Change was coming.

  Lyric may have lost her magic years ago, but she still had her intuition. The question was what change was coming, and who would be changed?

  She sighed, thinking of Felicity, of the seventeen years she had been her mother. Lyric knew all too well there was no greater fear than those reserved for one’s children. Lyric had not carried Felicity in her womb, but she was her daughter, nonetheless.

  “What troubles you, my love?”

  Her husband, Lochlan, stepped behind her, slipping his arms around her waist while resting his chin on her shoulder. He planted a kiss in the delicate curve where her shoulder met her neck, resulting in a thrilling shiver.

  Lyric sighed. “Just thinking.”

  “Worrying, you mean.” Lochlan read her like a book. “Felicity is strong-willed, but she is smart and open-minded. She will accept all of this when the time comes.”

  It was true. Lyric was worried for Felicity, for what her daughter’s future would bring, but she couldn’t be certain the change she felt in the air was related to Felicity. In truth, it could have been any of them or any number of the friends they’d left behind two days after Felicity’s birth. But Lochlan was right. The closer Felicity came to coming of age, the more confusing her life would become.

  “I can feel her growing more and more powerful with each day that passes,” Lyric whispered. “Soon, she will grow stronger than the spell that protects her. What then?”

  Lochlan pulled her closer, planting another kiss on her throat. “Then, we will all sit down together—you, me, Felicity, and Lucinda—and we will tell her everything. Once she knows, she will remain here with us, still hidden, but safer in the truth.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Lyric conceded. “Still, I can’t help worrying about her. We were told she would be different, but things are getting more and more difficult for her here. Perhaps we were wrong to raise her in such a small, isolated place.”

  “The isolation is what keeps her safe,” Lochlan said. “The people here are not without their faults, but, as a whole, they are kind and well-meaning. Trust me, there is no family in Prosperity Glen I have not thoroughly vetted. And there is not one that could bring her harm without suffering the consequences.”

  “You’re right,” Lyric said, turning to him. “Of course, you’re right.”

  Lochlan had been by her side all these years, helping her to navigate the rocky waters of parenthood, and there was no one more skilled at keeping his family safe than he. Only days after Nan had taken Felicity from her true father, Lyric and Lochlan had moved in with them in an isolated cabin in these mountains Lyric had come to love. It wasn’t home, exactly, but it was the next best thing. She pecked Lochlan on the lips just as the bell to the front door chimed.

  “Afternoon, Lovebirds,” Nan said.

  She crossed the floor, her arms weighed down by two large bags—pokes, she called them. She plopped them down on the counter, the handles falling away to reveal the golden heads of Nan’s favorite autumn treasure.

  “Lucinda, you’ve been busy,” Lochlan remarked.

  “I decided I’d harvest the witch hazel today,” Nan said. “I thought I’d stay in the back this evening and distill the bark and leaves. It’s football season. That means the mothers will be in here before too long searching for something to treat all the bruises with.”

  “Wonderful,” Lyric said. “We could make some more of the men’s aftershave lotion, too. That always sells well around the holidays.”

  “Felicity can help me,” Nan said. “I spotted her a couple blocks away. She’s headed in this direction, looks like.”

  Lyric checked the clock, her heart stuttering forward. It was 3:25. She had been so preoccupied, she had lost track of the time. That explained all the traffic outside. The schools had let out.

  “Her progress report came in the post today,” Nan added. “She’s failing Algebra 2. That girl—I tell you what. She breezed through the first part of algebra. I don’t understand why the second part would result in such a drastic change.”

  Lyric smiled. “I am fairly certain it’s her motivation that’s lacking. She simply isn’t interested in mathematics. She has always been this way. If she loves it, she excels. If she doesn’t, she loses interest.”

