Hold Me Closer, Necromancer - Lish McBride [43]
The clanging stopped and she heard more footsteps. She stilled midstretch.
“Your concern is noted, James.”
“Then why not get rid of her?”
“I can’t pass up the opportunity.” Douglas’s voice held a strange mixture of excitement and worry.
“You’ve studied weres before. Find another shifter to guinea pig.”
“Weres, yes, but hybrids? No. Even if the packs didn’t normally keep to themselves, the fey sure as hell do. I’ve never seen anything like her and her brothers.”
“Then take one of the brothers, or one of the other hybrid offspring. Not the tánaiste.”
“What do you think I wanted to do? Even with our precautions, they’ll figure out she’s missing soon. Their guard will be up, their security doubled. It was a fluke Michael got her in the first place, even I can admit that. No, we’ll have to do our best to make lemonade out of Michael’s idiocy.”
“I just hope the gains will be half as great as your risk.”
They walked away before Brid could catch Douglas’s response. She turned her head and rested her cheek against her leg. She desperately needed something to tip the scales in her favor. In the meantime, she’d have to be patient. Look for an opening. And hope she got to take another bite out of Michael.
11
She Loves Me Like a Rock
My mother is not a big fan of the straight path. She says you don’t learn anything by toeing the line. “Do you think,” she says, “Little Red Riding Hood would have learned a damn thing if she hadn’t wandered off to pick some flowers?” Very popular at PTA meetings, my mother. Good thing they gave her the willies.
You don’t have to really speak to her to discover her preference for the curvy trail. You just have to walk from her gate to the front door. My mom’s cottage sits back from her fence, nestled in the shade of several large pine trees. Between the slatted wooden gate and her welcome mat lies a lot of space that most people would make into a pleasant green lawn. Not Tia LaCroix. She has no use for lawns—she calls them “bland ornaments.” You can bet you won’t find a single eggshell-white wall in her house either. In lieu of a lawn, she planted a garden. But the word garden doesn’t really paint the whole picture. You can’t fully grasp it until you open the gate and walk on the cobblestone path through what one mailman described as the “forests of LaCroix.” The mailman would’ve probably disliked her because of the extra walk, but she always made him cookies on the holidays, or when she decided it was a holiday, and very few people can resist that kind of bribery.
Simple, her garden is not. But beautiful, well, that goes without saying. Mom has a green thumb and perhaps a few other people’s as well. It’s worked well for her. She has that little herbal shop in Fremont, and her online business is thriving.
There seems to be no design to the forests of LaCroix. At least, I’ve never been able to figure one out. When I tried to tell that to my sister, Haley, she looked at me like I’d lost all my brains. “Of course there’s a design, stupid.” I’d watched my mother wander around, seeming to plant at random, stopping here and there to touch the soil and adjust vegetation. Maybe Haley is able to see things that I can’t.
I think Mom built the path for more reasons than to teach life lessons. Walking the path gives you time to calm down, marshal your thoughts, and center yourself.
Currently, I decided that “pissed” would be my center. I marched up the path, ignoring the fleeting smells of basil, lilac, pine, rosemary, and a thousand others that met us in the night air. Pretty smells weren’t going to distract me from my anger. Not tonight. Ramon carried Brooke’s bag and kept his mouth shut. For the most part anyway. “Just don