by Ani Gonzalez
Caine raised his brows, looking skeptical. "So the universe wants you to build a tower?"
Luanne laughed. "Don't be silly. It's not a structure. The Tower is, well, it's a false premise, something built out of ignorance and arrogance. Like the biblical Tower of Babel, it's something you've constructed for yourself that is no longer operative. A huge fallacy." She frowned quizzically. "I'm just not sure what my deadly illusion is. That I can bake? But that's so pedestrian, unworthy of a Major Arcana card, really."
"Deadly?" Liam asked. "Are you saying this card is dangerous?"
"Oh, no," Luanne said with an airy wave. "It's all about spiritual growth and letting go of illusions. Particularly illusions of safety and comfort. That's what the Tower represents, false safety and comfort."
"So what does it mean when you're no longer safe?" Liam asked, not reassured by her answer.
Luanne shrugged. "Disaster, upheaval, revelation, Armageddon."
Well, that didn't sound good.
But Luanne wasn't done. "The card shows two figures falling from the tower onto the jagged rocks below. That's what the card means, a big fall, a surprising crash onto a harsh, unwelcoming reality. It's as if the universe pushed them out of their little hidey-hole and into the coldness of the void."
An image popped into Liam's mind, a young boy falling and hitting his head on an owl-shaped stone. It was so vivid he could almost see the blood. A hazy, ghostly figure hovered around the edge of the vision
It made him shiver.
He was about to ask Luanne if she could explain further when he spied a tall figure in a leather jacket and hat striding through the gym.
It was Sheriff Stickely.
"Hey, pumpkin," Luanne said with a cheerful wave. "I thought I'd find you here."
The sheriff didn't look surprised to hear that. They'd been an item for a while. He must be used to this by now.
"Hi, toots," he answered, kissing her on the cheek. I need a minute to talk to these guys, then I was thinking maybe we could—"
"Pick up pizza on the way home?" Luanne asked brightly. "Great idea. I already called it in. It will be ready in fifteen minutes."
The sheriff chuckled. "Sounds good. I'll meet you in the car."
Luanne ran off and Sean pushed his hat back as he turned toward Caine and Liam. "I'm sorry to do this to you, but I'll need statements from everyone who was in the school yesterday."
Caine's face turned to stone. Liam felt a cold chill run down his spine.
"We'll cooperate, of course," Caine said carefully. "But why do you need statements?"
It was a good question, and Liam had a feeling that he knew the answer.
The sheriff shook his head. "I can't tell you that right know. I don't have all the facts. If you can have your guys drop by the station tomorrow—"
"He fell," Liam said suddenly. "Jonas fell and hit his head."
The sheriff's face went blank and his eyes turned flinty.
But Liam couldn't stop. He understood the vision now.
"He didn't fall," he said. "He was pushed."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
"I'VE NEVER experienced anything like that before," Liam said, running a hand through his hair shakily. "And I never want to again."
Kat set the teakettle on the burner and reached for her special "Soothing Sleepy Sunbeam" chamomile tea mix. Liam had calmed down a bit, but he'd been a nervous wreck when he'd first entered their house.
"I'm not sensitive this way," Liam continued. "And I think that's a good thing. I renovate haunted houses for a living. The fact that I don't sense things is very advantageous. I like my psychic blindness. I don't want to see anything."
Kat scooped out the herb mix and poured it into a tea ball. "What happened, exactly?"
Liam slumped in the kitchen stool. "We were talking to Luanne—"
"I see," Kat replied thoughtfully, closing the tea ball. "Hon, that was your first mistake."
Luanne's ramblings sometimes had a reality-altering effect. One could easily start seeing things after a chat with the fortune teller.
"She was going on and on about the jumper cards and the Tower and falling people getting their heads smashed on rocks."
"The Tower? That's the card she was talking about?" Kat tried to recall what the Tower meant. Something about people fooling themselves?
"Yes, it jumped out at her," Liam replied. "Literally. Apparently that means that it was trying to tell her something."
