Tripping over Orca as he squeezed himself between her feet, Bethany did a small pirouette and a couple of hops to keep from falling on the cat. A hand reached out to steady her, leaving static electric power on her skin. She dodged when she heard a sneeze and sparks flew past her ear.
“Hello, Grey, you’re out early.”
“Good God, Beth, that cat is getting bigger every day. I swear when he walks I can feel the earth shake. No wonder you trip over him.”
Bethany laughed. “Thus the name Orca.” She waited for Grey to get the joke. “You know, big as a whale. Not to mention he’s black and white.”
Grey dismissed it all with an impatient wave of her hand that sent sparks flying. “Have you met the new chief of police?” Disapproval dripped like venom from her words.
Bethany hesitated before answering. She seldom knew which direction Grey’s conversations were going to go. “No, is there some reason I should?”
“Oh my God, Beth, you need to stop digging in the dirt sometimes and come to the city council meetings.”
Laughing, Bethany led the way to the beach cottage. “Digging in the dirt is my livelihood. You know that Mayor Helena-Marie Blansett has the town firmly under control without my input. I just don’t see a reason to waste my time.” Behind her, Grey gave a disgusted snort. Bethany suppressed a giggle at her cousin’s impatience. Instead, she walked across the deck and opened the screen door to the kitchen. “Come in and you can tell me all about this horrid new police chief.”
“She’s pissed at him because he gave her a speeding ticket,” Sydney observed, handing them both fresh coffee.
“Grey got a speeding ticket?” Bethany feigned disbelief and shot an amused wink at Sydney.
“Smartass,” Grey countered, but her lips curled at the edges.
“Speaking of the new police chief, maybe I should call him about a little breaking and entering. You broke into my house and helped yourself to my special blend coffee and a sweet roll.” Bethany stared pointedly at the crumbs on the table. “It better not be my last raspberry filled, Sydney Janzen Spencer.”
“But I made a new pot of coffee,” Sydney protested, hurriedly wiping the crumbs from her mouth and making a half-hearted swipe at the evidence left on the table. She glanced over at Grey. “Why don’t you tell Beth about Kal.”
“Nice change of subject,” Bethany muttered. Setting her mug on the table, she eased into a chair and pretended patience as she waited.
Grey glared at Sydney. “You’re on a first-name basis with him?”
Sydney took the seat opposite Bethany. “Unlike some people I know, I don’t blow through stop signs and break the speed limit in town.”
Orca waddled imperially into the kitchen to check out his food bowl. Finding a fresh supply of tasty morsels, he hunkered down to eat, purring loudly. Allergies kicking into overtime, Grey sneezed, sending sparks flying across the table and barely missing the gigantic cat.
Orca looked up and laid his ears back, giving Grey a warning hiss of anger. She narrowed her eyes and hissed back, challenging him to a contest of wills.
Orca lost.
Shooting her another glare, he headed back to the front room, swishing his tail like a club, his precious treats momentarily forgotten.
“You better waddle a little faster, Orca, or you’ll get your tail singed,” Sydney suggested, gingerly feeling her own head for damage.
Grey sighed. “You know, Beth, if you had a sleeker, more agile familiar your spells might work a little better. I think that behemoth is soaking up all your magickal energy. That’s why your spells aren’t working lately.”
“My spells are fine,” Bethany protested. “Is someone going to tell me about the new police chief before I have to go to the greenhouse? I’ve got a tour bus and a school group visiting today.”
Both Sydney and Grey started talking at once, and Bethany lifted her hands in an I-give-up motion. “One at a time. Please.”
“He’s a major jerk. Cute, but a jerk,” Grey said, studying the new polish she had on her fingers.
“She just means he didn’t make a pass at her,” Sydney said with a grin. “He’s gorgeous, Beth, and just your type. Exotic, from the islands, and has that surfer look going, bronzed skin, fluid muscles. Shoulder-length hair.” She grinned, knowing her cousin had a thing for men with longer hair. “Shoulder-length, Beth, all thick and tousled.
Grey rolled her eyes as if the whole deal was ridiculous. “He scowls all the time, like that makes him some sort of badass.”
