Rowan Wood Legends Read online

  Rowan Wood Legends

  The Lost Clan, book 2

  Olivia Wildenstein

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  CHEAT SHEET

  GOTTWA GLOSSARY

  FAELI GLOSSARY

  Prologue

  1. Holly

  2. The Blame

  3. The Vanishing Body

  4. The Silent Treatment

  5. The Medical Examiner

  6. Daughters And Mothers

  7. The Arrows

  8. The Darts

  9. The Rose Liana

  10. The Wind Chime

  11. The Club

  12. The Magnet

  13. The Punishment

  14. The Contamination

  15. The Imprint

  16. The Note

  17. The Cave

  18. First Flight

  19. The Wave

  20. The Black Out

  21. After the Storm

  22. The Treasure Hunt

  23. The Bond

  24. The Changelings

  25. Dark Magic

  26. The Dinner Bargain

  27. The Non-Date

  28. Hate And Love

  29. The Pack

  30. The Gathering

  31. The Greenhouse

  32. The Letter

  33. The Attack

  34. Hunter Blood

  35. Death

  36. The Reflection

  37. The New Tattoo

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Also by Olivia Wildenstein

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Book 2 of The Lost Clan series

  by

  OLIVIA WILDENSTEIN

  CHEAT SHEET

  CHARACTERS

  Adette: Taeewa’s mate; the bazash’s daughter

  Ace Wood: Linus’s son; Maximus’s grandson

  Aylen: Nova’s sister; Cat’s aunt

  Astra Sakar: half-fae; owns Astra’s Bakery

  Bee: Beatrice; owns Bee’s Place; Blake’s grandmother

  Blake: Bee’s grandson; Cat’s friend

  Borgo Lief: Ishtu’s lover; Cruz’s “adoptive” father

  Cass: Cat’s best friend in Rowan; Etta’s daughter

  Catori Price: main character

  Chatwa: Iya’s mother; twin sister to Holly’s mother, Ley; hunter

  Cometta: known as Etta; part fae; daughter of Astra; sister to Stella

  Cruz: fae; faux medical examiner; friends with the Woods family; Lily’s fiancé; Lyoh & Jacobiah’s son

  Derek Price: Cat’s father; Nova’s husband

  Elika: Negongwa’s mate; Gwenelda’s mother

  Faith Sakar: Stella’s daughter; bad blood between her and Cat

  Gregor: current fae wariff; soulless narcissist

  Gwenelda: huntress; first to awaken; absorbed Nova’s soul

  Holly: Ley’s daughter; fae; Iya’s cousin; Cat’s great-great-aunt

  Ishtu: Kajika’s mate; looked like Cat

  Iya: Chatwa’s daughter; Cat’s great-grandmother

  Jacobiah Vega: fae; former wariff; Cruz’s father; killed by Lyoh Vega

  Jimmy: Cass’s brother; Etta’s son

  Kajika: Ishtu’s ex-husband; Gwenelda’s brother-in-law

  Ley: Chatwa’s twin sister; fae

  Lily Wood: fae; mute; Ace’s sister; Linus’s daughter; Cruz’s fiancée

  Linus Wood: fae; wealthy

  Lyoh Vega: Jacobiah’s wife; Cruz’s mother; killed her husband; killed Ishtu

  Maximus Wood: Linus’s father; ruthless, lawless, bloodthirsty leader

  Menawa: Gwenelda’s mate; Kajika’s brother

  Negongwa: revered leader of Gottwa Indians

  Nova Price: Catori’s mother; Derek’s beloved wife

  Satyana: Aylen’s daughter; Shiloh’s twin sister

  Shiloh: Aylen’s daughter; Cat’s young cousin; Satyana’s twin sister; has the sight

  Stella Sakar: part fae; daughter of Astra; sister to Cometta (Etta)

