by Tegan Maher
I lifted a shoulder. "Most of the time they're just jumbled and skip around all over the place. It usually happens when I'm stressed or worried about something."
"You said usually. Tonight was different?"
"Yeah," I said, barking out a mirthless laugh. "You could say that."
She waited a couple seconds, then glowered at me, tapping her toe mid-air. "Well are you gonna tell me how it was different, or should I just start guessin'?"
"It wasn't jumbled at all. As a matter of fact, it didn't even feel like a dream."
She shook a gnarled finger at me. "You more than anybody should know such things aren't to be taken lightly. You shoulda called me right off, as soon as you woke up. Ain't no such thing as coincidence. I taught you better." She started pacing back and forth, floating across the table, then back again.
"You mean ... you think maybe it really wasn't a dream? But how? Daddy's gone."
Addy shot me her best don't be a dunce look. "No, your daddy left. That's different than bein' gone."
I leaned back in my chair, gobsmacked. She was right. I guess somewhere along the line, I'd made peace with daddy leaving by convincing myself he'd died. In a car wreck, or a boating accident, or maybe a piano out of a window and took him out. Whatever. I'd been daddy's girl. The only reason he wouldn't have come back for us would have been because he was dead.
Addy tilted her head at me, then compassion filled her eyes as dawning struck. "Oh, honey. I'm sorry. I didn't know that's how you'd dealt with it." She put out her arms to hug me, then realized she couldn't. She folded them behind her back instead.
I pressed my lips together. "So now that we've dispensed with that notion, why do you think he'd contact me like that? For that matter, how would he contact me? Daddy didn't have any magic."
She didn't say anything for a few seconds, just resumed her pacing. "I don't know the answers to either of those questions." She paused and studied me for a minute. "How somebody could contact you is easy—you're a telepath, and we've never had reason to keep that a secret in the witch community. You shield yourself during the day, but you're vulnerable at night."
I didn't like the sound of that at all. The idea of somebody crawling around in my head at any hour gave me the heebie-jeebies. I shuddered. "So the odds of daddy being the one to instigate the communication are slim to none, right?"
She nodded. "Though for the life of me, I can't imagine why whoever it is would want to show their hand before they're ready."
"That's easy," I said. "Hubris. The one thing all the bad guys we've dealt with had in common was arrogance. They were totally convinced they'd come out ahead in the end. That their plans would work."
She rubbed her chin and nodded. "You may just be on to something there. Describe this witch to me again."
Any doubt I'd had that she was a witch had flown out the window the moment I'd accepted that the dream wasn't a dream. I described her again, this time giving Addy every detail I could remember.
Recognition lit her eyes as I talked, then disbelief. She shook her head. "I know—knew—a witch who fit that description to a T, but there's no way it's her. She's dead."
"No," I said, "this woman was no older than my age. Maybe even a little younger."
She cocked a brow. "You know as well as I do, looks can be deceiving. She could have an extended lifespan, or she may have been wearing a glamour." She pulled in a deep breath, then released it. She didn't strictly have to breath anymore, but it was a habit she hadn't given up. I was glad. Being around somebody who didn't breathe, even if they were on the other side of the daisies, would have been weird.
"Well," I said. "Did she?"
"Did who what?" she asked, distracted.
"Did the witch you're talking about have a longer than normal lifespan?"
She pinched her lips together and raised her brows. "Maybe, but I'm absolutely certain she's dead."
"And how would you know that for sure? I mean, weirder things have happened. Maybe whoever told you she was dead was wrong, or if you saw her get hurt, maybe somebody healed her."
She shook her head. "Trust me, honey. The woman's deader than a hammer."
"How can you be certain, though? I mean, if she fits the exact description?"
Addy turned to me. "Because, sugar, I killed her myself."
Well then. That hadn't been the answer I'd expected, but I shouldn't have been surprised. At least not about Addy being sure she was dead—she wasn't likely to state something that important as fact if she didn't know for sure. Her killin' somebody was another matter. In all the times she'd mentioned that last epic fight, she'd always been a little fuzzy on the details. I knew there had been a faction of witches who didn't want the council, and that they'd rebelled and tried to kill Aunt Beth, but it had all been a bit abstract. A history lesson, more or less. It had never occurred to me that if it was an all-out war like they'd described, then it was likely some people didn't survive to tell the tale.
After all, it's not like you can take a witch into custody without a huge fight if she really doesn't want to go.
I hated to ask again, but I needed more details. We couldn't afford to make assumptions. "And you're absolutely certain she died? And that nobody hauled her off the heal her or revive her?"
"Absolutely, without a doubt. She's dead. I killed her, I checked to make sure she was dead, then they cremated her, and I was there for the whole shebang. Faith is dead."
"No twins, or any other siblings at all? No kids?"
She shook her head again. "Nope. None. We couldn't even track down any family to notify. Thus the cremation."
I sipped my coffee while she paced. "So you think she reached out to taunt me?"
Addy's face was troubled. "I think so. My question, though, is what does your father have to do with all this?"