"That she needs a reality check? I can see that."
If anyone needed to come back to planet Earth, it was Luanne LaRue. In this case, the cards were absolutely correct.
Liam frowned. "Well, maybe. But Luanne didn't see it that way. She was talking about death, destruction, and Armageddon when Sean showed up."
"Luanne loves Armageddon," Kat said, concealing her rising unease. "She sees it everywhere."
"Well, apparently, so do I now," Liam snorted. "Caine's hackles went up when the sheriff told us that we would have to give statements. He wanted to know why, and, frankly, so did I. Sean, however, refused to tell us anything."
"I don't think he can," Kat said reasonably.
"That's when I saw the kid falling onto the grass and hitting his head on a rock," Liam sighed. "It was so real."
Kat made a sympathetic noise. "Visions usually seem that way, but that does not—"
Then the kettle whistled loudly, interrupting her.
"Let me make you some tea," she said, walking to the stove. "It will help you calm down."
She poured the hot water into a porcelain teapot, then added the tea. The water slowly turned a reassuring golden color.
She closed her eyes and muttered a quick prayer to Oshun, the Yoruba goddess of love. The Lady of Enchantment could calm all troubled waters. She would bring Liam peace.
"Here you go," Kat said, handing the cup to Liam and hovering protectively as he drank.
He relaxed instantly, his shoulders unknotting, and she sighed with relief.
Spells were tricky around Liam. He wasn't kidding about his immunity to the supernatural. Kat's husband was blessedly psi-null. Heck, he'd worked on the famously cursed Hagen House, his family's ancestral home, for years without feeling a peep from the evil spirit within.
You could trigger a magical nuke next to Liam Hagen and he wouldn't feel a thing, which was why the vision was so strange.
Liam seeing things? Unlikely.
And, yet, here it was. He'd seen someone's death. What did it mean? And did it have something to do with Luanne's cards? Death and destruction, Liam had said.
Liam wouldn't feel magic working around him, but a paranormal Armageddon? Yes, even Liam would be able to feel that.
She poured tea into a cup and drank it down, focusing on the attributes of the chamomile. Liam wasn't the only one who needed to calm down now.
The warm, golden glow enveloped her, helping her think.
This was nothing to freak out about. Liam just had a vision. This was Banshee Creek and visions were commonplace. Even Kenny, the clueless PRoVE intern, had seen some numbers burnt into a toasted bagel, played them in the Virginia Lottery, and won five thousand dollars, which he was using to fund a Christmas Chupacabra hunt in Texas.
Sure, Liam was resistant to the paranormal, but everyone had their limit. He'd been living on top of the town's geomagnetic fault for most of his life. It was bound to have an effect.
And, of course, he'd seen Jonas fall. They'd all seen the young man's body lying on the linoleum floor...
She jerked. Linoleum, not grass. Liam had seen grass and a rock.
So had Liam seen Jonas' death or had he seen Luanne's Tower prediction? Had the fortune teller filled his head with images of bodies falling through the air and smashing into rocks? Had his subconscious turned that into Jonas falling and hitting his head?
And what about Claire Delacourt and her Chilean spell? Was it all connected?
Kat sipped her tea, trying not to visualize an impending
disaster. It was Christmas in Banshee Creek. Disaster should be the farthest thing from her mind. She should be thinking about decorations and carols and whether she could get away with doing a Cuban-style turkey this year. Would that freak Liam out?
As if sensing her train of thought, Liam lifted his head and frowned.
Dear heavens, was he becoming telepathic now? Now that would be too much for her. Visions, she could endure, but a husband who could read thoughts would wreck any marriage.
Liam sniffed the air. "Er, is something...?"
That's when Kat smelled it too, the acrid scent of smoke.
Oh, no.
She grabbed a pair of silicon gloves and pulled them on.
"Burning?" Liam finished as she opened the oven. She winced as hot smoke hit her face and pulled out a tray of burnt cookies.
"Those look...nice?" Liam said plaintively. "Very, uh, spiky."
