Biting my bottom lip, I stopped in front of the alcove, with its sofa with its tumble of colorful throw pillows. Potted plants lined the narrow table behind it, and tendrils of green began their slow climb up the white brick wall.
Alicia’s murder had not been my fault.
But what had the lawyer, Eclectus Something-or-other, been saying about murder? He had to have been talking about Alex’s death. And a murder would fit with that premonition of doom I'd experienced. But the way Alex had died… I shuddered.
Think of something else.
I touched the tiny plants in their clay pots. Before the fire, the alcove had been covered in ivy. Now that my magic was running hot, could I encourage their growth with a spell?
Picatrix mewed and jumped onto the couch.
“You’re right,” I told the ebony cat. “The plants aren’t important – not right now.” I dropped onto the wide couch and knocked a pink and green throw pillow to the rug. Digging my phone from my pocket, I called Darla.
“Jayce? Is something wrong?”
“No.” I laughed. “I just wondered, did Alex Mansfield cancel his order on Monday?”
“I don’t think so. I mean, I thought we owed him a carrier. Why?”
“Nothing – it’s just. It’s silly, but his wife told me he was planning on going hiking that morning. It probably doesn’t make any difference, but I just thought maybe the police would want to know.”
“I’ll ask Mathilda tomorrow if she took a call from him and forgot to tell us.”
“Thanks. Sorry to interrupt your evening.”
We hung up, and I tapped my phone on the arm of the couch. The violence Brayden had described would imply a masculine killer, wouldn't it? Or the kind of fury only a spouse could be driven to. Could Candace be a suspect? If the police believed that, surely they'd have pulled her in for questioning before her lawyer had gotten to her. I wasn't exactly a fan of the Doyle Sheriff's Department, but they didn't let the grass grow under their feet.
Ugh, I wasn’t getting anywhere. I did my best thinking when I was moving. Gathering my foraging gear – basket and clippers and headlamp – I left, locking the apartment door behind me. Brayden’s new overhead light snapped on, and I smiled.
I left Doyle’s back roads and stepped onto a familiar trail limned by snow. I’m an earth witch, and the forest and I had developed an understanding. Though I wasn't careless around wild animals, I didn't fear them either. I wasn’t worried about bears or mountain lions.
Maybe I should have been.
The night was cloudless, and the moon had not yet risen. Venus hung above the silhouettes of western hills. I swear I could see every one of the planet’s mythical seven points.
I kept my headlamp in my basket, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness of the narrow trail, gray in the starlight. Doyle was not quite foothills, not quite Sierras, and the terrain grew more Alpine as I climbed.
Foraging opportunities were thin in November. I stopped, ankle-deep in snow, besides a low pine. I inhaled deeply, exhaled. My heart softened, and I opened it to the tree. “May I clip some branches, beautiful?”
A breeze whispered through the tree, and my heart lifted.
“Thank you,” I murmured and trimmed three boughs. I wasn't sure if I'd use them for cooking or decorating, but they were lush and smelled divine.
I stilled my thoughts and shut my eyes, just feeling. The earth hummed, a deliciously low bass vibrating through my feet and into my core. The coming winter trembled through the granite stones. Pine sap pulled deeper inward, and roosting crows clutched at the trees’ rough branches.
A stench of rotting things brushed my senses, and my eyes blinked open.
Insides tightening, I bent my senses further outward, ears and eyes straining as I felt with my inner sense.
The smell was gone.
My imagination? I rolled my shoulders, my basket bouncing against my thigh.
But I couldn't quite shake my disquiet and turned west, toward town. The snow turned the forest ghostly. Below, lights from the Victorians winked like a fairytale village.
I tramped loudly on the soft ground, giving any animals fair warning of my presence. Branches and dried needles and the occasional patch of ice crackled beneath my feet.
Pines crowded around me, the path tightening, blocking the lights of Doyle and the stars. I reached into my basket, fumbling for the headlamp.
A large shape shifted on the path.
