Entangled- The Homecoming Read online

  Entangled - The Homecoming

  The Sugar Maple Chronicles - Book 7

  Barbara Bretton

  Free Spirit Press

  Praise for Barbara Bretton

  Praise for USA Today best-selling author Barbara Bretton

  “Bretton’s characters are always real and their conflicts believable.”

  — Chicago Sun-Times

  “Soul warming... A powerful relationship drama [for] anyone who enjoys a passionate look inside the hearts and souls of the prime players.”

  — Midwest Book Review

  “[Bretton] excels in her portrayal of the sometimes sweet, sometimes stifling ties of a small community. The town’s tight network of loving, eccentric friends and family infuses the tale with a gently comic note that perfectly balances the darker dramas of the romance.”

  — Publishers Weekly

  “A tender love story about two people who, when they find something special, will go to any length to keep it.”

  — Booklist

  “Honest, witty... absolutely unforgettable.”

  — Rendezvous

  “A classic adult fairy tale.”

  — Affaire de Coeur

  “Dialogue flows easily and characters spring quickly to life.”

  — Rocky Mountain News

  Copyright 2018 Barbara Bretton

  All rights reserved. No part of this book, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews, may be reproduced in any form by any means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without prior written permission from the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, business establishments, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distributing of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the copyright owner is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic and print editions, and do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  Chapter 1

  Do you believe in love?

  For the first thirty years of my life, I wasn’t sure I did. Don’t get me wrong, I was a dyed-in-the-wool romantic who spent her evenings mainlining Chips Ahoy while watching the Hallmark Channel. Happily-ever-after endings seemed to work well enough between the covers of books and in the rom coms I devoured by the hour, but in real life?

  That was where you lost me.

  I mean, when was the last time a handsome knight in shining armor parked his white charger in your driveway and handed you a two-carat princess cut diamond and the keys to Barbie’s Dream House?

  [Crickets.]

  That’s what I thought.

  Heroes are definitely in short supply in the real world, which was one of the reasons why I spent most of my free time pretending the real world didn’t exist.

  When Luke MacKenzie came to town to investigate Sugar Maple’s first murder, I didn’t intend to fall in love. He was mortal, after all, and I knew first-hand how dangerous a combination magicks and mortals made. My own parents’ doomed love story was never far from my mind. Mix magick and mortal together and tragedy was right around the corner.

  But here’s the thing about love: It doesn’t care if you’re ready. It doesn’t care if you believe it has the shelf life of a ripe banana. Love opens you up to life in a way nothing else does and it doesn’t ask permission. From that moment on, your heart belongs to someone else and you wouldn’t have it any other way.

  And, in my case, it brought my magick to life.

  By the way, I’m Chloe Hobbs, the half-human/half-sorceress owner of Sticks & Strings, New England’s most popular yarn shop. Knitters and spinners from up and down the East Coast (and some as far away as California and Hawaii) flock to our workshops and turn our sales into the fiber junkie’s equivalent of Woodstock. You wouldn’t think that would be a problem, but when an entire town is trying to hide a secret in plain sight, things can get a little dicey.

  My best friends are a witch, a shifter, and a Norwegian troll. My 100% Homo sapiens husband Luke hangs out with a selkie and a werewolf. A family of Fae run the Sugar Maple Inn, a popular rest stop along the Spirit Trail, and our rarely used funeral parlor is owned by a family of vampires. We’ve been here since my ancestor Aerynn fled Salem with a group of Others and founded Sugar Maple as a sanctuary where they could live in peace.

  Of course, the word “peace” is relative but, despite the problems we were currently dealing with, I was optimistic about the future.

  Then again, I’m a new mother and a new bride. Optimism seems to come with the territory.

  At least it did until the new magicks came to town.

  I was born and raised in Sugar Maple and thought I knew all of our biases and prejudices and idiosyncrasies. However, the intensity of dissent from some surprising sources sent me reeling. For centuries, we had worried about hiding our magick from fearful, judgmental humans bent on banishing our kind from their world. I never thought we would become the bad guys.

  Unfortunately, that seemed to be exactly what was happening, right before my eyes.

  Two months ago I opened up Sugar Maple to leader Rohesia’s clan of Others who were escaping their crumbling dimensional home beyond the mist. I had been so sure that the residents of Sugar Maple would embrace the newcomers that I pretty much presented the move as a done deal.

  Not my finest hour.

  You probably heard the uproar that exploded at our Town Hall meeting last month when I presented the plan to expand Sugar Maple’s population. (To be honest, they probably heard the uproar in space.)

  Last week one of Paul Griggs’s sons had been charged with harassing a young male member of Rohesia’s clan and running him into a ditch near the Toothaker Bridge. Two members of our Monday Night Knit Club almost came to blows over donating used clothing to the newcomers to help them blend in more easily with the rest of us. There was even talk about requiring the newcomers to file paperwork with Luke, our Sugar Maple police chief, detailing how they planned to contribute to Sugar Maple’s economy.

