Something in the smile unnerved me, but I didn’t have the chance to figure out what. By the time I could get my brain into gear, they were on their way out. I lunged, brushing Essie’s arm on the way to the door, and it only earned me an odd look and dismissive shrug from the pair. Indie’s panic roared through me like a riptide.

  Calm down, I said. Tell me what’s wrong.

  They took it, Indie said in a strangled voice.

  They took what?

  They took her magic away. I don’t know how they did it without killing her, but they somehow managed. They bespelled her, too. That has to be what this is. She wouldn’t infantilize herself for anyone, let alone a man. Someone turned her into a... an insipid, vapid… idiot of a woman! They need to pay for that!

  I wasn’t sure what Indigo was more disgusted by—the fact that someone had targeted her niece or that they’d turned her niece into a teenage stereotype.

  I took another step forward, trying to collect myself enough to go after them. I didn’t want to lose them this time. Indigo would never forgive me if they slipped through our fingers for good.

  “What are you doing?” Angelo asked.

  “I need to...” I began.

  But then somebody screamed. Everyone in the lobby turned towards the noise. I didn’t stop to think. I was in motion before Angelo could stop me. For once, Indie and I agreed on something.

  If a monster was attacking Estelle, we were going to stop it.

  Chapter Twelve

  Lydia

  I was hit broadside by something heavy and was sent sprawling.

  Said something crushed my foot on its way past and I yelped in pain. My arms went out to my sides, windmilling wildly as though that might save my head from cracking open like a rotted pumpkin on the concrete. I tipped backward, still flailing, and would have smacked hard against the pavement, if large hands hadn’t caged my waist. They didn’t arrest my momentum, but did transform it. When I hit the ground, my body met flesh instead of stone. Angelo held me cradled against his chest. He took the brunt for me, grunting in discomfort when he hit the asphalt head-on. We rolled twice before hitting the curb on the opposite end of the ambulance parking lot. He recovered more quickly than I did and propped me up against the curb.

  “Are you alright?” he asked.

  I blinked a few times, trying to reorient myself. When I could finally bring things back into focus, I realized Angelo hadn’t come through unscathed. Blood ran in a thin line down one of his temples. The skin was scraped raw, red beading on his forehead. It reminded me of the times I’d skinned my knees as a kid. He’d sacrificed layers of skin to save me from hitting the ground.

  His eyes narrowed and he snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Lydia, are you alright?”

  “I’m fine,” I answered, reaching up a shaking hand to touch his forehead. “But you’re not. You’re hurt.”

  “I’ll heal.”

  “But...”

  “If you want to help, you could kiss it better.”

  I expected to find him smirking at me, but there was no hint of teasing in his expression. He meant it. A kiss was probably as good as a bandage for a superficial injury when you were treating an incubus. Before I could talk myself out of it, I pressed my lips to the center of his forehead. It wasn’t much, just a brush of my mouth across his skin, but my body reacted like he’d groped me. Nervous excitement zinged up my spine and I let out a shuddering breath as he drew my lifeforce out through that brief contact. When I blinked again, his forehead was still bloody, but it no longer had a source.

  Angelo reached up and smudged a little blood from the corner of my lip. “The vampire look is interesting on you, but I can do without the blood play.” He flashed me an unapologetic smile.

  “Cute,” I grumbled.

  Angelo brushed his fingers over his forehead as if he could still feel the ghostly imprint of my lips on his skin. His eyes closed, as if he was recalling the memory with a small shudder. It was almost obscenely intimate to know he knew how I tasted before even touching me sexually.

  I sighed and pain shot up my foot when I tried to stand. Angelo had to catch me once more, steadying me with a hand on my waist. I ended up in his lap, tucked in close to him.

  “What the hell happened?” I grumbled.

  “Kids,” Angelo muttered darkly, nodding toward the other end of the lot. I turned in time to see a pair of bicycles round a corner and onto the sidewalk of the next road. A cop car was giving chase.

  “But I heard a scream?”