  Taeewa: Gwenelda’s youngest brother; the 13th hunter

  Tony: Aylen’s husband

  Woni: Iya’s daughter; Nova’s mother; Cat’s grandmother

  GOTTWA GLOSSARY

  aabiti: mate

  abiwoojin: darling

  adsookin: legend

  baseetogan: fae world; Neverra; Isle of Woods

  bazash: half-fae, half-human

  chatwa: darkness

  debwe: truth

  gajeekwe: the king’s advisor, like a minister

  gatizogin: I’m sorry

  Gejaiwe: the Great Spirit

  gassen: faerie dust

  gingawi: part hunter, part fae

  golwinim: Woods’s guards, fireflies

  gwe: woman

  ishtu: sweetness

  kwenim: memory

  ley: light

  ma kwenim: my memory

  maahin: come forth

  Makudewa Geezhi: Dark Day

  manazi: book

  mashka: tough

  mawa: mine

  meegwe: give me

  meekwa: blood

  naagangwe: stop her

  tokwa: favor

  FAELI GLOSSARY

  alinum: rowan wood

  astium: portal, door

  calidum: lesser fae; bazash

  caligo: mist

  caligosubi: one who lives below the mist, aka marsh-dweller

  caligosupra: one who lives above the mist aka mist-dweller

  calimbor: sky-trees

  captis: magnetize

  clave: portal locksmith

  draca: first guard; wariff’s protector (dragon-form)

  enefkum: eunuch

  fae: sky-dwellers; SEELIE fae

  forma: underground-dwellers; the UNSEELIE fae

  gajoï: favor

  hareni: grotto

  kalini: fire

  lucionaga: faerie guards

  mallow: an edible plant, faerie weed; doesn’t affect humans the same way it affects faeries, and hunters are immune

  Massin: Your Highness

  Neverra: baseetogan; Isle of Woods

  sedes: dweller

  vade: go

  valo: bye

  volitors: floating trees

  veram: truth

  ventor: hunter

  wariff: equal to a gajeekwe

  wita: dust

  Prologue

  Dinner was lively and lovely. Exactly what my exhausted self needed. Dad, Aunt Aylen, and I sat down around our little kitchen table and ate delicious chicken satay and pea-flecked fried rice. Aylen had spent the afternoon whipping up both dishes and explained exhaustively how to fold the eggs gently into the rice so you didn’t end up with an omelet.

  I never thought discussing food would be so therapeutic. Between cooking pointers and filling my hollow stomach with sustenance, I began to feel better…more human.

  Spending the afternoon with Kajika in the tree house had probably helped too. The hunter was a new comforting presence in the strange world that had become mine when Mom passed away. Dad still believed she’d had a heart attack, but I knew she’d died because of a spell that brought a two-hundred-year-old ancestor back to life, an ancestor named Gwenelda who acted as though this were still the 1800s and faeries were the most horrid beasts walking the Earth.

  Kajika shared her belief. I did not. Perhaps it was because I hadn’t lived through the massacre, the Dark Day—Makudewa Gheezhi. Or perhaps it was because I was gingawi—mixed—half hunter, half faerie. An atrocity to both species.

  Back at the tree house, just a few hours before, Kajika had confessed to liking me. A lot. So maybe I was no longer an abomination in his eyes. Or maybe my resemblance to his great love Ishtu an
d the fact that he possessed my best friend’s memories clouded his opinion of me.

  I balanced my fork on my index finger as I thought of Blake, another casualty of the faerie hunter war. Hot tears blurred the prongs of the fork. I blinked.

  The fork teetered like a seesaw until I found its center of gravity somewhere close to its neck. Would I ever find a balance between my two sides? I imagined the tines were my faerie side, and the butt of the fork was my hunter side. For a while, both remained aligned, but it was a fork, and I wasn’t a utensil.

  The doorbell rang.

  The fork wobbled and fell prong-side against my plate with a startlingly loud ding.

  “Are you expecting company, Cat?” Dad asked.

  “I…didn’t invite anyone.” But when had that ever stopped people from bursting into my home and my life?

