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CHAPTER FOUR

Allen remained calm even though the tiny woman across the table was poised to jam her knife into whatever part of him she could reach first if she didn’t like his answer. His shifter reflexes and reaction time would mitigate any severe damage, but he really hoped it wouldn’t come to that. It risked not only blowing his cover, but jeopardizing the Roots as well.

From his cushion on the windowsill, Hobbles lifted his head, his fur beginning to bristle.

Careful now . With a nonchalant expression, as if he had no idea of the danger he was in, Allen lifted another forkful of bacon and pierogi to his mouth. “Me? I’m just here for the food. Literally.”

The reference to Kalina’s delicious cooking and his employment at Homegrown Roots Grocers made his hosts chuckle. Zofia wasn’t convinced, not yet. She worked with the Hawthornes, albeit only once a year, but she maintained their property in town and had clearly seen several generations of witches grow up.

“I’m not here to cause trouble,” he assured her. “Far from it, actually. But, with all the rumors flying around town like those snowflakes out there, I’d rather be prepared than ignorant. They’re not the only others here, and collateral damage is a possibility.” It was the truth, one-hundred-percent.

At the mention of others , that catch-all term for supernatural creatures and Fair Folk diaspora, Zofia smacked her lips. No doubt she was thinking of Prue Stonewell, Annesley Valley’s most prominent hedge witch. Hedge witches were solitary by definition, practicing their magic individually instead of collectively with a coven. Prue Stonewell, however, ran a chapter of hedge witches here, a kind of mastermind group where witches and practitioners could troubleshoot spells and generally learn from each other. They were one step away from declaring themselves a true coven, and there was no way Annesley Valley could support two covens. Nor would the Hawthorne matriarch ever allow it.

But she wasn’t here to defend her land, was she?

“The only trouble you’ll find here is the kind you go looking for, boy,” was Zofia’s reply, but her suspicions—at least about him—seemed forgotten as she released her hold on the dinner knife.

Allen knew it for sure when she pulled a tin from her velvet handbag and pried it open, liberating the trapped aromas of cinnamon, nutmeg, and brown sugar. Zofia Hollyoak didn’t share her treats with just anyone, after all, and certainly not those who had offended her. Or were here to endanger her friends.

“Skala,” she said, offering the tin to him. As she did so, Hobbles went back to sleep. “It means ‘stone’ or ‘rock,’” she explained.

“Are they going to chip my teeth?” he asked, taking a brown lump studded with raisins, dates, and walnuts.

“Bah, they’re cookies, boy.”

“The question still stands.” He was only half teasing .

“They haven’t chipped mine yet, and she’s been trying to get rid of me for years,” James said, the soft cookie easily giving way under his teeth. “They’re great with tea.”

“Better with boilo,” Zofia said, glancing pointedly at her empty shot glass.

Chuckling, James refilled three of the four shot glasses with an apologetic, “Sorry, Allen.”

When they’d had their fill of cookies and tea (or boilo), Kalina wouldn’t hear of Allen washing the dishes. Homegrown Roots Grocers would not be late with their delivery to the Hawthornes. As Hobbles returned to Zofia’s handbag, Allen helped the tiny woman with her coat and left her to manage the headscarf as he brought the truck around to the front of the townhouse.

Zofia didn’t even wait for him to come to a complete stop before she started thumping into the street with her cane.

“Mrs. Hollyoak!” he admonished. He chuckled at her unbothered audacity.

She waved him off, peeking out between the truck and the parked car in front of it before coming around to the passenger door. Still chuckling, Allen leaned over in the cab to unlock and push open the door for her.

Then his wolf heard it. A squealing of tires.

Abandoning the door, Allen lurched upright in time to see a dark sedan barreling up the one-way street in the wrong direction. The car swerved from side to side into the cars parked along the curbs, clipping sideview mirrors and gouging doors. It wasn’t slowing down.

“Zofia!”

The passenger side door was still locked, and there was no way he could open it and haul her inside before the drunk driver reached them. There was no time for her to shuffle out of the road, either, let alone get on the sidewalk. The tiny woman yelped, plastered herself against the side of the truck in the hopes that the sedan would graze past her, and turned her face away.

Allen did the only thing he could think of to protect her. Grabbing the steering wheel and the headrest for leverage, he swung his legs out across the seat and kicked the passenger side door with all his strength. If he was very, very lucky, the driver would see the oncoming projectile and course-correct his car away from Zofia.