  He nodded. “They were the ones screaming. They probably got spooked when the cop showed up. They must have thought the incline leading toward the ER entrance looked like fun on a bike. Too young to know better.”

  A little of the tension eased out of me. When I’d heard the screams, I’d been sure we were about to witness some poor sap disappearing down the gullet of something big and slimy. It was both annoying and a bit of a relief to realize it was something as trivial as kids playing where they weren’t supposed to. The bike hadn’t landed on me and had only clipped my foot. I was pretty sure I could put weight on it. It didn’t feel as bad as it had a minute ago.

  Angelo helped me to my feet, and I scanned the parking lot, hoping to catch a glimpse of a familiar face or the flash of dark hair that would give me a hint to where Essie and her weird boyfriend had gone. If Angelo hadn’t seen her too, I would have thought she’d just been a figment of my imagination. Something strange and possibly magical was going on here.

  There’s no ‘possibly’ about it, Indigo piped up. There’s magic in the air. Can’t you sense it?

  I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be sensing. The cold was so pervasive that it froze my thoughts, making them as slippery and hard to find traction on as black ice.

  The cold, you mean? I asked. I thought you said that was Taliyah’s doing.

  No, the incubus said that. It’s possible she’s responsible for the snowfall, but the energy I sense is different. It’s not fae. It’s… hostile. Something is or was here, I just can’t put my finger on what that something is.

  That made the skin at the back of my neck prickle. I might not have known much about Indie’s background, but I’d witnessed enough to realize she’d lived a full life before meeting her end in my former shop. She’d seen and done a lot. If a source of dark energy confounded her, it was definitely cause for concern.

  I took another wary look around, searching for the source. Now that I was paying attention, I could feel something odd, but it was just a nebulous sensation, nothing I could really grasp. It felt like those uncertain moments in the theater before the monster jumps out and slaughters the girl on screen. You know the creature is out there, but not what direction it will come from. And that curl of dread in your chest from not knowing was worse than facing the thing when it inevitably revealed itself.

  Of course, I could have been wrong about that. I was still new to the world of monsters. There were probably plenty of things out there that were a lot worse than dread. I just hadn’t met them yet. If all went well, I’d keep avoiding that meeting.

  “We need to go,” I said softly, pitching my voice as low as I could. If there really was something with large teeth and sharp claws lurking nearby, I wanted away from it. Almost in response, I spied Angelo’s BMW where he’d parked it in the emergency room parking lot.

  Angelo gave me a quizzical look. “I thought you wanted to look for Indigo’s nieces? Why the rush to leave now?”

  I shook my head. I wasn’t sure how to explain this to him without sounding like a crazy person. I couldn’t reveal Indie’s continued existence without pissing her off. But what else could I say? I didn’t imagine that ‘I just have a bad feeling’ would go over well.

  “Please?” I asked, a note of desperation leaking into my voice. I hated it, but it made him soften. I didn’t like being Angelo’s damsel again, but if it got me away from the unsettling feeling I was experiencing, I’d allow myself to be less of a feminist, just this once.

  Angelo nodded and wrapped an arm around my waist and helped me hobble along. I leaned on him gratefully and scanned the parking lot around us, expecting something to lunge out from behind a Toyota and sink four-inch fangs into my calf. It didn’t happen. Nothing dropped down on us from above or let out a primal shriek designed to stop my heart. It was just the still, ominous cold that made my chest ache, even in the warm air inside the cab of the car. It felt like someone had pressed a block of dry ice against my breastbone. I kept expecting frostbite to bloom like a black rose under my skin.

  “You seem scared,” he said and opened the car door for me, then helped settle me into the passenger seat.

  “The kids really spooked me,” I answered.

  “Well, everything is okay now,” he said as he started the engine and cranked up the heat. Even though I could feel it blaring at me, I still couldn’t seem to shake the bone-gripping cold. It was like it had settled inside me and nothing was going to shake it.

