“Tim’s gone,” she said.
“What?” He sat up straight. “What do you mean, gone? Did he escape from prison?” Timmy was the name of his stepson, the boy who’d pulled the trigger. He’d been tried as an adult and sentenced to a life sentence for Hallie’s murder.
“He’s dead,” she said in a quiet voice. “Someone killed him.”
Lachlan’s jaw worked. He was trying to process this information but it simply didn’t compute. Timmy dead? Killed? What?
“I thought you’d want to know,” she said. “It’s been all over the news down here, but I figured it wouldn’t be reported up north where you are. So, I thought someone should tell you. I guess I could have had someone else call you, but I thought it should be me, so…”
“Fuck.” Lachlan found himself unable to say anything else.
“Yeah,” said Debra.
He licked his lips, trying to pull himself together. “Uh… I mean, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” she said.
Silence.
Dead. Timmy dead. The person who’d killed Hallie was dead too. He could hardly believe it. “Were you… in touch with him?” Lachlan knew that Debra had cut ties with Timmy right after it happened, but he thought that it might be likely that she would eventually want to see him again. After all, he was her son. Of course, Debra and Steve had gotten pregnant with twins pretty quickly after the entire incident, so it wasn’t as if Timmy was Debra’s only child anymore. Still, to have now lost two of her children… She must be devastated.
“We had started to talk on the phone,” Debra said. “But I hadn’t seen him, hadn’t gone to visit him.”
“Aw, shit, Debra, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She didn’t say anything.
Well, what would she say to that? Maybe that she was sorry too? She probably wanted to get off the phone with him. She’d called to deliver this piece of news, and it couldn’t be easy for her. He cleared his throat. “Well, I, uh, I appreciate you telling me.”
“Sure thing,” she said.
He waited, certain that she’d begin to make excuses and get off the line. But she didn’t. She simply breathed. He adjusted his grip on the phone. Waited some more. When she still said nothing, he said, “Uh, you must be devastated.”
“Look, telling you isn’t the only reason I called.”
“No?” said Lachlan. He was starting to feel a little apprehensive. Why else would she have called? She didn’t want him to come back for the funeral or something, because he couldn’t. He needed to stay far away from all of them. Going back there would bring up too many painful memories and he had worked too hard to build a new life for himself. And besides, it wasn’t as if this new life wasn’t without complications, given the powers he had to dampen and the threat of the Green King and everything else.
“When they found him, they thought it was a drug overdose,” she said. “He was locked in his cell all night, alone. But during the routine autopsy they do at the jail, they discovered he’d been smothered by a pillow. They found fibers from the case in his mouth and under his fingernails, like he was clawing at it, like he was—” Her voice broke. “Fighting off his killer.”
“Geez,” said Lachlan. He couldn’t help but suddenly think of his own little son, Wyatt, struggling against a pillow on his face. It made Lachlan’s chest tighten painfully, and he shook the image away.
“No one can figure out how the killer even got into the cell,” she said. “And no one’s trying very hard either. After all, given who Timmy is, what he did, most people aren’t too bothered that he’s dead. The police are no exception. Steve didn’t want me to ask you this, because he said it was crossing the line, but I know that you’re the best detective that ever worked in Bartle, and if anyone could figure this out, it would be you.”
Lachlan sputtered. “You want me to solve Timmy’s murder?”
“I need to know what happened, Lachlan. I need to know who did this to him.”
“Debra, I can’t just horn in on another department’s investigation—”
“They know you. They’d work with you. If you showed up here, they wouldn’t ask questions.”
“And anyway, I’m far too emotionally invested to be objective at all—”
“If you cared about Timmy, they would care,” she said. “You’re the person who’s got the biggest reason to be glad that he’s dead. If you showed them that he mattered, that his life mattered—”
“Who says I think it did?” Lachlan said, and his voice cracked.