The door shot off the old truck and punctured the sedan’s passenger window like a thrown shield. Glass shattered, and there was another squeal of tires, a whump , and the screeching of metal as the sedan dislodged the truck door on its swerving escape down the street.

“ Zofia! ” he shouted again, her name repeated as a scream from Kalina as she and James burst outside.

Allen scrambled over the bench seat and dropped down into the street. He hunched over the fallen form of the caretaker. At the sight of her, his canine teeth elongated, his eyes flashing a deeper gold behind his contacts. He wanted to bolt after that sedan, chase it down like it was an elk, and tear the driver out from behind the steering wheel with his teeth. But his wolf couldn’t hear it anymore, could only hear the shallow gasps of the woman beneath him.

Her floral skirt was hiked up above her knees, a rent in her navy pantyhose revealing a long, shallow scratch from ankle to knee. The satin headscarf strangled itself around her neck. Beneath her thinning white hair, a spot swelled and darkened into a bruise on her forehead. A thin red line, which could’ve been mistaken as a loose thread from her cranberry coat, trickled wetly from the corner of Zofia’s mouth and down her cheek. Shattered window glass dappled her like lumps of rock sugar. The old woman blinked rapidly up at him, shocked .

With a deep breath, Allen calmed the wolf and became the soldier once more.

The first thing he did was snatch the velvet handbag out of the street. The crow would never forgive him if her beloved cat got squished by an oncoming car. Hobbles was already clawing the insides to get himself free, yowling in distress. Allen thumbed the brass clasp, and the orange-and-white cat wobbled out to immediately huddle in the crook of his mistress’s neck. He gave a pitiful mewl and licked her cheek.

“How are you doing, Zofia?” Allen said, unbuttoning her coat to look for more injuries. He couldn’t risk moving her until he knew her spine wasn’t broken or could confirm her insides were still very much inside her. He doubted she could even stand with her ankle swollen to the size of a sweet potato. “Sweetheart, I need you to talk to me.”

“Sweetheart?” she murmured, licking chapped lips. The endearment had jolted her awareness just as he’d intended. “Are you . . . flirting with me . . . boy?”

“Oh, Zofia,” Kalina wailed, dropping down on her knees beside her friend.

“Don’t do that,” Allen said forcefully. Kalina choked on her sob in surprise. “Get up and watch the street. The last thing we need is to be hit again before the paramedics arrive. Jim?”

“I’m on the phone with them now!”

“Zofia, can you wiggle your toes? Move your feet?” he asked, working on the buttons of her blouse. The woman preferred dark floral prints, which made looking for blood a nightmare if he didn’t strip her.

“Are you asking me to the masquerade ball?” she asked. Then she looked down at what he was doing to her clothes. “We should dance first before you take me to bed.”

His lips pursed down, suppressing his smirk. “You’re too old for me, Crow. ”

“I know tricks.”

He had to force himself to concentrate and not laugh. “I’m sure you do. Is one of them sitting up, by chance?”

Her iron grip found his forearm, and she popped upright into a sitting position as if she had a metal spring in her back instead of vertebrae.

“Whoa,” Allen said, eyes wide.

Then she groaned, her twiggy fingers probing the bruise on her head. “ Ow .”

“Fifi? You’re going to be alright,” Kalina told her, looking this way and that for any more cars. She held Zofia’s cane in both hands like she was ready to bludgeon the hood of any vehicle who approached them. “And when you’re safely in the hospital, I’m going to march right down there to the Cat & Cauldron and give Sam Barley a piece of my mind. The last thing we need are his patrons sloppy with eggnog raging down these narrow streets!”

A drunk driver—he’d thought that too, at first. That’s certainly what it looked like, though how someone that drunk could’ve made it this far up the street from the pub without crashing already was somewhat of a miracle. It was also just as unlikely that the driver had lost control in the storm, as it was a light flurry at best and the snow wasn’t even sticking to the dry street. And how had the sedan, after being knocked off its course of turning Mrs. Hollyoak into a lifeless smear against the truck, managed to escape down the street without further collisions?

Allen sniffed, as if the wind would deliver the answers to his nose.

“The Hawthornes!” Zofia exclaimed suddenly, trying to rise. Hobbles, who had crawled onto her lap, protested with a hiss. Her sweet-potato-sized ankle was having none of it either, and his keen ears heard bones shifting into places they didn’t belong. It was definitely broken .

“No, no, no,” Kalina protested, abandoning her post in the street to keep her friend seated. “Not until the paramedics.”

