Calico Bay

C H A P T E R O N E

Josephine Rennem is the Alpha Female of Calico Bay, one of the few places in North America where you can openly practice magic.

She is supposed to rule the city with an Alpha, but he fled to a coven in the north to escape his responsibility, and left a trail of heart break behind him.

But now he’s back, and determined to prove that he is now worthy of being Alpha beside Josephine.

••• ••• ••• •••

Josephine Rennem was a lot of things, but patient had never been one of them. A flaw she’d tried and failed to fix all her life before she decided to use it as an asset.

The local baristas knew the signs of her growing impatience (snappiness, tapping her fingers on the table, etc) and tended to get her coffee to her quick as possible.

Not that she minded the wait as much as she minded being late. She had worked at a coffee shop and knew how annoying impatient customers were, but she was glad just the same that the baristas tried their best to get her coffee out to her quick.

This was when her flaw came in handy. Dealing with her older cousin Tess was where she really started feel the sting.

“Josie, I know you don’t trust me with thing like this-“

“I wonder why,” Josephine drawled. Her cousin needed to help her with planning and such but last time Josephine and given the rather eccentric blonde a task, she’s totally forgotten because one of her favorite local poets was preforming at an open mic night at the Ginger Witch, a popular bar and eatery in their hometown of Calico Bay. Tess sighed and her big grey eyes pleaded with her younger cousin.

“Please. This festival is as important as it is for you as it is for me.”

Like most things in Calico Bay, the festival would be celebrating the magic that returned to them 100 years ago. The festival was a spin on the normal high school’s homecoming, as it was celebrating the Homecoming of magic back into their veins again.

The festivities were also a chance for newly Chosen teenagers to show off their fresh talents.

Josephine smiles fondly at the memory of her homecoming, where she’d shape shifted into a massive lioness behind one of the girls she’d hated and kissed her crush.

After several more minutes of persistent begging, Josephine put Tess in charge of the catering. It was reliably easy and usually non-problematic, as the local caterers knew exactly what they were doing and had been serving at Homecoming for years.

Tess still took the task in stride and Josephine found she had no lingering anxiety over letting her take the job.

Josephine walked Tess to her car then back into her office. The office building had only two floors and a basement, the first floor being a large lobby and gathering place and the second being offices. There were only six offices on the floor. The first five offices were for coven leaders, and the sixth was hers.

It was significantly larger than the others, considering her position held more power and that two people were supposed to share the office. Calico Bay has no mayor, but Josephine was essineitally that but with a different title and stigma- Alpha Female. Her title was a good way of describing her, and she earned her place by being the best. That was how it worked with magic. If you were born to be in power, you would have the magic to accommodate the ambition.

That’s why the Alpha and Alpha Female were known and trained at an early age, because from Homecoming to Cristening, when a young witch is given a path, it is obvious that they are capable of protecting the bay.

For Josephine, it had been a calling all her life. Something she had craved for as long as she could remember. But since that was it the same for the Alpha, she was running Calico Bay alone.

And doing a damn good job.

Josephine answered and sent emails until all her first steps to successfully carrying out a Homecoming were completed and she was left with an extremely satisfied feeling in the pit of her stomach, replacing the anxiety that had writhed there before she had finished.

She pulled her hair out of its tight high ponytail and shook her head like a dog; a physical manesfistation of the carefree, warm attitude she adopted when she wasn’t running a city.

She walked out of her office and walked down the hall to Penelope Viridi’s office, one of the five coven leaders. Penelope, known to everyone but her mother as Penny, was extremely hard to get along with but was close friends with Josephine.

They were both used to making the hard choices and looking like the bad guy for the greater good- so naturally they shared a connection that wasn’t understood by most. The women in question, seven years Josephine’s senior, was closing the lid to her laptop as she walked in.

“Want to grab lunch and take the rest of the day off?” Josephine asked. Penny frowned and quickly opened a meticulously organized planner, then scanned it quickly with sharp eyes. She purses her lips, then smiled slightly.

“For once, I can contribute to your procrastinational habits. I just finished everything I needed to for now.”

Josephine beamed. “Great! What sounds good?”

Penny rounded her desk and plucked her dark green trench coat from a silver coat holder by the door.

