Page 49

“What are we doing? Following a magic user to their home? Taking Finn and Nix?” Grayson asks, banging the back of Finn’s seat gently in frustration. “This is dangerous.”

“She prefers Luminary, Baby, and I can take care of myself,” Nix mutters but doesn’t open his eyes from his position on Grayson’s shoulder. And he certainly can take care of himself–and the rest of them, too.

Gideon’s wolf isn’t happy about their mates in the stranger’s home, either. Or that their other mates are on a revised route to intercept them at Nimue’s residence.

The past week and a half has been an exercise in anxiety and patience. Neither of which is Gideon’s natural state of being.

But what choice do they have?

Grayson is accessing what looks to be an incredible amount of magic, of all things, and he’s doing it willy-nilly with no regard for himself or Nix. If Nimue can help, then they have to see what she can offer.

Nix was an impeccable judge of character, with one glaring, disastrous exception, and Emmy hadn’t set off alarm bells for anyone, but when Nix asked to ride in the Luminary’s vehicle, Gideon put his foot down.

Even Finn had looked like he was ready to throw hands if there had been so much as a hint of someone trying to take Nix away—voluntarily or not.

Perhaps it was that Finn was still unsettled about leaving the rare books on the library table (unshelved) and the scroll jammed unceremoniously in a nook, incorrectly sorted.

Nimue had suggested not making it easy for whoever came after them to find this link to the pack, so she’d stuck in the aisle behind a series of manuscripts from Mesopotamia that even Gideon could smell were made of human skin. It hadn’t been hard to walk away from it, at least for him.

Nix dragged Grayson away, lured with promises that they’d be back or, at the very least, that they’d visit other scholarly archives to hunt for more easter eggs his magical selves might have left behind.

Frankly, Gideon could not be less interested in his past self…not when his current and future selves had too much to fucking do.

It wasn’t lost on him that they had all accepted this reality without so much as a blip.

Gideon, who had always had faith in the spiritual also focused on dealing with what he could control—or making it something he could control—or moving the fuck on.

Wasting time gnashing teeth or wringing hands when they could just get on with it made no sense.

Which was why he needed to get on with solving their immediate problem as soon as fucking possible.

“Grayson, we need advice on your newfound talent to float above the ground, use air and fire, and…fucking teleport. You blew up a three-million-dollar MRI machine today, and I saw my goddamned face in a thousand-year-old scroll. We need answers.”

“More like fifteen hundred years old? Maybe eighteen?” Finn murmurs absently as he makes notes on his phone—probably shit his eidetic memory gleaned from the books he’d read before the magical face-off.

“Fuck off, Finn. You’re not helping,” Grayson mutters, basil scent almost entirely eclipsed by the mystical patchouli.

Putting the phone down, he turns to face his mate.

“Sorry, but Gideon is right. You almost hurt yourself and Nix today. And apparently, not for the first time. What if you’ve been doing this on a smaller scale since last fall?

We—I need to know what we’re dealing with so I can help you.

Help him,” Finn insists, nodding toward Nix, but softens his tone.

“Grayson, don’t you want to know what this is all about? ”

“I do,” Nix says and meets Gideon’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “We agreed to speak with Nimue and Emmy. They’re nice. Emmy smells a little like my lawyer, Erin, and patchouli. Although I think that’s perfume, and mostly because of her Mom.”

Gideon raises an eyebrow at the benign sentiment in the face of almost getting your souls drained dry, and his mate shrugs. Sighing, he asks, “If Kitten says they’re nice, what can go wrong?”

“I wish you’d stop saying that,” Grayson groans. “Something always goes wrong. I feel fine. We’re fine.”

Fine? Gideon is entirely not fine. He’s so far from fine, he couldn’t find it on a map. If he could find a map. His mind is whirling, and today, like any other day he can count since landing in Clearwater has been…less than fine.

Gideon prides himself on being flexible when it comes to major life events. Sure, he doesn’t crave adventure outside of his sex life; he likes things to be predictable and expected, but when life throws you lemons…you ask how high.

So right now he’s jumping high and hoping these unexpected allies can at least help them get a grip on this wildly out-of-control major life event.

Ninety minutes after they leave the library parking lot, they pull up in front of a 1920s bungalow on Adalee Street in the suburb of Tampa Heights.

Jumping out of her mother’s car so Nimue can park in the rear, Emmy signals that they should park in front of their place. Gideon stares at the single open spot on the packed street. Parallel parking. With an audience. Fucking great.

