Cupcakes, Trinkets, and Other Deadly Magic (Dowser Series) (26 page)

I shook my head. I couldn’t go with her, and I wasn’t ready for the promises the portal had offered. With my feet firmly planted in the earth of my home, I knew this was where I belonged. The magic of the portal held no sway over me.

Sienna laughed, full of joy. The edges of her face blurred. She took another step, pulling her back leg into golden light.

I clung to her fingers, and she to mine. Then she disintegrated into the magic.

I held onto her as long as I could, longer than I could even see her with my eyes. I held on until there was nothing left to hold.

I exhaled the breath I’d been holding, and felt utterly lost and found at the same time.

The door at the top of the stairs banged open, and a strident voice thundered across the room. “Jade Godfrey, close that portal immediately.”

I turned to look up at my Gran where she stood. A tiny woman, she somehow filled the doorway above. Her never-dyed hair was pulled back into a long silver braid. Her magic danced like blue lightning on her fingertips. I’d never seen her do that before. I wondered what spell she was preparing. The urge to instantly obey her — though honestly, I had no idea how to close the portal — came and went. It was as if the golden energy had melted away all the years of my gentle indoctrination along with the ‘unliving’ magic.

I smiled instead. My best, most winning I’m-not-really-smiling-but-actually-calling-you-on-your-bullshit smile.

Gran frowned. Her eyes swept the room. She looked very displeased with the blood, the black magic, the shifters and a vampire currently occupying my storage room. “I’m the guardian of the portal. Not you. Not yet, perhaps not ever. You will close it.” Gran didn’t like repeating herself.

Accusations and arguments flitted through my mind. I could press her with the power of this magic behind me — I could press her hard. The golden glow rolled around me in response, supportive if not eager. “Close it yourself,” I said, as pleasantly as I could.

Gran’s frown turned into a look of concern. She opened her mouth to speak, but then seemed not to know what to say. It was the first time I had ever outright defied her. Yeah, I was a late-bloomer in that area. So what?

Then Scarlett, my mother, shouldered past Gran to make her own assessment of the room. Her strawberry-blond hair hung over delicate shoulders in a perfectly waved waterfall. Her bright blue eyes stood out against her creamy skin, which, as always, she showed as much of as possible without verging on slutty territory. She looked only a few years older than me. I’d always hated that she neither appeared nor acted anything like a mother. She raised a beckoning eyebrow at Kett, though her gaze lingered on Desmond. Then she dazzled us all with a smile, my own paling in comparison.

“Hello, darling,” Scarlett said, her voice strong and musical at the same time. “Going to introduce me to your friends?”

“Sure,” I responded. “Just as soon as you tell me who the hell my father is.”

Scarlett’s grin widened. She threw her head back and laughed as if I was utterly delightful and charming. She laughed as if she loved me, as if I could never do or say anything wrong. Charm and charisma were the focal points for my mother’s magic and the everyday outlet of that energy, but there wasn’t a contrived bone in her body. Charming and truthful was a devastating combination. I’d never seen anyone stand against her when she cared to exert her will. Not even Gran. I had no chance. Plus … I thought of Sienna, whose touch I could still feel on my fingers, who had no mother rushing to her rescue, no mother willing to step into a room full of monsters in human skin and extend her hand …

I stepped away from the portal. I stepped away from the soul-filling magic and it closed behind me as if it had never existed. Though I could still feel the buzz of it underneath my skin when I was near.

It was the polite thing to do after all.

I was still going to get some bloody answers, though.

Everyone was okay. Or, at the minimum, they were all functional enough to be bullied out of the basement on their own two feet by Gran. She was going to “raze the remains of the blood magic” — Sienna’s ‘unliving’ magic — “from the face of the earth.” I’d never heard her voice laced with so much power or anger before. I didn’t stick around to watch.

I thought about going for a walk even though it was still the middle of the night, but then wound up curled up on my couch. Scarlett would come to me — she neither made nor broke promises lightly. I would get my answers and then I would sleep. I just didn’t want to wait, or demand answers in front of the wounded shapeshifters. Or the far-too-sharp ears of the vampire.
 

My questions were my own. The answers belonged to me and no one else.

