by Catie Rhodes
I DIDN’T REALIZE how tired I was until we walked into Mysti and Griff’s nice home, and the hot blast of central heat warmed my cold skin. I stood underneath the vent soaking up the dry heat. Mysti stopped next to me, probably wanting to talk.
Brad pushed around us and raced up the stairs, already tapping on his cellphone. Griff brushed past without speaking, went into his office, and shut the door. Mysti and I raised our eyebrows at each other.
“Is he okay?” Griff’s coughing fit had me worried. The way it disappeared as soon as he got out of the clearing made me think he was the victim of more than seasonal allergies.
The roar of Wade’s motorcycle carried through the walls as he piloted it down Griff’s short street, soft at first but then loud enough to rattle the pictures on the wall as he pulled into the garage. The sound cut off abruptly. Mysti walked to the garage door and opened it a crack.
“You know Griff doesn’t like to lose control. He’ll go in there and research until he has an idea what happened to him.” Mysti stopped speaking when Wade came to the garage door and waited to be invited inside. She smiled and motioned him to come in. We walked from the kitchen into the living room.
Wade immediately stripped off his coat and many shirts and draped them over the back of the couch until he wore nothing but a black ribbed sleeveless T-shirt. I watched in a languid haze. Feeling someone’s gaze on me, I gave up my eye candy to find Mysti staring at me.
“Wade, you can stay in Peri Jean’s room with her if you like. We’re all adults here.” She picked up his two denim shirts off the back of the sofa and rolled them into a ball. “I can wash these tonight. We’ll dry them in the morning.”
Wade folded his coat over his arm and studied me. He shook his head. “No. I’ll take the couch.”
The rejection sank into my bones. It wasn’t like it came out of the blue. But that didn’t make it hurt less. For no good reason, the memory of the way Wade’s hands felt on my body, the way his lips felt on mine the one time we almost made love, came back to me. My shoulders slumped.
“You’ll be cramped on the couch. We have an air mattress.” Mysti tugged my arm. “We’ll set it up for you.”
“Mind if I get a quick shower?” Wade plucked the tight T-shirt away from his chest. “Get the road grime off?”
Mysti got Wade a towel and showed him to the upstairs guest bath Brad and I shared. We left him to his business and went out to the three-car garage. I climbed into the attic and found the box containing the air mattress and a couple of sleeping bags to zip together. We went back upstairs to the den. The sounds of Wade splashing in the shower came through the walls.
Brad opened his bedroom door and tapped to get our attention. “You think Wade’s mad at me about Jadine?” He directed the question at me, so I answered.
“Fuck him if he is.” I jerked the air mattress out of its carrying case. Brad’s mouth fell open. Mysti came to stand next to me. She shook her head at Brad.
“But I…” His voice raised in a nails-on-chalkboard whine.
“Bradley, be a grownup for once. Please?” Mysti stood with her hands on her hips.
Brad slammed his door and turned on his TV.
I plugged in the air mattress and started inflating it while Mysti unrolled the sleeping bags. She did so with her eyes firmly fixed on the dark fabric, the poster child for discreet politeness.
“I’m sorry I suggested Wade sleeping in your room.” She raised her head from her task, and her cheekbones wore slashes of deep red. Mysti liked being wrong almost as much as folks liked a sunburn on the ass. “I thought the two of you had an occasional thing. The chemistry between the two of you is almost tangible.” Her lips curved into a lewd smile.
“I’d like to. He wouldn’t.” I rested my hand on the on/off switch for the air mattress. It was almost full but needed just a little more air. “I take that back. I think he would like to, but…” I trailed off and rolled my eyes at Mysti. “His sister read his cards in the matter of our relationship. The reading said getting involved with me would have dire consequences.”
Mysti, never one to brush off a card reading, nodded, a thoughtful expression on her face. “Seems kind of silly in this day and age, doesn’t it?”
I snorted and turned off the air mattress.
“I don’t always agree with Wade, but I admire his determination to stick to a decision once he’s made it.” She must have seen something on my face for she came to stand near me, always ready to comfort and show love. “But that doesn’t make it easy when you feel a certain way about somebody. I know.”