It’s not enough that his mate might be magical, or that they’re going to Nimue’s home, or that he saw his face in a fifteen-hundred-year-old scroll. Nope. Now he has to prove to Finn—who just got his goddamn learner’s permit—that he can park a fucking car.

“Want me to do it?” Finn offers, his grin the smuggest smug to ever smug.

Gideon resists the urge to growl. He’s too stressed to make rational choices, so he does what he always does when he’s not 100% sure about something: he fakes it until he makes it.

And by the Goddess’s grace, he pulls it off. No scraped bumpers. No crushed pedestrians. No Finn gloating.

“That was sexy,” Nix giggles, squeezing his shoulders. Grayson mutters “ hot as fuck,” and slides out behind him.

He barely has time to feel the smug satisfaction of winning before he almost clips a passing car while opening his door.

Shit. Damn. Fuck.

By the time they’re all congregated on the front stoop, Gideon feels a crackle of unease; Grayson is emanating a low, snapping static at an unseen threat.

It’s strange, because he’d felt no inkling of a threat once they’d come to an understanding in the library parking lot.

And Nix had been giddy. Like he said, Gideon trusted their pregnant omega’s instincts for people, especially now that they have pack babies to worry about.

Nimue opens her door wide, letting her daughter pass beyond her.

“Hang on. It’ll pass, I promise. We welcome you into our sanctuary with open hearts.

May the protective enchantments of our home acknowledge you as a friend, and may the Goddess’s favor bless our time together with peace and understanding. ”

The oppressive feeling passes as quickly as it had come.

“Sorry, it’s a protection spell. Works wonders on solicitors and those who carry ill will.”

“Like Ron and Louise across the street. Ugh,” Emmy mutters and starts pulling dishes out and laying them on the long kitchen table. “They are the worst.”

“Emmy, speak no ill, and no ill will come to you,” Nimue murmurs serenely.

It makes Gideon’s eyes pop wide open until she laughs.

“No, seriously, he’s a jackass. Keeps dumping his trash in my bins on trash day, so I’m over my limit. Then the collectors leave my trash. Frustrating as fuck.”

Emmy growls under her breath. “It’s a pain because pick-up is every other week, you know?”

No, Gideon did not know, nor, if he’s honest, does he care. But Finn is nodding and placing the plates around the table while Nix is growling about paying the neighbor a visit before he goes.

Grayson is still standing just inside the door, and at first glance, Nimue doesn’t appear concerned. It’s as if she is giving him a moment to acclimate on his own. She does, however, place herself between her daughter and Nix every time Grayson shifts even an inch.

They’re sitting on some kind of powder keg here, and Gideon isn’t sure how to diffuse it without setting a fuse to it. “Coming in, Gray?”

Grayson’s jaw cracks hard and the basil-vanilla-patchouli smells like smoky machinery and metal. Has his mate bitten his tongue?

“There is so much magic in here, it’s driving my wolf mad. I feel like if I move, I’m going to trigger something.”

“Ah, Warrior,” Nimue says as she approaches with her hands out in front of her, an apron with a cat in a witch’s hat on the front; it says My Pussy is Magic . It’s funny and ironic, and Gideon likes her a little bit more.

“I apologize for your discomfort. I am a master-level Luminary, and magic is infused into my dwelling like a lifeblood. But I can maybe help you feel less…irritated.”

Grayson nods. “Please.”

“Perhaps if we can put you in touch better with your magic, mine won’t seem so abrasive.”

“Just tell me what I need to do.”

“Can you see your magic as a flowing stream or a babbling brook? Most magic users find that the mental image of a gently flowing body of water helps them tap into it. There will usually be a color that speaks to you…it’s your manifestation of The Plain. Do you see the color of your link?”

“Brook? Stream?” Grayson repeats, eyes narrowed skeptically.

Nix steps close to press his palm to Grayson’s back, and his shoulders drop a bit, and the clench of his jaw lessens just a smidgen. “Mine is no small trickling stream from a fairy story.”

Nimue tilts her head. “No? Mine is a deep russet-colored creek running through a wooded glade.” She closes her eyes, probably to enjoy the vision more clearly. “Can you describe yours, Warrior?”

Closing his eyes, Grayson’s voice deepens, becoming a multitude of tones that make the hair on Gideon’s arms stand up, and that place he sometimes feels, the Goddess, begin to tingle .

Finn and Emmy peer in from the kitchen.