Page 1 of Blood and Magic (RBMC: Helena, MT #2)

Maeve

NOVEMBER

I ’d never given much thought to dying.

My mother passed when I was eleven, and though I understood all things must come to an end, I didn’t fully comprehend the precarious tightrope upon which we mortals walked until the Grim Reaper gave mine a good shake.

“Do you think Percy will retaliate?” my twin, Ava, asked from across the dining room. She pushed salad around on her plate, her eyebrows scrunched together in a scowl.

“I don’t see how he can,” I replied. “Guin and Sol have him backed into a corner. Even if he comes out swinging, there isn’t much he can use to his advantage.”

Ava nodded and glanced back at her food, but neither of us had an appetite.

Our father, Uther Vanderbilt, had finally succumbed to cancer mere weeks ago, and in a move we all should have seen coming, our despicable elder brother, Percy, had made a play for the family business.

We were the Vanderbilts, the wealthiest and most powerful family in Helena, Montana.

In order of birth, Ava and I were smack in the middle: Guinevere, Percy, and Liam on one side, Isolde and Galahad on the other.

We owned over five thousand acres of land where we raised cattle and trained horses, and that said nothing of the wind turbines and natural gas companies we used to sell energy back to the national grid.

Our grandparents had made us wealthy, but my father had turned it into an empire.

“Do you think the Royal Bastards will help us?” I asked, bringing my sister’s gaze back up to me.

She shrugged. “Sol seemed pretty sure.”

Our family and the Royal Bastards had been enemies for years.

A land dispute had started it, but the feud escalated when my mother died on their property and my father blamed them for it.

He said the Bastards ripped her to pieces, leaving nothing but a bloody patch in the snow. We never found her body.

After Father died, Percy stepped in to take over, and our ranch hands left us, refusing to work for that spineless coward.

I didn’t blame them. Percy had always had more ego than brains, and he’d never once worked the ranch.

Why would they respect him? This had put our dear brother in the frustrating position of having to make a deal with one of the local motorcycle clubs, the Bloody Scorpions.

In exchange for our sister’s hand in marriage, the president offered his men to help us.

Isolde, whom we affectionately called Sol, had taken a drunken sojourner into the mountains and returned with a lover named Orion from a rival motorcycle gang, complete with the entire Royal Bastards crew behind him.

Ava and I had helped her hatch a devilish scheme to bring our dear brother back down to earth, and when he realized he’d been outmaneuvered, he’d sulked off to greener pastures.

It had been hilarious to watch his precious plans crumble around him. I absolutely loathed what he’d done, so I was thrilled to see him sink so low. That had been a few days ago, and none of us had heard from him since.

“I’m not sure I believe Sol when she says they’re not responsible for our mother,” Ava said. “There’s something wrong with them, something off.”

“I agree.” I sipped my wine, choking back the Cab Sauv despite how much I loved dry reds.

The thought of the Bastards always set me on edge.

Rumors circulated through Helena that they were vicious beasts that turned into animals on the full moon.

It was small-minded folklore, of course.

Shapeshifters didn’t exist. “Sol seems different now, too. Doesn’t she? ”

Ava nodded. “Definitely. I don’t know what happened to her at that cabin with the Bastards, but?—”

“It’s her eyes,” I said. “I look into them now and see something else staring out at me.”

Sol was only eighteen months younger than Ava and me, by all rights our Irish triplet.

We were best friends, the three of us. No one else could be trusted, no one who wasn’t family.

I’d tried to have friends, of course, and I’d even made a few at boarding school.

But money corrupted everything it touched, and I could never be sure if they really liked me or my daddy’s wallet.

“It was like when Guin started dating that ranch hand. What was his name?” Ava narrowed her blue eyes in concentration.

“Van,” I said, recalling the tall, attractive biker with sandy blond hair and dark brown eyes who used to smile at me from under a cowboy hat. “Beautiful Van.”

“Right.” Ava laughed, drinking her glass of wine. “Of course, you’d remember his name.”

I balked and feigned offense. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Despite being genetically identical, I fear our taste in partners is quite the opposite.” She smirked and let out another loud giggle.

“Precisely,” I agreed. “I’m a hot-blooded woman, and you’re a frigid prude.”

