I shook my head and rubbed my eyes. I didn’t want to see her get run over again. But I did. Over and over again.

  Chapter Thirteen

  We were drinking coffee in her kitchen, something we didn’t do nearly enough.

  The first thing I’d done once I’d gotten control of myself was call my sister and confirm that Tammy was okay. Once confirmed, I threw on some clothes, ditched the makeup, pulled my hair back through an Angels ball cap, and was out the door faster than, officially, any woman ever.

  I had precisely two more panic attacks before I finally pulled up to my sister’s house. Once there, I rushed into the guest bedroom that Tammy shared with Mary Lou’s own young daughter, Ellie Mae. My sister always loved her own two-word first name, and blessed (or cursed) her own daughter with one of her own. Anyway, both girls were sitting up in bed, texting. Perhaps texting each other. Kids these days. Tammy shot me a look that suggested she disapproved of my very existence on this planet. But she was alive.

  I’d done my damnedest to shield my thoughts from my powerfully telepathic daughter, to bury my concern and panic, and I think I might have succeeded. “Love you,” I had said, and she’d rolled her eyes.

  In the kitchen, Mary Lou handed me an oversized mug that was, I was certain, exactly twice the size of my stomach. We sat at her cute little kitchen table that overlooked her cute little backyard, and three sips of perfect coffee later, I was bawling like a baby.

  Mary Lou came over and took the cup from me. She set it aside and kneeled down and wrapped an arm around my shoulders. Our heads touched, our hair intermingled. Two sisters who had taken two very different paths.

  She whispered some sympathetic words, instinctively aware that I wanted to keep this mini-meltdown from my daughter and my son, who was playing video games upstairs with his younger cousin, Billy Joe. Yes, Billy Joe. I think I might have cried a little harder with that last thought.

  My face slid to her ample bosom, pulled down by the sheer gravitational force of her breasts. Had I been an air breather, I surely would have suffocated by now. I managed to pull away, just as a napkin materialized in my hand. Yes, Mary Lou was that good of a mother and sister and friend.

  “She’s fine, Sam.”

  I closed my eyes and looked away and made a small whimpering noise. The images of her dead in the street came flooding back and the whimper nearly turned into another bout of tears.

  “Nothing’s happened to her, Sam.”

  “Yet,” I said.

  “Don’t talk that way—”

  I raised a finger to my lips, especially since I knew my sister was about to launch into one of her Law of Attraction sermons.

  “She can hear us?” asked Mary Lou.

  My sister’s home was big, maybe even twice as big as my own. Then again, that wasn’t saying much. Danny had never really gotten his career going and the money had never really flowed in from his end. I’d made more than him as a federal agent which, I think, had gnawed at him. When I started working private, our money situation turned erratic at best. Maybe that was why the bastard had turned to his lurid side business. A side business that, as far as I knew, was still nothing more than smoking ruins.

  To the world, Danny was still officially missing. And, since I doubted anyone would find his body buried deep within a cave, he would stay missing. I, of course, knew he was dead. So did my kids, and so did my sister. Most definitely my sister, as she had been a pawn in his plot to do away with me.

  Anyway, few people asked about him, which spoke volumes of his futile life. My kids, it seemed, were the only ones who missed him. Little did they know he sometimes appeared in their bedrooms, or just outside their doors, or in the far corners of our house where he watched us silently, before disappearing into nothingness again. I never, ever mentioned his presence. His spirit haunting our place would do little to help them move on. I could see spirits, but I rarely interacted with them. It seemed that the interacting part was largely contingent on them. Few seemed to try. Most seemed content to appear, to watch, then disappear again.

  Once again, I held the oversized mug in both hands, and looked at my sister through the steam that was still rising. Through her open sliding glass door, I could hear the birds singing and chirping and squawking. I knew she fed the birds each morning, and squirrels, too, I thought. She had not one but three birdbaths in her backyard, with small wooden bowls scattered around her garden for all the little critters. Her backyard was a veritable wildlife sanctuary. She had everything from raccoons to skunks to hawks showing up.

