Chapter 93 My Mate!
"I'm fine," Grace said. "He's not holding me. Maddox is my friend."
The old man looked at her and then at Maddox standing by the door with his eyes open and focused on nothing.
"Come," he said, and took her arm.
Grace pulled back. "I just told you—"
He was stronger than he looked and he had already moved her two steps toward the back of the shop before she yanked her arm free. She put herself between him and Maddox, which was a slightly absurd position given that Maddox was currently standing by a shelf of ceramic pieces looking at a fixed point on the wall with the unfocused expression of someone whose senses had been entirely removed, but she put herself there anyway.
"Stop," she said.
The old man stopped. He looked at her standing in front of Maddox with her chin up and her jaw set and his expression shifted slightly, not into agreement but into assessment.
"Your mother mentioned you," he said. His voice had come down from the urgency of a moment ago. "She said you might come one day. Looking for answers." He looked at Grace with the specific attention of someone cross-referencing a memory. "She did not mention you would arrive with a wolf."
"Maddox is not a threat to me," Grace said.
"You believe that."
"I know that."
The old man looked past her at Maddox, who had at this point walked sideways into the shelf and displaced three objects, none of which he appeared to notice because he could not feel the contact. He was reaching out with one hand in the general direction of the door and making contact with a display case instead.
"Werewolves are not friends of witches," the old man said, returning his eyes to Grace. "That is not an opinion. It is a history. A long, specific, well-documented history that your mother learned the hard way."
"I don't care about the history right now," Grace said. "I care about finding my mother, and you just told me you knew her, so please stop trying to drag me into your back room and talk to me."
The old man looked at her.
Behind her, Maddox walked into a standing display and it tipped and he went down with it, landing heavily on the floor among scattered objects, and lay there for a moment apparently unsure which direction was up.
The old man watched this.
Then something that was not quite a smile moved across his face.
"Your mother," he said, "also had a habit of defending wolves." He said it with the weight of something that had cost him something once. "It did not end well."
"What happened to her?" Grace said.
He looked at her for a long moment and then he sighed, a long exhale that carried the weight of a man revisiting something he had put down a long time ago and finding it heavier than he remembered.
"She disappeared," he said. "Fifteen years ago, give or take. She was here and then she was not, and nobody in this town has seen her since." He moved toward the counter and stood behind it, putting the glass surface between them. "She left things. This necklace was one of them."
Grace looked at the pendant in the window display.
"She told me to keep it," the old man said. "She said someone would come for it one day and would know it was meant for them." He looked at Grace. "She described you. Not precisely, not by name. But the description was accurate enough."
Grace moved toward the window and looked at the necklace up close. The stone in the crescent caught the light from the street and the movement inside it was more visible up close, something slow and deep in the colour.
"She gave it to you for me," Grace said.
"I believe so."
"I had one like it," Grace said quietly. "I broke it. By accident." She looked at him. "I didn't know what it was."
The old man was quiet for a moment and then he made a sound that expressed a great deal without being any specific word.
"Of course you did," he said.
"I didn't know," she said. "I didn't know any of this until recently. I didn't know she was my mother. I thought she was my grandmother." She paused. "I didn't know what I was."
The old man looked at her with an expression that was moving through several things slowly. The sharpness that had been in it when Maddox walked in was still there but it had company now, something older and more complicated than suspicion.
"The necklace," he said finally, "was a locator. A specific kind. It was keyed to her. If you had worn it and focused on her, it would have led you to wherever she was." He looked at the pendant. "That one will do the same thing. It was made for that purpose, but you were meant to join both halves."
"Then I can use it," Grace said.
"You can wear it and try," he said. "Whether it works depends on whether she is somewhere that can be found. Whether the channel between you is open." He paused. "And whether whoever took her wants her to be found."
"You think someone took her."
"I think she didn't leave willingly," he said. "She loved this town. She had reasons to stay." He said the last sentence with the care of someone not saying something specific, and Grace filed it away.
"Can't you do a locating spell?" Grace said. "A witch can locate a person through bloodline connection. I've seen it done."
"I know it can be done," he said. "The question is whether I can establish a connection through you strong enough to follow. Your abilities are untrained. That complicates the channel."
A crash from behind her. Maddox had found the far wall by running into it and was now standing against it with his palms flat against the surface and a very specific expression on his face, the expression of a man who was working very hard to maintain some dignity in a situation that was actively removing it.
Grace turned back to the old man.
"Please take the spell off him," she said.
The old man looked at Maddox against the wall. "It will wear off in a few more minutes." He said reluctantly.
"Please," Grace said. "He's my mate."
The old man looked at her sharply.
She had not meant to say it that way, or not necessarily, but it was what came out and it sat in the shop between them with the finality of a thing said that could not be unsaid.