“It’s a brooding look, not a scowl.” Sydney countered. “Besides, you thought the look was sexy.”
“Don’t let Nick or Beck hear you two singing his praises. They might get jealous.”
Everyone turned to see a dripping Halona standing at the door. She set her bag of treasures outside on the deck and shook a warning finger at Grey. A glow of ethereal blue light surrounded her fingertip.
“Come on in,” Bethany invited. “I can see you’re in on this little conspiracy to fix me up with the police chief/jerk too.” She looked around at her cousins. “Because that’s what this is, isn’t it?”
Halona stepped inside and pulled a terry bathrobe and towel from a hanger Bethany kept next to the door. “He’s not a jerk, but he is kind of a …”
“Barbarian,” Grey supplied, and Halona shot her another warning look.
“He’s someone you need to meet.” Halona exchanged a glance with Sydney, and they both looked at Grey.
“I’m not gonna tell her,” Grey said. “You tell her.”
Bethany gave a long sigh and stood up, taking her cup to the dishwasher. “Okay. I have to get to work. I hate to disappoint you wicked little witches, but I am not into…” Her voice trailed off. It suddenly seemed as if her air supply had disappeared. Coming up her boardwalk was the sexiest man she had ever laid eyes on.
Grey wasn’t too far off the mark when she’d called him a barbarian. There was something untamed about him. His hazel eyes were hard, and his angular features were softened only by tangled dark curls brushing across his face and spilling onto his wide shoulders. Bethany estimated his height well over six feet. He looked like a giant compared to her petite size.
He wore a thin black shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His jeans were worn thin in all the right places and clung provocatively to his long, muscular legs. When he looked up and noticed Bethany watching him, he smiled, causing crinkles around his eyes and dimples in his cheeks.
Something stirred at the edge of Bethany’s memory making her heart beat fast and her legs feel weak. He should be dressed for battle, she thought, imagining his powerfully built forearms encircled by heavy leather wrist guards. Instead, he wore a tribal tattoo around his left wrist and a silver amulet around his neck.
“You were saying?” Sydney asked. “Something about not being into …what? Surfers? Police chiefs? Island hunks?”
“Shut up,” Bethany whispered. “Stay here. All of you.” She raced out the door to meet the man before he made it to the deck and skidded to a stop when she noticed her grandmother trailing along behind him. Her tiny form had been blocked by his much larger body.
“We tried to warn you,” Grey called out in a sing-song voice.
“Is everything all right?” Bethany asked, leaning around the chief to see if she could find any visible injuries on her grandma.
“Everything was fine before he showed up,” Grandma Caan said with a petulant frown.
Bethany looked back and forth between the two of them. Neither spoke, so she gave an impatient huff and turned to her grandma.
“Okaaaay. What happened when he showed up? And where’s Charlene? Were you left alone this morning?”
“I’m not a child,” Grandma retorted hotly. “I don’t need a babysitter. I was getting ready to do a reading…”
“Your grandmother was fleecing tourists on the beach, Ms. Kent,” Kal interrupted. “I asked her if she had a vendor’s license, and she told me I should go—�
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Bethany quickly held up her hand to stop him. She could pretty much imagine what was said. “Grandma, what’s up with you? Charlene is a nurse, not a babysitter. She’s there to help you. Were you trying to scare the tourists into paying you for a protection spell again?”
Grandma Caan remained stubbornly silent. Dressed in her long dark dress with bright flowing scarves and heavy jewelry, she looked more like a circus medium than the once powerful and respected witch she had been. Her dark eyes stared defiantly in the direction of the new chief, and she raised her hand, beginning to point a finger.
“Oh no you don’t,” Bethany made a leap to grab her grandmother’s hand before she could release some disaster of a spell. Half a second too late, she managed to squelch whatever curse the old woman had been casting on the new police chief, but the residual effect of the half-formed spell was a stink that smelled like rotten eggs.
Bethany felt her face bloom with color, and Kal waved his hand vigorously in front of his face.
“I’m sorry. Sorry,” Bethany repeated.