"Believe me, I wish I knew," I said. If he really was alive, he had some serious questions to answer. Or maybe I didn't want to know after all. If he walked away from us and stayed away without so much as a birthday card, then maybe I didn't want to open the door and welcome him back with open arms.
She whirled around to face me, her expression determined. "I don't know who or why, but we're gonna find out. My aunt started to fade. "I'll be back later. I need to talk to your Aunt Beth, then I'm gonna see if I can track Camille down. She needs to know what's happening, because if somebody's making a grab for power around here, we may just have gotten our first clue. And believe me—they won't give us many."
As she disappeared, I picked a piece of the banana up and popped it into my mouth, chewing while I thought. Dad had told me to take Shelby and run, but as much as I wanted to protect her, running just wasn't how Flynn women did things.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
BY THE TIME RAE SHUFFLED into the kitchen a half-hour later, I'd managed to pull myself together some by baking a batch of muffins. She almost always stayed over on nights we went out since we'd made a ritual out of getting ready together. When Fancy's was busy, parking was at a premium so we rode together. Plus, that way if one of us drank a little too much, the other could drive.
"You're up early," she said, bumping me with her hip on her way to the coffee machine. "And on purpose, too. If I didn't know better, I'd think you just hadn't gone to bed yet."
"Ha ha," I said. "I wish that were the case, and believe me—I'm not up on purpose." I described the dream to her, along with my conversation with Addy.
She made herself a cup of hazelnut coffee while we talked, then joined me at the table. "Are you okay, though?"
Leave it to Raeann to know me well enough to see straight to the heart of the matter. "I don't know," I replied. "I mean, all these years ... where's he been? And what am I gonna tell Shelby? We never talk about Dad, so I'm not even sure what she thinks happened to him." I drained my coffee then pulled in a deep breath. "I guess I'm about to find out though."
"And I think we should probably bump magical practice up. Maybe even take a look at Addy's a
nd Mom's spell books." She gave me a quizzical look. "Do you have your mom's book? I don't think I've ever heard anybody mention it."
Come to think of it, I hadn't either. "Honestly, I don't even know if she had one. I've never thought to ask."
"Surely Addy or Mom would have said something by now if she did," Rae said. "I know I have a ton of stuff in mine, and so does Mom."
I laughed and she wrinkled her nose. "What?" she asked. "You don't think I have all those drink blends memorized, do you?"
"Actually, I know you do," I replied. "For that matter, I have half of them memorized just from helping you."
"And that," she said, flicking a wrist to turn off the beeping oven timer, "is part of the reason I have a book. You only know half of them. What if I have to go out of town or get really sick? You—or somebody—needs to know how to make them all. Plus, I experiment a lot, and when I finally get something right, I like to write it down. I have way more recipes than I have shelf space, and many of my blends are either personalized or specialized, so I only make them when somebody needs them."
I, on the other hand, did not have a book, mostly because my recipes weren't always anything special. Sure, I tweaked them to make them better and give them that special something, but the main special something in my products was my magic. And that's not something anybody but me could add. I stood and pulled the muffins out of the oven, then grabbed my cup and popped a pod into the coffee maker to brew my third cup of coffee.
Her eyes turned serious as she met my gaze. "You know this could be really bad, right? I don't like that they got in your head like that. If she can break in to leave a message, she can do anything when you're asleep."
That was something that had been bothering me. Despite what she and Addy apparently thought, I did have safety nets built in that worked whether I was awake or asleep, and it would tough for anybody I didn't trust to break them. I broke out in a sweat as I realized why my dad had been there—the witch had used him to get past my defenses. I said as much, but to my surprise, Rae looked doubtful.
"Look, Noe," she said. "I know you want to think the best of him and give him the benefit of the doubt—and this is assuming it wasn't a dream and it was really him you saw and not some cooked-up image the witch used to sucker you—but he's been gone for a long time. Where's he been?"
Her skepticism kinda pissed me off, and she must have seen it because she raised a hand. "I'm not saying that's the case for sure, and I'm not talking bad about your dad, but don't get tunnel vision. In this case, I think it's best to hope for the best but prepare for the worst, okay?"
She laid her hand on mine on the table, and I had to admit she was right.
"Yeah, I know," I replied, turning my hand over and giving hers a squeeze. "And that's exactly what happened. I saw him and automatically assumed he was the good guy."
"And he may be, if it was some kind of telepathic communication, and if it was him." I looked up and her eyes were full of commiseration. "Just don't get your hopes up, okay? I don't want to see you go through that heartbreak again."
She'd been there when I'd gone through losing first mom to a car crash, then dad when he left us at Addy's and never came back, so she knew how much it had gutted me. I gave her a watery smile. "Thanks, Cuz. You're awesome as always."
"Of course I am." She got up and plucked a warm muffin out of the pan. "You're gonna have to tell Shelby about this. You know that, right?"
I pulled in a deep breath, then released it through my cheeks. "Yeah, I suppose I should."
Rae shook her head. "Not should. You have to, today. If this is a real thing—and I think we'd be stupid not to assume it is—then she needs to be aware. We're all telepathic, so we're all susceptible. If she can breach you, she can get any of us, even if she did use your dad to get over your barrier." She studied the back of her hand. "I never thought I'd say this, but at least knowing my dad is dead takes that power from them."
