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A plan I could definitely get on board with. Maybe Chloe’s definition of “early” was scrolling through her phone for a couple of hours before she finally decided to go to sleep, but every inch of my body was telling me it had been a long day and that I needed to be in bed sooner rather than later.
“You have a good night,” I told her, then headed out to the living room, where Calvin had sat down in one of the armchairs and was petting Sadie. He hadn’t turned on the TV, though, telling me he also thought it was a good idea to go to sleep almost immediately.
“Ready to get to bed?” he said, and I nodded. Once upon a time, that question would have probably led to the sort of activities that had resulted in the child I was carrying, but right now, I was only thinking of sweet, sweet slumber.
“Thought you’d never ask,” I replied.
No one seemed too inclined to get up early the next morning, even though we’d all been pretty much asleep before ten o’clock. Instead, Calvin and I wandered into the kitchen around eight or so, where Calvin brewed a pot of coffee for himself and Chloe…whenever she decided to emerge…while I settled for some cinnamon tea. Not for the first time, I reminded myself that I’d never been addicted to caffeine and that it was totally fine to be drinking something unleaded.
Right.
But at least I’d slept well and felt about as rested as I could, considering I couldn’t change positions during the night the way I used to before I was carrying a ten-pound bowling ball around everywhere. And all right, Dr. Carlisle had said the baby would probably end up around seven or eight pounds, not the ten-plus I’d been fearing, considering how big Calvin and his brothers had been when they were born, but still, the extra weight got to you after a while no matter how hard you worked to compensate for it.
Chloe came in just as Calvin was pouring a cup of coffee for himself. For all I knew, she’d been asleep the whole time and had only roused herself now because the scent of the French roast had drifted down the hallway to the guest bedroom.
“That smells amazing,” she said as he got a mug from the cupboard and filled it for her. She thanked him, then headed over to the fridge so she could add some milk to it.
“Sleep well?” I asked, and she nodded.
“Like a rock. It felt so much better to be out here and not alone at that Airbnb.”
Maybe that was part of the problem. We hadn’t talked much about her college experience, but it sounded to me as if she’d always lived at home and had never been alone at night. I had to admit that the first time I’d slept by myself in my new apartment after I moved out, I kept waking up all night, starting at every single sound. Soon enough I got used to knowing there wasn’t anyone else around — well, except the people who lived in the neighboring apartments — but still, if it wasn’t the sort of thing Chloe was used to, then her heebie-jeebies would have been understandable even if her boyfriend hadn’t been murdered a few yards away from where she slept.
“That’s good,” I said, even as Calvin shot me a look from under his eyelashes. It seemed pretty clear to me that, while he was willing to indulge my whims and allow my sister to stay here for a day or two, he wanted me to know that this couldn’t be a permanent situation.
And I had no intention of letting it turn into that. No, we’d give Chloe a day or two to clear her head, and then we’d be on the hunt for something more permanent. In fact, I’d already started to think it would be smarter to have Josie look for a house I could buy for my little sister, a place that could truly be her own. That way, she’d be more inclined to look at Globe as a real home, and not just someplace where she was hanging out for a while until she figured out what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.
She turned out to be fairly handy in the kitchen, too, whipping up some pancakes as fluffy as anything I could have made while I sat down at the table by the window and Calvin handled bacon duty. Soon enough, we were sitting in the dining room having breakfast, while the bright morning sun poured in and told me it was going to be another beautiful day.
So beautiful, in fact, that after breakfast Calvin excused himself to go work in the yard. He’d bought several bags of grass seed at the garden center the other day, and since the lovely weather looked as though it was going to continue, with no threat of frost overnight, he decided now was the time to get the new lawn going.
That left Chloe and me to our own devices. We both excused ourselves to go shower, then headed back into the living room some forty minutes or so later. I’d been thinking of the best way to broach the subject of buying a house rather than moving from Airbnb to Airbnb, and had even brought my laptop out to the living room so my sister and I could look over the listings together.
However, as soon as she sat down on the couch and flipped her still-damp hair over her shoulders, my breath seemed to catch in my throat.
Hanging around her neck was a silver medallion with a design I hadn’t seen for several years. It featured a moon on one side and a stylized tree on the other, stamped onto a round piece of sterling about an inch and a half wide.
The symbol for the Greater Los Angeles Necromancers’ Guild.
Chapter 15
THE GLANG’S ALL HERE
Somehow, I managed to force out the words. “Where did you get that?”
Chloe’s gaze strayed downward to the medallion revealed by the deep V of the long-sleeved T-shirt she was wearing. “This? Jack gave it to me. I guess it belonged to his aunt. It was with my jewelry when I was looking through it this morning, so I thought I might as well wear it as a sort of way of letting Jack know I was sorry about what happened.”
“‘Jack’s aunt’?” I echoed. It was probably a good thing I was sitting down, or otherwise my suddenly shaky limbs might have betrayed me. “Who was his aunt?”
Looking mystified at my sudden interest in the heirloom she wore, Chloe replied, “Her name was Athene Kappas. She was Jack’s dad’s younger sister. I guess she died a couple of years ago in a car crash.”
I forced myself to take a breath, then another. Yes, Athene had died almost three years earlier, in a crash caused by a hex that Lucien Dumond’s evil younger brother had placed on the car owned by Travis Cox, who was still Globe’s one and only Uber/Lyft driver.
But….
If she had been Max Speros’ younger sister — separated by a gap that must have been at least ten years or more — then why didn’t they have the same name? True, I didn’t know for an absolute fact that Athene had never been married, but she also never gave the impression that she’d been married and divorced, either.
All right. I needed to take this one step at a time.
