Maia's Magickal Mates [The Double R 3] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (2 page)

She playfully punched his shoulder as he released her waist to take her hand.

“I got caught up trying to decide between the plain pound cake or the coffee crumb cake,” he said as they walked to the front door together. “I finally decided we can’t go wrong either way with Entenmann’s.”

“Honestly, I think I’m too nervous to eat anything, even Entenmann’s.”

“Maybe our guests will be, too, and as eager to leave as we are to get rid of them.”

Caith unlocked and opened the door, greeting the couple that stood on their front porch before introducing himself and Brielle.

“It’s nice to finally meet you two,” the woman, Althea, said.

She was nothing like what Brielle had expected. Her voice was cultured and, clad in designer clothes, she and her husband had an obvious look of money about them. Not that Brielle had anything against people with money. She just wondered what these particular people wanted with her and Caith. She and her husband came from modest backgrounds and lived by modest, if comfortable, means. It worked for them, but the Teagues were obviously not in their league.

“Please, come in.” Caith stepped aside to let the couple into their humble abode.

Brielle offered to take their coats and hung them up on the Peg-Board that Caith had installed behind the door.

As the couple passed her to enter their house proper, Brielle reached out with her mental fingers to touch their auras, drawing back at what she sensed. It wasn’t anything necessarily bad, but their colors were definitely off, as if their souls were in flux.

Caith had offered them seats on their simple brown sofa and took a seat in the matching adjacent recliner.

Brielle tried to catch his eye as he addressed the husband, Griffin. Failing this, she made her way over to sit on the arm of the recliner, wanting Caith’s closeness, needing it.

“Before we get started, I was curious as to how you learned about us,” Caith asked, taking the words out of Brielle’s mouth.

Griffin laughed, obviously uncomfortable as he shifted in his seat. “Well, Caith, you certainly know how to get to the point.”

“I don’t see any reason to beat around the bush, Griffin.”

“Of course not,” Althea said, looking at her husband as if for a signal before looking at Caith and Brielle. “Let’s just say we have our sources.”

“Did your sources happen to mention that we’re solitaries and are perfectly happy practicing that way?”

“Don’t you miss meeting with like-minded people?”

“We’ve both gone down that road a long time ago and learned the politics and structure, among other things, just weren’t for us.”

“I assure you your experience with West Moon would be different.” Althea grinned, looking supremely confident. “We’re not big on structure, either.”

Brielle cleared her throat. “Most traditional covens don’t recruit.”

“As you’ve probably guessed, we’re not traditional.”

Griffin leaned forward in his seat, forearms resting on his thighs as he folded his hands. “We aspire to be better than traditional. Greater.”

“Joining a coven or study circle isn’t about competition.” This couple had it all wrong if that’s what they thought. Wicca was a spiritual journey, a search for peace and harmony with the universe, or at least it should have been. It wasn’t about being better or greater than.

“You’re sadly mistaken if you believe that. Everything in life is a competition,” Althea said, her tone firm and…aggressive, for want of a better word, as if she thought to convince them with her attitude alone.

Brielle glanced at Caith and saw him arch a brow. She could see that he was ready to call an end to this meeting forthwith.

When he stood up, Brielle felt the energy in the room suddenly change.

She stood up next to him, her fingers gripping his biceps as she looked at the couple still seated on their sofa.

Althea smiled up at them.

Brielle saw it then, the cloudy spots in the woman’s aura, right before she felt the liquid warmth on her own upper lip. When she reached up a hand to touch her lip and her fingers came away with blood on them, Brielle caught her breath.

Caith looked at her then at Griffin and Althea as the couple finally stood. “I don’t believe your group is for my wife and me. I think you should leave now.”

Her husband’s words emboldened her for only a moment before the energy in the room shifted again, more drastically, knocking Brielle’s world totally off-kilter.

Right before she felt something touch her mind, she realized that her and Caith’s time had run out, and they would never see either of their boys on this earthly plane again.

As she and Caith began their journey to the Summerland, Goddess imparted the best thought in the world to accompany Brielle. When the time came, she and Caith would be granted the chance to assist their sons in reaching their destinies.

The small consolation eased Brielle’s emotional and physical pain as she passed from the earthly plane to the astral plane.

Here and Now

The 21
^st
Century

Sacramento City Cemetery, Sacramento County, California

Current day

They should have told him what he wanted to know. None of this would have happened had they been honest with him and more forthcoming. He wouldn’t have been forced to kill them had they but cooperated.

Prentice Teague half listened to the High Priestess extol the virtues of his parents and scowled. He could have told the Priestess a thing or two about the deceased.

You brought this on yourselves.

All his life he had tried to get them to notice him, to
love
him, his efforts all for naught.

They
had been too busy worrying about making amends to the Wiccan community in general and those boys in particular. What about making amends to
him
? He was their son, their only child, not the Malloy boys. He was their
blood
. Yet he had been pushed to a back burner because his parents had grown consciences after the Malloys’ deaths. They felt
guilty
.

