Sapphire Nights (Crystal Magic Book 1)(46)
After he finished his three kinds of grease, and she’d practically licked her bowl, they used hotel toothbrushes and checked out. Walker grabbed the champagne bottle on the way. It might not be bubbly, but it was his, and a good memory for the lonely nights ahead.
“So first thing we do after we pick up my backpack is ask Cass who lived in Hillvale twenty years ago?” Sam asked as they drove back to the restaurant where she had first met Cass. “She may still not be strong, so let’s line up the important things first.”
“I want to know how in hell she put a hex on you for days while she lay in a coma,” he grumbled, pulling into the storage facility next door to the restaurant.
A cloud crossed Sam’s usually sunny face, but she held back her feelings and shrugged. “She’ll just say drugs. Focus. Have you ever asked her if she knew your father?”
She punched her birthday into the keyboard, and the gates opened. She produced the key on her key chain with the locker number on it, and he drove down the aisle until he found it.
“I didn’t know he was here for sure until this past week, so no. I’ve kept his name on the down low while I snooped.”
“Snooping while learning about everyone, letting them trust you—you’re sneaky but good.” She climbed out, distancing herself literally as well as verbally.
Walker thought he should be good with that. He kept an eye on their surroundings as Sam applied the key to the designated box lock and twisted. They both sighed in relief when it opened, revealing a backpack. She rummaged around inside the pack until she found a small leather cash purse and opened it. Smiling triumphantly, she climbed back in with her treasures and waved her driver’s license and credit card at him. “I’m real again.”
“That relieves you of cartoon goddess status then. You’ll have to be normal like the rest of us.” Forcing her back into his mental closed case file, he drove out of the storage unit and headed for the hospital.
Cass had planned this whole damned expedition, right down to a restaurant and hotel near storage lockers and a hospital. He ought to strangle the old lady.
As they circled the hospital parking lot looking for a space, Sam stiffened. Walker hit the brake and followed her gaze. “Effing shit.”
He eased the car down the next aisle and over to a construction dumpster where a tall, slender, gray-haired female wrapped in shawls waited. Cass let herself in the back door of the SUV before he could even turn off the engine. “Home, Jeeves,” she ordered.
“What are you doing out of bed?” Sam asked with what sounded like horror. “Did the doctors say you could go?”
“They want to run a battery of tests and bill Medicare a fortune. I’m fine. Let’s go. We have work to do.”
Walker didn’t let up on the brake. He glanced at Sam. Her fingers were balled in fists. Remembering how she’d nearly broken his finger in her fury, he waited to see if he needed to intervene.
“That’s all you have to say to me?” Sam demanded, still sounding horrified. “You medicate me, send me into the void, leave me helpless—and all you can do is order us to take you home? Do I get an apology? An explanation? Or do we need to haul you back into the hospital and tell them you’re insane?”
Walker winced. But he stayed out of it. It wasn’t his head the old witch had played with. In his rearview mirror, he saw Cass lift her bony chin and glare out the window.
“You were bent on rejecting us without valid reason. You needed to meet us with open eyes, using that observational mind of yours and not childish emotion. And now that you’ve had time to study Hillvale, do you still want to walk away?”
“That justifies whatever you did to me?” Sam cried, although some of her fury had deflated. Walker suspected she’d already recognized why the old woman had done what she had.
How she had done it was another mystery entirely.
“Hillvale is special,” Cass said quietly. “We could change the world, if the world doesn’t destroy us first. I was willing to die if it meant you would return to help us.”
Shit, the old lady had hit Sam’s sympathy buttons. Sam frowned in thought. He really didn’t want to fight the old woman and carry her back inside. But he didn’t want her dropping dead on him either.
“I’m fine,. Let’s go,” Cass said with a wave of her thin hand. “They could be up there bulldozing the vortex if we don’t go back now.”
“Bulldozing the vortex? Is that what this is all about?” Sam asked, nodding at him in an unspoken command.
Walker took it as an okay to move on. The hospital would already have Cass’s information. He’d have his assistant double check to make certain they knew she was okay and that they didn’t need more. He was all for interrogating the crazy old bat all the way back to town.
“Are you prepared to tell me what you did to Sam?” he asked before leaving the lot. “Otherwise, I’m hauling you back inside.”
“Drugs, dear. It’s all in knowing your pharmaceuticals. Well, and a little hypnosis, perhaps. Did that work?”
Walker checked his rearview mirror. Cass had a too academic, sophisticated air to look like an innocent old lady, no matter how she tried. He knew she lied, at least partially. She’d probably used mushrooms, all right, but the Lucys did weird inexplicable things. He needed to figure out how before they did it again.