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When he still couldn’t find her a few minutes later, he decided to follow his shifter nose. Alana would probably be very frustrated that he was using his wolf senses to find her, but she would just have to understand that now she was on the council, her time wasn’t always her own. When Mrs. Francis calls you, you show up.

Alana’s scent led him back to her store and then right into the woods.

“Please, in the name of all that is holy, she did not go into the woods by herself.”

Of course, she had.

His witch was fearless, though just when he had started thinking about Alana ashiswitch, he didn’t know.

NINE

ALANA

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Alana wasn’t usually the type to swear a blue streak. There were so many words in the world, and she was usually so sure that she could find something better to say than a cuss word.

That was before she found herself lost in the forest in the middle of the night.

And not just any kind of night, either, but the first night of an earthquake when there was no moon and very few stars in the sky, thanks to the heavy clouds that colored the black night with ominous tones of gray.

The green glow was long since gone, vanished into thin air as if it was nothing more than a thick cloud of greensomething.

Magic, most likely.

Alana didn’t know what kind of witch or magic could create an earthquake, but she knew she had to find that green glow. It would have answers, of that she was sure.

Of course, it wouldn’t have all of the answers. It wouldn’t be able to explain why she had kissed Cohen Pierce a handful of times that night, just about the time the earthquake happened.

Now that she thought about it, alone in the dark and scary woods, the kisses and the earthquake had been almost simultaneous. It didn’t make much sense, but even she had to admit thatsensedidn’t exactly always makesensein Half Moon Key.

Alana continued to walk into the woods until she found the little clearing with the fairy ring ... or so the locals called it. She knew this strange rock formation for what it really was.

The place where her grandmother had done the protective spell on Half Moon Key.

The green glow might be gone, but there was something else that worried her.

Some of the big boulders were cracked right down the middle as if some huge god had decided to go to town on them with a powerful sledgehammer. She ran her fingers down the crack of one of the stones, and she shivered against the strange ebb of energy that collided with her fingers. She tried to trace the energy, but it led her on a merry chase around the clearing. There was no tracking it, and there was no holding it down.

She wasn’t following it. It was following her. It was all very strange. It was energy on the run, seeping into Half Moon Key, and she didn’t know what the hell to do to fix it.

“I swear,” she said through gritted teeth to the ground under her feet. “If you start to quake again, I am gonna be so mad.”

She started to speak magic words, hoping to settle whatever had unsettled the seat of her family’s magic. It took powerful magical juice to protect a full town as her grandmother had done, but it took even more magical juice to try to recreate it.

So focused as she was on the spell she was trying to cast, she barely heard someone shouting her name. She was just about to convince herself that it was all in her head when it echoed again, this time stopping her dead in her tracks.

“Alana!” the loud call came again.

“Cohen?” she asked, recognizing the voice.

“Alana? Where in the fuck are you? Stop moving, will you? I can’t get a read on where ...” He stopped short as he found his way through the line of trees and into the small clearing where Alana stood. “Oh. You’re safe.” The words rushed out of him as he rushed forward. He didn’t stop advancing toward her until he held her in his arms, one hand at her back, the other tangling in her hair. “You cannot scare me like that, do you hear me?”

She tapped against his chest and didn’t stop until he loosened his grip but only enough for her to look into his eyes. “And I was meant to be in danger, was I?”

“How am I supposed to know if you’re safe or not? I told you to stay with Lila and help the council that way. I didn’t ask you to start a hike in the woods in the middle of the night. What were you even thinking?”

“Don’t scold me, Cohen Pierce. I am a grown woman and well within my rights to go off anywhere I damn well please.”