Page 103 of What The Hex (The Family Spells)
“Just … walk them around in the courtyard out back until they do their business,” I explained with a loose shrug. “They’re basically like dogs.”
“Your babies are like dogs?” Hex asked as the twins play-snarled at one another and began to wrestle, tangling their leashes together.
“Your babies now, too, cumwad. Take ‘em outside.” Caine pretended to be indifferent to the whole scene, waiting until a perplexed looking Hex disappeared before he stood up and gazed after him.
I offered him up a scathing look in response.
“Are you trying to help or trying to scare him off?” I asked, and my husband shrugged.
“Both?” he queried back, pulling out his phone and handing it to me. “If he can’t handle this, it’s better we know now, before the kids get attached to him.”
“They already like him,” Spectre explained, working on the incense display as Argent grabbed a broom and began sweeping the store. If we weren’t open, he could’ve used magic to sweep, but seeing as human customers brought in the most money, we tried to play nice.
I wondered briefly about the Christmas tree car people who saw the krampus get incinerated. Either they’d brush it off as a trick of the light or else the entire family would be in therapy for the remainder of their ridiculously short human lifespans.
“Our children were born of love and shared souls; they can sense the thread that binds the idiot to us.” Argent was frowning, despite the cuteness of his words. “Although I have never met him in any incarnation in all of my long life.”
“That doesn’t mean he wasn’t in a past one,” I explained, rubbing at the side of my head. “You know how reincarnation works; it’s pretty much luck of the draw. You may have met the three of us in our past lives, but that doesn’t Hex mean wasn’t our soulmate then either. He just wasn’t around.”
I stared down at Caine’s phone.
Well, fuck me runnin’, brother. We’d love it if you were here on Christmas. Anytime works. Mama goes all out for the holidays, you know. It’s basically fuckin’ Christmas from the day after Halloween to last day o’ January.
The text was from Caine’s brother, Abel. I know, I know. It’s very Biblical sounding, but these were werewolves. They didn’t practice any human religion. I’d say it was pure tongue in cheek that she’d named her sons after characters in the Bible (although she did add that extra E to the end of my husband’s name).
“You messaged your brother and not your mom?” I asked, lifting my head up from the screen. Caine turned a slow look on me and raised both brows. “She’s the alpha female of Citrine Sunrise, Caine.”
“Which means you need to call her,” he said, and I narrowed my eyes on him. Aha. I saw where this was going. He was right, by werewolf standards anyway. Witch standards, too, if I thought about it that way.
I did need to call Raeanne myself.
“Being the alpha female is tough work, ain’t it?” Caine slapped my ass as he passed by, just as my apprentice, Mahou, came in the front door. She was bundled up in a big red coat with real fur trim. Demon fur, actually. Whilst Coven Apothecary preferred to send demons back to Hael over killing them, we weren’t about to put our morals ahead of peoples’ lives. If a demon was hurting or killing people, they deserved what they had coming to them.
“Could you please not?” she asked with a sigh and a roll of her eyes. She placed several packages wrapped in brown paper on the counter. “Delivery guy dropped these outside instead of at the back door.” She paused and looked around. “Where’s the new guy?”
“Out back with the twins,” I said, finding Caine’s mother’s number in his contacts and struggling to make myself breathe through my anxiety. He had her labeled as Dear Sweet Mama Raeanne. “I’m about to call Caine’s mom.”
“Oh,” Mahou said, cringing and giving Spectre and Argent a look. “That sounds, um, like a terrible way to start off the winter season. Doesn’t Pack Citrine Sunrise hate their wolf sides?”
“They see it as a curse to be overcome rather than a gift from the earth,” Caine explained with a sigh, using both hands to sweep back his dirty blond hair. He rarely—if ever—looked stressed. Generally, he was outgoing and fun or pissed the fuck off. But this? The look on his face told me exactly how he felt about this endeavor.
Not only did his family not respect his witch side—ironic considering his mother was the one who’d had an affair with a male witch in the first place—but they didn’t even appreciate being werewolves.
Werewolves were one of the few Numinous species who actually originated from this world. Witches did not; faeries did not; demons did not. So for Pack Citrine Sunrise to deny their own heritage was absurd.
