Page 46 of Lost in the Moonlight

The car hadn’t had a front license plate when it had zipped by Willow and me this afternoon, and the back plate had been covered in dirt. I had nothing to give Hardy. It had panicked Willow, but I’d told her I didn’t believe it had anything to do with her or even with me being Lincoln Matherton. But it didn’t mean it wasn’t something that could become an issue.

More darkness drawn to me.

Would I forever be the demon in my painting, drawing someone like Willow into my lair, only to have her become the bloody leg sticking out of the bedsheets? Would I destroy her?

As I lifted a hand to open the restaurant door, a chill hit me. Eyes on me. And while I was accustomed to the feeling of being watched by my detail or the paparazzi or some everyday Joe staring at me with curiosity, this felt different. Heavier.

I did another scan of the street and saw nothing.

Maybe it was just Sienna’s ghost glaring at me from the window of the gallery.

Fuck it all.

Let the eyes search and find.

Nothing to see here but a man ordering sweet and sour chicken.

If that seemed worthy of a photo, let them take it.

? ? ?

My body woke, itching and scrambling for me to get out of bed when I’d barely been asleep for an hour. Lying there was useless and counterproductive. So, at barely eleven, I headed downstairs to the study. The first thing I did was check thesecurity app I’d left open on the desktop. The front yard was cast deeply in shadows. The lantern-like streetlamps near the cemetery and farther past my neighbor’s pushed dim, circular rays through the mist, but the light never quite reached my house.

The Pathfinder was parked out front of Willow’s place. No sedan in sight.

I sat in the rolling office chair, hands on top of my head, looking out the multipaned window to the garden that had been shaped and molded by the landscaping company I’d hired. It was too neat. Too tidy. Willow’s garden screamed of whimsical creatures dancing with tiny flutes and flitting wings. I wanted that. I wanted the magic of fairies and instead had brought the stiff formality of my family’s home with me here.

Wasn’t this move to Cherry Bay about finding something more? Something different?

Finding me.

I spun the chair around, taking in the bookshelves. Straight and neat. But the knickknacks peeking from the stacks of books hinted at the fantastic. Smiling Buddhas. A pewter dragon with its wings spread.

I rose, pulling down the art history books I’d kept from my college days and then some of the oversized coffee-table books filled with photography and art. I spread them out on all the available surfaces, flipping through them, stopping whenever an image somehow clicked inside me.

And when I stood back after hours of work and scanned across the open pages, I saw the beginnings of a theme. An extension of what I’d been drawing and painting for the last few days. Sienna’s words about Willow’s light burning away the dark were taunting me. But maybe we weren’t supposed to existwithout the dark. Maybe without it, we’d never see the light for what it was. We needed both in order to be whole. The yin and the yang. Just like it was possible that we needed a bit of make-believe, a little bit of magic, to exist alongside the reality so we could understand and appreciate both.

We needed to be reminded that heroism existed as well as evil.

Maybe I was losing my hold.

It was just fanciful thinking to dwell on villains and heroes.

This wasn’t a story or a dream. This was real life.

I inhaled sharply, taking a moment to catalog my physical and emotional state in an attempt to center myself. To pull myself back from the dark abyss that sleeplessness could send me spiraling into. The odd prickling sensation that always curved up my neck and scalp after days with little sleep mingled with a haze as real as the mist on the streets. Neither was ever a good sign for rational thinking. Add to it the anxiety that spiked every time I thought about seeing Sienna again and the incompetence I felt in protecting Willow, and the danger of paranoia stood just around the bend.

I’d be grasping for the brushes of reality before long.

And yet, when I looked back at the pages spread out around me, I still saw a fairy tale emerging. I sensed hope. New beginnings. Possibilities.

I forced myself away from the study, focused on the mundane aspects of fixing a tea concoction purported to soothe, and then returned to my bedroom. I took a shower and let the heat work its way into my bones as much as the tea. Only when weariness draped over me like a weighted blanket did I climb back into bed.

A pair of fairies with faces like Sienna and Willow danced into the midnight of my mind. Hair spun from the silk of moonbeams flew about them. Sky-colored eyes in different shades of blue and gray beckoned. One of them was all sassy, snapping, pounding feet, while the other was laughing, smiling, prancing leaps. Their own version of dark and light leading the way in different directions.

I didn’t even realize my eyes had drooped, didn’t even realize I’d actually slept, until my phone, singing out my sister’s ringtone from the pocket of my jeans I’d dropped on the floor, woke me. I didn’t have a clock on my bedside table, as it only added to the ants crawling through me when I woke in the middle of the night, but there was some light peeking through the blinds. A gray otherworldliness declaring the early morning.

I’d slept.

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