Owl's Fair (The Owl Star Witch Mysteries Book 2)
Page 19
My mother and Aunt Gwennie raced down the stairs. “We saw the lights on. Is everyone all right?”
“Ms. A, did you doubt our ability to take down these two idiots?” Emma asked my mother, her tone pleased. “I got this one with one punch to the face, the other one with an elbow, and I was in a drugged coma for, like, a day. Oh, speaking of idiots.” Emma reached behind her and pulled out a set of handcuffs.
Meryl’s eyes grew wide. “What are you doing?”
Emma slapped the cuffs on the reporter’s wrists. “You have the right to remain silent—”
“You can’t arrest me! I’ll tell everybody about this! I’ll tell everybody about witches and pixies!” Meryl screeched, trying to pull away from Emma’s grip. “I’ll tell them all about the paranormal, and you’ll all be exposed!”
“You can tell everybody all about the paranormal,” Emma agreed. “You can tell the prosecutor about witches, about vampires, about pixies. You can tell them about the little tiny people that live in the swamp that can talk to alligators.” Her head tilted to the side. “When you start telling people that don’t believe in the paranormal about this stuff? Well, you just sound like a nutter. So, rock on. You do you.”
“But it’s true!” Meryl screamed. “I can expose you all!”
“You do your best, there, sweet cheeks,” Emma told Meryl, shrugging. “My guess is all that’s going to do is determine whether you go in a concrete cell or a padded one. People have been trying to use paranormal defenses since that ‘devil made me do it’ trial. No one gets off an attempted murder charge ‘because pixies.’ I mean, come on now. This is Florida. No one gets off for anything here.” Emma tilted her head. “Well, except that Zimmerman guy. But that’s a whole different discussion.”
“You stupid idiot! You and your revenge fantasy!” Meryl spat at Amethyst. “This is all your fault!”
“How do you feel?” I asked Emma with concern.
“Man, that nap totally got me ready for this.” Emma winked at me. “I have the best fun with you, Astra, I swear. I always wanted to try a punch like that. It’s not often anyone comes at me from above. Did you see her fly back? Ha! How many people can say they delivered an elbow strike to a murderous pixie? Not many, I bet.”
The back door slid open, and a brightly colored head tentatively peeked in. My mother welcomed him, and he nodded to her formally.
Alice gasped. “Pistachio!”
“Alice!” Pistachio ran in, his eyes seeking the human woman he wasn’t supposed to love but did.
Alice smiled. Her eyes were red, and tears were running down her cheeks. The pixie chieftain ran to her, and Alice threw her arms around him, hugging him tightly and burying her face in his shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
“It’s okay,” Pistachio said. He stroked her hair. “You have nothing to apologize for, nothing to be sorry for. This fiasco is my fault.” Over Alice’s head, he glanced at Amethyst. “I should have been honest with everyone. Maybe we could have avoided this. I’m just…I’m just glad you’re all right.”
We all smiled.
Well.
Not Amethyst.
Or Meryl.
Those two were pretty annoyed.
But everybody else.
Chapter Nineteen
The runners sailed across the finish line.
Well, sailed may be generous.
First, speedy entrants sailed through with a wave to the cheering crowd. Then runners kind of…loped. Eventually, they came in exhausted clusters, covered with sweat, limping across the temporary white line painted across High Street.
Alice Windrow didn’t care. She waited to shake every hand, give every participant an encouraging hug. The Alice Windrow who waited to shake everyone’s hand was not the same one that had laid on the couch for a day or chased after the pixie chieftain with a lovesick fervor. This Alice stood firm, confident. She looked ready to shake hands with the entire world.
“Dad always waited, all the way to the end,” she explained once there was a break in the competitors. “He praised every child, every adult: the runners, the volunteers. In the end, he made sure everyone knew they’d had an audience. That they were seen.” Alice walked back to stand with me in the hot Florida sun. “I mean, we were just people that came to watch, right? But Dad loved these things.” Her eyes grew watery. “I guess that’s why I do it, now that I can.”
