Paranoia, Pixies and Prophecies Read online

  “Wait, what sort of a civil war?” I demanded, trying to get my thoughts to stop spinning long enough to pick out the most important questions. I didn’t need to be some sort of magical healer like Marcella to know that the old elf clearly didn’t have more than a few minutes left.

  Before he could even attempt to answer my question, the elf broke out into another loud, long coughing fit. It sounded slick and wet, terrifying me to no end. He was bent over the bed, holding the sheet to his mouth as he hacked up a whole lung.

  If elves even had lungs. I wasn’t too up on elf anatomy.

  Finally, weak and trembling, the elf turned just enough to peer out at me with one milky white eye.

  “They want the worlds to unite," he gasped, wheezing between each separate word, seemingly needing to take a breath after every little one.

  “Unite how?” I asked. My voice was pleading. I hated to sound like that as if I truly needed something from someone I barely knew, but that was all I could get out.

  The old elf opened his mouth, and a slight ray of hope shined within my chest. I was finally going to get the answers I’d been looking for since the fae woman attacked me in my backyard.

  Why did the fae want to use me? What was so special?

  Just as quickly, my hope was squashed. The elf gasped for air, and I could see every cell inside of him go still as he fell back against the bed, wheezing as he tried to pull in air. Even as old as he was, his body was still fighting to live.

  Until it wasn’t. With one last, gasping, terrible breath, he went still forever. His milky white eyes, the ones that had been so unusually focused despite their blindness, were unfocused now, staring off into nothingness.

  There was a moment, right after the old elf died, that I almost thought I might have gone, too. Maybe it was shock at seeing someone truly die for the first time. I’d seen dead bodies before, plenty of times, but by the time I had gotten to the crime scene, they were always corpses. Never alive. Still and frozen in death. It was easier to forget that these people had once been human, somehow, when they were no longer breathing. It wasn’t traumatic.

  But I had watched the life drain from the old elf’s eyes.

  Or maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe it was the fact that I had just been so close to the answers I’d been desperate for the last six months. I’d finally felt like I could reach out and grasp the explanation in my fingers.

  Who was I, truly? Why was I one of the halflings the fae seemed to have their eyes on? Was it really just me, or anyone like me?

  So many demands that had been swirling around my mind for ages. And the old elf could have answered them. I wasn’t even sure how I knew. He was just so old and wise, he seemed like Yoda. Like he would have to know all of the answers to my questions.

  But now he was gone.

  I was frozen in time for a brief second, willing his eyes to become focused once again, to stare at me, and maybe to smile, as if this had all been some sort of great game, and he’d managed to fool me after all.

  None of that happened, though.

  “Shannon.” Mom’s whisper was soft in my ear, tremulous as if she was afraid of how I would react.

  “It’s fine,” I murmured back, shaking myself out of it and standing.

  There was something that happened to me whenever I was traumatized. I was sure a therapist would have called it disassociation, but I didn’t like to use such medicinal terms.

  A part of my brain would shut off whenever the world felt like it was too much to handle. I’d become a woman solely driven by logic, able to compartmentalize with the best of them, almost robot-like in the way I dealt with things.

  It was one of the parts of me that Kenneth had loathed all those years, though he would never have said it. The man was somehow able to deal with his emotions on a level that could have rivaled Albert Einstein, were the two comparable.

  I, on the other hand, could not do such a thing. I needed to shut down in order to survive. The world had to become black and white because the gray area was far too terrifying a realm to deal with.

  I felt it happen right there in the attic. At the same time, I knew there was no need for it. I was surrounded by people who loved me, people who would happily stay up all night to help me process everything I was feeling.

  But even knowing that, there was a part of me that whispered, They could never understand. They’re nothing like you.

  So, the shut off began, whether I wanted it to, or not.

  “You should say goodbye, Shannon,” Marcella said to me as I rose from my chair.

  I looked into her soulful brown eyes, ones that I could tell were full of mourning similar to my own, but the most I could bring myself to do was nod.

