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  We like puzzles. A man led the voices this time, eagerness in his voice. There was a pause, then they said, Keep us busy and there will be no destruction, only hope and prosperity.

  A lazy man is a wicked man, a woman cackled.

  Sebastian considered that to mean a deal had been made. “Can you take some kind of form, one that will allow you to physically protect her if she needs it?”

  If he learned anything today, it was not to underestimate the warlocks. Sebastian alone wasn’t enough to keep her safe, and he couldn’t weaken his pack by asking for round-the-clock guards for her, despite how willing they’d be to safeguard an innocent.

  I know what we’ll be! The gleeful voice of children preceded an obvious shift of power in the room. Briony began to stir, and Sebastian felt Heath and Sophia’s gazes on him as well as the kelpie and Harry appearing at the door. He ignored them all, reaching with all of his senses to see what the concentration of power was about to do.

  What it would become.

  Movement on Briony’s bed caught Sebastian’s eye. Her stuffed, striped, gray cat was moving to its feet as if on its own volition. He didn’t move, preferring to keep Briony in his arms, but watched intently as the cat’s stripes became more vivid, its eyes turning from round pieces of black plastic to almond shaped, glowing green as they stared back at him.

  A small, live cat bounded off the bed to stop in front of Sebastian and Briony. It inclined its head to him before settling itself on her stomach, purring.

  “That’s no normal cat,” Sophia murmured, leaning toward it curiously. The cat blinked at her sleepily, but provided no comment. “Should we send word to Raphael? He’ll want to know about this.”

  “No, let him enjoy his honeymoon,” Heath drawled, drawing his mate close. “He deserves some peace. We can deal with anything for the couple of weeks he’ll be gone.”

  Sophia snorted. “Only because you have such a kickass Head Soldier.”

  “It seems you’ve gotten the conduits under control. Congratulations, you’ve got a lifetime of power in the form of a stuffed kitten.”

  The cat in question hissed at the kelpie, but it was a halfhearted effort. It seemed more intent to rouse Briony further, nuzzling her cheek with its furry gray face.

  “Can someone take this away like I took it away from the warlocks?”

  The kelpie shook his head. “No, you’ve earned their loyalty. Now you would have to give them away, or rather, that pretty witch would.”

  Sebastian ignored the comment as a tic developed in his jaw. I need his help; I can’t kill him. From the way the kelpie was looking at Briony while she struggled to sit up, it was going to be really hard not to at least severely injure the creature.

  “Who let a hoard of conduits into the firehouse?” Briony asked on a reproachful moan, her hand to her forehead. “They laid me out flat.”

  “The hoard actually sought her out first,” Sophia supplied. “We heard how hard she fell and came running, wondering why in the hell the carpet was moving us toward her like one of those strips at an airport.”

  The cat purred at her words, which Sebastian interpreted to be a feline chuckle.

  From her expression, Sebastian knew that was the moment Briony realized just what was sitting on top of her.

  “Gris-Gris?” she gasped. “What’s happened to you?”

  The cat only nuzzled into her hand, as if showing its approval of its new name. “Sebastian?” Her tone was weak but brave, determined.

  He hardly noticed, instead watching her hands on Gris-Gris. Fine lines ran up their backs. Her knuckles were slightly swollen, her fingers moving almost painfully. Had he not known about her mortality, he never would have noticed a difference between what they were and what they should have been.

  She’s dying.

  And they had a finite timeline in which to reverse the warlock’s work, or he’d lose her forever.

  Chapter 7

  BRIONY knew Sebastian was watching her hands. What she didn’t understand was how he knew to look for the signs of her newfound weakness. Neither Big Mama nor Aiyanna would have told him, of that she was certain. Then how does he know?

  Resisting the urge to ball her hands into fists and sit on them, she kept petting the tiny cat that used to be her favorite toy. As a child, she’d clutch it to her chest when she was too scared to sleep, afraid of all the creatures that could pluck her from her bed and disappear with her.

  Big Mama had given it to her and told her it was her familiar, the animal companion so many strong witches found.

