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“I get it,” he said. “And it makes me love you all that much more, watching you be protective of Chloe. But she’s an adult, and she gets to make her own decisions.”
Including going back to the Airbnb. I just wished I didn’t feel so hinky about the situation.
Most likely, I was only responding that way because of the accident this afternoon and the discovery of the hex hidden under my license plate. True, I had no way of knowing whether Jack Speros’s murderer and the person who’d scratched that sigil into the Jeep’s paint were one and the same.
On the other hand, I had no reason to believe that they weren’t. All day long, my brain had been picking away at the problem, trying to see if it could turn up the smallest detail that might point to the person behind all this magical mayhem, but I couldn’t think of a single suspect who controlled those sort of dark powers.
At least it didn’t seem as though Chloe had been targeted at all, which meant she should be perfectly safe. No, she’d have a quiet night at the Airbnb, and then she’d head into work tomorrow morning, with the only truly frightening thing she needed to face being all the last-minute shoppers who would crowd into the place to take advantage of the final day of our big sale.
“It’s true,” I told my husband, and then cut off a piece of chicken and popped it in my mouth. Thank the Goddess that my appetite hadn’t suffered much during my pregnancy, except for some queasy moments early on. True, the last couple of weeks I’d been getting full sooner than I would have liked and had cut back on my portions. Luckily, though, Dr. Carlisle said my weight gain was still right where she wanted it. “The last thing I want to do is hover.”
“You’re not hovering,” Calvin said. “You’re worrying, which is different but completely understandable.”
I couldn’t help smiling at those words. Some people might have said that Chloe wasn’t my responsibility, and maybe she wasn’t, at least in any legal sense of the word.
But she was family…and that made all the difference.
Despite all those reassurances, I didn’t sleep well that night. Some of my restlessness could have been due to the simple fact that the baby decided to start practicing its field goal kicking at around eleven-thirty, but I thought it was more than that. Although I couldn’t remember them clearly, my dreams had been disturbed as well, full of foreboding images that didn’t make much sense once my eyes flared open and I stared up at the ceiling of the bedroom, only faintly illuminated by the glowing numerals on the alarm clock next to my bed.
Was I restless because my subconscious mind wouldn’t leave me alone…or had the unknown user of magic pointed another hex at me, a slightly subtler one this time?
That thought wasn’t reassuring at all.
Well, a glass of water would do me good. No way was I going to walk through the dark house into the kitchen, but I could head into the bathroom and get myself a drink there.
As soon as I sat up and pushed my legs over the side of the bed, I heard Calvin’s voice in the darkness.
“Everything okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, smiling a little as I thought of how many times I’d uttered those same two words today. “I just need some water.”
He shifted against the pillows and said, “All right.”
I pushed myself upright, still smiling. After all, my getting up in the middle of the night wasn’t that strange an occurrence, not when it seemed as if sometimes I had to haul myself out of bed to use the bathroom every hour on the hour.
But I loved that he was being so vigilant, so attentive. I could tell he blamed himself for not going with me to my doctor’s appointment this afternoon, even though I’d reassured him it was utterly routine and that he didn’t need to miss any more work than he already had…and would in the near future.
Besides, having him behind the wheel wouldn’t have prevented that crash. It was entirely possible he could have been hurt.
No, better that things had shaken out the way they did, even though I would be very glad if I never experienced another moment of terror like that again in my life.
The little nightlight in the bathroom provided just enough illumination for me to pour myself a glass of water. Our property had its own well, and the water was sweet and cold and fresh, easing the dryness in my mouth. I stood at the counter and drank the glass down, then wondered if I should pour myself another.
No, better not. I didn’t want to be up and down even more times because I’d drunk too much water to slake my thirst.
I set the glass down. As I looked up, I caught a flash of movement in the darkness behind me.
Calvin, getting out of bed after all?
Something moved past my head, dark and icy cold.
Spectral fingers reached for me.
A terrified shriek left my lips, and I ran for the bed as fast as my distended belly would let me, somehow knowing if I could get there, I’d be safe.
“Calvin — ”I gasped.
But he didn’t move, only lay under the covers as still as a corpse.
