Page 28 of Wicching Hour

Declan pulled up in front of the gallery and turned in his seat to study me. “You look better. Your eye’s clear now and your neck only has a light bluish ring around it.” His long fingers brushed softly down my throat. “Does that hurt?”

“Not really. It’s still sore, but it’s nothing like it was.” I took his hand and held it in both of mine. “I need the police to stop taking me to the crime scenes of choking victims.”

He squeezed my hands. “The last one wasn’t this bad, was it?”

I shook my head and felt a twinge. “No, but that one hadn’t happened a couple of hours earlier.”

Declan’s brow furrowed. “Why did they call you in so fast? Why aren’t they doing their own investigation first?” His eyes lightened to wolf gold. “You’re supposed to be the last resort when they’ve tried everything else. You’re not supposed to be the sacrificial lamb that lets them clock out early.”

His grip started to hurt, so I wiggled my fingers and he immediately let go. He shook his head and then stared blindly out the windshield. “Sorry.”

I explained the nightmare and the phone calls, everything that had happened before he’d arrived. He listened, his shoulders dropping. He took my hand again, gently holding it on his thigh.

“You saw it before it happened?” He looked back at me, eyebrows raised.

“It happens that way sometimes.” Something had been bothering me for a while and I decided to just tell him. “I’ve been struggling with some guilt about sleeping with you.”

No anger, just concern. “Guilt? Why?”

“When I’m with you, I don’t dream,” I began.

“Which is a good thing,” he said. “You don’t sleep anywhere near as much as you should. I worry about how little sleep you get before you start working with fire or climbing forty-foot scaffolds to paint walls.”

I nodded, accepting the truth of that. “But if I don’t see the horrible thing, I can’t do anything to stop it. It’s not just about you being a null, though. When I joined the Council and had shared visions with Mom and Gran, they saw things I didn’t. I’ve been hiding, trying to put these horrible visions out of my mind most of my life. If I’d joined the Council when they wanted me to, maybe—between the three of us—we could have helped the people that I blocked out.”

He flicked open his seat belt and then leaned over and kissed me. When we broke apart, he rested his forehead against mine. “You don’t owe the world your health and sanity. You protected yourself until you were ready. That’s nothing to feel guilty about.”

He pulled off my glove and twined his fingers in mine. “Those other Cassandra wicches that came before you died when they were children. You’ve learned how to survive this gift?—”

“Thanks to dad’s DNA,” I interrupted.

“Exactly. Which is why pure wicche lines are not healthy.” He was still pissed off that Gran and Great-Gran had made Mom give up Dad when she was pregnant with me because he’s water fae. They wanted the extra punch of power to help me survive but they didn’t want other little half-faelings polluting the family line. Truth be told, I was right there with him.

“So,” he continued, “you’ve had the time you needed to come up with strategies that protect you.” He coiled one of my curls around his finger. “Regardless of whatever your family was thinking when they knew a Cassandra was coming, your goddess didn’t make you this way to torture you and put you in service to the rest of the world. And she certainly didn’t bring me into your life if she didn’t want you to sleep.”

Oh. That helped. He was right. She wouldn’t have gifted me with Declan if she didn’t think I needed dreamless sleep. And him. A tightness in my chest eased.

“You are your own amazingly artistic, culinarily creative?—”

I grinned.

“—gorgeously magical siren who. Needs. Sleep. Having your own wants and needs doesn’t make you selfish and shouldn’t cause guilt. Besides,” he said, “what am I supposed to do without you?”

He looked up a moment and then gave his head a quick shake. “I don’t know what the rules are on spilling my guts like this, but I don’t sleep well without you in my arms. If I’m at my place or in the woods, I don’t go into deep sleep. I’m always hovering near the surface, awakened by a branch bouncing in the wind or a car driving by. My first thought is always,Where’s Arwyn?And then I remember you aren’t with me. But I can’t fall right back to sleep because then I’m wondering if you’re okay. Is there a creep bothering you? Are you having a nightmare? Is your cousin up to some demonic shit?”

Grinning, I kissed his jaw. “Thanks.”

He rolled his eyes. “It’s ridiculous. No one knows better than me just how powerful you are.”

“Nuh-uh. It’s sweet and makes me feel warm inside. I’m not thinking about death and tragedy anymore,” I said, climbing into his lap. I wrapped my arms around him. “Now I’m just thinking about you.”

“My plan worked.” And then he was kissing me, and all thought disappeared.

After quite some time, during which we ended up reclined on his bench seat with him kissing my neck and growling—which did funny things to me—he sat up suddenly. Looking over his shoulder out the window, he spat, “That fucking guy,” and jumped out of the truck, charging across the road.

A car slammed on the brakes and honked, but Declan ignored it. On my knees, I watched out the back window as he went straight for the sedan parked across the street. The guy dropped his phone into his lap and floored it, almost causing another accident trying to get away from Declan.

I needed to talk to Mom and Gran about this guy. Surely we’ve had creepy humans fixated on us before. How did we get rid of them without tipping off the world to the existence of wicches?

---