That was the explanation I wanted.
I didn't want to think of the darker explanation. Had Brayden pushed me away because he was connected more deeply to the murders than anyone knew?
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I woke up at nine and skimmed the local paper’s web page for more murder news. There wasn’t any, and I shut the laptop with enough force to send Picatrix scurrying from my bedroom.
I needed to find out what was going on, and that meant getting out of bed on a gray Sunday morning. Dressing quickly, I strode to my favorite brunch spot, Alchemy, my breath steaming the air.
A dog looked up as I passed, then returned to lapping water from a bowl at the feet of a ceramic Santa Claus, outside a shop door.
Alchemy was also Brayden's favorite Sunday brunch spot, and I smoothed the front of my jacket. He was a creature of habit. Odds were, he’d be there. But I wasn't wearing my favorite ruby V-neck sweater and faded skinny jeans to impress him. They made me feel awesome, and feeling awesome equaled confidence. Insiders tip: confidence powers a lot of magic.
Pushing through the heavy door hard enough to set its wreath swinging, I paused by the hostess stand. Unlit twinkle lights draped the rafters. Pine boughs lay in the white stucco windows.
My chest pinched.
Brayden sat alone, his plaid shirt rolled to his elbows and exposing tanned and corded arms. He read the local paper at a black metal table by the fire. In spite of everything, I couldn’t help feeling it was adorable he insisted on reading the paper version. He said reading online hurt his eyes, and he was wearing his reading glasses today. I smiled with bitter nostalgia. The glasses were also adorable.
“Hi, Brayden.” I peeled off my wine-colored jacket with the faux-fur trim.
He looked up and smiled blandly. “Hey, Jayce. How's it going?”
I flinched. How’s it going? You broke up with me by text! “Fu—” I took a breath. Something was wrong and making a scene wouldn’t help me figure it out. “I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“No reason.” His brow crinkled.
“Are you dining alone?”
“I'm waiting for Maya.” He grinned, his jade eyes glittering dully. “That woman will be late for her own funeral.”
My smile faded. I forced the corners of my mouth higher. “Then I won't keep you.”
“You're not,” he said. “It's good to see you again. And I think I owe you an apology.”
He damn right owed me— Cool it! “Oh?” I asked, head cocked.
“I should never have let things go on between us as long as I did. I was rebounding from Alicia's death. You're fun and beautiful and want to have adventures, party, be spontaneous… It wasn't right.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. Rebounding? We'd been in love with each other long before his wife had been killed and had waited too long after her death to admit how we felt. “Oh,” I choked out, “that's okay. I get it.” I so did not get it, and my confidence faltered. Had I been fooling myself about Brayden, blaming magic and murder on our breakup, when he just wasn’t that in to me?
“Meeting Maya, seeing Terry again, it made me realize how we don’t make sense. What I was doing to you was unfair. You deserve someone more spontaneous.” He smiled. “You need someone interested in more than home improvements.”
Hurt tightened my lungs, squeezed my breath away. “I like having a nice home,” I said lightly. “It’s not such a bad thing.”
“But let’s be realistic, it's not the excitement you're used to.”
My stomach plunged. “Excitement,” I repeated. Was he right? I had been itching to get out more, but… No! That wasn’t the point.
“You know. The dancing. The bars. The witchcraft.”
Beside us, the fire snapped.
“Yeah.” I forced the word from my throat. How to tell him that the dancing and the bars were only exciting because he'd been with me? And the witchcraft wasn't about excitement. It was a part of me, a quirk I’d thought he'd accepted, had even found interesting.
Across the room, a woman brayed with laughter.
“Hey, not to change the subject…” I was totally changing the subject. “You were on the high school wrestling team, right? The one with David Senator, Eclectus Hood, Alex Mansfield, and Wharton from the lumberyard?”
His gaze shadowed. He looked down at his paper. “What about it?”
“I heard that David was hazed, that he'd been left tied to a tree in the woods, and then he disappeared.”
He turned the page. “That was Wharton.”
“Wharton?”
A log in the fireplace crumbled, and sparks shot upward.
Brayden focused on a spot beside my right ear. “David was the smallest guy on the team. He did fine wrestling in his own weight class, but to practice, he needed to wrestle his teammates. Wharton was merciless. The kind of guy who had to win no matter the cost. The coach tried to explain that we needed to wrestle at eighty or ninety percent. That way, our partner had a chance to learn something, to try to apply some holds. Wharton never got it. He went a hundred and ten all the time.”
I willed him to meet my gaze. Let me see what you’re really thinking. “And you think he was the one who left David in the woods?” I asked, voice steady.
“Everyone knew it was Wharton. He denied it. No one could prove who dragged David out there to freeze. But everyone knew.”
“But if that was the case,” I said, “why was David upset with Eclectus and Alex?”
“Who says he was?”
“I saw it.”
He shrugged. “I don't know what you saw, but I don't know what was going on in David's head either. After his return, the guy was screwed up. It's not his fault, but what can you do?”
I stared, aghast. How could he be so casual about the Returned? Karin was— My sister-in-law was a returned. And yes, Emily had gone through hell, and yes, she was screwed up. But Emily needed help, not this… casual dismissal.
