“The medallion protected you from its control?” Mom asked Duncan when I finished.
“It did.” He rested his hand on it. “I didn’t know that would happen when I went looking for it. I’d hoped to help Luna and your family by finding it and returning it to you.”
“Assuming you could break Radomir’s control and not return it tohim?” I asked.
“You know that was my desire.”
“Yeah, but he was also the reason you were hunting for it in the first place.”
“Something I’ve not denied.” Duncan bowed to me, though he glanced at Lorenzo, who smiled slightly.
“Women may forgive you your transgressions,” Lorenzo said, “but they’ll never forget them.”
“I’ve observed that to be true,” Duncan said.
I exchanged looks with Mom, whose lips were twisting again, though her gaze soon returned to the medallion. Today, it lay on Duncan’s button-down shirt, gleaming in the sun but not glowing and emanating power the way it had during the battle.
“It is interesting that it would protect you from the magic of that control device when it existed,” Mom said, “but cannot do so after it’s gone.”
“Inconvenient more than interesting,” Duncan murmured.
“Is it that itcannot?” Lorenzo asked. “Or perhaps that itwillnot?”
“What are you suggesting?” Mom asked him.
Lorenzo shrugged. “It’s your family’s heirloom. They both are, right?” He nodded toward the cabin, where Mom probably had the matching medallion in her bedside table.
“They haven’t always belonged to my direct ancestors but always to the Snohomish Savagers, originally the Sardegna Savagers. Orselvaggio, I believe it was. I never learned the tongue. The pack left Italia several generations ago.” Mom lifted a finger, stepped inside, and returned with her medallion.
With a fanged wolf in profile in the center, it was almost identical to Duncan’s, but the head engraved on hers had smaller and narrower features. More petite, to suggest a female wolf? Long ago, maybe an actual male and female alpha had been the inspiration and posed for the engravings.
“I brought the wolf case and witch talisman along.” I waved to the truck. “I thought having them all together again might do something. Like last time.”
Bydo something, I meant cure Duncan.
Crossing my mental fingers, I hopped off the porch and pulled the items out of the glovebox. I hadn’t brought an oven mitt or ski glove, and the case zapped me painfully.
“Aren’t we friends yet?” I grumbled, enduring the punishment long enough to rest it on the porch railing. I put the talisman next to it.
Lorenzo watched all this curiously. Mom merely nodded. She wouldn’t know about the vision Duncan had received, but she’d been there when the case had opened. In addition to healing her poisoned cut, the mushroom-shaped artifact inside had magnetically or magically drawn the other artifacts toward it.
“You may need to turn into the bipedfuris again to get the case to open,” I told Duncan.
Eager barks and a howl came from the woods behind the property, and he looked in that direction instead of answering.
“Is the family on a hunt?” I guessed, though it was full daylight, no hint of the moon in the sky.
“Sort of,” Mom said with an eye roll. “There are yellow-bellied marmots in a rocky area back there by some old mine shafts. Gold prospectors poked around in the hills along the stream there in the 1800s, before our family purchased the property. The marmots love the area. It’s got water and rocks and holes and whatever they like to eat. A couple of them have come out of hibernation early and are taunting predators with cheeping sounds. Emilio and his brother are back there, digging at the rocks. They consider it fun. I think they’re idiots.”
“You’d better get things straightened out with the real estate agent,” I said, “so you don’t lose land filled with such valuable resources.”
“If you’re talking about the mineral rights, I don’t think anyone ever found much gold back there.”
“I meant the marmots. Keeping young werewolves entertained is important.”
“Ginevra’s boysdidplay back there when they were kids,” Mom said. “It’s a great spot for youths.”
More eager barks and yips wafted to us.