She dropped her jaw, half insulted, half laughing, and threw her napkin across the table at me. “Just because I don’t screw anyone with a pulse doesn’t mean I’m a prude.”

“I’m not shaming you,” I said, attempting to ease her ire, but a strange tightness in my chest stopped me. My lungs seized, my stomach lurching as a sudden wave of anguish shot down my torso and up my throat. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think.

Panicking, I clutched at my sternum and gasped for air.

“Mae?” Ava said, pushing to her feet. She scrambled over to my side of the table just as I lurched to the ground. My vision blackened, the world going blurry, my head both light and the weight of an anvil.

The last coherent thing I saw was my sister’s frightened stare, a replica of my own, and then the world went dark.

Dying was a peculiar thing, truly. There was no bright white light or angels calling me home to heaven. I thought I might see my mother or father, or perhaps our grandparents, but there was none of that, either—just the tragic droll of nothingness. Eternity of darkness. End of story. Good night.

* * *

I woke up with a gasp, electric currents shooting through my body as my back arched off the ground.

“Mae?” said a deep, dusky voice. Bright light flashed through each one of my eyes, and I winced against the splitting pain in my skull. “She’s coming back around.”

The EMT barked orders at other people around him, but I focused on the ceiling of my family’s dining room. A crowd of people surrounded me: staff, paramedics, my sister.

“What happened?” I croaked.

No one answered as I was lifted onto a stretcher and shuttled out of the house.

It was only on the ambulance ride to the hospital that I learned I had collapsed and banged my head on the nineteenth-century table on my way down.

My heart had stopped, and if it hadn’t been for Ava’s quick thinking and immediate CPR, they wouldn’t have been able to resuscitate me.

Stopped?

What do they mean stopped?

I never got an answer. The doctors at the emergency department ran as many tests as they could and arrived at no concrete conclusions.

I didn’t have any heart defects, and other than this one incident, there was no indication of illness, genetic or sudden onset.

They referred me to a cardiologist, who was as stunned as the other doctors.

Aside from a cracked rib and the scar on my forehead, I’d managed to walk away from death with barely a hair out of place.

I had access to the best doctors money could afford.

I’d been shuttled to Johns Hopkins and the Cleveland Clinic.

I’d flown halfway around the world and back, only for the world’s greatest minds to tell me they had no idea what happened or if it would happen again.

In the end, they put me on medication to help maintain the electrical current of my heart and said they’d see me again in six months.

“You’re okay now,” Ava said, gripping my hand on the last flight home.

She’d been by my side through it all, through the tests and the endless poking and prodding.

She’d been a guinea pig in her own way. As my genetic twin, they could compare our bodies to each other to search for any mutations.

But nothing ever came. “You’ll be okay now. ”

I nodded and gripped her hand, giving her a tight grin I hoped was reassuring.

But as I stared out the window of the private jet at the twinkling lights below, I vibrated with a hollowness I’d never felt before.

It was more than medical exhaustion, more than any doctor or specialist could tell me.

It grew into a nagging emptiness in my soul—rotten, dark, and all-consuming.

I hungered for something…I didn’t know what. I only knew I had to find it. This yearning clawed at my insides like razors slicing open my veins, making me restless and jittery. My heart ached for the unknown, and until I submitted, I couldn’t guarantee I would be okay ever again.

That emptiness stayed with me through winter and into spring. I went back to work at Vanderbilt Enterprises as director of operations, a job I’d been given by my father shortly after graduating from Harvard.

I hate this, I thought as I sat in a leadership meeting about upcoming strategic priorities.

“If we have any hope of remaining in the top five energy producers in Montana, we’ll need to increase our operational efficiency by at least thirty percent," said one of our vice presidents.

I blinked against the monotonous corporate speak. This meeting had gone on for two hours longer than necessary, and I should care about the direction the company planned to take, but I wondered if anyone even gave a shit I was here.

I didn’t add much value, aside from schmoozing with people who secretly gossiped about me being a nepo baby behind my back while brownnosing to my face. Vanderbilt Enterprises had once been my safety net, the one thing I always knew I would do. Now I dreaded walking into the building.