It took a few seconds for my voice to register, because he shuffled around to face the cruiser, the broom still clutched in his hands. He looked at us, blinking owlishly. “You’re part of it, aren’t you?”

  In a second, I was going to get out and force him out of the way. I didn’t have time for this.

  His eyes narrowed into dangerous slits, nearly disappearing into the nest of wrinkles and bushy eyebrows. “The seagulls,” he hissed, voice almost choked with hatred.

  Maverick whipped off his seat belt and cracked his door open. “Oh, for spell’s sakes,” he hissed, before shoving out a hand, palm forward. The old man then staggered back three steps and sat in a shrub on the side of the road, looking baffled.

  The car door slammed, and Maverick waved me on. “Just drive. Before he stands up and gets in your way again.”

  I did.

  The old man wasn’t the only one, or even the worst we had to deal with. More and more people were wandering the streets, with absolutely no regard for where the sidewalk ended and the road began. There was one woman coaxing the air like someone trying to call a cat to them. Another woman ran screaming in front of the car like she was being pursued by hell hounds. Other people linked arms and stumbled into the road like they were drunk. The worst were the ones shambling around like zombies, with glassy and unseeing eyes, completely uncaring of what was in front of them. Just slow, shuffling steps as they poked their way along, making low whimpering sounds in their throats.

  It was really, really hard not to run people over. I never knew where they were going to go, if they were going to step out into the road or not. I suspected they didn’t know, either. It made them hard to predict.

  There had been one person who was just lying in the road, staring at the sky. I unrolled my window and urged them out of the way with a little blast of winter cold. Soon they were awake, but they staggered off while mumbling about having to pick up a carpet cleaner.

  I didn’t even think any of this was part of the curse, but more the result of it. People needed sleep. And while some supernatural folks needed less sleep than their mundane counterparts, things were getting pretty dicey for us, too.

  I saw a couple werewolves among the wanderers, for sure. Even a demon who wasn’t bothering to hide his deep red skin, which would have been a problem, except that I was pretty sure any humans that saw him would just assume he was a hallucination later. If there was a later.

  I needed to stop this. It was dangerous. People were going to get hurt, and some already had. Not to mention the fact that brains needed sleep to function—if this curse wasn’t lifted soon, Haven Hollow was going to be a town of insane residents.

  It was infuriating, terrifying, to have to inch my way through town. The need to get home, to check on Sean and Charlie, was like a drumbeat in the back of my skull. But I couldn’t risk running into people, or driving over them in a few scary instances. All I could do was inch along, clutching the steering wheel so tightly that my hands ached and my knuckles blanched white. It took a painfully long time to make my way to my subdivision, and at one point I was tempted to just abandon the cruiser and sprint the rest of the way home. But I knew I wouldn’t arrive there any faster. As we got closer, Chloe started rifling through the bag she’d brought with her, pulling out vials and containers, which she started passing to Maverick.

  “Here’s the last of my four-leaf clover ointment. That will protect you from Faerie glamours.” Then she sighed. “Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of things you can use against them—not with Taliyah around, anyway. But that should be safe enough. Oh, and some ground up iron salts. It’s Ferrous Sulfate—fine for humans, but the powder can burn the Fae. Just be careful, because it gets all over the place really easily.”

  “And if I happen to have Fae blood coursing through my veins?” Maverick asked Chloe.

  “Oh,” she answered. “Well, then, I wouldn’t recommend anything I just... well, recommended.”

  I was only half-listening, focusing entirely on keeping the wheels on the road and getting home without any serious injury to anyone involved.

  “I will take my chances,” Maverick said in a grumble.

  When we finally reached my house, I bailed out of the cruiser, barely putting it into park and not bothering to turn the engine off or to close the door. Instead, I bolted up the front steps, slamming into the house, my breath almost solid in my lungs.

  Marty, Sean, and Charlie looked up from the mess in the kitchen. There were globs of batter on the counters, the cabinets, the ceiling, and Charlie sat on the counter steadily munching his way through a package of chocolate chips, his face smeared with candy.

