Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
Gertie Morton said whatever came to her mind and had no problem putting the members of Galen’s group in their places. Her diner was frequented by locals because the food was so good. It was also off the beaten track, so we could talk openly without worrying about tourists eavesdropping.
“There’s my favorite girl.” Gertie gave Aurora a long once over. “Did you change your moisturizer? Your skin looks really good.”
Gertie had settled on Aurora as her favorite member of the clique.
I assumed it was because Aurora was never singled out in a group of gregarious personalities and Gertie felt she needed the attention.
I was also grappling with the notion that maybe — just maybe — Gertie did it to bring Galen and Booker down a peg or two.
As for Lilac, she was used to people liking her, so not being Gertie’s favorite had become something of a personal challenge.
I found the whole thing hilarious. Lilac didn’t find it funny in the least.
“How does my skin look?” Lilac demanded. “Do I look like I discovered a new moisturizer?”
Gertie blinked, her face impassive. “No,” she replied before glancing over at me. “And you look as if you haven’t been sleeping.”
I’d learned not to take Gertie’s comments personally. She didn’t mean them as insults — well, mostly — but arguing with her about any of it was a complete waste of time. “Sorry.”
“I don’t need an apology,” Gertie replied. “I need to know why you’re not sleeping.” Her gaze immediately went to Galen. “Are you being a pervert?”
Rather than be offended, Galen laughed. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.” He pressed a kiss to Gertie’s cheek before leading me to a booth to get settled. “I haven’t been too perverted this week.”
Gertie looked to me for confirmation. “He hasn’t,” I confirmed. “There was a blue tongue thing last night. I was just as perverted as him.”
Gertie smirked. “Well, if he’s not being a pervert, why do you look as if you’ve been run over by a golf cart three times in quick succession?”
“I didn’t sleep well.” I slumped in the booth seat next to Galen. “I’ll perk up after some coffee.”
“I thought you found Wesley,” Lilac said. “Shouldn’t you have slept like the dead?”
“One would think,” I replied dully.
“She had a nightmare,” Galen volunteered.
“A dream,” I clarified.
“A nightmare,” he overruled, sending me a severe look. “I think Declan is trying to contact her in her dreams.”
“Declan?” Gertie was no longer messing around. “Declan Wilkes?”
Galen arched an eyebrow. “Did you know him?”
“Unfortunately. He was a bad man.”
“He wasn’t a man at all,” I said.
Gertie scowled. “He was a bad warlock.”
She was a psychic, but apparently she didn’t know everything. “He was more than that.”
Gertie adopted a quizzical expression. “I don’t follow.”
“It turns out Declan Wilkes was more than any of us realized,” Galen explained. “Hadley was in his house yesterday.”
Aurora bobbed her head. “Lilac told us the story. Hadley saw a mural with her mother’s face in the house. She learned Declan was a dhampir. We’re all caught up.”
“Gertie’s not,” Galen countered. He sent Aurora an exasperated look. “I want to talk to her as much as I want to talk to anybody.”
“I didn’t know,” Gertie admitted in a small voice. She appeared rocked by the news. “I had no idea.”
“Do you know what a dhampir is?” I asked.
“In theory,” Gertie replied. “A human-vampire hybrid.”
“Jareth insists the human must be a witch, so, to be more accurate, it’s a witch-vampire hybrid.”
“Interesting,” Gertie mused. “Did he tell you why that is?”
“Humans can’t survive the birthing process.”
Gertie shook her head. “Let me put your orders in. I’ll come back with coffee and juice. Then we’ll get into it.”
Gertie turned on her heel and headed to the kitchen without asking what we wanted.
“Remind me why we come here again,” I complained to Galen. “She doesn’t even let us decide what we want to eat.”
“Have you ever been disappointed?”
“Isn’t the customer always right?”
He laughed and patted my head. “You’re adorable. Will you marry me and make me smile like this forever?”
There was no stopping my eye roll. “You’re very corny this morning.”
“He’s a whole ear of corn,” Booker complained. “It’s gross. Stop it.” He balled up a napkin and threw it at Galen’s head.
Galen slapped it away. “Don’t push me.”
“Stop that,” Gertie admonished as she emerged with a tray of coffees and juices to dole out. Then she grabbed a chair from a nearby table and sat with us. “I need to know everything.” she insisted.
“You heard about Wesley going missing?” Galen asked.
