Forty, Fabulous and Fae Read online

  I was convinced I still didn’t know the whole story on that one.

  And then, lastly, there was the experience I’d had in the tiny back room of the bookshop yesterday. The one with the giant candle flames and the lightning in my arm.

  I was so distracted with my tumultuous thoughts that I didn’t even realize the little Honda Civic, whose spot I had been so patiently waiting for, had pulled away from the parking space, and I was now just blocking the street. As I pushed the gas down to park, a pristinely cleaned white Tesla whipped out from behind me, tires squealing, and shot into the spot faster than I could blink.

  Out stepped an overly thin woman in a couture skirt and blouse that was probably worth more than the car I was driving.

  “Hey! That was my spot!” I yelled at her.

  But the woman didn’t even bother to give me so much as a shrug. She just stepped up on the curb in her five-inch tall stilettos and marched into the real estate office next to the coffee shop.

  “I hate people,” I murmured under my breath. “I hope she pops a tire today.”

  POP!

  The loud noise was followed by a gush of air. I watched in shock as the back left tire on her fancy car slowly sank down until it was completely flat.

  I think my jaw hit the floor. I was so amazed I couldn’t even feel my body anymore.

  “It was just a coincidence.” Trying to convince myself was no use, and I knew it.

  But I did it anyway.

  I drove on in a haze of quiet shock and found a parking space halfway down the block. At that point, I was late, but I couldn’t even find it in myself to care when I walked in, and Hunter tapped his shiny silver watch mockingly.

  “You’re late,” he said as I sat down. He shoved a coffee mug toward me, black, with no cream and sugar, and then leaned back in his chair to give me a once over.

  “Someone stole my spot,” I told him, absently taking a sip of my coffee.

  Which was ice cold.

  “Excuses, excuses,” he sighed.

  “Well, the least you could have done is give me a warm drink,” I choked, setting the cold beverage down. Cold coffee had never been my thing.

  “Are you sure it’s cold?”

  “Huh?” I asked. Hunter raised a brow and nodded at my coffee mug. Glancing down, I found that the beverage was now steaming, as if it had come out of the pot two seconds before.

  Okay. Either I was losing it, or something else was going on.

  Honestly, I wasn’t sure which option I liked more.

  “Let’s just get to this case,” I said. “What did you want to ask me yesterday?”

  “Who says I wanted to ask you anything?” He shrugged casually.

  “You did.” I replied bluntly. “Yesterday.”

  “No, I just wanted to hear your thoughts,” he grinned, a lopsided sort of smile that made my stomach twist up in a good way. “So go ahead. Share with the class.”

  I gave him a once over. Now was the time to really make my decision. Did I want to talk to this complete stranger about a case that I had some sort of connection to, one that I wasn’t even sure of myself?

  Yes. I did. Because I wanted to know all the details, and no cop would ever give those to me.

  We spent the next two hours talking about the case, and the potential connections I’d made. Hunter explained that the person who’d committed the murders back in 1955 had never been found, and that the case remained open to this day.

  Mostly, though, he observed me. He was good about it, subtle, attempting to watch me in a way that would have been invisible to most other women. But I’d spent years working with criminals, learning to observe their behavior, and learning how they observed mine.

  Hunter wanted something. That was the only thing I was sure of when I walked out of that cafe. Just what that was, I had no idea.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. So, as any sane woman would, I pulled out pictures of the dead women and started to examine them, looking for anything Hunter or the cops might have missed, anything out of the ordinary.

  Anything that would tell me why there had been a shrine to those women in the bookstore. Or why my grandmother was convinced that she’d be the next woman killed.

  But I couldn’t find a damn thing. I looked, again, at the picture of the first of these recent killings.

  The woman was named Muriel Clarke. She was thirty-five, single, and a social worker. Muriel had dedicated her life to saving children from abusive situations, and finding them good, safe homes to live in.

  Why someone would want to kill a saint like her was absolutely beyond me.

