Her Mistletoe Wolf: A Holiday Romance (Witches and Shifters: Abbott Coven) by Lucy Piper

Author:Lucy Piper [Piper, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-12-13T16:00:00+00:00

9

BEFORE

“I got them!” Bitsy said as she waved a canvas bag around her head and hitched her son Joe higher on her hip.

Andria quailed. Bitsy had announced she’d discovered an even more powerful charm. Hers was an extremely valuable skill, but magic was a great deal more chaotic than her sister could ever acknowledge, and sometimes the effects were unexpected. Andria’s talent, especially the gap between what she thought she was Seeing and what happened, gave her a much higher awareness of her own hubris.

“Fool girl,” Granny Francis said beside her. They were seated on the back porch of the family home, a house built thirty years ago a few streets over from the store. It was set on an acre of land, though her mother was thinking of selling off pieces of it. A few neighbors had filled in their large lots with denser housing.

Andria thought it was a mistake to sell. If the coven was going to grow, they needed more housing, not less. At the moment, Bitsy, her husband, and Joe lived in the basement. Andria lived upstairs with her mother and Granny Francis. Sam and her husband had just settled in a tiny cabin out of town. It was still mortgaged to the hilt, but they were all paying it down. Sam was slowly transforming a field into the coven garden.

“Fool girl,” Francis said again as Bitsy put Joe down and he promptly bolted off the porch and into the woods.

“He’ll be fine,” she said, patting her grandmother’s ancient, wrinkled hand.

Would she ever be that old? If she was lucky, she would get there, and what a thing to wish for.

Carefully, Bitsy peeled back the canvas to reveal a pile of beads.

“What are those?” Andria asked.

Bitsy picked through them and handed her a blue circle of small glass beads in a zigzag pattern. Something in Andria’s system dropped.

“Careful,” her sister said.

“What are these?” Andria asked again. She didn’t like them. Whatever this was, it felt wrong.

Her mother slid open the sliding glass door to the back porch and came out clutching a stack of order sheets from the restaurant.

“Oh good, are they ready?” she asked.

Bitsy nodded and picked a dark red one for her mother.

“They’re wards,” Bitsy said proudly. She pointed to the necklace Andria had around her neck. “That’s just a basic protection spell compared to this.”

Fascinated, Andria picked hers up again. She’d heard of personal wards, but she’d always assumed there was something fundamentally different between them and the complicated spells that lay keep-out signs at the edge of the territory.

“So if another witch comes near me, they bounce off at ten feet?” she asked.

“Fool girl,” Francis muttered again.

Andria patted the old woman’s hand, unsure which girl she was referring to or maybe all of her offspring taken together.

“Nothing so dramatic,” Bitsy said. “That would take more power than any of us have. They’ll just not feel very comfortable. They’ll want to go away.”

Andria wanted to go away.

“Put it on!”

Maybe she was feeling the

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