Present Day…
Clara looked down as another weather alert beeped across her cellular phone. Another snowstorm was due to hit the East Coast, and it wasn’t even Christmas yet!
While she enjoyed the ambience of the frosted pine trees that surrounded the Jersey Shore town where she was born and raised, Clara did not enjoy shoveling the white stuff. Especially not with all the trouble her leg had been giving her lately.
Imagine being the slowest Werewolf in the Pack? Oh the shame! Clara snorted at her own histrionics. She didn’t give a rat’s ass about being unable to race with the other Wolves. At least, not since she was around sixteen.
“So, what are your plans tonight?” Delia asked her sister, jostling Clara out of her bizarre musings.
Day by day this winter, she’d grown antsy, and even a little morose. Delia turned up the volume on the holiday music that had been playing in the store for the last eight weeks with as much enthusiasm as ever.
“Delia! Turn it down,” Clara growled.
But her sister kept on swaying her hips, wagging her eyebrows up and down. With her short dark brown hair and her creamy jade eyes, she looked a bit like a Christmas Elf instead of a Werewolf.
Well, Wolf Shifter, actually. Most Packs had stopped referring to themselves as Werewolves once Hollywood got a hold of the idea that they were mindless monsters who turned into gruesome, half-shifted animals every full moon. Clara knew this, of course, because of the countless occult texts she and her sister collected and sold at their store, Crescent Moon Books.
“Come on, Clara, sing with me!” Delia yelled over the high-pitched notes sung by Mariah Carey.
While the superstar was not a Werewolf, Clara personally thought she could howl with the best of them. She shook her head and waited for Delia to finish murdering All I Want For Christmas. Sighing loudly, Clara wondered how the woman could be so terrible at singing, and so ignorant of that fact. She had supernatural hearing, for fuck’s sake.
She closed her eyes briefly. If she never heard that song or Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree or Jingle Bells ever again, it would be too soon.
“How can you still like Christmas music, Del? We’ve been listening to it since Halloween!”
“But these are classics! Besides, I love the holidays. And this year you have even more cause to celebrate. And I thought you were lucky being a Christmas baby!”
“Lucky? Every year I got one gift for Christmas and my birthday combined. How is that lucky?” she scoffed.
“But that just means your gift was doubly special.”
Yeah, right, Clara snorted. She wasn’t complaining. Not exactly. She was used to getting gipped every year on her birthday, but this year she was turning twenty-seven.
Looking at her dark haired, bronze skinned sister, it was hard to tell they were even related. Clara favored her mother’s people. Her maternal grandmother was born in Ireland, descended from the Celts and an ancient line that she’d kept secret for more years than Clara had been alive.
Twenty-seven years old in just one more week, and already her she-Wolf had been champing at the bit. She’d read the old scrolls, knew all about the importance of the number three in Magic.
Nine was a multiple of three, and an especially sacred number to her mother’s Druidic ancestors. On this birthday, Clara was going to inherit something. She didn’t know what exactly, but it both intrigued and scared the shit out of the Jersey she-Wolf.
“Seriously, tonight is the start of the Winter Solstice. Plans? Parties? A little bow chicka action? Anything?” Delia asked, slapping her hands down on her hips when Clara shook her head.
“Ugh, you are so overthinking this,” she moaned.
Was she, though? Clara did not think so. She did not know what to expect when she turned twenty-seven, and she refused to be excited about something that could be downright awful.
“You know, I don’t know why you want me to be excited, I read in the annals that a woman received her grandfather’s penchant for fighting his enemies with potent gas, Del. As in farts. The chick inherited super Magical farts as her boon for turning twenty-seven.”
“You are making that up!” Delia squinted as she yelled.
She never could tell when Clara was fucking with her. Of course, this time she wished she were. Magic farts were apparently a real thing.
“Nope. It’s in the annals Gran left us. The O’Hare family annal eighteen hundred seventy two.”
“Hmm, I must have missed that one,” Delia replied pensively.
She was always the happy go lucky one. The fun one. Carefree, beautiful, and completely in touch with her inner Wolf. When the siblings discovered they were the descendants of an ancient Druid line, Gran had taught them to be silent, to guard their secret fervently.
Especially against the Pack, which, when the old woman had been alive, had been run by a real jerk named Zev Maccon. So they read as much as they could to prepare for something that might not even happen. All the while, they had to adjust to life as Wolf Shifters, having inherited that from their father’s side.