  I leaned over the picture again, staring at her dead body, splayed on the bed, with that awful symbol carved into her chest. I hadn’t even bothered to question Hunter when he’d revealed these photos to me. They were evidence in what I had started to consider “my case,” and I’d take whatever I could get.

  “Who did this to you?” I murmured to Muriel’s dead body. Carefully, I stroked a finger down the smooth photo paper as a wave of sadness threatened to overtake me.

  Abruptly, the space around me shifted, and within a second, it was as if I wasn’t in my own room anymore.

  I was standing in Muriel’s bedroom. I recognized it from the photograph. There was the photo of Marilyn Monroe that hung over her bed, the pink curtains over her windows and…

  “Oh my God!” I screeched.

  Muriel was on the bed, underneath a dark, hooded figure as it tied her wrists to the bedposts. She was screaming and crying, begging her killer to spare her life.

  “Stop!” I bellowed. “Get off of her!”

  But it was as if I wasn’t even there. Neither one of them seemed to hear me. Desperately, I tried to move, to run over there and help her, but I couldn’t. My feet were glued to the faux hardwood floors of her apartment.

  The killer said something then, in another language. I couldn’t quite make out the words, but it sounded like Spanish, maybe? Or Latin of some sort?

  Muriel kept struggling, but the killer grabbed her mouth and shoved in a tiny, tulle bag filled with what looked to be a mixture of herbs.

  “What is that?” I murmured, trying and failing to step closer.

  And then, just as quickly as it had come, the vision was gone, and I was back in my own room once more.

  I gasped as my familiar walls fell back into place. I could feel the cool softness of my comforter underneath me, could smell the soft lavender of the calming spray Grams misted over our pillows every day, and yet, I still felt as if I was in that room with Muriel, listening as she begged a psychotic stranger to spare her life.

  And as he denied her.

  Those screams would haunt me forever. Tears streamed down my cheeks, but I didn’t make a sound.

  What the hell had I just seen? I didn’t even know if it was real, or the product of some over exhausted nightmare brought on by stress and overwork.

  I grabbed my phone, which was perched on the antique bedside table, and shot off a quick text to Hunter, praying relentlessly that he told me I was foolish.

  Were any of the victims found with a bag of herbs in their mouths?

  Those three little bubbles appeared to indicate he was typing, and I held my breath as I awaited his response. I wasn’t even sure what I wanted him to say.

  Then, his response came in.

  Yeah. How did you know?

  I don’t know how long I stared at those five little words. It might have been two seconds or two hours. But I couldn’t even bring myself to respond.

  “This is crazy,” I chided myself. “Crazy! There is no way…”

  The word wouldn’t even leave my lips.

  Magic.

  I was starting to believe that magic was real. That the little potions and sage bundles Mom and Grams sold were a smidge more than funny trinkets.

  I needed tea. I wasn’t a huge tea drinker, normally, unless I was super stressed. When I was a child, Mom had always made me a cup of her “specia
l tea,” and it would calm me down within seconds. That was what I needed, because I felt the exact opposite of calm. In fact, I felt like I was going to rip out of my skin if I thought about the absolute insanity that had invaded my mind any longer.

  I padded down the stairs and headed for the kitchen, assuming everyone else was asleep. Herman meowed softly from his cat tree by the window, but he didn’t bother to get up.

  Even the cat knew it was late.

  Apparently, though, my mother did not. I caught a flash of her curly red hair as I rounded the doorway, but she didn’t even see me.

  Her back was to me, and she was standing at the old, temperamental stove that sometimes liked to just stop working for absolutely no reason at all.

  “I hate you, you silly old thing,” she snapped. “I always have to do everything myself.”

  As if to prove her point, she raised her hand in the air, snapped her fingers, and then threw a tiny ball of fire at one of the gas burners, lighting it up.

  I’m pretty sure that’s when I fainted.

  8

  I’d never fainted before in my entire life.

