Preorder Book 1, Crystal and Claws, today
Tori hesitated at the driveway to 113 County Road 13, afraid of their defenses, even though there were no wards.
Wards were witches’ defenses, and as far as she knew, werewolves couldn’t keep anybody off their land with anything other than their teeth. Also, the Griffin Coven didn’t even have wards, because they’d need a real coven to put them up. It was the strongest spell a family could do.
She took a deep breath and turned her van onto the driveway.
Unsurprisingly, nothing happened.
She kept going, and the road immediately started to climb. She frowned as she looked through the passenger side window at the lush valley. Most houses were built in the lee of the hills near the road, where it was flat and easiest to get to, and you didn’t have to string a hundred feet of utilities. She was climbing the side of the mountain at this point. Where the hell did they build and how?
The road got bumpier and bumpier. She cursed and hoped they’d rent a car with four-wheel drive because, while she knew some earth movers who could take care of this, even her powers of persuasion weren’t going to get them here in the next twenty-four hours to fix this.
Two days ago, rocks had fallen across I-36, the main artery west. Enrique, the owner of the earth-moving company, owed her a significant favor and was happy to put her at the front of the line in general, but she couldn’t justify taking priority over trucker traffic to the western half of the United States.
She crawled along at five miles an hour as the road got bumpier. She might have to pull in strangers, because even a fancy SUV wasn’t going to get through this. She stopped. Erosion had worn two deep grooves into the dirt, and she was going to find herself beached if she kept going. She backed most of the way down the road and pulled a pair of boots out from behind her seat.
“I did not have hiking on my bingo card for the day,” she muttered as she started up the drive on foot. Fortunately, it was easy walking, because the center of the road had grown over, though she pulled her socks over her jeans to prevent tick bites.
How long did a road have to be neglected to get into the state? How long had it been since the wolves had come home?
The dude on the phone had insisted they did have a caretaker for the house, but they clearly didn’t make it a regular stop. What state was the house in? She also had a couple of construction crews in her back pocket, but she couldn’t renovate a house in a week.
This part of the road had been cut into the side of the hill, creating a cliff over the road, and Tori couldn’t help thinking of rock falls as she glanced at the menacing raw earth on the steep slope above her. She looked out at the valley below. Why not build there? Why on the side of a literal cliff?
She finally rounded the cliff and stopped with a gasp.
The road climbed to the apex of the hill, where a gigantic house sat with views in every direction.
“That’s why.”
If she had unlimited money, she supposed that’s exactly where she would put a house. She knew the difference between a lot of money and unlimited money. Most people never saw it, and in truth, the concept was obscene. No one should have that much money. It did something to them, warped their view of reality and humanity. She shuddered. The fact that there was a werewolf pack out there with unlimited money freaked her out.
She kept going.
The house was dark brown wood with half-stone walls. It was huge, but didn’t have columns, which was a very small point in its favor.
It did have multiple balconies across the central section between wings that flared out on either side. There were windows everywhere, all closed with wooden shutters. She added those to the list to open.
She hesitated again at the bottom of the porch. It was huge, at least ten feet across, and wrapped around the entire house. There had to be at least twenty bedrooms in this place, but it didn’t seem to be built for ostentation. People used to live in this house. It wasn’t for weekend ski trips.
She took a deep breath and put her foot on the first step.
Nothing happened.
“Of course not.”
She jogged up the steps and put her fingers against the lock of the huge double door as the sun hit the stained glass above the door.
The dude had inquired about how she was going to get in, and she had hand-waved something about the county offices and keys, which was complete bullshit to cover this.
She forced her telekinetic magic through the door, and it swung open at her command.
She stepped into a huge open space three stories high, centered on a towering stone fireplace opposite the main doors flanked by windows that reached to the ceiling. These were not covered in shutters, but they did have tape all over them. The cloth-covered couches and chairs spread around the room reminded her of a hotel lobby with little pockets of furniture for separate guests. On the left wall, there was a huge television, and across from it, an even bigger painting of woods.
She shook her head as she looked between the view out the window, deep into the mountains and the continental divide, to the painting of almost the same view.
“Because you just didn’t get enough nature here,” she muttered.
She wandered away from the door. If she didn’t know this was owned by a werewolf pack or had her own experience of communal living in a coven, she would have been really confused.
There were certain things about huge families living together that changed a house. From the way the living room was set up to the industrial-sized mixer in the kitchen in the right wing of the bottom floor, to the number of bedrooms, to the soundproofing in the bathroom with multiple stalls next to the kitchen, some things made living in a large group easier. All the tricks had been employed in this house. She couldn’t help counting up the furniture and goggled at the number of wolves this would house.
“The twins are going to have a stroke,” she muttered as she pivoted in a circle. They had no wards, nothing to protect them, and Silver Spring was the only town for miles in any direction.
So why hadn’t she said anything?
She’d liked the voice on the phone. There was a warmth and a dry wit in his tone.
Dealing with underlings usually went one of two ways: either they were more stuck up than their employers, as if they could borrow glory and wealth and annoy everyone else with it, or they were allies. He was definitely the latter, but with a sense of humor and respect that she loved.
He was going to come alone.
The strategic thinker in her insisted that it would be the perfect time to take him out when he was alone and vulnerable, but she didn’t share the twins’ insistence that all werewolves wanted to immediately kill every witch they met. If the twins went after him, it would be murder.
She didn’t want him to die. She didn’t even know him, but she knew that much.
So if she wasn’t going to plan his murder, she had to do her job. She took out her notebook and started down the list of cleaners, grocery deliveries, and research about any other earth movers in the area, because everyone else would need a bonus for making that hike. Maybe instead of trying to fix the road, she could just rent a backhoe and drive it up and down herself?
Her phone buzzed and she flipped it over.
I’ll be there Friday, the text read.
What the hell was she doing?
Her family, the women who took her in off the streets when she had nowhere else to go in the world and adopted her and raised her, were sitting ducks in town. She had advance notice that the Double Thirteen house was about to be occupied. They could prepare, get defensive spells ready, or at least negotiate a line.
Her finger hovered over her phone.
It was one wolf. How much damage could he do?
She took a deep breath and typed, I’ll be ready.
