Werewolf Knight 3, page 1
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Chapter 1
I took another look at all the various sketches, site plans, and construction notes that were in front of me. It was a hell of a lot to take in, and I could barely wait to see what we had made.
Since Ava and I signed the contracts necessary to start a chain of coffee shops, things had gotten totally out of hand, and we’d all been hunkered down working on our respective areas of interest. I glanced down at the logo that Sybil had drawn out, as well as all the careful diagrams of plants that she’d made in order to decorate the wallpaper of each cafe.
Jillian, our head of marketing, had referred to the cafe design as “boho,” which made me puke in my mouth a little bit. But she wasn’t wrong. There were botanical threads all around the cafe thanks to Sybil’s design work, and the tables and chairs were medieval tavern themed. The place looked like a modern version of Sally-Anne’s inn, even though none of the people on the corporate team would understand the reference at all.
I sat up straight and leaned back in my ridiculously comfortable dark leather chair. The snow was beginning to fall outside, and the white midday light shined into my new home office.
My desk was about six feet in length, and faced the door. Ava had lectured me on the feng shui of how to make a room work, and I’d half-listened. So I’d tried placing the desk so that it faced the window behind me originally, but that had been too distracting. I’d then turned it to face the door as Ava had instructed, and sure enough, it worked out a lot better.
The office was lined with dark cherry wood bookshelves which were covered in botanical books, books about coffee, and pretty much every literary classic an English department could ask for. And the best part was that it’d all come from storage when we cleaned out the books and coffee shop, which was now the lauded flagship store for Moon Bean Brew, and we hadn’t paid a dime to turn my office into my dream library.
I could hear the sound of jazz music wafting up from the kitchen downstairs. The noise echoed through the hallways and bounced off the walls to give it a kind of eerie feeling, but to me, this was the perfect way to spend an afternoon. There was nothing as relaxing as looking over the business plans while the snow began to fall outside, and best of all, I got to walk around the house in warm slippers in the middle of the day.
It was all perfect until the door slammed downstairs, a sure sign that the girls were back from another expedition.
“There’s noooooooo business like mushroom business!” I heard Sybil sing from downstairs.
“Please never make me do that again,” I heard Tabitha groan. “By the Goddess, it literally started snowing!”
“Well then there’s no more mushrooms this season,” Sybil said with a giggle. “So you can stay inside and…”
“Make a mushroom risotto?” Tabitha asked.
Now that the girls had plenty of free time to watch television, Tabitha had developed a surprising interest in watching cooking shows. It was all the more bizarre since she’d gone most of her life without lifting a finger, and watching the noblewoman in the kitchen was like watching a three-year-old use finger paints for the first time, but still definitely endearing.
I turned in my wheeled leather chair, took a deep breath of the pine-scented air, and then stood up. I saw that I’d spent more time than I’d planned on emails and site plans, and I decided it was time to take a break. I sighed happily and headed for the staircase.
The girls were still chattering, and their voices filtered up the steps. Sybil and Tabitha didn’t notice me when I stopped on the landing since they were still pulling off their coats and boots.
Sybil had been wearing a long, navy-blue cloak that we’d found in a consignment store in Brooklyn, and she looked like someone from a movie set in the 40s. She pulled off her red leather gloves and stuffed them in the pocket before she found an empty hanger for her cloak.
Tabitha, on the other hand, had been wearing a black North Face puffer jacket and matching black bedazzled Uggs. I couldn’t get over how much she loved to dress like a normal Jersey girl, since she was literally nobility from another world entirely. But she looked good in anything, so I didn’t protest.
“Ladies,” I called down to the girls, and they both immediately looked up.
“Hank,” Sybil exclaimed and waved. “I missed you! We got soooo many new mushrooms to experiment with.”
“Hello, darling,” Tabitha said and put her hands on her hips. “I’d say I missed you, but I only saw you two hours ago.”
“So you didn’t miss me at all?” I asked and cocked an eyebrow. “Not even slightly? The man who provides you with Ugg boots, this beautiful house, and land with an endless array of mushrooms to pick?”
“I could do without the mushrooms,” Tabitha sighed. “But I suppose you’ve earned it. I do like Ugg boots, after all.”
The blonde winked at me and traipsed away into the dining room. She was being sassy, but it was just her way of teasing me. She also knew how much I loved it when she was acting like a little princess, so she tended to revert to that whenever we were having a rare quiet moment.
“That wasn’t much of an apology,” I called after her as I started down the steps.
Normally, I would have run down the steps, but Sybil had started adding wreaths and plants to the posts, and while it smelled good, I’d knocked more than a few off in recent days. So I smiled at the dark-haired woman as I walked down the steps carefully so I wouldn’t send another pine bough to its untimely demise.
“Want to see my mushrooms?” Sybil asked once I’d reached the bottom.
She was wearing a long, dark blue dress that was almost indistinguishable to her dresses in Lupercalia. Her emerald eyes glimmered in the light of the foyer, and her cheeks were especially rosy from the snow.