  Fainting’s not nearly as normal as TV and movies make it seem, seeing as I’d gone forty years without doing it. But, apparently, seeing my mother snap her fingers and create fire out of thin air was just the kick in the ass I needed to turn into some swooning 1950s housewife.

  Admittedly, the colors that were dancing behind my eyelids, as I was vaguely aware that I had slipped out of consciousness, were a lot more appealing than what I would see when I came back to the world of the waking.

  Until, of course, someone shoved a vial of smelling salts under my nose, and I was rudely brought back to the real world by the abhorrently strong scent of eucalyptus and peppermint.

  When I opened my eyes, the very first thing I noticed was the intense, bright lights above me. They came into focus slowly, and I could see that I was laying on the kitchen floor, under the fluorescent recessed lights Mom had installed three years ago.

  The next thing I saw were the two very worried faces of Mom and Grams, hovering over me like they were afraid I was about to up and die on them.

  “Oh my God!” I bellowed when the memories of the last few minutes came flooding back into my head. I shoved myself away from them, sliding backwards on my butt across the kitchen floor until my back slammed into the hard wood of the kitchen doorway.

  “Shannon, calm down,” Mom said, her voice uncharacteristically calm. “You just fainted.”

  “Yes, I did.” I nodded vigorously, making some sort of attempt to process what I had just seen, while also trying to look like I hadn't already been wondering if magic was real.

  Admittedly, I kind of wanted the high ground of feeling like I’d been lied to for forty years, and had held no suspicions up until that point.

  “Any particular reason?” Mom asked, still eerily calm.

  But I knew what she was doing. She wanted to figure out how many more lies she could get away with tonight.

  “I saw everything,” I spat, springing to my feet. The movement was a little wobbly seeing as how the edges of my vision were still blurred from losing consciousness, but I made sure to keep my gaze focused on Mom and Grams.

  Herman, apparently sensing the drama that was about to unfold, pranced into the kitchen and leapt up onto the table to press himself into Grams’ side, purring softly. Grams reached out an absentminded hand and ran it along his back gently.

  “How old is that cat?” I demanded suddenly.

  Mom and Grams looked down at Herman, then back at me.

  “The… cat,” Grams repeated.

  “Yes, the cat,” I replied. “Is that not what he is? Are you going to tell me we’re aliens, too?”

  “Oh my goodness we are not aliens!” Mom guffawed. “Don’t be ridiculous, babe.”

  “Uh-uh.” I shook my head vehemently. “I am not the ridiculous one. You wanna know what’s ridiculous? The fact that you’ve been lying to me for forty years. What’s your number one rule, Mom?”

  Elle McCarthy’s eyes went so wide, she might as well have been a character in a cartoon. Her mouth plopped open, but she managed to snap it closed quickly and shake her head.

  “Rules don’t apply to moms, remember?” She crooned, calling back to what she used to tell me as a child.

  “That doesn’t work anymore,” I replied evenly. “The rules have completely gone out the window, clearly! I mean, who keeps secrets like this? Secrets. I don’t even know what these secrets are! I mean, are we aliens, or like, some sort of creatures from a parallel dimension, or did we pop out of a TV show and just appear in this realm? So many possibilities. So many lies. So many things have been happening, and I couldn’t explain them. But now I can! I think. I don’t know. Maybe I can’t. Like the flight attendant. And the tire. Ooh, I hope that stupid woman with her stupid Tesla got stranded on the side of the road for hours!”

  I have this horrible tick, see, when I get stressed. Well, maybe it’s not a tick so much as a really poor coping mechanism. Kenneth used to call it my “crazy time,” because when I’d have a particularly stressful case, I’d pace around the living room for hours and hours, talking aloud to myself and trying to work out all of the kinks in the situation.

  Without even realizing it, that was exactly what I was doing now. It wasn't until I ran straight into one of the kitchen chairs and probably bruised my hip that I realized I wasn’t even talking to Mom and Grams anymore. I was sort of talking at them.

