Preorder Book 1, Crystal and Claws, today
“It’s 113 County Road 13,” the deep voice on the phone said.
“Double thirteen?” Tori echoed with a gulp.
“I know, unlucky.”
Tori’s sister Cat insisted unlucky thirteen was a marketing ploy by movie studios, not real witchcraft, and to never take her eyes off the real danger: werewolves.
They hadn’t seen nose or tail of the werewolves who owned 113 County Road 13 in twenty-five years.
“Hello?” the voice asked.
Her sister Annie was playing with an Irish wolfhound as big as she was across the yard, but stood up with a frown on her face.
Tori shook her head and walked away. “I’m here, sorry, could you repeat the address?”
“Um, it says here 113 County Road 13.”
It says here? He didn’t even know it? The dude had called her work line cold and asked for a consultation. Was he a werewolf? An intermediary like her?
“Got it,” Tori said. “What services are you looking for?”
In light of the earth-shattering bomb that werewolves may be returning to Silver Spring, Tori defaulted to her normal response to insanity: absolute calm and confidence. The worse things got, the calmer she could sound.
Tori provided white-glove service for ritzy, part-time residents in the mountains around her hometown. Sometimes it meant cleaning up mouse poop, and sometimes it meant flying in live lobsters from Maine in time for dinner. She was a fixer.
Most of her family worked at the Cauldron and Broom in town, the coven’s new age, magical bookshop. While she was so grateful to the twins who pulled her out of foster care and into their makeshift coven of misfits, she was bored stiff with retail by the time she was fourteen and legally allowed to work. She also hadn’t wanted to leave Silver Spring, the little town of 800 tucked into the Colorado mountains, where the only other businesses were even more boring.
She’d taken the hustling skills she’d learned on the street and the customer service skills drilled into her by the twins and made her own job.
So when she asked, “What can I do for you?” the sky was the limit.
“To start, can you make sure there’s a house?”
Make sure there’s a house?
“Um, I can drive by.”
“And electricity and water that work?”
“No problem.”
She paid the county commissioner a case of bespelled kombucha every month to ensure requests like this would go to the top of the line. She got the kombucha from Gary, the owner of the hardware store, who used the same scoby—the mix of yeast and bacteria that fermented the disgusting drink—that he’d started in the seventies. She paid him in orders from rich clients for gardening supplies. She worked shifts at the Cauldron and Broom for Niamh, the twin with potion magic, in exchange for bespelling it.
She licked her lips and looked back at the collection of women cleaning up around her, a job she’d shared until her phone rang. They appeared to be doing yard work.
“Oh god, and broadband, I forgot.”
“I’ll get the fastest internet possible,” she said automatically. Nobody seemed to know how broadband worked, that you needed, well, a broad band. Even millionaires didn’t want to cough up the cash to wire a path from Denver or Aspen through the mountains.
“How, um, how long will you be staying?” This was not a standard question, but it was the Double Thirteen House. Nothing was standard.
“Hopefully a week or two?” the man said.
Everything in Tori sagged in relief. She could probably keep this quiet if they were only here for a week.
“No, I belong in civilization,” the man continued. “I’m trying to get things fixed before the, uh, the family arrives.”
She laughed hysterically. “You make it sound like the Mafia.”
She had one client she was fairly certain had made his millions through organized crime. She normally cared little about how people made the money they paid her, but when the man on the phone didn’t immediately object, she hummed.
“You could do something about enemies if we were the mafia,” the man muttered, and she gulped.
“Sorry. Bad joke,” he added after an extremely awkward amount of time. “Um, so I’ll see you on Friday? Is that enough time?”
“Of course,” she said automatically. No matter the request, she always had enough time.
“Thank you.”
“Is that all? You just need the lights on?”
“Oh hell no, but we can circle back when I see what I’m working with, sound good?”
“Circle back?” Definitely someone from the East Coast, probably some kind of business or Wall Street dude. On the West Coast, they never promised to get back to her at all.
“Yeah?” he said. “Is that okay?”
“Of course. I’ll be in touch to, uh, tell you there’s a house.” She hung up and turned back to her family.
One was picking leftover potions out of the hedges. One was painting the wainscoting of the Purple House purple again with four brushes she was directing like an orchestra.
The house had another name, Something Grange, but the neighbors all called it the Purple House, and that name had stuck. It was a faux-Gothic mansion some millionaire from the last century had built on the site of his silver mine, but the sisters had painted it purple for reasons she’d never understood.
It had been attacked by a werewolf a week ago and was covered in debris, magical and mundane. To be fair, most of the debris was from the defensive spells the dude had set off. The wolf had done no damage himself.
“What is it?” Niamh asked, and Tori pasted a smile on her face, grateful they didn’t have anyone with empathy magic in the coven. Normal, healthy covens were made up of family members with a mix of all twelve talents. The Griffin coven hadn’t been healthy for a generation. But instead of waiting for a takeover, the twins had started finding witches in foster care, overseas orphanages, or who’d lost their families.
She was fiercely grateful and glad of it, but it did make for a coven overburdened with telekinesis like hers. It made for truly amazing games of dodgeball, but it wasn’t a real coven. An empath in foster care would look no different from the overly conscientious kids who greeted the inevitable trauma of their lives with fawning and obeisance. It was somewhat harder to hide the fact that shit moved without touching it when you got upset.
She was fully responsible for two different episodes of Ghost Hunters. The only upside was that one asshole foster parent was still too scared to sleep with the lights off.
“Who was that?” Siobhan, the taller twin with a shock of white in her black hair, asked from where she was pushing silver-tipped spikes back into the ground with magic.
“Client,” Tori said automatically.
Siobhan nodded, accustomed to a lack of details because discretion was at least half of what they paid Tori for. But this was the Double Thirteen house.
Who were these people? Why were they coming? Why now?
And why was Tori keeping silent?
She looked around the yard.
Because the twins went to DefCon 17 anytime a wolf was mentioned. They’d had one lone wolf in their territory who’d meant them no harm at all, and look what they did.
The lost pack is coming home.
The words would not come out of her mouth.