  “I already did,” I assured her, knowing it was true. I had said goodbye to the old elf the moment he’d gone into that coma, knowing he would probably never wake up.

  I left my family in the attic, not even able to look at their faces and see the same grief and sorrow I felt inside etched there.

  Out on the staircase, Hunter caught up to me, slipping a hand gently around my waist and bending down to whisper in my ear. How the man managed to do that while walking down a staircase was absolutely beside me.

  “Are you really okay?” He murmured.

  “Not in the slightest,” I replied, shaking my head halfway. “But what good does that do?”

  Hunter fell silent, not offering some sort of placid remark that was wholly untrue. That was one of the things I found most attractive about him. He didn’t try to placate me with lies. Instead, he’d sit there and let us both stew in the truth, no matter how painful it was.

  Kenneth would never do that, I thought, and then instantly berated my mind for the comparison. I was tired of treating them like they were equals, side by side in two columns, like a pro and con list.

  But I still couldn’t help myself. Maybe it was a side effect of ending a fifteen-year relationship. I had no one to ask about it, really, seeing as Mom and Grams had never quite made it as far as Kenneth and I had.

  Without even realizing it, I pulled to a stop in front of my bedroom, slipping my hand into Hunter’s. I was just getting ready to ask him to stay the night, just for my own comfort, when his cell phone rang.

  Instantly, his eyes flicked down to the device, lighting up with excitement. I was sure whatever it was had to be extremely important, and I couldn’t help but feel a little bit excited right along with him.

  And then, of course, I instantly felt guilty for getting excited. Someone had just died, after all.

  “Is it okay if I take this?” Hunter asked, holding up the phone.

  “Of course.” I nodded my head vigorously, at once trying to tell him that he never needed to ask permission, and also trying to figure out if I could catch a quick glance at the caller I.D. without appearing too nosy.

  Hunter slipped off down the hall, and I could hear him say hello to whoever had called.

  Moments later, he was back, grinning like a mad dog with a bone.

  “What is it?” I asked, half laughing at the nearly deranged look in his eyes.

  “I’ve got a case,” he told me proudly. “I’m officially a P.I. for anyone magical folks within one hundred square miles of Portland, Oregon.”

  5

  Hunter did end up staying the night.

  But that was all he did. I don’t think either of us felt very in the mood after what we had just witnessed in the attic. Admittedly, it was a little strange to have a man in my childhood bedroom, but that feeling quickly faded away as Hunter wrapped his arms around me.

  I just felt safe. That was the only way I could have described it. Falling asleep in his arms was like being wrapped up by a thousand weighted blankets in the middle of an anxiety attack. I actually slept through the entire night without waking up once, which was unexpected, given all that had transpired.

  I only realized when I woke up that I had completely forgotten to update Mom, Grams, and Marcella on the stran
ge portal in the shadow world.

  In fact, it was the first thought that entered my mind, followed very quickly by the harsh realization that the warm, comforting body that had slept next to me all night was no longer there.

  “Morning,” Hunter grinned when I sat bolt upright, feeling around the small bed for him.

  “Oh. Morning,” I chuckled, shrinking back a little in embarrassment. He was just across the room, pulling his jeans back on after having taken them off to sleep, and was staring at me with a wide, almost doe-eyed expression on his face.

  It only took a split second for me to grow self-conscious. In the light of day so much more visible, and I started to wonder if he could see the cellulite on my upper arms or the few gray hairs that dotted my red hair.

  Which was probably also a frizzy mess. I fiercely patted it down, trying to both make it look normal and also look as if I was doing absolutely nothing to it.

  “Stop,” Hunter murmured, once again managing to know exactly what I was doing. Sometimes, I swore he could read my mind. “You look beautiful.”

  He traipsed over the wood floor, his footsteps lighter than air, and bent over the bed to give me a long, slow kiss.

