When a ghost was asking me to watch my step, I knew that things had taken a bad turn. “Thanks, Franny. I promise. Would you stay here and keep an eye on the bedroom with Bubba? You can come in the room.” I disabled the wards against her with a flick of the wrist. “Bubba can generally take care of himself but until we know what’s going on, I don’t want to take any chances.”
“Of course. Thank you for asking.” She silently drifted into my bedroom and stood by the window, with Bubba sitting by the hem of her gown.
As I rejoined the party below, Aegis returned, a dusting of snow on his shoulders. The flakes clung to him. He had no body heat to melt them off. I glanced around to make sure no one could overhear us.
“What did you find?” I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but he shook his head.
“Nothing. I didn’t find anything out there. But don’t leave the doors or windows unlocked tonight. Come on, let’s go talk to the guests.”
He stared at me, unblinking, and for the first time since we had met, I was nervous. He was lying and I could sense it. But there wasn’t much I could do.
“Fine. But we need to talk later.” I looped my arm through his and plastered a smile on my face. As we rejoined the party, the evening slid into a mire of doubt and shadow.
Chapter 3
BY THE END of the night, I was exhausted, and Aegis didn’t want to talk. In fact, he seemed preoccupied to the point where I took Bubba and went upstairs to bed by myself. We had occasional nights where we didn’t have sex, especially if we had played around during the early evening, but if he was home, we usually cuddled for a bit before I dropped off at around midnight. Scheduling my days around his nights wasn’t always easy, but we had done our best to synch up. But tonight, I decided it wasn’t worth opening a can of worms, and chalked it up to a grumpy day.
Next morning, I made sure that the basement was secure before heading out for the day. We had rigged up a mechanism where Aegis could bar it from the inside so that nobody could get in. He had a secret passage through which he could escape if the house was on fire or some other nightmare like that, but nobody besides us knew about it. We hadn’t hired the Alpha-Pack for that particular renovation. Instead, Aegis installed it himself and if he said it was secure, I trusted him. It was his life that was at stake.
I fed Bubba, then puttered around the house while debating over attempting to make pancakes. But I knew that my cooking skills weren’t up to the task. In all of the years I’d been alive, I had always managed to avoid being the one stuck in the kitchen.
Instead, I dug out the leftover cookies from the party, along with a couple deviled eggs that were tucked in the back of the fridge, and I added a thick slice of cheddar. In a fit of inspiration, I mashed up the eggs and spread them on a piece of toast, then added the cheese for an impromptu egg sandwich. After that, I finished off a half-dozen chocolate peanut-butter chip cookies, then drank the last few swallows in the quart of milk I found in the fridge. I had never stocked milk until I started living with Aegis, but he liked it, and so I kept it around now.
Bubba meandered past, giving me the side eye as I stood there, eating in front of the refrigerator door.
“What? You eat off the floor. My manners aren’t any worse than that.”
He sniffed, eyeing the milk in my hands. “Mrow?”
“No, I’m not giving you any milk, it’s not good for you. You know what it does to your digestion. The cat box is a horrendous mess and you end up urping for several days.” I tossed the empty milk carton in the recycling bin. “Besides, we’re out. I’ll pick you up some treats when I’m out this afternoon.”
Bubba leaped up on the counter and stared at me with that innocent look of his. He was gorgeous, with his long flowing ginger fur and wide, winsome eyes. “Mrowf?”
I stopped, letting out a short sigh. “No, I don’t know who was on the balcony, but I think Aegis found something. He’s not saying anything, though. But it wasn’t Ralph. I know that much.”
Bubba considered this for a moment, then wandered off into the other room. I watched his tail pluming as the drafts in the old mansion ruffled through it.
The caterers had cleaned up after the party, so there really wasn’t anything to clean, and if there had been, Aegis would have done the dishes while I was asleep. He usually left breakfast for me to eat, but given the amount of leftovers I knew would be in the fridge, I had told him not to bother the previous night. The man could cook and bake like a pro.
Finally, I scribbled out my to-do list for the day—a never-ending trail of shopping and planning—and settled in for a morning’s work on turning the mansion into a place where people would want to come stay.
BY ONE-THIRTY, my head was spinning from numbers-crunching. I squinted, seeing double as I turned off the ten-key. Time to go shopping. I had so many things I had to buy before we opened the next week that I was starting to panic.
Shouldering my purse, I told Bubba I was headed into town and firmly locked the door. As I tromped through the snow to my car, my fur-trimmed coat barely keeping the cold at bay, it occurred to me that I loved my new life, even when there were glitches.
My mansion was on the outskirts of Bedlam, but given how small the island was—twenty-six miles long and from two miles wide on the ends to fifteen miles wide at the center—driving into the town didn’t take very long.
Grateful I had the forethought to buy snow tires for my CR-V, I cautiously navigated Yew Tree Road toward the still-icy Thornbush Drive that would lead me into town. Obviously Harold Winsket had overslept. The chief of trash collection, he was also our snowplow operator during winter. When he couldn’t make it, Skerrit Tomas, his assistant, took over. Both of them were ferret shifters, and they were usually on the spot about their work. But the roads were covered in snow and ice, and the banks were only growing deeper.
As I eased down Thornbush Drive into the town square, I found myself smiling. Living in Bedlam made me happy.
Over the years the architecture had changed, but some of the old buildings were originals, going back to the early days of the island. The post office, city hall, and police station were a combination of red brick and gray stone—the same on the outside as they had been during the 1800s. Oh, they had electric lights now, and heating and plumbing, but the architecture stood true to form, and the buildings rose from under their cover of snow, full of old-world charm and strength. I had my doubts that they would survive a major earthquake, but then again, if the big one hit along the Cascadia Subduction Zone, we were all going to be running for cover.
Bedlam was a tidy town anyway, but she really spruced up for the holiday season. Multicolored lights encircled every tree along Main Street, and wreaths hung from the lampposts, shimmering with the brightly colored faerie lights. Downtown proper was built up around the central square, which acted like a gigantic roundabout.
In the center of the square itself was the city fountain, with a massive sculpture of a cat sitting on a crescent moon in the center. The water had been turned off because of the freezing temperatures, and a layer of snow dusted the cat’s ears and head, and the horns of the moon. There were four Yule trees, one at each corner of the fountain, and shoppers milled through the square, though no one lingered on the benches in this weather.
I found a parking spot in front of McGee’s Apothecary and, bracing myself against the chill, slid out of the car into the biting wind. Snowflakes were blowing every which way as I hurried into the shop. I needed to stock up on ingredients for several of my spells, and I also wanted to get some of Andy McGee’s elixir. It was the best tonic in the world, better than any multivitamin for energy and general vitality. I wasn’t sure what he put in it—he had developed a secret recipe—but it worked.