She shook her head once before her face scrunched up in pain. “You don’t understand. I have to be there. The schedule, the pact—”

“No, Zofia,” said James. “And listen, you can hear the sirens. The ambulance is almost here.”

“ No ,” the caretaker protested fiercely. Then she caught Allen’s eye, and she looked at him. Really looked at him.

The wolf inside him froze. She knows what we are.

No, she doesn’t. But she knows we’re other.

He shivered, wondering who else he hadn’t completely fooled with his grocery delivery boy routine. She’s known all this time.

“Boy,” she said in that flat, knowing tone.

“You crafty crow,” was his answer.

She smiled without humor, knowing they truly understood each other now. “Take this.” She wiggled the little opal ring off her finger and held it between them. “Light and water of stars,” she murmured, “bind our lives to one.” Zofia gave it to him, and when he tried to put it in his pocket, she snapped, “On your finger, boy!”

It fit on his pinky finger, just barely.

Zofia fumbled with her velvet handbag with shaking hands until Kalina opened it for her. “The keys,” the caretaker said. “Give him the keys.”

Kalina lifted a ring of large brass keys from the purple velvet and held them out to him. Allen took them, this time receiving no reprimand when he put them in his pocket.

“Unlock the Hall and burn the sage,” Zofia instructed him. “You’re the caretaker now.”

“But—”

“Go, boy! You’ve no time to waste! ”

Startled, for there was such vehemence in her voice, Allen rose.

“We’ve got her, Allen,” James assured him. “Go on.”

Allen jumped into the truck and crawled across the bench. He shifted the truck into drive and eased onto the cobblestone street. He shot a look at the rearview mirror to confirm his friends were safe before stepping on the gas. Whatever Zofia had done to that ring was making his finger itch, and very unpleasantly, too.

There was only one road leading up the hill to where Hawthorne Hall reigned, and normally Allen would’ve taken the time to truly assess his surroundings had it not been for the itch. By the time he parked the truck at the apex of the circle drive, he was about ready to chew his own finger off.

Allen launched out of the truck. Fumbling for the keys in his pocket, he hadn’t taken one step off the driveway before a shimmering force field blocked him from the brick path to the front doors. Allen stumbled back a step before he shook off the experience and tried again. A ripple of iridescent blue light prevented him once again.

He gritted his teeth against a wolfish whine of pain and did the only thing he could think of. He shoved his hand with the ring on it at the shimmering barrier. The magical gate vanished upon contact with the opal, or so it seemed. A remnant of its physical presence brushed against him like the touch of a ghost, and Allen promised himself he’d examine it—and everything else—later.

The itch now a persistent burn, he dashed up the path, barely registering the boxwood hedges framing the path or the grandeur of the polished rowan-wood entryway. His wolf was frantic now, and they were both convinced his pinky finger was going to combust any second now.

Under the awning, Allen flipped through the keys until he found the one decorated with the same embellished H that marked the double doors and thrust it home. Tumblers groaned and he shoved his shoulder into the door when the lock retreated.

The itch vanished the second he staggered into the empty grand foyer.

His first impression was of a ghostly, abandoned version of the von Trapp house in The Sound of Music or the mansion in Scarface , the grand fireplace in the far wall giving a more ominous impression instead of welcoming one. But again, he didn’t stop to truly ponder. He didn’t want the itch to return, and he needed to complete the second half of the mission Zofia Hollyoak had given him.

“Burn the sage.”

It was right there inside the doorway, on a simple pedestal beside a box of matches. Lighting the thick bundle, he let it smolder until a healthy plume of whitish smoke rose from its tip.

“Now what?” Allen muttered. He waved it around the entryway and coughed. “Is this it?” His voice echoed in the emptiness of the grand foyer. Of course the building didn’t reply, but one never knew with these witchy things.

Zofia hadn’t given him further instructions, so there was only one thing to do: be thorough.

“Unlock the Hall and burn the sage.”

There were many more keys on this ring, and the bundle of sage was so long and fat it would smolder for a considerable time.

“Guess I’m opening every door and fumigating the entire building,” he muttered.

But first things first. Allen ripped that infernal ring off his pinky finger. He was seconds away from hurling it into some spirits-forsaken corner when he thought better of it. The silver band clinked lightly against the pedestal where he placed it beside the matchbox. It would be the perfect bargaining chip to demand an answer from Zofia when she was released from the hospital. He already had a mission, so what had she just gotten him into?