The Accidental Familiar (Accidentally Paranormal Series Book 14) (24 page)

Damned if he understood what she’d meant about Avis, but damned if it hadn’t left him tossing and turning last night. Her words had been clear as day. She didn’t like him. She thought he was a bad person.

But she didn’t know why, which made no sense. He liked this woman far more than he’d planned on originally. Yes, she’d been crazy attractive from the get-go, but he hadn’t planned on her stirring up feelings the way she did with her funny jokes. He didn’t plan on her attractiveness ramping up a hundred notches while he’d watched her humble herself from the window of the nursing home to Mr. Rush about her overdue rent. She had a deep sense of integrity, and it was something too often ignored in this day and age.

Then there were her incredibly sensible quotes. Quotes eerily similar to Yash’s quotes. In fact, at one point, when she’d quoted Maya Angelou, it was the exact quote Yash had often used—he’d maybe even used Tzu’s. Still, it was uncanny.

Rolling his head on his neck to ease the growing tension there, Rick forced the image of a beautiful, naked, incredibly sexy Poppy from his mind and focused instead on the frustration he’d felt when he was unable to express himself.

He, too, was in the wildly attracted zone. He’d wanted to tell her that until his throat seized up like a car engine. So instead, he’d kissed her in the hopes she’d feel what he was feeling.

He wanted to ask her not to make any rash decisions until this demo was over and he could take some time off to spend with her.

He wanted to tell her about the visions he had of them sharing a bottle of wine, having dinner, getting to know one another, and yes, digging deeper into him rebuffing magic in general. But the Avis thing was an enormous problem.

And he’d be fucked if he knew what to do about it. Avis had been through it with him. Every exam, every late night while he worked at a diner as a short-order cook and Avis helped him study over customers’ hamburgers, every good deal they’d made together as a team and every last shitty day he’d had since Yash abandoned ship.

He wasn’t just going to up and ditch all that history because Poppy had some “feelings” she could neither identify nor back up with any proof.

But he couldn’t discard them either—because he found he cared what she thought. He wanted to get to know her.

He wanted.

He just didn’t know how to address her problem with Avis. He didn’t even know where to begin, it had caught him so off guard. But the second he got a break here, he was going to hunt her down and find a way to ask her to stay—at least until he had a voice and they could have an actual conversation.

Speaking of, he pulled his phone from his pocket, deciding to at least send Poppy a text, asking her to stay. He pulled up her name and typed out,
Please stay
for the umpteenth time, only to have it refuse to send.

“Rickster!” Avis shouted as he made his way across the entry of Littleton with a sweep of his long trench coat and a wave. “How are you, old man? Still having trouble with the throat?”

Rick nodded, still baffled by this sudden case of laryngitis.

Avis slapped him on the back, peering down at Rick’s phone. “You need to see a physician, my friend. And is that our Poppy you’re texting? Is my boy in like?”

Rick grinned at him, but then he remembered how Poppy felt about Avis and toned it down, shrugging his shoulders.

“I knew it!” Avis declared. “I saw the way you were looking at her, you dirty dog! Why don’t you go? I can certainly handle this alone. Everything is ready, and everyone is out of the building. No stragglers at all. As a matter of fact, they’re all meeting up at the diner across the way to watch the demo. Codgy old busybodies,” he joked affably.

But Rick shook his head in a vehement effort to remind Avis they were in this together. Besides, he wanted to be available to the people of Littleton if they had second thoughts—to reassure them everything would be all right.

Avis held up a gloved hand. “Don’t say another word…” He paused and gave a hearty laugh. “Sorry, bloke. I meant, don’t trouble yourself with an explanation. I understand why you’d want to bugger about until the demo is done. For the tenants, yes?”

Rick nodded his confirmation. How could Poppy not see that while Avis could be a real cad when it came to women, he also had a big damn heart?

“You always were an old softie, and I’m in full support. Now, I have to get moving and be sure the city isn’t going to thrust their greedy little hand out any farther for more last-minute permits. Call me later?”

Rick gave him the thumbs-up sign and smiled.

“Good enough. We’re going to be very rich soon, Rickster, my boy. Very rich indeed!” he cackled.

