“I’ll be gone two hours, tops.” I stood on my toes to kiss his cheek. “The portal goes directly into my place. I won’t even have to walk outside.”
“I wanna come!” Killian appeared at my side, tugging on my dress with still-slightly-sticky fingers. “Mama, I wanna come too!”
I knelt down to his level. “Not today, baby. Mama needs boring grown-up talk time.”
His lower lip jutted out. “But I’m good at talking!”
“You’re the best at talking. But this time I need to go alone.”
“Next time?”
“Next time, I promise.”
He held out his pinky, his face deadly serious. “Pinky promise?”
I linked my pinky with his, feeling my heart squeeze. “Pinky promise.”
“That means you CAN’T break it.”
Mal appeared behind us, watching the exchange with soft eyes. “Your mother does not break promises.”
“Good.” Killian nodded firmly. “‘Cause if she does, she has to give me ice cream.”
I blinked. “That’s not how pinky promises work.”
“It is now!”
I looked up at Mal, who was clearly trying not to laugh. Our son had us wrapped around his tiny honey-covered finger, and we all knew it.
“Two hours,” I told Mal as I stood. “I’ll be back before you even notice I’m gone.”
“I always notice when you are gone.”
I rolled my eyes, but my stomach did a little flip anyway. Four years of marriage and he said things like that without hesitation. Looked at me like I was the only person in any realm that mattered.
“Clingy,” I said.
“Protective.”
“Same thing.”
I stepped through the portal before he could argue, feeling the tug of magic as one world dissolved and another took its place.
The bookstore smelled like old paper, exactly the way it always did. Late morning sunlight streamed through the front windows, catching dust motes in the air. I’d barely stepped out of the portal in my back office when I heard voices from the main floor.
“-and I told him, if you can’t commit to a second date, don’t waste my time with the first one!”
Krystin.
I pushed through the storage room and found them all there, Krystin behind the counter with a coffee cup, Bella curled up in one of the reading chairs, and Daphne perched on the arm of the couch. My best friends, my people from before everything got complicated.
“Look who finally remembered she has friends on Earth!” Krystin spotted me first, her face breaking into a grin.
“I’m sorry!” I crossed the room and they all rose to meet me, pulling me into a group hug that smelled like Bella’s expensiveperfume and Krystin’s dry shampoo. “It’s been crazy. Where’s Emma?”
“She needed the day off, so we thought it’d be nice to catch up with readings. And crazy, you say?” Bella pulled back, eyebrows raised. “You’re literally a werewolf queen. That’s past crazy. That’s certifiable.”
“When you put it that way, my life sounds fake.”
