Maia's Magickal Mates [The Double R 3] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (32 page)

Cade noticed she, like Maia, had a healthy appetite, vegan or not. He liked this about Sabrina. He also liked that she didn’t seem to have any qualms about her weight, not that she needed to anyway. Her body was the perfect combination of athletic and feminine. She had an hourglass figure with lush, round curves filling out her small frame, but her well-delineated biceps were a testament that she did not fear breaking a sweat at hard labor.

Cade felt Maia staring at him and slowly turned to meet her look with a smile.

“Like what you see?” she asked under her breath.

“Always.”

Maia shook her head and laughed. “I’m going to call Sabrina over here to give you a good cuff upside the head, you keep it up.”

“That one giving you a hard time?” Sabrina asked.

“Always,” Maia said.

“Another reason for you to keep up your strength, dealing with the likes of your two escorts here, I reckon,” Sabrina said, and Cade covered his laugh with a hand over his mouth and a cough as Maia and Thayne both blushed vivid red.

Maia recovered enough to say, “They are trying.”

If he and Thayne didn’t watch out, the two women would soon be in cahoots and ganging up on them, not to mention the rest of the men in the house.

The kitchen was silent for a moment as everyone enjoyed the food that Sabrina had prepared, before Joshua spoke up.

“It’s a real shame about that boy going missing this week.”

His low tone was conversational, but Cade sensed something more beneath his words than regular chitchat.

“I know, and so soon after the Humlet boy went missing,” Sabrina said. “Maybelle is still beside herself with fretting.”

“Seems like a real epidemic,” Luke put in, and Cade noticed his frown of concentration.

Cade had a bad feeling, the kind he used to get when he was working missing-persons cases with LAPD. Even with all the forensic and scientific breakthroughs, missing and exploited children were still an all-too-common phenomenon in the twenty-first century. How bad was the problem back in this time without all the complex procedures and science at the lawmen’s and town’s disposal?

Cade looked at his brother, who simply shrugged. Any other time he would have let things go at that and deferred to Thayne’s sagacity, but hearing about Maybelle’s fretting twisted something inside him. He had to respond. “Epidemic?”

“It’s the strangest thing. Started with the Indian settlement a couple of towns over, then it moved to the Negro town a road or two down from it, and now children have started turning up missing in Elk Creek.”

“How many?” Cade rasped.

“All told, or just here?”

“All told.”

“To the best of my recollection, ten, including the two boys from Elk Creek.”

“How long has this been going on?” Maia asked, taking the words out of Cade’s mouth.

“Hard to say.” Sabrina shrugged as she cut into a piece of her ham with her knife and fork. Her nonchalant words said it all.

Kids turned up missing from the Indian and Negro towns, no big deal, and the good Christian folks in the white towns just brushed it off. As soon as children turned up missing from the white town, the problem becomes an “epidemic.”

Cade didn’t fault Sabrina or Luke. They weren’t the problem. They were just a small symptom of a bigger issue. The attitude was what it was—pervasive, systemic racism. Sadly, the mind-set was the same in the nineteenth century as it remained in the twenty-first century. People of color, but probably more importantly their children’s lives, just weren’t valued as much as white children’s lives.

Cade knew he had to handle his next questions very carefully, if he said anything at all.

He mentally weighed the pros and the cons of getting involved and couldn’t come up with a good reason not to show a little healthy curiosity. “When did the first boy go missing?”

Sabrina looked at Luke and Josh as if for confirmation before answering. “Don’t rightly know. I heard tell about the Indian kids a couple of months or so ago, maybe more.”

“And the first boy from Elk Creek?”

“That would be Olivia and Clay’s boy, Tommy. He’s the sweetest kid, a hard worker. He and his best friend, Isaiah, help me in my garden sometimes.”

“When’s the last time he was seen…” Cade almost said alive, but seeing as Sabrina spoke about the kid in the present tense, he didn’t want to pop her bubble unnecessarily. Not to mention he was breaking a lot of unspoken rules asking so many questions.

“I saw him about a week ago, probably when most of the town did. He and Isaiah came by to help me gather some herbs and plants for my tonics.”

“How old is he?”

“Tommy’s fourteen.”

“And the boy that went missing this week?”

“That’s Aaron. He’s thirteen, although you’d think he was older. Took up the slack working the farm for his mama after Maybelle lost her husband a year ago to consumption. Like Joshua said, it’s a real shame, it is.”

Poor woman. First she’d lost her husband, now she’d lost her son?

Cade had to do something.

He felt Thayne looking at him and turned to catch his brother’s subtle look of warning. It may have been subtle to everyone else at the table, but Cade heard him loud and clear. The look shouted for him not to get involved. As selfless and compassionate as his brother usually behaved, Thayne’s expression surprised Cade. Cade was usually the apathetic one who couldn’t be bothered by other people’s problems. The mien had served him well for a while, all the way up until he’d come back to Los Angeles and walked into that police station handling a high-profile missing person’s case. He’d told the desk sergeant he could help, and that was all she wrote. His life changed from that point on.

Cade knew he’d get an earful from his brother later for what he was about to say, but he couldn’t stop himself. “Is there any way we can help?”

“Don’t see how, unless you can bring Tommy and Aaron back to their mamas.”

“I’d like to try.”

Sabrina raised her eyes from her plate to give Cade her full attention. “How would you do that?”

“I’d be real interested to know how you’d do that, too,” Joshua said.

Cade really looked at him for the first time since Sabrina had introduced him.