  “Well, the failing grades won’t be any help to her when she’s trying to get into college,” Nan griped. “If I’ve told her once, I’ve told her a thousand times, but she just won’t get it through that thick skull of hers. She just so different from—”

  Lyric closed her eyes, fighting off a wave of emotion elicited by Nan’s allusion to Ivy, Lyric and Lochlan’s grown daughter, just as the bells on the doors jingled once more. Lyric bit back her words, as Felicity slipped inside. With dramatic flourish, she slung her backpack in the chair in the corner and groaned.

  “How was your day?” Lochlan asked, stepping away from Lyric. “Everything good at school?”

  He pulled Felicity into a one-armed hug and kissed her forehead.

  “Oh my God, Dad,” Felicity said. “We haven’t seen each other in, like, eight hours. It’s not like we’ve been separated for months.”

  “Forgive me,” Lochlan said, pulling her closer. “Sometimes I forget I’m not allowed to show any measure of affection to my teenage daughter.”

  Felicity stepped away and threw her hands up, as if in praise. “Finally, he gets it.”

  “Your father asked you how your day was,” Lyric said. “Are we still allowed to be interested in that?”

  She rolled her vivid blue eyes, still striking, despite their best efforts to tone them down so long ago.

  “Eh, you know,” she said with a dismissive wave, “the usual. Hours of teachers droning on and on about crap no one cares about while girls watch make-up tutorials on their phones, and boys pass pervy notes that make me want to bleach myself and light a match.”

  “Did that Seth Erwin text another vulgar picture?” Nan cut in. “I have half a mind to send that disgusting little worm an ill wish.”

  “Not that I wouldn’t enjoy seeing Seth get what he deserves, but I think I have enough social issues without you actually hexing my classmates.”

  Lochlan had grown still beside Lyric.

  Deathly still.

  So still that Lyric had to fight off flashes of a past life, a life best forgotten. She crossed the floor and took his hand, squeezing as tension crackled through the room. Even Felicity wasn’t immune to the lethal energy that rippled across the store. Despite her rejection of “Nan’s superstitions”, Felicity was very much in tune with her intuition and the energies of others.

  She cocked her head, meeting Lochlan’s eyes. “Dad, it’s no big deal, really. Seth and his leeches are total pervs, but it’s nothing I can’t handle. They’re morons, but they’re harmless.”

  Lyric took in her daughter, from her combat boots and skinny tartan pants that hugged her curvy figure to the black T-shirt that barely covered her midriff. Add her gorgeous blue eyes, flawless skin, and dark glossy hair to the package and Felicity was breathtaking. And she was no longer a little girl. She was a woman now, with all the allure of her birthright. Which meant what these boys were feeling and doing was far from harmless. Despite her efforts to stand apart and remain outside, Felicity was like the honey queen parading amongst the drones.

  “It begins with inappropriate comments,” Lochlan said through clenched teeth. “It escalates with pictures such as those you’ve described. Then, they start to crowd you, try to isolate you. These may seem like harmless jokes now, but rest assured, their goal is to put their hands on you, and that is no matter to brush off with the wave of your hand.”

  “Dad, I’m fine. I can take care of myself. It was just a stick figure drawing. It was nothing. Just a bunch of immature asshats being stupid.”

  Lochlan opened his mouth to speak again, but Lyric silenced him with a hard squeeze of his hand. There was no sense in scaring their daughter. Felicity could take care of herself, something she would discover sooner rather than later. If anyone ever harmed her in any way, Lochlan would likely kill them before they could even process the threat—if the protections they had placed on her the night of her birth didn’t beat him to it first.

  “Ooh, is that witch hazel?” Felicity asked, changing the subject. She walked over to the counter and ran her fingers across the golden heads that poked out from the bags.

  “It is,” Nan said. “I could use a hand with it if you want to help.”

  Felicity smiled, glancing back at Lyric and Lochlan. “I’m fine, you guys. I promise.”

  An overwhelming sense of sorrow pressed against Lyric like a cold blade. Secrets, it seemed, would be an inescapable necessity for as long as she lived, however long that might be. As Felicity followed Nan into the back room, Lochlan held out his arms, and Lyric was happy to step into his embrace, both worried for their fearless daughter.

