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24

Magical Mojo

Harry glanced in the hatchback’s rearview mirror and couldn’t prevent the smile that automatically bloomed on her face at the sight of Jax’s truck following closely. To say it had been a whirlwind twenty-four hours was an understatement. To say it had been life altering was a bit more on track, but a track she had no clue how to navigate.

A Fate Witch. A Finding Ceremony. And a fae.

It sounded like the setup for a joke and she really didn’t relish the idea of being the punch line.

All Harry’s festering worries came to a halt when she turned down Nora’s drive and saw the figure sitting on the new steps. Fifteen yards away from the house, she slammed on the accelerator and ripped up the rest of the driveway before coming to an abrupt stop.

Harry flung herself out of the car the second she slid it into park. “Cassie!”

Her friend stood up, laughing. “Slow down, you klutzy bitch. This town of yours is so small, I’m not sure there’s a hospital around here to take you to if you fall and break something.”

They hugged, both laughing and crying at the same time.

“It was way too long this time, Cass,” Harry admonished slightly, hesitant to pull away.

“I know. I just hated to drop back in when I had even less to go on than when I left before.” Cassie ran her critical gaze over her. “You doing okay? Grace hasn’t been giving you too much trouble, has she?”

“No more than usual.” Harry grinned coyly. “So… you’re the mother of a dragon.”

Cassie shook her head in disbelief. “I’m still not so sure I can believe it until I see it for myself.”

“You haven’t seen Gracie yet?”

“No, your aunt Nora said she went to some kind of flea market with a Devon?” Cassie smirked when Harry released a groan. “Do I need to get all mother on her ass?”

“No, he’s a good kid,” Harry reluctantly admitted. “And he’s completely smitten with her, and her with him. It’s actually kinda cute.”

Cassie’s gaze drifted over Harry’s shoulder and her eyes widened. “Speaking of cute…”

Jax’s hand slid to Harry’s waist, his other reaching out to shake her best friend’s hand. “You must be Cassie. I’ve heard a lot about you, from both Harry and Grace. Your daughter is quite the force of nature.”

“Don’t I know it…?”

“Jax. I’m—”

“Oh, I know who you are, too, Alpha Jaxon Atwood.” Cassie’s red lips slid into a mischievous smirk. Her gaze momentarily flickered toward his hand still secured around Harry’s waist. “You’re at the root of most of my conversations with my daughter lately. I can’t thank you enough for helping her through this.”

“It wasn’t all me.” He smiled down at Harry. “It was very much a team effort.”

“Sure. Sure. I’ve heard a lot about these efforts.”

“Cassie,” Harry warned, barely withholding a smirk. “Behave.”

“I’m behaving. I mean, I haven’t mentioned that fucked-through-the-night skin glow you’re sporting this morning, or the fact that Nora told me the two of you were stuck in some secluded mountain cabin all night with nothing to do but each other.”

Jax chuckled.

Harry elbowed him, the move making him chuckle harder. “Do not encourage her.”

“Well, Cassie, it was great to meet you in person, but I have to make sure that both my business and my pack haven’t burned to the ground while I’ve left both unsupervised.” Jax gently spun Harry and pulled her into a kiss that brought the tips of her toes to within an inch of leaving the ground. “I’ll drop by later, okay?”

“Mm-hmm.” She peered up at him, a lust-drunk smile on her face. “I need to call a team Fearsome Four meeting. Make some things clear with Lenny and Elodie, and then I should probably start figuring things out.”

“You got this, babe.”

“I got something, but right now it feels more like heartburn.” She patted his chest in an attempt to sooth his worry. “Go and make sure you still have a pack to Alpha, Alpha Atwood. I’ll be here trying to figure out how the hell I’m supposed to bring Fates Haven’s magic back into line, perform a ceremony I have no earthly idea how to perform, and find a fae dragon shifter that very well may not be in this realm.”

He cupped her jaw, thumb running over the curve of her bottom lip. “See. Easy. Like I said, you got this.”

With a parting kiss and a wave for Cassie, Jax got back in his truck and headed out toward the pack ranch. Harry watched him go until his taillights disappeared from view.

“Start talking, witch, or my imagination will start filling in the blanks.” Cassie’s arm dropped over Harry’s shoulder as they headed up the steps.

“There’s honestly so much, I don’t even know where to begin.” Harry sighed. “My head feels like it’s exploding.”

“From the sheer amount of information or from the intensity of last night’s orgasms?”

Harry shot her a look.

“What? It could be either, and I wasn’t kidding about that fucked-through-the-night glow. The last time I felt that glow—”

“Was with the fae dragon shifter you picked to be your one and only one-night stand?” Harry shot back with a smirk.

“That would be it.” Cassie paused, incredulity passing over her face. “She seriously turned into a fucking dragon? Like with scales and a tail?”

“And beautiful wings, but she hasn’t figured out how to use them simultaneously yet, so she’s all little-fawn awkward and it’s super adorable. I wouldn’t tell that to her face, though. She’s huge. She could swallow Nora’s hatchback in one gulp if she wanted.”

A mother’s pride shone in Cassie’s eyes. “Let’s go call the others so you can start divulging everything you learned on that mountain—especially the stuff you learned while naked.”

“I was fully clothed when the Fate Witch bomb of knowledge was dropped.”

“Okay. But I still meant what I said.”

“ W HY IS NO one saying anything?” Harry asked two hours later, after a full hour assuring everyone that she had no intention of leaving Fates Haven. Ever. “Seriously. Anything.”