That was difficult enough. Of course, once the Curse of Natalis had been broken by a teenager named Grazi Kelly a few years ago, things had gotten a tad bit easier for most of them. For Clara, the danger had just begun.
It seemed the curse had been holding back her extremely dominant she-Wolf. Without it to temper Clara’s beast, her inner animal had been growing more and more powerful by the day. Her she-Wolf was pretty chill most of the time, but lately she was scratching at her skin and acting out of character.
More signs that added up to Clara not being thrilled about her upcoming birthday. Of course, Delia could not stop talking about it. Her younger sister simply couldn’t wait to embrace her Druid gifts.
“Do you think you’ll get something cool? Like dreamwalking? Or ghost whispering?”
“How in the fuck you can think either of those things are cool is beyond me, Del!”
Yep. This was proof Clara was adopted. She was her sister’s total opposite. And not just because she was fair skinned, blonde, and scarred for life after a tragic accident with a drunk driver. The mostly shy she-Wolf had a brilliant mind and a quick tongue, which she often had to bite else risk losing a customer.
Delia was a people pleaser. She was always smiling and pleasant. Her sleek brown she-Wolf could run miles around most other adult Wolves. She was the fastest she-Wolf around and was always finishing just behind the Pack’s elite Wolf Guard during their monthly runs. Runs that Clara had been avoiding.
“Look Del, I plan to deliver the rest of these orders before this nor’easter hits us. Then I’m going home, I’m gonna heat up some pizza, and I’m a binge watch some British crime dramas on Prime.”
“Oh my gods, Clara, not again? How many seasons of DCI Banks can you possibly sit through?”
“All of them,” she replied, grinning wickedly at her sibling.
Delia found British accents completely annoying, and Clara wondered if she didn’t watch them on purpose just to bug the shit out of her.
Of course you do, her Wolf pushed the thought at her with an approving grin on her lupine face
The animal’s thoughts were becoming more and more clear in her mind as her birthday neared. More cause for concern. Werewolves were dual natured beings, not two separate entities, and yet, sometimes it felt that way.
Grrr.
“So, I’m gonna go out, meet some hot Druid or Wiccan, welcome Solstice with him and the Coven, and you are going to go home. Alone.”
“You do you and I will do me,” Clara returned, giving her sister the one fingered salute.
“Yeah, I think you have been doin’ you for too damn long, Clara. You need a man.”
“How would you know?”
“Um, I live with you. And we share an Amazon account. Your replacement battery order is off the charts, sis.”
Oh gods, how mortifying.
Not only were the Crescent sisters co-owners of Crescent Moon Books. The women also shared the small house they were raised in, in the same small town they were born in. She just couldn’t picture herself anywhere else.
Maccon City was home.
It was as simple as that. Her family was there. Her Pack was there. And he was there.
The secret object of her affection lived in the South Jersey town as well. He was Pack, a Wolf Guard, actually, and he was just about the most handsome man she had ever laid eyes on.
“Solstice marks the beginning of Winter,” Delia continued. “You won’t be honoring Gran if you don’t dance naked under the moonlight,” she crooned.
“What? No way, Delia. Besides, Gran never let us dance naked under the moonlight.”
“I know, right? Prude,” she said with a grin. “Alright, come on, at least light a candle or something. I swear, Clara, if you don’t, I’ll cast a spell on you,” Delia grinned wickedly at her sister, wiggling her fingers, and making ghostly noises.
“Shh!”
Clara looked around, tsking at her sister sharply. The one thing Gran had instilled in both women was a healthy fear of being discovered. The Macconwood Pack might have undergone an entire management change in recent years, but that did not mean everything was different.
Clara needed to make sure there were no prying ears in the shop, which, thank the gods, was unlikely as they would be closed in the next five minutes. The truth was, the Crescent sisters had a secret. Maybe not too dark, or deep, but it was secret all the same.
“What? Why are you looking at me like that? It’s not like the Pack isn’t accepting of Witches anymore. The Beta is mated to the Morrigan, for fuck’s sake,” Delia said, rolling her eyes.
“And that might work well for one of the Wolf Guard, but we are a bit lower on the totem pole, Delia!” She admonished.
If there was one thing their Gran had always taught them, it was to hide that part of their Magical heritage. Yes, they were Werewolves, a trait passed on by their father. But they were more than that too.