“As if we don’t go to the same four places every singly day. Which one are you picking today?”

They ended up at an Asian fusion restaurant and ordered their usuals. Josephine spun her noodles around her chopsticks and took a huge bite as Penny complained about another coven leader.

“He’s the most infuriating person I’ve ever met. He thinks that just because his family are the traditional combat witches he can tell me how to run patrol of my own coven. Like, am I the one with an encantado problem in my ports that’s killed my boat workers? No. Am I the one that has a mutiny-prone son? No. So why the hell is that stupid hick of a witch telling me how to run a simple patrol?”

“Because he wants to feel validated and your anger does that for him right now,” Josephine told her calmly. As Alpha Female, she knew more about the coven leaders than they knew about themselves, and the Aquiop coven leader had come to her for help with his encantado (shapeshifting trickster dolphins) problem.

As a shapeshifter, Josephine was uniquely gifted to help him. Of course she usually didn’t shift into aquatic animals and if she did it was usually a mako shark or a sea lion, but a dolphin had been fun.

Penny pondered her suggestion then shrugged, but Josephine could tell the the truth in her words had satisfied Penny’s desire to turn every wild flower in his yard toxic.

They finished lunch with small talk of spells and Homecoming and parted ways. Josephine hailed a drake to get her home. Drakes were slightly related to dragons, just without wings or a breath weapon. They were domesticated and commonly seen on farms in the area.

The one downside to the domestication is that they were always some shade of gray. The one that was currently taking her home was slate gray with a metallic sheen to it’s scales. She paid the driver and fed the drake a pear before unlocking her first-floor apartment.

Her rather large salary had gifted her this apartment with a loft. The color scheme was burgundy and brass and it was dark it cozy. She locked the door behind her and did a quick protection spell over the threshold.

“Praesidio.”

The door was outlined with light for a moment then summed back into normal redwood. Satisfied, Josephine greeted her cat, Kieran, and then walked to the kitchen. After retrieving a peach she padded to her bathroom to take her makeup off.

Dark liner was swiped off her light hazel eyes and foundation scrubbed away. One of her favorite things was self care, evident in the upkeep on her skin, eyebrows and eyelashes, hair, and so forth. Josephine despised practicing magic when she felt dirty. She felt it was rude.

After lounging around her house for another hour, Josephine was startled by knocking on the door. She frowned. Was she expecting someone?

She trusted her city enough to open the door without further precautions.

Her mistake.

Josephine first noticed the black boots that looked like they’d been through hell, the dark wash jeans that were ripped in one knee. Her eyes traveled up to a worn white top under a flannel under a loose jacket, an excessive amount of layers in her opinion.

But yet again, he’d always worn them. At least that much hadn’t changed.

She slowly looked up to his face, where his eyes had seemingly gotten done searching her. She had changed from work clothes into a huge hoodie, so her long, tan legs were probably a sight for sore eyes got him.

I’ll let him look at what he can’t have.

His face had never failed to make her breath run away when she had seen him everyday and their five years apart had not made it better. He had grown out of the boyish charm that made her comfortable into an observant man that she wasn’t sure she could hide much from.

His eyes were still as dark and bottomless ash she remembers, framed by thick lashes and set perfectly above a strong nose and a pair of high cheekbones. His hair had been cropped from the curly mess she knew from high school into a ridiculously flattering haircut that was short on the sides and a bit long on the top.

Standing in front of her was Rori King, the prodigal Alpha of Calico Bay.

And he was hot.

But, she was too, and Josephine gave him a slow smile that she knew infuriated him. At least it had.

“And so, the prodigal son crawls home.”

He said nothing, only stared at her with those piercing eyes. His gaze then flicked behind her into her apartment, and she knew he could see a least two empty wine bottles. His brows furrowed and a rush of indignation hit her.

“Not sure why you bothered,” she spat and spun away from the door, but leaving it open for him to come in. She wasn’t done assessing him, playing with him. When she last knew him, he had let her do whatever she wanted and hadn’t played the Alpha roll of keeping her in check.

One of her favorite things to do had been to see when he would intervene, craving some sort of discipline from the older boy.

