Catnip & Curses (The Faerie Files Book 2)

by Emigh Cannaday

  “You arrogant, self-absor—”

  “Hawthorne!” called out an unfamiliar voice. Then a dark hand was slapping Logan on the back. He whirled around to face the guy I’d once compared to a toad.

  “Oh, hey, you two,” he said, moving away from me as Johnson and Kozlov stepped up to our booth. I gave them both a forced smile, hoping they weren’t going to slide into the booth to join us. Kozlov still looked wildly uncomfortable.

  “Where have you two been?” asked Johnson. “You took off this morning and never came back. You okay?”

  “Yeah, just . . . it was a rough night.”

  “Yep, last night was really something, wasn’t it?” he grinned.

  “That’s an understatement,” I said, willing them not to sit down with us. “I was really worried about you. Alvarez thought you were going to be a screaming lunatic for the rest of your life.”

  “Yeah, well, all’s well that ends well,” he said, still grinning. “I’ve seen the light, Rivera, and it’s all because of you.”

  Logan shot me a glance. I knew what he was thinking . . . Was this the same guy? Should we be concerned? I regarded Johnson closely for a second. The change in him was unreal. The pigeon chested, frog-voiced, wet fish of a man from yesterday had been transformed into a hyper-positive go-getter. He stood in front of us with perfect posture and a dazzling smile, looking like a motivational speaker.

  Kozlov, meanwhile, was still guiltily staring at the floor, not saying a word.

  “Yep. I’ve seen the light,” Johnson repeated. “I’m a believer now.”

  “A believer in . . . ghosts?” Logan ventured.

  “In everything. But especially in the power of healing. And I have Agent Rivera to thank for that. Elena changed everything.”

  “Yeah, she has that effect on people,” he said, trying not to smile too wide. “Well, I was just about to go lay down, so . . . ”

  “I’m sorry about the Valium!” Katrina blurted out. “I emailed my supervisors in the Resource Planning Office and I cc’d Chief Harris on it, but he just told me that there’s nothing he can do unless you decide to take action against me. I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to.”

  Logan cast her a sympathetic look.

  “Don’t worry about it, Kozlov.”

  “Please, call me Katrina,” she implored.

  “Alright then. Don’t worry about it, Katrina,” he said. “I mean it. I’ve been driven off the road and rescued from an exploding car and been in fights with werewolves and shapeshifters. Accidentally drinking someone’s meds isn’t that big of a deal.” He paused and gave her a sincere grin. “I’m just tired. I thought I’d take a nap and then we could all go back to the station tonight and try to resolve things with Clyde.”

  “That sounds like a great idea!” she beamed before turning to Johnson. “C’mon Carl. Let’s get out of their hair.” Then she looked at Logan and I once more. “Is there a certain time you want to meet?”

  “How about eight-o-clock?” I suggested. It was late enough that they wouldn’t ask to join Logan and I for dinner, but it was early enough to get a jump on Clyde.

  “Sounds great! See you then!” Johnson replied. The two of them walked away with smiles plastered on both of their faces.

  I waited until they’d disappeared, then turned to my partner.

  “That was close.”

  Logan ran a hand through his hair and sighed. Then he laughed to himself.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I said it was going to be complicated,” he replied. “You sure you want to get involved?”

  “I don’t remember saying that’s what I wanted,” I huffed.

  “You didn’t have to. We got involved the second you invited me into your room.”

  My eyes swiveled over to his. Damn, they were so blue. So deep. So complex.

  “We could go there again,” he suggested. “Just tell me what you want.” He didn’t dare lean close or touch me when we were in the public eye. His level of restraint was infuriating.

  What did I want? Ha! I wanted him to forget all about being so fucking polite. Sitting there, trapped in between the back wall of the booth and Logan’s broad shoulders, I was ready for him to take me right then and there. To hell with the badge, with the bureau, with the human world around us. He could throw me down on the table and I’d have howled like a banshee caught in a faerie ring.

