Page 80 of Wind with a Chance of Wolfsbane

“Uh, you kind of can’t.” I stared at the sign for Grimm Cove as several cars drove past me on their way into town. “Mina, I’m sorry I took off without telling you. I knew you’d try to stop me.”

“Damn straight,” she said with nothing but certainty in her voice. “It was reckless, Willa.”

“Mom, are you going to the parent event across campus?” asked a familiar voice in the background from Mina’s end of the line.

“I am,” said Mina, her voice softening. “Why don’t you and Hannah head over to the next stop on the tour? I can find my way to where I need to be.”

“Hold up, you’re going to seriously let us walk there on our own?” asked the young woman. “First, Aunt Willa takes off on some mysterious emergency trip, and then you loosen the strings enough to let us walk around on our own in a city we’ve never been to before? Normally, I’d be excited. Now I’m convinced something really bad is happening, and you and Aunt Willa are trying to hide it from us. Don’t think we didn’t all hear you shouting behind the bushes a minute ago.”

“You were shouting behind bushes?” I asked, unsure why I was shocked.

Mina grunted.

I snorted.

Mina was quiet for a second. “Everything is fine, Temperance. Willa is checking on a friend of ours who had an emergency. And I love when you open your mouth, and your aunt falls out. I do not have tight apron strings. I don’t cling or hover.”

Since becoming a mother, Mina worried endlessly. She went from craving danger and excitement to being terrified that the very same part of our lives she’d once loved would infect the next generation of Murrays.

Our daughters.

Her fears weren’t unwarranted. It wasn’t as if we had gotten pregnant under anything close to normal circumstances. The night we’d both gotten pregnant had been anything but normal, either.

Mina and I had been pregnant together and had given birth on the very same night. Our daughters had been raised under the same roof. They were a lot like Mina, and I had been when we were their age, and they acted more like sisters than cousins.

They were also more than human—the same as Mina and me.

The same as their fathers.

“How is Hannah?” I asked, hating that I’d left my daughter in the middle of a campus tour she’d been looking forward to for months. The note I’d left her on the hotel bedside table had told her not to worry, that I had to handle another matter, and that I loved her.

“Honestly, I’m not sure Hannah has noticed you’re gone yet,” said Mina with a small laugh. “She’s been too swept up in the architecture on campus and telling us random facts about Yale.”

That sounded like my daughter. She loved to learn and had spent the entire car ride from Toledo to New Haven giving us all a verbal history lesson on our destination.

“Temperance, come look at this,” said Hannah loudly. “There is a sign in front that talks about the building dating back to—”

“I’m not going to look at another building with you,” said Temperance. “I’ve seenmorethan enough on this trip. Let’s go meet up with the group that was talking about campus nightlife. It had hot guys in it. Especially the guy giving the tour. What was his name again? It rhymed with—”

“Don’t say it,” said Hannah quickly. “His name was Tucker Proctor.”

“Your mind is amazing,” Temperance said loudly. “It never forgets anything except to look where you’re going. Watch out!”

“Hannah, are you okay?” asked Mina.

I tensed. “What happened?”

“Your daughter just walked into a group of young men unintentionally,” said Mina with a soft laugh. “Now my daughter is trying to get their numbers.”

I smiled. “Mina, Temperance is just like you were when we were that age.”

“Yes,” said my sister, a level of tiredness in her voice. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“They’re good girls,” I responded. “Because of you.”

“Because ofbothof us,” she corrected before sighing. “One second.”

There was a slight pause.

---