“Mateo!”
“I’m guessing you don’t speak Italian either.”
She shook her head, smiling for the first time. “You are not responsible for my family. I will fix this. And then you have to go back to your life, and I go back to mine.”
“I’m not letting you confront an entire coven full of witches by yourself.”
“That entire coven full of witches is my family.”
“That doesn’t make it better. Most of the violence committed against other human beings is from people they know, and the most likely way that a woman dies is at the hands of her family.”
She crossed her arms. “Yeah, at the hands of her husband or boyfriend. That’s a statistic about domestic violence, not two old women.”
“With magic. Two old women with powerful magic.”
“Okay, fine. Fine! You help me do this last thing, and then we say goodbye, and you go back to your life. There is no place for me in it.”
He was silent for two long minutes, and she prayed he would accept this. They had to live in reality.
Finally, he took a deep breath and stepped away from her. “What’s the plan?”
She laughed long and hard. “Hell, this is just one in a million ways we’re different. You’re the planner. I was just going to storm inside.”
19
Cat took a deep breath and approached the purple house slowly. Mateo had a plan. She hated the plan because it involved crawling back to the family and groveling in mock surrender while Mateo stalked the woods as a wolf outside. The only one who hated the plan more than she did was Mateo, which was the only reason she had agreed.
And if it all went to hell, maybe she’d have a little bit more time to grab more things from her room on the way out. She hadn’t exactly explained to Mateo that they hadn’t just rejected what she knew about wolves; they had rejected her, and she was currently homeless.
She knew he wouldn’t hesitate. He’d fold her into his life without a second thought, assigning her a room in that gigantic house and even hauling her back to New York. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t be one more thing he had to take care of. She hadn’t realized that the playful, nerdy dude who was so terrible at cooking and curious about the world was not the Mateo Amato that anyone else got to see.
He loved his family completely, but he was stoic, distant, and serious with his cross-continental calls and his perimeterdefenses. She knew that was also a part of him, probably the biggest part, but she couldn’t stand it if he became so invested in protecting her that he would never let her know him.
Now what? You’re so proud you’re going to sleep in the snow?
There was always Misty’s Airbnb, the one house in town you could rent on short notice. It was never booked this time of year.
She tried to imagine hanging around town, taking a job at the grocery store, or, heaven forbid, with Gary at the hardware store. Maybe she should move to New York.
She felt a hand on her shoulder and nearly shrieked. Mateo wrenched his hand away.
“Sorry!”
“What?” she demanded, looking around for danger. He was supposed to be a wolf in the woods, not a man on the sidewalk.
“You’ve been frozen here for five minutes. Is everything okay? What are you sensing?”
She blinked. “Nothing. Sorry.”
“What do you See?”
She was about to tell him it didn’t work like that, that she needed bowls and crystals and light, but with his hand on her shoulder, she flickered easily through images of the future. She saw glimpses of the outraged faces of the twins, but she didn’t know whether that was at the beginning of the conversation or the end. Then she saw the bloom of white fire so intense it blinded her, and she staggered until Mateo caught her up in his arms.
“Oh my god, what is it?” he demanded.
The aftereffects of that searing glow burned her retinas. She glanced around, surprised to see it was still dark and nobody had run screaming from their houses, terrified of the apocalypse.
“What?” he asked.
