14. Fourteen
FOURTEEN
D inner took it out of me, and I was exhausted for the walk to the guesthouse. We could’ve driven. Landon, however, decided the walk was better for us. He downloaded a calorie-counting app before we left the inn, then muttered to it the whole way home.
“There are only forty-three calories in a slice of bacon,” he announced when we hit the trail at the back of the inn. “That’s not too bad.”
I didn’t bother looking at him. I was focused on the trees. “How many calories in an egg?”
He did something on his phone. “Seventy-eight.”
“And hash browns?”
“Holy crap,” he said after a second. “There are almost five-hundred calories in a cup of hash browns.”
“Which you eat two cups of every morning.”
“That is a gross exaggeration.” He didn’t sound convinced. “So, how many calories am I having for breakfast every morning?”
I wasn’t a math wizard, but it wasn’t hard to add it up. “Well, if you have two cups of hash browns, ten slices of bacon, and three eggs…” I trailed off.
He didn’t come up with a number.
“That’s about fifteen-hundred calories. And that’s not counting the toast … or the juice.”
“Juice is good for you,” Landon argued.
“As long as you don’t have too much of it.”
“It says there are a hundred and ten calories in eight ounces. How many ounces do I drink every morning?”
“More than eight.”
“Wow.” When I finally looked up, his gaze was accusatory. “Why did you let me eat that much?”
Was he kidding? “I’ve been on you for months to lower your calorie intake.”
“No, you’ve been trying to take bacon away from me. You never mentioned that I was getting fat.”
“You’re not fat.” He was starting to bug me. “I don’t particularly like when people use the word fat. You’re just softer than you used to be.”
The wounded look on Landon’s face might’ve made me laugh on a different day. “That’s the meanest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
I shook my head and went back to scanning the trees. When we got to Aunt Tillie’s pot field, I hesitated, my eyes flitting between the trail ahead of us and the hidden field to our right. “Want to take a detour?” I asked.
It took Landon a moment to register what I was suggesting. He pursed his lips as he regarded the field. “I guess. You don’t think the monster is hiding in there, do you?”
“Unlikely. I’m unsettled, though.”
Landon forgot his calorie counter—at least for the moment—and put his phone in his pocket. His hand was warm when it landed on my lower back. “Let’s do it.”
Aunt Tillie’s pot field had grown into something bigger and better than I think even she envisioned.
Originally, she’d created it to hide what she referred to as her glaucoma medicine.
She didn’t have glaucoma, and the field was home to a lot more than marijuana these days.
After numerous trials and errors, she’d managed to turn it into an all-around greenhouse of sorts.
The temperature remained warm in the winter, so we could enjoy outdoor time even when snow was falling outside the dome.
Not anybody could find it. There were wards. Unfortunately, beings—humans and monsters—had made it past the wards more than once.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Landon asked when we were inside the dome. My gaze was busy as it bounced around the field.
“Talk about what?” I asked, moving forward. I didn’t sense danger. Right before the arachnids hit, my danger alarm hadn’t gone off either. I wanted to be certain. “I’m not worried about your four-and-a-half pack.”
“Stop calling it that,” he warned. “I’m going to be back in top shape in less than a month. Mark it down.”
“Okay, Aunt Tillie.”
“I like working out. I’m good at it.”
“You could do it professionally,” I agreed.
“Do you want to talk about what’s going on with Aunt Tillie?” Landon asked.
I knew he wouldn’t leave it alone. “Sure,” I responded. “What specifically should we talk about?”
“She seems fairly normal to me.” He laughed after he’d said it. “I never thought I would use the word ‘normal’ in conjunction with Aunt Tillie, but I’m not certain why you’re so worked up.”
“Because she’s dead serious when she says she wasn’t at Clove’s place.”
“She’s lying. She does that.”
One of the problems with telling constant lies—something Aunt Tillie did regularly—is that people come to expect it from you. Nobody I knew expected Aunt Tillie to tell the truth. They didn’t even dislike her for the lying. It was simply who she was.
“This feels different. Plus, I saw her face when we mentioned she was on the scooter and the four-wheeler today. She doesn’t remember.”
Landon was quiet a beat. “You don’t know that,” he said. “This could all be a game.” He took my hand and turned me so I had no choice but to look at him. “She’s not going to live forever. I know that. You know that. The idea of losing her is hard. I genuinely don’t think we’re there yet.”
“Something is off, Landon. I feel it.”
