"It's not even noon. Let's start with coffee. I promise, I'll be fine."
"I'll make a fresh pot," Serena offered and got up to go to the counter and the waiting coffee maker before she put some bread and butter on a plate on the center of the kitchen table for them all to snack on. Serena liked to bake, and that instinct got very intense when she was stressed. Elise was pretty sure there was abakery's worth of goods hiding in the kitchen if they hadn't yet been devoured.
Once everybody had steaming mugs of coffee and slices of sourdough in front of them, she was out of time to come up with any new story.
"Yeah," she said. Elise wrapped both hands around her mug. She just had to dive right in. "I got kidnapped by a werewolf. I'm okay," she held up her hands and gestured around as if to demonstrate it.
"We figured that part out," said Serena, her elbows dug into the table as she leaned in. She was practically vibrating with curiosity … and violence. "Could you give us any more details? How are you alive? How are you okay? Did you heal yourself? Did you kill any of those motherfuckers?"
"I didn't need to heal myself," she said as she set her mug down. "No one hurt me." A brief flash of Reece's angriest expression flashed through her mind.
If it hadn't been for Nico—no, she wasn't allowed to think about Nico right now.
"So, you know I was at work, right?" she prompted with a glance around, and the others nodded. "It turns out the alpha of a local pack got injured, and their healer was out of town. One of the betas broke into the zoo to steal medical supplies, and unfortunately, he ran into me and thought I was a veterinarian."
"Why did he think that?" Briana asked. She and Aya exchanged a look. "Where was everyone else?"
"I thought you said everyone was working late?" Aya tilted her head and looked at Elise like she belonged under a microscope.
Elise hadn't told the others about her extracurricular activities at the zoo. If they knew she was there without permission, they would make a whole big deal about it andprobably want her taking protection with her. Or not doing it at all and letting her powers fester.
Really, it was just easier to go in secret and not let anybody worry. Aya suspected, though—that was the thing about best friends; they had an annoying habit of figuring out all your secrets.
"I was near the wildlife refuge," she said. She picked at the bread in front of her so she had something to do with her hands. "And I had spilled something on my shirt, so I put some scrubs on, and he made his own conclusions from that."
"So he thought you were a vet?" Delainey asked.
Elise nodded. "And he didn't realize that I was a witch, so I just kind of played along."
"Which pack was this?" Briana asked.
"The Southern Basin."
She was nodding, so whatever their scrying had told them must have indicated Elise was in that territory.
"We're going to fucking destroy them." Serena slammed her palm down onto the table and made the mugs rattle."No one will even remember that pack ever existed by the time we are done with them."
Delainey had a particularly evil look on her face. "You think we can give them scabies?" she pondered, tapping her fingers. "And lice and crabs? I want every single inch of their skin itching forever."
Serena's fierce expression resolved into an even eviler smile. "Hell yeah, I think we do that first, so they suffer, and then we kill them."
Aya looked contemplative, and Briana had her head tilted to the side, like she was considering going along with the warmongering psychos.
Elise probably had to put a stop to the evil scheming, but she knew her sisters well enough to know that they had to get it out of their system before they could speak rationally.
She noticed the whiteboard hanging on the wall, where normally a colorful print hung and soaked up sunlight in the mornings. The handwriting was almost impossible to decipher, which meant it must have been Delainey's. But Elise had known her long enough that she could make out what it said, and the arrows and X's and O's helped.
Elise wasn't an expert, but it almost looked like a football play—a football play involving witches attacking a werewolf pack … a lot of witches. Far more than the ones in their coven.
She met Briana's gaze. Their coven didn't have a leader, per se—smaller covens rarely did. It wasn't necessary when witches liked to act on their own most of the time. But if this coven did have a leader, it was Briana. She was the one who had brought them all together in the first place. She was the one who had found the house. She was the oldest among them. And she was the one they all ran to when everything went wrong.
"Were you going to call in my parents' coven?" Elise asked with a pointed glance at the whiteboard. "Was this the rescue plan? Because this looks … big."
Briana didn't look repentant in the slightest. If anything, she sat up straighter. "Of course. They're your parents, first of all, and they want you safe. And they are respected members of one of the oldest and biggest covens in the state. If anyone could take on a relatively large pack, it would be them."
Something like fear curdled in Elise's gut. That explained why no one had come to rescue her in the days she had been held prisoner. Her friends were planning a full-on assault rather than a careful extraction mission.
And someone, or many someones, could have died.
