Under Witch Curse (Moon Shadow Series) (7 page)

I went with the sneakers anyway because they were comfortable.

When the piles were pushed back into a semblance of unorganized, but out of the way mess, I stood to find White Feather watching me.

“You look good,” he said. His eyes traveled across my face.

Feeling self-conscious, I brushed one of the newly trimmed bangs away from my cheek.

“I need a dressier coat.” I fussed with the zipper, running it up and down. I didn’t own a dress coat.

He smiled, his green eyes sparking with mischief. He touched a strand of my hair. “You’re cute. Just the way you are.”

Did that mean he realized I had a new haircut and approved? Was it important that he noticed? Cute was cute. I smiled. Good enough for me.

We headed out.

Like my parents, White Feather’s mother lived in one of the older sections of Santa Fe. The short brown adobe house had an expansive front yard and a Spanish style middle section for gardening. In the old days, the center area might have been used for chickens, but White Feather’s mother kept her chickens in the winter-dormant outer yard. A rolling coop was tucked around the side of the house.

Since the chickens had snuggled down for the evening, White Feather shut the door and latched it for her.

I waited while he rolled it around the back.

The only magic around me was that of family and a very content Mother Earth. This home was a happy little pocket of soil where vegetables had grown and trees waited for spring. The porch was swept clean of cobwebs and dirt, but the concrete steps were cracked, a somewhat obvious add-on or perhaps replacement for older wooden steps.

White Feather joined me on the porch. “Dad has been gone since Tara was five. Gordon and I keep an eye on things. Mom will be glad to meet you.” His voice was filled with the guilt of a child who remembered his father every time he visited, and knew he could never fill the void.

I reached for his hand before realizing it would mean we’d end up walking in holding hands. Not that it mattered, but I wanted to make a positive first impression, not look like a clingy girlfriend.

White Feather ducked his head for a quick kiss.

My heart and face warmed. Resolutely, I stowed most of my nerves where they belonged, at least until he ushered me into the living room.

I stopped dead in my tracks. Three people waited off to the side, two of them seated at a long dining room table. The first person that registered was Mat’s boyfriend, Jim. His smug, somewhat sheepish expression grinned at me as though he had just finished laughing—at my expense.

“You have got to be kidding me.” The familiar golden skin, the handsome face...the resemblance to White Feather was there, although Jim was stockier, and his frank, honest eyes were obviously full of deceit. I grounded automatically, as though under attack. White Feather would have had to be dead magically to have missed the surge as I struggled to find my balance.

“What’s wrong?” White Feather asked.

It might not be an outright attack, but as far as I was concerned, the threat was real enough.

Jim’s smile widened at the shock on my face.

Tara giggled. She sat next to Jim, not resembling either brother. “Let me guess. My brother used a disguise on you, and you just figured it out.”

I had no time for her. Tara was a smart-mouthed teen, struggling to train a talent that she should have discovered five or six years earlier. It had taken my mother, myself and a lot of danger to tease it out from behind her attitude problem.

She smirked. “Don’t feel badly,” she said, obviously hoping I would. “He fools lots of people. Smarter people—”

White Feather made a noise that was a cross between a growl and a grunt. He floated a breeze across the table that was hard enough to shift a napkin in front of her face.

Tara stiffened with surprise and her lips locked shut, something she had only recently learned to do, but should have conquered when she was seven years old instead of eighteen.

“You played your part well,” I snapped. White Feather and I had met when he was operating undercover on a case for his cop brother, Gordon, the idiot sitting at the dinner table. I had never met him, not as Gordon. When I met Jim in Matilda’s shop, he was playing a successful engineer. I hadn’t known he was Gordon because he had completely failed to mention that he was a cop, related to White Feather, or was anyone but a doting boyfriend.

I had never made the connection. I was willing to bet my best friend hadn’t made the connection either, because she would have mentioned it.

Gordon, aka Jim, shrugged and gave a quiet, assured laugh. “No harm done.”