  That one made me laugh. At this point, the members of Rohesia’s clan didn’t know what an economy was. They were still working on the wonders of indoor plumbing and electricity. Their magick is more elemental than ours. More violent in many ways. Diplomacy wasn’t the first weapon in their arsenal, but it should have been the first weapon in ours.

  Have you ever found yourself trapped between a rock and a hard place? That was exactly where I found myself now. I owed everything to my extended Sugar Maple family. They were the ones who had surrounded me with love and support after my parents were killed in a car crash. They were the ones who waited patiently for me to gain my powers and take my rightful place as the next heir to Aerynn.

  But I owed something to Rohesia and her clan, as well. My parents had betrothed me to her grandson Gavan when I was six years old, pledging my future to a life of Old World ways, Old World magick. In other words, a marriage based on familial duty instead of love.

  A marriage Rohesia had counted on to save her community.

  The physical structure of their dimension was crumbling faster than predicted. Suddenly time was of the essence. They needed to make life-or-death decisions that would determine whether their clan would move forward or pierce the veil forever.

  After over twenty years of silence, Rohesia sent Gavan to investigate rumors of my pending marriage to Luke and to stop it, if necessary. His mission was clear
: he was expected to marry me and join our two factions together, no matter what. In a surprising twist, Gavan had refused to break up the family Luke and I had created. He understood what Luke and Laria meant to me and he found the guts to stand up to Rohesia, who was a powerfully intimidating leader.

  Somehow we had made Rohesia see reason. Twenty-first century reason. She could have made my life a living hell but she didn’t, and because of that act of compassion (at least that’s how I choose to view it), Luke and I were able to exchange vows.

  Some of Rohesia’s clan had chosen to roll the dice and stay in their ancestral home until the end. Some had chosen to pierce the veil on their own terms, taking control of their destiny in the only way that made sense to them. But the majority had campaigned for a move to the human realm where Sugar Maple was viewed as the ultimate success story.

  My ancestor Aerynn had founded Sugar Maple as a refuge for magicks seeking safety from a hostile world. As far as I was concerned, it still was.

  It was the second Saturday in October and I was holding a Teach Your Kids to Knit workshop at Sticks & Strings that afternoon. My human cousin Wendy had volunteered to drive over from her home in Maine to help out. I loved her and appreciated the offer but I knew that teaching a group of six-year-olds to handle garter stitch wasn’t the real attraction.

  Rohesia’s grandson Gavan was.

  “The guy’s good,” my BFF Janice said as we watched the two of them gazing into each other’s eyes over a display of Koigu before the knitters and their children arrived. “He must have attached some kind of GPS gadget to her butt. The second she pulled up this morning in that old white minivan of hers, he manifested.”

  “He doesn’t know from GPS yet,” I reminded her. “You’re looking at primal attraction, Fae style.”

  You could feel his intensity across the room.

  Janice sighed deeply. “He’s a hottie,” she said. “I’ll give him that.”

  I nodded. Why debate the obvious?

  “She knows it will never work, doesn’t she?” Janice asked.

  “I’ve told her what I can about the Fae, but I’m not sure she heard me.”

  “She doesn’t want to hear you,” Janice said. “She’s in lust.”

  “She thinks she’s in love.”

  “Women always think it’s love but, trust me: first it’s lust.”

  I couldn’t argue that point either. For Luke and me, those first days had been all sparks and fireworks like the Fourth of July.

  “I even used the Prince Charles analogy,” I said. “He might have loved Camilla, but first he had to marry Diana.”

  “So he could sire an heir and a spare.”

  “Exactly.” And we both knew that imperative was non-negotiable. I lowered my voice. “Wendy can’t have children,” I said, my eyes misting over as I watched the two lovers pretend they were nothing more than friends. “Even if she had magick, that would be a deal-breaker for him.”

  The weight of his clan’s future rested on his shoulders. Rohesia and her band of Others were still reeling from his decision to break our betrothal bonds, and I knew that the pressure on him to join with a magick from Sugar Maple grew more intense with every day that passed.

  Casting in his lot with a mortal who could never bear his child was definitely off the table. Unfortunately, everyone seemed to know that but Gavan and my cousin Wendy.

  Janice blew out a long sigh that made me laugh out loud. “I’m no fan of his clan, but I think he might be worth a broken heart.”

  “I hope so,” I said, “because that’s the only way it can end.”

  “Ouch!” My BFF shot me a look. “Cynical much?”

  “Just being realistic. She’s a twenty-first century human. He’s a magick, following rules set in place during a different millennium. I’m not sure even love can bridge that gap.”

  There was a long, uncomfortable silence, and then Janice said, “You realize it’s all your fault.”

  The words tore through me like buckshot. “What?”

  “I know you heard me, Chloe. I said, this whole thing is your fault.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  She shook her head. “Not this time.”

  I faced her head-on. “You want to be more specific?”

  She waved in the general direction of the two prospective lovers. “Him. His cohorts. That Rohesia woman. You never should have opened up Sugar Maple to them.”

