“Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded.
“I wanted to.” Tears stung the corners of Aline’s eyes. “But you already didn’t trust me. What would you do when you found out I also had fae powers?”
She had a point. If she’d demonstrated fae powers, we never would have allowed her inside Briarwood’s walls. And she might never have saved us last night.
While I ate a cardboard scone Aline explained how she concocted her plan in secret. After Daigh had spoken to me in the mirror at Briarwood, she’d realised that he was lying about everything. She’d used her powers to contact the other witches through their own mirrors and beg them to come to Crookshollow in secret. Andrew had cancelled a lecture, Gwenand Candice had shut up their gallery shop and broken Smithers out of the institution, and they’d arrived just in time.
“It’s not every day a dead witch appears in your bathroom mirror and begs for your help,” Gwen smiled, patting Candice’s knee. “Of course we came as quick as we could to help our Briarwood friends.”
“It was a shock to see Aline again.” Andrew rubbed his hollow eyes. “But I didn’t want Corbin to fight this battle alone. Not again. I just wish I hadn’t brought Bree along. She didn’t need to see...” His voice trailed off, and he gulped, holding in his grief.
Two sons dead. It was too much to ask a parent to endure. If I believed in a kind and benevolent God, then staring into Andrew’s broken eyes would’ve cured me of that nonsense.
Flynn glared at Isadora. “I thought you didn’t like to meddle in the affairs of other covens? Wasn’t that what you told Maeve?”
Isadora patted her mouth with her hand, as though the whole conversation bored her. “When I discovered how much of a mess you lot made of things, I had to step in to protect the Soho Coven.”
“Come now, Isadora,” Clara smiled sweetly. “We all know that’s not true.”
Isodora’s lips pursed, her eyes flashing. Something about the exchange tugged at me, some mystery to unravel. But the grief shadowed over it. I didn’t care about Isadora and her secrets. I didn’t care about anything.
But Clara clearly did. She stared at the intimidating witch with such a self-satisfied smirk on her face. She was bursting to tell whatever secret Isadora was protecting.
Isadora shot Clara a withering look. “You ungrateful little hussy. I took you and that wretched son of yours off the streets and gave you a home and a livelihood, and you repay me by stealing from me and now you try to undermine me. I am a High Priestess here, and you are just an ignorant rustic hedgewitch?—”
“I wouldn’t speak to my mother like that in my home.” Ryan’s voice took on a weird, gravelly tone. As I watched in fascination, his face moved, the bones and skin rearranging itself into a very different shape. Reddish hair pushed through his skin, and his nose elongated into a muzzle. He rolled back his lips to reveal rows of sharp canine teeth.
Okay, I amnotseeing this. Ryan’s face didnotjust transform into a fox.
But everyone else saw it, too. Flynn yelped. Rowan moaned under his breath. Arthur growled and crossed the room, drawing his sword from its scabbard and pointing it at the creature that had previously been Ryan. Clara tapped his leg.
“Don’t you wave that thing around in here, son. You’ll put someone’s eye out.”
“He’s using a glamour. That’s a fae trick.” Arthur shot back.
Ryan growled at Isadora. It didn’t seem to scare her, which was ridiculous, because my heart pounded a mile a minute. Isadora waved a manicured hand at Clara, wrinkling her face in disgust. “Can’t you control that beastly son of yours?”
Ryan’s fur retracted back into his skin, and his face rearranged itself back into human features. He shook his head, puffing out his cheeks and scratching his paint-flecked hair. My heart leapt into my throat. That… whatever it was... had woken me up from my grief-induced stupor.
“What the fuck just happened?” Arthur demanded.
“Oh dear.” Clara frowned. “I’m sorry. Ryan didn’t want you to know his secret, but sometimes when shifters feel their pack being threatened, their natural instincts take over.”
“Shifters?” Flynn squealed. “You mean, shapeshifters? They actually exist?”
Ryan nodded. “I’m a vulpine – a fox shifter. I am part human, part fox. It’s why I don’t leave the house. The shift can bedifficult to control, especially when you’re excited, or angry.” He said this last word glaring at Isadora.
“There was a fox running around on the meadow,” I remembered. “It bit a fae in the ankle, and he fell back into the void. That was you?”
“I can still taste his blood.”
I remembered something else, too. Corbin showing me an image from Isadora’s book of an orgy that contained half-human, half-animal creatures. He’d called them shapeshifters. I hadn’t wanted to consider the possibilities at the time, and Corbin seemed to think it was a conversation for another day. He was more interested in that rusty ampulla on his library shelf. I was surprised to find myself accepting the evidence of my eyes, but there were so many unanswered questions. I had toknow.
“How does shifting even work? Is your human skin an exoskeleton? How do you change your size? That matter and energy must go somewhere – it can’t just disappear and reappear when you transform back. What do you eat? Do you?—”
Ryan laughed. “This is exactly why I don’t associate with other humans.”
“I’m sorry, but you can’t just drop a bomb like that and expect us to just accept it, no questions asked. I need to understand and?—”