  With all the chirping and chittering going on behind me, I said, “Truthfully? I’m not sure what Tammy’s range is, but I suspect it’s significant.”

  “How significant?” Mary Lou was dressed in mom jeans—she loved her mom jeans—and an old-school, sleeved softball shirt that was now wet with tears.

  “I’m wondering if there is no limit,” I said.

  “What does that mean?”

  I thought about that, as even this concept was new to me, too, but it felt right. “If she has established a prior connection with someone, I think—and this is just conjecture on my part—I think she has the potential to dip into their thoughts from anywhere on Earth.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “Just a guess, but I’ve seen some evidence of it. She seems to know where I’m at most times, for instance.”

  “Every teen’s dream.”

  “And every mom’s worst nightmare,” I added.

  “We do tend to rely on stealth,” said Mary Lou.

  “Stealth is out the window with her.”

  “She can read other family members, but you can’t?”

  “Exactly. At least, not immediate family members. Never really tried third or fourth cousins.”

  “But she can?”

  “Oh yes. And not just family members, but other immortals, too.”

  “Kingsley?”

  I nodded.

  Mary Lou said, “Does he know that?”

  I nodded again.

  “Good. Should keep the bastard honest.”

  Mary Lou hadn’t been as forgiving as I had been of Kingsley’s past transgressions. Mary Lou claimed it was her job to remind me of it as often as possible. Once a cheater and all of that.

  “He’s not a bastard,” I said, then giggled. “And, yeah, he tends to stay away from her. I don’t think he wants her to know all his secrets.”

  Kingsley, I knew, had lived an interesting life. Before he was a famous defense attorney, he had seen and done his fair share of questionable activities. And by questionable, I meant raiding local cemeteries and feasting on rotting corpses. You know, normal stuff.

  “Is she listening to us now?”

  “If she wanted to,” I said.

  I wondered if she could control thoughts, too. That gave me pause for thought. Hell, was she controlling me now? I doubted it, but that was just the thing with mind control, one never really knew.

  “So it doesn’t really matter where we have this conversation then?” asked Mary Lou.

  “Not really.”

  “Or how low we keep our voices.”

  “Well, the others could always overhear us,” I said. “You know, in the traditional way.”

  “We have the strangest conversations, Sam.”

  “We do.”

  “I’m not sure I enjoy them.”

  I waited, sipping, wondering again who those kids were in the car with my daughter. I hadn’t recognized any of them. Then again, I hadn’t gotten the clearest look at their faces. That was the thing with my prophetic dreams... they gained clarity over time. The closer to the event, the more details emerged.

  “I mean, I enjoy talking to my kid sister—a kid sister who looks nearly a decade younger than me, mind you.” My sister was six years older, and I’d been part of the undead club for a decade. “But I’m not sure how much I enjoy talking about all of this... craziness, you know?”

  I nodded. “I know. You would prefer to talk about the kids and school and movies and Game of Thrones.”

  “Well, yes. Normal stuff.”

  “Mary Lou, normal flew out that window years ago. Like a bat. A vampire bat. I wouldn’t know normal if it bit me on the ass.”

  “You see, it’s these kinds of conversations. They are unsettling to me.”

  “Are you saying you want me to not talk about what I am, and what my family is going through?”

  “Maybe just a teensy bit less? Is that too much to ask?”

  I thought about getting mad. I thought about overreacting. But I thought my sister had a point. This past decade, our conversations had been dominated by what I am, what was happening to me, and the general weirdness of all things Samantha Moon.

  “Let me get this straight,” I said, my voice rising a little. I feigned righteous indignation. “Are you telling me that your life doesn’t revolve around me?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you—”

  I cut her off. “And that you have, in fact, a life outside of vampires and werewolves?”

  She caught on. “A thriving life, in fact. A very fulfilling life.”