  But we weren’t in the Hollows, ruled by the whims of the fae. We were in Arizona. There were laws against rampant hedonism. I looked around the bar, calculating my odds. It was the lull between lunch and dinner. There was only one other couple on the opposite side of the bar, and then a couple of staff restocking items behind the counter. I could just imagine writing a review for the hotel after we got kicked out:

  Five stars. Would come here again.

  And again.

  I licked my lips and gave him a flirtatious grin. “What I really want, is—”

  Logan immediately reached for his ringing phone and brought it to his ear. So much for sexy flirting time, although he did say this would be complicated.

  It sounded like he was talking to his dad. It sounded like he was calling to say he was home from he hospital. I, too, reached for my phone, typing a message for him to read:

  Ask your dad if anything weird happened to you when you were a baby.

  I shoved it in his face.

  At first, he waved me away, trying to get my phone out of his grill. When I refused to put it away, he looked at the screen, looked at me, and then glanced around the bar. Then he set his phone on the table and put his dad on speaker.

  “Dad, can I ask you something?”

  “Of course. You know I’m an open book.”

  “Right. Okay then. When I was a baby, did I ever have anything weird happen to me?”

  “Anything weird? Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Just anything that seemed unusual?”

  There was a lull in their conversation, long enough that I totally expected his dad to say, “Not that I know of.”

  But what he said was;

  “Actually, there was this one time . . . but it was your mom who noticed it, not me. You were about eight months old at the time and until then you’d been sleeping just fine. We always used to brag to everyone that you never cried, and that you always slept through the whole night. You were such an easy baby. No trouble at all . . . aside from diapers.”

  “Yeah, I suppose a baby like that would be unusual,” Logan said, snickering softly.

  “Anyway, you had this babysitter. A really nice older lady named Loretta. She had a daycare in her house and watched kids on the weekends, too. She practically raised half the kids in the neighborhood. She was so reliable.”

  “Sure.”

  “Yeah, Loretta was a real sweetheart,” Logan’s dad continued. “Until this one day.”

  Logan and I simultaneously leaned closer to the phone.

  “What happened?”

  “Well, your mother and I dropped you off at her place and went out on a date with another couple. When we got back, it was a total shit show.”

  “A shit show? How do you mean?” Logan frowned in confusion while I was silently hoping his dad would tell the story faster.

  “I mean there were two cop cars parked in front of Loretta’s house and the other kids’ parents were there, shouting and bawling their heads off. The poor lady didn’t know how to handle the situation. I remember her sitting on the porch, bawling as much as the parents.”

  “Jesus, what happened?”

  “Someone broke into her house. Well, apparently. We’re not exactly too sure what happened.”

  “You think she was lying?”

  “I think she was a fucking space cadet. The woman was great with kids and all that, but she got up to something a little extra that day. Smoking crack, poppin' pills, I dunno. She’d done something anyway. Maybe mushrooms.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Beca
use she said a fucking gremlin with its hand on fire broke into her basement. Gimme a break!” Dad laughed so hard he started coughing. “Aw, man. I haven’t thought about that in a long time. Didn’t we ever tell you about this?”

  “Noooo . . . ” Logan slowly managed to say.

  “Well shit! I can’t believe I’ve never told you! I mean, it was bonkers at the time, but thinking about it now, it’s just hilarious.”

  Neither of us were laughing. Logan appeared to be frozen stiff, his limbs all stuck as though he was in suspended animation.

  “You said the gremlin’s hand was on fire?”

  “Heh heh, yeah. And Loretta swore up and down that the fire was green or some color that’s not normal for fire. Totally nuts. Anyway, she calls the cops. Says a gremlin broke into her house and is looking through all the babies. She’s adamant, too. Like really serious. So the cops come out, thinking she’s stoned or high. And they had to make sure the kids were okay. As you’d expect, there’s no sign of a flaming Gremlin, but all the kids are screaming. I mean really screaming. And Loretta was hysterical, of course.”

