Bizarre Life of Sydney Sedrick (4 page)

The journal! I’d completely forgotten Grandmother Maria’s journal was under the register. Going back behind the large wooden counter with the clear glass top, I tugged my bag out from where I’d stashed it. I felt angry and frustrated. What the hell was going on? The temptation to turn off the front store sign and hide in the back storeroom pulled at me. But business was how we paid the bills.

I dug through my bag, grabbed the journal, and set it on the counter. I grimaced when the door chimes sounded again. For a weekday, the store was seeing a lot more business than usual this early in the morning. Couldn’t a girl get a moment alone?

At first glance, the woman seemed harmless enough. Dressed in clothing typical of our customers, she was wearing a long flowing skirt and a long-sleeved, button-up shirt covered by a big frock of a coat. Relief flooded over me at the normalcy of her appearance. I wasn’t sure how much more weirdness I could take in such a short period of time.

“Hello,” the woman said as she glanced around the store. “I’m looking for a new Trinity Knot charm. My daughter needs a new necklace. She has lost balance in her life. You see, she is struggling with her children and her husband. She can’t quite get the hang of juggling everyone’s needs and making sure that she’s all right, too.”

I smiled, happy to help with something so routine. “We have those over here.”

I led her to a table toward the middle of the store that held our large selection of charms and stones, each with different meanings and uses. I’ve only just begun to learn about them.

“I have a Trinity Knot,” I offered, as the woman picked up one charm, then another, as if gauging which would be perfect for her overworked daughter. “My grandmother gave me this one.” I held up the silver charm attached to brown leather lacing that never came off my wrist.

“It suits you.” The woman inclined her head, then continued to pick her way through the various colors of Trinity Knots.

I traced my charm with the tip of my finger. Grandmother Maria said it was to help me find my way. I definitely had to do more research in the near future on old Irish charms, but that would have to wait until after I read the journal.

“Look at this one!” The woman dangled a Trinity Knot before my eyes, clearly delighted with her find. “I think this is perfect, and green is my daughter’s favorite color.”

After I rang up her purchase, our first real customer of the day vacated the store. I dashed back to the counter and read some of Grandma’s journal. I skipped a few pages to get to the meaty parts. I need some answers. Now. Hopefully something in it would be able to help me figure out what was going on. I felt like I was the only one in the dark.

That ticked me off.

After skimming a few more pages of the journal, the line
my attacker’s eyes
caught my attention.

They were like nothing I’d ever seen before
.

Heartbeat picking up, I stopped skimming and started reading every word as they echoed in my head in Grandma’s voice. Grandma Maria had been twenty-two years old when she was attacked. She described walking down a dark street by herself, on her way home to the house where we now live. The house was originally where my great-grandmother and grandmother lived together, raising my mother and my aunt.

My grandfather had passed away from a congenital heart disorder. His heart was so weak and so big, it wasn’t able to pump enough blood to sustain his life. He was very young when he passed away, leaving my grandmother to raise two young girls on her own. She worked at Morning Sun, her mother’s store, until eight o’clock during the week, then went home every night to spend time with her daughters and get them ready for the start of a new day.

I walked around the corner of the block and was hit by something so hard I thought a car had jumped the curb and ran into me. Before a scream passed my lips, someone rolled me over and struck me across my face with a closed fist. I only had a moment to see my attacker. Those eyes! They were like nothing I’d ever seen before. The next blow knocked me unconscious.

After coming to, I noted that my legs rested on the cold floor of a barn. There were hay barrels and loose hay strewn all across the bottom of the barn’s floor. My arms were bound behind my back, making sitting up impossible.

A deep voice boomed from somewhere in the dark, beyond my sight.

“I’ll cut you loose, woman, if you agree not to give me any grief.” The man slowly came away from the shadows, giving me a full look at him.

“Giving you grief is something I’d say is quite impossible at the moment.”

The giant of a man stood in front of me with his hands on his hips.

I later learned that my attacker was Morris, leader of the Midwestern Werewolf Pack.

Werewolves? Was that the secret? That there’s a crazy gene being passed down through the generations? Then I thought of the creature who attacked me, and kept reading.

His territory extended into upper Wisconsin, down to Illinois, over to Minnesota, and part of Iowa. It seemed necessary for him to tell me how large his territory was. He implied his strength in numbers was great and that he had a long reach over a large area. He made sure that I was aware that if I ran, there was nowhere he couldn’t find me. He also said he was capable of protecting me from anything.

