A Little Wicked (The Bewitching Hour Book #4)(4)

His head turned as he followed her movement, but besides that he didn’t move. “She’ll want to see you.”

As soon as Sam was past him, she quickened her steps and ran down the hallway without stopping until she reached Abigail’s room. She knocked even as she pushed the door open, but Abigail wasn’t there. Sam looked at the empty vanity and the closed curtains. She didn’t remember Abigail ever having the curtains closed. She was kind of a freak about natural light. Sam crossed to the curtains and pulled them open in a quick motion, immediately flooding the room with sunlight.

“What a pleasant surprise,” said Abigail from behind her.

Sam twisted around and immediately let out a sigh of relief when she saw her mother. “Hey. I....” She tried to figure out where to start. “Have you talked to Garrett today? He’s being weird.”

“Considering what’s happened, I think we’ve all been a little weird lately.”

Not this weird. Before she could say anything, Abigail reached toward her nightstand and picked up a stiff piece of paper. “I was going to have a messenger deliver this, but since you’re here, I might as well cut out the middleman.” She let out a little giggle but Sam must’ve missed the joke.

She went around the bed to take the card from her mother and looked it over. “You’re throwing a solstice party tomorrow? But it’s not the solstice.”

“Well, I know that. But with the families in town, it would be a good opportunity to show what we Harrises have to offer.”

She wasn’t wrong, but it really didn’t make any more sense. “But Heather just—”

“These things happen. It’s how we react that will affect the trajectory of the next few weeks. I’m not about to let the families see our weakness, especially when they’re going to be going after our throats.”

Once again, completely logical, but Sam still couldn’t get her head around it. “Mom, I think that—”

“Honey, you seem stressed. Come here.” Abigail held out a hand and all Sam could do was stare at it. She had no idea what sort of comfort Abigail was trying to offer, but the unease was finally too much for her.

“I have to go,” she said abruptly as she pushed past her mother and made it to the hallway.

“I’m here if you need to talk,” said Abigail, wide smile in place.

“I....” There were no words. Sam struggled for the simple, “I’ll call you.” Garrett was thankfully gone and there was a clear path to the door. The second she stepped outside, she couldn’t help but feel a rush of relief.

Her first thought was to call Derek, but she stopped herself from reaching for her phone. What would she say? Garrett was now a robot and Abigail was completely normal? Derek had already been through enough, and there was still a very real possibility that all the weirdness going on was just a normal reaction to all the witchy shit that had happened. Besides, Derek didn’t need any more witch drama right now.





“You can’t be serious,” said Parker as Derek printed out another file.

“It might be nothing,” he admitted as he took the paper off his printer and added it to the growing pile on a table in the middle of the conference room they’d commandeered.

She leaned forward and riffled through all the cases they’d earmarked so far. “We’re never going to get anywhere with this,” she muttered.

Derek agreed, but he wasn’t sure what else they should be doing. After a lot of back and forth that morning, they figured the best way to move forward was to look back. Namely, look back on cold cases that seemed like there might be some supernatural element involved. A prospect that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, but now that they were digging through the cases everyone else had given up on, it was becoming apparent that any case that wasn’t solved looked as though there could be magic involved.

It was so easy to make a human forget the important details. To coerce someone to give an airtight alibi. To tell the police officer in charge that the droids they were looking for weren’t there.

“You’re right,” Derek admitted, running a hand over his eyes and thinking of the hours they’d wasted so far.

Parker stood and paced around the table. Her jacket hung off the back of her chair and she’d untucked her shirt a few hours ago, leaving it hanging loose around her waist. “Okay,” she said out loud. “Let’s think about this again. We want to keep the city safe from your girlfriend, right?”

Derek rolled his eyes. “From her family, yes.”

“And even if we found a case that could be explained by magic, there’s not much we could do about it.”

“I think that if a human was hurt because of a witch, Claudia would punish whoever was involved.”

“Claudia?” asked Parker skeptically. “The one who wiped Sam’s memories? And the one who used you to kill her granddaughter?”

“I’m not going to argue that she’s a good person or that we should trust her. But Claudia Harris does have a warped code of ethics she follows. She’s not afraid to hurt people, but she’s not trying to either.”

“Morally neutral is not morally good,” she pointed out.

Derek couldn’t argue with that so he kept his mouth shut.

“But we do know people who are morally bad in almost every way, right? Heather Harris and Jackson Benedict.”