And then he hung up the phone, fighting the lump in this throat. He leaned back in his chair, hardly able to breathe.
How dare she call him and ask him that? How dare she?
CHAPTER TWO
I sat cross legged on a towel spread out on the sand and watched my son Wyatt play. He wasn’t real good at using tools like shovels yet, but he did enjoy picking up handfuls of sand and moving them in and out of buckets. He liked doing that even better with wet sand, so half of the buckets surrounding us were full of water and wet sand.
Wyatt went at the task as if it were serious business—rocket science or the equivalent. He scrunched up his face and gave it his total concentration. Sand moving was his world at the moment.
The two of us were on the beach behind my hotel. I had taken the afternoon off to spend with Wyatt. My cousin Vivica was lying on her stomach, sunning herself next to us, and her son Jackson, who was a few months younger than Wyatt, was sitting on the other side of Wyatt’s buckets, trying to pick up sand too but losing most of it between his chubby fingers. The two little boys were incredibly adorable.
“There you are,” said a voice from behind me.
I looked up to see my fiancé Lachlan, still in his shirt and tie from work. He sat down in the sand next to me. His shoes were crusted in sand, and now his butt was going to be too.
“You okay?” I said to him.
He shook his head. “I don’t know if I’m ready to talk about it.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Why’d you bring it up then?”
He shot me a glance.
Okay, I guess that technically he hadn’t brought it up, but something was wrong. It was all over him. I swallowed. “It’s not…” I gestured at the horizon. “The children of the deep?”
“No,” he said. “No, there’s nothing on that front.”
I nodded. Right after Lachlan had stolen Wyatt’s power, he’d started using the talisman that Olsen Hunter had made for Wyatt so we really had no idea what kind of power it was that Lachlan even had, because all of it was dampened by that talisman. “So, then, what is it?”
“Penny, let me wind down.” He let out a huff.
I shrugged. Fine, if he wanted to be grumpy, I wasn’t going to push it.
Lachlan scooted through the sand over to the boys. “What are you guys up to?”
Wyatt looked up at Lachlan and his eyes got bright and wide. He grinned a big grin and let out a laugh.
“Hey there, little man,” said Lachlan, reaching over and scooping the little boy up. “Daddy’s home.”
Wyatt laughed again.
“Say Da-da,” said Lachlan.
Wyatt let out a string of babbling noises that sounded nothing like Da-da.
“I don’t get it.” Lachlan looked over his shoulder at me. “He used to say it all the time.”
“No, he didn’t,” I said. “He just made noises that you interpreted as him saying it.”
“Whatever.” Lachlan turned back to his son. “Da. Da,” he repeated slowly and carefully.
Wyatt just giggled.
Wyatt was in the stage where he would say words, but he didn’t tend to use them to mean anything. He liked to babble sounds like “dadadadada” over again, but we couldn’t get him to say that sound for Lachlan yet, at least not consistently. He’d do it once or twice, we’d get excited, and then he wouldn’t do it again, leaving us to wonder if it hadn’t been a coincidence.
“Oh, hey, Jackson,” said Lachlan, reaching out for the other little boy. “How are you doing today?”
Jackson grinned, showing off his new teeth. He’d been drooling and fighting to get them through the gums, but they’d peeked through earlier in the week.
Vivica sat up. “Did I miss something?” she said.
“Lachlan’s home,” I said.
She grinned at him. “Hey, Lachlan.”
“Hey, Vivica,” he said.
There was a crash in the distance, a peal of loud, loud thunder.
We all jumped.
On the horizon, a speck of black clouds was growing larger and larger by the second.
I felt my heart start to speed up. I put my hand up to block out the sun and peered out. “What is that?” It was moving far too fast to be anything natural. It was like a live thing, like a creature made of mist and darkness.
Spears of lightning slashed jagged brightness across the sky.
Thunder boomed.
The air took on that just-before-it-rains quality that threatens and promises.