“I did.” Gertie flicked her eyes to me. “I was going to come see you, but I wasn’t certain that was a good idea.”
“I would have been happy to see you,” I assured her.
She smiled.
“I would have been happier if you let me order my own breakfast,” I added. “Just once.”
Gertie pretended she hadn’t heard me. “You found Wesley last night. The news spread through town this morning. Everyone is relieved.”
“We found him,” Galen confirmed, “but we’re missing a few steps in between.”
He started telling Gertie what we knew. A pause was enacted so Gertie could retrieve our breakfasts from the kitchen. He resumed as we ate and she sat in the chair again.
“You think you saw your mother on another plane?” Gertie asked me.
I swallowed hard. “Essentially,” I confirmed as I mixed my eggs and hash browns together. For once Gertie had brought me exactly what I would have ordered. It didn’t feel like a coincidence.
“How would that work?”
It took me a full bite to realize she was asking the question of me. “I have no idea.”
“We’re not a hundred percent positive it’s Hadley’s mom,” Galen interjected. He looked distinctly uncomfortable.
“You’re not positive,” Gertie countered. “Hadley, even though she’s fighting the urge to argue with you, does believe it was her.”
Galen’s sigh was long and drawn out. “I knew it.”
“I don’t know that it was my mother,” I hedged “I … well, it’s been brought to my attention that perhaps I’m projecting.”
Gertie bobbed her head. “You’ve only ever heard stories about your mother. A child will always be desperate to know where she came from.”
“The thing is, the stories my father told are vastly different from the ones Wesley and May told me,” I said. “She sounds as if she were two different people. A wild child here, a respectable wife and mother on the mainland.”
“People mature,” Gertie noted. “These guys haven’t.” She gestured to Booker and Galen. “This one has matured into a fantastic adult.” She smiled at Aurora.
Lilac raised her chin and harrumphed.
Gertie didn’t look at her, instead training her eyes back on me. “You don’t have to apologize for wanting that to be your mother.”
Galen protested. “I just want her to be realistic.”
“Why do you get to decide what’s realistic?” Gertie challenged.
“I’m not trying to dictate to her.”
“Not on purpose,” Gertie agreed. “You are, however, trying to tell her what to feel in a vain attempt to mitigate her hopes.” She leaned forward. “You can’t stop her from getting hurt by demanding she not believe.”
Galen closed his eyes and the strain of the last few days showed on his face.
“You love her with everything you have,” Gertie continued. “You have to love her through the good and the bad. We don’t know that this is going to turn bad. If it does, she’ll have you. Maybe hope is the best thing for her at this point.”
When Galen opened his eyes again, he was resigned. “I don’t ever want to steal her hope.”
Gertie patted his shoulder. “Maybe you are finally maturing after all.”
“Does that mean I’m your favorite?” Galen asked hopefully.
“Nope.” Gertie winked at Aurora, then turned back to me. “Have you worked out how it could be your mother?”
I was rueful. “That’s the part I struggle with most. My mother died thirty years ago on the mainland. Declan Wilkes disappeared from this plane, this island, twenty years ago. He only arrived on the island a few years before that. He couldn’t have known my mother.”
Gertie did the math in her head. “He wouldn’t,” she agreed. “She went to college on the mainland. I don’t even remember her coming back for holidays there at the end. She would have been gone long before Declan came here, so why would her soul be on that plane?”
“That’s only one of the questions we have,” Galen confirmed.
“Okay. Prioritize your questions,” Gertie suggested.
“The biggest, at present, is what happened to Wesley. Did he leave the ranch voluntarily? Was he lured away? Hadley was lured to the plane door. Maybe Wesley was lured in the same manner.”
“To what end?” Booker asked. “What good does luring Wesley to town and locking him in the cemetery do?”
“We don’t think he was there the whole time,” I said.
“I have confirmation on that,” Galen added. “The grounds crew was in there yesterday. They were in the building. Wesley wasn’t there.”
“Then he was moved there after the grounds crew left yesterday,” Booker said. “What time was that?”
“About two o’clock in the afternoon.”
“That means he was somewhere else from the time he disappeared until after dark yesterday,” Aurora said. “Where?”
“The other plane,” Lilac assumed.
“Hadley’s mother had no idea he was over there,” Booker argued. “She seemed to know that Hadley was coming. Why wouldn’t she know the same about Wesley?”
Frustration clawed at my throat. We were stuck in an endless loop.