It was bad enough that he had chosen to spring his identity on me in front of a family gathering. Hurting for my friend over his deceit only made me escalate to furious that much faster. Mat didn’t know he was a cop. If he was using her to gain inside information into the magical underground, she was going to hit him with a spell that might blow up half the plaza.

He was lucky I wasn’t carrying any spells with firepower. Witches had a hard enough time trusting men; on top of the usual scum who discarded women carelessly, there were groupies, naysayers, and the worst of all, those who “wanted to see what it was like to be with a witch.” From Gordon’s smug attitude, it appeared that he was in a race to lock in a spot on the lowest part of the totem pole.

White Feather squeezed my fingers, his own tension ratcheting a notch. “Gordon, what are you up to now?” He switched his attention to me. “You haven’t met Gordon yet?”

I shook my head. “No, I only met Jim. Mat’s
boyfriend,
the impressive and successful engineer who has been spending a lot of time with her.”

“We’ve been at enough crime scenes...but I guess we’ve never actually run into him.” Light dawned on White Feather’s face as he sorted through the times I had had the opportunity to meet Gordon face-to-face. But it had never happened, and maybe someone in this room had been actively avoiding it.

Well, here went positive first impressions. I swallowed my desire to throw a firecracker spell in Gordon’s lap and said, “Twenty-four hours. If you don’t tell her, I will.”

That wiped the smile off his face. His eyes turned a darker brown, and he sat up straighter. “It’s none of your business.”

“She’s my best friend. I guarantee you it’s better if you let her down easy because when I tell her, I won’t sugar coat that you aren’t who you’ve been pretending to be.”

A breeze swirled in the air, a warning from White Feather. I tore my anger away from Gordon, my muscles clenched for a fight. If White Feather sided with his brother, I didn’t even have a home to escape to, not in the middle of vampire hours. But I wasn’t going to stand here and watch some guy smirk his way through dinner at the way he’d put one over on my best friend. I couldn’t blame White Feather for standing by his family, but what about Mat? She was as close to me as family, closer if you considered that my sister Kas and I barely spoke.

Before I could defend my decision, White Feather said, “Wait a minute. Mat doesn’t know him as Gordon?”

My finger jabbed the air in the direction of the dinner table. “I didn’t know him as Gordon either. If Mat had known, she’d have mentioned it. So far as she knows, he’s Jim. Not a cop. Not your brother. Just a guy who
cared
.”

“Hey, I do care!”

I whirled back to him. “Not enough to be honest with her,” I snarled.

White Feather tugged on my hand, probably to prevent me from launching myself over the table. “Gordon, are you out of your mind? You’ve been dating a witch for how long? And you didn’t tell her you were a cop? You
lied
about who you are to your girlfriend?”

Gordon’s eyes narrowed, but before he could respond, White Feather turned to me and said, “You might want to give him forty-eight hours. After we eat, he’ll have time to check in with work. If I were in his shoes, I’d clear my schedule.”

“Hey, whose side are you on, anyway? You know my job! Some of us don’t get to entice chicks with fancy magic. You could at least stand by your own brother here. I’ll tell Mat when I’m ready.”

My fingers cramped when White Feather’s grip tightened on mine. The ring on my left hand warmed even as the air swirled around it. “In case there was ever any doubt.” White Feather held up our linked hands. “Adriel’s mine. My family. Do what you have to do any way you see fit with your relationships, but mine is for life. Be happy she’s giving you twenty-four hours instead of marching over there right now, because if that’s what she decides to do, I’m going with her.”

I sucked in a breath and let it out slowly. As introductions went, that was putting the cards on the table. I had expected “This is Adriel,” or “Adriel, the witch I told you about.” My heart was beating fast, but his words tripped it with relief. A small spark of giddiness spread through me that was its own kind of magic. I tamped down on my anger, letting some of it drain into Mother Earth.

White Feather didn’t bother to employ a similar trick with the wind, at least not until his mother stepped away from the entrance to the kitchen, breaking the stare between the brothers.

“Welcome to the family,” she said. “I hope you like enchiladas, and I hope you like things hot. This family doesn’t do cold chile or cold anything else.” She set down a bread basket and approached us. When she clasped my free hand, she felt the ring White Feather had given me.