  The two of them were the picture of calm, though, as they watched me make an insane attempt to turn a freak show of a situation into something semi-normal.

  An impossible task.

  I sucked in a deep breath and turned to them, mustering up as much calm as I possibly could.

  “You done?” Mom asked with a quirked eyebrow.

  “Yes,” I sighed. “All done.”

  “Sit down.” She pointed to the chair in front of me.

  “No, it’s fine,” I shook my head, even though my legs were a little wobbly. But I was filled with this juvenile determination to do the exact opposite of everything my mom wanted.

  “Sit, before you faint again,” Grams ordered, her voice stern.

  “Okay, I’m sitting,” I put my hands up in defense, and plopped my butt in the chair.

  A pregnant pause filled the room. The kind of tense silence you can actually hear, as if the atoms themselves are buzzing with stress and anxiety.

  “We’re witches,” Mom finally said.

  It was confirmation of something I'd already hypothesized. But that didn’t make it any less preposterous when she finally said it.

  And the way she said it. With such important finality, as if she’d been gearing up for this conversation for years.

  Which, I supposed she must have been, if she’d been hiding magic from me this entire time.

  I couldn’t even look at them in that moment. The betrayal I felt was like a rock twisting and growing inside my stomach, pressing on my lungs and making it nearly impossible to breathe. It made me want to puke or punch something all at once.

  I dropped my face into my hands and stared down at the wooden table, taking note of every craggy little dent in its surface. Bruises from a long life of sitting in our kitchen, dealing with two growing girls and countless visitors, endless visits from teenagers who didn’t know the meaning of the word “antique,” and, apparently, whatever sort of witchy magic Mom and Grams had been cooking up in here for the last… who knew how long.

  I guess my silence must have started to scare Mom, because I felt her kneel down next to me and put her hand flat on my back, rubbing it up and down like she always did when I was this upset.

  Except, for the first time in my life, my own mother was the one who had caused this immeasurable ache in my heart.

  “Say something, Shannon, please,” she murmured.

  For a moment, I couldn’t. There was a lump in my throat the size of Antarctica, and
I was afraid that if I opened my mouth, all that would come out would be an uncontrollable torrent of tears and snot.

  Herman, in a very uncharacteristic move, pranced across the table and nuzzled the top of my head, purring the whole way.

  “That’s a good familiar,” Grams murmured behind me, almost to herself.

  “Familiar?” I mumbled curiously. My head snapped up, and I was once again reminded that I had about a thousand million questions to ask them, the first of which started with “How,” and ended with “is that freaking cat still alive?”

  “Yes,” Grams nodded. “Not every witch has them, of course. Your mother doesn’t. But some of us do.”

  "But shouldn’t he have, like, died, or something?” I asked.

  Herman, outraged by the very thought of his death, leapt away from me with an angry hiss.

  “No,” Grams replied. “A familiar dies with his witch. So, if I live to be two hundred and three, so will Herman.”

  “We’re not immortal, are we?” I demanded. Suddenly, the very thought of an eternity in this miserable human world struck me as the most horrendous thing that could possibly happen.

  “No, that’s not our clan,” Mom responded. “Look, baby girl, it has been a long night, and I’m sure you have more questions—”

  “Try a thousand,” I interjected.

  “Right,” she nodded. “But don’t you think it would be better if we sat down and had a chat about all of this when the sun is out and our brains are clear?”

  I narrowed my eyes as I tried to decipher where the hidden agenda was in her words, but I couldn’t find one.

  I did need time to come up with all of my questions, and to be able to sort my thought into something more than what I currently expected to be a barrage of accusations and demands. That probably wasn’t the best way to approach this situation.

  The truth of the matter was that I had a lot to learn, and I needed time to learn it all. Plus, the conversation would probably be a lot more fruitful if my mom and I didn’t butt heads the entire way.