“I’d love to see your mushrooms,” I said as I wrapped an arm around her waist. “But none of them are poisonous, right?”
“Well, some are,” Sybil said and shrugged. “But when I combine them with the right ingredients they won’t be. Or they will be, and we’ll just use them when we need to poison something.”
“Sounds about right,” I said with a laugh.
I heard some weird static and interference reverberate through the house and figured that Tabitha was playing with the radio. We could’ve easily just played songs from my phone’s playlist with the Bluetooth speakers that filled the house, but I liked the radio because it reminded me of growing up in my parents’ house.
Those childhood days had been so simple. My father was always the first one up, and he would start the coffee while he listened to the radio. If we were lucky, he’d also make eggs and bacon, though most mornings, we’d gobble down a bowl of cereal while my mom tried to make sure that everyone had whatever they needed to get through the rest of the day, whether that was signing permission slips for me and Ava or filling a thermos for my dad.
“I found a hidden spot where all the best mushrooms are,” Sybil declared as she wrapped a cold but elegant hand along my neck.
“Oh,” I said as a shiver rushed down my spine. “You girls must’ve been freezing out there.”
“It was torture, Hank,” Tabitha said from the next room. “Absolute torture. Sybil wouldn’t let me leave until we’d foraged every last mushroom in the forest.”
“It’s snowing,” Sybil said with a sigh. “There aren’t going to be any more mushrooms to forage if it starts to pile. So don’t worry, it’ll be a few more months before I subject you to that again.”
“I’m going to hold you to that,” Tabitha warned as she appeared briefly in the doorway.
As the blonde padded away again, Sybil looked at me and winked.
“I know for a fact that some of these will have some more special qualities, if taken care of properly,” Sybil whispered.
“What, like psychedelic properties?” I asked. “I don’t know if I’m so eager for that. I tried shrooms once at a music festival, and it was simultaneously the most stressful and underwhelming time in my life. I didn’t feel any different at all, but I couldn’t focus on anything because my tent was talking to me.”
“Sounds weird,” Sybil said. “And no, that wasn’t what I was thinking about.”
The herbalist shook her head, like she wasn’t sure she believed my story, and then headed for the kitchen.
“It happened,” I insisted as I followed behind her.
“I’m sure it did,” Sybil replied over her shoulder.
It was my turn to shake my head as I stepped into our kitchen. We hadn’t done much redecorating since we’d moved in, but we’d added a few pieces from Lupercalia, like one of Blueclaw’s old practice shields that was hanging over the kitchen table and a comically large goblet that Charles was throwing out because his wife insisted that they needed space for another kid’s room.
We could’ve kept the decorations at our Lupercalian estate, but I thought it was funnier this way. Plus, it added to the whole mystery of the man who ran Moon Bean Brew. Whenever shareholders or construction meetings were held in the dining room
“Perfect,” Tabitha declared as she found a station that was playing Nirvana. “This is what I need for making popcorn.”
“I liked the jazz you guys were playing,” I protested. “It was a lot calmer, and it kind of fit the mood of a snowy day a little more.”
Tabitha looked up at me and raised an eyebrow. She didn’t care what I preferred, and so now we were going to be listening to Nirvana while we made popcorn.
“Point taken,” I said and smiled.
I walked over behind Tabitha, lifted my hand, and gave her a loud slap on her perfectly soft ass, which made her jump about a foot in the air.
“Hank!” she protested, and Sybil burst out laughing.
“What was that?” I asked as I looked around. “Did someone say something?”
“I wish I didn’t enjoy that so much,” the blonde said and shook her head.
The noblewoman was wearing a black turtleneck that hugged her frame and flared jeans with red wooly socks. Her eyeliner was smudged as always, but her cheeks glowed a rosy pink from the heat of the kitchen. She looked delicious, but she quickly pulled herself up onto the counter before I could slap her butt again. She kicked her feet back and forth as she watched Sybil carefully lay out her mushrooms, and she refused to look at me again.
“So,” I said, as Nirvana’s MTV sessions cover of Where Did You Sleep Last Night blasted over the radio. “Why are we making popcorn?”
“Movie night,” Sybil said absentmindedly as she moved a red mushroom to a separate pile.
“Hey,” I said quickly. “Isn’t that one poisonous? You probably shouldn’t be touching it.”
Sybil looked up and smiled.
“Not to touch,” she said. “Just to consume. But eating just one of these probably won’t kill you. It’ll just make you feel a little disoriented and probably sick to your stomach.”
“What’s it called again?” I asked. “Looks like it’s straight out of a Disney movie.”
“In Lupercalia, we call them white tongues,” Sybil said. “But according to your books upstairs, it’s called an Amanita mushroom here.”
“I loved that book,” Tabitha said.
“Really?” I asked and raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been looking at botanical books with Sybil?”
“Huh?” Tabitha said. “I thought you said Lolita.”