∞

So it turned out there weren’t that many answers to be had — at least not from my Gran or Scarlett. Supposedly, the identity of my father was actually unknown, other than the fact that he’d been gorgeous, blond, crazy strong, and Australian. I’d never noticed the faraway look my mother got when talking about him. I wondered, for the first time, if she’d loved him. How could you possibly love someone you only knew for one night, during a fertility rite ceremony? Yeah, that was a new tidbit. A circumstance that they — in their collective wisdom — thought it best to keep from me. Mom, while “backpacking around the world,” had participated in an aboriginal fertility ceremony somewhere in the middle of bloody Queensland. She was sketchy about whether this took place during a full or new moon, and I was pretty sure she’d ‘run away’ at sixteen rather than ‘backpacked.’ And, now that I thought about it, she’d been running away ever since. But never back to Australia, not that I knew. I wondered if dear old dad scared her as much as he obviously exhilarated her.

And what the hell did that say about one half of my DNA?

Gran and Scarlett couldn’t exactly deny my sudden ability to heal very quickly or imbue things with magic. They’d already figured out that part, and kept it from me for my own protection.
For my own protection
 … that wasn’t going to be the last time I heard those words, and they already pissed me off. Magic users who could create magical objects were rare among the Adept — so rare that my freedom could be in jeopardy, according to my Gran.

I had a list of questions rattling around in my pretty little head — questions that might be too big for such a small container. Was there a portal in the basement? Yes. Where did it lead? Gran had no idea, nor had she ever seen it open. The responsibility of hiding it was passed down generation to generation, not that Vancouver was that old in terms of settlement. Was Sienna dead? Again, Gran didn’t know, though it seemed likely that only a person in tune with such magic would be able to travel through it. So why the hell was I attuned with it when it seemed no one else was? Again, Gran didn’t have an answer for me, though it was pretty obvious it all came around to the question of the other half of my DNA.

When I broached the subject of the life debt with Desmond, which I was pretty sure hadn’t been dissolved along with Sienna, my Gran’s lips had thinned and I saw the blue of her magic rimming her eyes. Even my mother seemed put out at this information. At this point, it was not-so-subtly suggested that I needed sleep, and I was promptly sent to bed. Seeing as I was utterly exhausted and probably not absorbing the answers to my barrage of questions anyway, I complied.

Desmond was about to be in the line of fire, which pleased me more than it should have. Yes, I should fight my own battles, but it was awfully nice to have a pair of powerful witches at my back. In my mind, the shifter and the vampire had everything coming to them that my Gran and Scarlett could dole out. They’d ripped me from my protective cocoon and showed me a world of magic that scared the shit out of me. The fact that I was still standing had little to do with either of them. The fact that I was walking away was pure choice. The first choice in days that I felt was uninfluenced by forces greater than me.

∞

I felt like I needed to sleep for three days, but settled for the three hours that was all my body seemed to need.

I got up. I baked, though it wasn’t my shift — I’d traded with Bryn for Sunday, but at least I knew what day it was — and took a 9:00 a.m. yoga class. Halfway through the class, I realized I wasn’t struggling as much as usual, and I tried to just enjoy that feeling. The other option was to acknowledge the weight that the sight of the empty mat beside me seemed to exert on my chest. Obviously, Hudson had affected me on a level that was at odds with the briefness of our friendship. I wondered if Scarlett felt that way about my father, and I was glad that I hadn’t had the chance to be intimate with Hudson.

The ache caused by Sienna’s betrayal and apparent death was distinctly different. That felt like a shard of a knife tip broken off and lodged in my heart; the top right section of my heart, to be specific. I’d left my foster sister’s mess for my Gran and Scarlett to sort and clean up. That was probably cowardly of me, but I had no idea what else to do. I wished it all felt like a dream, or even a nightmare, but it didn’t. The last few days felt very real to me. Terribly real.

I wandered back to the bakery and jogged up the stairs to my apartment, though I usually never entered through the front door. I thought it might be symbolic … a reclaiming of my life and all that … But then I decided I was freaking out and reading too much into everything.
 

A shower soothed me further, and I was feeling somewhat rebooted. Then I took the garbage out. Who knew that such a mundane task would result in the frustratingly unresolved stirring of the beehive of my mind? Not me. Otherwise, I would have let it stink up the place.

