“Aren’t they?” she said. “If there is a woman you can picture with a child, that is not one to let get away.”
He could not ask that of Cat.
But he couldn’t go home without saying goodbye, right? That wouldn’t be polite. It’s not like he wanted forever with a witch or, heaven forbid, magic children. What on earth would that look like?
But he could not leave without saying goodbye.
“Whatever put that smile on your face, keep thinking it,” she said, amused, and then frog-walked out of the living room with Gianna wrapped around her leg.
It was impossible. Maybe some wolf somewhere could settle down with a witch, but he was a New York alpha. He couldn’t uproot his pack, nor could he traipse through the city with a witch on his arm. And that was just the pack. He had an international company that he couldn’t run off of two satellites. He was trapped in a hair’s nest of obligations that a woman would inevitably have to fit into, not the other way around.
Cat fit here, with her snowshoes and s’mores and a town that used her as their entire police department, causing her to risk her life. She really needed someone to watch out for her since apparently no one thought it was their job to do that…
His head bumped against the laptop.
He could not do that either, but he could at least say goodbye.
11
Cat trudged wearily up the drive to the purple house. It had only been a few days, but it felt like a week. The kids were all recovering in a hospital in Denver from hypothermia and frostbite, but nothing more serious. They would all survive thanks to a wolf who had helicopters on standby.
She hadn’t seen him again. She had been trying to keep the kids calm and explain to Search and Rescue what had happened, and then he was gone. She told herself it was for the best. Of course, he was gone. There was no other choice for either of them, but she irrationally wished she could say goodbye.
No, she irrationally wished that she would never have to say goodbye again, but that would be beyond irrational. That was impossible and ridiculous.
The purple house was a three-story historical number one block west of Main Street. The house was a mansion, at least according to Colorado standards at the turn of the century. It looked vaguely Victorian, though everything was made of wood, put up by a newly rich miner to flaunt his success.
The purple paint had come later. Cat didn’t know if the twins were trying to be ostentatious, cultivating their reputation in town as eccentrics, or if they just really liked the color.
She still lived in her childhood bedroom on the second floor. She loved the place and stayed partly because of that and partly because the only place in Silver Spring to rent if you were single and didn’t want to share a house with people you didn’t know were tiny apartments above businesses downtown.
She also stayed because this was the heart of the coven, the bustling, crazy center of all of Niamh’s experiments and Siobhan’s gardening disasters. She’d never met another person who had more love for something she had less talent for than the older twin and her plants. She couldn’t imagine leaving them, so she was surprised that she felt nothing but fatigue as she walked up the front steps onto the front porch.
The door burst open, and the twins flew out, squawking at her as they folded her in their arms. Siobhan nearly strangled Cat, her dark hair blinding her. Witches with telekinesis tended to walk through the world like bowling balls. In contrast, Niamh fluttered around, patting various body parts she could reach.
“We should’ve listened,” Siobhan said to the top of her head.
“We always listen,” Niamh said, tapping her elbow repeatedly. “We should have acted! You knew they were out there.”
“What would you have done?” Cat asked with a smile as she tried to free herself. “Then we would’ve all been stuck in the blizzard.”
“You’re a hero!” Niamh declared. “Everyone is saying so.”
“Come in, come in, you must be famished!” Siobhan added.
“I’m good,” she said, but allowed them to draw her inside, where she stopped short at the transformation of the front hall since she’d left two days ago. They’d been redoing the defenses, but now they looked ready for war.
Cat had never heard the story about why they were so obsessed with werewolves. She hadn’t questioned it when she was growing up. It was just a normal part of childhood to be dangling silver everywhere and to have a secret room in your house full of weapons and ancient spell books for defense.
It looked like they’d emptied the room and put all the weapons in the front hallway. This had never happened before. Crossbows and cudgels were leaning against a shelf full of defensive potions, delicate glass ornaments full of magic poison to throw.
“What is going on?” she asked, looking around.
Annie stepped out of the sitting room, a smirk on her lips.
“I can’t believe you didn’t foresee this,” Annie said.
“I can’t believe you didn’t say,” Cat countered in an old script between them. It had stung a lot in high school. Annie was another stray. They were the same age in the same grade and shared many classes, but Annie had lived most of her life on the streets and did not appreciate being relegated to a tiny town in the mountains, especially because she hadn’t realized she was a witch.