“Some sick, twisted part of me thinks this is another chance for me to—you know—change his mind.” My body flushed. When the only long-term boyfriend I’d had since my failed marriage dumped me, my love life had flatlined. Mostly by my own choice. A few stray pickups showed me that alley-catting no longer filled the void. The almost-sex with Wade was like a taste of real sugar after a lifetime of artificial sweetener. Nobody else could measure up.
“I understand. When I knew Griff was the one, I wouldn’t let him walk away.” She unrolled the sleeping bags, and I began zipping them together. We spread the now huge sleeping bag over the air mattress. “At least not without letting him know what he’d be missing.”
“So, if you were me, you’d keep after him?” The idea of sneaking into the den after lights out appealed to me more than it should have.
“Maybe not so overtly.” She tipped one eye into a wink. “Right now, he knows he can have you any time he wants you. If he thinks you’ve moved on, he’ll have to rethink the situation.”
This idea went against my nature. But then, chasing after Wade like an awestruck teenager went against my nature too. A smile tugged at my lips.
“Just understand one thing. That card reading wasn’t a joke.” She shook her finger at me. “If the two of you get together, there’ll be consequences, both good ones and bad ones. Maybe more bad than good.”
The shower shut off, and a board creaked on the staircase. We both jumped and spun around. Seeing nothing there, we shared a giggle. Mysti motioned me to follow her into her witch room.
“Let me show you the reason you shouldn’t let that reading keep you from being with The One.” She stood on her tiptoes and pulled a wide and flat plastic storage box off the highest shelf, undid the catches, and opened it.
I leaned close, eagerness beating at my chest. These boxes contained Mysti’s personal items from her early life. She kept this period of her life closed off. This was the first time she’d invited me to share any of it.
“Things happen every day to change the road we’re on.” She took out a picture of toddler with wild light brown hair down to her waist. She wore a plaid jumper and held a ball in one chubby hand. Her smile was bright as sunlight. “I was born Melissa Jane White, but my parents got involved with a cult. That changed the path of my life.” She handed me another picture.
The same little girl, now a couple of years older, wore a faded shift. Dirt smudged her arms and face. She stared at the camera the way animals in the zoo watch the people who come to see them. My emotions stung as I studied it, but I forced my face to stay neutral. Mysti was showing me the wounds that made her the woman I cherished as a friend. She was showing me her scars. When I told people about awful stuff I’d experienced, I didn’t want their horror, their outrage, or even their sympathy. I just wanted understanding and acceptance.
“Then my parents tried to escape the cult. That changed the direction of my life again because I was killed in that escape.” She stared at my face, searching for something I didn’t know how to give her. “But someone I never knew, maybe a healer like Wade Hill, brought me back. That changed things again. I spent the rest of my childhood in foster care.” She showed me another picture of herself.
This time Mysti was in her early teens, a skinny woman-child with her thick brown hair pulled back. Haunted, too-old eyes took up most of her face. An awkward buck-toothed boy slouched nex
t to Mysti. It took me several seconds to identify him as Brad. They stood in the hallway of some industrial building.
“This picture was for my social worker’s file. Brad and I had just been kicked out of another foster home. You could have said my fate was sealed then. I’d maybe finish high school, do some vocational training, hopefully marry someone who didn’t abuse me.” Mysti handed me one last picture. “But here’s the thing. It’s never over until you’re dead. Before then, you always have a chance for something better.”
I couldn’t help smiling at the change in Mysti. This time in her late teens and already transforming into the beautiful woman I knew, she grinned ear to ear, silver bracelets stacked on each arm. Next to her stood a dark-skinned woman with a gap between her two front teeth and long, dark hair slowly fading to gray. They had their arms around each other. Brad, now a teenager stood off to the side, his face bright, more like the man I knew.