His sandy-blond hair and droopy, silver-gray eyes gave one the impression of youth and inattentiveness, but Cade saw just how alert and sharp Joshua was. Despite the dark circles beneath his eyes, the cause of which Cade briefly wondered, it was obvious that Joshua wasn’t a man to take lightly.

“I could—”

Thayne cleared his throat loudly and glared at Cade.

His interruption didn’t go unnoticed, and everyone’s eyes went from Cade to Thayne and back to Cade again.

Cade felt everyone waiting to see what he would do next. He wasn’t sure himself what he was going to do or say next.

Finally, Sabrina leaned forward in her chair and patted Cade on the hand, saving him from himself. “I’m sure you mean well and the families would appreciate it, but there’s really nothing you can do that the sheriff and his deputy haven’t done already.”

The sheriff and his deputy aren’t psychics.

Cade held his tongue, however. He knew he couldn’t go shooting off his mouth about any sort of extrasensory perception, something with which these good people probably didn’t have too much experience, if any.

He also knew he wouldn’t be able to keep quiet about this for long. Especially if, God forbid, another kid turned up missing.

It was just a matter of time.

When Prentice initially landed in the Old West after finally successfully casting Brielle Malloy’s spell, he’d thought he would be prepared for anything. He wasn’t as prepared as he’d assumed he’d be.

As the days progressed and bled into each other, Prentice grew to understand that this shithole dust bowl was exactly where he was meant to be, as much as he detested it.

Prentice felt the others, the three psychics who’d disappeared from Aura’s house, all around him. He sensed their energy.

When they’d first disappeared he had spent a good several minutes just sitting on that bottom step in the basement, wondering what his next move should be. He had nothing to go by except that silly incantation he’d caught when it was too late to do anything about it.

Prentice recited it over and over to no avail. He decided there had to be more to it than just the recitation, and admittedly he was a little rusty in his spell-casting abilities since he rarely used them. He didn’t need the formality of spells to get what he wanted since his powers were so strong without them and growing stronger.

His powers, however, weren’t able to facilitate the spell.

He loathed admitting it, but Prentice needed help.

Hungry, he turned off the oven and helped himself to a healthy serving of the lasagna simmering inside. Not until he bit into it did he realize it was some vegetarian concoction. It wasn’t bad, but Prentice liked his meat as well as the next carnivore and wasn’t into passing up a thick, juicy steak any chance he got.

He washed down the meal with cold water from the tap and cleaned up as much of the mess in the kitchen as he could. Once he was satisfied that nothing looked obviously untoward, he left Aura’s house a little before the sheriff arrived to investigate the explosion that her nosy neighbors must have reported. Even with the isolated location of Aura’s house far enough from other homes for routine disturbances to go relatively unnoticed, the sonic boom that had accompanied the trio’s disappearance could not be ignored, not even by her farthest neighbors.

Prentice briefly considered killing the two officers who had arrived but thought it would bring more attention to the house and property than he wanted. As it was, too many official sorts stomped through and around the house after the incident for his comfort.

As he’d intended, the two officers didn’t find anything out of order except the missing basement door.

Parked a good distance away to be unnoticeable, Prentice actually watched from the cover of his car with a pair of high-powered binoculars as the two officers entered the house. They’d drawn their guns as they searched all the rooms in the house before they finally stood in the kitchen scratching their heads.

Within a couple of hours, the officers finally departed, leaving Prentice free to go back in and look through the house in more detail than he had previously.

He looked through the house from the bottom up, determined to find something, anything that would clue him in to where the Malloy brothers and the Jensen woman had disappeared to.

He finally came across a box in the attic, and the vibe he received from the items inside told him that he had found exactly what he was looking for. The energy was palpable, and he hadn’t even opened the box.

Reverently, he pulled the box from its corner in the dusty attic floor. He knew that he had come across powerful magic within and knew to respect his discovery. He cleared off a nearby bench and sat down to open the box.

He found the usual minutiae that made up domestic life. Athletic medals and certificates of merit with the Malloy boys’ names emblazoned on them inhabited the box. There were also report cards, photo albums, and clay and paper arts and crafts within.

Prentice dug deeper, displacing the personal items within, all evidence of the Malloy brothers’ cherished existence, determined to find something more important. Determined to find what he needed to help him locate the brothers and their woman.

Finally he came across a handwritten letter addressed to Thayne from his mother.

Prentice sped through the first paragraph, getting the gist before he reached mention of the infamous pendant and the incantation.

This was the chant, in black and white, exactly as they had invoked it, exactly as
he
had recited it. Except that when he’d recited it, nothing had happened, nothing at all.

He had to be doing something wrong, but what?

Prentice stayed in that attic in Aura’s house until daybreak before what was missing suddenly occurred to him. It was in the chant itself.

He could not get around the “sons and daughter” portion, but what did he desire and wish for the most?

Giving in to the rare limitation, Prentice put in a call to one of his coven’s more gifted members and risked trusting him with a little of what he tried to accomplish in Oklahoma without telling him exactly what was going on.

What he told Prentice was something he could imagine Aura or his pathetic parents saying to him. He told Prentice in order for any spell to work the caster had to sincerely believe in the spell. Otherwise, the invocation meant nothing, was just a collection of empty words.

Prentice hung up from the coven member wanting to break something.

It took him a few days to figure out that there had to be a way around the “sincerely believe” part, which brought Prentice right back to his desires and wishes.

What he desired and wished for the most was power and revenge. In order to get both, he had to find the three who had escaped him.