  The kind that made my toes tingle and sent a flurry of butterflies through my stomach.

  “Morning,” he whispered as he pulled back.

  “You already said that,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah,” he shrugged, “but I had to say it to you properly, kiss and all.”

  I was blushing. I was both acutely aware of that fact, and completely oblivious to it. I think I gave in to the notion that I would always be blushing when Hunter was around.

  “Now, you have got to get up,” he ordered, yanking the covers off of me and sending a draft of freezing cold air over my legs.

  “Excuse me!” I screeched, scrambling to try and get my covers back. I liked to wake up slowly in the mornings, to laze about in bed for a few minutes before I slowly rolled out and put my robe on to avoid the freezing cold attack I was currently experiencing.

  “We’ve got a case,” he replied absently, turning to the mirror to fix his shirt.

  It was a different shirt than the one he’d been wearing the night before. I was about to ask him where the heck he’d gotten an entirely new outfit from when he turned toward me and threw a pair of jeans and a regular old t-shirt at me. “Put this on.”

  I stared down at the clothes in my lap for a brief moment, confused, and then looked back up at Hunter. “You know I don’t normally wear this stuff out in public? And that I’m not a P.I. right?”

  “Today you are one,” he shrugged. “I need your keen knowledge of how the human police system works.”

  “But it’s a magical case,” I replied, still not completely following. It wasn’t my fault at all, though. I was not a morning person. In the slightest. I needed time to wake up, and it appeared Hunter was the exact opposite.

  “And you are a magical being,” he replied, grabbing my arm and rather unceremoniously pulling me straight out of bed.

  I could see there was absolutely no arguing with him right then and, while I knew this was all a ploy to attempt to take my mind off of the dead elf and his fairly ominous final warning, I gave in anyway.

  “Fine,” I sighed, walking into my closet to change.

  Hunter may have stayed the night, but I wasn’t exactly ready for him to see all of me just yet. It’s funny when you’re a forty-year-old divorcee. Things I hadn’t always thought about with Kenneth- at least until he cheated- were suddenly at the forefront of my mind with Hunter. Would he notice the stretch marks on my breasts, the ones that were not a product of pregnancy but rather a natural occurrence when a woman aged? Or what about the suddenly wiry hair on my legs, the ones that grew back way too fast for my own liking? The poof of fat at the bottom of my stomach that I couldn’t dissolve, no matter how hard I tried? Sure, I’d wondered about these things with Kenneth, but we were married. I figured the guy was stuck with me no matter what.

  “Clearly, I was wrong,” I chuckled to myself.

  “Wrong about what?” Hunter called from the other side of the door.

  Thank God I was hidden in the depths of my closet, where he couldn’t see me blush as bright as a cherry tomato. I needed to stop speaking out loud when I wasn’t alone.

  “This shirt,” I replied. “I thought it looked good on me, but, uh, I was wrong.”

  As far as lies go, that one was by far my weakest. Thankfully, Hunter seemed to buy it, because when I emerged, his eyes lit up.

  “I think it looks great on you,” he reassured me. “I forgot how well I knew how to pick out women’s clothes.”

  You know that phrase “choose your battles?” Well, that was a battle I decided I didn’t need to choose at the moment. Hunter had absolutely no idea how to pick out a woman’s clothes but, by the expression on his face, telling him that would only leave us crestfallen.

  “I’m not jeans and t-shirt gal normally, but this works,” I told him instead.

  He was sitting on the edge of my bed, leaning back on his hands as he stared at me, and that image suddenly made me want to both cry and tear his clothes off all at once.

  It just seemed so perfectly right to have him in my room. We’d only just started dating, but I was sure in that.

  “Don’t we have a case to solve?” I asked, throwing the attention off of me and turning toward the door.

  “Yep,” he replied, catching up to me to grab my hand in a gesture that was so casual it was as if we’d done it a thousand times already. “Let’s go.”

