Page 41 of Wicching Hour (The Sea Wicche Chronicles #3)

FORTY-ONE

The Importance of Pants

“H oly crap!” I ran into the gallery so I had a wall of windows, forty feet high, to watch the show.

The storm suddenly ended.

Faith held a hand over her mouth. “Oh, no. I forgot! Jake and Tyler will be sopping wet.”

Declan laughed. “That was incredible, and they’ll survive. Once we tell them—assuming it’s okay to tell them—they’ll think it’s as amazing as we do.”

I gave Faith a suspicious look. “When we had that heat wave a couple of weeks ago, was that you in a bad mood?”

She giggled, delighted by our reaction. “No. That was climate change.”

“She was kind enough to give us a cool breeze in the backyard, though,” Elizabeth said, “so we could have a nice dinner.”

I glanced over at Bracken, who was watching the rain droplets meander down the windows. “You don’t have to look. It’s done now.” He had a hard time with my wall of windows because they weren’t perfectly square. It was a very old building, after all.

He looked down, tapping his pockets, a sure sign he was agitated. I went to him and took his arm, leading him back into the studio.

He patted my gloved hand. “I’m fine. I just feel as though I’ve let people down. I disappeared when Elizabeth and Bridget were still adolescents. If I’d stayed, perhaps I could have been of service. At least been a gentle and attentive friend in the family.” He shook his head. “It was wrong of me to abandon everyone.”

He was speaking softly to me, but Elizabeth must have heard because she came up on his other side.

“Nonsense, Uncle Bracken. We saw how they treated you. It actually felt empowering when you walked away. I hadn’t known that was possible. You showed me there was another way.” She thought a moment. “Have you ever flown?”

He nodded. “Once. It was miserable.”

“They tell you to secure your own oxygen mask before you attempt to help others. That’s what you were doing. You had to find your own peace before you could offer it to others.”

He smiled and nodded. “I’ll try to think of it that way. Thank you.”

My eyes went to the table and my stomach dropped. “The maps are gone!”

“No, no,” Bracken said. “It’s all right. Given Cal’s interference tonight, I didn’t want to leave them behind.” He pulled his journal from his inside pocket again and took out the maps. “I’m afraid we got sidetracked. Perhaps we should get back to business.”

I let out a sigh of relief and tried to settle my jangling nerves. Flicking my fingers, I put down the shutters. It felt like we needed all the protection we could get for this discussion.

“Now the third map is interesting,” Bracken said, “but I’ll let Arwyn explain.”

He was allowing me to decide how much to share. “I’m going to give you guys the highlights because the whole story isn’t necessary for our planning. My dad came to the gallery opening. Before he left, I told him about the Cal situation and asked if he had any scouts or guards or whatever who could search the shore for demonic darkness.”

“Oh,” Faith breathed. “Good idea.”

“I didn’t hear back right away. I know Dad’s a big shot and busy, so I figured he just hadn’t had time to get to it yet. Anyway, I was sitting on the deck, listening to that horrible podcast about burning me?—”

“What?” Elizabeth interjected. “What podcast?”

Declan took over when I paused. “Arwyn has had issues with stalkers all her life.”

Elizabeth looked appalled. “Why were we not told?”

Robert glanced at Bracken. “As your uncle said, if she received safety and comfort from someone else, it would weaken the connection to her moth—her gran.”

“She was abducted by a pedophile,” Declan continued, “when she was three? Four?”

Elizabeth gasped and Faith looked close to tears.

I waved my hand, trying to get us back on topic. “The point is I have another stalker right now. When he confronted me on my deck a few weeks ago, I’d had enough of his ignoring my demands to leave, enough of the creepy looks and innuendo, so I froze his lungs for a few seconds.”

“You can do that?” Frank asked, impressed.

I shrugged. “Defensive magic was the first thing I was taught so I could defend myself.”

“So you could defend them ,” Bracken murmured.

“After I released him and told him to run, he bounced off the chest of a very angry werewolf who picked him up off the deck with one hand.” I shook my head. “He was terrified when he ran, but fear often turns to anger and, in his mind, it was no longer about him trespassing on my property and being a creep. Now the issue was me being an evil witch who needed to be burned at the stake.”

“But how did he jump to wicche?” Faith asked.

I got up, went for the pan of churros, and brought them back to the table. I took a bite of one, needing the sugar, and said, “Calliope, of course. I had a vision of her talking on the phone to the stalker, getting him pumped up with evil witch talk. He has a gun and promised Cal to kill me tonight, so everyone needs to take special precautions and no one walks outside until I’ve checked that the coast is clear.”

“What about Tyler and Jake?” Faith asked.

“No one is going to confuse two tall, muscular men with me. If anything, they’ll find him before he sees me,” I told her. “Remember, wolves have perfect eyesight, even in the dark, and they can smell the metal and gunpowder from…” I looked at Declan.