Her dad had died of a freak heart attack in his late thirties when Rae was just a baby. She didn't even remember him. I felt horrible for her that she was forced to feel any sort of relief about that.
"There are other ways, though," I said, getting up to make a batch of muffins. Examining my supplies in the fridge, I decided to go with orange-cranberry. They were always a hit.
"Yeah, I know. Which is why we all need to be on alert. We need to put extra wards up before we go to sleep, too."
She was right as usual, but something in me shied away from doing that. What if he really was in trouble? Or what if he could reach out and tell us what was going on? I'd have to give that some serious thought, because if there was a chance either thing could happen, I wasn't sure I wanted to put up extra wards.
"You're right," I said, mostly to placate her, and she gave me the hairy eyeball. "I know what you're thinking, so get it out of your head right now. Whatever was going on there was way above your pay grade."
Though I started to protest because, after all, I had all these cool new powers, I knew she was right when I took two seconds to think about it. There's no way I could have even begun to create a scene like she had, assuming she'd built the meadow for my benefit. And I sure didn't know how to summon shadows or emerge from them. If that was one of her superpowers, it was a doozy. What if she was able to trap me in there? The thought turned my blood to ice. "I know," I said, this time with more conviction. "I'll start putting up extra wards at night." And I meant it—there was no dream worth dying, or—worse yet—being trapped in my own head for the rest of my natural life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I MADE THE MUFFINS, then helped Shelby feed the horses so she could get a head start on getting ready for school. I decided there was no time like the present to tell her about the dream, and Rae was right—she needed to know. Ripping the Band-aid off was how Addy'd taught us to do things, so I didn't waste any time.
Once I'd told her about the dream and summarized my conversations with Addy and Rae, Shelby was quiet for a few seconds.
"You okay?" I asked.
"Yeah," she said, squinting. "I guess it's just not as big a deal to me as it is to you—Dad appearing in a dream, I mean. To me, he's just an abstract idea. I don't even remember him and probably wouldn't recognize him if I passed him on the street. I haven't romanticized his leaving because I don't have any real emotional attachment. I mean, obviously I wish he'd have stuck around, but it's not like he left a gaping hole in my life when he went. I was only three."
When she put it like that, it made sense. We'd never really talked much about Dad. Addy and Beth had shared a lot of stories about Mom with us, and of course, Dad was included but was rarely central to any of them.
I gave her a side hug. "I just wanted to let you know what was going on. Whatever's up feels big to me, and I have to wonder if it's not tied to the stuff Camille's working on. In any case, until we know more, we need to beef up our wards and keep practicing our magic."
She groaned. "I have a good handle on things and so do you. Rae's got her whole super-growth thing under control, too."
We'd gotten lax with our practices for exactly that reason. "I don't know," I replied. "Call it a gut feeling, but I think we need to learn to work together a little better and maybe broaden our scope to see exactly what we can do. Up 'til now, we've just been practicing controlling it. Maybe now it's time to push the limits a little."
She shot me a sideways glance and grinned. "Does that mean you're going to let me blow things up on purpose?" One of her skills was wind magic, and she could literally compress the air and hit an object so hard that it blew up.
I raised a brow at her. "Maybe so. Blowing things up may come in handy if we have something bad coming at us and if you have to use it, I'd rather you be able to focus it so you don't blow up a house instead of a flowerpot."
She rubbed her hands together. "Then let's do it! How's this evening?"
"Perfect," I said, laughing. Our goal up to that point had been not blowing thing
s up, but maybe we'd been remiss in not practicing the other way, too. Just in case.
Her phone chimed with a text and she checked it. "Oh crap! Cody's on his way to pick me up, and I haven't even showered yet."
"Better get on the stick then," I said.
"Yeah, I better. Catch you this evening," she replied before making a mad dash for the house.
Rae was dressed and ready when I made it back in the house. Since we only had two bathrooms, time was at a premium when all four of us were there. Thankfully, Addy'd installed a second water when I'd hit high school, so I didn't have to worry about taking a cold shower. "Give me twenty minutes and I'll be ready. It's only seven-thirty, so that should time it just about right to catch people before they start the conference."
Rae had the muffins all packed up when I came down, scrunching some product into my hair to avoid the worst of the frizz. The one good thing about winter was that it made my wildly curly red hair a little more manageable.
"So how do you want to handle this?" she asked once we were in the truck. "It's not like we can just go in and say, so, did any of you kill Loretta? We're asking for a friend."
I shot her a sideways glance and grinned. "Why not? It sounds like a perfectly reasonable method to me. If one of them confesses, we've solved the case and Coralee's off the hook."
She rolled her eyes. "Be serious. I think the best way is to use the soft opening. Start with asking some general questions about the conference, then lead into the murder."
She looked so serious, I had to laugh. "You've given this a lot of thought, I see. Should we use the group method, or cull them from the herd and interrogate them separately?"
"Maybe start with the group, then corner people."
"How about we just take the muffins in and play it by ear? I'm guessing the murder is all they're going to be talking about, even though it's been a couple days. That's some good fodder and I doubt the buzz has died down much."