The Accidental Familiar (Accidentally Paranormal Series Book 14) (20 page)

Poppy blanched, the remaining acrid taste on her tongue souring her stomach all over again. “And that means?”

Licking her lips, her face lined with concern, January held fast to her hands, her fingers digging into Poppy’s. “Whatever this force is, it’s latched onto you, and it’s not leaving. I’ve never seen anything so powerful. But worse, I don’t know how to get it out of you.”

“
G
hostbusters?” Poppy asked, only half joking. If there was a crisis group for newly minted paranormals, why couldn’t there really be a group who busted ghosts?

But January didn’t laugh, and neither did Calamity nor Rick, which didn’t bode well, she suspected. “I need to do some research on the obscure, but while I do, I want you to promise never to stray far from anyone. You can’t be alone with this entity.”

“Done deal,” Poppy agreed, hoping she didn’t sound desperate and petrified, even if she really was.

But the doctor gripped her hands harder. “I mean it, Poppy. Keep someone with you at all times until I figure this out. This isn’t something to play with. You
need
someone who can help, or at least call for help if it attacks again. The ladies are tough as nails, don’t get me wrong, but this doesn’t just require brawn. It requires a spell or a summoning, or… I’m not sure. Something stronger than I’ve got, that’s for sure. Are we clear?”

“She won’t have to worry about that, January. I’ll stay close.” As if to prove his good intentions, Rick wrapped an arm around Poppy, pulling her to his side.

“
Okay?
” January asked again, peering into her eyes.

Poppy nodded outwardly, but on the inside, the inside not torn up by this aura she’d puked, she was terrified. “Okay.”

Squeezing her fingers one last time, January rose, smoothing her skirt. “I need a laptop from someone, please.”

“And coffee, I’ve no doubt, Mistress January,” Arch, Johnny-on-the-spot as always, offered.

She smiled and gripped his upper arm, running an affectionate hand over his battered ascot. “You’re a prince among men, Arch. Yes, please. Coffee is necessary if I’m going to keep my eyes open.”

Arch and January scurried off into the kitchen, picking their way over the strewn throw pillows and overturned end table.

“Calamity? Ladies? Let’s see how we can aid January,” Wanda suggested, giving Poppy’s head a stroke of her hand before she left for the kitchen as well.

Nina chucked her under the chin. “Jesus, that was something. All that green and yellow puke comin’ out of your mouth like some freight train bound for hell. And look at you—still walkin’ and talkin’. You’re the shit, kiddo.”

Green and yellow puke certainly was a testament to one's constitution. She grabbed Nina’s wrist and squeezed. “Thanks for catching me. I owe you one.”

“You owe me shit. Glad I was there,” she muttered before taking her leave to join everyone else, so clearly uncomfortable with praise.

When it was just she and Rick left, the silence didn’t become as uncomfortable as she’d thought it would after their conversation about Yash. Instead, he kept his arm around her and pulled her back to lean against him.

“Was it really green and yellow?”

“I think there was some red in there, too. But I can’t be sure. It all happened in a split second of sound and color.”

“You think anyone thought to YouTube it?”

His laughter rumbled deep in his wide chest. “Feel like that might create some widespread panic, you know?”

Relaxing, Poppy inhaled a soothing breath. “Yeah. That’s fair. I think I might need to go brush my teeth.”

“I think I’d support that choice.”

Now she laughed, letting her head fall to his shoulder as she looked up at the cracked ceiling. “Ever tasted an aura?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“It’s far more disgusting than your Brussels sprouts. In fact, I’d rather eat a barrel of those green balls than puke an aura ever again. But my eternal thanks for making that thing let go of me. How’d you do it?”

“I think it was us a whole, Poppy. It’s the only explanation. I’ve never had that much power before. I think what January says is true. Our power together is strong. I felt the current.”

“But I didn’t do anything but flail helplessly like a fish out of water.”

“But did you feel the magic?”

“I felt the burn on my tongue like a nuclear bomb had gone off in my mouth, but I can’t pinpoint the same feeling I had when I turned you to stone. I think I was too caught up in the pain of my intestines being ripped from me via my throat at that point.”

He squeezed her tighter. “It was there, Poppy. I felt it.”