  Since Hunter still didn’t quite know his way around Portland, we took my car. Also, it was a lot more unassuming to travel around the hipster city in a Prius than in a big old truck. And, as I pointed out, P.I.s should always be as unassuming as possible.

  If the Shannon I was six months ago could have seen myself then, she would have been horrified. P.I.s were often the bane of my existence, but I had to admit it was fun to go on an investigation knowing there were not as many legal restrictions holding us back.

  The case in question, as it turned out, was that of a middle-aged witch. Who was, unexpectedly, a witch.

  That was quite surprised when he opened the door to us and grinned. When Hunter had said we were going to see a which, I had just automatically assumed he meant a woman.

  The man was short and stout, with balding gray hair and sagging jowls. He was wearing a button-down shirt and a pair of khaki pants, paired with shiny black shoes. There were beads of sweat dotting his forehead as if he’d just finished with a massive workout.

  “I’m so glad you were free,” the man sighed, ushering us inside. “I called Diego Voltu, but he said he’s all booked up for the next two months. What business does a P.I. for witches have being booked like that?”

  “Affairs, probably,” Hunter shrugged, glancing around the space.

  I knew he was looking around for clues but, since I had the luxury of being nearly equivalent to a ride-along, I decided to glance around just to be nosy.

  The house was massive. It was in the rich neighborhood, the one my friends and I used to ride our bikes through and pretend we lived in, just so we could have a taste of what it felt like to have that much money. Of course, I’d grown up to get more than a taste of it, but that didn’t stop the nostalgia I felt now that I was finally able to get a look inside one of the homes I’d dreamed of owning as a child.

  It was just as magnificent on the outside as it was on the inside. The floors were marble, and there was a massive, twisting staircase coming down the middle of the foyer that we stood it. It was one of those very clean, minimalistic spaces, a way for rich people to show just how rich they were by only putting a few extraordinarily expensive pieces of art in the space.

  I used to want to be one of those people. It was so silly, now that I thought about it.

  “Well, I can assure you, my wife is not having an affair,” the man replied, offended as if Hunter had sug
gested that.

  “And I’m sure you’re right,” Hunter replied with a nod.

  “I’m sorry,” the man deflated. “The police are trying to go with that theory and I just… I’m worried, is all. I know Magda. She wouldn’t do that to me. I’m Bruce, by the way.”

  He stuck his hand out to me.

  “Shannon,” I replied, taking the offered hand. “You have a lovely home.”

  “Thanks,” he shrugged, glancing around the space like it was a hovel. “It’s all Magda’s doing, really. She’s the moneymaker around her. Big tech, you know. I’m just a teacher.”

  “And a witch,” I replied plainly.

  “Yes, that too,” he nodded. “Which would be why I called you.”

  “What are Magda’s powers?” I asked, pretending not to catch the lopsided grin Hunter had given me. I knew he desperately wanted to brag about the fact that he’d been right about what a distraction this was for me, but there was no way I’d give him the satisfaction.

  “She doesn’t have any,” Bruce replied earnestly. “She’s completely human.”

  “So then why did you call us?” Hunter asked, his brow furrowing in confusion.

  “As I said, the police think she just ran away,” Bruce sighed, sinking to sit on the bottom step of his staircase. “We got in a fight recently, which I told them about. Of course, I couldn’t tell them the exact content, just that I’d lied to her about who I was.”

  “She didn’t know you were a witch,” I said, instantly recognizing the dark sadness in his eyes. I’d seen the same expression plenty in Mom’s and Grams’ eyes right after I’d discovered the big lie.

  “Yes.” Bruce dissolved into a puddle of tears the moment the word was out of his mouth. Hunter and I shared a glance, trying to figure out what to do with the sobbing man. Emotions weren’t exactly either of our strong suits.

  “I’m sure you were just trying o protect her,” I said to Bruce, in an attempt to comfort him.

  “Yes!” He gasped. “That’s what she doesn’t seem to understand! I just wanted her to live a normal life. Magic is dangerous.”