  “As long as you have Gris-Gris with you, nothing can come to harm you,” she’d said. Briony had believed it as a child, carrying the toy everywhere, but soon learned that familiars had to be alive.

  This cat was living, breathing, purring, its fragile form nothing short of pure irony for the strength she knew it had within it. Even without her powers, she could sense this wasn’t only a conduit but many powerful ones, all in one form.

  The equivalent of an atom bomb was rubbing its head against her hand.

  “I took the conduits from the warlocks when I blew up the room where they were housed,” Sebastian explained.

  “I’m the booby prize,” the kelpie in the doorway added, raising a wry eyebrow in her direction.

  “Nice to meet you…” Briony trailed off.

  He grinned. “Emmanuel.” In two large steps, he walked over, leaned down and outstretched his hand. The man smelled of dirty water. His eyes were genuinely friendly, but so tired she didn’t know how he was still standing.

  “Briony.” She shook his hand, surprised when he pulled her to her feet. Behind her Sebastian growled, wrapping a protective arm around her waist.

  “It’s okay, I was getting up anyway,” she said as she placed her hand over Sebastian’s, squeezing lightly. “Let’s talk over dinner—I’m starving and fought no one today. Emmanuel, feel free to take a shower here. We’ll all be downstairs. That should give you some privacy.”

  Relief positively radiated from the man.

  “Actually, he’ll have his own room to shower in,” Sebastian said. “He’s going to be staying with us for a while.”

  Emmanuel’s mouth hung open, shocked. Heath narrowed his eyes dangerously. It was a silent warning that took Briony off-guard until she remembered he was acting Alpha until Raphael’s return.

  “Explain,” Heath said in a low voice.

  “We have a deal,” Sebastian answered confidently, as if unaware of Heath’s rising anger. A pang of longing pierced Briony’s chest. For the first time in her life, she couldn’t see the colors of emotions and intentions swirling around shoulders, rising behind heads like halos. That gift had left with her immortality.

  “He’s going to help me kill the man who’s hurting Briony. In exchange, I set him free from captivity with the warlocks,” Sebastian finished.

  Sophia eyed Emmanuel warily. “Sebastian, how do you know this isn’t exactly what the warlocks wanted you to do?”

  The kelpie pursed his lips. “You don’t, sweetheart.”

  Sophia lunged for him. Heath held her back, a small smile curving his lips. “I’d be careful, water-dweller. She’ll have your ass before you can say ‘current’.”

  “Stop,” Briony exclaimed wearily. There was a time and place for distrust—this wasn’t one of them. It didn’t take a psychic to see that all Emmanuel wanted was to be alone.

  She’d heard Radburn brag about how long he could keep his conduits alive, feeding from their power before they died. There was no telling how long this man had been kept by the warlocks, away from his family and everything he called home.

  “We’re going to leave him be. If you want to leave, you can,” she told him. “This isn’t captivity. We’re not warlocks.”

  With that, she picked up Gris-Gris and walked out of the room to stand by Harry, fully aware of the angry gazes boring into her back.

  Sebastian was t
he first to follow her, Heath and Sophia on his heels.

  “What the hell was that?” Heath looked as if he wanted to shake her.

  “Don’t speak to her that way,” Sebastian growled. “She’s right—we can’t take him from one cage and put him into another. So long as he keeps his part of the deal he can come and go as he pleases.”

  “He won’t harm any of us,” Briony added confidently.

  Sophia’s expression softened. “You’d better be right, witch.”

  Downstairs, Sophia and Sebastian put dinner together while Briony whipped up a massive smoothie, dividing it eight cups. “You can judge what to put in everyone’s,” she told Harry, nodding toward the collection of herbs she’d come to keep at the firehouse. “I’m going to do Sebastian and Emmanuel’s.”

  She blended calendula into Sebastian’s drink to promote healing. From the way he walked down the stairs, slower and more calculated than usual, she knew he’d been injured today. She put a generous amount of ashwagandha in with Emmanuel’s smoothie to kick-start his immune system.