“Well,” Nora said first, sitting calmly in her favorite reclining chair, “that makes sense.”

“What makes sense?”

“All of it. I had an inkling.”

“An inkling?” Harry gawked at her aunt. “About anything particular or all of it .”

Cassie raised her hand. “Let’s go back to what you learned while naked.”

Lenny and Elodie snickered. They’d been a handful while on FaceTime with Cassie, and now they’d officially met in person? An octopus couldn’t handle all the snark.

“My sex life is the least concerning thing right now.” Harry plopped heavily onto the spare chair. “But, like I said before, there was naked skin, orgasming, and then a witch with a Buffy the Vampire Slayer obsession literally came bursting through the door.”

Nora chuckled. “Remus always did like making an entrance.”

“Thank god he didn’t enter five minutes earlier or I’m pretty certain Jax’s cougar would’ve used him as a cat toy.”

Elodie chuckled. “It’s a lot, I agree. So let’s think about this logically.”

“I’m all ears.”

“You’re the new Fate Witch.”

She nodded. “So Remus claims.”

“But you can’t fix the magical mojo in Fates Haven until you embrace your cool new powers and perform a fully functioning Finding Ceremony.”

“Correct.”

“So you need to become one with your cool new powers first. You need to practice. And what better way to practice than seeing if you can find an elusive fae shifter—and not the one who’s upstairs in her bedroom right now.”

Harry turned her attention to Cassie, whose face slowly slid into an emotionless mask. “Cass? What do you think? We were looking for Luke to get answers, but now that we know what kind of shifter Grace is, do you still want to track him down?”

Cassie nibbled her thumbnail before stopping herself. “That is a really difficult question to answer. Part of me wants to keep it all tucked away in the past, because what if the reality isn’t quite what I remembered? What if I imagined the connection we had, or the type of person he was? Then bringing him into Grace’s life could implode it.”

Harry let her friend work through her thought process. “It could, but…”

“But it could also be the best thing for her,” Cassie finished. “If Luke is the guy I’ve always thought him to be, finding him could be good for Cassie. And not to mention that, yes, we know she dragons out, but do we really know everything that entails? There’s just so much that’s still unknown.”

“That’s also true.”

Cassie sighed. “I think I should talk to Grace and see what she wants to do. She’s sixteen, and old enough to make these kinds of life-changing decisions. I have a suspicion I know which direction she’ll want to go, but I don’t want to assume.”

“Great.” Elodie clapped her hands. “While Cassie does the mother thing with Grace, we’ll start prepping for the monster of all descry spells. What do you need? Incense? Chalk? A Ouija board?”

Harry shot her a funny look. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“You don’t think you’re leaving us out of this, do you? I want to help hunt down a dragon. Do you have any idea how fucking awesome that would be to put on my résumé?”

Nora chuckled. “Actually, the extra help couldn’t hurt.”

“See!”

“I don’t even know how to do a spell of this magnitude,” Harry admitted. “I usually just light up my magical compass and have it point the way. Pretty sure that won’t work with inter-realm Where’s Waldo? , and before anyone asks, Remus is not an option. He’s probably lying in a lounger on one of those Caribbean cruise getaways.”

“Then perhaps we should round up the basics.” Nora headed toward the back of the house. “I’ll gather the typical herbs. You all work on the rest.”

“So what else do you need, Miss Fate Witch?” Elodie asked eagerly.

“Candles?” Harry shrugged. “Lots and lots of candles because I’ll need a hell of a lot of concentration… and space. We’ll need a shit ton of space for all the candles.”

“We’ll do it at the defense studio. There’s plenty of room.”

Everyone dispersed eagerly.

“Wait!” Harry cried out. “We don’t even know if this is what Grace wants!”

“It is.” The teen stepped off the stairs, obviously having been sitting there the entire time, camouflaged , and sent her mom a strong nod. “I want to find him. If he doesn’t want to be involved or have a relationship with me, that’s fine. But I’d at least like to know more about who I am and what I can do.”

Cassie pulled her daughter into her arms. “We already know who you are, Gracie Lou. You’re my sweet, intelligent, and brave no-longer-little girl. We’ll do this, but only if you’re one hundred percent sure it’s what you want.”

“Will you be okay if we find him?” Grace asked her mother. “If you’re not, I’m sure Gavin can help us find all the information there is on dragons. It’s what he does.”

“You don’t worry about me, sweetheart. I’ll be more than fine.”

Cassie waited a moment before glancing around, her gaze falling on Harry. “So when do you want to do this?”

“In two days? It’ll be a witcher moon, and while I’m not one to really believe magical superstitions, something’s telling me that that would be the best time.”

“And that’s the night before the Mud Runner,” Elodie added. “So we can work in some last-minute training while we’re at it.”

Harry, Lenny, and Grace all groaned simultaneously.

“Hey!” Elodie propped her hands on her hips. “There will be none of that! We are tied with those egotists. Tied! That event will either make us or break us.” She whipped around toward Harry, her finger wagging. “And so help me, Harlow Pierce, if you even for one second think about taking it easy on Jax because he’s been your orgasm donor for the last twenty-four hours, I will completely wing out on you.”

Harry held her hands up in surrender. “I wouldn’t even dream of it.”

“Good. Now let’s go get our hands on enough candles to melt an entire wax emporium.”

Harry couldn’t help but laugh, thankful to be surrounded by this kick-ass, supportive group of women. Even if this failed spectacularly, they’d at least have enough people to have one hell of a midnight margarita party.