“What?” he asked.
“I guess I'm just surprised to hear you say that,” I said slowly.
“Why? It's true.”
“Yes, but… You're an EMT. You always have such empathy for people.”
A black-aproned waitress brushed past.
“I'm an EMT,” he said, “not a psychiatrist. What the Returned are going through is outside my wheelhouse.”
Since when, I wanted to shout. “Two people on your old wrestling team are dead,” I said, my words tumbling over each other, “plus one of their wives. Do you think there could be a connection to their deaths and that team?”
He raised a dark brow. “I don't see how.”
“Did anything else odd happen on the team?”
“It was a wrestling team, Jayce, and over twenty years ago.”
“Did you get any threatening letters recently?”
“Threatening letters?” a woman asked from behind me.
I turned. Maya.
She wore an ivory, winter outfit from the pages of a fashion magazine. Skinny jeans. High boots. A gold necklace dangled low around her neck. She smiled. “Hi, Jayce. What's going on?” Faint, twin lines appeared between her brows. “Is something wrong?”
I steadied my breathing. “Some of the men on Brayden's old wrestling team received threatening letters.”
“Some?” She cocked her head, and her long mahogany braid shifted over her shoulder. “Who?”
I folded my arms, my chest burning. This was none of Maya’s business. “With two of the men on Brayden’s old team murdered. I was concerned. Have the police talked to you about any of this?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. “There's not much point though. I don't know anything and never got any letters.”
“That's a relief.” I backed from the table. This had been a mistake. Forget brunch. I couldn’t stay here with the two of them.
“Oh, hey.” Mayra raised a finger sparkling with a ginormous ameth
yst ring. “Your sister who owns the bookstore, and the one who writes, I wonder if they might be interested in helping me out with the library?”
“The library?”
“I've decided to jump in and help revitalize it.”
“Revitalize?” I parroted.
“You know how strapped for funds the town is and how ramshackle the library has become. Now that I'm a part of Doyle, I thought I should give back.” She pulled out a chair, its legs scraping the tiled floor.
I gritted my teeth. The sound was worse than nails on a chalkboard. “And remodel the library?” Dammit, did she have to be a philanthropist too? That was just demoralizing.
“Oh,” she said, “not remodel. The library is falling down about the ears. It will need a complete tear-down, so we can build something new.”
“You're going to tear it down?” I asked, dismayed. “It's a historical landmark.” True, I never used the library, but Karin and Lenore would go nuclear when they heard about this.
“Technically, it's not. It's just old. But this is such a wonderful town. Doyle deserves a modern, well-lighted space, with Internet that works.” She grimaced. “You hate the idea. I’m trying too hard to fit in, aren’t I?”
“No,” I stammered. First Brayden, then moving into the house of Lenore's beloved boss, Mike, and now the library? Maya couldn't have turned our world upside down more completely if she'd tried.
She slumped in her chair and shook her head. “So, you think it’s a good idea?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “The library is old.”
“Ancient is more like it,” Brayden said.
She pressed her hand to her chest. “What a relief. I could just do it myself, but I believe community projects work best when they come from the community.” Her full lips curved. “You know what they say, do no harm. And the best way to assure that is to involve all the stakeholders.”
Good. Because Lenore and Karin would definitely have something to say about this idea.
“I'm planning a series of fundraisers to get people involved,” Maya said, “to give the community more of a stake in the project. Do you think your sisters might like to be involved?”
“I'll ask.”
“Thanks!” She sat and smiled across the table at Brayden.
I shifted my weight. “Well, enjoy your brunch.” Sickened, I beelined for the hostess stand. I had to get out of here. But why should I let them chase me off? I was an adult. They were adults. I hadn't done anything wrong. And I was hungry.
The young hostess smiled, pocketing a notepad in her black apron. “Hi, Jayce. Spot by the fire?”
“Um, no. Maybe the room on the other side?”
“Sure,” she chirruped. “How many?”
“One.” The number of new beginnings and the recently dumped.
The hostess led me to an empty table on the back side of the fireplace. Its heat radiated through the white stucco wall. So did Maya's rich laugh.
I stared blindly at the menu, and the words blurred. Brayden hadn't been acting drunk or crazy today. He'd been acting like a decent guy who'd ended a relationship that wasn’t right.
I squeezed shut my eyes. And if he'd fallen for Maya, who could blame him? She was smart, beautiful, rich, getting involved in the community…
I'd been fooling myself. Brayden had nothing to do with the murders. He wasn't trying to protect me. He wasn't under any weird strain. He just didn't love me anymore.
Had he ever?
My throat closed, my breath bottling in my lungs, my eyes growing hot. I put down the menu and walked out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Oh, Jayce, I'm so sorry.” Karin swung her flashlight beam off the trail. Elongated shadows slanted through the redwood grove, the tall trunks colorless beneath the light.
We were on the west, snow-free side of Doyle, but the forest floor was damp from a shower that had ended as quickly as it had begun. She shivered and zipped her blue parka higher, pulled her knit cap lower on her head.