The diamond sparkled up at her. She smiled and winked at White Feather. She released my hand and hugged White Feather. Her black hair, mostly gray on the top, wound down her back in a single braid that was still black on the latter third.

White Feather had to lean way over to embrace his mother.

As soon as she stepped back she said to me, “Ignore any food you don’t like and eat what you do. My son tells me you are of the earth.” She inhaled deeply as though she might be able to smell me. “That is good.”

She touched my arm and guided me to a chair, leaving White Feather to follow. “Sage bread for appetizer?”

My hand might have been a bit shaky from residual anger as I helped myself to a slice from the woven basket.

There was a long silence before Tara finally broke it with her own concerns. “How is Lynx?”

I chewed on a bite of warm bread. Even in my current state my taste buds declared the bread a slice of heaven. “Lynx? He’s fine. I’ll tell him you asked after him.”

Her face blanched. “I don’t think it will do much good. I have about as much luck with relationships as Gordon.”

Gordon didn’t have his head down, not exactly, but he was intent on buttering his bread. His intense concentration was warranted even without the family spat. The bread tasted of baking in a stone oven; crisp crust, wonderfully soft center. I followed his example and focused on eating. It wasn’t hard to compliment the blue corn enchiladas or the cheesy pan-sauteed zucchini.

For the rest of the evening we all behaved, but the event could only be considered a qualified success. No one died and there were no actual fist fights. I didn’t set off any spells, and if Gordon had any, he kept them quiescent.

I fully intended to follow through with my threat to tell Mat, and everyone knew it. That fact kept Gordon appropriately preoccupied. Before we left, I would have suggested Gordon have fire engines in the area to put out the fire that was likely to ignite across his head when he told Mat, but Tara distracted me when she handed me a note.

“For Lynx,” she whispered. “I spelled it. You won’t be able to read it.”

“Do you want me to try?”

She started to reply and then stopped, warring with her desire to know if I could beat her magic.

I laughed. “Don’t worry. I won’t.”

White Feather’s mother hugged us both and sent us home with leftovers.

On the way back to White Feather’s house, he asked, “Were you ever mad that when we met, I pretended to be someone else?”

“We weren’t dating. We were business associates protecting our identity, and we both used disguises. We both knew they were disguises. Your brother met Mat in a social context and kept it that way. What is he trying to hide?”

White Feather was silent for a while. “A lot of women don’t like cops.”

“And a lot of them do.”

“Some women don’t like...warlocks. He might have done it to protect me. Or hide it from her. He’s done that before.”

“Mat is a witch. She’s an
obvious
, never even been in the closet, witch. She’s met you. What’s to hide?”

He chewed on that for a while. When we pulled into his driveway he said, “If he’s been using her to investigate some case or other, I might have to kick his ass myself.”

“You can get in line, but if that’s what he was doing, after Mat gets done with him, there’s isn’t going to be much left to kick.” And if she didn’t finish the job for some reason, I would.

Chapter 10

Pounding on the front door early the next morning—very early—had me rolling across the expanse of the king bed, reaching blindly for my silver dagger. White Feather jumped into his pants before I found my weapon.

His ability to explore with wind filled in the cracks between the knocking. “It’s your dad,” he sputtered.

It took a moment to register. “Moonlight madness!” I relaxed my grip on the sheath and sat back on the bed, blinking blearily.

White Feather finished pulling on a tee shirt, and only then noticed my stupor. “Isn’t there an emergency?”

I hadn’t even started searching for my clothes. Around a yawn, I shook my head. “Not necessarily. Dad gets up early.”

“And visits? It’s 5 a.m.!”

My brain was too befuddled to explain. I nabbed a sweater and jeans from the pile on the floor and stumbled along behind White Feather to the front door.

It was an effort to discern which of the two very large men at our front door was Dad. “Dad, it’s five in the morning!” It was also freezing out. “Come in. Or let me get my coat. Is Mom okay?”

White Feather retreated behind me, allowing everyone to crowd into the foyer.