Wolves at the Door - Lidiya Foxglove Page 0,1

feared they might be the other buyers who tried to swoop in, especially after I caught Caleb sneaking around the last flip trying to steal my newfound treasure.

“You two! What the hell? We’re about to settle!” I said.

“Noo, no, babe,” Kiersten said. “I’m sorry, but we were totally still in the fight. When I last talked to Blanche we were at one-eighty and Caleb and I said we were going to come and check the place out in person, but she’s an old lady and I think she just got confused or something. I just got off the phone with her. We’re offering two-twenty.”

If I had my truck and all my tools I think I would have snatched a shovel out of the back and come at her. She was giving me that blinding smile of hers, knowing she was punching me in the gut.

Something was very fishy here.

This was the second time the woman who inherited the house promised it to us and then abruptly changed her mind. It wasn’t a huge leap for me to guess that a spell was at work. Blanche Greenwood wanted to sell to us.

“You’re playing dirty,” I said.

“All’s fair in this business,” Kiersten said. Ooh, she was shameless. I had to admire that.

“I’m sorry,” Caleb said. “But have you seen the house yet?”

“I just got off the plane.”

“It’s going to be a hellish project.”

“But you want to buy it?”

“Because it has my lovely wife’s name written on it.” He squeezed her shoulders. She was wearing a sleeveless sundress with her cleavage front and center and a fit and flare, 1950s style skirt, in a shade of pale yellow that showed off her California tan. Not that I wanted a tan. She would look old and wrinkled someday. Not that I cared. Anyway, I wasn’t so much jealous of Kiersten’s appearance as just that she always seemed to have everything so together while I was basically homeless and barely scraping by.

“It’s a gorgeous house,” Kiersten said. “I don’t think it’s even your type. Aren’t you more of a gloomy haunted northern house sort of girl? Come over for a tour and you’ll see.”

Come over for a tour? There could have been steam coming out of my ears. “It isn’t yours yet,” I said.

I heard another vehicle coming down the relatively secluded road to the title agency’s offices, which were shared by a dentist that had already closed for the day. I expected Graham’s rental car, and I was relieved to have back up.

Instead, another truck appeared and a petite redhead flung herself out of the door of the shiny red pick-up. My eyes widened.

Her eyes narrowed.

“Oh. Helena,” Billie said. “Now just what are you doing down here on my turf?”

“Maybe you should ask the Californians,” I said. “Apparently, it’s their house.”

The other competitor had arrived, and unfortunately it was the one witch who hated me, and the one witch who had reason to hate me.

Chapter Two

Helena

Billie Pruitt was a girl whose name marked her the same way ‘Helena von Habsburg Nicolescu’ marked me, only in the opposite sort of way. She was a nobody, I was a somebody. Just, by default. She attended the same high school as me, one of a handful of kids at my elite boarding school who had received a scholarship. Naively, I made friends with her. We both shared an interest in unladylike subjects. It didn’t last long.

The other girls quickly reminded me that I was a society witch and Billie was a bumpkin. Her family was dirt under our shoes. Within weeks everyone called her “Hill Billie” although she was not actually from the hills. For me to be nice to her would have been social suicide, at school and at home. After all, I had two older sisters in the very same school. There was no escape.

I knew we were in the same line of work, but she ranged no farther north than Georgia and we had never met on the field of battle.

Now our eyes met with all the conflicting emotions of high school, which were the worst emotions to confront when I had important work to do.

“Hi, I’m Kiersten.” Kiersten held out a hand. “I’m sure we haven’t met yet.”

“You’re buying the house?” Billie said. “Oh, no. I want that house. I just spoke to Mrs. Greenwood.”

Mrs. Greenwood could really use a real estate agent so she stops giving everyone different stories, I thought. But she was an eighty-five-year-old witch who was possibly being manipulated