Chapter 20
Idon’t wake up until eleven-thirty. For the first time in a while, I don’t feel overwhelmed or anxious to start the day.
My thoughts aren’t consumed with work and murder, but rather with the guys and everything that’s happened between us.
I lounge around in bed for a while, enjoying doing nothing, and then get up and make a cup of coffee.
Taking it onto the back porch, I drink it in silence, admiring the nature around me all in its natural habitat, which is a better way of saying I’ve done shit to the yard.
Having lived in apartments my whole adult life, I’m pretty clueless as to what to do with gardening, and I don’t know how to put in any sort of landscaping.
The lawn is in desperate need of being mowed, and now that the guys are safely inside, I can call someone out to do it until I get a lawnmower myself.
It’s nice and sunny out this morning, and after I finish my coffee, I bring the grimoire out with me and spend an hour or so studying and practicing magic.
Then I fill the rest of the afternoon doing adult things I don’t really want to do but have to anyway, though today I don’t mind grocery shopping, paying bills, and cleaning the bathrooms as much as I usually do.
I’m putting groceries away when my phone buzzes on the counter with a text. I grab it, a little afraid it’s work. I’m enjoying my time off and don’t want to leave when it’s getting closer to sunset. It’s Gemma, and I remember we had plans for tonight.
Gemma: Hey, lady! What movie do you want to see?
Me: I don’t even know what’s playing. You can choose. I’m not picky.
Gemma: What about First Comes Love? It’s a romantic comedy and Aidan Shepherd is in it. I’ll see anything with him in it.
Me: He is easy on the eyes LOL
Gemma: You can bring your boyfriend. Boyfriends? I don’t want you to think I’m judging you or anything! I’m actually jealous. You’re dating hot identical twins…seriously not fair.
Thomas and Gilbert would love to go, and will be thrilled to go out two nights in a row. Is it rude to bring them, though? I’m new to this whole having a female friend thing. We were supposed to go to a movie just the two of us for girl bonding or whatever.
Me: I’ll see if they want to go, but they probably won’t be into a rom-com.
Gemma: Want to grab dinner before? Or after?
Me: Before would be great. What time?
Gemma: There’s a 7:30 showing, so if we eat at 6 that’ll give us plenty of time. I can pick you up.
Me: I live far from the theater. I’ll meet you instead and we can pick a place to eat from there.
Gemma: Sounds good!
I put the phone down and go back to the groceries, looking forward to hanging out with Gemma again, but a little disappointed I won’t be here when the guys wake up. Thomas and Gilbert know about the movie—and encouraged me to go—but I write a note anyway and tape it to the library door.
Feeling sort of bad for entertaining the thought of making them stay in the dark during the day now too, I go into the basement.
The library is clean, heated and air conditioned, and homey.
But it has windows. And if people came over and went into the library, they’d see my “statues.” The basement is a step up from being outside, right?
It’s safer, that’s for sure.
Turning on a light, I look around, hands on my hips.
I haven’t spent much time down here at all.
It’s cluttered, with boxes full of crap I need to thoroughly sort through and get rid of once and for all.
Knowing that if I put it off again, it’ll never get done, I open the nearest box.
I’ve looked in it before, and discarded it when I saw it was full of files and papers.
It’s heavy, and the box rips when I try to drag it closer to the old wooden stairs.
“Dammit,” I grumble, and start picking up the papers. And then I notice my great aunt’s name on one of the papers. I sit cross-legged on the floor, quickly sorting through the box. It’s full of documents and receipts, and it seems dear Aunt Mary was a bit OCD with her bookkeeping.
People like this make my job easier.
“Thank you, Aunt Mary,” I say out loud, flipping through a binder labeled HOUSE.
She has statements from everything, including taxes, any updates she paid for, and—bingo—the deed.
She bought the house the year my mother was born, and it cost a lot of money, even back then.
I comb through the rest of the binder, looking for any sort of proof of transaction about the gargoyles, and find nothing.