Around us, everyone began to throw their towels into bags and to pack up their chairs.
On the horizon, the black cloud moved faster and faster, overtaking the sky. The wind whipped off the ocean, blowing back our hair. The air felt charged with something ominous. The sea was turning choppy. Waves rushing in had more white surf than they had before. They were taller. Against the black sky, the ocean looked black too. Dark water surging in front of us. The pleasant summer day we’d been experiencing was a thing of the past.
Wyatt and Jackson promptly started wailing.
I leapt to my feet, gathering up our towel. “I’ll get the stuff if you guys want to get the boys,” I said, breathless. I tried to keep my tone casual, as if we were preparing to run from a sudden storm, but I knew that this wasn’t any normal thunderstorm. This was something more potent, and it was coming for us. Shivery panic was rising up in my body. I wanted the boys inside. Now.
The waves increased in size at an alarming rate. I watched a huge wave crash up over the beach, engulfing people who’d been sunning closer to the water than us.
There were shrieks as people ran from the wave tugging their coolers and umbrellas.
And the wave behind it was bigger still. It was—
Crash.
The water surged and broke overhead, drenching us. I coughed, stunned, pushing wet hair out of my eyes. How had it gotten on top of us so quickly?
Wyatt!
I screamed.
The wave had picked up my son and was dragging him down the shore, pulling him back along with the water of the wave.
Lachlan and I both took off, racing for the little boy.
Wyatt was crying, wailing and struggling, but he was no match for the sea.
Lachlan was faster than me. He took the lead.
Another wave. Huge. High. Dark water overhead—
We were underwater. I couldn’t see. Salt water stung my eyes. I flailed, trying to hold myself together. The water was strong, and the current was pulling on my body, yanking on my limbs. It hurt, as if it might tear me apart.
I surfaced as the wave drew back. I blinked and shrieked and looked and looked and—
Where was Wyatt?
Where was Lachlan?
Then I spotted them. They were down the beach. How had they been thrown all the way down there?
Now the sky opened up, pouring down needle-like icy raindrops on us from the black clouds overhead. Lightning continued to rent the sky, thunder to shake the air.
“Lachlan!” I shouted.
He was holding Wyatt to his chest. Wyatt was coughing. Water was pouring out of my tiny boy’s mouth. I dashed for the two of them.
But Lachlan was scrambling up the beach, away from the water, as fast as he could.
Good. We needed to get to safety.
I turned back to the ocean.
And was smacked in the face by a wave, even bigger than the last. It pulled me down against the floor of the ocean, twisting my body in painful ways. All I could see was darkness and swirling. Then, reaching for me from the depths of the water were strings of seaweed. They wrapped around me like long, thin fingers, digging into my flesh. And deep below me I could see a pair of eyes—red and ancient and knowing and hungry.
I struggled.
The seaweed wrapped tighter and tighter around me.
I couldn’t think of anything to do, so I shifted, letting my dragon form flow through me. I unfurled my wings under the water and opened my mouth to breathe fire at the glowing eyes in the deep.
But my fire went out the second it left my lips. I was under water after all.
Still, I was free of the sea weed and I fought my way to the surface.
What I saw floored me.
The entire beach was flooded with water. Waves were reaching all the way up to the first level of my hotel. I could see my guests running through the surf, trying to get past the hotel, to clear the water and get to safety. Vivica was with them, and Jackson was in her arms, squalling at the top of his lungs.
But where were Wyatt and Lachlan?
I flapped my wings to gain altitude and I hovered over the beach, scanning in all directions.
Another wave came through, the surf reaching high enough to spray my body even as I hovered in the air. It crashed over the pool behind my hotel, tearing away the fence that surrounded it, tearing out all the lounge chairs that surrounded it. The water lapped against the back door of Vivica’s suite.
But I still couldn’t see Wyatt.
There!
