Sapphire Nights (Crystal Magic Book 1)(50)

He shut the sirens as he hit the parking lot where lodge guests still spilled from the building, carrying suitcases and children.

Children. They had effing damned children in the path of that fire. He watched a curly-haired toddler no older than Davy had been and his lungs ran out of air.

Focus, Walker. Resist the urge to grab the children and run. “Water trucks,” he said curtly. “Planes. They’re on the way. Clearing brush is the best thing we can do.”

He slammed out of the car, fighting his protective instincts. He couldn’t take care of Sam, and he sure as hell couldn’t take care of a hotel filled with people. But he had a job to do.

Walker watched warily as Sam let herself out the other side. Her elegantly boned face was so much like Cass’s it was eerie, now that he’d seen them together. Both women were poised in the face of danger. Sam’s stillness was almost terrifying, akin to a cougar that smells danger and freezes before leaping.

“It’s fueled on evil,” she murmured. “I can feel it flowing through the ground. Cass is right. Someone deliberately set that fire.”

Shit, back to crazy again. “Stay here. Don’t move or I put you in handcuffs.”

Lazy, lanky Harvey, the long-haired musician and wood-carver, hurried across the lot to add to Walker’s escalating fury and anxiety.



Sam was aware that she’d ticked Walker off, but the primal elements flowing through her were stronger than his anger. She felt as connected to the land as she did to Cass. She could feel the stress. It was an odd feeling, stronger than the ones she’d used for planting.

Walker’s stress was of a different sort. He’d donned his sunglasses, and his expression was one of control so rigid that a muscle ticked in his jaw. He was watching the people pouring from the lodge with their belongings as if he wanted to make them all disappear.

A baby cried, a child shouted. He flinched and shoved on his mirrored sunglasses. His fists curled as he watched Harvey approach.

The musician provided welcome distraction. Harvey’s height gave him a lean look, but his black t-shirt revealed sinew and muscle. For a musician, he took athletics seriously, it appeared.

He held out one of his carved staffs to Sam. This one was a blond wood, slender, the tree branch’s original knobs and curves adding an almost feminine quality to it. The handle had been carved to resemble an antique sailing ship prow—a woman’s face with crystal blue eyes and hair streaming in the wind. Sam instinctively reached for it before he spoke.

“Protect the earth,” Harvey commanded.

Beside her, Walker nearly growled. Harvey loped off to help Carmel’s brother haul his paintings to a battered Land Rover. Helping empty the studio, the stout real estate mogul Grumpy Gump was collecting the smaller canvases, leaving the big ones to skinny Lance. For the first time, Sam noted gray shooting through the mogul’s thick blond hair.

Kurt and Carmel Kennedy were there, assisting their guests in their departures.

Sam’s staff twitched. She had no idea what that meant, but after being trapped and helpless these last days, she needed her self back. She’d always craved an accepting community, but she’d learned early to defy bullies who kept her out.

She glared at Walker. “Handcuff me, and you can arrest me for assaulting a police officer.”

“That would be a reverse policy. I mean it, Sam. Don’t be part of the problem,” he ordered.

“I think we’re all part of the problem, but that fire up there is manmade. I can feel the malice burning.” Torn between intellectual obedience and the innate sensation of knowing how the earth felt, Sam’s defiance escalated.

Even as she spoke, one of the lodge’s uniformed security guards raced down the hillside, shouting, “It’s a cross! The crazies are burning a cross!”

“No, they’re not.” At that deliberate slur, she chose sides and started toward the path into the woods. “The Lucys are in town, blocking evil with bulldozers.”

She said it for Walker’s benefit, not the guard, who was too far away. Walker grabbed her elbow and swung her around.

“That part, I almost understand,” he said. “But you can’t put out the fire. Stay here and keep the Kennedys in line or they’ll be rounding up your friends and shooting them.”

Startled, she studied his expression, but wearing his mirrored sunglasses, he played his inscrutable card. Last night, in his arms, she’d thought she understood him. Today, not so much.

Remembering Carmel at the graveyard at midnight, she had to consider his conclusion, but she shook her head in disagreement.

“The Kennedys are not the wrongness seeping through this soil. I guess you’re right, though, I’m new to this. I’ll hold them off with my new stick.” She gave him a blindingly insipid grin that she figured he didn’t buy for an instant, but he released her.

Last night had been a moment out of time, one she’d never have again, she feared. He was the Null voice of sanity and authority, and she was just a crazy Lucy, apparently. She stalked off toward the lodge.

She discovered the walking stick had a belt that she could strap around her arm or waist or anywhere that suited her. She fit it to her waist and hefted a toddler wandering after his father, who was bogged down in bags of toys and coolers.

“People are more important than things,” she warned the mother racing up to fling diaper bags in the back of their van. Sam handed her the kid. “Get out now, before the fire spreads.”