“No one would know you were practically comatose a couple of days ago,” I told her. “Everything came together beautifully. Looks like it went off without a hitch.”
She looked around. “Yeah. Hey, let’s go stand under that canopy. Looks like it will be a little while before the rest of the runners catch up.” Alice glanced toward the sky. “The sun is just brutal.”
I smiled.
That was likely the most common phrase uttered in Florida in the summer, especially in the afternoon.
Even so, I was enjoying the leisurely Sunday, standing under the trees around the Forkbridge Community Center, watching the sweaty competitors in Alice’s marathon cross the finish line. The air felt damp, and I could faintly detect the fresh salt in the breeze. The air in this park smelled like…home.
Technically, I was there to guard Alice’s life, just in case we didn’t get everyone who was involved in the conspiracy to murder her. In reality, though? It was just a formality.
Ami reported the star card stopped glowing, finally, sometime yesterday afternoon. We later realized it was just a few moments after Clan Waterflash formally banished Amethyst Cloudspirit from the swamp and surrounding areas.
Human justice would move more slowly, but apparently, the card understood that. Meryl Hawkins in a cell seemed enough to satisfy its need for justice.
Emma stepped out from the crowd and joined us in front of the Forkbridge Community Center. “Hey there!” she called cheerfully. Slipping beneath the shade of the canopy, she slapped Alice on the back. “Looks like a great turnout.”
“More than we bargained for,” said Alice. “The volunteers said there was a rush to sign up after Meryl Hawkins’ arrest hit the papers. I guess everyone has a morbid curiosity about crime, even though nothing really happened. As far as everyone knows, I was just in hiding for a day.”
“Just think of how many people would sign up if they knew the real story,” I joked. “Someday, the world will be ready to know about witches and pixies, I’m sure. But I’m also sure today is probably not that day. Look at how they already treat the spiritualists in Cassandra.”
“It’s not that bad, but it’s not that good, either.” Detective Sullivan nodded. “Awful about Amethyst Cloudspirit, but it appears justice has been done by pixie rules.” She paused. “You know, I don’t want to talk out of turn, but pixie justice leaves me a bit nervous about what it means for Forkbridge. Banishment seems like a way of washing their hands of the whole thing and making that psychotic pixie our problem. Their territory is just a small swamp.”
“They banished her from the state,” I explained to Emma.
“Oh?”
“Yeah, we don’t have to worry about her in Forkbridge. Alabama and Georgia might want to be on alert, though.”
“Clan Waterflash did what they had to do, I suppose,” Alice added. But she didn’t look happy. “I just wish none of it had happened at all.”
“This had been in the planning stages for a long time,” Emma told her. “Cloudspirit came into this thing relatively late, but Meryl? She’s been working on this plan since your parents died.” Alice’s eyes widened. “No, no. Your parents were not murdered—that accident really was an accident. But guess who was assigned to look into that for the Gazette?”
“Meryl,” I guessed.
“You got it. She found out about all the intricacies of the trusts and holdings under the guise of investigating the accident.”
“Then she used that to make a plan to steal it all,” I told Alice.
Alice shuddered. “But how did she get involved with Ame
thyst and the pixies?”
“Long game, I guess,” Emma said, shrugging. “She probably followed you, put two and two together about you and Pistachio. Maybe she overheard you guys when you met. Whatever it was, once she realized what was going on, she sought out Amethyst to use her, and the rest is history.”
“That’s just diabolical,” Alice told the detective.
“She’s not talking yet, but we found enough information at her house from the search warrant to put a lot of this together. Lucky for us, she takes meticulous notes.”
“What do the other cops think about all the pixie stuff?” Alice asked.
“That she’s nuts.” Emma smiled. Then she shrugged. “I told her. But they think the people with the crazy names in her notes are either code or imaginary.”