  I lowered my voice and sat back. My little faux tirade over. “I’m sorry, M-Lou,” I said, using her high school rap name. Yes, she had a rap name, and, no, I never let her forget it. Ever.

  “Thank you, Sam.”

  “So when’s the band getting together again?”

  “The band?” she asked, blinking, then put it together. “I was in a rap band for precisely two weeks, Sam. Two weeks.”

  “Two of the greatest weeks of my life,” I said.

  “You’re terrible. Oh, no, you don’t, Samantha Moon!”

  And now I was off of my stool and in the center of her kitchen floor, going through her rap routine, a routine I’d watched her practice dozens and dozens of times with her friends; over and over they’d practiced their moves and flashed wannabe gangster signs.

  “My name’s M-Lou, and I’m coming for you,” I rapped, and did their hop, skip, slouch dance perhaps a little too well.

  “Sad that you still know that—”

  I ignored her. “I drop sick rhymes for these scary times...”

  “Oh, God. Kill me now...”

  I did their routine, sliding right, then left, waving one arm, then the next. Now, elbows up, hands swinging. The robot zombie, as she used to call it.

  “Mommy,” I heard a small voice ask from the kitchen entrance, “what’s Aunt Sammie doing?”

  “Never letting me forget, baby. Never letting me forget.”

  “We like cute boys and we cannot lie...” I rapped, and accidentally slid into her stove. Ellie Mae giggled and ran over with me, picking up the dance moves quickly, or at least trying to.

  Mary Lou shook her head. “My. Worst. Nightmare. Ever.”

  “Oh, stop, M-Lou,” I said, sliding to the left, then to the right. Ellie Mae slid right along with me. “And join us.”

  “No.”

  “C’mon.”

  “Fine.”

  And she got up from her own stool a little too fast, I thought. In fact, it fell over. She ignored it and joined the two of us in the center of the kitchen. She fell into step smoothly and picked up where I’d left off, channeling her inner thug:

  “We like cute boys and we cannot lie...”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The dance party ended when Tammy appeared in the doorway, shook her head contemptuously, and pronounced that we were all lame.

  I caught up to her in the living room. My niece followed us in, and I asked for some privacy. Mary Lou swept her up and hauled her deeper into the big house.

  “Strong words for someone who used to call themselves Lady Tam Tam.”

  Tammy took to studying my sister’s china hutch, which displayed anything but china... my sister, besides being a closet rapper, had been into all things medieval growing up. Dungeons & Dragons, fairies, sword and sorcery novels, Renaissance fairs. Yeah, go figure. I’d been told repeatedly that I’d been a witch in a handful of past lives. Maybe my sister had been Maid Marian or, maybe, a princess with an aversion to peas.

  “You’re funny,” said Tammy, without looking around. She was eyeing a Knights of the Round Table display that, admittedly, looked pretty dang cool.

  I said nothing, not because I didn’t have plenty to say about my wannabe rapper, medieval-loving sister. But because the dream had come again, and I saw my daughter jackknifing in the center of the road as the truck’s tires thumped-thumped over her exposed stomach. Crushing the life from her and bursting blood from every orifice.

  “Eeww, Mom.”

  Yeah, I doubted that last vision—or memory—had stayed hidden. Too powerful, too painful, too fucking terrible.

  “Such language, Mother.” She had moved on to examining a fairy sitting on a crystal ball. The fairy had blue wings. I wondered if fairies were real, too.

  “Of course they’re real, Mom.”

  “Oh? And how would you know?”

  She giggled and moved on to a red-winged dragon perched on a pewter rock. The dragon was eyeing the fairy. I came over and stood next to Tammy. We were both eyeballing twin swords sheathed in a wooden mantel of some sort.

  “You kind of sounded like you knew what you were talking about,” I said.

  “I’m just joking, Mom. Of course they’re not real.”