  Marty was understandably shocked at my entrance, but a moment later, he smiled, waving his hands in the air.

  “Oh, Tally, you’re back! Really early, so um...” He looked around the kitchen. “Yeah, you weren’t supposed to see this. Um, okay, don’t freak out. The boys wanted pancakes, and I thought we’d have this mess all cleaned up before you got home.”

  I barely even heard Marty’s babbled apologies. I just ran across the room and pulled the boys into my arms, clutching them tight enough that even Charlie, who loved hugs, squirmed.

  “Taliyah?” Marty’s brows pulled together. “Is everything okay?”

  I smiled, not wanting the boys to know how upset I was. “Everything is fine.”

  Thank God.

  Both the boys gave me worried looks. Charlie’s lower lip wobbled a little. They were so smart, and they could see right through me most of the time. But I just smoothed their hair back and wiped a smudge of chocolate off Charlie’s cheek.

  “Chloe’s here. She’s going to stay with you and Marty while I go to work, okay?”

  Sean was still watching me with a suspicious expression, especially when Chloe came into the house, still wearing her pajamas and barefoot. But Charlie lit up, waving happily.

  Marty was looking more and more confused, standing in my kitchen with a goopy spatula in one hand. I mouthed “I’ll explain later” to him, and he nodded, still baffled, but not concerned about knowing what was going on. He really did remind me of a golden retriever, but in the best ways.

  “Oh, are you guys having pancakes?” Chloe managed to sound cheerful, and I wasn’t sure how she managed. “Can I help? I just need to put some things away first, okay?”

  She hefted her carpet bag and then faced me with a sigh. It was going to stink for me, but knowing that Chloe was going to do everything she could to protect the house from any kind of Faerie enchantment made some tight, ugly emotion wedged up behind my breastbone relax.

  “Okay, listen to Marty and Chloe, okay, boys?” I dropped a kiss to both of their foreheads, and maybe lingered a little too long, before heading for the front door again.

  It was time to get to the bottom of this pixie business.

  ***

  “Come on, come on, pick up.”

  I might have been freaked out and furious, but I wasn’t stupid. I wasn’t about to take on a group of unknown individuals of unknown threat level without any backup. And I definitely wasn’t going to go in without letting anyone know where I was going.

  Not that Maverick wasn’t the best person to have at my back, but I didn’t think for a second that we were invulnerable, and whoever these jerks were, these Will o’ Wisps or pixies or whatever, they’d already been messing with us both for almost a week. And we were exhausted.

  I couldn’t exactly call in my deputies, and Lord only knew what shape any of them were in anyway. With my luck, half of them were now wandering the streets, looking like sleep deprived zombies at the moment. Fortunately, I still had my fellow council members, and some of them were really, really good to have on your side in a fight.

  Too bad I couldn’t seem to get any of them to answer their freaking phones.

  Roy’s phone had just rung and rung and rung. I’d finally hung up and called Fifi instead. If anyone knew where Roy was, it would have been her. Fifi might have been a succubus, but she was still a demon, and that made her tougher and stronger than any human. She also threw a mean punch when she was motivated, and I trusted her. But her phone rang through to voicemail, just like Roy’s had. Frustrated, I hung up and called again. She finally picked up on the third ring.

  “Fifi? Are you there?”

  “Taliyah?”

  “I need your help with something. The town is under attack. Can you–”

  A low, throaty moan sounded across the line, and all the blood in my body tried to relocate into my face. There was then the sound of shuffling, a rhythmic creaking, and a low snarl that had me hanging up before I could continue to be an accidental voyeur.

  Well. I knew what Fifi was up to. And from the sound of it, Roy was with her. So. That was something.

  Maverick gave me a curious look, and I waved him off and decided just to try a different number.

  Poppy answered on the second ring, but she didn’t say anything.

  “Poppy? Are you there?”

  Still no answer—just a kind of absent-minded hum until I hung up again.

