Mudflaps and Murder

by Tegan Maher

  “What?” I asked, rubbing my sleeve across my face. “Do I have dirt on my nose or something?”

  “Nah, but I wanted to tell you something, just to give you a heads up and some time to get used to the idea. Anna Mae and I have been talking about moving in together. I’m probably gonna move into her place, seein’ as how I don’t think her dining room table will fit in the apartment, let alone the rest of her stuff.”

  “That’s good,” I exclaimed, happy for them. They both deserved a happy ever after. Then the puzzle pieces clicked into place. “So that’s why she was so upside-down when I went to see her.”

  His brow furrowed. “What do you mean, upside-down.”

  I explained how she’d acted, and a shadow of worry crossed his face. “It was her idea. We’ve been talking about it for months, but wanted to wait until the time was right. We talked about marriage, but she’s not eager to jump back into that, no matter how much she loves me. I’m hoping to wear her down eventually, but I’m giving her some space on it for the time being. I can’t imagine that’s what’s rattling her.”

  “Even good life changes still cause stress,” I told him. “Given what she’s been through, I suppose it’s only natural for her to be a little gun shy. Sometimes it takes a little bit for logic to overcome trauma, and she sure had a heap of that.”

  He shrugged. “I guess so. I won’t mention that you said anything about it, but I’ll throw out a feeler. If she’s that stressed, she needs to know that there’s no hurry. I want to make her happy, not push her into a nervous breakdown.”

  “Oh, you make her happy. Don’t worry about that. Even after a year and a half or whatever, she still gets that disgustingly goofy grin on her face every time she talks about you.”

  “You mean the same one that you get when anyone mentions Hunter?” His brown eyes sparkled with mischief, and his teeth looked extra white against his tanned face. “That goofy grin?”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying my level best to keep a straight face. “That one, except much goofier. Sorta like the one you’re wearing right now.”

  He picked up the slobber-covered ball Wiz had dropped at his feet and winged it across the yard again. “So when are you two going to talk about it? I worry about leaving you out here by yourself. I know you’re a big, bad witch and all, but you don’t have eyes in the back of your head. I’d feel better about leaving if I knew you had somebody to watch your six.”

  “We’re getting to it,” I said, being intentionally vague. “Why? Has he said something to you?”

  “It may have come up a time or two,” he replied, taking a sip of his tea and setting it back down on the wicker table.

  I waited for him to say more, but he was apparently going to keep it as vague as I had. “And?” I said after a full minute stretched out.

  “And nothing. He just said it was the logical next step, but said he wasn’t in any hurry.”

  “What does that even mean?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Stop over-thinking it. You’re wigging yourself out over nothing.”

  I pulled in a deep breath and let it back out. “Yeah, I know. But it’s a big deal. I don’t want to ruin a good thing.”

  “It’s your life,” he said, holding up his hands. “I just want you to be happy.”

  “Noted,” I replied, smiling at him. Impatient nickers sounded from the gelding pasture, and I shook my head. Mayhem, Gabi’s horse, was at the gate, bobbing his head and pawing. “Hold your horses,” I called. “Literally! I’m coming.”

  “We better go feed them before he starts a full-on rebellion,” Matt said. “C’mon. I’ll give you a hand.”

  Between the two of us, it only took a few minutes to get everybody fed, and settled in for the night. It occurred to me that we probably wouldn’t have many more evenings like this, and I tried to imagine Hunter being there to help me instead. I realized I didn’t have to imagine it—he was there just about all the time, anyway. Duh. I shook my head, unable to believe I hadn’t looked at it through that lens in any sort of concrete way. I determined then and there to do what I should have already done—talk to him like an adult instead of avoiding the subject and giving in to my insecurities like some backwards teenager.