Morris had a fierce look about him, like he had lived a long, difficult life already, despite the young age he appeared to be, or so my ignorance led me to believe. That was before finding out how long werewolves really lived. Morris was already well over a hundred years old by my first encounter with him.

My chest tightened when the door chimes sounded again. Reluctantly, I tore myself from the journal and watched my younger sister enter. Three years separated us, and she was still living with my parents. A man followed her in.

A wave of uneasiness filled the air the second her companion crossed my store’s threshold. This was the same feeling I’d gotten earlier when tall, dark, and sexy had rocked my hormones. Finally, something made sense. The two men were werewolves, just like in Grandma’s journal, and they seemed to all of a sudden be everywhere. This young man was now the third werewolf in less than twenty-four hours to be in my presence, and that was already more than enough for an entire lifetime.

Was it possible my attack had something to do with them? When Morris’ man had entered Morning Sun, there was too much distracting me, such as his well-developed muscles, tight ass, and sexy as hell voice, and I hadn’t realized there was a change in the air. Not until he’d left. It was like the atmospheric pressure wasn’t as heavy as when he was physically in the store.

The air was heavy again.

And warmer.

I shot him a suspicious look over the top of Brie’s head. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t trust him, and I wanted to let him know his little secret wasn’t so secret anymore. I also wanted to make it very clear that if anything happened to Brie, I would make it my life’s goal to hunt him down and hurt him very badly. It didn’t matter how strong werewolves were, a sister’s scorn was worse.

I faced Brie with a bright, fake smile. “I’ll meet you at the house after work so I can freshen up a bit if you absolutely insist we go checkout the clubs. It might be good to get wild and let off a little steam. It’s over on 56
^th
Street.”

“Okay, me and Michael will go over to the house and hang with Aunt Judith, maybe have some dinner, and then go to his uncle’s house. We figured he’d go visit his family for a few hours before we went out with you.”

My breath caught at that statement. Fear struck me in the chest like someone had shoved an ice pick through my heart.

“His uncle? What’s his uncle’s name?”

“Morris.” Michael pinned me with a challenging gaze.

My stomach felt like someone took a blowtorch to it, the pain extending down my torso, and my breathing became involuntarily faster, despite my efforts to calm my nerves. Did my baby sister really plan to go meet the leader of the Midwestern Werewolf Pack? Was she crazy?

I opened my mouth to warn her.

“We’d better get going, Syd.” Brianna glanced at Michael, and I noted the possessive curl of Michael’s fingers around Brianna’s shoulder. “We just wanted to stop by and say hi.”

I fought the urge to rush after Brianna as Michael led my sister from the store. Hopefully my Aunt Judith would stop my sister’s after dinner plans. Aunt Judith had said she knew the secrets my mother and grandmother had kept from me. Maybe she would be able to spot a werewolf on sight when Brianna walked into the house with Morris’ nephew.

I dashed to the door. “Brianna, wait.” But they were nowhere in sight. Did I just let my sister leave with a killer?

If I could find out more about Morris, maybe I could help my sister. I headed back inside, tugged the journal from beneath the counter, and started reading again.

Morris told me he knew my grandmother, Shannon McKenna. He said we were a lot alike. He smelled my blood connection to her. Morris said the vampires would not be far away since his son was able to find me so easily. Gran told me about the wolves and the vampires, and how they’ve been at war. The wolves thought they were in the right; they were of nature and close to the Earth. He and his people thought the vampires were nothing more than parasites, living off of human blood. Gran said they had been fighting over the land in and around Kenosha ever since the vamps came over from Ireland. The land had enough populated areas within the city to keep the vampires well fed, and there was enough open land with sufficient wildlife to sustain the wolves around the perimeter of the city limits. The two refused to coexist. In my opinion, neither one of them had any more claim to the land than the other.

So there were vampires, too? What else was in this city my mother insisted on me moving to? There were clearly werewolves down in Chicago, at least one family of them. How much of a coincidence was it that Michael just happened to find my baby sister out of all the people in the Windy City? Yeah, that wasn’t likely to be much of a coincidence at all.

It was close to seven o’clock, and there was a lot to do to finish the day’s stocking before the store closed for the night. Aunt Judith had been spending most of her time in the greenhouse back at home. I’d been running the store on my own almost since moving to Kenosha. It gave me something to do. Just the simple acts of cleaning and stocking the store Grandma cared for so dearly gave me a sense of purpose.

Preparing for the spring planting was really important to Aunt Judith. There was a lot of preparation to get her seedlings ready this month and nurture them before planting in late May. Aunt Judith and Grandma Maria had always grown most of their own herbs and spices in a large garden out in the back of the property, behind the greenhouse.