Shea didn’t have the heart to tell her grandmother that nothing she’d taken over the last few days had helped at all. She didn’t bother asking how Kallista could tell she was hurting, either. Not only was her grandmother also a witch, but they had the same talent. Kallista was a healer who could sense illnesses and injuries and often used magic to help relieve someone of it.
Well, her grandmother could. What Shea did was… different. She could feel all kinds of pain—both physical and emotional when her shields were down—but relying on magic to fix it?
Yeah. Nope.
Shea blew on her tea to cool it, resigned herself to a burned tongue in addition to all her other aches and pain, and chugged the tea.
“Feel better?”
No. “Oh, yeah. I do.”
Her grandmother snorted through her long nose. “She’s twenty-five now and still my granddaughter tells me fibs.”
An experienced witch learned how to tell lies from truth using magic. After raising Shea and her older brother, Hudson, their entire lives, Kallista was pro at knowing when they were lying—and she didn’t need her magic to figure it out.
Having been caught, there was nothing she could say except, “Sorry, Nana.”
“Mm.”
Shea took another sip, willing the herbal tea to do something. “I mean, I’m sure I’ll feel better later. Sometimes it takes a minute for the remedy to take.”
“The tea, yes. But I’ve been working on you since I arrived in front of your shop and I could sense your aches. Your hip,” Kallista said, her dark purple eyes narrowed shrewdly on Shea’s right side, “and your back. The bruise must be something terrible for the heat radiating off of it.”
That’s how the healing senses worked. Shea had a hard time explaining it to anyone who didn’t already understand, but she could look at someone and tell where they were hurting and how badly by the color she saw and the level of heat she felt wafting off their skin.
Only... one thing. That first night, when the sudden pain brought her to her knees, she went home and checked every inch of her body in the mirror for some outward sign. She was perfectly intact. No bruises. No cuts. Not a single blemish on her olive-toned skin.
Since she didn’t plan on stripping down and showing her back to her grandmother, she hurriedly tried to change the subject. “I’m fine. Don’t worry about it. Anyway, what are you doing here? I thought you were overseas.”
Her grandmother was currently working with a European coven and had been since the beginning of the year. So while it was nice to see her again after missing her these last six months, she had to admit that the timing was a little suspicious.
“I’ll be returning shortly. My coven has priority over any others, my family even more than that. You didn’t seem surprised when I entered the shop, Shea. Now, is there anything you want to tell me?”
She wasn’t surprised because, from the moment Luciana left her shop, Shea had been expecting a visit just like this. Her grandmother would’ve burned through quite a few diamonds to gather the magic to transport halfway across the globe, but Kallista wasn’t kidding: family comes first. So, yeah, she’d been expecting this.
Her grandmother’s question? Not so much.
Shea gulped. She hated questions like that. A million different things always sprang to mind—some so embarrassing that she cringed to think her Nana might know about them—and she had
to wonder if that time she went three days without changing her underwear meant something now.
Before she could admit to anything, her grandmother said, “I spoke to Luciana.”
Was that all? She figured that already. “Yeah? Did she mention that she stopped by yesterday?”
“She told me that she suspected the cause of your problems, my dear. And, now that I’ve come all this way to see you, I have to say that I agree.”
“You know what’s wrong with me?”
“Yes. I believe so.”
“Great!” That was the first good news Shea had received in days. “Then you can fix me.”
“It’s not so easy as that. Tell me, what do you know about bonds?”
“Bonds? What do you— wait. You mean like fated mates, true love, Para bonds?”
Her grandmother nodded.