"I used candied pecans instead of coconut flakes," Kat exclaimed. "They're supposed to look like snowballs."
"Black snowballs?" Liam asked, chuckling. "More like coals."
Kat laughed. She couldn't help it. "I don't think that would go over well." She pulled off her gloves and stared at the carnage before her. "I may need to decrease the baking time."
"Ya think?" Liam said, knocking the burnt pecans off a cookie and biting into it. "The nuts burned, but the cookie is really good."
"That's a relief."
There was an edge of bitterness to her voice. She'd thought the candied pecan pieces were a stroke of genius, but, apparently, the candy coating burnt easily. Maybe if she added them at the end...
"By the way, how are you feeling?" Liam asked.
"Me?" Kat jerked, surprised. "I'm fine. You're the one who had a shock. I've just been eating my own body weight in cookie dough." She patted her stomach. "That's why I'm feeling a bit bloated. Why do you ask?"
Oh, goddess, was all this baking making her gain weight? That wouldn't be surprising now, would it? She was going to have to do some drastic dieting when this was over.
Liam reached for another cookie. "No, seriously, these are excellent."
"I added some ground pecans to bring out the flavor," Kat explained.
"It worked," Liam said, munching happily.
Kat nodded, pleased that the cookies were tasty. However, she needed them to look pretty as well. A bunch of semi-spherical cookies wouldn't win the competition, no matter how flavorful they were.
She was going to have to come up with something fast.
Maybe this was the catastrophe Luanne was predicting.
Cookie Armageddon.
CHAPTER TWELVE
"WHEN I asked you what you saw," Sean Stickely said, scratching his chin, "I was hoping for something a little bit more..."
"Concrete?" Liam asked, fiddling with his paper coffee cup.
They were sitting around a flimsy plastic table in the police station's break area, which currently doubled as an interview room. The sheriff, it appeared, was trying to keep this casual. So this was not an official police interrogation. It was just two guys sharing stale coffee, surrounded by plastic chairs, coffee utensils, and a vending machine with a taped sign that read, Who keeps stealing all the Cheetos? Please stop.
"Realistic," Sean answered.
Liam sighed. "I know it sounds silly..."
Sean shook his head. "Actually, it doesn't. I live with Luanne. I'm used to stuff that sounds silly, but then...isn't." He leaned back on the chair, crossing his arms. "A rock, uh?"
"And grass," Liam said.
"We'll keep that in mind," Sean said. "Now, how well did you know the kid?"
Liam stared down at his coffee cup. He couldn't help but notice that Sean didn't seem surprised about the grass and rock details. Was it because it was just a stupid vision?
Or was it something else?
"Not well," Liam said. "He was in high school, about to graduate, and he worked with PRoVE. He dropped by my office a couple of times because he was working on a Hagen House project. He seemed to be doing a lot of research about it."
"Was he nice?"
"What do you mean?"
Jonas wasn't nice, exactly. He was brash and aggressive, with a nerdy teenage arrogance that was sometimes hard to take. Liam, however, did not like to talk ill of the dead.
But Sean did not waver. "Was he well-liked?"
That was an easier question.
"He was respected, I think." Liam took a sip of coffee. "He did amazing research for PRoVE. He was a wiz at online searches, capable of finding obscure information on genealogy and historical sites. He even found a small Italian museum that had uploaded original materials on Etruscan witchcraft. It was pretty impressive."
"But?" Sean asked.
"What do you mean?"
"There's a 'but' in there somewhere."
Ah, a cop's intuition. A pain in the butt, to be sure.
Liam shook his head. "He could be...too smart for his own good. He had brains, but he was a little too eager to show them off. He could also be very confrontational. A little skepticism is good, but sometimes you can take it too far."
"For example?"
"He asked a lot of questions about the Hagen House curse, like, how old it was, what exactly happened. All normal as far as it went. But then he asked about how much would the house sell for and whether it helped my building business to have refurbished a cursed house. He was always looking for the 'gotcha' moment. "
"I see."