Annoying? Sure.

Fun? Hell yes.

He took the bait and stepped into the apartment, breathing deeply. Something she also knew about Rori that she guessed hadn’t changed was that he was big on smells, and her apartment smelled exactly like her. Christmas spice and vanilla.

She was getting more estatic by the second. The wild magic inside her that allowed her to change forms was churning in response to her euphoria. She loved pushing boundaries with him and from the looks of it, she would get a hell of a response now. Even from his posture, she knew he wasn’t the pushover that had left her behind to run a city of magic by herself.

“So, what brought you back? I know it wasn’t a sense of duty.”

He turned those deep eyes onto her again.

“Actually, it was.”

Josephine could have cried. His voice had definitely hit puberty. He had been a late bloomer and had left Calico Bay barley taller than her 5’10. He was at least 6’5 now. Most Alphas, male or female, tended to be tall. Whatever that coven up north had taught him they’d blessed him with a gorgeous body too. Even through his layers, Josephine could make out huge biceps and amazing forearms.

She’d always been a muscles women when it came to her men. Even if she dates a girl, butch was definitely her type. So Josephine hoped he didn’t notice the saliva that was near dripping down her mouth.

If he was anything like the boy he’d been before, he wouldn’t.

“That coven up north sure did a number on you didn’t it,” she wondered aloud. “What was it called again?”

“Iudiciis,” he told her.

“Latin for trails,” Josephine mused. She took in him and his stature in a different light.

“They do a lot to you?” She asked, soft and apologetic. He still had a long way to go before she ever let him be Alpha with her but she still had human decency. Witches had to take care of each other- flighty asshole or not.

“Nothing I couldn’t handle,” he told her. Josephine felt like she had been slapped. The amount of times she’d said those words when she couldn’t handle what she was going through. And here he was, echoing her dark past.

It was too hard to stay mad, so Josephine slipped back into a playful mood.

“Want something? Coffee? Tea?” He nodded, and she lead him to the kitchen. Kieran rubbed on Rori’s legs and purred.

“Traitor,” she hissed at the lean black cat. Kieran purred louder. Rori took a seat at the bar and watched her as she made him coffee. Damn, he had missed those curves. She has always been beautiful, a bit disproportionate when she was a teenager.

But now at 22 she had grown into her body and it was all Rori could to not to just grab her to him and never let her go. He had seen the gleam in her eye and had known she recognized the Alpha he’d grown to be. The city and the covens in it needed both of them and he’d failed them. Failed her.

Never again.

“There you go, Mr. King,” she said as she placed a mug of creamy mocha in front of him. He took a sip and sighed before he could stop himself. Josephine made the best mocha he’d ever had, with cinnamon and cream and probably a spell. She’d never tell him what the trick was.

Josephine hopped on the counter and watched him drink, analyzing him once again. It didn’t help that he was her dream man but he couldn’t be Alpha. She couldn’t let the playboy, now man-child, be responsible for the protection of the five covens.

“Josie, I’m sorry.”

Charged silence hung in the air after Rori’s statement. She didn’t know what to say or what to do. She didn’t think he would sound so genuine, or be in her house at her bar with her cat at his legs. Anger rose up in her stomach like nausea and she felt both sick and incredibly anxious.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. She knew she probably looked pathetic and that her eyes were shining with tears. The hurt that her 17 year old self had felt rushed back into her and she realized at that moment that what she needed was closure. Alpha pairs were never required to be romantically involved but if they were they were practically soulmates.

If you were born an Alpha, you had another Alpha out there that was perfect for you. Someone who would see you and all your flaws and love you just the same.

Josephine had held onto the thought that Rori would be the man that could be be that for her. And for a while, the happiest while of her life, he was.

But then he’d told her she was too much, that their relationship was all an act, that she was the most obnoxious girl he’d ever met.

That he would rather die than be an Alpha with her by his side.

Dammit, she would not cry!

And so, to give closure to the seventeen year old girl who was left by the one person who wasn’t going to leave, Josephine dropped her smile and let the wild magic inside her pulse dominance throughout the room. Let her eyes bleed into the eyes of a lioness, her spirit form. And said this:

“But it’s not enough to be sorry.”