  It made her stomach roil thinking about what could have happened to Sebastian. The warlocks could have done any number of unspeakable things to him, Aiyanna, Cael, and Harry, and she had no way to warn them about it.

  Part of her wanted to see if the gag placed on her had been taken away by the mortality hex, but she couldn’t risk trying to tell them what she so badly needed them to know: that the warlocks would target the werewolves whether Sebastian angered them or not.

  Their plan had been in the works for years, but Briony hadn’t known whom they spoke of until she met the werewolf pack. Only then did she recognize the names Radburn had mentioned those years ago, names of men he fully intended to kill.

  What she didn’t understand was what the warlocks were waiting for. Why hadn’t they made a move? She doubted they’d forgotten the plans they agonized over for hours, days, months.

  Luckily, Sebastian seemed motivated enough to destroy the warlocks without the knowledge she knew he deserved.

  “Conduits?” he prompted when she handed him his smoothie.

  She only spoke after she’d taken a sip of the mixture Harry passed her. The herbs he’d chosen were goji and ligustrum fruit, for strength and anti-aging. She smiled.

  “Conduits house massive amounts of power. Sometimes a conduit is a person, sometimes that person dies and their power goes into an object they were particularly fond of. Even more rarely, someone will separate their power from themselves and hide it in an object. Usually that’s when they know the—” she stopped, pausing in lieu of the word warlocks, “—want what they have.”

  Harry nodded. “We have a few witches in our coven who’ve done that.”

  Big Mama was one of the witches he spoke of, having stored a great amount of her power in a pillow she’d lovingly cross-stitched.

  Gris-Gris sat at her feet, watching Briony expectantly. She went to the refrigerator and pulled out a carton of cream, but the cat shook its head. I really need to determine what gender Gris-Gris is.

  The cat stared at her until she took out a plastic-wrapped slice of leftover wedding cake. Its eyes lit up and she could swear it grinned at her.

  She set the cake on the counter and lifted Gris-Gris up to see that she had taken the form of a female cat. Setting her back on the ground, she unwrapped the cake and put it on a small table against the kitchen wall, assuming Gris-Gris wouldn’t appreciate being fed on the floor.

  When Gris-Gris leapt onto the table and ate her extremely unhealthy meal in two abnormally large bites, Briony couldn’t help but laugh. Meeting Sebastian’s gaze, she saw he was smiling too.

  “Thank you,” she told him, knowing he hoped Gris-Gris would save her. He could have used that power for virtually anything, but he’d chosen her.

  Everyone was too hungry to wait for Emmanuel. They ate voraciously, Aiyanna hissing and snapping playfully at Harry when he mimed stealing a piece of Andouille sausage from her plate. When they finished, Sebastian made a plate for Emmanuel and put it in the warming drawer.

  “If he can’t find it, that’s his problem,” he muttered darkly, meeting Briony’s eyes. She laughed, wishing she could put the spell she wanted to on the drawer, only to suggest that the kelpie open it.

  Such a simple, basic spell most twelve-year-olds were proficient with, and she had no hope to create it. Grief threatened to overwhelm her, but she refused to let Radburn win.

  I will not die full of resentment and hatred. It was exactly what Radburn wanted.

  She shoved her ireful thoughts into a far corner of her mind and took Sebastian’s hand. “Can we talk alone?”

  He nodded.

  The closer they came to reaching Sebastian’s bedroom, the angrier he became. His jaw was clenched and his eyes narrowed into slits. His hair stood straighter, more vertically as light bulbs puttered out from his passing. Briony didn’t need her magic to sense the level of his rage physically manifesting around them.

  Before Sebastian could reach it, a garden gnome statue Briony assumed had nothing to do with the women of the house came to life and scurried away, shrieking.

  “I thought you were contained,” Sebastian growled at Gris-Gris.

  Briony couldn’t hear the conduits’ response, but it was obviously communicating with Sebastian, turning her head in his direction and swishing her tail imperiously

  “How do you talk with them?” Briony knew the conduits were sentient, yet she’d never come across a witch or warlock who could communicate with them. Sebastian had a massive advantage, a gift the entire spectrum of magicians would kill for.