  “No wonder. I’d scream if I saw something like that.”

  “Yeah, well the first thing those cops do is get her to a hospital for a psych evaluation. She spent six months in a facility. Figured she’d had a mental breakdown from stress or something. She’d been working her ass off at two jobs. Babysitting most days, waitressing weeknights. She was run ragged. Guess it all got to be too much and she started seeing things.”

  Oh, I believed Loretta was seeing things. Things that were really there. Chills ran up and down my body, sending goosebumps along my arms and legs.

  I turned and looked up at Logan, who was staring straight ahead. There was nothing so unnerving as seeing a big, tall, strong man look so utterly disturbed . . . so completely overwhelmed.

  “Logan? You there?” his dad said through the phone. I gave his arm a gentle, firm squeeze to try and pull him back into the moment.

  “Yeah, sorry. It’s just . . . ” I watched as Logan’s body language did a 180 right before my eyes. His breathing was deep, yet irregular. His heart was beating faster. “It’s just kind of a weird story to hear. It freaks me out.”

  “Yeah, no wonder. But you were fine. We found you eventually.”

  “Obviously,” he said, his mouth suddenly dry like paper. It wasn’t from the scorching Arizona heat. “Where was I?”

  “Out in the backyard, crawling around a big old tree. Aw man, you were covered in all kinds of crap . . . mud and leaves and little bits of bark and whatnot. Looked liked you'd burrowed a tunnel right through the damn thing.”

  My head was spinning now, and my chest was still tight. I took a few long, deep breaths, although it didn’t make much difference. Logan was too focused on what his dad was telling us to notice me silently freaking out right next to him.

  “Anyway, when your mom picked you up, the first thing she said was, ‘This isn’t my kid.’ She said you looked different. That something about your eyes was different. I dunno. I guess the shock of the whole scene got to her, too.”

  “She really said those things?”

  “Yeah, and a bunch of other weird stuff. I can’t remember now. I wish she was here so we could talk to her about it.”

  “Me too.”

  There was a long pause where I wondered if Logan might start to cry. I knew he loved his mom more than anyone else in the world, apart from his dad.

  “I remember right after that happened, I started to think your mom had gone a little nuts herself. She kept holding you and looking at you like she’d never seen you before. Said you smelled different. I never noticed anything weird about you, though. You looked like my boy to me.”

  “Hmmmm . . . ”

  “Ain’t it weird, the things you remember?” his dad commented with a laugh. “I haven’t thought of that story for probably twenty years. Now that I’m telling you about it, it feels like yesterday.”

  Logan looked down at me in a daze. After hunting ghosts and wrangling werewolves together for the last eight months, I thought I’d seen just about every expression that face could make.

  I was wrong. So, so wrong. He looked miserable.

  “Dad, I gotta go,” he said after picking up his phone.

  “You okay? You sound a little off.”

  “I’m just tired,” he said. “I’ll talk to you soon.”

  After hanging up, Logan stayed silent for a minute or two. He was staring into space, deep in thought. Then he held a hand to his head as though it ached with the weight of this revelation.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, placing a hand on his forearm.

  “No,” he whispered, jerking his arm away. “I’m not okay. I . . . I need to go for a walk. Or lay down for a while. I don’t know what to do. I’ve just got to get out of here.”

  “Want me to come with you?”

  “No—” he said sharply. “I need some time alone.”

  19

  Logan

  Darkness surrounded me, along with the smell of moss, and the feeling of tree roots winding their way through the mud as I sank lower and lower into oblivion . . .

  My king-sized hotel bed had disappeared ages ago. Now there was nothing supporting me but the darkness. I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t feel anything, but I could smell and I could hear. There were the noises of thousands of animals burrowing through the earth . . . the smell of a thousand rats, mice, and rabbits tunneling underground. I could smell hundreds of plants, their sweet, yet sharp smell filling my nostrils.

