“Girl, please.” Derek waved his hand away, dismissing my concerns. I hated it when people dismissed my concerns. Usually because it meant I was about to wind up in Crap Creek without a paddle. Or even a canoe.
Derek continued. “You know as well as I do that Amethyst is Kookytown on crack. The guy found an angle he liked and he wants to run with it.” He shrugged. “He’s a writer.”
“Exactly. I don’t trust them.”
Derek made a noise that sounded like he was choking on a mosquito. “Do I have to remind you that you’re a writer too?”
“I’m a reporter. There’s a difference.” I was grasping at straws, but I was desperate. Samhain was coming up, which meant a clothing-optional moon ritual; I was pretty sure Pickle was in town, accosting all the candy stores; and I had yet to figure out what was going on with my fidgety mother, my overprotective dog, and my insanely irritable cousin. So I wasn’t exactly in a healthy position to be shadowed by a nosy author with a tape recorder and an interest in the occult.
Because, good Goddess, what if he exposed me? What if the world suddenly knew where I lived and every history zealot who believed in the ancient texts of the Druids came looking for me?
Or hunted me, as Birdie called it. The hunters came from all walks of life seeking to unlock the mysteries of the Universe. Looking for ancient texts hidden long ago, artifacts with power beyond human comprehension, treasures believed by most of the world to be only legends. These were just some of the secrets the Council kept, and I, as the Seeker, was sworn to protect them.
It was imperative for myself and everyone I loved that my role remain closely guarded.
Derek approached me and put a hand on my shoulder. “You need to get on board, because he’s been pitching the idea all over town. Been talking to people and lining up interviews over the weekend, apparently. If you had gotten to the meeting on time this morning and hadn’t had a cat fight with Monique, you would have known that.”
That gave me the best idea I’d had in a while. I snapped my fingers. “That’s it! Monique. Men love Monique. She can give him all the information he needs.” And possibly a floor show.
He shook his head. “Nope. Gotta be you. He was pretty clear on that.”
Damn. Who had this guy been talking to? He couldn’t possibly believe I was a witch. I mean, people around town knew we were pagans, knew we cast spells here and there, but they didn’t really know. Not the whole truth. Not that I was the Seeker of Justice, privy to information regarding very valuable, very ancient artifacts the world over. Not even Chance knew that.
Derek said in a serious tone, “If we don’t cooperate with him, we could lose a lot of advertisers. I’ve been getting calls about this guy since you left. Personally, I had never heard of him.” He leered at me in an attempt to look stealthy. “I prefer spy novels.”
It didn’t work. He looked more like a man being forced to eat a lemon against his will. “But I checked him out and he’s pretty famous, especially with the folks around here. People are excited about this thing.” He lowered his voice and gave me a stern look. “And I don’t have to tell you that newspapers are dying all over the country. People want their news online these days. Lucky for us, this town is still stuck in the Stone Age, but that could all change tomorrow.”
He was right, I knew, but that didn’t set my mind at ease. If anything, it made me more jumpy.
When I didn’t respond, Derek walked toward the door. He opened it, paused, and shifted to face me. I could see that the writer wasn’t standing there anymore. “Oh, and one more thing. This guy?” He thumbed toward the hallway. “He’s not looking to make us out to be small-town hicks. He’s from Amethyst.”
With that, Derek left me standing there in silent surprise.
Blade Knight was from Amethyst? He didn’t look familiar, but that didn’t mean anything. I had pegged him to be about ten years older than me.
So then, the question remained. Why was he so insistent that I help him with his research?
Before I went back to my work, I removed the sword from the wall. The vibration that had been attached to it from my consecration and the Morrigan’s blessing was gone.
I placed it on my desk carefully. When I did, the folder I had tucked the reunion notes inside of earlier glowed.
Derek’s words echoed in my head alongside Gladys’s e-mail.
He’s from Amethyst. A couple of doctors, lawyers, an archeologist, some homemakers, and an author.
Was Blade Knight the author Gladys had dug up?
The door to my office was ajar so I walked over to it, shut, and locked it. The light faded from the folder as I opened it to give the notes a more thorough examination.
“Let’s see who you really are, Blade Knight.”
The information on the author was buried five pages deep within the e-mail Gladys had sent me. But it glared at me all the same. As if a spotlight were shining on it.
When I read the name, I had to sit down from the shock of it.
Chapter 8
I stopped at the library on my way home from work to check out a Blade Knight book. The librarian informed me that none were available at the moment. She handed me a flyer and told me there was a signing scheduled for tomorrow evening at the bookstore on Main Street from six to eight. The front of the flyer featured the author’s book covers. I counted thirteen titles in all. Five were part of a series featuring a female FBI agent named Tracey Stone. From the looks of the covers, Tracey was a badass who knew her way around a gun. I decided to just download the e-books. So I logged into the Amazon website via my smart phone and purchased all thirteen novels and sent them to my laptop and my Kindle. That way I could study Blade Knight where he lived. Find out what he was really up to.
The author’s bio was on the back of the flyer. It read:
Blade Knight is the author of thirteen novels, numerous newspaper articles, and several short stories. He is originally from a small town in the Midwest, but now makes his home in Chicago.
