Page 11 of Wicching Hour (The Sea Wicche Chronicles #3)

ELEVEN

The Return of Sleepless Baking

I hadn’t invited Officer Asshole in because I didn’t want that horrible negative energy in my workspace. Now, though, I opened the back door, hit the lights, and invited Detective Hernández in.

“I’m freezing,” I said. “I’m going to make tea, if you want some.” I went to the kitchen and pulled out my brewing supplies.

“Yes, please,” she said, taking a seat on the couch. “Should I assume you’re shivering right now because you didn’t want him in your space?”

“You’re an excellent detective.” I opened the freezer door. “Do you like meringue? I have some chocolate-filled meringue cookies.”

Hernández leaned back on the couch. “That sounds amazing. Yes, please.”

I turned with a plate of magically thawed and warmed cookies and stopped short. “Oh, no. I’m so sorry about your grandmother.”

The detective blinked and then sat up straight.

“Shit. Sorry! I’m sorry.” I shook my head, disgusted with myself. “Give me a minute.” I put down the plate and walked back to the kitchen. Putting my gloved hands over my face, I built my mental barriers back up, reinforcing them.

When I walked back with two mugs of tea a few minutes later, I placed one on the coffee table for her and then kicked off my shoes and sat in my chair with my legs pulled up, holding the steaming cup between my knees and chest, trying to warm up.

“Please forgive me. I wasn’t looking. It’s on your mind. There’s a lot of emotion wrapped up in it, so I got a flash of her in a hospital bed. I’d lowered my mental walls earlier when I was trying to figure out who was on my deck and what was going on.”

I closed my eyes and breathed in the steam from my mug. “I hate hearing personal things.” Opening them, I found her watching me, her brow furrowed. I took a sip and tried to make peace with the death of yet another friendship. I’d really thought this one might work. She knew a lot about me and still liked me. Past tense.

“I don’t want to talk about that,” she said.

I nodded, staring into my cup.

“Can you tell me what happened with the stalker?” She opened her notebook and began to write.

I went over all of it, including my belief he had been recording me.

“You said his name is Brandon. Can you draw a picture of him?” She asked.

Placing my empty cup on the side table, I stood and went to my computer. “I could, but I have video footage of him. There are cameras all around my gallery.”

Hernández moved to stand behind me so she could watch what I was doing.

“There’s no sound,” I said, pausing the replay when the cloud moved and the guy’s face was visible in the moonlight.

“Can you send me that?” she asked.

I nodded, taking a screenshot and then running it through my digital imaging program. It was what I used to clean and tweak photos for sale. Once I was done, the image was quite clear. “When he approached me the first time—a month or two ago—he was clean-shaven. The beard is new.”

She made a soft hmm sound. “He wanted to look more like Declan.”

My hand on the mouse froze. How had that not occurred to me? “There’ll also be footage of him last night and earlier today on the camera feed from the front of the gallery. Do you want me to pull that up as well?”

“No. This is good enough for tonight. I can get started with what you’ve already given me. But can you check the other cameras to see if you’ve got your stalker leaving and Officer Harding watching him go?”

“Ooh, good call.” I flicked through camera feeds until I found the one on that corner of the gallery. Unfortunately, it was pointed down so I could document and charge anyone vandalizing my gallery. The outer edge of the video feed caught the police car hood but not the windshield. We couldn’t see the cop. The stalker clearly jogged by after the car appeared in the video, though.

“Is that enough to prove he let the stalker go?” I asked.

“No,” she said, voice cold as she scribbled in her notebook.

I didn’t think that anger was directed at me.

“It’s the hood of a dark SUV,” she explained. “There are no insignias we can see that mark it as a police vehicle. Can you send me that video clip too, though? At the very least, I can submit the full report, your phone call—I started recording almost immediately—the images, and videos to my captain and see what he says. Harding doesn’t have a clean record. I know of at least one suspension.”

Turning in my computer chair, I watched her flip her notebook closed before pocketing it with her pen. She took one last sip of tea and said, “Send me what you have there. I’ll go home and write it up and then see if I can talk with the captain tomorrow.”

“Thanks. I know you’re already busy, so I hate adding to your work.” And I hated that my comment about her grandmother was weighing so heavily on her.

“It’s my job, and that officer just let a potentially dangerous man walk free because he’s upset he got reprimanded for pulling his gun on you instead of the suspect in the last case you worked on.”

She stared at the plate of cookies, debating, and then took one. “Lock up after me,” she said and was gone.

Doing as I was advised, I made sure the doors and windows were locked and then put down the window shields. They’d been installed as part of the remodel to keep the gallery safe from huge storms on the ocean. Monterey didn’t get those kinds of storms, but something had made me say yes to the expensive and unnecessary protection. I think in my gut, I knew the danger was far more likely to be from two-legged predators than from a furious storm.

I ate a cookie as I rinsed out the mugs and put them in the dishwasher. Hopefully Declan and the other wolves were getting a break from the aggression Cal and her demon engendered.

Trudging up the stairs, I considered whether or not I should even bother trying to sleep up here. I needed to change, but without Declan keeping the nightmares away, it hardly seemed worth it.