Liam ran his hands through his hair. "There wasn't anything wrong with the questions. It was just the manner in which he posed them."
"What exactly?"
"He insinuated that the curse would increase the market value of the house," Liam said, chuckling. "And that it might be a convenient fiction created as a real estate marketing scheme. Elizabeth almost fell over laughing when I told her. The house was unsellable because of the curse. That someone would think that we made it up as a marketing ploy was ludicrous."
"But that was the kind of thing Jonas did?"
"Yes, he saw himself as a Dana Scully type, someone who questioned everything. He went through the PRoVE tapes, trying to find fake data and wrote a ten-page memo on all the inconsistencies he found."
"Was Caine angry about that?"
"No," Liam laughed. "Caine hired him on the spot. PRoVE loved the memo. They even added annotations to the videos to explain the inconsistencies. You know how they feel about feedback."
Sean raised a brow. "So Elizabeth laughed and Caine issued a job offer. I bet most people wouldn't react that way."
Liam shrugged. "I heard there were some hard feelings with some of the other groups. Caine had to go around and smooth some ruffled feathers. I don't know the details."
"But I do." A dulcet voice said behind him. "That boy was a pain in the keister."
Sean smiled and put down his coffee cup. "You're early, Ms. Delacourt."
Claire Delacourt laughed, sweeping her silver hair back with a toss of the head. "Time is relative." She scanned the room. "And I wanted to check out the station. I see you're still sharing the old building with the fire department."
"Works for us," Sean replied.
Claire glanced at a nearby wall. "Your company remodeled the building, right, Liam?"
Liam jerked. "Yes, we did. It was an easy job."
"No mishaps, no hauntings?" Claire asked, running her fingers over the light blue wall paint.
Liam frowned, wondering why she was asking. "No, we just put in bulletproof windows and reinforced the doors. It went smoothly."
In fact, it had been his easiest Banshee Creek project to date. At first, they'd panicked because they'd thought they'd ordered the wrong windows—an expensive mistake—but it turned out the measurements were perfect. Even the steel-reinforced doors, which were supposed to be a pain to install, were actually a breeze.
"Some buildings want to get things done," Claire said, smiling at the wall. "They don't mess around."
&nbs
p; "You're not referring to Caine's warrior cult theory, are you?" Liam asked, chuckling. "He wanted us to line up the windows with the sun to honor the Powhatan warrior god."
Claire raised a brow. "And did you?"
"Uh, it kind of turned out that way," Liam admitted reluctantly.
Claire petted the wall, as if she were stroking a cat and her lips curved into a smile. "Of course it did."
"Jonas said it was bunk," Liam noted.
"The windows?" Sean asked, confused.
"No, the whole warrior clan theory," Liam said. "He said there was no evidence that there was ever a sacred warrior clan in this area or that they cast a protection spell over theis site."
"No," Claire's smile grew wider. "There isn't any evidence. He was right about that." Her gaze turned pensive. "He was right about a lot of things."
"And that's worth talking about," Sean said, getting up from his chair. "Here, Claire, I'll get you a cup."
"I guess that's my cue," Liam said, also getting up.
"Thanks for helping out, Liam," Sean said as he poured out a new cup of coffee. "I'll see you later."
"Sure," Liam said as Claire took his place.
He walked out slowly, trying to listen in. What could Claire possibly know about Jonas? She'd been living on the West Coast for years.
"Let's start," Sean said.
"Sure," Claire replied. "But first, I have a question." She pointed to the sign taped on the snack machine. "When did a tanuki sneak into town?"
That was all Liam was able to hear.
Sheriff's station, warrior clans, and tanukis. What did these things have in common?
He had a feeling Kat would know.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
"IT SHOULDN'T matter whether she likes the coconut or not," Luanne said. "As long as the recipe is well-executed."
Kat weighed her friend's statement. You had to be judicious when talking to Luanne. Sometimes her words carried extra layers of meaning, and it was best to identify those early. This time, though, it all sounded like gobbledygook Luanne had learned from the Food Network.