The shadows of the trees slanted wildly beneath Karin’s light. Dark figures seemed to leap from the shadows, and I shivered too.
“Brayden's an idiot.” Nick hiked his backpack over the shoulder of his fleece jacket. A puff of mist streamed from his mouth. I was willing to bet Karin had woven a protection spell into his matching knit cap.
“Though I'm not sure we’re any better,” he continued. “How did I let you two talk me into chasing a cannibal fairy monster?”
“We couldn't let Jayce search alone again,” Karin said. “Just because screaming scared it off once, doesn't mean it will work again.”
I swallowed. “Forget Brayden. And this time we have a weapon.” I fondled the bottle in my pocket. Magic under pressure obviously wasn’t something I managed well. So, Lenore, Karin and I had bottled my go-home spell into grenade form. All I needed to do was hit the anthrophage with the bottle hard enough to bust it open, and the monster would rock on outta here.
I wished Lenore could have been here to see my brilliant idea in action, but she had an author event at her bookstore tonight.
“I just don't understand it.” Karin scratched the side of her head with the flashlight. The beam bounced around the pine branches, dizzying. “I saw the connection between you and Brayden. I was so sure you two were soul mates.”
Water dripped off a redwood branch and plopped onto my forehead. I wiped it off with the back of my hand and didn’t respond.
“There are the steps to the fairy spring.” Nick pointed to a break between two redwoods. “You said Bigfoot was sighted near here?”
I shot him a grateful look, which he couldn't see in the darkness. Karin was nearly as upset as I was about Brayden, but I just couldn't talk about him anymore. “That’s what I heard. But we can’t be sure the Bigfoot sighting was really an anthrophage sighting.”
“But what are the odds it’s not?” Karin murmured.
I dangled a clear quartz pendulum from one finger and silently asked it to show me the way to the anthrophage. The crystal bounced up and down on its silver chain, as if unsure where to go.
Karin groaned. “Don't tell me we’ve lost it again.”
“Do you see anything?” I asked.
Her gaze swept the uneven trail. “No. Not anymore. How does it just disappear like that?”
“We're close to the fairy spring,” Nick said. “Do you think it went through that door?”
“I think it makes sense to check.” But my stomach twisted. The fairy spring had once been a gateway to another world. We were fairly certain that particular door had been closed. But if the anthrophage had visited the spring, did that mean a trace of magic remained? Or had the creature simply come for the water?
Silent, we descended the earthen steps to the base of the cleft in the hills. A pool of water rippled, inky in the moonless night. I gripped my flashlight more tightly.
Karin’s beam swept the spring. Water flowed from a break in the mossy granite, pooled and flowed onward in a burbling stream. Redwoods stood sentinel, ringing the pool. Dead ferns and bare brushes dotted its banks. Whip-like denuded branches arced over the water.
I willed my pulse to steady and extended my senses.
“Feel anything?” Nick asked in a low voice.
“No,” Karin and I replied in unison, then flashed quick smiles at each other.
She reached for her husband's hand, and a chill ache bound my heart. Nick didn't practice magic, but he believed in my sister. Had Brayden ever really believed in my magic, or had he been humoring me all along?
It doesn’t matter. I stepped closer to the spring and stopped beside a smooth rock, stained dark with water and half-buried in the damp earth. Kneeling, I placed my hand on the stone, cold as death. I whispered a word and gently pushed my senses into the earth.
Water stirred beneath, flowing past the tree roots, over stone, deep into the earth. A rattlesnake hibernated under a pile of
loose stones and dreamed of cool grass shivering its belly as it hunted.
But no magic. No monster.
I sagged against a redwood.
“This gateway to Fairy is still closed,” my sister said. “Though that doesn't explain why the anthrophage was prowling around here.”
“It's quiet here, private,” Nick said. “And there's drinking water.”
“A part of me had hoped I was wrong, and this gateway was still open,” Karin said. “That would mean we wouldn't have to search for the others.”
“You think there's more than one open gate?” I asked, alarmed.
“You know there is,” she said. “I went through one last summer.”
“They say bad things come in threes,” Nick said.
“Is that a triplet joke?” Karin punched him lightly in the shoulder.
In answer, he kissed her forehead. “Never.”
“Honestly you two.” I pointed at my chest. “Person who just got dumped. Right here.”
We climbed the earthen steps, up into the pine forest and then down again, into rolling hills. Their oaks were twisted shapes in the moonless night.
We looked over our shoulders a lot.
Something rustled in the dead grasses.
We spun toward the noise and raised our flashlights. Only Nick’s beam was steady.
“Do you see anything?” Karin whispered.
I shook my head, blood thundering in my ears. The anthrophage wouldn't attack the three of us, would it?
“Odds are it’s just an animal,” Nick said. He checked his watch. The dial glowed blue. “We promised the sitter we'd be back by nine. It's almost eight.”
“Is it that late?” Karin whispered, hurrying forward.
I smothered a smile. The two were probably asleep by ten most nights and praying Emmie would sleep past five the next morning.
We hiked onward. Soon, lights from nearby homes gleamed through the trees.
Something thunked beside me, and I jumped. A kickball bounced down the hill.
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