No mention of his given name. No mention of what had happened to him when he was a child.
Interesting.
I tucked the flyer into my bag and circled around and out the back door of the library, down the steps, and across the alley. It was getting late. The sun had slashed the October sky with streaks of crimson, magenta, and violet before I had entered the stone building. Now the colors were darkening, making room for the night sky and the moon that would plump to fullness later in the week—the Blood Moon. Someone was burning leaves a few doors down as I made my way across the alley and up the street toward the cottage.
I was thinking about Chance and Monique when I heard a crunching sound behind me. Like a foot stepping on a brittle maple leaf.
There was a knife slipped inside the heel of my boot and a stun gun in my bag. I didn’t slow my pace down, but I set my senses to full alert. It was better to be cautiously aware of the surroundings than to appear paranoid. That way, a would-be attacker who thought he had the upper hand would get the shock of his life when the tables were turned on him.
Another crunch. Closer this time.
I sniffed the air, tuned my ears to the vibration that was fluttering behind me. The soft music of a jazz pianist drifted over from my left. From my right, I smelled catnip that had recently been cut or rolled in by a happy feline.
Crunch, crunch, crunch. Louder. Closer.
Too close for my liking.
I whipped the knife out from my boot heel and, in one swift motion, whirled around and aimed it at the man who was following me.
Except it wasn’t a man. It was Pickle.
At first, I wasn’t sure who was more shocked, the fairy or myself. The poor thing was a wisp of a boy who looked to be no older than the age required to secure a driver’s license. His skin, which was already pale under normal conditions, grew fright-whi
te as he stared at me, wide sky-blue eyes filling up with water.
He was eating a peanut Munch bar.
I quickly plastered a broad smile onto my face, held my hands up slowly, and said, “Easy there, buddy. It’s okay. I’m going to put this away, all right?” I slid the blade into my back pocket.
My Fae guide still hadn’t made a sound, but his eyes started bubbling over like a burst pipe.
“No, no, don’t cry, Pickle. Please don’t cry.”
Why in Goddess’s name was this race so freaking sensitive? Sugar overload?
Pickle jutted out his lower lip, wadded up something in his hand, shrieked, and launched it at me. Then he ran straight into an oak tree and disappeared.
“Perfect. That’s all I need is a pissed-off fairy.” I removed my jacket and tried to extract whatever the hell it was he had thrown at me that was now imbedded in my hair. I managed to free a piece of it. It was a tan, sticky substance. I took a whiff of it. Mashed-up Bit-O-Honey.
“Son of a pusbucket. I’ll never get this out,” I grumbled.
I spun around to rush home.
That’s when I saw the author.
He was standing next to his car looking as if he’d just seen a ghost.
I dashed through a row of houses and ran all the way home. I flung the door open to my cottage, thrust myself inside, and bolted the door shut, trying to catch my breath. How much of that had the writer seen? Could he see Pickle? Was that even possible? Or was it only me who could see my Fae guide?
I leaned up against the door, closed my eyes, and blew out a sigh.
A loud whinny drifted over to me from the general direction of the living room.
Thor was lying on the couch, his paw tapping the cushion as if he were a parent waiting up for a child who had missed curfew. I opened one eye as the dog jumped down, lumbered over to me, and sniffed the wad of candy in my hair.
He sat down in front of me and glared.
“Don’t give me that look.” I walked into the galley kitchen of my small cottage and filtered through the cupboards, searching for peanut butter. I heard it worked to remove gum from hair. Maybe it would work on Bit-O-Honey. “If you hadn’t invaded Cinnamon’s home, I wouldn’t have had to lock you in here.”
Thor harrumphed and stood by the back door. I let him out just as the front bell rang.
I grumbled, knowing very well it was Blade Knight. I was really growing tired of this man following me all over town. Didn’t he ever hear of appointments? Cell phones? Geez, I felt like I was living in a fishbowl, just swimming around, waiting for him to pluck me out and flush me down the toilet.
There was no peanut butter, so I stuck a Cubs hat on my head and went to answer the door. I flung it open.
“Look, I’ve had a long day—”
Chance stood there, a bouquet of daisies in his strong arms, looking sexy and confused at the same time.
“You want to tell me about it?” he said.
I moved aside and let him pass through the threshold, shutting the door behind me.
“Not now.” I followed him to the kitchen, where I watched as he put the flowers in water. I snaked my arms around his waist, laid my cheek on his back, and said, “Maybe we could talk about it over dinner. How does salmon sound?”
Chance lifted my arms and turned to face me. He pulled me close, secured my arms back around his waist, and kissed me. It was a deep kiss. The kind you can feel all the way down to your toes and back.
He sighed. “I can’t, baby. I completely forgot I agreed to help with this reunion thing. Rain check?”
My body stiffened, despite my brain warning it to relax. Be cool. I turned to wash the dog dish left in the sink from last night. “Sure. Why not?”
My foot was shaking as tension in my body rose to the surface. I could feel the unreasonable bitch that lay within me fighting to make her way out. Down, girl, down.