  Angelo pulled out of the parking lot and when I looked to my right, I could have sworn I saw a pair of eyes peering at us from over the bed of a nearby pickup truck. Then Angelo whipped around the corner, and it was lost from sight, leaving me wondering if my eyes were playing tricks on me or if there really had been a creature crouching in the Chevy.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Angelo

  Lydia was uncharacteristically quiet on the way back to Haven Hollow.

  Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t the chatty type at the best of times, but I wouldn’t have characterized her as a shrinking violet either. Yes, she preferred to have her cute little nose stuffed into a book or hovering inches away from some occult knick-knack or other. Usually, I wanted to rip the book away and kiss her breathless when she tried to protest. But I never acted on my impulses. Instead, I usually compromised by initiating a conversation. I was good at it after so many years working at the realty office. If you kept the social gears well-oiled, you were more likely to sell a house. A creepy realtor resulted in a home sitting vacant for months, if not years. Lydia was a verbal jouster, always keeping a quip ready in case I gave her cheek.

  I liked that about her.

  More and more, it wasn’t just her looks that drew me in. It was the way her head canted to the side when she was thinking deeply about something. It was the uptilt of her lips when she smirked at something I’d said. It was the bubbling sound of her laughter that evoked the image of bubbling champagne every time I managed to be lucky enough to make her laugh.

  It was her.

  Dark ones below, was this woman underneath my skin? Was it even possible that an incubus could form real feelings for a woman? I mean, yes, it was obvious such was the case with Fifi and her sasquatch, but I’d always imagined she was just the outlier—the one succubus who was born with more morality than was fair. But could the same be said for me? Was I becoming less superficial? Was I getting attached? Dark ones below, I hoped not. My poor parents were already pulling their hair out due to the quandary that Fifi represented. If I turned out to be cut from a similar cloth, they’d probably suffer total hair loss.

  “Egad,” I whispered. “I’m going soft. And that’s something that no incubus wants to be.”

  Lydia didn’t laugh or ask me what the hell I was talking about. In fact, she didn’t react at all. Her stare was focused on the middle distance before us. The stretch of land between Haven Hollow and the nearest hospital wasn’t much to look at. Just long stretches of farmland dotted occasionally with a church or a cemetery. Judging by the glazed look in her eyes, I doubted she was even seeing it. She got that look when she was having an internal conversation with herself. It happened often. Introspection was a hobby of hers.

  “Lydia?” I asked, raising my voice to be heard over the drone of the radio. It wasn’t a tune I’d heard before. But that wasn’t super surprising—if it wasn’t music from my youth or played over the speakers at clubs, I wouldn’t know it. I met a lot of willing prey that way. At a bar or on the dance floor. Strangely, I hadn’t found myself in such places in a long time—well, since Lydia had come into my life, anyway.

  Lydia jerked upright at the sound of her name, choking down a spluttering sound. The look on her face would have been cute if her persistent silence hadn’t been so concerning.

  “What?”

  “I’ve been trying to talk to you for a few seconds now. Where is your head at?”

  Her demeanor was... off. I wanted the Lydia I knew back, but I wasn’t sure how to manage that.

  “It’s nothing,” she lied, trying to discreetly rub away the evidence of the goosebumps rising on her arms. “Ignore me. I’m just being paranoid.”

  “Paranoid about what?”

  She cocked her head to the side as if she was searching for a response. “I think the Estelle and Lavinia thing spooked me.”

  “If you’re scared, I want to help.”

  “I’m not scared,” Lydia snapped back. “I’m just... spooked. There’s a difference.”

  “Yeah, ‘spooked’ has two o’s in it, and ‘scared’ has none. Want me to track down my pocket thesaurus and demonstrate how synonyms work?”

  She smacked my bicep, and I hid a grin. There she was again. When she settled back into her seat, she folded her arms sullenly across her chest. Better. I liked sullen more than scared.

  “Since when do you own a pocket thesaurus?” she muttered. “I wouldn’t even think you had a dictionary.”

  “Well, technically the thesaurus is Fifi’s and, you’re right, I don’t own a dictionary either. And I’m pretty sure the only reason Fifi bought the hardbound thesaurus was because she thought it was a decent weight to chuck at my head whenever I annoy her.”

