licked a dab of frosting off my fingertip as if I had no care in the world. I was learning the rules of this dominance game pretty quickly.

Green rolled over Desmond’s eyes. It was a really bad idea to play games with an alpha in his own home. If McGrowly made an appearance, he would totally ruin the kitchen trying to get to me. I liked the kitchen. I just loathed Desmond’s all-knowing, all-suffering tone.

“Don’t think you know me, shifter,” I whispered. I didn’t lay my hand on the hilt of my knife, but I really, really wanted to. God. Where was all this aggression coming from? The constant feeling of having no control of my own life? Desmond’s dominance games pulled me right out of the contentment I’d felt from making Mory’s necklace.

“I know you, dowser,” Desmond growled. He spread his large hands on the granite counter before him. His fingers were each thicker than my thumb.

“I gave them permission.” Audrey whispered so quietly that I barely heard her.

Desmond rolled his shoulders, then slowly turned to look at her. She stumbled to her feet, knocking her chair back, and knelt on one knee with her head bowed.

“Explain,” Desmond said, “why you have allowed two pups to leave this house unaccompanied.”

“I sent your enforcer, Lara, with them.” Lara was one of Desmond’s personal enforcers. He’d brought her, along with Kandy and Jeremy, to Vancouver when they were investigating the werewolf murders.
 

“So you chose to lighten the guard when we had a guest in residence that has been offered our protection?”

“No. I …” Audrey faltered.

“Actually, I changed my mind. I will take responsibility.” I swore a vein in Desmond’s forehead twitched when I spoke. “They told me their plans. I foisted them off on Audrey, assuming she could rein Jeremy in better than I.”

“A fair assumption,” Desmond said. He didn’t look at me.

“I should have said no. I practically threw them together.”

“Werewolves do not mix with necromancers,” Desmond said, completely rebuffing my attempt to take the blame. He wasn’t big on the shades-of-gray concept.

“Werewolves don’t mix with anyone but other werewolves,” Kandy muttered under her breath.

“Except in the wild,” I said, smiling at the little bit of information I’d somehow accumulated. “They can mate with coyotes and dogs, right?”

Kandy looked at me, her mouth was wide open. Then she started to laugh.

Desmond growled. But then he seemed to give in and start laughing along with Kandy.

Audrey glared at me from her position kneeling on the floor when Desmond wasn’t looking. She didn’t find the subject of interspecies mating at all amusing. Did shapeshifters mate across species of animal? Desmond was a mountain lion, which I understood was a form practically exclusive to his blood relatives. They had to marry wolves and what-not, didn’t they?

Now wasn’t the time to ask.

“To the graveyard we go,” Desmond declared. He swiped another cupcake off the platter.

I’d once found him stoic and unreadable, but now the Alpha of the West Coast North American Pack’s mood changes seemed abrupt and confusing. Perhaps I’d been spending too much time with Kett.

Speaking of whom, the vampire was watching me. He then deliberately looked down at the coffee table. I’d tidied up after making Mory’s necklace but hadn’t put everything away yet. Kett raised his gaze and rewarded me with a very rare, very human smile.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, embarrassed that I was pleased with pleasing him.

His grin widened. “Alchemist,” he said.

I shrugged. Desmond frowned as he glanced between Kett and me.

“To the graveyard, and then I get to unwrap my gift from Blackwell?” I asked brightly. I crossed out of the kitchen toward my room.

“You will at least look at it, dowser,” Desmond answered.

I ignored him, thinking only of what sort of shoes to wear to a shifter graveyard, then to open a gift from a sorcerer whose intentions were unknown and perhaps deadly.

Something with laces and a bit of a heel, perhaps.

The shapeshifter cemetery was about a five minute drive from Desmond’s house. The private plot, which was situated on the edge of the hill overlooking the river, was the size of three or so residential lots. It was well-maintained, though the trimmed grass was brown from lack of rain. The graveyard itself spread out from a crypt that sat about ten feet beyond the low wrought-iron fence that ran along the edge of the road. It was as old as anything I’d seen in Portland. This had obviously been shapeshifter territory for hundreds of years.

Lara’s bashed-in SUV was parked at the roadside edge of the spiky, wrought-iron front gate. Through and to the side of the gate, the door to the crypt was canted to one side, half-ripped from its heavy-duty hinges. As I raced by the door, pulled frantically forward by the low pulse of magic I could taste from the other side, I saw that the interior of the crypt was empty … excepting the shifter remains, of course. Shapeshifters seemed to favor cremation. No bodies to exhume was a good policy in general for the Adept community in the twenty-first century.

Lara was lying crumpled to one side of this white stone mausoleum. By the marks and the blood trail, she’d fought even after she’d fallen, perhaps taking cover behind the crypt. Or perhaps she’d simply been left there to die. Even though my senses told me that the teenagers were nowhere near, I couldn’t stop myself from frantically looking for them.
 

I wasn’t sure the vivacious werewolf was alive until she moaned when Desmond brushed by me. He held me back even as he moved forward. Lara’s magic rolled toward him, as if she sensed him on another level. She was covered in burns and what looked like pock-marks. Her wounds were bloody, sore, and similar in pattern to the partially healed burns I’d seen on Kandy’s arms this morning.

She reached out for Desmond as he knelt beside her, but she couldn’t hold on after he’d gathered her in his arms.

“Change,” he ordered. The green of his magic blazed from his eyes. I’d never seen them so bright without being followed by a transformation.

Lara shook her head, the movement forcing a painful moan. “The kids …”

“Change,” Desmond demanded.

“We need to know what happened here.” Audrey spoke up from behind me. Kandy’s grip was rubbing the bones of my wrist together, but I didn’t mind the pain. The green-haired werewolf had stepped up to hold me back after Desmond passed by.

“We have the dowser for that,” Desmond answered. His magic rolled off him in a way I hadn’t tasted or felt before. It crashed over Kandy, Audrey, and me. The two werewolves involuntarily fell to their knees.

“The dowser,” Lara moaned. She was still fighting whatever Desmond was attempting to do with his magic. I could see her own magic answering and twining through his, though. Her green was dim — so much dimmer than Desmond’s or Kandy’s. My heart began to ache as my mind urged me to look away. But I didn’t.

I shook Kandy off my wrist. The green-haired werewolf couldn’t hold me and withstand whatever Desmond’s magic was doing. I stepped into Lara’s eyeline.

“There’s a … gift … for her …”

“We know,” Desmond said. “Now change.”

Lara arched up in pain. Her magic gave way to Desmond’s, which spread out over her body. Desmond grunted. I had a feeling he was trying to siphon off the werewolf’s pain somehow, while also triggering her to transform.