I froze, heart thumping.
A buck stared, motionless, his antlers magnificent and deadly. I’d caught him by surprise. That was not a good thing.
Swallowing, I willed my pulse to slow, imagined my breath flowing directly into and out of my heart. My fear dropped away, replaced by an almost painful swell of love.
The buck took a hesitant step closer. I extended my hand, palm down.
The rotting smell flooded the trail.
The buck skittered backwards. He turned and sprang off the trail, down the hill. Bushes crashed, then silence.
My skin crawled. The buck hadn’t imagined the scent and neither had I.
I crouched, setting aside the basket, and pressed both palms to the earth. “Greetings, Old Ones,” I said in a low voice. “What else is here?”
My awareness flowed into the vast network of tree roots. I felt the rumble of a far-off lumber truck. A family of chipmunks burrowing beneath a pine. And a tremor of the buck's fear.
A flash of heat. The spatter of crimson across a tree trunk. The hot stench of his own blood, and the buck was gone.
I gasped, falling backwards, and landed on my butt. What the hell?
The air thickened.
Shaky, I rose to my feet and brushed off my jeans. It could have been natural. Animals died in the woods every day. It was nature's cycle.
But I couldn't shake the feeling of wrongness. And neither could the trees. I could still feel their disquiet, a sense of intrusion.
I snapped on my headlamp and pulled it onto my head. Hands trembling, I grabbed the basket and hurried down the hill, slick and damp.
A branch snapped behind me.
I ran.
Now all I could hear were my own footsteps, the banging of my pulse in my ears, the heave of my breath.
A pine branch tumbled from my basket. A stone skidded from beneath my foot. I stumbled, staggering over a low mound of snow, and raced on.
I rounded a corner.
A shape moved to intercept me, and I veered right. My foot twisted on a tree root veining the soil. Pain shot through my ankle, and I fell, one knee hitting the cold ground.
“Whoa!” Maya flung up her hand, shielding her face. “Watch where you aim that thing.” She jogged in place, my headlamp whitening her ice blue microfiber track suit. Her long braid bounced behind her.
I twisted, frantic, my headlamp making tall shadows of the trees, and I listened, hearing and seeing nothing.
“Jayce?”
“Sorry.” Crouching, I yanked off the headlamp and gripped my ankle. I winced. Damn, it hurt.
She jogged closer. “No, I'm sorry if I startled you. Are you okay?”
I laughed unsteadily and stood. Testing my ankle, I clenched my jaw against the pain. “I'll walk it off.” I collected my basket. A few small branches remained inside.
She stopped bouncing around, and her arms dropped to her sides. “I’m sure you could. But why don't we walk back together?” She glanced around. “I have to admit, sometimes I get nervous alone in these woods. At night, every boulder is a troll and every tree stump a goblin.”
And maybe there was strength in numbers. “Then we shall battle them together.”
Slowly, we walked downhill, my head lamp in my hand, its light bouncing across the narrow trail. I glanced over my shoulder every twenty feet, watching, listening.
She shot me a sideways look. “Do you always go running in boots and jeans?”
I raised my bas
ket in answer. “I was foraging. The running was kind of spontaneous.”
She chuckled, her voice low and sultry. “You did strike me as the spontaneous type. It must be difficult combining that trait with running a coffee shop.”
“Yes,” I said, voice clipped with an anxiety that must have sounded snappish. I steadied my breathing and smiled. “I'm on a deadly dull schedule now. Good thing I never needed much sleep, and the weekends give me plenty of free time.”
“You’re closed on weekends?”
“The weekend tourists prefer wine to coffee tasting.”
“Makes sense,” she said.
“I hear you're an entrepreneur too?”
“Did Brayden tell you that?” She laughed lightly. “I used to be an entrepreneur. Now I'm trying to figure out what's next.”
The pines gave way to oaks and elms, and Doyle unfolded, glittering, beneath us. Far below, on Main Street, colorful Christmas lights wound up the tallest pine. When had the town put those up?
