Page 71 of Cocktails & Cauldrons

“What are you doing here, Aunt?” Brenna asked coldly. Her confidence might be waning, but she didn’t have to appear that way. “And who is this sly cat you brought, eager to cause trouble?”

“I’ve come to help you, you ungrateful twit,” Odessa snapped, irritation in every line of her weathered face. Except her eyes. Hidden in their depths was a warning or wariness Brenna had never witnessed.

“What if I don’t want your help?”

“Would you rather Loman O’Connor murder you and steal your power?”

“How is that different from what you’ve been doing all these years?” Brenna demanded.

“You’re living, aren’t you?”

Well, there was that. “Am I supposed to be grateful for the fact you were syphoning my magic? That you murdered Gran?”

Odessa jerked as if struck, and a pained look settled on her countenance. “I’ve been sorry about that since the day it happened, Brenna. I loved Doreen.”

“Let me guess. Your monster made you do it?” There was no forgiveness left in her. The disappearance of Eoin had been the last straw. From here on out, she was taking no prisoners.

“You have no reason to believe me, but it’s the truth,” Odessa told her.

Brenna sneered, full of bluster and fake confidence, hoping to buy time until her true friends came for her. “What do you hope to do to save me that I can’t possibly do for myself?”

“Help you defeat Uncle Loman,” the other witch inserted, a crafty smile on her face. “But you have to give over your power to Odessa completely.”

Brenna didn’t trust her as far as she could throw her, and with her scrawny arms, that wasn’t very far. And if she didn’t miss her guess, the woman was Irish, and that put her firmly in the suspicious category.

“Uncle? So you’re related to Reggie and Ronan?” she asked, purposefully ignoring the suggestion she give up her magic. That was never going to happen. Not to these two.

“Aye. But they’re feckin’ useless, as you so recently witnessed.”

Left with no choice but to bluff her way through this exchange, she checked her temper at the door and asked, “What’s your plan?”

Sly satisfaction flared to life in the other woman’s eyes, and Brenna’s blood turned cold. The first chance she got, the bitch would stab her in the back.

“You’ll willingly submit to a transference of magic. You’ll be the same uninspired girl you are, and I get the strength to defeat the others.”

Others?

She shot a quick glance at her aunt. Odessa was either constipated or trying to put down something Brenna wasn’t picking up.

“Can you hear me, Aunt Odessa?”she mentally asked, avoiding addressing her directly in front of the other woman.

From the corner of her eye, she saw her aunt give a single nod.

“Can she?”

A minuscule shake of Odessa’s head.

“Is this a trap?”

Before Brenna received an answer, the red-headed witch growled. “What’s with the bleedin’ silent treatment? You either want our help or not.”

“You still haven’t outlined your plan, and I don’t know your name,friend.”

Respect shone from Odessa’s rheumy eyes, and she nodded once again when the feisty woman’s back was turned to her.

“Moira Doyle.”

Brenna was sure she’d never heard the name, but the woman was related to that kidnapping bastard Reggie, and seriously eager to kill Ronan, who Brenna happened to like. She was putting Moira in the friends-she-never-wanted-to-have column.

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