But I do find a black-and-white picture of the house from the year it was built in the late 1800s. And it doesn’t have gargoyles.
“How did you meet your boyfriends?” Gemma stirs her mojito with the straw. “I need you to teach me your ways.”
I laugh, glad I went over a story in my head on the way here. I’m a good bullshitter, having seen people bullshit and lie while being questioned over and over again. I’ve also realized that the best lies are the simplest, and fucking that up is easier than most think.
“Through work.”
“Right.” She brings her drink to her lips and takes a sip. “You mentioned that. Did you start dating one first? How did the whole dating both at the same time thing happen?”
I shrug. “It kind of just did.” Which is true. “I went out with Tom first, and then realized I had feelings for Gil as well, and it just kind of went from there.”
“And they’re totally fine with it?”
“It was their idea.”
“Damn, girl.” She shakes her head, laughing. “That is just so unfair. Why didn’t you say anything before when you were talking about your boyfriend?”
Because I wasn’t talking about the twins, but boyfriend number three. “Not everyone is so understanding.”
“Oh, right. I did that whole experimenting thing in college, and the one week I had a girlfriend was really enlightening. People are assholes. Like what does it matter who we’re sleeping with?”
“Exactly. And yeah…people can be assholes.”
“So,” she says, looking down. Her shoulders tense and she gets that look of regret or guilt on her face again. Gemma’s pretty transparent with her emotions, though I have no idea what’s going on right now. “Tell me more about them. Where are they from? They have really interesting accents.”
“Europe.”
“Britain? I can’t place the accent.”
“Yeah. They traveled a lot growing up, so I think their accents were influenced heavily from the time they spent in France.”
“Wow, that’s awesome. I haven’t been out of the US. I’d love to go to France.”
“Yeah, me too.” I don’t want to go alone, though, and thinking of Jacques’s face when he sees what Paris is like now makes me smile.
“Thinking of a romantic getaway?”
“I might be.” I reach for the bread in the middle of the table.
Her phone dings, and she reaches into her purse to read the text message. Her body language shifts again, shoulders tensing as she types back a reply. “So both Tom and Gil work in the same department?”
I know she’s nosey, but she’s prying just a little too much. And she seems uncomfortable.
“Yeah. They do.”
“Imagine the good-cop, bad-cop they could pull. Though I’m sure you already have.” She wiggles her eyebrows and we both laugh. She turns her phone on silent and tosses it back in her purse. After that, she relaxes again, and we continue to talk and laugh throughout dinner.
Her phone has been blowing up, quietly vibrating, and she ignores it until we get to the theater. Standing in line with me for popcorn, she huffs and digs it out of her purse.
“I’ll be right back,” she tells me, and practically stomps off.
The line is moving slow, and though it’s loud in here, I catch a few words of Gemma’s conversation by reading her lips.
She’s telling whoever is on the phone “no” over and over, and says “because she’s a decent person” more than once.
Before she hangs up, she tells the person on the phone “then you do it” and closes her eyes, slowly letting out a breath.
I turn away when she comes back, not letting her know I was listening.
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” she says, waving her hand in the air. “It’s my boss. She wants me to pick up more shifts even though I’m maxed out on overtime.”
“There’s a shortage of nurses right now, isn’t there?”
“Yep. I’m seriously considering going back to school for something else.” She pushes her hair back and looks down. “I’ve always loved interior design. You said you just moved into a big old house. That’s like my dream to decorate.”
Did I tell her I moved into a “big old house?” My brain has been a bit fried and I can’t be sure. I might have mentioned moving, but I don’t think I’d ever refer to my house as “big.” That’s too braggy for me, and I can’t stand people who try to show off their material wealth like that.
“Yeah,” I say, and shuffle forward. “I did.”
“When did you move in?”
The air between us shifts, and luckily the woman ahead of us gets out of line and we’re next to order.
I get a large popcorn and a Coke, and even though I’m full from dinner, keep stuffing my mouth full so Gemma won’t ask me any more questions.
I’m new at this whole having a female friend thing, and I don’t know how to properly handle this.
