I couldn’t take it.
“Am I a suspect?” I blurted.
“Do what?” Ben shook his head as if he’d misheard the question and stared back at me with a look of incredulity.
“You heard me, Ben,” I rushed the words out before my brain could convince me to shut up. “Am I a suspect in Paige Lawson’s death?”
“Hell no.” He stared at me and screwed up his face in confusion. “Where the fuck’d’ya get that idea?”
“I don’t know,” I shook my head as I sighed. “I was there… All the stuff that’s been happening… Now you’ve obviously got something bothering you-presumably because of that phone call-and you’re keeping whatever it is from me…”
“Gimme a break, white man,” he said. “Hell, I don’t even tell my wife everything about work, okay?”
“Yeah, maybe so, but I’ve got a feeling that whatever that phone call was about, my name got mentioned in there somewhere.”
“Listen…” he sent a hand up to massage his neck and gestured at me with the other. “You’re just gonna hafta trust me on this. That call is prob’ly gonna turn out to be nothin’, but even if it doesn’t, I just can’t discuss it with ya’ right now. Okay?”
“Probably going to turn out to be nothing,” I repeated his words. “So it does have something to do with me then?”
“I told ya’, I’m not goin’ there.”
“But if it has something to do with me…”
“Row, drop it.”
“Ben…”
“Now, Row.”
I wasn’t going to get anywhere with him, that much was obvious. I was also breaking the cardinal rule of not pushing Ben Storm into a corner, and I knew better. I decided I’d better heed his advice.
“Yeah. Okay. Sorry. You know how I am…”
“Yeah,” he harrumphed. “No shit.”
I cocked my head in the direction of the dining room and changed the subject. “So everyone’s getting ready to eat.”
“Great,” he nodded. “I’m starvin’. You gonna tell me what we’re having yet? It smells good.”
“I think you’ll like it.”
“Okay, but what is it?”
“Food, Ben. Trust me, you’ll like it.”
“Well, if I don’t, at least I’m covered.”
“You didn’t really bring a sack of belly-bombers, did you?” I asked.
“No, but I got a coupl’a frozen pizzas out in the van. All I gotta do is borrow your oven and I’m good ta’ go.”
I shook my head and grinned at him, “I can’t believe you did that.”
“Hey, a man’s gotta eat.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the back of the house. “By the way, did you say your deal was over with out there?”
“We’ll officially cast circle a bit later, but that’s not for a while yet. So except for tending the fire through the night and clearing the towers later, yeah, it’s pretty much done. Why?”
“So it’s all clear for alcohol?”
“In moderation, yeah, sure. Since you aren’t participating, you’ve pretty much been clear all along.”
“Shit, wish I’d known that, ‘cause I need a Scotch like right now.”
“Yeah, me too. Do me a favor and pour me one while you’re at it,” I said as I stepped past him. “I’ve just got to hit the restroom first.”
“You sure you wanna drink? I thought ya’ said alcohol wasn’t allowed in the circle thing, and if y’a still gotta do that later…”
“I’ve got awhile yet. Besides, in this particular case I don’t think the God will mind if I relax a little bit.”
“Okay. You’re the Witch.”
“Yeah. Don’t remind me.”
The hairs along the back of my neck were still on end by the time I returned to the dining room. It was becoming more obvious by the second that something very bad was waiting in the wings for its chance to overturn my world.
And I hated not knowing what it was.
CHAPTER 17
The sun was riding a southern arc in the cloudless sky, casting its brightness across the cityscape as I hooked my truck onto Clark Avenue and then a couple of blocks later found myself a parking space directly in front of City Police Headquarters. After easing between the diagonal lines, I levered the vehicle into park and paused a moment. Finally, I took off my sunglasses and tucked them between the headliner and passenger side visor then switched off the engine.
December 24 ^ th had stealthily arrived as a follow-up to our celebration of the winter’s solstice; sneaking into the fold as it always did each year, no matter how prepared you thought yourself to be. Two entire days had passed since the party, each of them an almost indiscernible fraction of time longer in lighted hours than was the day before. The Sun God had been reborn, but the new solar year had still brought with it the issues left unresolved during the previous turn of the wheel.
However, as if in honor of a secretly declared cease-fire, the 48 hours had passed with nothing blatantly out of the ordinary happening to me. No dreams, no uninvited visions, no sleepwalking. Not even the barest twinge of a waking nightmare. In Felicity’s estimation, and that of others around me, this all appeared to be a display of my progress; an outward indication that my psyche was on the mend. I wished that I could agree with them, but I’d had a similar experience before, and the outcome had been less than pleasant.
To me, this period of supernormal silence was more frightening than anything that had occurred to date; very simply because I could feel the foreboding that they could not. Still, as I said, it was nothing horrific; nothing that was overtly driving me as had the events of recent past. This was merely an indefinable aggravation that would tickle and itch, doing all that it could to irritate me, asleep or awake. Each time I would think it had finally gone away, it would pop up in a different corner of my brain, tempting me with shaded emotions that hinted at a future it had no intention of actually revealing in advance.
The sense had been with me ever since Yule, bolstered in part by Ben’s cryptic attitude following his secretive phone call. Deep down inside I knew this was a harbinger of things to come and these fleeting days were merely the calm before the storm. What I feared the most, however, was that if this level of calm turned out to be directly proportionate to the intensity of the coming squall, then I could never be prepared for what I would have to face. I was truly afraid that in the grand scheme of things, everything up until now had been the metaphorical equivalent of nothing more than a spring shower.
For a time, I made an almost hourly ritual of mutely begging the Lord and Lady to reassure me that I was wrong. When it became obvious that my pleas were to be left unanswered, I gave up.
Truth be told, what I really needed to be doing right now was forgetting about it all and taking some time to relax. Whatever it was that was coming was still an unknown, and there was simply nothing I could do to stop it. Not at this stage of the game anyway. I was just going to have to ride it out. On top of that, a new calendar year was almost upon us, and the more mundane tasks in my life would soon multiply. January tended to be one of the busier months for my consulting business, for with a simple turn of the year, annual budgets magically refreshed and people started renewing support contracts and planning system changes. With that being only a week away, the lull in my day-to-day grind had already started to dissipate and would soon be coming to an end. Once that happened, if I was still dealing with a plague of ethereal horrors, I was going to be a complete wreck-as if I wasn’t one already.
For the moment, I had no place to be and nothing much to do. I really needed to take advantage of the situation. It would be a perfect day for some quiet meditation and grounding exercises, especially considering that I could have the whole house to myself with no distractions.
Today being Christmas Eve, Felicity-fully decked out as one of Santa’s helpers-was visiting a local children’s home with her nature photography club. And I do mean she was fully decked out. In fact, I was actually finding it hard not to think about how she’d looked when she left the house. To the kids I’m sure she simply appeared to be a rather perky elf, but to your average red-blooded adult male… Well, let’s just say her costume wasn’t “standard issue” for the North Pole, and she did it justice in ways Father Christmas hadn’t originally imagined, if you know what I mean.