So, after my usual nightly routine, I went back downstairs to stretch out on the couch. I hit the remote, lowered the screen, and then browsed through a streaming service for a nice quiet British mystery with lots of long shots of the countryside. Those always settled me into sleep. How long I lasted before the nightmares started varied.

I sent Declan a goodnight text and then settled in, knowing full well I’d be out before I discovered who’d done it. And I was.

A woman’s voice whispers through a phone line. Poison circles the central processor, weaves through circuits and chips, moving out through the speaker and into the ear of an angry man who feels deprived of what he’s entitled to. Sneering in his triumph, he grabs a pen and starts taking notes.

It goes dark and then…

A leaf crunches under the boot of a different angry man. He stops, lifting his foot and placing it several inches to the right. His focus is on the back of small house in a row of small houses. The ones on either side are dark and quiet. A light remains on in one room. Understanding he needs to wait, he stands beneath a large tree in deep shadows. A phone rings and it’s picked up almost at once.

Lights in the living room and then the kitchen turn on, illuminating the patio. Three flowerpots are filled with colorful impatiens blossoms. He takes out a compact set of binoculars and watches narrow strips of her through barely open blinds, as she moves through the house. He’s thinking about being in her house, being able to come out of nowhere and grab her, like you see in scary movies. Grinning to himself, he steps farther back into the deep shadows under the tree and waits for her to finish what she’s doing and go to bed.

Eventually, as the night wears on, a final lamp is switched off. Adrenaline floods his system. It’s time. Shouldering the bag that’s been sitting at his feet, he moves silently in the night, a shadow moving through the dark.

At the sliding glass door, he shines his penlight through the glass, looking for locks. He takes out a tool, picks the lock, slides it open a few inches, and then pulls a slim pole with a hook on the end from his bag. He pulls on the ends, extending it to its full length, and then reaches through the door with it, dislodging the dowel in the runners at the base of the glass doors as a secondary lock.

He slides the door open, moves in, and then closes it behind him. He has the house to himself now. Her things are his. He can do whatever he wants, and that mouthy bitch doesn’t have a say in it.

The house is small and too fucking girly. Who the hell buys a floral couch? Gaze barely touching on photos, he dismisses them all, too excited to find his prey in her bed. I, though, jolt awake.

Grabbing my phone, I swiped through and tapped the screen. It took multiple rings, but I finally heard, “Arwyn?”

The breath I’d been holding rushed out. “Are you okay?”

“Sure. I mean, I’m awake and confused, but yeah, I’m fine.” Hernández said. Another voice said something in the background, and I knew I’d woken her girlfriend as well.

“Sorry. I had a dream.” I sat up, trying to put it all in order. “The killer was waiting in the back of a house. There was a row of little houses backed up against a wooded area. Lots of trees.”

I heard rustling and knew she was probably getting her notebook. “Do you live in an area with lots of little houses?”

“Wait. You saw me?” Hernández’s voice was alert now. She was up and moving, murmuring something to Andie. “Give me a minute.” The sound muffled and I assumed she’d put her phone in her pocket.

After a few minutes, she came back on. “The house is clear. What did you see?”

I started to explain, and she stopped me. “A floral couch? No. That’s not us. Is this happening now?”

“I don’t know! It could have been last night, last week, three years ago, or tomorrow.” It made me crazy. How was I expected to help if I didn’t know. It wasn’t as if killers held up their phones at the start of visions so I could see the date and time.

“Okay, okay. I understand. Keep going after the couch,” she said.

I did until I got to the photos. “That was why I called in a panic. You were in one of the photos on the living room wall.”

“I was— shit! I know who it is.” She hung up and I was left in a knot of jangling nerves.

There was nothing to paint. I had no lingering images haunting me, so I flicked on the lights and headed to the kitchen. Aunt Hester had told me that cookies had sold the best yesterday, so cookies it was. I checked the refrigerator: eggs, milk, butter. I checked the pantry. I pulled out my mixing bowls and baking sheets and decided to make what had always been a crowd favorite. And by crowd, I meant large family get-togethers. Chocolate chip cookies with Heath bar chunks it was.

I had just started measuring flour when my phone rang. It was Detective Hernández.

“Okay. We’re good,” she said. “It wasn’t my friend Gaby. What you said sounded so much like her place, but she can’t be the only person with a floral couch. If they weren’t popular, they wouldn’t make them.”

“True,” I said, though I was still feeling uneasy. The name Gaby gave me a little jolt of recognition. “Are you sure, though? Did she check? That name… I don’t know. I’m not trying to scare you. I woke up in a panic when I saw your picture.” I thought a moment. “There were big flowerpots on the patio.”

Hernández made a noise. “I’m going over myself right now to check.” And then she hung up again.

Could I have tried to go back to sleep to see more? Maybe. I’d tried before but it hadn’t worked. After nightmares, I was too keyed up to sleep. One time, I tried taking a sleeping pill, but that was a failed experiment. I’d been trapped in horrors, cycling through my brain. I’d learned nothing more and instead had been given more fodder for future nightmares.