“Brayden told me you started a Tarot website,” I said. “That’s so cool. I love Tarot.”
“I never thought my company would grow as big as it did. It might not have if I hadn't sold it to the right company.”
I glanced over my shoulder. “How did you become interested in Tarot?”
“How does anyone? I stayed interested in it because it works, though I couldn't tell you how.”
We emerged behind a row of houses.
“That's me.” She pointed toward a two-story Victorian. “Do you want to come in for a drink?”
Who was I to turn that offer down? “Why not? Thanks.”
She vaulted the low chain-link fence, knocking off the rim of snow.
I hooked the toe of my boot into a gap in the fence and swung my leg over. Placing my foot carefully on the ground, I tested my ankle. A faint zing of pain zipped up my calf.
Maya had cleared the weeds that had grown up since Mike’s death. The ground was soft beneath my boots and dotted unevenly with snow. The Victorian’s exterior paint had been stripped, leaving pale, gray wood.
“The painters are coming tomorrow,” she said, walking around the corner of the two-story house. “I wanted to get it done before we get more rain or snow.”
“Oh, it’ll be snow,” I said absently. Everything east of Main Street’s double-yellow line got the snow. It was our unofficial and very weird snowline. If the weather reports were accurate, the white stuff was coming next week.
I followed her up the porch steps.
She unlocked the front door. A crack ran through its stained-glass panes. She stepped inside. “I suppose no one locks their doors in Doyle but me. Big city habits.”
I brushed past her. “You're from…?”
“San Francisco.”
I sighed with jealousy. That city was just cool.
She closed the door and toed off her running shoes. “You can leave your boots on if you want. I just like feeling the ground beneath my feet. Or in this case, the floor.”
I loved going barefoot too but tugging off my boots seemed like too much hassle. Plus, they were giving me some needed ankle support.
I gazed up the wide, curving staircase to the second floor. The knife-fight red carpeting had been removed, leaving bare wood. She'd repainted the high walls stark white. An unseen clock ticked, the only other sound beside our own soft shuffling.
“I can't stand carpeting,” she said loudly, as if the quiet of the house had gotten to her too. “Rugs are fine, but wall-to-wall carpeting? Ugh. You wouldn’t believe all the dirt I found beneath them. And the wood floors are in such good condition, it seemed a shame not to show them off.”
Maya led me into the massive library. The bookshelves had been cleared and turned into a makeshift bar along one side. The wall around the white fireplace had been painted in wide, vertical black and ivory stripes. A mirror framed in mercury glass hung centered above the fireplace. Two low, kidney shaped tables like something out of Star Trek sat atop brown faux-bearskin rugs. Stylishly uncomfortable black and white chairs grouped around the tables.
Lenore would totally hate it.
Maya lit the wadded-up newspaper lying ready beneath the wood. The paper flared, setting the gold streaks in her hair ablaze. Her crouching shadow lengthened, stretching to the trio of gothic-arched windows opposite. She straightened. “What would you like to drink?”
“What have you got?”
“Dirty martini?”
By happy coincidence, it was my favorite cocktail. “Perfect.” I walked to the tall, church-like windows and pretended to gaze out while she made the drinks. But all I could see was my own reflection, pale and wild after my run. I smoothed my hair. What would Brayden think of the Baba Yaga look? I smiled.
“Here you go.”
I started, turned.
She was right beside me. I'd been so lost in my own reflection, I hadn't heard her approach. Embarrassing.
“So, tell me about yourself,” she said. “Brayden mentioned you grew up in Doyle?”
Brayden had been telling her an awful lot, but I nodded. “My sisters and I.”
“Right. Is it true you’re triplets?”
“Yep. But we don’t all look alike.” I laughed. “What a disaster that would be.”
“I heard one of your sisters is a writer?”
“Karin,” I said. “She writes romance novels. Paranormal romance.”
“Wait, is she the Karin Bonheim? I had no idea! Do you think she'd sign one of my books?” She moved to the fireplace, and I followed.