A delivery truck was blocking the dumpster behind the bakery. Kandy, of all people, was chatting up the driver.

The green-haired werewolf stepped back when she saw me, offering me a grin. The truck pulled away.

I lifted the lid of the dumpster and chucked the garbage in. It hit the empty bin with a satisfying, ringing thump. It must be garbage day. I was very pleased with this confirmation that I was once again on track with my satisfying, regular routine. I chose to ignore the delivery truck, to ignore the werewolf who was currently closing the gap between us with long strides. I was happy to see her on her feet — just not in my alley.

Kandy sauntered over to me, her grin still firmly in place. She was covered in various-sized bandages on her arms, neck, and chest. She hadn’t bothered to cover them with more than a V-neck short-sleeved T-shirt, which bore an obscene cartoon involving an apple and a banana. I didn’t try to figure the joke out. Sienna had bled the werewolf so badly that her wounds were taking time to heal. Guilt pooled in my stomach, and I tried to push it away as not my responsibility.

“Morning, neighbor,” Kandy said. It was actually just after noon, but I didn’t correct her.

“Neighbor?” My voice came out in an unbecoming squeak. Kandy didn’t seem to mind. In fact, her grin only widened.

“Sorry, can’t talk. Getting an actual fridge delivered, instead of that dinky one you have in the apartment. You know I like my meat cut large and readily available.” I didn’t know that, actually … and didn’t really want to know that. “Catch you in yoga tomorrow? Sorry I missed today’s class.”

“Okay …” Yes, I was a little thrown. Kandy turned back into the bakery via the alley door and I dumbly followed at her heels. She had no issue passing through the wards. But then, I’d given her access only a few hours before.

“Delivery guy wanted to drop it in the alley,” Kandy said, chatting over her shoulder as she crossed through the kitchen and into the bakery. “But he can cart it up the front stairs himself.”

She walked around the display counter and pushed her way through the line of customers as if she owned the place. The delivery truck had pulled up out front and was now blocking one of the lanes on West Fourth.
 

Kandy dashed out the front doors. The trinkets hanging there tinkled in her wake. I realized I was just standing and staring after her. A few of my customers greeted me and I tried to be polite, but I wasn’t sure I’d actually formed words to answer them.

The sun streaming in the French-paned windows glinted off Scarlett’s hair, alerting me to my mother’s presence in the seating area. I hustled over to her. She was prettily perched on one of the high stools by the farthest round table, awarding me with a blinding smile as I approached. I managed to not falter under its wattage.

“Kandy just told me ‘Hi, Neighbor’.” I completely skipped any pleasantries.

“Oh, yes. The werewolves have rented the second upstairs apartment from your Gran.”

“What?” I was having a hard time keeping the dismay out of my voice. Actually, I sounded a bit petulant, even to my own ears. Not attractive.

“It was some arrangement that the alpha — lord, is he a fine specimen — came to with your Gran. Something about protecting his investment. You’ll have to ask Pearl about it, but it’s never a bad thing to have a werewolf at your back.”

“All the better to eat you,” I muttered.

“Oh, darling. Werewolves aren’t man eaters, at least not those of the pack. And it seems you need all the powerful allies you can get now … if you’re going to fully exercise your magic.” There was some sort of chiding in my mother’s wording somewhere, some backhanded chastisement, but I didn’t absorb it. Scarlett didn’t typically play the role of disappointed disciplinarian, so that part was easy to ignore.

I started to turn away from her extreme sunniness and her way of never really answering questions with any substantial information. I also hadn’t missed her calling Desmond ‘a fine specimen’. I wondered if McGrowly, or ‘all muscle and lots of trouble,’ as Sienna had referred to him, knew he was now on my mother’s radar. She’d chew and swallow him whole, and he wouldn’t know what had hit him until she was walking away. The thought pissed me off a bit. Not enough to forgive him for the heavy-handedness, or the botched life bond, or anything at all, really. But still.

“Jade,” Kett said as he crossed from the counter through my peripheral vision to place an espresso in front of my mother. “I was thinking we could go treasure hunting next weekend. I believe the coast is known for its native artifacts.” He sat on the stool opposite Scarlett.