Walker, and all three witches stared at Holly in blank shock. She didn’t need a human brain to understand the sheer, stupid horror written all over their faces.
They saw her. They saw her as she was now. They saw her like a bear, and this was how they reacted. They weren’t happy about it. They weren’t overjoyed that now she was one of them—far from it. This was the worst disaster imaginable to them, the people she loved and trusted most in the world.
Out of the distance, Trevor roused himself. He strode to the couch and sliced his finger at the two visitors. “You two get the fuck out of here. Don’t ever let me see your faces anywhere within a hundred miles of Silver Spruce again. Tell your father not to try another stunt like this again, or we’ll be mounting an attack of our own on Golden Oak. I don’t need to tell you how many of the clans will support us. The Braxtons aren’t exactly surrounded by friends there. Now get out of here.”
Audrey tried to pick up her gun, but Trevor smacked it out of her hand. It clattered onto the floor, and the two intruders made tracks. They scurried for the deck and vanished into the trees heading overland toward the west.
The instant they disappeared, Trevor’s shoulders slumped. He rotated around and eyed Holly—and not in a nice way.
Hattie broke the ominous silence by murmuring under her breath. “Dear God, just look at her!”
“When did this happen?” Johnny breathed.
Garret shifted back into a man. That was another set of perfectly good clothes ruined. He faced Holly and answered over his shoulder without turning around. “Just now. We were running around outside and…it just happened. We were heading for The Stones, but we were nowhere near them. We were miles away, so it wasn’t that.” He jerked sideways and raised his eyebrow at Johnny. “Are you telling me you didn’t know about this? You didn’t detect it?”
Susanna answered for him. “No, nothing. I can’t pick up anything unusual about her. She’s reading as a regular human woman. She’s pregnant with a shifter baby, though. That’s the only thing I can read about her.”
Garret frowned at Holly. She should get offended that they were talking about her like some kind of overgrown science experiment, but she couldn’t. Part of her wanted them to fix this, to take it away from her.
Under their inspection, she recognized for the first time how unnatural this was. This shouldn’t be happening to her. As wonderful and invigorating as it felt, it was all wrong at a cellular level.
Johnny stepped around Garret and faced Holly. He caressed her with his eyes—her fur, her teeth, her rounded ears, her turned-in feet, and her curved claws. He saw her as she truly was, but he loved her. She saw that shining in his eyes the same as ever.
He put out his hand to her, but he hesitated to touch her. His fingers hovered within inches of her fur until she relaxed into the idea of his touching her like this. Only then did he let his hand fall on her shoulder.
He combed his fingers through her hair and whispered low, “You can come back now. They’re gone. You can come back. You’re all right. We’re here. No one will bother you.”
Without meaning to, her bearskin dropped away. She immediately wrapped her arms around her naked body to cover herself. She didn’t feel the full shame of what she’d done until she returned to human consciousness, with all of them staring at her.
Garret swiveled around Johnny even though he was buck naked, too. He scooped up a blanket from the couch and held it out to Holly. Without a word, he wrapped it around her and steered her to sit down where the strangers just were.
Edwina sat down next to her and rested her hand on Holly’s knee. “Don’t worry about this. It isn’t dangerous to you or the baby.”
Holly stared up into Edwina’s unnaturally green eyes. “Are you sure you can’t tell? I thought you guys would have been able to pick this up right away.”
“There is a limit to our power,” Hattie told her. “Maybe, like Garret said, it just happened now. Maybe it wasn’t there for us to pick it up until the moment it happened. We’ll probably never know, but Susanna is right. We still can’t detect it even when you’re sitting right in front of us. You look perfectly normal