“Ma’am, I’m bringing your grandmother to you this time, but really, I think she needs to be supervised. She was gathering up pebbles on the beach and convincing her audience she could read their future in those stones. Then she told them, very theatrically I might add, that a great disaster was about to fall upon their vacations unless they paid her an extra fifty dollars for a prayer of protection. Three people had already given her money before I arrived.”
“Umm, why don’t you go inside, Grandma? The girls are waiting for you in there. They have donuts and coffee.”
When the old lady hesitated, Kal continued, “She told one lady her emerald ring had a curse on it that couldn’t be broken. Grandma here told her she could take the curse away for a hundred dollars, plus the ring. If the woman kept the emerald, she would always be cursed. Of course, if she gave the ring to Grandma, it would be destroyed so that no one else would be at risk.”
Bethany didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Emeralds were her grandmother’s favorite jewel. She must have plotted the whole scene just to get the ring. “I need to talk to the chief, Grandma. You go on inside.”
Muttering under her breath, Grandma Caan shot another defiant stare toward Kal and landed a swift kick on his shin before making her way up the steps and into the house. Three sets of hands yanked her inside before the chief really lost his patience and arrested her for assaulting an officer.
Bethany put both hands over her face for a second and wondered if she could work a little magic to make him forget the whole episode. Even though she came from a long line of powerful witches, she seldom used her power frivolously, and Grey had been right. Her spells were off lately.
“I’m so sorry,” she repeated again. “Grandma is going a little…”
“Ya think?” Kal asked. Scowling, definitely scowling, he reached down to rub his leg through the faded jeans.
Bethany couldn’t help it. She burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation. Her cousins’ plan to fix her up with the new police chief had gone terribly wrong. In fact, after this little disaster, she rather imagined he would keep as far away from her as possible.
She was surprised when Kal’s eyes narrowed then his lips twitched, and he broke into a smile, followed by a deep rumble of masculine laughter.
“She’s got a kick like a punter for such a tiny little thing.” He shoved a handful of thick, windswept hair back out of his face and grew serious again. “You need to keep an eye on her.”
“I’ll try to keep her in line,” she promised.
He stuck out his hand to her. “For her sake, make sure you do, Ms. Kent.”
“Bethany, please.” She felt the hardness of a male hand used to physical labor.
He nodded, and Bethany realized he still held her hand. She gave a gentle tug.
“Oh sorry,” he said, but his wicked grin said he wasn’t. Slowly, he let her draw her hand away, finger by finger.
“I’ll be seeing you soon.” He turned to retrace his steps down the boardwalk, and Bethany couldn’t help but enjoy watching him walk away. He didn’t walk so much as he strutted.
“Aloha,” she murmured under her breath and turned back to the house, unable to stop smiling.
Chapter 2
Chief Kal Burke shut the door to his office and dropped down hard in the worn-out leather chair. Absentmindedly, he picked up the Cross pen on his desk and began to doodle, but his mind replayed the scene with the crazy old lady and her beautiful granddaughter. Just thinking about Bethany made his chest squeeze tight and his heart accelerate. There was something about her that teased the back of his mind, playing with his memory, but he couldn’t get a handle on it. If she really was a witch, like the mayor insisted, then she sure as hell had put a spell on him. He couldn’t get her out of his mind.
He had felt power in the old woman. She carried a strong bloodline now tainted by the ravages of dementia. Unusual, Kal thought, but not unheard of. He stopped doodling and tapped the pen mindlessly up and down. Was she really suffering from dementia or a binding spell cast on her mind? Could she be a victim of the man he was looking for?
More puzzling to him was the lack of power in Bethany. He’d expected her force to reach out and slam him. Instead, he barely got a spark of energy from her. Only light static electricity had danced across his skin when he touched her but nothing like the energy a multi-generational witch should be radiating.
Despite the disappointing consequences of their meeting, Kal didn’t doubt the signs. They had led him here, straight to the Kent woman and her cousins.