A very familiar smell, one of the sickly sweet scents of the pixies—a mixture of clove cigarettes and stale copper—hit me for just a moment. I looked around, scanning the crowd, but no shocks of vibrant hair jumped out at me.
“You okay?” Emma asked.
I turned and saw she was staring at me, concerned.
“Yeah, no, I just…it’s nothing. I probably imagined it.”
“Astra!” A deep male voice called out.
A smiling Jason Bishop waved his hand high above the crowd.
I turned away.
“Astra!” he called again, louder this time.
Emma and Alice turned to look.
Emma whistled. “Oh, my. Please tell me he’s single,” she said. With a wide-eye glance, she added, “And human. Ooh, he’s sweaty. I like them sweaty.”
“Stop it, Emma.” I cringed, but turned and put a bright smile on my face. “Hey, Jason!” I called back and waved. Whispering, I warned Emma to be nice. “He’s a middle school teacher.”
Now, to be clear: I waved.
Lifted my hand up, palm forward, and swung my arm side to side to return the greeting. I did not lift my hand up, palm facing back, and swing my hand back and forth in the universal motion that said, “come here.”
But “come here” he did.
“Hey there!” he said. “Ladies,” he added, nodding toward Emma and Alice. That boyish grin would’ve lit up my life from the inside out if I wasn’t already immune to the charms of men.
Entirely.
I said it. I meant it.
Emma and Alice moved forward, closer to my side.
“Hi, Jason. Nice to see you,” I said.
Waving to my apparent wing-women, I introduced the two to the handsome middle school teacher. After politely mopping off the copious amounts of sweat with a towel, Jason shook everyone’s hand.
“I waited for you the other morning, Astra, hoping you and your younger sister would continue joining me for that morning run,” he said with a long look. “Did Ayla have a really tough time recovering from the soreness?”
Ayla had been lying on a couch complaining for four days running now.
Yet she’d gotten in her closet remarkably fast when a murderer broke into the house. I mean, for someone in so much pain.
“I think she’s playing it up for dramatic effect, if you want to know the truth.” I smiled. “I don’t know that I’m going to get her back out any time soon.”
Jason laughed heartily.
“Anyway,” I continued. “Sorry to have missed you. I got caught up in a case Emma and I had,” I told him, gesturing toward the detective without elaborating. “I’ll probably start running again in a day or two after we wrap up. I’ve been staying up pretty late, so it’s been hard to get up early.” Because of vampires. But we’ll leave that part out.
“I’m glad it wasn’t me you were avoiding,” Jason responded, his eyes twinkling mischievously. Then he winked.
Emma’s eyebrow raised.
Before I could say anything to him, or punch Emma in the face for that stupid eyebrow, Jason cleared his throat and bowed slightly. “If you ladies will excuse me, I’m in dire need of a shower and something to eat. Alice, Emma.” He paused. “Astra.”
As he walked away from us, I felt the back of my neck burn.
“What the hell was that about?” Emma asked. “Spill the tea, girlfriend.”
I glared at her. “He was just being nice.”
“Nice? You’re kidding, right?” Emma put her hands on her hips. “That middle school teacher has some smoldering bedroom eyes, and they were—much to my disappointment—not on me. They were also not on Alice. They were on you, my dear. Are you seriously telling me you did not notice the bedroom eyes?”
“Cut it out, detective.” I looked away from her incredulous glare. “I’m not looking for a relationship.”
“I’m not saying you should. I’m saying you should let him take you out on a date or two.”
“He didn’t ask!”
“He will.”
“I doubt it.” I softened my tone, hoping to defuse her onslaught of dating advice. “Look, I’m not ready for a relationship. I just got home. I just got this owl. Just getting to know my sisters. This new job. Not ready.”
“How old are you again?” Emma asked.
“Thirty-three.”
“Wow, have you considered therapy?” Emma’s eyebrows shot up.