He brushed my hair from my face. “Let’s not expect the worst just yet, huh? Let’s take a breath, get some sleep, get a good workout tomorrow morning, and go from there.”
I gave him a narrow-eyed look. “I am not going to the gym at six o’clock tomorrow morning. It’s not happening.”
“Come on, Bay. The couple that works out together, lives forever together.”
I snorted. “You’re not getting up at six o’clock tomorrow morning. Who do you think you’re fooling?”
“Oh, it’s happening. I will have my eight-pack back before you know it.”
“And that butt?” I challenged. “Are you going to get that back?”
Landon tried to look over his shoulder at his butt and failed. “What the hell is wrong with my butt?”
“There’s nothing wrong with it. I like a squishy butt. When I met you, however, you could bounce a quarter off that thing.”
“You had better be joking.”
I laughed as I headed toward the field exit. “I like it squishy. It’s fine.”
“Don’t even look at me,” he complained as we headed toward the trail. “You’re the meanest person I know.”
“I love you too.”
He didn’t respond. His eyes were focused forward. For the rest of the walk, I heard him muttering, but I knew that he would not be up and heading to the gym at six the next morning.
BECAUSE WINCHESTER WAS STAYING AT THE INN —everybody agreed it was best not to have the dog out between the guesthouse and The Overlook with arachnids on the loose—there was plenty of room in the bed when I rolled under the covers and snuggled up at Landon’s side.
He was reading something about 75 Hard, which apparently involved working out for forty-five minutes indoors and outdoors every day for seventy-five days, sticking to a diet, drinking a gallon of water daily, and a number of other stipulations.
He wasn’t going to stick to that, of course—he couldn’t when eating at The Overlook multiple times a day—but he’d convinced himself it was an option.
“Goodnight.” I kissed his cheek. “I love you.” My eyes were already closed when my cheek hit his shoulder.
“I love you, too. We are getting up to work out tomorrow morning.”
I merely smiled.
“Also, Aunt Tillie is okay. I understand that you have very specific worries about what’s happening—and you have the best instincts of anyone I know—but you’re overreacting. She is not losing her mind.”
I wanted him to be right, but he wasn’t. I was too tired to have that conversation again. Instead, I rested my hand on his stomach—it still felt pretty hard to me—and smiled as I drifted off.
I expected to sleep hard. Dreams are part of the game, especially when you’re a witch, but I was still surprised when I woke in a filmy dreamscape.
The edges of the dream were blunted, fuzzy.
That was my first clue that this dream was different.
Often my dreams were more metal than pop.
This dream, however, felt as if I was about to wander into jazz land.
“It took you long enough,” Aunt Tillie said when I found her standing on the bluff where we conducted our witchy rituals—and occasionally danced naked.
Her expression was dour. “You spend too much time trying to bolster your hairless monkey’s self-esteem and not enough time focusing on the important things in life. ”
I raised an eyebrow. “Is that so?”
She bobbed her head. “He’s a man. He already thinks enough of himself.”
“Tell me how you really feel,” I prodded with a grin. This was clearly Aunt Tillie preparing to unleash a hex on me. She was angry about what had happened earlier, and this was her punishment.
And, yeah, sure I shouldn’t be happy about the fact that I was likely going to smell like Brussels sprouts or fish all day. The fact that she could plot this hard did bolster me some.
“That is how I feel. I’ve never understood why you and your cousins—and now your mother—feel the need to pledge yourselves to a single man when you could have ten men at a time. You know, one to fit each need. It’s ridiculous … and traditional. The lot of you weren’t raised to be traditional.”
“It’s not about tradition,” I argued. “It’s about belonging to someone. Landon and I belong together. Mom and Chief Terry belong together.” I considered it a moment. “You can be as obnoxious as you want, but I know darned well you felt the same about Uncle Calvin.”
Aunt Tillie’s eyes narrowed. “I think you’re mistaking me for someone else.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I know you loved him. I also know that it wrecked you when he died. You didn’t want to open yourself up after him, and I get it. Loving someone else would’ve been an insult to his memory.”
“Now I know you’re confusing me with someone else.” Aunt Tillie’s expression grew even more dour. She looked as if she was sucking on a lemon. “I’m not who you think I am.”
“Oh, no?” I was amused. “Is this part of the game? Is this where you tell me that you’re an evil witch from another plane and you’re here to kill Santa Claus? I still remember when you told that story on Christmas Eve when I was eight.”