The prospect of the money they’d make from building these condos had at one time been insanely appealing. But today, none of that interested him. Not the dollars, not the exhilaration of a new project.

As he looked at Littleton, with its charming gardens and weird stone spiral on the roof, he experienced a stab of sadness he didn’t understand. But it was there, and it was demanding he pay attention.

* * * *

Oh my God!” Poppy called out from the bedroom in the shed, pushing the white and gray-lavender comforter out of her way. “I think I found something, ladies!”

She’d awakened today with an ominous emptiness in the pit of her stomach and a heavy heart, and that sense of pending doom hadn’t left her all day long. It eased as she’d sat beside Carl outside and chatted with Wanda, probably because those were all things that brought her joy.

But as the day crept into late afternoon and Nina and Marty prepared to do a quick round of trick-or-treating with their girls, that doom grew.

Calamity skidded into the room, sliding right into Poppy, who sat on the floor in front of some drawers beneath Yash’s old bed. She hadn’t really bothered to look around much since she’d been here. Moving in had felt like an invasion of someone else’s space. Add to that Rick’s original dislike of all things familiar, and she’d avoided even unpacking her overnight bag.

This had been Yash’s, and his imprint was clear. But today? Today he was everywhere. Every single thing she looked at in the shed screamed his name in big, bold letters.

“Whatcha got there, Pop Star?”

She pointed to the hidden bottom she’d mistakenly come across when she was looking for her ballet slippers. Arch had tidied up, and she couldn’t find them anywhere. The bottom of the drawer, lined in a velvet lavender material, had bubbled up and the strange notion she had to pull it back at all costs, the surge of urgency, made her do just that.

“Look!” she waved a hand at the scads of pictures and papers.

“You think this is all the Yash guy’s pictures of Rick?” Marty asked, coming to sit next to Poppy. “If he took off like a bat out of hell, I guess the dirty SOB didn’t want any reminders of the boy he raised like his own.”

But Poppy shrugged her shoulders. She heard the words, the tinge of venom associated with them, but that just didn’t sit right.

“Let’s find out.” Sifting through the pictures, Poppy couldn’t help but smile, her heart clenching. There were tons of them. Rick in a Boy Scout uniform. She almost laughed out loud. Of course, he’d been a Boy Scout.

Rick in a Santa hat next to a stack of partially opened presents, wearing a pair of batman pajamas. Rick building a snowman, his nose red from the cold. Rick with a big turkey drumstick. Rick getting his high school diploma. Rick with Avis wearing hard hats at what looked like an earlier development project. Rick surrounded by a circle of small children with a building of some kind in the background. The back of the picture read,
Africa, 2011
.

“He built things in Africa,” she whispered softly, staring at Rick, sweat glistening on his forehead, his dark hair slicked back.

“Well, our Rick isn’t such a dick after all, is he?” Wanda said, tapping the picture with a smile.

And the final pictures, Rick with a man in a dark brown robe with an embroidered pattern down the front, that looked exactly like what Poppy had pictured someone doling out advice would wear. His face was kind amidst the wrinkles lining his cheeks, his eyes shining and happy, his snow-white hair but fringe surrounding his mostly bald head.

In one picture, he had his arm around a young Rick, protectively tucking him to his side. In another, Rick’s head was thrown back as he laughed, apparently at something Yash had said or done. Yash sat next to him at a table, his hand stretched across the surface to rest on Rick’s, his eyes laughing, too, his smile wide.

There were easily twenty or so of Rick and Yash, and even one of Yash by the shed, tending the gardens she had earlier enjoyed sitting beside.

But it was the very last one she touched that caught her attention. Fanning her hand over the pile, she revealed a picture of Avis, Rick, and Yash, standing in front of Littleton.

Her heart began to drum up a beat of raging panic as she looked closer, leaning forward at the waist. Everyone was smiling but Yash. In fact, he looked quite pained. Reaching out, she picked the picture up to examine it more closely—which was exactly the moment her stomach began to roll much in the way it had when she’d puked an aura.

A groan slipped from her lips as her fingertips burned and she fought a scream of agony as the white-hot pain seared through her belly, forcing her to roll to the ground.

“Poppy?” Marty bellowed, grabbing her shoulders. “Poppy! What’s happening?”