He glanced briefly at the locked bottom drawer of his desk, wondering if he would have time to cast the runes he kept hidden in a leather bag. Tossing the pen down, he decided not to push his luck. So far, no one had seemed to notice he had talents of his own. Or at least none that stood out stronger than the majority of permanent citizens in Blansett, North Carolina, and that was just the way he wanted it.
Mayor Helena-Marie Blansett had recognized he possessed magic from the moment they shook hands at a law enforcement convention in Honolulu. Although the convention handled every type of law enforcement, the magical community had its own unique problems in that field. To find a trained paranormal law official could be difficult. The mayor insisted he come to North Carolina and take the position of police chief. Kal told her he was on the hunt for a particularly dangerous entity and wasn’t interested, but the coven leader insisted his destiny lay in the village of Blansett, not far from where he’d spent summers as a child visiting his haole father.
Helena-Marie knew of the evil he’d been chasing for the last two years, and during a private luncheon, she admitted she thought her community might be dealing with the same creature, or one of its kind. As they shared knowledge about the evil they both sought to destroy, Helena-Marie told him of the cousins and their impressive bloodlines.
Kal did a quick glance around the office to make sure he was alone. Satisfied, he looked down into the glass paperweight he kept on his desk and waved his hand over top of the smoky orb. Inside, the dark pattern swirled and scattered, leaving a fuzzy image that slowly coalesced into focus.
Kal looked at Blansett Bulbs and Flowers, seeing the large Victorian glass enclosure that housed the commercial side of the business. Ignoring the nearby structures that held the plants and herbs not yet ready for sale, Kal focused on finding Bethany.
The image shimmered as though he looked into a still pond of water, but the scene was clear enough. Bethany held pink flowers in both hands as she talked to a young man wearing jeans and a green Blansett Blubs and Flowers T-shirt. He had a dark gardening apron, smudged with dirt, over top of his clothes. He looked impish with his shock of carrot-red hair and freckled pale skin. Red seemed like the kind of guy you’d expect to play practical jokes and get into role playing games with near obsession. Kal made a mental note to check him out later.
Walking away from the kid, B
ethany moved to the sales floor where a busload of elderly tourists was oohing and aahing over the displays of exotic blooms. She stopped to speak with each of them, smiling and nodding and occasionally patting someone on the back.
Kal watched her draw packets out of her apron pockets and gift them to certain people. He knew from town gossip the packets were mixed herbs Bethany put together as healing teas for various ailments. A slow smile spread across his face. The local herb doctor had quite a business going at the green house.
Making her way out through the glass doors, Bethany walked onto the brick patio. Large shade trees grew through holes in the bricks and between shaded tables that were set up for botanical arts and crafts. Kal watched Sydney’s second grade class making what he assumed was fairy houses.
Moss, bark, flowers, and vines were strewn all over the patio. Two young women hovered around the tables, giving instructions and encouragement. Those would be the twins, Kal thought. Michele and Michaela, or Shell and Mickey as they preferred to be called. Both had short, raven-black hair and startling blue eyes. Their mother, Linda, was part-time dispatcher for the department.
Kal drew his vision back, ready to shut down the scrying orb when he caught a glimpse of bright red hair and hesitated. Frowning, he leaned closer to the glass as if that would help him see more clearly. The red-haired kid paused outside a building and glanced around, obviously checking to see if someone might be watching him. Satisfied, he unlocked the door and slipped inside.
Kal waved his hand over the paperweight and sat back in his seat, crossing his arms over his chest. It could be nothing. The kid might be sneaking into one of the sheds to smoke a little pot. He might be avoiding some chore he didn’t want to get stuck with. There could be a hundred innocent reasons for the sneakiness. He’d ask Linda about him the next time she pulled duty.
* * * *
Through glass windows in her miniscule office, Bethany saw the tour bus crowd milling around among the blooming flowers. She always kept a selection of exotics that most greenhouses didn’t stock. Several of the tourists would pick their favorites and leave their names and addresses at the checkout counter, and Bethany would ship the flowers to them with a guarantee they would be healthy and alive when they arrived. She had a thriving mail order business from out-of-state customers due to her tour bus clientele.
Mystic Tides Page 26