  “I don’t blame her,” Lydia laughed.

  I nodded. “The first word she told me to look up was ‘ass.’”

  “Meaning you?”

  I nodded.

  Her lips twitched once. “And what are the synonyms for you, then?”

  “I was rather partial to ‘knave’, now that you ask,” I frowned at her. “It has a kind of old-school flair you just don’t see these days.”

  That earned me a brief but genuine smile. If I hadn’t been driving, I would have tipped her chin up to taste her lips. When a woman was happy, I could taste it, like powdered sugar on a brownie. You could eat it without that extra sweetness, but you appreciated it when it was there.

  “Tell me what’s bothering you,” I repeated after a moment of silence.

  “It’s nothing. Just a feeling.”

  “What sort of feeling?”

  She shrugged. “I think something was watching us in the parking lot before we pulled out. I had the same feeling when we left the hospital and the feeling hasn’t left me. It’s like—this weird fear that something is following us.”

  “Hmm.”

  “But it has to just be my imagination right? I mean, if a monster was tailing us, we’d know it, right?”

  Not necessarily, but I didn’t say as much aloud. Humans, and creatures built like them, don’t look up as a general rule. Usually, there’s no need. Nothing flying in the mundane world was strong or motivated enough to view humans as prey, so the instinct to check the sky was missing in most humans and in their evolution. It was the big bads on the ground—the bears, wolves, big cats—that humans had to fear. Supernatural predators were a different story though. And many of them could attack from the air. Better not to tell Lydia as much though—she was obviously creeped out enough as it was.

  But if there was something in the air, surely I’d sense it. There’d be a feeling to it—an overall warning that would settle in my gut like an anvil. But all I could sense at the moment was the swirling cold of Taliyah’s Winter magic. I wanted to call and tell her to knock it off because my defrost was barely keeping up, but I didn’t. Firstly, I wasn’t that suicidal. One did not tell the heir apparent to the Winter Court to calm herself unless they were prepared to become meat in an avalanche sandwich. Second, Taliyah had good reason to be upset. Her deputy was dead, killed by something large, nasty, and unknown. Stress was the name of the game right now. I’d done worse than lower the temperature when my powers had come online the first time. The ambient pheromones had actually made my aunt and uncle get back together again after inexplicably jumping each other. They were a holy terror at family reunions, constantly at each other’s throats. Neither one of them had ever figured out why they’d been drawn back into a relationship, but I knew. I’d inflicted that unhappy couple on the family again. Shudder.

  “I don’t feel anything but the cold,” I said.

  “Yeah, me either,” Lydia responded, rubbing her arms with more vigor. “It’s like... fog.”

  “Fog?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, does that make sense? When something is so thick and pervasive that you can’t even see the world in front of you? Except it’s magic, not mist?”

  Actually, I did understand what she was talking about, despite the word salad. The cold was so thick and potent that I could barely pick up the tangible feeling of the Hollow’s ley lines when we crossed over them. And that was strange. Not only that, but it shouldn’t have been happening. Lydia was onto something.

  I slowed the car to a crawl and pulled into the first driveway I could find. It turned out to belong to a church. A handful of cars and a hearse were parked in the lot. Must have been a funeral. I put the BMW into park then twisted the keys in the ignition and shut the engine down. But I didn’t move. Instead, I scanned the surroundings, looking for a good place to get a read on the land. I’d be more likely to sense something hiding in the magical ‘fog’ if I was stationary.

  Lydia scanned the lot warily and reached for her seatbelt. “Shut the car off. You don’t want to waste gas.”

  “I did,” I said as I turned to face her with a frown.

  Lydia cut her gaze to me sharply. “You did? Then what’s that sound?”

  “What sound—?”

  But my words were cut off by the sound of a low growling that was coming from our right. It was quiet at first, like the sub-audible hum of a passing car, but it was growing louder by the second, soon transforming into the thundering bass beat of a subwoofer. I sat up straighter, eyes wheeling to find the source of the noise.