Page 26 of Wicche Hunt

While she went to her room to put on real shoes, I checked the locks and grabbed her handbag. She found me by the hall door to the garage. Taking her bag from me, she opened the door and waited for me to go first.

“I know a great burger place on the way home. I can run in and get us dinner.”

Shaking her head, she opened the drivers’ side door. “I don’t need—”

I cleared my throat, and she looked over the top of her car at me. I stared back, eyebrows raised, waiting for her to remember her promise to Pearl.

Finally, she nodded and got in. “I could eat.”

ELEVEN

Family. Amirite?

Hester didn’t eat much, but it was something, and that made me feel better. Her gaze had been darting all around the studio while we had dinner. When it was clear she’d had her fill, I cleaned up and gave her a proper tour, including the gallery.

The building was an old cannery that had been in the family for a while. I had purchased it from Gran and began the arduous task of converting it into an art gallery with a studio. The majority of the building was the gallery-retail space. The grand opening for that was less than two weeks away.

The studio was also my apartment. I had a large work area with a small living room comprised of a couch, a coffee table, a reading chair, and an end table. The back half of the studio was a kitchenette with a restaurant-grade oven for all the baking I did. A small restroom was in the back corner. Upstairs, in the loft, was my bedroom and a full bath. And then on the other side of the studio, opposite the gallery, was the fire room where I did pottery and glass blowing.

The construction was finally done. I just needed to paint the walls in the gallery and start moving in my art. Hester loved the idea of a tea shop in the gallery, and I eventually got her to agree to stop by regularly for a muffin and a cup of tea.

I could have been wrong, but it felt like getting her out of her house—away from the grief that had saturated the furniture and sunk into the floorboards—was helping to lift her mood. Sorrow was coming second to wonder at the moment, so I pressed my advantage and took her out on the deck.

It being summer, the sunset was just now winding down, the sky pink and purple rather than gold and red. I waved her over to the railing and introduced her to Charlie and Herbert.

“Cecil,” I called and a tentacle broke the surface. “This is my Aunt Hester. Can you say hello?” Three tentacles swirled at the surface and then went back under.

Hester gasped and leaned farther out. A tennis ball rolled across the deck and came to a stop directly beside my shoe. Dang. That was impressive.

“Wait right here.” I ran in the studio door and grabbed the long orange plastic pole with the ball cup on the end. The gizmo was made for throwing a ball to a dog, but it worked great for playing fetch with a seal. Declan had found it for me, and I’d been using it ever since. I picked up the wet tennis ball with the scooper and then went back to the railing.

Pointing out with my free hand, I told my aunt to watch the water. I flung the ball, the plastic arm helping it go much farther than I could have managed on my own. Hester looked confused for a moment and then delighted as she watched Wilbur streak through the water after the ball.

“Was that a seal?” The sight shocked a laugh out of her, her cheeks finally losing their gray pallor.

“That was Wilbur. We’ve had a daily game of fetch going since I moved back to Monterey.”

Shaking her head, she looked down where Cecil had broken the surface and then up at the thirty-foot tentacles that appeared to be pulling my gallery into the ocean. “How?” was all she got out.

“Has no one explained my parentage to you over the years?” I asked, twisting my hair and stuffing it down the back of my shirt, out of the wind.

At the embarrassed shake of her head, I patted her shoulder and waved her back in. “It’s okay. No need to feel uncomfortable. Coreys have been looking at me sideways my whole life.” I pointed to the couch, and she sat.

“They don’t look at or talk to me at all,” she said.

“Yeah. Some of us can be real assholes. On behalf of the Coreys,” I said, “please allow me to apologize.” Opening the freezer, I rattled off all the baked goods I was stockpiling for the gallery opening. One little spell and they’d be thawed and tasting like they were fresh from the oven.

“You’re a baker too?”

“I’m a real Renaissance woman.” At her confused look, I said, “As you know, I’m a Cassandra wicche. I’ve had horrible nightmares and visions my whole life. When they wake me up in the middle of the night—and they do every night—I bake. I talk with my friends in the ocean. I draw, paint, blow glass. I do whatever I can to plaster over the dark and traumatic with light and beauty.”

I held up my gloved hands. “I’m not a germaphobe. Psychometry. I can read thoughts, see memories, have visions, whatever, when I touch people or things. I’m a clairvoyant and a precog. Also, while I’m a Corey wicche on my mom’s side, my dad is water fae. I have no idea what kind—I’ve never met him—but he’s responsible for my affinity for water. And probably for upping my psychic abilities.

“Cassandra wicches usually only pop up in our family every couple hundred years. I got a lot of shit, particularly from my cousins, when I was little. Unknown parentage, long crazy hair that takes on blue, green, and purple hues when I’ve been in the ocean, knowing what they’re thinking, what they’ve done, being my mother’s daughter, all of it made me incredibly unpopular. I’m told I asked for my first set of gloves when I was about three, after I’d told a room full of family members about Aunt Bridget and Uncle Michael’s imminent deaths.”

“Oh no,” Hester breathed.

“Yeah. I was the family’s own little harbinger of death. Made me quite the popular party guest.” I shrugged a shoulder. “What are ya gonna do? Anyway, about these baked goods,” I said, opening the freezer door again. “Which sounds good to you?”

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