“We welcome the spirits of the ancestors and the honored dead not yet reborn…”

Prentice bowed his head, tried to appear the dutiful, grief-stricken son.

The only grief that struck him now involved the time and money it would take to find Thayne and Cade Malloy now that he had extracted their names and other vital information from his parents.

The information had not been nearly enough, but his parents had suffered their untimely deaths before he could get anything else useful out of them, uncooperative, unfair, and sadistic until the very end. Why had he expected anything different from them, especially when he considered these were the same people who had sent him to public school just to teach him a valuable lesson?

Despite their wealth and standing in the community and business world, his parents—mostly his father, truth be told—thought the experience would build character and make him a stronger person, capable of handling the coven when it proved his time to take it over.

Prentice had news for them. The experience had built his character all right, made him hard and planted the seeds for him to become a vengeful killer. Not that he was into the Bible or anything, far from it, but he thought it appropriate that his parents had reaped exactly what they had sowed.

Why did they have to make everything so difficult? They could have just given him the information when he had asked for it, but they had to make him work for it. Make him kill.

He only wanted what was best for the coven. He wanted it to be unsurpassed by any other, the most influential body of its kind anywhere, and he knew exactly what he needed to do to get it there.

His parents hadn’t seen things his way, had been too weak, too shortsighted, too worried about
offending
anyone to move the coven where it needed to go.

Prentice sneered at the thought.

His parents had worried too much about what other people thought of them. This had been their major malfunction for years now. This and they did not know how to move on.

What had happened to the Malloys had not been their fault. It had been an unavoidable Accident, and one they regretted. They had done so much since to make up for it. Didn’t they see that? They had done more than enough for those Malloy boys.

He stopped himself from spitting on the ground at all the information he had uncovered at the end, at how deeply indebted his parents had felt toward Thayne and Cade, how they had anonymously taken care of the boys financially for decades.

What made them so special that they deserved what rightfully belonged to
him
? What made them so special that they deserved his parents’ attention when he barely earned it?

No matter what he did, what he achieved growing up—and his successes had not been insubstantial by any means—it had barely rated a blip on his parents’ radar screen.

Prentice listened as the Priestess blessed the food and drink, glad now that the graveside ceremony neared its end.

He had the private investigator to contact as he wanted to see how far he progressed with locating Prentice’s targets.

He knew that up until a month ago, the younger Malloy had been working on retainer with the LAPD, some psychic of note helping the police locate missing people and solving unsolvable murder cases—how noble. This brother had, however, recently fallen off the grid. No telling where he had gone yet.

The older brother continued to be a lot less visible, not really leaving much of a media footprint at all from which to work.

Was he publicity shy, or had he never done anything of note?

Prentice was prone to believe in the latter. Most people, unlike him, were average or even below average—intelligence, looks, accomplishments. Most people went through their whole lives never doing anything remarkable or important. Most people just lived lives of insignificant mediocrity in obscurity.

Not him. He would be different, he vowed. He
was
different.

Prentice resigned himself to working from scratch finding the older brother unless this PI he had hired was worth his pricey salary or better.

The several coven members present each took a drink and poured some into the grave in turn, then ate something and placed part of the food in the grave.

When Prentice’s turn came he took an obscene kind of pleasure in pouring some of his drink and placing some of his food in the grave, knowing that his parents would never again enjoy or partake in these basic, simple life functions.

He closed his eyes, remembering their deaths, the moment when he knew that he held their lives in his hands and that they were his to do with as he pleased.

The experience had been heady, even frightening at first. Sure he had used his gifts and position to obtain a measure of revenge against some former classmates and others who had wronged him over the years, but he had never exercised his gifts to the extent that he had used them on his parents. However, as he continued pushing for the truth, pushing for additional information, pushing for
more
, something inside him changed, snapped…grew.

He realized with a sense of invulnerability and satisfaction that he had absorbed his parents’ powers as they’d died.

The final outcome had proved more than a power trip. It had been a serious rush, one he found himself eagerly wanting to repeat.

Prentice knew exactly who he would use his augmented, developing powers on next.

McCoy, Colorado

Current day

Thayne Malloy woke up in a cold sweat, limbs tangled in his Egyptian cotton sheets as he bolted upright, panting.

He listened to the mostly innocuous noises of the modern ranch house settling around him in the night and waited to hear the commotion that he was sure had woken him out of a sound sleep.

The more seconds ticked by with him hearing nothing untoward, however, the more sure he became that a noise hadn’t woken him at all. It must have been a now-dissipating nightmare.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying to reconnect with that moment when he first became aware he dreamed. He saw them, his mother and father, as they had been more than two decades ago—young and alive.

Thayne hadn’t dreamed about his parents in a long time, and it had been even longer since he had dreamed so vividly about the night of their murders. He refused to think of their deaths as the police had labeled them before closing the case—a murder-suicide.

He had never believed that version of how his parents had died. He knew his father never would have killed his mom, nor would he have committed suicide. His dad had loved his mom too much to do that to her or the family.

Thayne had been a kid though, too young for anyone with authority to take him seriously, too young for anyone to listen to what his gut told him.