Maverick didn’t look pleased, but he didn’t kick up a stink, either. “Be careful out there.”

  I managed a smile. “Always am.”

  It was hard not to look back as I walked away.

  ***

  When I wanted a nice place to have a quiet moment, where none of my fellow council members were likely to show up other than Fifi, I went to Sunny’s.

  It was this little breakfast spot, almost a diner, where there were planters that broke up the room, making it feel more private than it really was. Sunny made some of the best pancakes I’d ever had. The coffee was great and there were free refills and it was a hundred percent human run.

  Now, I didn’t have anything against my ‘fellow’ supernaturals, but sometimes it was nice just to sit back and be Taliyah, and not have to think about Princess Olwen and the realm of Faerie lurking around every corner. Sunny’s was like a little oasis of normal in a life that had only gotten weirder by the day.

  So, it was a bit of cognitive dissonance when I pulled up outside the restaurant to find Sunny, sweet, gray-haired Sunny who’d never said anything harsher than ‘bless their heart’, going absolutely berserk and wailing on a street lamp with a baseball bat. She was sucking air through her clenched teeth, her eyes so wide I could see white all the way around them like she was a spooked horse. And she was sobbing as she gave the poor abused lamp post another wallop. Her arms were shaking, and I was worried she was going to give herself a heart attack.

  The instant the cruiser was in park, I was out the door. I didn’t even bother to close it behind me.

  “Sunny. Sunny.”

  It was like she didn’t even hear me, she just wound up for another swing. I could see her pulse fluttering in her throat like a wild thing, desperate to burst free.

  “Sunny, what’s going on? Talk to me. What’s happening?”

  Nothing, no response. There was blood on her hands, like she’d torn her skin with her grip on the bat. I had to snap her out of it, but I didn’t want to get in range of the bat. She wasn’t hurting anyone, apparently, and I didn’t want that to change.

  There were people in the restaurant, pale faced and wide eyed as they stared through the windows. Others were across the street, coming out of shops and stores, no one getting close. That was good. Though, I did notice a distressing amount of under eye circles and dark eye bags among the watchers.

  There were too many humans watching. And that meant I couldn’t do anything too overt, but I needed to bring Sunny back from wherever she’d gone to in her head, so I got as close as I could without getting hit, and clapped my hands together.

  “Sunny!”

  As my palms connected, I sent a little burst of Winter chill through Sunny, trying to shock her back to herself. Her head snapped up then, and she sucked in a gasp like someone who’d just been dunked in freezing water. The bat slipped from her hands to clatter to the ground, and I hurried forward to grab her before she fell.

  Sunny looked terrible. The gentle lines of her face had deepened, until she looked almost haggard, her gray hair slipping out of the bun she always kept it in. Her arms were shaking, bruises blooming under delicately creped skin.

  “O-oh.” Blue eyes blinked up at me, and then around. “Where am I? What happened?”

  I propped her up and made sure she wasn’t going to keel over on me. “I was kind of hoping you could tell me that. What were you doing?”

  “What was I doing?”

  I nodded. “Why were you attacking a lamp post?”

  She looked, if anything, more confused. Tears pooled in her eyes, and her thin lips trembled. “Lamp post? No, no. There was a monster. I… it was outside the window. I thought it was going to attack my customers! I couldn’t let it in, there are little ones in here!”

  My heart gave a bruised little thump against my ribs. The idea of Sunny the breakfast queen, completely human, and in her seventies if she was a day, grabbing a baseball bat from somewhere and charging out to fight a monster so it couldn’t hurt anyone, well, it made my throat tight.

  “And you didn’t think to call the police?”

  The confused blinking got faster. “Well, no. I didn’t want to be a bother, and I thought if it kept coming, someone else might call.”

  Didn’t want to be a bother. Good grief.

  “Okay, well, next time you think you see a monster, call me please.”