“The very next foster family we were placed with lived next door to Petunia LeBlanc. My fate changed again.” She stared at the picture of herself and her magical mentor for several long moments. Tears brimmed in her eyes. She placed the picture carefully back in the box and closed it again. “You never know what life will bring your way. Keep an open mind and always be ready. Only stuff like your ability to see ghosts, Wade’s ability to heal, maybe Griff’s ability to grave dowse are destinies you can’t escape. The rest of it is shaped by chance and circumstance.”
I thought it over. My life had changed directions dozens of times, but I had never seen it as a changing of my fate. I had always seen the web of my life as a set of events, mostly negative, determined at my birth. No matter what road I took, they all ended at the same place. Had I been wrong all this time?
The last big change in my life was finding the Mace Treasure. It forced me to become something I never intended. It closed some doors of my life but opened a few new ones. My bank account was fatter than it had ever been in my life. I had shed the skin of Gaslight City, gotten out alive. Nobody knew me in this huge place of teeming activity. I really could start all over, if not here in The Woodlands, then in one of the smaller towns near here and still work for Griff.
Mysti watched me think, ever patient, ever calm. She waited until I glanced at her face again to speak. “I’ll give you one warning. You and Wade may live happily ever after. If that’s the end you want, I encourage you to seek it.” She paused, and I nodded. “But I also encourage you to pay attention. Don’t walk a lost highway. Look for the signs life throws at you. Be ready to walk a new road if life shows you that there’s something, or someone, different in store.”
She was right. But I had invested so much time and emotional energy into wanting Wade, into falling for him. Right then, I couldn’t imagine having feelings for someone else.
Someone, probably Wade, began to rustle around in the den.
“I’m not saying make a change right now.” She pulled me into a hug and led me out of her witch room. “But keep your mind open.”
Wade stood next to the air mattress, shirtless and wearing his dirty jeans. His hair, unbraided, hung down his back. He winked at me.
Little gestures, like the wink, kept me guessing and drove me crazy. If he’d given up on us together, why did he bother with the little touches, the casual flirtations? Did he want me or not?
“You want to brush my hair?” He rubbed his towel over it, watching me and my reactions.
His stare burned down to the soles of my feet. I opened my mouth to say yes. Mysti put one hand on my back. Everything she said was right, and I knew it. I had to put Wade on the spot and be willing to move on when I had the truth. That confrontation could wait for another day, a day when I felt stronger. Still didn’t mean I had to let him flirt with me.
“Not tonight. It’s been a rough day.” I glanced at Mysti. Her tight face suggested either an intense need to fart or a herculean effort not to laugh.
Wade’s shoulders dropped, and his flirty confidence fell right along with his jaw. “But I thought we could talk over what happened. Maybe get some ideas.”
“Actually, Griff’ll want to do that downstairs.” Mysti frowned at Wade’s jeans, which had a mystery stain all the way down one leg. “I can also loan you some of Griffin’s sweatpants. They’ll be too short and too small, but I could wash your jeans with your shirts.”
“Yeah,” Wade muttered and gave his hair an angry flip. “I’d appreciate that.”
A few minutes later, we sat in the living room holding steaming cups of what Mysti called drinking chocolate. It wasn’t as sweet as the regular stuff and a lot richer. I took cautious sips of mine, though my impulse was to greedily gulp it.
Wade came in from the backyard, tucking his cigarettes and lighter into the pocket of a pair of black sweats that came up to the middle of his calves. I patted the spot next to me on the sofa. Obviously still insulted over my rejection, he gave me a derisive snort and went to stand in front of Brad who sat in the room’s one recliner. Brad held his ground almost a minute, but his tapping on his cellphone increased in urgency. Finally he bolted out of the chair and scurried to sit on a throw rug.
Wade continued to glare at the poor man. “Bradley, you try to cock block me again with a woman, and I’ll beat your ass.”
“Save the drama. It’s time to work.” Griff had his yellow legal pad in his lap and his pen poised over it to check off each item as he covered it. “I had an email from my license plate contact. We have an address on the woman who poisoned Peri Jean.”
“She sure was easy to find.” I wanted to beat the IQ points out of her.