  I placed my napkin next to my empty plate and walked to the front door. A teeny, tiny part of me hoped Kajika was standing behind it.

  I swung the door wide and gaped at our visitor.

  It wasn’t Kajika.

  1

  Holly

  My best friend’s brother was wringing his trooper cap between his fingers as though it was waterlogged, but it was as dry as my throat.

  “Hi, Cat. Um…is your dad here?” Jimmy asked.

  “M-My dad?” I repeated clumsily.

  “I’m right here,” Dad said, walking toward us.

  Jimmy’s large forehead was pasty and slick with sweat. It was cold out. No one sweated in this weather. I peeked behind him. His squad car was parked alongside the hearse.

  “Sorry to disturb you so late, Derek, but we got a body for you.”

  Panic shot up my spine. “A body?”

  “Whose body?” Dad and I asked at the same time.

  Jimmy wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, then set his cap back on top of his head.

  “Who died now?” Aylen asked, joining us by the front door.

  “Holly.”

  “Holly?” I whispered. “Holly died?” My breaths surged up fast, too fast. They made my head spin and quickened my heartbeat. Black dots flickered on the edge of my eyesight, fragmenting Jimmy’s face. I zipped my hand out to grab ahold of something before I keeled over like my fork. That something was Dad’s sleeve. My body swayed, and the next thing I knew, Dad had one arm around my waist and was steering me toward the couch. He settled me down while Aylen dashed to the kitchen and returned with a glass of water, which she slipped into my shaky fingers.

  “How?” I croaked. “How?”

  “Her great-nephew dropped by the station to report her passing. Now, we’re pretty sure it was a natural death, even though she had—” He stopped short.

  “What did she have?” I asked.

  “I think she might have contracted chicken pox or something.”

  She was a faerie. Didn’t faeries heal from human diseases?

  “Sheriff Jones would like your father to validate the cause of death.”

  “That’s not…not really my area of expertise,” Dad said.

  “I know, but maybe you could give us your thoughts. Could we bring her here?”

  “Of course, but—”

  Jimmy was already on his phone, so Dad stopped talking.

  “The EMTs are on their way,” Jimmy said after disconnecting.

  “Where’s her great-nephew?” Dad asked.

  “I don’t know. He seemed distraught. Which I suppose is normal considering the circumstances. He said he would meet us at the farmhouse, but he never did.”

  Dad stole a disquieting glance at me. “Did you have time to question him at the station?”

  “Like I said, he was distraught. And then, when we asked him for his alibi, he said he’d been with Catori all afternoon.”

  My cheeks smoldered, the only warm spot on my chilled body.

  “Her car broke down a couple miles away, so they had to get it back from the towing company,” Dad explained. He peered beyond Jimmy, squinting into the darkness. “Actually, where is your car, Cat?”

  “I, uh…it wasn’t ready,” I lied, pulse hammering. I hated lying to my father, and yet, ever since Mom had died, ever since I’d found out about faeries and faehunters, I’d been feeding him lies almost every day. I called it shielding him from the truth.

  Still, lies.

  “I thought you ran out of gas,” he said.

  “There’s actually a problem with the fuel gauge.” Liar. Liar. Liar. When Ace had called to tell us Aylen and Dad were digging up a hunter grave, I had mere minutes to reach the cemetery. Cars didn’t go that fast. But hunters did. So I’d abandoned the car on the side of the road and allowed Kajika to run me home.

  Dad’s eyebrows peaked.

  “They said it would be ready tomorrow,” I added.

  Tires crunched the gravel, taking the focus off my missing Honda. A whirling red light ignited the night. Even our living room turned red and maroon from the powerful strobes.

  “Did you spend the afternoon with Kajika, Cat?” Jimmy asked.

  I swallowed. “Yes.”

  “You ain’t covering up for him, are you?” he continued.

  I sprang up from the couch. “Absolutely not. Kajika wouldn’t murder Holly.”