Chance took a step to the side. He leaned in to get a look at my face. “Hey, what’s wrong? Is something bothering you?”
The only other thing in the sink was a glass and I scrubbed the hell out of that thing with a Brillo pad. Had I scrubbed any harder, I could have molded it into a candy dish.
“Nope. All good.”
I could feel myself losing it. I mean, really losing it. There was heat rising up from my belly. I bit my lip to keep my mouth from turning against me.
Chance put a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Hey, Stacy, what is it?”
Could he honestly not know? I mean, really? Were men that clueless? I turned to face him, trying very hard to soften my voice and calm that little vein in my throat that throbbed whenever I was upset.
“You’re cancelling our date so you can hang out with Monique and now you’re standing there asking me what’s wrong?”
He moved back as if I had slapped him.
Chance put a hand out in a calming gesture. Oh, I just hated it when they did that! His voice was so irritatingly steady when he spoke that I wanted to pinch him, just to hear a different octave.
“Okay, first of all, I’m not cancelling to hang out with Monique. And secondly, I completely forgot about this thing or I would have told you sooner.”
“You know what? It’s fine.” I tossed the glass back in the sink and it rattled around the drain for a while. “Hey, at least you brought flowers.”
I turned to walk out of the kitchen and Chance grabbed my shoulders. He tried to look in my eyes. “Stacy, come on.”
I flicked my eyes away. It wasn’t just that he was cancelling a date. It wasn’t just that he might be working with Monique. It was me. My own guilt for not telling him everything about what I had gone through lately. For not being able to share with my partner all the things I so desperately needed to talk about.
Guilt is a nasty bitch. And she makes you do really stupid things.
When I wouldn’t look at him, Chance dropped his arms and backed up. “You don’t trust me? Is that it? After everything we’ve been through?”
Everything we’ve been through. Everything I’ve been through. Now, so many secrets.
“Of course I trust you. But I don’t trust Monique.”
Chance’s eyes darkened as he stared at me. “No. That’s not it. It’s something else. It’s that thing that’s always come between us. It’s your fear.”
My head shot up. “What? What are you talking about?”
He backed up, slowly nodded as if he had just come to some sort of epiphany. “That’s it, isn’t it? You don’t trust yourself to open up to me completely, so you’re terrified that someone else might.”
“That’s not fair!”
He rapped his knuckles on the counter, looked at me with a doubt I had never seen before. Never wanted to see again. “You’re right. It’s not fair. For either of us.” He turned to walk out of the cottage.
I didn’t bother to call him back. The way he carried himself as he walked out the door told me everything.
There was a crack in our foundation. And I was the only one who could fix it.
Except I couldn’t. Not without risking his life.
And that was a chance I wasn’t willing to take.
Chapter 9
I sat there on the front porch of my cottage, sobbing, a wad of Bit-O-Honey stuck in my hair, my hat glued to that, and an empty carton of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia tucked between my legs. Salty tears marched down my cheeks as Thor settled in next to me and passed gas.
It was not my finest hour.
I was just about to hunt down a bottle of tequila and order a meat lover’s pizza when a familiar voice that I thought I’d never hear again pierced my ears.
“Stacy Justice, pull yourself together!” Danu barked.
I looked up. A large orb floated in front of me with the Goddess Danu’s image imbedded in it. Her fiery red hair engulfed mos
t of the frame and her emerald eyes were blazing at me.
I was so not in the mood for a lecture.
“What are you doing here, Danu?”
I glanced around but I didn’t see Pickle.
Badb, the Morrigan, poked her head inside the orb. “Good Goddess. She’s a mess.” She shot Danu a look. “Honestly, this is the Seeker?”
I considered poking the orb with my fingernail just to watch it pop, or telling Badb to take a long walk down a short pier, but I had neither the energy nor the cojones to do so. Instead I said, “I’m not in the mood. Leave me alone. Both of you.”
Danu ignored my request. “Did you make Pickle cry?”
I threw up my hands. “That’s why you’re here? To lecture me about some overly sensitive fairy who’s hopped up on so much sugar even Willy Wonka would be disgusted.”
“Who’s Willy Wonka?” Badb asked.
I stood up. “I said go away.”
The screen door slapped behind me as I made my way into the house in search of booze.
The goddesses floated behind me.
“Stacy Justice, you’re beginning to anger me,” Danu said. “Don’t think I won’t yank you back through the portal.”
“Yeah, well, I have news for you, Danu. I had a door installed where your painting used to be.” That was how I got myself sucked into the Otherworld in the first place. A portrait of Danu once hung in my grandmother’s house and served as a doorway that led to the Geraghty Girls’ Chamber of Magic. I asked Chance to put a door there so that would never happen again.
A sob choked in my throat at the thought of Chance. I needed wine. Something, anything to make this nightmare of a day a little more bearable. Where the hell was it? I was sure there was a bottle of Pinot Grigio somewhere. I slapped the cabinet door closed when I couldn’t find any.
Danu scoffed. “Do you honestly think a door would stop me?”
Slowly, I turned around. “Don’t do it, Danu. I can’t take any more surprises today.”
Obsidian Curse (A Stacy Justice Mystery Book Five) Page 5