Oh, God, why was he all by himself? My tiny little boy was in the dry sand next to the hotel, struggling to stand up. He was crying, and Lachlan wasn’t with him.
Then I saw Lachlan, struggling up through the waves. He had been sucked out to sea.
Another wave was coming. I swooped down and hooked my claws into the back of Lachlan’s sopping shirt. I lifted him into the air and flew him to Wyatt. Lachlan picked up our son immediately and took off running.
The wave crashed against the first floor of my hotel. It shattered the windows, and the water rushed inside.
But I didn’t care about my hotel at that moment. All I could hear was the horrible sound of my baby’s agonized screams. He was so afraid.
* * *
I was wrapped in a blanket and nothing else, because when I’d shifted back from dragon form, I hadn’t had any clothes. All my stuff was in the upper level of the hotel, but we hadn’t been allowed back inside yet. The officials said that there could be structural damage, and that it could be dangerous inside. Apparently, there was a possibility the whole building would collapse.
We were out on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, which was the only building on the beach that had been hit by the crazy, huge waves. In fact, further down the beach, it hadn’t even rained. I wasn’t an idiot, and I’d seen those red eyes in the water, so I was pretty sure what all this added up to. The Green King. He was coming. And he knew who we were.
I held Wyatt, clutching him to my chest, afraid to let him go. He was asleep now, had conked out in my arms from sheer exhaustion. Lachlan had his arm around me, holding both of us close.
He kissed the top of my head. “I’m sorry about the hotel.”
“We can rebuild the hotel,” I said, leaning into him, enjoying the feeling of his broad body surrounding mine.
He wrapped both of his arms around me, encircling Wyatt as well. “I know, but it’s right before peak season. You’re going to be out of commission at the period of time when you usually make most of your money for the year.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “We’ll be fine.” I had money that I’d inherited, and I wasn’t hurting for cash. I looked around. “Have you seen Vivica?”
“While you were getting checked out by the paramedics,” said Lachlan. “Felicity was here too. She took Vivica and Jackson back to her and S
cott’s place. Said we should head there too as soon as we can.”
“Oh,” I said. “Good.”
“You want to go?” said Lachlan.
I shook my head. “Not yet.” I burrowed against his warmth. “I saw something out there.”
“What do you mean?”
“I saw… a face in the water.”
“Someone was drowning?”
“No, like something was in the water. Some malevolent thing. Something angry and old. And seaweed came for me, wrapped itself around me. I had to shift into dragon form to get away from it.”
He was quiet.
“You know what this means,” I said.
He didn’t say anything.
“It’s the Green King, Lachlan,” I whispered.
He sighed, and he tightened his grip on us both.
CHAPTER THREE
I wasn’t angry with Lachlan about what he’d done, taking Wyatt’s power. I couldn’t be, because I understood why he’d done it. Neither of us wanted our son to bear a burden like that, to be forced to fight a monster because it was his destiny. We wanted him to be a normal little boy, grow up without any pressure to be anything other than what he wanted to be. And we wanted to protect him. More than anything on earth, we wanted him safe.
So, I knew why Lachlan had taken Wyatt’s power, transferred our son’s violent destiny to himself.
But I wasn’t pleased with the way he’d done it. He’d been secretive, and he had done some kind of dark magic to take the power into himself. Lachlan had never specified exactly what he’d done, but I lived in worry that it had left some kind of taint on him. The two of us had both danced too often with darkness, and it marked our souls. I wanted nothing but light for us from here on out. However, that wasn’t going to happen, because the Green King was coming for us.
And the other thing that didn’t please me was the consequences of Lachlan’s actions. He’d taken Wyatt’s power, but that had changed the timetable for the Green King. Now, he was coming after us.
And it was Lachlan’s fault.
But I couldn’t be angry with him. Not truly angry. I thought he knew that, but we hadn’t talked about it, and we hadn’t talked about the Green King either. Whenever I brought it up, Lachlan got quiet.
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