Andrea rolled her eyes. “Have I told you that you’re a helicopter parent?”
“I’m going to be the Wrath of Hell parent in a minute.” I crouched by the bed. “You lift, I grab.”
“Okay.” Andrea gripped the edge of the massive bed and jerked it up like it weighed nothing. A black lion cub the size of a small Chow Chow darted toward her. I lunged for him and missed. He snarled and locked his teeth on Andrea’s shin.
“Ow!”
“Don’t drop the bed on my kid!”
I grabbed Conlan by the scruff of his neck and yanked him back.
“Get him off my leg!” Andrea howled.
I slid my arm under Conlan’s furry throat and squeezed, sinking steel into my voice. “Let go. Let go right now.”
Andrea snarled and the noise that came from her throat was pure hyena. I squeezed harder, applying a choke hold. Conlan released the bite and gasped. I rolled out of the way, moving my son so I landed on top of him, and Andrea dropped the bed. The floor shuddered.
A red stain spread through her jeans.
“Your son bit me!”
“Sorry.”
Conlan bucked under me. I held tight.
“He bit me!” She pointed at her leg.
“He can’t help it. You smell like a hyena, and you’re scary.”
“I’m not scary. I’m nice! I’ve babysat him like twenty times. I gave him ice cream! Ungrateful brat!”
The brat gave up on trying to throw me off and went flat on the floor. I got up. Conlan shook himself. He looked just like a lion cub. His fur was black and velvety soft, with faint smoky stripes, and his ears were round and fluffy. He blinked at me and twitched his ears. I cracked up.
“He’s adorable,” Andrea said. “I’m still pissed off, but he is so fluffy. Baby B used to be that fluffy.”
“Rawr rawr,” Conlan told her.
I reached out and popped him on the nose with my fingers. “No.”
He recoiled like a chastised kitten and blinked.
“You bit Aunt Andrea. We don’t bite our friends.”
Conlan noticed the plate and wandered over to it. A pink tongue slid out of his mouth. He licked the honey.
“Now I’ve seen everything,” Andrea said. She hiked her jeans leg up and showed me a red wound on her shin. “I felt his teeth scrape bone. He’s got a hell of a bite. That’s a lion right there.”
“Sorry.”
“Oh, you’re going to have to do better than ‘sorry.’ Your son assaulted the alpha of Clan Bouda.” She wrinkled her nose at me.
“It’s already closing, you big baby.”
“It will close better if you buy me a late lunch and some margaritas.”
Conlan licked the plate clean, crawled into my lap, and draped himself over me. He had to be at least thirty-five pounds. Probably closer to forty.
“Lunch might have to wait. I’ll tell you what, give me a crash course in shapeshifter toddlers, and I’ll give you some of our homemade sangria.”
The sangria started as an experiment. Before the Five Hundred Acre Wood formed, someone in the area must’ve grown grapes in their backyard, because we came across a clearing with several old vines. Christopher mentioned that he grew up on a vineyard in California, I asked him to teach me how to make wine, one thing led to another, and now I made forest sangria. I had also planted some of the vines in the backyard, but they were too young to produce fruit.
Andrea’s eyes lit up. “Did you make a new batch?”
“I did.”
“Deal. Usually they shift at birth and then about once or twice a week, so you get a chance to get used to it. But your boy never turned before, so your mileage may vary.”
My mileage always varied. “How long does it last?”
“He’ll shift back when there is something he needs hands for or when he gets tired. Same rules as an adult shapeshifter: one shift, maybe two per twenty-four hours, and after that second, he’ll need a nap. The babies don’t know their limits yet, so be prepared for him to try two shifts in a row and flop right on his face. It’s kind of funny. They just go boop and fall over.”
The last time he fell over and got a knot on his forehead, I drove him to Doolittle like a bat out of hell.
Andrea sat next to me. “Cheer up. Babies are easy. It’s the adolescents who make problems. Before you know it, he’ll be a teenager and Curran will start teaching him half-form.”
“Stop.”
“The worst is over. He’s well formed, he’s proportionate, no weird bones sticking out anywhere . . .”
“I mean it, stop.”
“Okay, okay. So what else? Oh, he will have a bit of a learning curve figuring out what he can do in each shape. Some things are instinctive. Like if he is chasing something, he may shift without thinking. But a lot of times, they’ll try to bite things while in human form or change shape and want their sippy cup. Baby B carried her spoon around in her mouth when she turned into a hyena. It was the funniest thing. I’d cut up meat for her and she still wanted me to put it on the spoon and feed her. Wait until I tell Raphael.”
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
“What? Why?”
“Because your husband gossips like a church lady.”
“Please. Don’t insult me. Church ladies line up around the block to take gossip lessons from Raphael.” Andrea grinned. “No, seriously, why?”
“Because if you tell Raphael, the entire Pack will run over here to gawk at him, and I can’t do this right now. I have shit to deal with.”
“Is it Roland?”
“No.” I told her about Serenbe.
“Well, fuck,” she said.
“Yep.”
We sat quietly for a while. Conlan was sprawled on my lap, making a low rumbling noise. It was almost like purring. It felt oddly comforting.
“If you had to shoot a dog in the eye with an arrow from a regular bow, what’s the longest distance you could do it from?” I asked.
“Regular bow, I could guarantee a shot at forty-five yards. If it was a highly trained archer who wasn’t me, maybe thirty, but an eye is a small target and dogs like to move.” Andrea sighed. “It can never just be peaceful, can it?”
“Oh, I don’t know. The past eighteen months were pretty quiet.”
She snorted. “What about the Cherufe burning down City Hall two months ago?”
“It only scorched City Hall.”
“And before that there was the Raijū thing. And before that . . .”
I held up my hand. “Okay, yes. But you know what I mean. All these were normal. This thing in Serenbe isn’t normal. This is magic on a massive scale.”
Andrea sighed.
As if on cue, a magic wave rolled over us. Conlan raised his head, shook himself, and lay back down on my lap.
“I need Curran to come back,” I told her. “He was a baby lion before. It would really help.”
“What is up with your lion anyway? This is what, his third one?”
“Fourth.”
Curran once explained to me in excruciating detail how he hated to hunt. According to him, he was a lion, he weighed over six hundred pounds, and the last thing he wanted to do was run through the woods chasing after deer. But since Conlan’s birth, he and Erra had hatched a plan to extend the Guild’s reach past Atlanta for a strategic advantage when my father eventually came calling. Usually this strategic outreach involved hunting some sort of monster on the outskirts of Atlanta. It took Curran three or four days to catch it, and my aunt insisted on going with him.
“He takes Erra with him. That’s the most puzzling part.”
“Maybe they’re bonding.”
“My aunt, who continuously reminds me that I married a barbaric animal, and my husband, who thinks she’s an insane murderous bitch, are bonding?”