He tipped his head back and forth. “Depends on the conditions. On a calm night in the forest, maybe a mile. Here, with the high winds and the muddled town scents…definitely farther away than he would need to be to take a shot with a handgun.”

Frank and Faith’s eyes went wide.

“Your guards are distracted with arsonists right now,” Bracken reminded us. “Ones who have already tried to set fire to the building. That gasoline smell would probably blunt the scent of a gun. Now would be the perfect time to attack you.”

Recognizing the truth of that, I went to my computer and pulled up the camera feeds on my screen.

Declan stood, muscled tensed. “Did you see that?”

I was standing right in front of the screen, and I hadn’t seen anything.

“Fourth camera,” he said. “There was a flash of movement just on the edge of the frame.”

“Otis?” I stared at the screens but couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, other than Jake and Tyler looming over two trussed-up men on the ground who were struggling and appeared to be cussing out my guards. They were near the front of the parking lot, the opposite side of the gallery from where we were.

“There,” Declan said again, suddenly beside me. When I leaned forward to run it back, he put a hand on my arm to stop me. “We need to see where he is now, not a minute ago.” He pointed to the camera feed showing the arsonists. “They’re the distraction, taking the guards out of play, yelling over whatever noise the one sneaking over here is making.”

A chill ran down my spine.

There was a shadow and then a man stepped onto the deck with something shiny in his hand. Declan started to move, but I caught his arm as a huge wave swamped the deck, slamming the man into the outside wall of the hot shop.

I heard a gasp behind me and realized that everyone was now circled around the screen, watching.

When the water washed out, my father was standing on the deck, bare-chested. He palmed the stalker’s face and picked him up with one hand. Water flooded out of Dad’s hand and seemingly down the man’s throat. He held the convulsing man until he went limp and then threw the stalker over his shoulders onto the rocks. Another large wave crashed over the rocks and swept him out to sea.

Dad looked up at the camera and raised a hand in greeting, then pointed down and mouthed Pants before disappearing. Everyone stood stunned, but I started laughing and couldn’t stop. The others were watching me like I was crazy. I finally stopped wheezing long enough to repeat, “Pants.”

I made my way back to the table. “Well, that’s one less thing we have to worry about tonight.”

Frank pointed at the screen. “Is he dead?”

I nodded. “Most certainly. If he washes ashore, he’ll have water in his lungs, and it’ll be ruled a drowning. Chances are, though, Dad threw him back in the water so scavengers could feed.”

Declan and Bracken accepted this and returned to their seats.

“I’ll have Jake and Tyler find his car and ditch it somewhere far from here so his disappearance isn’t connected to you,” Declan said.

Elizabeth and her family were less used to crazy, deadly shit happening and therefore stood together, looking warily at the screens.

“Sorry. This is what it’s like to be in the thick of it. I’d feel worse if he hadn’t come here to kill me. Don’t forget, I’ve already read him. I know exactly what he planned to do with me, so you’ll excuse me if I don’t mourn my torturer. And just so you don’t think I’m a callous nutjob, I wasn’t laughing about his death. I was laughing at my dad. The first time he rode a wave onto my deck, he was naked. I told him I’d be much more comfortable if he at least put on some pants. Tonight, he made sure I noticed that he was wearing pants.” I couldn’t stop grinning.

“Well,” Elizabeth began, ushering her family back to the table, “if he was planning to hurt you, then it’s good that your father took care of him. That’s what parents do.”

Once everyone was seated, I resumed story time and told them about my visit to the bottom of the sea.

Stalker forgotten, Elizabeth and her family hung on every word, rapt. When I got to merpeople, Faith gasped.

“Long story short, it was the fae queen in disguise. She eventually revealed herself to me and gave me that map,” I said, pointing.

“As you can see”—Bracken took over the telling—“Both the queen’s map and Orla’s overlap on these two spots as Calliope’s possible lair.”

“Wait,” Elizabeth whispered, leaning forward. “You met the fae queen?”

I nodded. “She is the most beautiful being I’ve ever seen in my life and exudes so much power I was feeling lightheaded in her presence.

“The point is,” Bracken continued, “that the same two places were identified. We need a plan to investigate both.”

“We have a boat,” Robert said. “We could sail to both locations, see if we can find a way past the wards.”

Faith sat up straight. “I could call up a storm. It might be warded to be invisible, but we’ll notice if rain bounces off nothing.”

“And I found a spell in that grimoire you borrowed,” Bracken said, “that I think can get us past a ward.”

I looked at everyone assembled. “Can we do this tonight? Maybe we just look for properties, but if we find it, are we ready to go in?”

“I’m afraid we have to be,” Bracken responded somberly. “She’s figured out how to use us against you. A man died tonight because she pushed and pushed him to kill you. Two more men are headed to jail for attempting to burn you and your gallery to the ground.” He picked up the maps. “These are a gift. We need to act on them before it’s too late.”