  I raked a hand back through my hair and turned to Maverick. “Anything?”

  He hung up, scowling. “Wanda and Lorcan aren’t picking up, which is fine, because Lorcan wouldn’t be able to help us anyway, and even if it was night time, I don’t think anyone would want to have to deal with a hallucinating vampire.” No, he was right. That scenario had just rapidly shot itself up the list of the top ten things I didn’t want to see.

  “What about your other coven members?”

  “Either not answering their phones or if they do, they sound about as good as Poppy did,” Maverick answered on a sigh.

  Fine. It was just Maverick and me then. Well, so be it. We shared a look, and as dark storm clouds started rolling in, we turned around and headed for the woods, side by side.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The trees were full of fog, gray vapor rolling between the trunks, making everything soft and dream-like. Little flicks of pale green light danced and flared in the mist like fox fire, but I wasn’t sure they were fireflies any longer.

  “Stick close to me,” Maverick said, his voice grim. “It’s too dark in there and it would be too easy to get turned around.”

  Since I was pretty sure that was part of the pixies’ plan, I was doubly determined to keep Maverick with me. And that was easier said than done. As soon as we stepped past the tree line, the fog rolled over us like a soft, cool shroud. Sounds then became muffled, until all I could hear was my own breathing and the echo of my own heartbeat in my ears. After only two steps, I reached out to grab Maverick’s hand so we didn’t drift apart.

  His fingers curled around mine and squeezed once reassuringly.

  Somewhere out in the woods, someone screamed.

  I jolted, my pulse kicking into overdrive. With the mist so thick around us, it was impossible to tell where the sound had come from, and I wasn’t about to start shouting and give away our position.

  A branch snapped, and I twisted towards the sound, Maverick going tense beside me. I held out my hand, frost nipping along my fingertips. I wasn’t about to draw my service weapon, not when the visibility was so bad. I didn’t want to risk missing, or hitting the wrong thing. But if whatever was coming towards us was hostile, it was going to get a very chilly reception, literally.

  A werewolf bumbled out of the fog then, a familiar werewolf. I was trying to remember his name, and it took me a second, but I was pretty sure it was James or Jim, maybe. He smiled at me and gave a little wave.

  “Ociffer,” he said as he staggered past us, not even acknowledging Maverick.

  “Oh, good,” Maverick said so sarcastically that it almost looped back around into sincerity. “The woods are full of bystanders who are sleep deprived and brain deprived too, it would seem.”

  I let out a long breath. “Just be grateful he was wearing pants.”

  I heard Maverick mumble something like, “That sounds like a story I’m not sure I want to hear,” before we continued forward.

  Another person careened past us in the fog, never quite coming into view, but I could hear their panicked breathing as they ran. I cursed softly under my breath. With only the two of us, searching the woods was going to be practically impossible, even if it had been a clear day. The fog made the space just feel that much larger, and almost alien.

  I didn’t doubt Chloe regarding what she’d said and who was behind it all. Working for years as a police officer had given me a pretty good sense of when someone was trying to feed me a line, and people had a million tells every time they were lying—tells that most of them never realized they had.

  That had been the exact thing that had driven me up the wall when I’d first come to town in order to investigate my brother’s murder. The people in charge had apologized, and told me Cain had died in the line of duty. But then there had been all kinds of little inconsistencies about exactly what he’d been doing, and who exactly had killed him, or how, for that matter. And then everyone was sneaking around, smiling to my face, and lying through their teeth about everything going on in Haven Hollow. Suddenly, all of Cain’s rambling journal entries about cults and conspiracies didn’t look so ridiculous.

  So, no, Chloe hadn’t been lying. She’d told me the truth as she knew it. Unfortunately, it seemed that she had some pretty big holes in her own knowledge. Changeling or not, she was still an outsider. And there was probably a whole lot about the supernatural she didn’t know. Which meant that Maverick and I were going in blind, both figuratively and literally, thanks to the fog.

