Page 43 of Fat Enemy Mate

I remind myself that she’s not sitting in my cabin because she chose it. She’s here because the rogues were hunting her down, and I insisted she come here; I wouldn’t have let her go. She had no choice. When this is over, she’ll go back to her humans and her life. I doubt she’ll look back.

She looks up and smiles when she sees me.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hey,” I reply.

“How was the meeting?”

“Fine. Nothing new on the rogues. I’m back on the ridge from Wednesday.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?” she says. She watches me for a second. “You sure there’s nothing else?”

“Yeah,” I tell her. “Just a long meeting. You want some food?”

She nods and puts the book down as I head through to the kitchen. “I’ll give you a hand,” she says as we begin moving around the kitchen in a way that has become increasingly familiar over the last couple of days.

I can’t help mulling the whole thing over as I chop the vegetables I picked up before the meeting. The damn lottery has a lot to answer for. I never even wanted to go, never wanted to throw my name in the hat, and yet it selected me with nothing to offer, and now it’s left this thing hanging over me. I glance at Lara, who seems oblivious as she sets the table, and wonder what she would think of it all—even the lottery itself would probably seem too much like a shifter thing for her to stomach. As Amelia pointed out, Lara is a human, and they don’t suffer the bond as we do. She can just leave, but if I’m honest, I can already feel the tendrils of something like a bond wrappingaround my wolf. If Lara leaves, she could really damage my wolf if I let this go further, and if she stays, my wolf could hurt her in mating if the lottery magic is unstable.

I put the stew on to simmer and tell Lara I’m going to bring in more wood from the store. Really, I just need to get outside for a minute. As soon as the door slams behind me, I lean against the rail of the porch and look out at the familiar treeline that has been the one constant in my life, feeling like I just want to go back to the steady consistency I’d built before the lottery, before Lara. But my wolf laughs at the suggestion because he’s decided that he wants the burn of the magic and the woman. I glance through the glass pane and spot Lara moving around my kitchen as though she belongs, and that feels like a visual of everything Amelia was warning me about.

Wanting what I can’t have and what my wolf might do if he doesn’t get it.

Chapter 20 - Lara

The pack hall is the busiest place I've been to since I came down off the mountain. If I thought the alpha’s house was busy after the meeting, it has nothing on this. It’s obviously the hub of the entire pack with people coming in and out, deliveries arriving, and kids running past the door on their way to and from the nursery that’s attached to the side of the building. Wilf reckons it's just a normal Wednesday morning in Silvercreek, but it feels livelier than I was expecting—though I don’t know what I expected, not really. Anya is sitting across the table from me with both her hands cupped around her coffee and a smile on her face that I want to like more than I actually do.

That’s not true; I do like her. She's pretty in a way that witches often are; her stunning dark red hair is pinned up, and silver rings on most of her fingers, with a voice that makes you lean toward her without realizing you’re even doing it. She's been talking for about twenty minutes, and I've understood maybe half of it. The other half is full of pure magic terminology, and Luna keeps gently translating. I appreciate the translation. But I don't appreciate the growing feeling that Anya is carefully choosing what she says.

"So you don't know what it is," I finally ask.

"I know what it isn't," Anya tells me. "It's not the kind of magic I deal with. It's not anything in the books I grew up with. I know the general mechanics of it, but it overlaps with dark magic, which is ironic because I feel like it was built off protective intentions."

"Right," I say.

"Lara," Anya goes on, "I just don’t want to give you any false information before I’m sure. But the strongest read I'mgetting off you is that this isn't something you developed all by yourself. This is something that was placed on you, very young. A protection spell. Old, powerful, and made specifically for you."

I sit with that for a moment, feeling my cheeks burn for reasons I don’t understand.

"Placed on me," I repeat.

"That's what it feels like to me," Anya says. "It reads as magic that's been sitting with you since childhood. It was probably placed on you before you were old enough to ask questions. A parent, most likely. Or a grandparent? Someone who loved you enough to find a witch who could do this kind of thing, which would not have been easy."

"My mother died when I was four," I tell her. "I don't really remember her. My father never said anything about a… a spell, or a witch. He wasn't religious or into any of the crafts, except for the wards in the huts he maintained. He wasn't into anything like that."

"Maybe he didn't know," Anya offers gently.

"He might not have known," I agree. "I think he would have told me if he’d known. He wanted me to be safe, so he would have told me how to use this? Perhaps my mother did it, but I don’t know why I wouldn’t have known about it if she had."

"Some folk can be funny about magic. Perhaps she didn’t want anyone to know. Anyway, we don’t need to know the why, just the how," Anya tells me. "I'm going back to my coven this afternoon. I'm going to look into protection spells of the kind that fit with what I felt today. Specifically, the ones strong enough to override shifter compulsion, because that narrows it considerably. I have sisters with far greater knowledge who may be able to shed some light, and I'll be in touch with Luna when I've got something."

"How long?" I ask.

"I don't know," Anya admits. "If it's in our books, days. If it's not, longer. I know it’s important. All I would say is that be careful when you use it, like in the garden. Even if you didn’t feel it, it’s going to cost you something whenever you do. Your energy, your reserves. Mafic like this is never free."

"Okay," I say, because I don't know what else to say to a woman telling me that my dead mother might have paid a witch to put magic on me when I was a baby, and it might drain me somehow whenever I use it.

“Sorry, I couldn’t give you anything more definitive,” she says.