  “I don’t like Seth Erwin,” Lochlan said. “I know his father, and there’s no respect for females in that family. He treats his wife like his property, rather than his partner. I’d wager Seth harasses Felicity because she does not bend to him.”

  “We have raised our daughter well,” Lyric said. “She is smart, independent, and headstrong. It is good she does not play the witless trophy to these obscene boys.”

  “I am as proud of our daughter as you, but being a strong female among boys who have been taught their whole lives that women should be submissive to them can also be very dangerous.”

  He sighed, shaking his head in frustration. “How can a world with access to so much information remain so antiquated in their beliefs? Though not many, there have been powerful female rulers in this world’s history. Why are the women here still so disrespected?”

  Lyric shook her head against Lochlan’s shoulder. In truth, she had been baffled by Lochlan’s observation since moving in with Nan so long ago. Here, every question could be answered with the press of a button or a voice command, yet the people remained ignorant of their own heritage and governments. Lyric blew out an uneven breath, staring once more out the front window at the creeping cars.

  Lochlan’s words had done nothing to soothe her unsettling premonition. She turned away from him and started pacing.

  “Did you feel it?” Lyric asked him. “The change in the air this morning?”

  “Aye,” Lochlan said. “I did. Like the air before a lightning storm.”

  Lyric opened her mouth to say more, but before she could give voice to her worries, the door chimed again, and this time, a small group of middle-aged women scattered, sampling Nan’s special blend of catnip tea and sniffing the different beeswax candles Lyric made and sold.

  Fighting off the unpleasant feeling, Lyric plastered on her most welcoming smile and crossed the room to assist her customers.

  Chapter 4

  Felicity measured out the distilled water, poured it into the large stock pot on the stove, and turned on the burner. Nan was being unusually quiet. She sighed, fighting the urge to roll her eyes. There was no point in delaying the inevitable.

  “I know progress reports came out today,” Felicity said, “so why don’t we just go ahead and get this lecture over with?”

  Nan gave her a wry look. “And you say you don’t believe in intuition. Seems to me you’re right perceptive when you take a notion.”

  “I’m failing algebra.”

  “So I saw,” Nan said. “Tell me something. How is it you are making straight As in all of your other classes, including Advanced Placement courses in English and History, yet you cannot pass general Algebra 2? You did fine in algebra last year.”

  “Honestly?” Felicity began. “The class is awful. Every ambitionless moron in the school is in there, including Seth Erwin and his entourage of crotch-scratching Neanderthals, and Mr. Jarnigan is so boring. Even he hates the class. He checks the clock after every sentence. Plus, math sucks.”

  “Is Raven Hensley an ambitionless moron? I seem to recall her being in the class.”

  Here we go.

  Nan always had a point to make.

  “Raven only took that class because I was in there, and then Mr. Jarnigan put us in a seating chart, so we can’t even sit together. Being near Raven is the only possible way for that class to be remotely bearable, and I can’t even have that because everyone else is too immature to sit where they want. Yet somehow, Cody, Tim, and Seth got seated right beside each other.”

  “I see,” Nan said. “And how is Raven doing in the class?”

  “You know Raven. She has an A. Probably a perfect score if I had to guess.”

  Nan opened her mouth to argue, but Felicity quickly cut her off.

  “I’m not Raven, Nan, so don’t even go there. She aces every class because all she does is go home and study. She never knows when her mother will get her back and her world will turn to chaos again, so she makes sure she has plenty of wiggle room grade-wise in case her whole life is turned upside down again.”

  “Fair enough,” Nan said. “It still doesn’t explain why you—a perfectly intelligent and capable young lady—are failing a class that shouldn't be difficult.”

  Felicity shrugged. “I don’t know. I just can’t seem to focus when I’m in there. It’s like there’s this energy. I can’t see it, but I can feel it.”

  She wasn’t lying. Eighty percent of Felicity’s failing grade was her own fault because she hated the class, but twenty percent was the class itself.

