by Mara Webb
“Yeah, I’ll get Brielle to check it out again at some point. She had to escort that woman’s body back to the main island.” Susan.
“Any clues as to what happened to her?” I asked.
“Drowned as far as we can tell, but that woman has made more enemies than friends in the last few months. I wouldn’t put it past somebody to have killed her and made it look like an accident,” she said, placing both of her hands on my injured leg and closing her eyes.
“What’s this, some sort of healing magic?”
“Ha, no,” she snorted. “The Aconite remedy makes the whole area burn so hot, it’s like pressing warm photocopies to your face.” I shook her off.
“Get away from me,” I laughed. “Don’t you have better things to do than bother me today?” I loved the sisterly teasing that both she and Effie subjected me to, and as Kate was a mind reader, I knew she knew that.
“You’ve got one guardian running wild around the island in wolf form, another one that is so in love with you he can’t think straight, a dead body and a golf tournament. I’m here to make sure you don’t get into any more mess,” she grinned. I replayed the words ‘so in love with you he can’t think straight’ a few times and remembered what Ryder had said before he left.
I knew as soon as the memory crossed my mind that Kate would see it.
“Oh my,” she grinned. “He made a move!”
“He didn’t,” I protested. “Ryder just, you know, he was just… he was apologizing for the weather thing and—”
“He said ‘I’ll be waiting for you’, Sadie,” she said. There were no secrets where Kate was concerned, she could read me like an open book.
“He did, but—” I didn’t have chance to think of a response before someone was pounding on the bedroom door.
10
Kate answered the door. She had unplugged a lamp from the nightstand and was holding it behind her back, she clearly intended to smash this over the head of any potential attacker that was lurking in the corridor.
“You can read minds,” I hissed. “Surely you know who’s outside.”
“I’ve not actually been doing it all that long and there is plenty that I don’t have the ability to see,” she said. “You are just unusually easy to read. It’s like you want me to know what you’re thinking.”
She opened the door and raised the lamp high above her so she could bring it smashing down on the unwitting figure outside.
“What on earth!?” Kieran shouted. He crouched down and shielded his head.
“Oh, it’s you,” Kate said, lowering the lamp and laughing.
“There is a hole in the door so that you can see who is knocking!” he shrieked.
“Where’s the fun in that?” Kate said, offering him a hand to help him up. He took it, brushed the creases out of his pristine white polo shirt and shorts, and looked into the room to locate me.
“Sadie, what happened?” he asked. I pulled at the sheets to cover up my exposed legs as I was only wearing a t-shirt, but he had obviously noticed the bandages.
“She tripped over the bed frame, she could have died,” Kate said flatly. “I think breakfast on the balcony downstairs would help with the recovery. On the house obviously. For both of us.”
“Of course!” he nodded. I wasn’t sure if she was an evil genius or Kieran was just oblivious to her schemes. “Breakfast was already free for Sadie, but you will be catered to if you are her escort. I believe Miller has left early, is that right?”
“What have you heard?” I said.
“Ryder was just at reception saying he needed a room, I asked him if he was here as your guardian too and he mentioned that he was your only guardian for the foreseeable future,” Kieran explained. I felt lightheaded for a moment before regaining my composure.
“We’ll be down in a few minutes,” Kate said. “We will take the largest breakfast you’ve got, and a tall glass of fresh orange juice. Oh, and toast… can we get some of those tiny pots of jam? And a coffee?”
“I don’t know if I’m all that hungry,” I muttered.
“I’ll finish her plate if she can’t handle it, thanks,” Kate said, closing the door on Kieran. I think his feet had been slightly inside the room, but the door had slammed into his toes, I could hear pained whimpers from the hallway.
“You’ve gotta do the golf thing today,” Kate said. “Until we find Miller, or Miller finds us, there is not going to be much to do.”
“What about the dead woman?” I asked.
“Well Miller isn’t the only police officer in Hallow Haven. He is, without a doubt, the most attractive officer though, you could wash towels on those abs…” she faded out into her imagination for a second. “I know he is my second-cousin; you don’t need to remind me. I’m just saying, you may as well go golfing or whatever you’re supposed to be doing, and let Ryder fix the weather problem.”
“What do you mean? What’s wrong with the weather now?” I asked.
“Greta seems to think that there will be a massive full moon every night until Ryder does something to make it right,” Kate shrugged. “I said that she needed to stop being such a negative Nancy about it all, but she might have a point.”
“Oh great,” I sighed. “Look, let me have a super-fast shower, throw on some clothes and then we can go and gorge ourselves into a stupor.”
“Now you’re talking,” Kate grinned. She jumped back onto the bed and clicked her fingers; this caused the TV on the wall to burst to life and was playing music videos from the 1980’s.
“Make yourself comfortable,” I teased, rolling my eyes at her as I walked into the bathroom.
“You might want this!” Kate yelled, using her magic to throw the swan-shaped towel at me. I managed to catch it but needed to grab onto the door handle to avoid falling over as I was still unstable on the leg. I could put weight on it, just about, but it was so uncomfortable that I knew I’d need to use the crutch.