“And you’re admitting it?”

He sighed, turning her to him so her cheek lay on his chest. “I’m admitting it. I don’t have a choice but to admit what was right in front of me. That aura could have killed you. The hell I’d let that happen.”

His words warmed her in a place deep inside where she’d never felt this kind of warmth before, and it left her almost breathless. “I appreciate you protecting me, but I don’t want you to go against your principals on my account.”

“This thing with magic, my dislike of its use, goes back to my parents…”

“Doesn’t what puts us on the therapy couch always lead back to our parents?” she teased, hoping he’d see his explanation didn’t have to be a tense conversation.

“Maybe it does, but in this case, magic killed my mother, and eventually my father.”

She sat up, placing a palm over his heart. “Oh, Rick. I’m so sorry.”

“My parents were good people. When they immigrated here to the states, it was on the promise my father’s best friend would help get him a job at the paper mill he worked for.”

Hackles rose on the back of her neck. “Was this friend a warlock?”

“He was, as was his boss, who took a shine to my mother. The long and short of it is, the bastard cast a spell on her, a cleaving spell. A spell you’re helpless to fight against, even though you’re aware of everything happening to you. You can’t speak in protest. You can’t do anything but ride the tide.”

Poppy gripped his hand, fascinated by the contrast of their skin. “He didn’t. Oh, God, he…”

Rick nodded, his slick black hair gleaming in streaks under the lights. “He did. She left my father and me for this guy. She had no will to stop it, but I saw it in her eyes, I saw how he’d turned her into a helpless puppet on the outside. But inside? She was dying.”

“And your father’s magic wasn’t strong enough to remove the spell, was it?” she asked, her voice low and hushed.

“No. And every day, he’d see Mama at work while his friend’s boss dragged her around like his toy, and it broke him, brought him to his knees until he couldn’t even get out of bed some mornings. But he eventually found someone he thought could break the spell.”

“Who?”

His head hung low, his chin at his chest. “Me.”

Oh God. No. Please don’t tell me Rick was responsible for his mother’s death.

Gulping, she was afraid to push any more. “Don’t. Don’t tell me if it’s too painful. Please. I don’t want to make this any harder.”

But Rick shook his head, his lips in a firm line of determination. “Nope. You’re right. You have to know what happened. I don’t know why my father thought I could break the spell. I was just a kid with typical, very minimal warlock powers. But Papa swore he’d prayed to the Goddess, and she’d told him I was the savior to this problem. Looking back now, from an adult perspective, I truly believe he was delusional at that point. With his grief, with his fear. He wasn’t sleeping or eating…but I didn’t have anyone to turn to. I didn’t know
who
to turn to anyway.”

Poppy closed her eyes and absorbed the information, but she didn’t speak.

“Anyway, convinced I was the one who’d be able to break the spell, Papa taught me the incantation. I read it over and over again. I practiced doing all the right things, using all the right sacrificial objects.”

“And you did it because you were a good kid and you were just doing what your father told you to do. You know that, right?” He had to know that.

Rick’s fingers flexed in his lap, the veins beneath his olive-colored skin pulsing. “Rationally, I absolutely do. But it doesn’t change the fact that when I read this incantation, when I summoned this dark force that was supposed to break the spell and release my mother, it didn’t break the spell. It didn’t break the spell because my magic was weak, and no matter how much I practiced, I’d have never been able to pull it off without help from someone with stronger magic.”

Biting the inside of her cheek, Poppy tucked her chin beneath the neck of her sweater. “What did it do?”

“It stole my mother’s heart. Ripped it right from her chest,” he rasped.

As though a sonic boom of information had fallen into the room, Poppy fought a gasp. She gripped his hand and squeezed with everything she had in her. “I’m sorry, Rick. I…” Words failed her.

“And then my father’s boss killed him for taking my mother away. A woman who had no defense against him.”

Now she
did
gasp, instantly stuffing her knuckles into her mouth to quell the abrasive sound. “What happened to his boss? Surely you people have some kind of punishment for this? You guys can’t just go around murdering people and getting away with it, can you?” She was outraged by the notion.

“Oh, he was punished, but the damage was already done. Both my parents were gone, and that’s when Yash came into the picture. He was sent by Familiar Central to take care of me—and he was probably more a foster parent than a familiar until I got older.”