  “Tell me about this energy,” Nan said. She began using a knife to separate the witch hazel leaves from the branches.

  “I don’t know,” Felicity said. “It’s hard to describe, but it’s just kind of heavy. I totally dread going in there every day, like something’s warning me to stay out. And then today, when I was looking out the window, I could have sworn I saw someone watching me from behind the big oak tree in the front courtyard.”

  Nan put the knife down, pausing from her work. “What did this person look like?”

  Felicity felt her belly twist itself into knots. She had been waiting for just such an opportunity to tell Nan about the boy in the hallway, but for some reason, she was hesitating.

  “Go on,” Nan urged.

  So Felicity told her everything—from the figure that peeked out from behind the tree to the strange boy in black who had been watching her in the hallway before disappearing into thin air.

  “Am I going crazy?” Felicity asked. “I mean, was it a ghost or something? You know I don’t really buy into all of your Appalachian Hoodoo superstitious crap, but for the first time in my life, something really freaked me out. I mean, no one else saw him.”

  “Describe him to me again,” Nan said.

  “Super pale, jet black hair, really angular bone structure,” Felicity recalled. “He was wearing clothes like he wasn’t from this century. And his eyes were as dark as a void.”

  Nan dropped the knife, the metal blade clattering against the floor. Shaking her head and cursing under her breath, she pushed her chair back from the table and picked it up.

  “Nan?” Felicity asked. “Does it mean something?”

  “Of course it means something,” she said. “It is natural to see a teenage boy at school, but it is highly unnatural to see one that no one else can see. So this is not only a sign but also some sort of omen, and we would all be wise to keep our eyes open.”

  “Was he real?” Felicity asked. “Or was it some sort of premonition created in my mind?”

  “That I don’t know,” Nan said, “but be on your guard, and if you see him again, tell me immediately.”

  “But why?” Felicity asked. “I mean, if I’m seeing ghosts or having premonitions, then he can’t hurt me, right?”

  Nan took her hand and looked her in the eye. “There is more to this world than you or I could ever wrap our minds around. Just promise me you will tell me if you see him again.”

  Felicity nodded, wondering exactly what Nan meant. But that was Nan’s way. She didn’t pretend to know what she was talking about if she wasn’t certain of something. Being tight lipped was her way of telling Felicity to keep her guard up while she figured it out.

  The conversation didn’t exactly make Felicity feel better, but at least Nan didn’t think she was crazy. Still, Felicity couldn’t shake the strange feeling that somehow, she needed to find this boy. That somehow, there was a change coming and the boy from the hallway would be a crucial part.

  Even more than that, Felicity felt an inexplicable, yet overwhelming desire to find out who he was and why she alone could see him in the hallway.

  Back at home, Felicity sat on the front steps of the wrap-around porch of her family’s log cabin, sipping a cup of peppermint tea to calm her nerves. The dim glow of the porch light offered some measure of comfort in the increasing darkness, though her thoughts did nothing to settle her unease from the day’s events. Birds roosted in the trees that towered over their yard, which grew more and more dense until they met the thick forest at the base of the mountain behind their house. The crickets were still chirping, despite the drop in temperature, and the stars were just visible between the gathering clouds.

  The door opened behind her, and her parents stepped onto the porch, watching her with worried gazes. Nan brought up the rear, clicking the door closed behind them.

  “On your feet,” she said. “There’s work that needs doing tonight.”

  Work. That was what Nan called it when she practiced the old ways of her family, a craft passed down nine generations back. Felicity sighed.

  “Is this really necessary?” she asked. “Did you have to tell them?”

  “I do not keep secrets from your parents, young lady,” Nan said.

  “Nor should she,” her father said in his Scottish lilt. “My question is why you didn’t tell us what you saw today when you first stormed through the storefront door?”

  Her parents both spoke with accents, apparently acquired when they studied abroad in the British Isles. It was where they met, according to all the stories they had told her over the years. Their accents got thicker when they were mad or worried.

 

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