  She raised a shaky hand to wipe at her eyes, her expression mortified. “I’m so sorry, Chief. I don’t know what came over me. I just haven’t been sleeping well, and I thought I could tough it out.”

  A flash of icy rage tore through me, and I had to take a careful breath or risk blasting a circle of frost on the road right there in front of all those people. If someone was behind this—if someone was responsible for the entire population of Haven Hollow not getting any rest, I was going to make them pay in ways I hadn’t even thought of yet.

  “It’s okay, Sunny.” It was a fight, but I kept my voice light and professional. “But I think you should see a doctor. It’s dangerous to go without sleep, and I think you’re going to need your hands bandaged.”

  Sunny laid trembling hands on her cheeks. “Oh, I’m so embarrassed.”

  A little girl poked her head out of the restaurant, past the adults milling around. “You tried to fight a monster for us. That’s cool!”

  There were a few chuckles, and a smattering of actual applause, and that at least broke the tension a little. I managed to help Sunny to her feet, and braced her when her knees threatened to dump her back onto the sidewalk. She shifted her weight a little and winced, and I knew she’d be feeling it in the morning, even worse than she was now.

  “Lorraine? Can you handle the place while I’m gone?”

  One of the two head waitresses, a brunette who’d been with Sunny since she’d opened the place waved us off, picking up the bat off the street.

  “Go, take care of yourself, boss. I’ll make sure Shirley gets back to her spot behind the counter.” She waggled the bat, in case I was having any doubt over who Shirley was.

  That seemed to be enough reassurance, and I helped Sunny to hobble her way to my still running cruiser for my second trip to the hospital that day.

  Enough was enough. I needed to get to the bottom of whatever the hell was going on in this town, one way or another. Not sleeping wasn’t just a mild inconvenience—people could get hurt. They could even die if they went long enough without any rest.

  I’d make sure Sunny got taken care of, and then it was time to get to work.

  ***

  What was that quote—the one about life being the thing that happened while you were making plans?

  Yeah.

  The calls started pouring in before I’d even managed to get all the way to the hospital with Sunny. I’d been barking orders, trying to organize things through the cruiser’s bluetooth while also paying attention to the road and trying not to get into a wreck, which got harder, because the people in the other cars seemed to be half-asleep at the wheel.

  The reports were coming in fast and furious. Traffic accidents, more people shouting and running from things no one else could see, people falling, others having extreme emotional meltdowns. It was all signs of extreme sleep deprivation, and the worst of it seemed to be hitting the human population, but the supernatural half didn’t seem far behind.

  After I’d made sure Sunny was safely with the nurses (who, themselves, appeared exhausted), I’d headed immediately back towards the center of town. On my way, I called Maverick to see if he’d gotten home safe, and if things were as nuts in the town center as everywhere else.

  “Worse, I think,” he said, his voice terse. “I’ve had to save three idiot humans from walking into oncoming traffic. Some are just standing around, staring at nothing, and making this annoying whimpering sound in their throats.”

  I took a right and pushed the gas pedal down a little harder. “Is it just humans?”

  “No,” he admitted. “I had to knock out a badger shifter who was screaming about spiders in his skin, and then I hid him in the back room, because I didn’t know where else to put him. The idiot was snoring before his head touched the ground.”

  Not good. Not good at all. It was one thing if the human population fell into some kind of sleep deprived mania, but if the supernatural citizens, some of whom could bench press cars or turn people’s eyeballs into grapes started lashing out, the town was in trouble. Big trouble.

  “Do what you can,” I gritted out as my phone pinged with another call coming through. “And please be careful, Maverick.”

  “That sounds like you’re worrying about me.”

  “You know I worry about you, you idiot.”

  That got me a chuckle and I couldn’t help my own smile as I ended the call to pick up the next. This one was from Marty.

  “Hey, Tally.”

  “Marty, hey.” I braked hard to avoid a car drifting into my lane, and whipped my cruiser around in the other direction with a sigh. Someone needed to be off the dang road in a hurry.