  There was a sense of damp, although it was strangely comforting. I could feel the earth travel up all around me. But I didn’t need my hands to feel it. I could sense things without seeing or touching them. I just knew where I was; I was sinking into the bowels of the planet, moving through waves and layers of wildlife.

  I’d landed in the Hollows.

  I’d come to this conclusion because I wasn’t just moving through the ground, but through separate planes of energy. I could feel the air around me change. I could feel a green light start to creep its way up from the deep abyss.

  At last, my eyes began to function. I looked down and saw a wide orb of pulsing green. The light shone its way up to me as though it was glowing just for me. I felt compelled to go closer and willed myself to float down towards it. I tilted my body up, my head down and waved my arms and legs so I was essentially swimming through the darkness.

  The green light pulsed brighter and buzzed more with each movement. As I got closer to it, I thought it resembled a gigantic emerald heart. Part of me thought I should’ve been scared of it, but at the same time I knew that the light was going to give me answers. Sinking down lower to it, I pushed out my hand and felt it sizzle on the edge of the orb.

  Then I went in.

  Big mistake.

  At first I thought I was being electrocuted. Each fiber of my being was jumping, burning, tensing up and screaming. It was like I was being pulled apart cell by cell, as though each hair on my body was catching fire. It was both painful, terrifying and exhilarating. The world around me was now the brightest green I’d ever encountered. The accompanying buzz was deafening, leaving a ringing in my ears.

  Slowly, I became absorbed into the light until I became one with it. Then I was pushed out of it, forced out of the blinding greenness as though I was being reborn. I felt a tingling sensation run all over me as I was pushed and squeezed out of the orb. A popping sound burst in my ear, and with a final thrust I was ejected from the light and out into the open.

  “Wait!” I cried out to the light.

  It felt so good I never wanted to leave it. But as I looked over my shoulder, I saw it was already gone. Suddenly, I was someplace where my body had regained all my senses.

  I could feel the ground beneath my feet and see stone walls all around me. I lifted a hand and pressed it to the bricks. They were cool against my skin. Then I lifted my fingers to my nose and smelled them. The scent
of cold limestone lingered.

  Then came the realization that this was nothing like the dreams I’d been having. They felt real too, but not like this. This was so definite, so solid. And as I looked down the length of my body, I didn’t see chubby little baby legs; I only saw my own. I was adult me, but I was in this fae world. Not just in my own mind, but in my own body.

  I looked around to try and get my bearings. It appeared I was in a long corridor with burning torches lighting the way every twenty feet or so. The smell of burning oil and wood filled my nose. The air was cold and damp, but I was sweating buckets underneath my clothes.

  Taking one of the torches off the wall, I held it out in front of me and traveled down the corridor like an old-world explorer. I eventually recognized the walls around me. I’d been down here before, but the last time I saw these bricks I was less than two feet tall and I was being carried by a flaming blue hand.

  My footsteps echoed as I walked, my journey down the corridor seemingly endless. The slight downward gradient of the floor gave the impression I was walking deeper and deeper into a long forgotten crypt. It grew darker the more I walked. I was grateful for grabbing the torch when I had the chance.

  Eventually the sound of my footsteps started to merge with something else. Music. There was the sound of a harp playing, each beautiful note making its way to my ears like pure gold.

  I had the strongest urge to follow it. I remembered Patrick telling me to follow my instincts, that they wouldn’t lead me astray. The music grew louder the more I chased after it. At last, I reached a golden door and realized the music was coming from directly behind it.

  I couldn’t explain the effect the music was having on me. It was both soothing and exciting at the same time. It made my heart beat like a jack hammer in my chest while simultaneously making me feel like I was falling in love.

  With my heart thumping in my veins, I pushed open the golden door eager to see the face of whoever played the magical sounding harp. But as I pushed open the door, I thought for a second that I was staring at myself in a mirror.