Her eyes opened in surprise. Just as she was catching her breath from his last admission, he said, “But in the end, Yash stole millions of dollars from Avis and me and took off. Haven’t heard from his since.”

She sat up and looked him in the eye, unable to hide her astonishment. “Okay, whoa. Slow that roll. Your familiar stole money from you after he’d been with you all these years?” No wonder he had trust issues.

Rick’s eyes became hard, simmering with anger. “He did. This was his place, by the way. I had it built for him when I began making serious money. It was my gift to him for taking a kid and turning his life around—giving him a place to call home. Yash called this his sanctuary—his bliss. A place he could go when he needed silence and solace, a place to reflect. And he shit all over it.”

Huh. Poppy heard the words, but she was having trouble placing stock in them…and that didn’t make a lick of sense. She didn’t know Yash from Adam.

“Why did he steal money from you? What was his motive after all those years?”

Rick shrugged his shoulders, the anger in his eyes tinged with sadness. “I have no clue, but it’s irrefutable. I found it all on a thumb drive. He’d almost left it right out in the open—it was as though he’d wanted me to find it. I’m assuming he thought he wouldn’t be caught. Cleared all his personal effects out of here except the one thing that damned him.”

“And you didn’t think maybe the thumb drive was a plant? Because it was so obvious?”

“I did at first. Believe me, I didn’t just automatically assume Yash was a lowlife. We’d spent too many years together not to give him the benefit of the doubt. But then I couldn’t figure out who’d do something like that. Incriminate Yash? Frame him? There was never a single bit of evidence to suggest it was anyone but him. So maybe he just got careless. Or maybe didn’t give a damn whether I found the thumb drive or not. And still, if he was framed, where the hell did he go?”

So a man who’d spent all of Rick’s life with him, quite out of the blue, steals his money and blows the Popsicle stand without looking back? Had he pretended for all these years to care for Rick?

But the proof was all there, according to Rick.

“So the assumption is he just up and left?” That was incomprehensible to her. She couldn’t wrap her mind around that kind of betrayal. If Calamity had done nothing else, she’d impressed upon her loyalty to your assigned warlock—
forever
.

“Yep. Gone for good,” was Rick’s response, wooden and dead.

Tears stung her eyes—tears for a little boy caught up in his father’s madness and an evil warlock’s lust for a woman he shouldn’t have been able to have. Tears for his loss of someone who’d saved him and just as surely had dropped him like a brick from the top of the Empire State Building.

“Jesus… I’m flabbergasted. I…I don’t know what to say. What do you say to that kind of betrayal? But I understand now. I get it, and I’m really sorry I pushed.”

As suddenly as he’d begun, Rick was done. Patting her thigh in conciliatory fashion, he slid to the edge of the couch. “It’s over now, there’s nothing that can be done about it anyway. Yash is in the wind and the money went with him. We’ve recuperated. I’m going to go see if there’s something I can do to help January. I won’t let anything happen to you, Poppy. I promise.”

With that, he was gone.

But she was left with a million questions. But there was one thing she was very clear about—he had a right to rebuke magic in his life. He’d been burned in the worst possible tragedy, and she felt every ounce of his rage, his grief, his unrelenting sense of betrayal by the people in his life who were supposed to protect him.

A tear slid down her cheek as she watched him mingle with the women, pouring himself a cup of coffee and draping a casual arm over Carl’s shoulder. A tear of desolation for a little boy who’d lost everything and regained his worth by making piles of money and never letting anyone in.

Poppy swiped at the tear in frustration. For now, she had to set aside the grief she somehow intuitively shared with Rick. She had a bigger problem on her plate—her life.

Something or someone wanted her dead, was the general consensus. Whether by proxy or she was the aura’s target, remained unclear. Either way, her life was in danger, and she didn’t know how to stop it.

Tucking her legs beneath her, gazing at the mess of the shed, she wondered about Yash and his about-face betrayal. She wanted to pry, but it was clear Rick didn’t want to offer much more at this point.

Yet, there was a part of him unwilling to let Yash go—unwilling to believe his betrayal was real. She felt that, too. Felt it hard, deep and sure.