“I'm sure she would,” I said, “when she's around. She doesn't live in Doyle anymore.”
Her smile was slow. “Too bad.”
I sipped the martini. It was perfect, dry and salty/sour. Tarot. The perfect martini? Yeah, Maya and I could be friends.
“And I think your sister Lenore used to know the owner of this house? She runs the bookstore now, right?”
“She owns it and runs a rare book dealership on the side,” I said proudly. True, she’d inherited the business, but it had been left to her because she was awesome when it came to all things books.
“Rare books?” Maya arched a brow. “Fascinating. Any specialization?”
I winked. “Occult.”
She threw back her head and laughed. “Delicious! These small towns are full of surprises. How on earth did she get involved in that?”
“Through Mike, the man who used to own this house.” I motioned around the high-ceilinged room with my martini.
“I knew the prior owner ran a bookstore, but nothing about occult books.” She arched a brow. “Should I be worried about ghosts?”
“Doubtful.” I laughed. “The occult was all academic to him. Anyway, Lenore inherited his business.”
“And she knew enough about the work to keep it going?”
I hesitated. Was she asking about the occult or the business itself? “She worked for Mike in the bookstore. It's how they knew each other.” I took another sip and studied her over the rim of my glass.
“But I'd imagine running a bookstore and running a rare book dealership are two very different things.”
“Lenore's been figuring it out as she goes along, but she seems to be doing okay.”
“And I suppose Lenore still lives in Doyle, since the bookstore is here?”
I nodded.
“The occult…” She rubbed the edge of her martini glass against her bottom lip. “I suppose Doyle is a good place for that sort of thing, with all that business about the disappearances. What's your take on that?”
I shifted my weight. I should have known this was coming. It was all visitors ever wanted to talk about – the Disappeared and UFOs. Doyle got its share of alien-obsessed visitors. They were convinced extraterrestrials caused the mysterious disappearance and reappearance of so many Doyle citizens. “It's certainly strange,” I said.
“Strange? An entire bar vanished wi
th everyone inside. Months later, people who'd been missing for years suddenly reappeared.”
“Actually, pretty much everyone who disappeared has reappeared.” As if that made it any better.
“But where did they go? Everyone I've talked to said they have some sort of amnesia.”
“Some people think they were abducted by aliens.” A much safer theory, since it was dead wrong.
It was also weirdly more believable than the truth – fairy abductions. Hardly anyone believed in fairies. My sisters and I had been forced to believe, and charming winged beings they are not. Fairies are freaking terrifying.
“Doyle even has a UFO-themed B&B,” I continued, “Wits’ End. If you want to learn more, you should talk to the owner, Susan Witsend. Her grandmother literally wrote the book — or pamphlet — on Doyle and UFOs.”
“You can't really believe in UFOs.” She smiled. “People only think aliens are responsible because of the weird, UFO-shaped clouds around here. But those appear wherever there are mountains.”
A footstep creaked on the winding staircase.
My gaze shot toward the foyer, where the lower part of the stairs was clearly visible.
No one was on it.
I imagined my aunt Ellen’s voice, it’s just the house settling.
“Lenticular clouds,” I said, still watching the stairs. “So, what's your theory on the disappearances?”
“Mine?” She pursed her plump lips. “The police said it was a gas leak and explosion, wasn't it, that caused the disappearance of that bar?”
“That's what the police say.” I lifted my glass to her. “But you don't seem convinced.”
“Twenty-plus people wandering around the woods for months with amnesia? How on earth did they manage to survive all that time and not find their way to civilization? It's pretty hard to believe.”
The doorbell rang, and she frowned. “Who could that be at this hour?” She sauntered to the entryway, vanishing from sight around the corner.
The front door clicked open.
A chill flowed from the foyer, and I shivered, walked closer to the fire.
A man laughed, and my heart did a little flip. Brayden.
Carrying a cardboard box, he walked beside Maya into the library, his head bent toward her.
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