  When that weight lifted off my shoulders, I found myself looking to the future and smiling.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I’d made it through three batches of muffins and was working on apple turnovers when somebody knocked on the door. Addy’d kept me company for a couple of hours, but since she and Belle had created a ghostly neighborhood watch of sorts, she’d had to go chair a meeting. Apparently, they were gearing up for Halloween. I’m not sure what that even meant since Halloween was still better than a month away, but it was keeping her busy and she seemed happy to be in charge of something again.

  The screen door screeched open.

  “Knock, knock!” Camille called. It had taken her forever to drop the formality and just come on in, but I was glad she had. I was in the process of kneading the pastry dough—something I did by hand just because I loved the near-hypnotic repetition of it. My magic flowed best when I was in that state of mind, plus it gave my subconscious time to work on problems in the background. I’d solved problems that way on more than one occasion.

  I grinned when she strode into the kitchen and dropped into a chair.

  As always, she was runway-ready from her glossy, shoulder-length brunette hair all the way down to the tips of her Jimmy Choo suede booties. Her gray eyes curved up slightly at the corners and her face was a contrast of angles—high cheekbones, a narrow, straight nose, and a squarish jawline. She looked a little like a brunette Jennifer Aniston, and I would have hated her a little if I didn’t love her so much. That hadn’t always been the case, though.

  We’d met back when my sister, Shelby, had been under observation by the Council of Magic. Back then, Camille’d had a chronic stick up her butt. Ironically, Shelby had been close friends with her daughter before we even knew who her mother was, and I wasn’t sure who was more perturbed when we found out, Camille or me. Everything had shaken out just fine in the end, though, and she’d become one of my closest friends and an integral part of our little group.

  Camille’s job was to hunt down bad witches and bring them to justice. Specifically, her powers veered toward mind magic. She could totally scramble your brain if she wanted to. Today, though, she looked like somebody had scrambled hers.

  “You look like a woman in desperate need of a glass of wine and a sympathetic ear,” I said, rolling out the dough.

  “Wine, definitely. Unfortunately, I can’t talk about my current cases.”

  I washed the dough off my hands, then poured us both a glass of wine from a bottle of red I’d opened earlier.

  “Here’s to a long vacation on a sandy beach,” I said, and the corner of her mouth turned up into a wry smile.

  “You’d think that’d be easy for us since we both have the power to teleport. Pack a bag, and in five seconds, we’re at the beach. Easy, peasy, right? Except life won’t slow down long enough to even let us pack the bag.”

  “Well,” I said, “in theory, I guess. I’ve never teleported to somewhere I’ve never been to. I don’t even know if I can.”

  She swished a sip of wine and swallowed. “You can do anything you want if you’d just practice and you know it. There’s no difference between my teleportation power and yours except I use mine all the time. I mean, sure, it’s tricky if you don’t know where you’re going, but you learn to use other maps.”

  “What do you mean by maps?” I asked.

  She pressed her lips together in thought for a minute. “Say I want to go to the Council’s headquarters in Madrid. I don’t know anything about the physical structure, but I do know what it’s composed of. Magic and witches and hallways and offices, and probably a lobby. But I also know that I probably can’t teleport to any of those offices without some sort of clearance. And I can’t teleport right out front of it in th
e middle of the day because people would see me. But I can teleport to their lobby.”

  “But you’ve never seen their lobby.” I wasn’t getting it.

  “No, but I’ve seen a lobby. I can picture one. Then I can imagine what one feels like. The chairs, the receptionist, the quiet, or maybe the hustle. And I know there’s probably a corner, but that I want to avoid landing on plants or people or furniture. So I take those experiences and expectations, ball them all up, then combine them with the intention of the actual place I want to be, and voila. I end up in the lobby of the Madrid Council of Magic.”

  I barked out a laugh. “That’s because you can focus. I have the attention span of a gnat sometimes. I’d end up thinking about sangria and end up in a Spanish vineyard.”

  “Well, would that be such a horrible thing, though? Think of it as an unplanned pit stop.” Her eyes sparkled with amusement. “Seriously though, Noe, you have some amazing gifts.”