I turned on the water and pulled Ryder’s shirt over my head, the scent of the fabric swimming around my mind as it brushed up against my nose. I hung it on a hook on the back of the door, then caught sight of my reflection in the mirror.
I had dried leaves in my hair, muddy streaks across my upper arms and over my face, and my eyes were a little puffy from crying. I couldn’t remember much about what had happened in the woods, it felt as though the memory was slipping away with every passing minute.
I didn’t even consider that I should be keeping the bandages dry. I stepped into the shower cautiously, holding onto any available surface I could grab, and let the water run over my head and down my body. There were small shampoo bottles provided by the hotel and I saw that one of them had already been cracked open. Ryder.
I didn’t want to spend too much time thinking about the fact that a man that had feelings for me had been naked in this very spot in the last half an hour. I definitely did think about it, though. Ryder had warned me so many times that Miller could be dangerous, had he been right all along? I could feel the shell necklace around my neck and the guilt made the pendant feel heavy.
Once I was clean, I shut off the water, stepped out onto the mat and grabbed the swan towel. It was a lot harder to unravel than I had hoped, the folds in the ‘wings’ area were particularly difficult. “I just want to get dry,” I complained out loud. I finally got the towel back into a usable shape, wrapped it around myself and stepped back into the bedroom.
“Dude, I’m starving,” Kate said immediately. She snapped both fingers and the towel around my body disappeared, revealing that I was completely dry and fully dressed. “Come on.”
“Where have you been all my life?” I laughed as she rushed towards the bedroom door. She handed me a crutch on the way past. “Where did you get this thing? Did you bring this to the island with you?”
“I am a witch; how do you keep forgetting?” she winked.
I half-expected to see Ryder in the restaurant, but he was nowhere to be found. Kate noticed me peering in through the glass
doors during breakfast and kept nudging me under the table, tapping my ‘good leg’ with her shoe.
“One of the reasons I wanted to eat out on the balcony was so that you wouldn’t be looking everywhere for lover boy,” Kate complained.
“Lover boy?” I repeated, raising an eyebrow.
“I get that you are in some torturous, steamy love triangle and that you picked Miller, but then you keep thinking about Ryder, and Miller’s gone now but Ryder is here and both of them have saved your life and it’s all super sexy, but you have other stuff to do,” she explained.
“I know that,” I sighed.
“You are the peacekeeper. You are funny and cute, you have that neat little blue streak in your hair now, you’ve got it all going on,” she smiled. “Don’t let those two stupidly-attractive idiots be the main focus of every single day of your life.”
“You’re right,” I nodded. It turned out that I was hungry after all. Kieran had relayed Kate’s order to the kitchen staff and our table had been filled with dishes to load our plates from. We had hash browns, scrambled eggs, pancakes, bacon strips, some sort of toasted muffin and grilled tomatoes. I avoided the baked beans, but Kate kept insisting that she’d seen some British show where the main characters ate it as a breakfast food.
“They don’t get everything right, those British people, but these beans are pretty good,” she smiled. “The karaoke place on the high street, on the main island not out here, they do theme nights. They have an English event coming up to celebrate May Day, we should totally go. We can wear corsets and those weird hip pads that make people look three feet wide.”
“Is that how you think British people dress?” I asked.
“Of course it is, haven’t you seen Bridgerton?” she laughed.
“Have you?” I replied, my eyebrows an inch higher up my forehead. We didn’t get great access to the more modern luxuries of the world out in Hallow Haven, they still used VHS tapes and our internet speeds would make a regular teenager cry. We did, however, seem to stock up-to-date magazines that advertised the shows that everyone else was watching.
Kate had picked up a bunch of TV guides and read all she could about this new show that people were going crazy for. She still hadn’t actually seen a single second of it but had declared herself an expert on the matter. I didn’t want to have to remind her, again, that the show was set in 1813, and that English people probably wore t-shirts and jeans just like everyone else.
“If I can get our hands on some cool costumes, will you dress up with me?” Kate asked. “Pretty please? I will make a more conscious effort to stop interfering in your love life if you indulge me.”
“For how long?”
“I will give you…” she was trying to figure out what the shortest amount of time was that she could promise that would get me to agree. “I will stay out of your head entirely for forty-eight hours.”
“Deal!” I shrieked, reaching over the empty hash brown dish to shake her hand. Two whole days without her reading my mind? I would have agreed to an afternoon!
A man pulled open the sliding glass door from the restaurant and stepped out onto the balcony, closing the door behind him.
“If you are here to offer more coffee, then I will take a refill in this cup and can you fill up this travel mug? I just figure that this golf thing is going to be incredibly boring, and I don’t want to fall asleep in the middle of it and have my snoring distract the players,” Kate said, holding up a large thermal cup. Where did she just get that from? Oh yeah, witch.
She seemed to have decorated the outside of the mug with a variety of Bridgerton quotes that she had read in the TV guide and I laughed as I took it out of her hands to read them. “I burn for you?” I read. “What does that even refer to? You haven’t seen this show!”
“Who am I hurting?” she replied. Good point. “I bought a little vinyl printer, and I am in craft heaven, this is my first completed project, and I am thrilled with it. I thought about selling these in town, but obviously no one around here has seen the show so I figured I wouldn’t sell much.”