Can I just tell her to mind her own business? No, that’s rude and obvious.
If the house wasn’t harboring so many secrets, I’d have no issue talking about it. And some people, like Richard, really are interested in structures rich in history.
“Let’s talk about magic,” she says once we’re in our seats and waiting for the movie to start. She just checked her phone again and shook her head at whatever she read.
“What about it?”
“You’ve been into it, right? I know you said you’re a skeptic, but come on. It’s not like I’m going to judge you.”
“I really haven’t, and I’m still not sure it’s real.”
She frowns. “There’s nothing wrong with believing in it.”
“Oh, I know. To each their own.” I don’t want to insult my only real friend, but something isn’t sitting right with me.
Maybe she’s not as good of a friend as I thought, and I know I have to look into this objectively.
Though for now, there’s nothing I can do.
I have to keep up the act that I don’t suspect anything.
“And I do believe in it, just not as widely as you, I guess.”
She laughs. “I have no idea what you mean by that.”
Sticking my hand into the bowl of buttery popcorn, I laugh too.
“I mean, I don’t think just anyone can learn how to do magic or go to Lyra’s store and get the right ingredients for a spell.
If magic were real, it would be more calculated than that, right?
Besides, if it were so easy, everyone would do it.
” I smile, then stick the popcorn in my mouth to buy me a bit more time.
I stand by my answer, though. Not just anyone off the street can do magic.
Any old words strung together and said while burning herbs haphazardly thrown together won’t do shit.
“Yeah, I suppose so too. Though I think people can be taught.” Her hand goes to her purse, and I can see the glowing screen of her phone from within. “So trying magic is really something new for you?”
“I can’t really say I’ve tried it. Just started not being as skeptical as before.” I look at her hand and she drops the phone. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she says quickly. “It’s someone I work with, begging me to come in and fill in a shift tonight.”
“Oh, okay.” I don’t believe her, and that bad feeling I get in my gut starts to grow tense.
“So, this party at your neighbor’s house,” she says, changing the subject. “You said the kid was trying to get pictures of you, right?”
“Yeah. Little perv.” I internally cringe as the words come off my tongue. Jared is a pain in the ass, but he doesn’t deserve any shit for a crime he didn’t commit.
“I think you should dress all sexy, show off those tits you’re always hiding, and then have your boyfriends show up and scare the piss out of the kid.”
I laugh. “That might be one way to deal with him.”
“So, your boyfriends,” she goes on, voice changing pitch. “Do they live with you?”
“When they’re not traveling for work, yeah.”
“Do they travel a lot?”
“Depends on their assignment,” I say, and thank the fucking stars, the commercials start. We turn our attention to the screen, and the tension leaves me once the movie starts. Gemma makes hilariously inappropriate comments about Aidan Shepherd throughout the movie, making me laugh even more.
“I had a nice time tonight,” Gemma says after the movie is over and we’re walking together into the parking lot. “Do you want to get drinks or anything?”
“Sounds fun, but I’m beat tonight. Can I take a rain check?”
She elbows me and giggles. “You want to get home to those hot boyfriends, don’t you?”
“I’d be lying if I said no.”
“Seriously, it is not fair.”
I laugh and pull my keys from my purse, looking around the parking lot. Surveying my surroundings and assuming everyone is up to no good is a habit, and one that more people should adopt.
“Where are you parked?” I ask Gemma, wanting to make sure she gets to her car safely.
“Right there.” She motions to a silver Honda with a bumper sticker that says “Wiccan and proud” in between two pentagrams. “See you Monday.”
I watch her get in her car, then slide into the driver’s seat of my Charger and get my phone out of my purse, tapping the screen to check for calls.
There are seven, and they’re all from Jacques. My heart races as I call him back. The phone rings. And rings. And rings.
Finally, he answers.
“Ace?” he asks, always questioning if it’s really me calling.
“Yes, is everything okay?”
“It is now.”
“But it wasn’t?” I rush out.
“There was someone at the house.”