  I took a sip of my wine, then swirled it in my glass, watching as the legs clung to the sides. “About that. I need to get a handle on my telepathy, and I was wondering if you’d be willing to work with me on it.”

  She ran her finger around the rim of her glass, and I smiled when it sang. She was doing it almost as an afterthought. Or as if she was organizing her thoughts.

  “About that,” she started, and I raised a brow. It wasn’t like Camille to beat around the bush, so I waited her out.

  “We need your help.”

  “We who?” I asked, though I assumed she was talking about the council.

  “Specifically, the Council, but what we need you to do is critical to all witches. And magic in general.”

  I laughed. “What does that even mean?”

  She sighed and rolled her eyes at me. “You know. Magic. Magical beings. Witches, fae, angels, werewolves ... all of us.”

  “Fae,” I said, my tone flat.

  “Yes, fae,” she replied. “I know it sounds like a stretch, and I hate to use an awful movie reference, but we are not alone.”

  “I know that,” I said, waving her off. “But the fae keep to themselves. I wasn’t even sure until now that they even really existed, even though I’ve heard Addy talk about them as if they do.”

  “Oh, they’re real. You already know angels are, so it only follows that demons are, too. And all sorts of other mythical creatures that aren’t exactly myths.”

  I rubbed my face. “I’m not even sure I want to know what you’re referring to, but that’s not the point, is it? The point is that you need my help with something.”

  She nodded. “I do. I’ve been thinking about your skills. All of them, but mostly your telepathy. For some reason, I can’t sense you when you use it, and normally my radar goes off like a three-alarm fire when somebody’s trying to poke around in my head.”

  “What?” I asked, shocked. I took a second to absorb that, then decided to test it. I sent out a little tendril of magic and took a tiny peek inside her mind. When she didn’t slam the door right off the bat, I pulled back out. My goal wasn’t to invade her privacy—it was to see if I could. And I did. She never so much as blinked.

  “How is that possible?” I asked, and she lifted a shoulder.

  “No idea, but it seems to be a fact. I noticed it when we were practicing, but I thought maybe you just weren’t hitting the mark. Then I thought about how you can call me, so to speak, without so much as knocking. Figuratively speaking, of course.”

  I’d had a telepathic link with Shelby and Raeann for as long as I could remember, but when we got juiced by being in the presence of angel magic, that weak communication link had intensified and grown into what was now full telepathy. Not only could I listen, but I could also speak, too. I’d had to call Camille a time or two for help, but I refused to use it beyond a mental 911 call.

  “So how can that help you right now?”

  She pulled in a deep breath and took a long sip of wine. I could tell she was trying to figure out how much to tell me, and I wasn’t sure what to think of that. I’d wait to hear what she needed me to do before I demanded full disclosure.

  “We’ve had ... trouble with a certain faction of witches,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “A couple of them are connected to Katrina but weren’t directly involved in the whole mess with you guys, so we couldn’t arrest them.”

  Katrina was a witch who’d tried to kill us several months before, and she’d done it by crawling around in my head Freddy Krueger-style while I was asleep. I still had nightmares about that, even though I’d turned the tables on her and we’d beaten them like drums in the end. I was confused, though.

  “Are you saying Katrina’s involved in it?”

  “At this point, I really don’t know, but to be honest, I don’t see how she could be. She’s locked up with nobody in and nobody out other than people directly tasked with bringing her food and supervising her daily activities.”

  “Yeah, but she doesn’t have to leave the farm to take a trip. She’s telepathic just like I am.”

  “True,” she said, uncrossing her long legs and leaning forward onto her elbows. “But we have some powerful spells in place to prevent that, created by witches from the Head Council. No one in, no one out, physically or psychically. We’ve never had a breach, and I don’t see why she’d be any different. She’s not nearly as powerful as other magicals we’ve dealt with over the centuries.”