“Has anybody considered that Wesley was never meant to be taken?” Aurora asked.
“The assumption has always been that he was targeted to lure Hadley. That symbol was designed to draw in Hadley. Her specifically. What if there were just enough common genes to draw in Wesley by accident, and the reason Hadley’s mother didn’t know he was there was because he wasn’t supposed to cross over? ”
I sat there for a long time, dumbfounded by the question. “Do you think that’s possible?” I asked nobody in particular after a few seconds.
“It makes as much sense as anything else,” Galen admitted as he rubbed his back. “Maybe Declan didn’t actually kidnap Wesley. Maybe Wesley ended up over there by accident and he doesn’t remember because he’s not paranormal.”
“Or someone on the other side used magic to make him forget,” Booker said. “Memory spells aren’t all that difficult. Maybe it was Hadley’s mother. Emma was a witch. Perhaps she found Wesley and he didn’t want to leave. She was his daughter, after all. I can see him putting up a fight.”
A sickening sensation lurched in my stomach. “She hexed his memory to make him forget, then pushed him through a plane door and saved him.” I felt certain that was how it had played out.
“Wesley crossed over by accident because he’s Hadley’s grandfather,” Lilac surmised. “No one was expecting him, so he flew under the radar until Hadley sent her mother looking for him.”
“Time moves differently there,” Galen said. “I bet Emma found Wesley within a few hours and managed to get him through a different door.”
There was just one problem. “How did he end up in the cemetery?”
“He could have made it to the cemetery and hit his head in his haste to get away from the zombies. Maybe he crawled into the building and was there a short time before you guys found him."
“So we’re back to Hadley being the ultimate target,” Galen said. “Wesley was a mistake. Declan wanted Hadley to cross over.”
“We’d assumed that Declan had to have someone here working with him,” I said. “That might not be true. We can’t explain the symbol in the field, and if Declan can reach into my dreams from the other plane … .”
“Then maybe he can do other things,” Galen finished.
“Declan may not be able to cross over,” Gertie said. “Clive couldn’t, and he died there. Yet Emma managed to get Hadley and Wesley to this side.”
“Why is she over there?” I demanded. “Why didn’t she get to go someplace wonderful and beautiful to rest?” Now that I was more convinced than ever that my mother was on that plane my anger was starting to build.
“Hey.” Galen sensed I was about to careen over an emotional cliff. “We’re going to figure it out. Don’t get too worked up.”
“What if it was your father?” I challenged.
“Then I would say he deserved it,” Galen replied. “We’re going to figure out a way to get her to that restful place. I swear to you.”
“Sorry. I just … I always imagined her floating on a cloud in a beautiful place. That plane is ugly. My mother doesn’t deserve an ugly place like that.”
“It’s okay, baby.” Galen pulled me into his arms and rested his chin on top of my head.
“She might have been trapped on that plane for some reason we don’t yet understand, or something else might be going on,” Gertie said. “I can try to do some research. I don’t know much about dhampirs so I’ll actually enjoy reading up.”
“Did you deal with Declan a lot?” Lilac asked. “You must have crossed paths with him.”
“Only a few times,” Gertie replied. “Nothing stands out. He wasn’t a pleasant man. I had no idea what he really was. I need to think back on our interactions now that I know more.”
Lilac bobbed her head. “What are the rest of us going to do?”
“We need to see Wesley,” Galen replied. “They’re releasing him today.”
I opened my mouth, but Galen pushed forward before I could speak.
“He’ll be coming back to the lighthouse with us,” he said. He didn’t seem keen on the idea, but it was what I wanted to hear.
I let out the breath I didn’t even know I’d been holding. “Yes. He’ll be coming home with us.”
Galen squeezed my shoulder. “Other than that … .”
“You should go to the Voodoo Lounge,” Gertie volunteered.
I frowned. I’d never been inside the seedy downtown bar. As far as I knew, no tourists ever visited. It was all locals. “Why would we want to go there?”
“Declan owned it before he disappeared.”
“Did you know that?” I asked Galen.
He shook his head. “There was no record of that in the file I brought home. Are you sure?” he asked Gertie.
“Oh, I’m sure.” She was grim. “A lot of terrible things happened at that bar. That was another reason I didn’t like Declan.”
Galen gave me a wan smile. “We’ll get Wesley first. Then I’ll take you to the island’s crappiest bar.”
“I can’t wait.”