  “I was just going to go check in on the boys. Thought I’d let you know.” I could hear him chewing something crunchy.

  “Oh, good. Thanks.”

  “You sound... stressed. Is everything okay?”

  He sounded suspiciously chipper. My eyes narrowed. “I don’t know,” I answered honestly, but then it hit me that it was a good thing that Marty was going to go and check on the boys. If Chloe was even half as far gone as some of the people I’d seen that day, I didn’t want her alone with the boys. Best case scenario, they were practicing their synchronized napping. Worst case, I didn’t want her burning my house down.

  “Well, you’ll let me know if you need to talk?” he asked and it suddenly occurred to me that out of everyone, Marty was the only one who... well, who sounded like himself. Okay, what the heck? I felt like all my clothes were made of cinderblocks, so how the hell was Marty so perky?

  “Aren’t you tired?”

  There was a pause while Marty swallowed something. “Tired? Why should I be tired?” he asked, hesitantly. “Should I be?”

  My thoughts were whirling, little sparks trying to fire in my brain while the gray fog of exhaustion tried to smother them. Marty wasn’t tired. And he was the only one who wasn’t.

  I tried to pitch my voice like a conversation and not like an interrogation. “How have you been sleeping, Marty?”

  “Fine? I mean, about the same as usual. I’m fine though, if that’s what you’re asking?” He sounded baffled. “Tally, is everything okay?”

  Marty, unlike everyone else I’d interacted with for days, was fine.

  Marty, my cousin.

  Marty, the Null.

  My hands clenched down on the steering wheel so hard that my fingers ached. So, clearly whatever was going on had a magical source if it wasn’t affecting Marty. Oh boy, was someone going to get it.

  “I’m fine. Thanks, Marty.”

  And then I had to hang up because the driver I’d been following came to a stop as he rolled forward into a drainage ditch, one of his back tires popping off the ground with the weird angle.

  I sighed and called for a tow truck.

  Chapter Eight

  Forget doing any detective work, or chasing down culprits, or even getting a clue as to who in the world would curse a whole town, much less why.

  Instead, I spent the day racing from scene to scene, trying to put out fires both literally and figuratively.

  Haven Hollow felt like it was coming apart at the seams. It wasn’t until well after dark that I managed to stagger home, and by the time I pulled into my driveway, I was so exhausted that I had to put my forehead down against the steering wheel and just breathe for a second, or I would have been sick.

  My eyes felt like they had sand in them, dry and gritty. My head throbbed, pressure wrapped around my entire skull, and my stomach bucked and heaved like a ship out at sea, and all I wanted was to crawl into bed with my sons beside me, and sleep for at least the next week.

  And I wasn’t the only one. As far as I could tell, everyone in town was so exhausted that I was hoping they wouldn’t get into any trouble before morning, because if I got called out in the middle of the night, I was going to go evil snow queen on the world and bust out an eternal winter.

  I’d even checked in with our resident sleep specialist, Syd, who ran a mattress store in town and claimed to be the literal sandman. Even though he’d essentially sold out of magical mattresses, he was also overcome with the inability to sleep. And if the sandman was suffering from no zzzs, you knew it was a bad situation.

  I dragged myself up the front steps of my house, my eyes throbbing in time with my heart. The vice around my skull winched a little tighter, and as I pawed through my pockets for my house keys, a flicker of light at the corner of my eye made me lift my head.

  I was expecting fireflies, honestly. I’d gotten used to seeing them around, so any little unexpected bit of light I assumed came from them. But there was no sign of the cheerful little bugs. Instead, there was a beam flitting around, like someone was using a flashlight, but I couldn’t see the person using it. The way the shaft of light was flicking around, it made me wonder if someone was lost out there, trying to find their way out of the trees.

