Page 14 of Wicching Hour (The Sea Wicche Chronicles #3)

FOURTEEN

Necking

D eclan pulled up in front of the gallery and turned in his seat to study me. “You look better. Your eye’s clear now and your neck only has a light bluish ring around it.” His long fingers brushed softly down my throat. “Does that hurt?”

“Not really. It’s still sore, but it’s nothing like it was.” I took his hand and held it in both of mine. “I need the police to stop taking me to the crime scenes of choking victims.”

He squeezed my hands. “The last one wasn’t this bad, was it?”

I shook my head and felt a twinge. “No, but that one hadn’t happened a couple of hours earlier.”

Declan’s brow furrowed. “Why did they call you in so fast? Why aren’t they doing their own investigation first?” His eyes lightened to wolf gold. “You’re supposed to be the last resort when they’ve tried everything else. You’re not supposed to be the sacrificial lamb that lets them clock out early.”

His grip started to hurt, so I wiggled my fingers and he immediately let go. He shook his head and then stared blindly out the windshield. “Sorry.”

I explained the nightmare and the phone calls, everything that had happened before he’d arrived. He listened, his shoulders dropping. He took my hand again, gently holding it on his thigh.

“You saw it before it happened?” He looked back at me, eyebrows raised.

“It happens that way sometimes.” Something had been bothering me for a while and I decided to just tell him. “I’ve been struggling with some guilt about sleeping with you.”

No anger, just concern. “Guilt? Why?”

“When I’m with you, I don’t dream,” I began.

“Which is a good thing,” he said. “You don’t sleep anywhere near as much as you should. I worry about how little sleep you get before you start working with fire or climbing forty-foot scaffolds to paint walls.”

I nodded, accepting the truth of that. “But if I don’t see the horrible thing, I can’t do anything to stop it. It’s not just about you being a null, though. When I joined the Council and had shared visions with Mom and Gran, they saw things I didn’t. I’ve been hiding, trying to put these horrible visions out of my mind most of my life. If I’d joined the Council when they wanted me to, maybe—between the three of us—we could have helped the people that I blocked out.”

He flicked open his seat belt and then leaned over and kissed me. When we broke apart, he rested his forehead against mine. “You don’t owe the world your health and sanity. You protected yourself until you were ready. That’s nothing to feel guilty about.”

He pulled off my glove and twined his fingers in mine. “Those other Cassandra wicches that came before you died when they were children. You’ve learned how to survive this gift?—”

“Thanks to dad’s DNA,” I interrupted.

“Exactly. Which is why pure wicche lines are not healthy.” He was still pissed off that Gran and Great-Gran had made Mom give up Dad when she was pregnant with me because he’s water fae. They wanted the extra punch of power to help me survive but they didn’t want other little half-faelings polluting the family line. Truth be told, I was right there with him.

“So,” he continued, “you’ve had the time you needed to come up with strategies that protect you.” He coiled one of my curls around his finger. “Regardless of whatever your family was thinking when they knew a Cassandra was coming, your goddess didn’t make you this way to torture you and put you in service to the rest of the world. And she certainly didn’t bring me into your life if she didn’t want you to sleep.”

Oh. That helped. He was right. She wouldn’t have gifted me with Declan if she didn’t think I needed dreamless sleep. And him. A tightness in my chest eased.

“You are your own amazingly artistic, culinarily creative?—”

I grinned.

“—gorgeously magical siren who. Needs. Sleep. Having your own wants and needs doesn’t make you selfish and shouldn’t cause guilt. Besides,” he said, “what am I supposed to do without you?”

He looked up a moment and then gave his head a quick shake. “I don’t know what the rules are on spilling my guts like this, but I don’t sleep well without you in my arms. If I’m at my place or in the woods, I don’t go into deep sleep. I’m always hovering near the surface, awakened by a branch bouncing in the wind or a car driving by. My first thought is always, Where’s Arwyn? And then I remember you aren’t with me. But I can’t fall right back to sleep because then I’m wondering if you’re okay. Is there a creep bothering you? Are you having a nightmare? Is your cousin up to some demonic shit?”

Grinning, I kissed his jaw. “Thanks.”

He rolled his eyes. “It’s ridiculous. No one knows better than me just how powerful you are.”

“Nuh-uh. It’s sweet and makes me feel warm inside. I’m not thinking about death and tragedy anymore,” I said, climbing into his lap. I wrapped my arms around him. “Now I’m just thinking about you.”

“My plan worked.” And then he was kissing me, and all thought disappeared.

After quite some time, during which we ended up reclined on his bench seat with him kissing my neck and growling—which did funny things to me—he sat up suddenly. Looking over his shoulder out the window, he spat, “That fucking guy,” and jumped out of the truck, charging across the road.