  Unfortunately, witches and warlocks alike would try and kill him for it.

  “That’s not normal?” Sebastian’s anger was hardly reined in, his voice shaking despite his efforts. “I thought they spoke with everyone who takes them.”

  “No. What you’re doing is unheard of.” She had so many questions, their answers invaluable to her coven. “What do they sound like? Are they angry and vengeful, or without emotion at all? Are conduits omniscient?”

  The latter was a belief closely held by the warlocks and largely the reason they gave conduits no chance of freedom.

  “They seem bored more than anything, and their voices are a collection of people—all ages, dialects, you name it. Whoever cares to answer has the lead voice at that moment.”

  Briony smiled, knowing how much these small, seemingly unimportant pieces of information would mean to her coven. Their historian, Betty, would lovingly transcribe every word, which would be pored over by every witch in New Orleans.

  For immortals, new information was a seldom-occurring commodity.

  “I don’t think they’re all-knowing. They’re just observant,” Sebastian continued. “For instance, they noticed your mortality. Want to talk about that?”

  He held his ground, energy sparking blue over his shoulders.

  Unsure what to tell him, Briony gave him wide berth to walk into his bedroom, gaping when the space came into clear view.

  “This is where you live?” she exclaimed.

  The space was Spartan. There were no Full Moon posters on the wall as she’d expected, nor any of the awards she knew he’d earned through the brewery. There was only a large square window, its plain black drapes pulled apart to allow the city lights in.

  The sole colors were black and white. Briony felt the loss like a blow, making a mental note to come in here with paints tonight. Sebastian deserved a bit of color. Besides, even if it didn’t have any magical side effects like she preferred, a little paint would brighten his mood. That was psychology, not magic.

  Sebastian didn’t take her attempt to change the topic of conversation. “Why are you mortal, Briony? That’s not natural, not for a witch.”

  “Actually, it can be if we want to be mortal. Like Big Mama aging for Papa since he was human—”

  “You know what I mean.” The overhead light explo
ded in a shower of sparks, darkening the room so the only light came from outside.

  Gris-Gris looked up and then to Sebastian, who shook his head.

  She raised her tail and shot out of the room, hissing at him over her shoulder.

  “Last night’s when I found the curse,” Briony answered. “It was put on the bricks in that alley, close enough to my house to affect me over time. Being so near, it finalized the spell, taking away my magic and immortality for good. Now my age is catching up to me.”

  His mouth was a thin line, his fury refusing to lessen its strength, but Sebastian’s eyes were sad. Reaching out to touch her face, he asked, “Will it show here?”

  “No, only my hands. Then I’ll turn to ash, which is what I should be if I were mortal.”

  Sebastian didn’t speak, but released a low strangled noise. Briony barely had time to notice the fat tear leaking from his eye before he pulled her into his arms and dipped his head to hers, taking her lips in a kiss so full of emotion she couldn’t begin to untangle where his began and hers ended.

  She twined herself around him, the electricity in his hair making her fingers tingle where she ran her hand across the nape of his neck. She held his shoulder tight with her other hand, unsure if he might shove her away.

  Her whole body was buzzing with sensation, telling her how right this was, her lips pressed against his, his hand warm and firm against the small of her back.

  Her nerves were raw, her whole body shaking by the time Sebastian pulled back, a dark expression covering his face.

  “This isn’t going to take you away from me,” he growled fiercely, rubbing his check against hers. “I was right when I told Heath that Sophia’s powers would never leave her, and I’m right about this. Gris-Gris will find a way to stop the aging process. You’re going to live another thousand years.”

  She would have given anything for him to be right, but magic didn’t follow a werewolf’s logic. Magic, powered by the energy that animated Gris-Gris and existed in all witches in certain levels, was bound by finite rules. One of them concerned the human body: what could be done to the body couldn’t be undone. Witches’ magic could appear to reverse aging in mortal women, yet in truth it only blurred the “imperfections” created with age.