  A shadow loomed in front of me then, a split second before something came whistling out of the mist. Instinct caused me to immediately jump back, and the tree branch that had been an inch from clocking me in the skull slammed into the ground instead. A middle-aged man, eyes wide, his breath coming in unsteady bursts, surged out of the mist, swinging the tree branch back and forth like a baseball bat. The fog roiled around him, drifting back from his arms, before rolling back in to press as close to him as possible.

  “Sir,” I barked. “Put down the weapon.”

  He didn’t stop. I didn’t think he even heard me, to be honest. He just kept staggering forward, whipping the branch around hard enough that I was worried he was going to hurt himself. Red crept up his neck, and there was a vein popping in his forehead under the gleam of sweat.

  “Get away from me.” He was repeating the words like a chant, half under his breath, his words slurring together. “Get away from me, get away from me!”

  Whatever he was seeing, I was pretty sure it wasn’t me. That didn’t mean I was going to let him play piñata party with my head though. But this wasn’t some supernatural threat or monster from the beyond. This was just some guy, driven out of his head by sleep deprivation, so I also couldn’t exactly turn him into a block of ice and call it a day. Maverick must have realized the same thing, since he didn’t reduce the poor guy to a smoldering pile of charcoal briquettes.

  Using my magic still wasn’t instinctive to me. Sometimes, I forgot I had it at all. Living my entire life up until a year ago as a human meant that I normally went for the human solution. But living in Haven Hollow meant that sometimes there wasn’t a good human solution. Like when evil faeries attacked. Or when werewolves got out of hand. Or when curses were running rampant through the street. Since I wasn’t about to shoot the poor guy doing his clumsy best to beat me into paste, I needed a better solution.

  I called the cold into my hands then, letting Winter flow through me, my blood slowing, feeling sluggish as the chill crept through my body. And the next time the guy made another panicked swing, I dodged, and grabbed the branch. Ice raced across the bark, and the sap still inside the wood expanded as it froze. With a sharp crack, the branch splintered, then shattered in the man’s hands, falling to the ground in little chunks of wood and sap frozen into amber. The guy staggered, now off balance, and then stared down at his hands with his brows wrinkled together, like he couldn’t understand what had just happened.

  Before his lagging brain could catch up, I grabbed his shoulder and spun him around to face Maverick. In a move like we’d practiced it, Maverick reached out to poke the stunned man in the forehead with a single finger, and he dropped to the ground like his bones had been turned into concrete. For a second, I was stunned. It all just happened so fast, I almost hadn’t tracked it. I opened my mouth to ask what the heck Maverick had done to the guy, but then the first snores cut through the air, and my shoulders collapsed.

  “No idea how long it will last, all things considered.” Maverick shrugged. “But it should keep him out of our hair for a while, at least.” And then he muttered something that sounded a lot like, “Lucky jerk.”

  I couldn’t disagree. Knocking myself out with magic for a cat nap was sounding more and more like an excellent idea. Adrenaline was the only thing keeping my eyes open at the moment, and when that crashed, I was going to be as useless as overcooked macaroni.

  It took a few minutes to heave the guy over to a tree and sit him up with his back braced against the trunk. Maybe not the most comfortable sleeping position, but better than him getting trampled by all the people moving around out here.

  A sob sounded in the trees, and a girl no older than twelve went sprinting past us. She was staggering, and tripped forward badly enough to catch herself on her hands, clawing forward for a couple steps before she managed to get her feet under her again and keep running. My heart dropped as soon as I saw her, because she was so young, and so scared. I couldn’t help running a few steps after her.

  “Wait.” If I could just get her to stop, Maverick and I could help her, I was sure. Running around like she was, she could get seriously hurt out here. But after just a few steps, I knew it was pointless. The fog rolled around her, so thick it was opaque. And there wasn’t even a ripple to say that she’d ever even been there. Chasing her blind wasn’t going to work, and would probably just scare her more. Better to put an end to all of it. Still, it bothered me. To leave a child out here, alone and frightened. It went against everything in me, police officer and mom.