Madelyn moved back and held the door open. Patrick steeled himself and stepped inside, passing over a threshold that felt more welcoming than any other save the one wrapped around their apartment in Manhattan.
Stairs in the tiny foyer led up to the second floor. French glass doors were opened into an empty sitting room. A second door was partway open to a half bath down the short hallway. A small side table was situated by the front door, but it held no bread or drink.
“Hospitality?” Patrick asked, not sure about the customs the Pattersons or Salem Coven adhered to.
“You’re family,” Madelyn said firmly as she closed and locked the front door. “There’s no need for hospitality.”
Patrick thought that was a breach of security, but it wasn’t his place to say anything. Madelyn beckoned at them to follow her down the short hallway to the rear of the house. Patrick hesitated and only started walking when Jono touched a hand to the small of his back, leaning down to whisper in his ear.
“I’m right here,” Jono reminded him.
Knowing that made it easier for Patrick to step into the open area that contained the home’s kitchen and living area, the walls full of windows and glass doors looking out onto a large backyard and the water beyond its shores. Patrick’s mind distantly catalogued the dangers the windows provided to someone with a long gun and good aim, but most of his attention was on the people seated and standing in the living room.
Faces that shared bits of his own features stared back at him, some with tears in their eyes, others with frank curiosity. A bolt of recognition burned through his magic, picking out the magic in the room, and he was surprised to discover that everyone present was a magic user of some sort.
Patrick let his gaze drift over everyone assembled before focusing on his grandmother, who sat between two men who had to be his mother’s brothers. They looked too much like Eloise and Madelyn to be anything else but family.
Eloise stared at him, blue eyes wide in a pale face that made her minimal makeup stand out starkly against her skin. The tears pooling in the corners of her eyes were carefully dabbed away by the tissue clenched in one wrinkled hand.
“I never thought…” Her genteel voice trailed off, and she swallowed thickly, lips trembling. “Patrick. It’s sogoodto see you.”
She sounded like she meant it, but some part of Patrick wasn’t sure he could believe her. It’d been twenty-two years, after all. Staring at the Pattersons made him realize they had probably spent all that time never forgetting his and Hannah’s and their mother’s absence while he’d done his best to never look back.
“Sorry, I…don’t really remember you,” Patrick managed to get out after the silence lingered a little too long.
Eloise sniffed delicately before trying to stand. One of her sons—Finley, his younger uncle—immediately stood and offered his mother a hand. Like Madelyn, Finley was blond, though Grant, now the oldest in the wake of Clara’s death all those years ago, was a redhead like Eloise.
Like Patrick.
It was really fucking weird seeing people who looked like him.
Eloise patted her son’s arm in a silent thank-you before approaching where he and Jono stood on the outskirts of the group. She was shorter than he was, pale red hair neatly styled, and the pearls around her throat had tiny images engraved on them that he couldn’t quite make out but which might have been flowers. She looked at him with wonder and disbelief in her eyes, one hand lifting toward him before she managed to stop herself.
“You remind me so much of my Clara,” Eloise said, voice breaking a little on her dead daughter’s name.
Patrick wasn’t sure what to say to that.
Eloise drew in a breath before carefully placing her hand on his left arm, her touch light. Patrick thought she would try to hug him, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He stiffened and forced himself not to jerk away. She must have sensed his unease because she didn’t try to embrace him.
Eloise’s eyes shimmered a bit with tears that she managed to eventually blink back. “I know this must be overwhelming. It has been for me as well. But I want you to know we are all so,soglad to know that you are alive.”
Patrick found himself out of his depth as he stared at his grandmother, not knowing what was expected of him in the face of her emotions and his own. He turned his head to look at Jono, trying not to panic and probably failing miserably judging by the way Jono stared back with concern in his eyes.
“Let’s sit down for this chat,” Jono said, breaking the tableau.
Sitting with furniture between him and everyone else soundedgreat.
Eloise drew her hand back, clearing her throat. “Yes, of course. Please have a seat, Jonothon.”
He gave her a gentle smile that didn’t show any teeth. “Call me Jono.”
“Jono, then.”
Eloise stepped back, and Patrick went where Jono led, finding himself seated beside the other man on a love seat, both becoming the center of everyone’s attention.
Patrick had felt less like he was about to undergo an interrogation in a federal courtroom than here in his grandmother’s home.
“Would you like anything to drink?” Madelyn said, the cheerfulness in her voice sounding forced. “Coffee, perhaps? Tea?”