  Dad placed a gentle hand on my shoulder. “No one said anything about murder, honey.”

  Neither his hand nor his words soothed me, and when they wheeled Holly in, the emotional rollercoaster I’d ridden all day took yet another treacherous turn. I approached the stretcher. They’d forgone the body bag. Instead, they’d wrapped her in the thick comforter Gwen had kept tucked around Holly’s deteriorating body.

  A vicious rash covered her exposed skin, including her scalp. Pink bumps meshed with her sparse white hair.

  I bit back a gasp.

  “Honey?” Dad lifted my chin with his finger. “Why don’t you help Aylen make tea?”

  I was pretty sure Aylen could handle boiling water on her own.

  Spearheading the small cortege, he opened the door that led down to the morgue. I didn’t follow them. I also didn’t make tea. I took my phone out of my sweater pocket to dial Kajika but realized he didn’t have a phone. My hands shook. My heart shook. The timeliness of Holly’s death irked me. Yes, she was ninety-nine years old and ill, but how convenient that she’d died the day Stella Sakar had stolen The Wytchen Tree—the book that held all of her secrets…all of mine.

  The brand Cruz Vega had burned on the top of my left hand flared, a trail of fire shaped like a V. I hated the mark. It was nothing more than a magical leash that kept me connected to a faerie I despised, allowing him to track my mood and moves. The previous night, he’d tortured me to find out where I kept the book, tortured me because of a faerie bargain I’d unintentionally struck. And he’d weaseled it out of me because the pain of a claimed gajoï was the worst physical pain that existed, akin to being all at once quartered and compressed.

  My brand grew warmer, brighter at the abhorrent memory.

  I wasn’t sure whom I hated more at that moment—Cruz or Stella. Where Cruz had never been a friend, Stella had been almost family. Where Cruz and I had spent a handful of hours of together, Stella and I had spent nineteen years together. Where I’d never loved Cruz, I’d loved Stella.

  I did know whom I hated more.

  Stella.

  As cupboards opened and closed and water steamed in the kitchen, I strode out my front door. Anger and tension filled me with hot-white rage. I didn’t think fresh air would cool me down, but it beat sitting in the living room, replaying Stella’s duplicity over and over.

  I kicked the beam holding up our porch, but that did little to flush the tension from my body.

  “What did that poor piece of wood do to you, Kitty Cat?”

  I whirled around, heart vaulting into my throat.

  Ace was leaning against the railing, arms folded in front of his chest, skin glowing like the moon.

  2

  The Blame

  The
left side of Ace’s face was splashed red from the strobe light atop the EMT van. Although the responders were all in the morgue downstairs, they’d left the light on.

  His eyes blazed like faceted blue topaz. “You okay?”

  “Peachy.”

  His gaze ran over my face. “You sure?”

  “Holly just died,” I blurted out.

  “I know.” His lips barely shifted as he spoke.

  “You know?”

  “That’s one of the reasons why I’m here. I came to collect her.”

  Goose bumps scattered over my arms. “Collect her?”

  “Faeries disintegrate.”

  “What?” I gasped but then added, “Shh,” as I remembered Aylen was in the kitchen, mere feet away. My aunt had no knowledge of faeries and hunters.

  “Cat, unless you want to end up with a pile of gray ash in your basement, I need to take her away.”

  “How come she hasn’t transformed already?”

  He unfolded his arms and edged toward me. Probably to get past me. I pressed my palm against his torso to stop him. “There are tons of people downstairs.”

  He looked down at my splayed hand, then looked back up, and I could’ve sworn his Technicolor irises pulsed. “There must still be some fire in her veins. But it will burn out soon.”

  Blushing—the Great Spirit only knew why—I yanked my hand away. What was I doing touching Ace Wood? My fingers tingled with my frenzied pulse, which lit up my stupid brand. Ugh. “How did you even know she was dead?” I asked, looking at the fiery V.