  “Okay,” I said, relaxing. “Now I know you’re kidding.” Janice was a fair, open-minded, compassionate woman whose own foremothers had fled persecution in Salem centuries ago for the safety of Sugar Maple.

  “I’m not the only one who feels this way. You were at the last Town Hall meeting. You heard what we had to say.”

  “’We’?” I asked, unable to keep the edge from my voice. “Are you telling me, you’re on the side of those--”

  “Citizens,” Janice supplied. “Townspeople. Life-long residents.”

  “Okay,” I said, aware of the rising tide of my temper. “Residents. I can’t believe you’re coming down on the side of Midge Stallworth and Verna Griggs and the rest of their short-sighted pals.”

  “Hello,” Janice snapped. “Were you at the same meeting I was? Don’t lump me in with Midge and Verna, thank you very much. The dissent was widespread and diverse and grounded in reality.”

  “Is that your Harvard education talking?” I had a temper, but I was rarely bitchy. I wished I could pull back my remark, but it was out there and, unfortunately, it packed a punch.

  “That’s my common sense talking,” she said, flashing a look of disgust my way. “Something you seem to have misplaced. I can’t believe Luke didn’t rein you in.”

  “Rein me in?” My voice went high and tight. “He’s my husband, not my keeper.”

  “He’s the chief of police,” my best friend threw back at me. “I can’t believe he wants to open up our town to a group of strangers.”

  “They’re not strangers,” I protested. “They were part of the original clan that began in Wales.”

  “I don’t care if we all came here on the same spaceship from Mars,” Janice said. “They’re strangers to us and to our ways and it’s going to get a lot worse around here before it gets better. You had no right to grant them asylum without taking the town’s pulse first.”

  “That’s why I called a Town Hall meeting.”

  “After the fact.”

  “It’s not like I had a choice, Janice. They stopped my wedding. They put all of you into a state of suspended animation. I did what I had to do, when I had to do it.”

  “Take a look around you, Chloe. My youngest came home with a bloody nose last week and it wasn’t because he tripped during gym.”

  I wanted to remind her that her youngest child came home with a bloody nose at least every other week but I somehow kept my trap shut. “I’m sorry Liam was hurt,” I said, meaning it. “Is he okay now?”

  She waved a dismissive hand in my general direction. “What is wrong with you?” she exploded. “Don’t you get it? Some of the newcomers jumped him on his way home from school and beat him up.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  The look she gave me was one of utter disgust. “Somehow I’m not surprised. That entire group has you bought and paid for. How do you explain the broken shop windows? The punctured tires up and down Osborne Street? The kids who mixed it up in the woods over that stupid cave?” She paused for breath. “They weren’t fighting themselves, Chloe. They were jumped by some of Rohesia’s group.”

  She made it sound like we were doing a West Side Story revival. In another minute, the Jets and the Sharks would be ready for a rumble over a cave where kids made out.

  “Sugar Maple isn’t perfect,” I said as the truth of her words smacked me in the head. “We’re not pacifists. We’ve had problems like this before and worked it all out.”

  “What’s happened to you?” she demanded. “Midge was right. You’ve changed and not f
or the better. The old Chloe would have taken everyone into consideration.”

  “Is that who put you up to this?” My control was shot to hell. “I never thought you’d lower yourself to doing Midge’s dirty work for her.”

  “Open your eyes, girlfriend.” Janice’s anger clearly matched my own. “Midge is only one of many.” She began to enumerate them on her fingers. “Midge. Lynette—“

  “Lynette?” My voice was up in dogs-only register. “Why didn’t she say something?” Lynette was my other BFF. “I thought we told each other everything.”

  Janice ignored me. “Lynette,” she continued. “Archie. Paul. Lorcan. The crew at Fully Caffeinated. Most of the folks at Assisted Living.” She paused. “Want me to go on?”

  Suddenly I became aware that Wendy and Gavan had fallen silent and were taking in every harsh and ugly word.

  I met Janice’s eyes. “I think we’ve both said enough for now.”

  “We haven’t said near enough.” She aimed her gaze at Wendy and Gavan. “Does either one of you know what you’re doing to this town?”

  They both looked completely bewildered. My heart went out to them.

  “Come on, Janice,” I said, in as conciliatory a tone as I could manage. “Leave them alone.”

  “No,” she said, without missing a beat. “They’re part of the reason we have trouble.” She aimed her words directly at the two erstwhile lovers. “It’s never going to work. I know it. Chloe knows it. I’ll even bet you two know it. They’ll never accept you, Wendy. You don’t belong and you never will.”

  “Janice,” I said, my conciliatory tone rapidly hardening. “That’s my cousin you’re talking to.”

  “Go on,” Janice challenged me. “Tell your cousin how you really feel about the two of them getting together. Tell her what you told me.”

  Poor Wendy looked as if she had been kicked in the stomach. “Chloe?” Her voice was soft, hesitant.