Page 157 of Tracking Snow

Chapter 48

Chug It

ONE

“You understand what it is that I’m giving you?” the low, growling voice asks from behind the desk as he slides the small potion bottle across it.

When the Beast of Boston requested our presence at his dark, foreboding brownstone castle, we thought for sure it was an invitation to our own slaughter.

The last time we saw Dominic Blackthorn, scary shifter and reigning crime lord over Boston, it was at Carolee’s funeral. The day was hot, humid, and drizzly, adding another layer of misery to an already miserable gathering around the gravesite.

Our gazes connected as his Isabelle buried her face in his chest, shoulders silently shaking with sobs, while Chip held their baby next to them, stone-faced and ashen.

In that moment, I had been sure the large, scowling man nearly bursting out of his suit was plotting my gruesome death. The squeeze of Snow’s hand was the only thing that carried us through a funeral I felt I had no right to attend.

The sickly churn of guilt was near lethal, and it took everything in me not to speed away like the wind. After facing that memorial, the others seemed to regard me with new respect for facing things head-on, but Two had been adamant ever since that the scary, hulking crime lord was plotting something.

Likely my demise.

“You...” I say to the man across the desk hesitantly. “You’re saying this is a petal that can...” I can’t finish the words. My hands turn leaden where they rest in my lap.

What’s a petal again? Four asks, his attention unerringly focused on the potion bottle filled with liquid black as night.

It’s like a cure, Six explains. Blackthorn notoriously deals in hexes, or what are called thorns, but he never makes a thorn he can’t provide a petal for.

But we weren’t hexed, Three points out worriedly. Maybe it’s straight-up poison. Or a new thorn?

Not that we don’t deserve it, Two snorts.

“It’s a petal that can reunite all your parts,” Dominic says, interrupting our internal agitation.

“But we weren’t hexed,” I say, echoing Three’s point.

Dominic takes a slow, steady inhale and exhale, never blinking as he regards me. It is truly like being in the presence of a predator thinly wrapped in a man’s skin. I half expect him to burst out of it at any moment, claws ready to rip me to shreds.

“From the research found in your mother’s records,” he says, continuing to act like he’s just a human man, “your mother used a mixture of methods. I think you already appreciate the irony of her using magic to eradicate magic.”

I close my eyes tight against another white-hot solar flare of guilt.

Mother wanted to use Ariel, and absolutely would have used Red. Who knows how many other mages or fae my mother used and abused in her relentless pursuit to cleanse the city of magic-kind? I don’t think any of us seven could really stomach the answer at this point.

But here we are, sitting in front of someone offering a cure to pull us all back together so we can be one.

Despite our hands being heavy, unable to move, our fingertips twitch. Still, we don’t reach out and grab the potion.

“Why are you doing this for us?” I ask the Beast of Boston, my tongue suddenly too thick in my own mouth.

His eyes flash green as they glance at the potion on the table. “Let’s say I am intimately familiar with the exquisite torture of being split.”

I wait a beat, but he doesn’t expand.

Maybe something to ask Snow about later...

Less than five minutes later, I’m hurrying down the street back to Snow and Ariel’s apartment, my fingers wrapped tightly around the tiny bottle in my pocket. Though I guess it’s our apartment now too since we moved in, promising to always knock extra loud before entering anyroom.

We’re going to do it, right? Five asks hopefully. We’re going to be one again?

Maybe we don’t, Six says. We’ve found a kind of harmony between all seven of us. Why do we need to go and change things now?