Page 19 of Bound to the Wolf
Delainey shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. I don’t think he’ll bite. You can sneak out before he sees you.”
Serena still looked torn, but then her smartwatch beeped at her and she made an angry face and hurried out the back door in a desperate rush to get to class on time. The screen door banged shut behind her, and through the kitchen window Delainey saw her jog across the gravel to her car, still tying her hair back with one hand as she went.
Not a minute later, Elise came down the stairs and cocked her head, listening to the voices in the hallway. Aya must have been at work, or she would have joined in on the excitement.
With her parents gone, Elise had stayed at the coven for the last two nights, probably reinforcing thatthiswas her home and that she had not officially moved in with her boyfriend.
Delainey hadn’t mentioned the sage she had seen Elise waving around, trying to cleanse the place of the bad vibes that her parents had left behind. She couldn’t blame her. She had been waving a bit of sage of her own.
“What’s going on?” Elise asked. “Who’s here?” She stood at the foot of the stairs in an oversized hoodie that hung past her wrists. She looked worried, but not too worried—she must have realized that whoever was at the front door, it couldn’t be her parents.
Delainey didn’t think they would be coming back anytime soon after the disaster that was their dinner together.
“Elise,” a male voice called from the front hallway. “Is that who I hear?”
Elise’s eyes went wide, and a smile bloomed over her face. “Emerson?” She rushed past Delainey and joined Briana in the front entrance.
Delainey reluctantly trailed after them.
Emerson had made it fully inside the house and put his stuff down. His overnight bag sat against the baseboard beneath therow of coat hooks, and the smaller tote was open at his feet, the tops of tissue-wrapped objects visible inside. He was already pulling something out of it.
Bracelets with charms on them. Hospitality gifts.
Oh fuck.
“I’m sorry it’s last minute,” Emerson said. He held the bracelets fanned out across his open palm like a hand of cards, each one a thin braided cord with a small glass bead at the clasp. “Some funding opened up at the university and I couldn’t say no to the opportunity to come and do a little bit of work here. I totally understand if you don’t have the space or something, but I wanted to come and say hi either way.” He held out a bracelet toward Briana. “It’s just a charm for mental clarity—and it should help with your headaches,” he mentioned. “I’ve been working on some research in that area. I think I might have a treatment for migraines in a year or two.”
Briana took the charm and slid it on her wrist. “Of course we have space for you,” she said, turning the bracelet once so the bead sat against the inside of her wrist.
Why she offered this without checking in with the rest of the coven was a mystery to Delainey.
Did Briana not remember how things ended with Emerson? Did she think this was Emerson’s nice twin or something?
Had Briana forgotten that they had just evicted some unwanted guests from the Wallace Grove coven and had no reason to involve someone else from that coven in their business?
“Let’s get some coffee,” Briana said. “Come on.” She led all of them down the hall to the kitchen, and Emerson handed charms to both Delainey and Elise, then offered two more to Briana, asking her to give them to the rest of the coven with his compliments.
Delainey tried to bite back her scowl.
Just because Emerson was from Wallace Grove didn’t mean he was evil, she tried to tell herself as she jabbed the bracelet into the pocket of her pajama pants. Elise’s parents could suck without implicating the hundreds of other people in their coven. That was how life normally worked, and she wasn’t even sure that Emerson had much of a relationship with the Nevins. She couldn’t remember from back when he had been dating Briana—but then again, Elise hadn’t yet joined their coven back then, so why would she know that?
But the timing of this was suspect.
They had just kicked Elise’s parents out of the house, and now a completely different Wallace Grove coven member was on their doorstep asking for hospitality.
Elise and Briana were talking to him like he was an old friend.
Delainey just held on to her coffee mug for dear life and tried to count down the seconds before she could make up some sort of definitely real freelance website emergency and escape back to her room.
The kitchen was warm and bright from the late-morning sun pouring through the window over the sink, and the fresh pot of coffee Briana had made filled the room with its dark, bitter smell, mixing with the ever-present sage and lavender that clung to the walls.
Elise drifted over to her. “Is something wrong?” She leaned a hip against the counter next to Delainey, wrapping both hands around her own mug.
“I don’t like his sudden appearance,” Delainey admitted, keeping her voice as quiet as possible and hoping it didn’t carry over the seven feet to Emerson, who seemed completely engrossed in conversation with Briana.
“The timing’s a little weird,” Elise conceded. “But stuff like this happens, and I can guarantee you he’s not going to be as bad as my parents were.”
“It’s weird that Briana’s being this cool right now,” Delainey told her. “We had to put up defensive spells to keep Emerson away last time when they broke up. It wasnotpretty.”
