Page 219 of Blue Moon Mistress

“I couldn’t sleep because of your little problem.” She looks at me over her shoulder. “And I heard you coming.”

At some point since the last time I was here, she’s spelled her dress clean and pulled her hair back out of her face in a long braid… it always made me think she looked like a dragon.

“I’ve brought the guys with me.”

She glances at the ghostly wolves on the other side of the fence. “I heard them too. So tell me what you want to tell me before they get here.”

I tell her everything I know so far… “And I am certain this has to be broken at the full moon. Because of them.”

She looks at me with a scowl that pulls up one side of her lips and exposes one slender fang. “You’re right.”

“I am.”

She nods. “It was one of the things that bothered me most about our last conversation… you can’t have werewolves in the equation and not have them screw everything up.”

“I’m sure they’ll love to hear it.” I laugh when she shoots me a sidelong glance.

But it’s not me she speaks to next. “Go,” she says to the wolves. “Get your humans and bring them here.”

Three of them do as she says. Chase’s stays.

She doesn’t seem to mind.

“Renée isn’t going to help you. She’ll deny that Aphrodite had her spells—no witch wants to admit when her grimoire has been desecrated. She’ll see it as a sign of weakness and that woman can’t show an ounce of humanity.”

“It’s still worth asking.”

Nodding, my grandmother sits on the stone bench near the boggy bit. “You have the book from your father’s family that deals with hexes… there is another. It’s in your attic.”

“My attic that was built after you were presumed dead? How did you manage that?”

“It’s magic you’ll learn in time.” She looks behind me and I know the guys are here. “The book is in the chimney there is a brick stamped with a pentacle. It shouldn’t be hard to find. The spell you’re looking for is the only one that will be in both books.”

It’s cryptic, but it’s more help than I thought I’d find here.

“As for the other reason you visited…” she turns to the guys. “You can come into the plot if you like. I won’t bite you. But you are just as welcome to stay on that side of the stones.”

None of them move, they don’t say a thing, they look at me.

“The wolves have to stay on that side of the gate… since they are not inside of you anymore, you are welcome inside.”

Chase is the first to step forward, and after he passes through the winding gate, the others follow. The single file entrance gives my grandmother more time to appraise them.

She doesn’t smile.

“You are the four who think you have a right to my granddaughter’s love and life?”

“No.” Thomas says, drawing her full attention.

“You’re the teacher, aren’t you? Why don’t you tell me what I need to learn?”

She’s not trying to compel them, there’s no scent of magic in the air. If there was, they’d smell it.

The fact that their noses are twitching tells me they know it’s not there, too.

“We love her. It has nothing to do with what we feel we have a ‘right to’ and everything to do with wanting to keep her safe and keep her with us.”

“Keep her safe? And what if keeping her safe means you have to make a terrible choice?”

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