“Maybe too easy. We’ll check out the address tomorrow. Wade? You up for it?” Griff glanced at Wade. The larger man nodded, and Griff’s pen scratched on the paper as he checked off that item. He moved his pen to another spot on the page. “Cecil mentioned going to that storage building for the disk and the runes. Are we really at a standstill without those items?”
I winced and nodded. “The only power we have over the Coachman is in those runes. The disk is…”
Griff held up his hand. “So if we destroy the runes, we destroy the Coachman?”
The impossibility of what needed to be done solidified into a headache. “Not really. We’d only destroy his connection to the living plane. Pruney—that’s the monster from the séance—implied we could use the runes to send the Coachman back where he came from. Not destroy him. He’ll still be wherever he hid his soul.”
Wade shrugged. “So what? Find the runes and destroy them. The Coachman will be trapped.”
A slow smile spread over Brad’s face. “Not necessarily.”
Wade narrowed his eyes at Brad, a silent threat to beat him senseless. Brad found enough courage to glare back. I knew I’d better stop the pissing match before it got started good, throbbing headache or not.
“Wade just got into town. Give him a chance to catch up,” I squinted against the pain in my head, rubbing at the tension in the back of my neck.
Brad, grinning ear to ear, couldn’t wait to deliver the right answer. “To trap the Coachman wherever he hid his soul, every single rune would have to be destroyed. He was summoned this time because Samantha and Samuel missed a rune and the wrong person found it.” He smiled, eyes cutting shyly at Wade as though he’d bested the bigger, stronger man by knowing the right answer.
“Brad’s right.” I hated to say it. He’d float on air for days. “There’s bound to be more runes, maybe scattered all over Texas. Even the entire United States.”
Wade shot Brad one more mean look, then nodded at me. “I see the point. How do we use the runes to send the Coachman away?”
He had me there. I shrugged and looked at Mysti for the answer.
“If the runes serve as the Coachman’s earthly essence…” Mysti’s eyes moved as she thought it over. “We’ll take the object of connection—the runes—and use them in the banishment ritual. We can cleanse them to break his connection then bind them to keep him from u
sing those particular runes to return.”
I knew all these techniques and felt comfortable using them. But one problem remained. “We won’t get to do any of this unless we find the runes.”
Mysti shrugged. “Now about the disk…” She stared at me.
“The only way I know to use it is to call that being from the dark outposts and make a deal with him.” I shuddered at the thought.
“You’re not doing that.” Wade spoke as though he had the final say in all things Peri Jean Mace. I wanted to let him know he didn’t, but I agreed. No calling Pruney.
Griff nodded and wrote on his pad. “I guess that’s it. Anybody have something to add?”
“What about your coughing fit?” I asked him. Mysti whipped her head side to side, but I ignored her. “You get any ideas what caused it?”
Griff stood. “No, and it’s my business.” He marched into the master bedroom and slammed the door. Mysti leapt up and went after him.
I started Wade’s laundry before I got ready for bed. Sleep came only sporadically. The sound of a very young child wailing—my heart knew it was Zora—cut into any peace I might have had. Right before dawn, I fell into a fitful doze. Griff’s shriek of pain and fear snapped me awake.
14
I SHOVED my feet into my house shoes and charged out of my bedroom. Wade met me at my door, a pistol in one hand.
“Stay behind me.” He turned his back on me.
“Get out of my way.” I pushed past him and darted down the stairs.
“Dammit. What’s got into you?” His footsteps thundered after me. I beat him to Griff and Mysti’s door and stopped.
It was closed. I couldn’t just open it. What if the scream hadn’t been a bad one? I tapped on the door. Wade rolled his eyes and opened the door. Griff sat on the bed with his hands over his face, sides heaving.
Mysti came out of the attached bath with a glass of water. She pushed it at Griff. “Drink this. Might help your throat.”
Griff raised his head. “I was tied up and burning in a barn or something. My lungs…” He barked out a cough, and the smell of smoke came with it, this time pungent enough for my cigarette-smutted nostrils to catch it.