  My pillow was singing its siren’s song from the house, and all I wanted was to go inside, and not worry about any problems for a few hours, but being Chief of Police in a small town meant you didn’t just get to ignore people who might have been in trouble just because you were tired, or felt like your skull was going to pop open at any moment.

  Dragging up my last ounce of willpower, I stepped back down off the porch and headed for the tree line a couple of houses over. The flashlight swung wildly, as if the person carrying it was panicked. Someone was definitely lost out there—but I still couldn’t make out anything other than the beam of light.

  “Hello,” I called, projecting my voice. “Can you hear me? Do you need help?”

  The light stopped swinging, like the person was listening to me. But they didn’t answer, they just waited.

  “Hello?” I waited another few seconds and then dug my thumbs into my temples to try and ease some of the pressure from my head. I was going to have to go out there and lead them back out of the woods, I was sure. I’d accepted it. Now, I just had to do it so I could tuck my sons into bed and go to bed, myself.

  I grabbed the mini mag light I kept on my keychain and took a couple of steps into the trees. Grass whispered against my jeans, and the branches creaked overhead even though there was no wind.

  “Go traipsing through a creepy forest at night,” I muttered, pushing a low hanging branch out of the way. “Just what I wanted to do instead of going to bed.”

  The shadows seemed to pull together, crowding close to the narrow yellow light of my flashlight beam. The wind was still, and the area beneath the boughs was strangely warm. Whoever was out here still hadn’t moved. No, they were waiting for me.

  I sighed in frustration before trying again. “Hello?”

  “Candace?”

  I whirled around, startled, to find Chloe watching me from the front steps of my porch. She pulled her cardigan around her more tightly as she watched me, her brows pinched together into a concerned expression.

  “What on earth are you doing?”

  I gestured briefly towards the woods. “I see a flashlight beam out there and I think someone is lost. I’m going to go and try to lead them out.”

  Chloe bit her lip in concern while she glanced at the trees. “What flashlight?”

  Sure enough, when I twisted back around, the light was gone. The woods were completely dark and eerily silent. Strangely silent. No bird song, no insects. Nothing.

  I rubbed my eyes, but the flashlight beam didn’t come back, and no one called out. And that was odd. Had I simply imagined it? Was I that tired that my mind was playing tricks on me? Not a great thought to have. Either way I looked at it, I needed to get some sleep.

  I shook my head and trudged back towards the house, and the concerned young woman watching me. “I could have sworn I saw something out there.”

  The words came out more defensively than I meant them to, but Chloe didn’t comment. She just gave me an understanding smile as I took a step through the front door, and almost doubled over as a wave of nausea burned up my throat. My pulse drummed a horrible beat inside my skull, and I had to swallow very carefully to avoid puking right there on the hall rug.

  “Oh my goodness, are you okay?”

  I waved Chloe off, bile burning at the back of my tongue. “I’m fine. Just tired.”

  My response was gruff, bordering on rude, but Chloe didn’t look offended, just worried.

  After a pause, just long enough to start feeling awkward, she cleared her throat. “Um, the boys seemed tired today, so we kept everything pretty low key. I helped Sean with some homework, and we watched a couple of movies. Nap time didn’t work out so well, but after dinner, I sent them up to bed early.” She smiled, but it was strained. “I knew they were tired when they didn’t even fuss.”

  “Thank you, Chloe,” I said, and meant it. She was really good with the boys, and frankly, I was starting to wonder what I was going to do without her if she ever decided she wanted a different job. “Are you going to be okay to get home?”

  She blinked at me, confused. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Well, if you’re too tired…”

  My voice trailed off. Because Chloe didn’t look too tired. Chloe didn’t really look tired at all. Her face had a healthy flush, no undereye bags were in sight and there were no shadows either. Her gaze was clear and focused.

  My suspicion raised its ugly little head, sniffing the air.

  I hadn’t seen a person in days that hadn’t been somewhere on the scale between exhausted and living zombie, other than Marty. Did that mean Chloe was a Null, too? Or was something else going on?