“No,” Sybil said and rolled her eyes. “Lolita isn’t a type of mushroom.”
“It was heartbreaking,” Tabitha continued. “It’s more beautiful than any book I ever read in Lupercalia.”
“I don’t believe that,” Sybil said and put her hands on her hips. “We all know you’re far too patriotic to think that anyone else could write a book as good as the ones in Lupercalia. What about The Ivy Tales?”
“Okay, true,” Tabitha said and shrugged. “My dad used to tell me a different Ivy Tale every night in the winter before bed. I looked forward to it all day from the moment I woke up. Even after I learned to read, I still wanted him to read them to me.”
The image of old Blueclaw reading to a tiny, eager Tabitha made my heart melt. Of course, there were no photos in Lupercalia, but I could picture her in a giant four-poster bed with white-blonde ringlets hanging over her rosy cheeks as she listened to her father read her a new story.
“What are The Ivy Tales?” I asked.
“We tell them every winter,” Sybil said as she put her final mushroom in place. “It’s about the origins of all the animals in Lupercalia and all the special gifts that were given to them by the Moon Goddess."
“Even I enjoy them,” Tabitha said. “And I couldn’t sit still for a second as a child. I like the one about the weasel.”
“Of course you like the one about the weasel,” Sybil said and rolled her eyes. “He’s the most troublesome out of all of them.”
“But he’s also the most fun,” Tabitha said and wagged her finger. “And he can get himself in and out of any situation he wants to.”
“Sounds like a networking genius,” I said.
“A what?” Tabitha asked.
The noblewoman still hadn’t really grasped all the business speak that was being thrown around constantly these days in the face of the chains and buyouts that were happening. Of course, that was true for all of us, though I had a basic grasp of the lingo.
“Networks,” Sybil said authoritatively. “It’s what mushrooms have underground. They’re all connected to each other.”
“Yep,” I said and chuckled to myself. “That’s what a network is.”
“You two are freaks,” Tabitha said and shook her head. “I used to steal horses and drink mead as a teenager. I didn’t have time to network with mushrooms.”
“Well, we all have our individual skills,” Sybil said joyfully. “If we ever need to pull off a heist, you can be in charge of that adventure.”
“Absolutely,” I added. “And I can’t wait to see you in action.”
“I promise you won’t be disappointed,” Tabitha replied with a grin.
“You’ll be joining us for movie night, won’t you?” Sybil asked and leaned across the counter.
I could barely resist her bright green eyes as they shined up at me, but I told myself I should really take a look at those few messages that had come in. My defenses started to crumble, though, when she pressed her hands into her cheeks and looked at me like a puppy.
“Of course,” I said firmly as I tried not to look into her eyes. “But I need to check a few more emails first. You guys make the popcorn and start the movie. I’ll join you as soon as I can.”
“You better,” Tabitha said. “We have a good one in mind for tonight.”
“Oh really?” I asked. “And what might that be?”
“We found it on the TV,” Sybil said with a giggle. “It’s called An American Werewolf in London.”
I threw my head back and laughed out loud. Since becoming a werewolf myself, I’d barely watched any werewolf-related media at all, since most of it wasn’t even close to accurate.
“Okay,” I said. “I actually can’t wait for that. That sounds awesome. I’ll be there before you know it.
“Popcorn’s almost ready,” Tabitha called out joyfully as she slid off the counter.
That was my cue to head back to the office and wade through the last bit of work, so I raced from the kitchen and headed for the stairs. I stopped just long enough to soak in the sight of the backyard covered in snow through the glass wall, and I felt a moment of happiness that this amazing place was now mine.
As I headed up the wide wooden staircase, I wondered whether I’d be hearing anything from Barney Converse. He seemed to email me every single day with another little check-in or some kind of offer to go to a snazzy event. Just the week before he’d sent a box of fifty mugs from JoeTown in all different colors. The gesture was nice, but it also baffled me. I wasn’t exactly throwing any parties that required the use of fifty mugs, so I turned half of them over to Sybil to use for her seedlings, which still left twenty-five mugs that currently collected dust in the cabinets.
I stepped back into my office, and once again I was taken by the sight of the snow falling outside the window. Sure, the Jersey winters in my childhood had been beautiful, but winter in a palatial mansion in the middle of nowhere was second to none.
I sat at my desk and flipped my laptop back open. Sure enough, the right side of my screen alerted me to three new email notifications. I clicked the message from marketing manager Jillian first.
Hey Baker siblings! Hope that you don’t get too snowed in today. The forecast is looking preeeetttyyy heavy where I am in upstate New York, and I reckon it might be the same in Jersey!
Either way, we’ve got a last-minute offer on the table from the How To Spend It section of the Financial Times. They’re looking at some of the best new cafes and eateries around New York, and I thought that an announcement about our chain development in the Financial Times would be a perfect way to kick off the New Year!
As you know, the readers have dough, and lots of it.
