What can we do?We have no Alpha.We have Silas, a sixty-three-year-old plant whisperer.We’re guests on Shadowpine land, and whether or not we’re actually under Kieran Holt’s protection is a question I’ve been increasingly afraid to ask.
I need to fix this.I just have no idea how.
A hand taps my shoulder and I spin around and make a noise like someone stepped on a squeaky toy.
Silas withdraws his hand and raises his eyebrows at me.“Why are you so jumpy lately?”
“Too much caffeine,” I say, and follow them into the bakery.
* * *
Magnolia’s Bakery smells like brown butter and vanilla and cinnamon.The cases are full — loaves of bread, fruit tarts, little pots of jam, rows of cookies and swirly pastries.
Dorcas and Coral have gone straight for the bread.Danny is studying the menu board with his brow furrowed.Silas is talking to the man at the register.
I drift toward the pastry case at the back and nearly walk into a woman coming around the corner with a tray.
“Henrietta Frost,” she says, and puts the tray down and hugs me before I’ve fully processed who she is.
Elmira.She ran the baking cooperative on Moonstone land when I was small, and apparently she’s here now, flour on her apron and everything.She’s shorter than I remember, which probably just means I grew.
“Elmira.”I hug her back.“I didn’t know you worked here!”
“Three years now.”She beams at me.“Look at you.So good to see you again!”
“Do you still have my favorite pastry?”I ask.I look past her at the case, and there they are.Third shelf, little paper cups, glossy chocolate tops.
“There are those mini chocolate cream pies you were always making too many of,” I say delightedly.
Elmira gives me a funny look.
Just a small one.A fraction of a second.
“What?”I ask.
“We weren’t making too many of them,” she says.“Andrew paid for them.Told us to say that.”A pause.“Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.”
She pats my arm and disappears back toward the kitchen.
I stand in front of the pastry case and don’t move for a moment.
Mini chocolate cream pies.
I was nine years old, and I’d been wandering through the weekend farmer’s market when she popped out of her booth and told me they’d made too many chocolate cream pies and would I please take some off her hands.
I’d eaten four of them standing right there.
And then there was the time the woman at the farmer’s market gave me half a roasted chicken because her family couldn’t finish it.And the time the man came out of the diner, waved me over, pressed a paper bag into my hands and said it was an order somebody hadn’t picked up, and what a waste it would be to throw it out.And the time a girl I barely knew from the Moonstone pack showed up at the edge of our property with a casserole dish and a vague story about her mother cooking too much.
Over and over again, for years.
People just happened to have extra food.People just happened to find me specifically to give it to.
How could I not have noticed?It was Andrew all along.
Andrew, who was twelve years old and apparently running a covert operation to make sure the scrawny little Shadowpine girl didn’t go hungry.
Andrew, who I just snarled at in a particularly nasty fashion at the mere suggestion that maybe the idea of being mated to me isn’t the most horrifying idea ever.
