by, holding a sleeping baby in her arms. I feel a little tug on my heart, knowing that could be me next year.
Or it could very well not be, because I still have no idea what’s in store for me, let alone this baby. The logical part of my brain tells me not to get attached, but I can’t not feel some sort of bond already, especially now that Lucas said he heard the heart beating.
“Finally!” Kristy beams when she sees me. “What took so long?”
I glance at Ruby. “We kind of ran into some unscheduled demon killing.”
“What?” Evander and Kristy ask at the same time.
“Scrapper demons,” I reply quietly and take a seat next to Kristy. Ruby sits across from me, face paling a bit from thinking about the demons. She acted fast and kept her shit together, but she’s not used to fighting demons like I am.
“Have you—”
“Yes,” I interrupt Evander. “We already alerted the council members at the door.”
“Scrappers follow others,” Naomi says what we’re all thinking.
“I know.” I unwrap my silverware from the blood-red cloth napkin and reach for the bowl of mashed potatoes. The entire great hall is set with the colors of black and red, traditional for the Feast of the Blood Moon, of course. Most everyone here are wearing similar colors as well. “We found three drunk kids in the woods, and one had a nasty bite wound on his leg. He said a werewolf bit him.” I plop a big spoonful of mashed potatoes on my plate, doing my best not to eye the decanter of red wine on the center of the table.
“Werewolves? In Thorne Hill?” Evander shakes his head. “Impossible.”
“We thought vampires moving to Thorne Hill was impossible too,” Ruby counters. “And two live here now.”
I put the spoon back in the bowl of potatoes and grab the gravy. “Something attacked that kid. I had Binx do a sweep of the woods and he didn’t find anything nearby. And it wasn’t Scarlet,” I add in case anyone else was thinking what Ruby was thinking. “It’s not possible for her to transform unless someone with angel blood takes her collar off, and Julian is busy on a mission and my dad is, well, MIA—again.”
Though Lucifer is very much here. The bad feeling rises inside me again, and I load my plate with way too much food to make myself feel better. I can’t drink away my problems, but I can at least eat. I hate keeping anything from my friends, but now isn’t the time or place to drop that kind of bomb on them.
“What now?” Nicole asks and I realize all my friends are looking at me.
“We eat,” I say and stick my fork into my food. “And celebrate the feast. If something was out there, it’s not anymore. I’ll have my familiars do another check before I go to bed tonight to be sure. But if werewolves are out there, they’ll make their presence known sooner rather than later.”
Historically, witches and weres get along just fine. Occasionally, you come across an alpha who wants to try and prove they’re just as strong as we are, but all it takes is one little spell to put them in their place.
And that, of course, doesn’t go over well.
But you just can’t compete with magic, as we proved a thousand years ago when the vampires tried taking on all of the witches and warlocks. If werewolves were to have a natural enemy, I suppose it might have been vampires at one time.
Both vampires and werewolves have increased speed and superhuman strength. But vampires are dead, giving them an advantage over weres in many areas. Vampires drink human blood and werewolves—in their wolf form—eat flesh and muscle, making them not in direct competition with each other. For the most part, they leave each other alone with the random battle-of-strength type of fights thrown in there.
Usually, the vampires win. That whole instant healing thing really comes in handy when your opponent can pull your flesh off your bones with their teeth in just seconds.
But as far as enemies go, the one thing witches, werewolves, and vampires can all agree on is our hatred for hunters. We’ve been persecuted, shot, hunted, and burned. Werewolves, like witches, are born with their powers. You can’t get bitten and turned into a werewolf, just like you can’t have a spell cast over you to become a witch.
There are rumors some packs are rather inbred as a way to