  Even though I knew I was probably inflating how much magical mojo Katrina had because of what she’d managed with me, I couldn’t help but be doubtful. Where there was a will, there was a way.

  Just the idea of crawling back into her head gave me the heebie-jeebies. I wasn’t scared of her—just the opposite, in fact. I wanted to tear her hair out by the roots. But having somebody get in your head while you’re sleeping is horrible. There’s no way you can really stop it, and it’s not like you can just not sleep. As a matter of fact, it was one of the reasons I kept my mind so tightly closed and only opened it when I was relatively sure I was only broadcasting one way. I didn’t want to give another being the chance to do that again. Not only had it been personally invasive, it had almost gotten us killed. I’d been the weak link they’d taken advantage of.

  Then something occurred to me. “Katrina knows what I look like. There’s no way she’d leave her mind open for the pickins if she saw me.”

  “I already thought of that. We captured several people directly involved in what they’ve got planned—her nephew, Sebastian, being one. We need you to get in his head and figure out what’s going on, and we need you to find out if he knows where they’re going. It’s critical that we find them.”

  “What are you looking for, and what, exactly, did they do? Why is this so critical that you’re willing to call in an outsider?”

  She started to speak, but then closed her mouth. “I can’t tell you unless you agree to help. Then it would be a contract, and you’d be sworn to secrecy.”

  I considered that. “Why can’t you do this? I’ve seen how powerful your mind magic is; you can turn brains into Spam, and you already have clearance.”

  She gave me a small smile. “Yeah, but I can only see the pathways and neural connections, and the physical aspects of it. Basically, I can wipe memories, look for tampering, and torture people.”

  She said the last jokingly, but she wasn’t kidding. She’d done a scan on me, and even when she was trying to be gentle, it was still an uncomfortable process. Not as uncomfortable as worrying about whether or not somebody’d laid a booby trap in your gourd, though, which is one of the reasons she’d tested me.

  “You have other mind readers,” I pointed out.

  “Yes, we do, but so far, they’ve failed. He has powerful walls. None of them can get past them.”

  “So what makes you think I can?”

  She averted her gaze and chewed on her lip.

  “What?” I asked. “Why do you think I’ll succeed where they failed?”

  “Because
we want you to go in while he’s asleep.”

  She held up her hands, but I pushed to my feet, nearly knocking my chair over.

  “Absolutely not,” I said, backing away. “Not a chance.”

  “Why not? Noelle, I know what you went through, but I promise you, this is different.”

  “No,” I said again, my voice firm. “I’m not going to agree to invade somebody’s privacy like that without at least knowing why.” I pulled the towel off the dough and started cutting it into squares with my pizza cutter.

  “But—”

  I showed her my palm. “But nothing. Tell me why you need me to do it, or forget it.”

  That was another reason we steered clear of the Council. They tended to get too big for their britches sometimes, and only gave you information they deemed necessary. I wasn’t walking into an agreement with them blind.

  I pulled in a deep breath and released it slowly through my nose. “Look, I’m not saying I’m not willing to help. If you tell me the whole story and why this is so imperative, I’ll reconsider. But I’m not crawling into somebody’s head without knowing it’s critical.”

  She nodded, resigned. “I figured this is how it would go. You’re a good person, you know that?”

  “I try to be.”

  “But so am I,” she said softly. “I wouldn’t ask you to do it if I didn’t believe it was absolutely the only option. There’s a big event coming up that directly affects the lives of all magicals, and I just want to make sure that everything goes as planned. I’ll see about getting you clearance.”

  My expression softened. “Of course, you’re a good person. It’s what makes you so good at your job. We’re doing girls’ night tomorrow, so I expect to see you at Fancy’s. Seven sharp.”

  Her full lips curved up in a small smile. “I’ll do my best.”

  She snapped her fingers and disappeared, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d made the right decision. Like she said, she was a good person.