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2
OAKLEE
My apartment wasn’t great. It was a loft apartment with a roof that leaked and a shower where the water ran cold sometimes for no reason, but it was mine. I’d bought it with the bit of cash that I’d managed to save up, away from my dad so he hadn’t been able to take it for his whores and his drugs.
The agent had told me it was a fixer-upper, which meant it was a piece of shit. She said the neighborhood was up-and-coming, which meant it had been down-and-going for a long time, and it wasn’t a very safe area, but it was better than sleeping on the streets.
Besides, I had one thing that others in this neighborhood didn’t have: protection.
My mom had been friends with an old fae woman—Augusta—who’d taught us a few small spells. Our fox magic was different than other magic—because we could sense magical signatures, Augusta had taught us to reapply them, to use the magic that existed somewhere and bend it to our will. It wasn’t something shifters could generally do, but I’d been able to get the hang of it when I was younger.
But then she died, and my world fell apart.
Since I’d only been fifteen when my mom passed away, and I hadn’t had any family I knew of, I’d been put into a foster system where, with the help of magic and fae, they’d found my dad.
When I’d gone to live with him, I’d fallen out of contact with Augusta. She’d just disappeared.
Living with my dad after that had been a special kind of hell, but I hadn’t gone unarmed.
I still had the spell she’d taught me, and although I wasn’t very powerful, and my shifter power wasn’t supposed to do that kind of magic, I could use some of it.
I could make it harder for others to find me, to trace my own magical signature. I could, in effect, hide from shifters. It was how I’d managed to always get away from my dad’s friends when they’d tried to hunt me down.
It was how I planned to hide here, too.
It wasn’t a foolproof plan. If they were powerful enough, they would be able to find me, but as long as I was here, without the safety of Jameson’s club when I wasn’t at work, I was hidden for the most part.
It was what I needed to hide from my dad, who would eventually come to look for me.
When I moved in my furniture, it was sparse. I had little to my name: a couch, an old box TV that somehow still worked despite the times, and a futon bed that fit into the small loft, accessible by a ladder. A bookcase for my books, an old fridge that hummed different tunes every night after it had been bumped around too many times during different moves with the one, two, three different owners who’d had it before me, and two suitcases filled with clothes and shoes.
Pallets stacked that served as a coffee table. A ratty rug I’d found in a dumpster and cleaned to within an inch of its life to fight off the winter cold in Montana for the short time I lived there. Here, it was more to make the place look like home than against the cold.
That was it. That was all I had.
When I’d arranged everything in my apartment, though, Ilovedit.
I’d never had a space I could just call my own, a space that belonged to me where I called the shots.
A space where I was safe.
After I was settled in, my phone pinged.
Tell me you’re back in LA.
I smiled at the phone and typed a reply.
I told you I was coming. You won’t get rid of me this time.
The reply was almost immediate.
Coffee?!
I laughed and typed a reply before I left my apartment and caught a bus to the bistro where we’d arranged to meet.
Nadia stood on the corner in front of the bistro, looking around like she was worried I wouldn’t arrive. When I walked to her, she squealed and grabbed me into a tight hug.
“I can’t believe you’re here!” she exclaimed. “It feels like forever since you left.”