A car slammed on the brakes and honked, but Declan ignored it. On my knees, I watched out the back window as he went straight for the sedan parked across the street. The guy dropped his phone into his lap and floored it, almost causing another accident trying to get away from Declan.

I needed to talk to Mom and Gran about this guy. Surely we’ve had creepy humans fixated on us before. How did we get rid of them without tipping off the world to the existence of wicches?

Declan came back to the open driver’s door, his eyes wolf gold. “Did you see that? He was filming us?”

“Yeah. I saw.” I shrugged. “We’re single and dating. We’re both fully clothed. He couldn’t see most of the kissing when our heads went below the window. I’ve used spells to get rid of him, but he just keeps coming back. I don’t understand—” And then I remembered the first part of my nightmare last night.

A woman was talking, spreading poison through phone lines, as a man listened avidly and took notes. Shit.

“I think I know why he keeps coming back,” I said.

“Fae blood?” Declan guessed.

“No. I mean, some of it initially. Probably. Now, though, I think Cal’s pushing him to stay on me like that other stalker who was going to kidnap and kill me a couple of weeks ago.”

Still standing between the truck and the open driver’s door, he let out a gust of breath and then grabbed my backpack from behind the bench. He put it on his seat and unzipped it. “Is it wrong that I really want to punch her in the face?”

“In Cal’s case, no. She deserves that and more.” I watched as he rifled through my bag. “What are you looking for?”

He shrugged. “No idea. Osso said he left your backpack on the floor when you went into the bedroom. He forgot about it as he walked you out. When he went back in, he saw it, went to grab it, and noticed it had been unzipped. The house was filled with cops that don’t like you. I’m trying to see if they were just curious or decided to screw with your stuff.”

Grimacing, I leaned forward and peered in. “You don’t smell pee or anything, right?”

Declan gave me a blank stare. “Would I have my hands in here if it smelled like piss?” He gave himself another quick shake and then kissed me. “Sorry. They make me very angry. You go out of your way to help them—at great physical pain—and they harass you like middle school bullies.”

“Yeah. That part does suck.” The pocket where I kept my honey bear filled with seawater looked too flat to hold the bottle. I unzipped and looked. Empty.

Declan reached into the main compartment and pulled out the bottle. “That’s not where it belongs.” He held it out to me.

I reached for it but then snatched my hand back. “You were wrong about them pissing on—or in this case in—my stuff.”

Declan growled loudly, his eyes bright gold again. I shoved the backpack into the foot well and knee walked to him, taking the bottle out of his hand and dropping it into the open backpack. “I don’t want you to crush that and splash us both in seawater and urine.” I laid my head on his chest and wrapped my arms around him. “Sorry.”

He growled again. “Why are you sorry? You didn’t do anything. I’m the one hanging on by my claws right now.”

“And that’s why I’m sorry,” I said, squeezing him tighter. “Cal and her demon are pushing the wolves. My guess, though, is that as Alpha, you’re siphoning off some of your pack’s aggression to keep them from hurting their loved ones. Meaning you’re the one drowning in excess aggression right now.”

“Meaning I’m endangering you,” he said, his voice somber.

“I’m stronger than the human partners and children.” I tipped my head back to look him in the eye. “What’s going on right now isn’t you. One of the things I found so attractive about you at beginning was your control. When Logan was doing everything he could to rile you up, you didn’t rise to the bait. Not once. All you wanted were my brownies.”

His eyes darkened. They weren’t quite his normal deep brown yet, but they were getting there. “That wasn’t all I wanted.”

“Yeah. That was pretty sexy too. So,” I said, sitting back on my heels, “can I make a suggestion?”

“Of course.” He picked up the backpack and put it behind his seat again. “I don’t want you touching that. I’ll get you replacements and burn that.” He got back in and slammed the door shut.

“My suggestion is you take the day off work, crawl into my bed—that smells like me—and sleep all day. Your exhaustion is making it harder to control the way she’s poking at the wolves.”

He opened his mouth to argue but then pulled out his phone and started texting instead. “I’m already late. Kenji and his sister are on site. They can take care of it while I sleep.” He wrapped his arm around me. “You should sleep with me. You only got an hour or two last night.”

“No can do,” I said as a large moving truck pulled into my parking lot. “The shipping people have arrived.”

He growled again, but it was a playful, frustrated one. Those butterflies were taking wing in my stomach again. I was learning the language of his growls.

“Buckle up. I’ll park around back,” he said, turning the ignition. He stopped beside Bracken’s RV, at the water’s edge. Pointing at the ocean, he added, “You should reset. You never know when you’re going to need your magic.”