myself with photos of all the fetters, but I’d never seen mandragora in person until now. I’d certainly never worked with it. I didn’t have to: mandragora was the herb used to mimic boundary magic. If you weren’t a boundary witch but you wanted to fuck around with life and death, that was your key ingredient.
And I was looking at a whole patch of it.
“Fuck,” I whispered, standing up and stepping carefully away as though it were poison oak. What was it doing on Beau’s property? Did he know? It seemed awfully unlikely that he knew this was here and hadn’t mentioned it while we were discussing the Unsettled.
“Tobias,” I said unsteadily. “I’m going to need you to change back so we can talk. Do you think you can do that?”
The werewolf looked at me and opened and closed his mouth several times, miming chewing. “You’ll need to eat for energy,” I said, nodding. “Got it. I’ll put your clothes in the yard and go raid the fridge, okay?”
I circled back to the driveway, retrieved Tobias’s clothes from the car, and left them in a pile in the backyard, averting my eyes from the tree line. No one had ever specifically said it, but werewolves definitely seemed to prefer privacy when they changed.
I went back around the front so I could warn Milburn. Sometimes werewolves cried out with the pain of changing, and I didn’t want him to come investigate.
The vampire opened the door for me again, quickly accepting my explanation about Tobias’s change. When I asked about food, however, his brow furrowed. “I have no idea,” he said, gesturing vaguely toward the back of the building. “But you’re welcome to check the kitchen. The daytime staff uses it for their food, and to prepare meals for Odessa and the night grooms. I’ll be in the study if you need something else.”
I’d never actually gotten a tour, but I wandered until I found a door that led into a small room with cupboards filled with dishes. This was probably where prepared food was laid out before it was served. A door at the back of the little room led into a surprisingly modern kitchen, all gleaming stainless steel and marble countertops. I found the fridge and pulled it open.
There were a number of cartons labeled with names, which I figured belonged to the daytime staff. There also were plenty of carrots and apples, possibly for horse treats, and some cold cuts in a drawer. I found a loaf of bread in an actual bread box on the counter, and grabbed what looked like half a pound of turkey and half a pound of ham from the fridge, carrying everything back to the grand foyer. Underneath the fancy staircase, there was a second exterior door that led to a screened-in porch and the backyard.
I didn’t know if Tobias would want to actually make sandwiches or just inhale the food as it was, so I left the bags on the porch steps and went back inside to wait.
A few minutes crawled by, and I found myself pacing on the pretty black-and-white tiles, trying to figure out what the hell mandragora was doing in Beau’s backyard. It wasn’t exactly native to this climate, so somebody had gone out of their way to plant the patch and tend to it. Without any vampires noticing.
I thought about the placement of Odessa’s parlor windows and the dining room windows. Neither faced that spot at the edge of the woods. So it was possible that no one could see the mandragora from the house, but that didn’t really explain the location. It would have made more sense to hide the plants in the woods between the manor and the barn. No one would notice someone coming and going to—
The front door opened and I jumped, startled out of my reverie. Beau entered the foyer so quietly that I wouldn’t have noticed if I’d been facing the opposite direction.
He saw my startled expression and said quickly, “Odessa?”
“Fine,” I assured him, straightening my shoulders. “She and Whitney are up in her room.”
“Thank God,” Beau said, his shoulders slumping.
At that moment the office door opened and Milburn hurried out to see Beau, who just gave him a long look, resting one hand on his shoulder. Milburn put his own arm around Beau, so they were giving each other an awkward one-armed hug. It should have looked silly, but their faces were anguished.
I let a long moment of silence pass, until