I frowned. “I don’t need therapy! Holy crow, get all the way off my back, would you? Just because I’m not entertaining a relationship with a guy that hasn’t asked me out, and who I’ve seen exactly twice in my entire life, I need therapy?”
“I didn’t say you did.” She rolled her eyes. “I just think you have a lot of unresolved issues—”
“Maybe I do!” I told her hotly. “And maybe I’ll work through them in my own time, okay?”
“Okay, okay.” Emma held her hands up in surrender. “He’s hot. And he seems interested. That’s all I’m saying.” I glared. “That’s all I’m saying!”
“How about you not say anything else?”
She didn’t.
But she did hum “Hot for Teacher” by Van Halen.
My mother hosted a dinner to celebrate the end of the case.
Since this was only the second star card case, I was afraid a festival dinner and wrap-up had just become a “thing” we would have to do from now on.
That’s how paranormal rituals get started, you know. You do something twice, and suddenly, it’s a freaking tradition.
I tried to argue, but my mother was insistent that “we have to thank the goddess for her help with the case, for trusting us to set things right, and have a formal ritual of conclusion, dear.”
We did that in the military.
We just did it in the pub.
With a beer.
Okay, more than one beer.
Pistachio and Alice attended. The chieftain was beaming, smitten to the core that Alice was by his side. As cynical as I was about relationships, even I found it sweet.
Detective Emma Sullivan sat alone at the center of attention, my sisters and Alice peppering her with questions about Meryl Hawkins and the intricacies of the plan to steal millions of dollars and an entire company utilizing a vengeful, tempestuous pixie.
“So Paul Wakefield had nothing to do with anything?” Althea asked while spooning more mashed potatoes onto her plate.
Emma shook her head. “Orlando’s dropping the case. Meryl used his access to transfer the money, but it was in his bank account for less than a day. Ultimately, it went into her offshore account in the Cayman Islands.”
“And what about Ebony?” my sister asked her.
Emma looked at Pistachio. “Did the seer know about Amethyst’s plan?”
The chieftain shook his head. “Ebony has gone into seclusion to contemplate her role in this. She believed Amethyst and now realizes that she should have come and talked to me.” He frowned. “Times are different. A male chieftain is not the norm, and I think everyone has to learn a new way to treat one another in this new era of…of—”
“Equality?” Ayla asked.
“Equity,” Althea corrected.
“Hear, hear,” Pistachio said, holding up a piece of chocolate like a wine glass.
“And on that note, I have to pee,” Emma told the table bluntly. She pushed her chair away and left the room.
“I like her,” Ayla said with a smile. “She’s cool for a human.”
“We all like her, dear,” Aunt Gwennie said. “Eat those Brussels sprouts.”
“But I don’t like them.”
“Eat them anyway.”
“Excuse me,” Rex said shortly, pushing back his chair and heading in the direction his sister had just gone. I watched him curiously, wondering why he’d gone after her. Vampires didn’t have to use the facilities the way everyone else did.
Archie, who was perched on a chair to my right, clicked his beak. I turned. His wide eyes stared into mine, and he turned his head swiftly down the hall. Confused, I leaned in. “You should go and listen,” he said ominously.
“Excuse me,” I murmured to the table, pushing away—earning a few odd glances as I left.
“Is there a secret meeting I don’t know about?” Althea asked wryly.
I walked down the hall until I heard low voices coming from a closed door. It was the herb room. Why would they be in the herb room?
I stopped in front of it.
“You have to get away from them, Emma,” Rex told his sister, his low voice hard. “This is a house full of witches. They are prominent, well known. Why didn’t you tell me that you were working with the witch, best friends with her? You asked me questions like you were investigating some case, not auditioning for a new best bud,” his angry voice hissed. “You don’t know what forces you’re dealing with!”
“I am not going to let you scare me into abandoning my friend,” Emma responded, her voice tight with anger. “If I can have a vampire brother, I can have a witch best friend. You’re completely overreacting.”