“Excuse me?” the man said. I had almost forgotten he was here.
“Yeah?” I replied.
“I’m not a waiter, I don’t work here,” he said. “I came to talk to you about Susan Colter.” I looked at Kate and then back at the guy standing beside us. He grabbed a chair from a nearby table and pulled it over so he could sit down.
“What do you want to talk about exactly?” I asked.
“I just think that there is more to this than meets the eye. I can’t really say too much because I’m legally not allowed to,” he said. “But I can slip you a number to call and perhaps you can learn something.”
“We aren’t in the market for some mysterious nonsense, sir,” Kate replied. “If you are trying to complicate things, then just keep it moving because things are messed up enough.”
“Derek?” The glass doors of the balcony were pulled open again and I saw Susan’s husband standing there, calling out to the man sat at our table.
“I was just saying hello to the peacekeeper,” Derek said, giving me a wary look that suggested he wanted me to go along with it. “Anyway, it’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Sadie. Good luck with the golfing today. I’ll see you out on the green.”
Derek stood up, returned the chair and then walked back through the door into the restaurant. Susan’s husband gave Kate and I a prolonged stare, then turned to follow Derek.
“What was that about?” Kate asked.
“I think he was about to tell us something useful,” I mused. We just had to speak to him alone, but how?
11
We managed to convince Kieran to let Kate operate a golf cart, and she acted as my chauffeur as we drove to the opening area for the tournament. I was supposed to make some opening remarks about the event, but I had absolutely no idea what to say. Kieran had sprung the information on me as he gave the keys to Kate and I was drawing a blank.
My head was pulled in so many directions that I was impressed I’d even managed to make it to the first hole on the course without having a total meltdown. Kieran introduced me in an ostentatious speech which was aimed largely at Emmy and her camera. I wondered if she’d been aware of the death that had occurred only hours earlier. Kieran wouldn’t want any footage of that going online.
“Without further ado,” Kieran said, after much ado, “I would like to bring Sadie Alden up onto the stage.” I climbed up the small wooden steps to riotous applause from the islanders, and confused looks by the foreign guests.
“Hey, what’s up?” I said into the microphone. “Golf, eh? What a sport!” The feedback rang out loudly and a few people winced. “I know that some of you have travelled from far away to have a couple of days of fun in the sun, and I hope you make the most of our fine weather!” If I hadn’t been mauled by a werewolf last night, then maybe I would have the mental energy to come up with something better. “Let’s go smash some balls!”
Why did I say that? Kate began to laugh so hard that she had tears in her eyes, she was clutching her stomach and desperately trying to breath in between scream-laughing, and I wanted the sky to fall down on top of me. Smash balls? Kieran had clapped and then indicated that the golfers should follow him for a briefing before they got started.
The tournament was made up almost entirely by men, and I had just said ‘smash balls’ out loud. Those words had come out of my mouth. I heard a weird beeping sound and turned to see what it was. Kate, in a fit of laughter, was trying desperately to make a phone call from her cell phone but was shaking too much to hit any of the right buttons.
“Are you calling Effie?” I groaned.
“I…can’t…breath…” Kate gasped, still laughing at my embarrassment.
“You can’t choose your friends, eh?” Fitz said, appearing in his human form in front of me.
“You can choose your friends, I think the phrase is that you can’t choose your family,” I replied. “Why are yo
u dressed up like the other guys?”
“I am playing golf today, isn’t it obvious?” he scoffed.
“You play golf?”
“Jeez, don’t sound so astonished that I might be doing something other than following you around,” he said.
“You are very rarely by my side; you are always doing random other things! I just didn’t know you played golf,” I replied defensively. “I got hurt pretty badly last night and I feel like everyone should be giving me a whole bunch more sympathy that I’m getting right now.” Kate seemed to have gotten through to Effie and now I could hear Effie’s cackling over the phone. There were never going to let me forget this.
I wondered briefly if my familiar was supposed to have protected me from getting injured, but if that was the case then I had three people trying to keep me safe and I was still managing to do it.
“I’m a dentist, it’s a thing. A lot of doctors play golf, it’s par for the course in my line of work. Huh? Par for the course, eh? Do you get it?” Fitz said. He was winking a lot and I rolled my eyes at him.
“Yes, I get it,” I nodded. There should be a law against golf puns until this thing was over. I was the peacekeeper, maybe I could make it a law. “Are you playing by yourself? Or is this a team thing?”
“Unofficially it’s a team thing,” he replied. “We compete on our own, but it’s sort of a game that we keep track of how each profession is doing. We’ve got some dentists, surgeons, lawyers, a few finance guys, I think that woman with the red hair over there is a heart surgeon. Most of them came from the mainland by plane over the last few days. I recognize some of the faces.”
I recognized one face too. It was Derek. He was following along with the group that was walking towards the first hole for the briefing from Kieran. “Hey, what about that guy?” I asked Fitz. “The one with the short brown hair in the polo shirt?”
“That describes literally every man in that crowd,” Fitz huffed.
“Right, I mean that one at the back. He has the green stripe on his shoes,” I clarified.