She gripped the picture harder, her fingers clamping onto the shiny paper so hard, the bones in her fingers cracked, and her arms shook.

As quickly as it began, as severe as the pain became, it just as swiftly dissipated before the picture caught fire.

Poppy’s fingers let go in reflective response, flexing outward until she hissed a protest.

“Fire in the hole!” Calamity yelped with a hiss, bringing Nina from around the corner.

“Got this!” Nina yelled as Poppy dropped the picture, and the vampire yanked her wand from behind her back, aiming it directly at the flames.

The spray of yellow mist from her wand extinguished the fire in a mere second, the remaining smoke wisping to the ceiling in threads of acrid black tendrils.

“Holy great balls of fire! You did it!” Calamity exclaimed, prancing about. “You fucking did it! You put out the fire, Nina! I told you all those hours of hard work would pay off, Half-Breed!”

But Nina, so obviously not one for praise, stooped beside Poppy and planted a hand on her shoulder. “You okay? And what the fuck just happened? That damn aura again?”

She shook her head in astonishment as she lay on the floor, dazed. “It was that same pain again, and…I don’t know. But I
do
know what just disintegrated in my hand was a picture of Rick, Avis, and Yash at Littleton. Yash knew about Littleton?”

“Did you ask the British Boob about Yash being there? When did he disappear anyway?”

Marty helped Poppy sit back up with a grunt. Looking at Nina, she made a face. “No. I didn’t even think about it. I also didn’t ask my favorite warlock. Getting Rick to talk was like trying to pry open a can of beans with your fingers. What he did tell me was hard enough to get out of him, but if I’d pressed any harder? I can’t even imagine how withdrawn he’d become. He all but walked away from the conversation as though I should just leave things alone. I didn’t get every detail. I was so blown away by what he told me about his mother and father, I almost couldn’t speak. Stupidly, I left things alone. Because I thought I’d have more time to dig. But it’s no wonder he’s not all ‘yay, familiar’ after what he did share.”

Nina’s nostrils flared. “So the picture? Is this like some kind of nutty-ass sign? Why the hell is a picture bursting into flames? How does this tie into this dude Yash? Does it tie in at all?”

The moment she wondered the same was the moment she was reminded of the expression on Yash’s face. It had stuck her as pained. “You know, Yash didn’t look happy in that picture, and in every other picture, he’s either smiling or at the very least, looks peaceful. What about that picture made him so unhappy and why am I feeling this impending sense of doom?”

Wanda, who’d also raced to her side but had remained as quiet as she’d been through almost this entire journey, cocked her head. “Explain doom.”

“I’ve been feeling it for a while now. At first, it started with the idea Nina would leave me here alone—”

“It was just a joke, Tiny Dancer.”

Poppy held up a hand. “No, I know that. In fact, as part of this familiar bundle package, I intuitively knew you wouldn’t leave me on my own. I didn’t know I’m also intuitive until January explained, but when she did, it all made sense. But the doom thing began as early as that moment, and it’s just been building since. At my apartment, I felt it, too. Like something is wrong, but I don’t have the tools to figure it out. Then today when I woke up, I was overwhelmed by it, consumed by it. The thing is, I just don’t know what to do about it.”

“So this was going on before the aura thing?” Wanda inquired.

“Yes. Definitely yes.”

“And you didn’t tell us you were feeling this way,
why
?” Calamity asked.

She sighed, exasperated by this unexplainable rush of ugly fear. “Because how do you describe a feeling without proof there’s a reason for a feeling? Lots of people say I have a bad feeling. I just didn’t know with me it really meant something.” Leaning back on the bed, she winced at the pull on her abs.

They were still a bit sore from the other day, but this encounter hadn’t helped. Something shiny under the small dresser across from the bed caught her eye. Well, maybe shiny wasn’t the word she was looking for.

Sparkling was better, muted, but sparkling.

Getting on her knees, Poppy scooted to the dresser and slid her hand beneath, sweeping the floor until she knocked the item out the other side.

Eyeing it, she realized it was a crystal of some kind, a blue, prism-like crystal in the shape of a teardrop.

Wrapping her fingers around it, Poppy was instantly slammed back against the side of the bed.

“What the hell is going on?” Nina yelled as a scramble of feet thundered in Poppy’s ears.