‘Convenient.’
‘That’s enough from you.’ Ashley grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and directed him towards the door. ‘Come help me make tea before I let him rip you a new one. This ain’t the time to be making matters worse.’
‘I don’t want any tea.’ He grunted, shaking her off and standing firm, but Ashley wasn’t going to be so easily dismissed.
‘Cute that you think I give a shit what you want,’ she said, giving him a shove. ‘Get your ass into the kitchen and hush up.’
As their voices faded away down the hallway, the parlour slipped into near silence, only Lydia’s heavy but even breathing audible.
‘It’s not safe for you to go back on your own,’ I said uselessly. I knew he was already as good as gone. ‘She’ll know you’re there.’
‘She?’ He raised a questioning eyebrow. ‘You know who it is?’
‘It has to be the woman I met this afternoon, the one from the magic store. There can’t be many Weres who understand the blessing well enough to use it to disarm a witch.’
‘Weres don’t use any magic other than the gifts we have. It’s one of our fundamental laws. Breaking it would be a high crime.’
‘The kind of crime that might get a wolf expelled from their pack?’
Wyn stood in front of me in his blue jeans and grey T-shirt, the toes of his desert boots darkened with a sea salt stain. I pulled my shredded shirt closer to my body and the walls of the parlour shifted almost imperceptibly from pale blue to pale grey.
‘I can’t tell you.’
The string that tied me to him pulled tight, straining with the weight of secrecy. Necessary, or so he thought, but I couldn’t help but worry about what it meant for us.
‘You can’t go back on your own,’ I said, my body fully healed and my mind clearer than ever. ‘Either call your pack and get them down here or take me with you. One way or another, I’ll have to face them eventually. The longer we keep it a secret, the more it looks like a lie.’
Falling to his knees, he rested his hands on my thighs, staring up at me with pleading grey-green eyes.
‘You don’t understand,’ he said, words written on his face he was struggling to say. ‘If they find out you’re a witch, they won’t let us be together. If they find out you killed Cole, they’ll kill you. I can’t live with either of those outcomes.’
‘Then what’s the plan?’ I dropped to the floor beside him, clutching at his hands. ‘How does this work after the summer? You’re going to lie to your pack for the rest of your life? Keep me hidden in Savannah while you live a double life in Asheville? We can’t spend forever counting down the days until we have to say goodbye again, Wyn, it doesn’t make sense.’
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted, falling back onto his heels and pulling his hands away, knotting them up in his own tangled, damp hair. ‘I don’t have an answer yet, but there’s no way I’m going to let them take you away from me. There has to be a way I can fix this.’
‘Find it,’ I said, snatching him back, pressing his hands to my heart and holding his gaze in mine. ‘Do whatever you have to do, because I’m not letting go of us.’
The determination that flared in his eyes reflected the passion in mine and when he kissed me, I kissed him back harder, staking my claim.
‘Em?’
On the chaise longue, Lydia’s eyelids flickered open, her gold-white irises returned to their natural deep brown.
‘I’ll go help Ashley with the tea,’ Wyn said, rising to his feet and squeezing Lydia’s shoulder on his way past. ‘Good to see you back in the land of the living.’
‘Yeah, sure, can you get me a Diet Coke?’ she replied without missing a beat.
‘It’s almost midnight.’
‘Which is why you should hurry up and get it while we’re still young.’
I felt my shoulders drop in relief. If nothing else, she was still herself.
‘So,’ she said to me, holding out her hands to examine her fingertips as Wyn slipped out of the parlour. ‘I’m a witch.’
‘Looks like.’
I sat down at her side, inspecting her palms when she turned them over for me. There was nothing to see but I could feel the same thing she could, the tingling in her fingertips, the prickling sensation on her skin.