  But I wasn’t so sure. I knew when my daughter was lying. I sure as hell didn’t need to be a mind reader for that. She had backtracked, but not very convincingly. “Fine,” I said. “We’ll talk about it later.”

  “You want to talk about the dream.” She moved on to a display of tiny pewter figurines that could have been lifted from a Lord of the Rings board game.

  “It’s not a dream, young lady.”

  Tammy shrugged and touched the glass with her fingertips. She was going to be small like me. I barely scratched five foot, three inches. She had barely tipped the tape at five feet. She was thinner than I’d been at that age. She could thank Danny for that. I’d always had a little, um, padding. Even in my vampirism, some of the padding had stayed, although I was leaner and harder than I’d ever been.

  “Okay, so a vision. Whatever.”

  “Not a vision. And not whatever. It was a premonition. A prophecy. A future happening.”

  She shook her head and I saw the smile reflected in the glass and I sort of lost it. Just sort of. I grabbed a shoulder and spun her around. When I spin someone, they spin. Big, small, in-between. And spin she did, nearly losing her balance.

  “What are you doing, you freak?” she gasped, stumbling.

  “This freak is trying to save your life.”

  When she righted herself, her face was flushed with embarrassment and anger. No reason to be embarrassed. We were alone in the living room.

  “I’m not embarrassed. I just don’t like being treated like a child.”

  “You’re fourteen.”

  “Exactly. I know what I’m doing.”

  “No, you don’t. You’ve seen my vision. You’ve seen yourself being thrown out of a car and being...” I just couldn’t say it.

  “Run over by a truck, Mom. Yeah, yeah, it’s all you’re thinking about this morning.”

  “Who are those kids in the car?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t recognize them.”

  She was looking away from me. I still held her shoulder; she wasn’t going anywhere. “Are you lying to me?”

  Now, she turned and looked at me and gave me a half smile laced with lots of snotty. Lots and lots of snotty. “No, of course not. Then again, you wouldn’t know if I were.”

  “I have my ways, young lady.”

  “Oh, you’re gonna snoop on me?”

  “I’ll snoop if I have to.”

  She took in a lot of air. My daughter was very much mortal and growing and blossoming and looking too cute for her own good. Her mind reading gave her false confidence. And I wished like crazy it would just go the hell away.

  “Not false confidence, Mom. Real confidence. I know what people are thinking around me. I’ve gotten real good at it.”

  “Mind reading won’t save you from that truck.”

  She broke away from my grip, and crossed her arms under her chest and stuck out a hip. There was a chance she looked just like me. “That’s just the thing. I would never do that, Mom.”

  “You would never do it sober.” And then it hit me. The look on her face just before the accident. The wild, jubilant, far-off look on her face. She wasn’t drunk. The others weren’t drunk. They were all on something.

  “I don’t do drugs, Mom. It’s just a dream,” she said, and gave me a small grin and was about to leave, when I caught hold of her hand.

  “Wait,” I said.

  She sighed, already reading the question in my mind. “Yes, the fairies are real, Mom.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I talk to them. I hear them singing at night, and sometimes in the morning, and then, they are gone.”

  “You have got to be kidding.”

  “Are they any less strange than vampires? Or werewolves? Or witches?”

  “I... I don’t know.”

  “They’re not, Mom. They’re real.”

  “Have you seen them?”

  She smiled and cocked her head. “Oh, yes.” And turned and left the living room.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “We found him there, up against the reeds, face down in the water.”

  I was standing with Detective Hillary Oster on the southwest side of Lake Elsinore. A human-shaped form lay under a stain-resistant white blanket. The stain-resistant part was probably a good thing, from what I was hearing.

  “Called you as soon as we got the call,” said the detective. “Took you long enough.”

  “Sorry about that,” I said. I had hit all kinds of frustrating traffic coming out here from Orange County. I’d nearly summoned Talos and sprouted wings through the driver’s side and passenger windows, and flapped myself right out of the sea of brake lights. “Would have been more convenient if the body washed up earlier in the day.”