Hearing my name spoken by a reporter, a stranger who did not know me, was weird even though my name had been occasionally mentioned alongside my father’s in the media. This time felt very different. This time made me feel vulnerable, exposed, violated.
A picture of my dad next to an intelligent-looking dark-haired woman who I assumed was one of the wives I’d missed out on flashed on the screen. Then the screen filled with a picture of me, from a dedication ceremony I’d attended with my father during my precollege days. In the photo I was smiling and had absolutely no idea what a huge mess my life was about to become.
The news ended with the reporter reciting a phone number, and summing up that I was a person of suspicion in the case of my father’s death and any information on my whereabouts should be immediately reported to the police.
The reporter gave the camera over to the weather-man, and I sat back in my chair, acutely aware that Nola and Zay were staring at me.
“Shit,” I said. I supposed the only good thing was they didn’t say I was armed and dangerous and should be shot on sight.
I expected Zayvion to say he told me so—Bonnie had ratted me out to the cops and they were looking for me, just like he said. But he sat there quietly, which was pretty decent of him.
“Well,” Nola said. “I think we need to think this out and make a plan of what to do next. Allie, do you have any ideas?”
“I still think I should go to the police. Turn myself in.”
Zay sat back in his chair and watched me from over the edge of his coffee cup.
“I’m innocent,” I said. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Can you prove that?” Zay asked quietly.
“Of course I can.”
“You have an alibi for where you were after you and I left the deli?”
I opened my mouth to tell him of course I did, and he could shove it. But my recollection of what had happened from when I left my dad’s office to when I woke up at Mama’s was spotty at best. Even the deli seemed a little foggy to me.
“I went home,” I said.
“Did anyone see you there?” Zayvion asked. “Did you make any calls? Talk to anyone in the halls?”
“No.”
“No witnesses. No calls to trace. Not good,” he said. “Then what?”
“I left.”
“Why?”
“I couldn’t stand the smell of the building.”
“Doubt that will hold up in court, but fine. Where did you go, and who saw you go there?”
This is where the really big black holes and gaps of time filled my head. The hit I Hounded on Boy had kicked in pretty hard by then. I was hurting and maybe even a little delirious. I was lucky I hadn’t wandered around town bleeding out of my ears and singing show tunes. For all I knew I might have done just that.
Or maybe I’d gotten angry and confused. Maybe I’d found my way back to my father’s office, managed to ride the elevator without having a panic attack, gotten past his perky, nosy secretary, and somehow summoned the strength to draw enough power, through the protection wards—and cast a killing spell—to kill him.
It just seemed so incredibly unlikely. But it also seemed incredibly unlikely that I couldn’t remember nearly a full twenty-four hours—the twenty-four-hour span when my father was killed.
“I can’t remember, exactly.”
Zay said nothing. He didn’t have to.
Nola rubbed her hand between my shoulder blades and gave me a gentle pat. “I suppose this is a bad time to remind you what I think about using magic.”
“Yeah, Nola.” I managed a small smile. “I know what you think about using it. And right now, I see your point.” I looked back over at Zayvion. “So maybe I don’t have an alibi. But do they have any evidence that I went back to my father’s place? Do they have any evidence that it
“They have Bonnie’s testimony that she Hounded the hit and it was your signature on it.”
“Bonnie hates me and would do anything to make me hurt.”
“Can you prove that?” Zayvion asked.
I rolled my eyes. “Maybe. Probably. We haven’t hidden our hatred or anything. People know about it. The bank job she and I handled—all the people involved in that know how she feels about me.”
“That would help,” Zay conceded, “but it won’t change the fact that the police brought in three Hounds to sniff the hit, and that Violet hired a separate Hound independent of them to check too.”
“Violet’s my dad’s current wife?” I asked.
It didn’t take him long to figure out I was not joking. He nodded.
“Okay. What did her Hound say?”
“They all said it was your signature, Allie.”
Five Hounds sniffing the same hit would find subtle differences if there were any. If five different Hounds said I did it, even I would think I did it.
But I had zero recollection of killing my father. I’d think a person would remember such a thing. I think I would remember it, memory loss or no memory loss. I would have felt it. I would have tasted it. It would still be in my hands, in my lungs.
“How do you know all this, Zayvion? Are you a cop? A reporter? How do you have all this inside information that I don’t have?”
“Allie, I’ve told you all that. Don’t you remember?”
That hit me like a punch to the gut. I did not remember. If he had come clean about who he was and what he did and why he was always following me around, it had fallen down the same twenty-four-hour black hole growing in my head.
I opened my mouth to tell him “How about we just pretend I don’t remember and you can tell me again,” but Cody let out a piercing, childlike scream of glee that reminded me why I never wanted to have a child.
He stood and pointed at the window, and once he ran out of air he filled up again and kept on screaming.
Nola moved around the table and put one hand on his outstretched arm. “You need to be quiet now, Cody. Use your inside voice. Use your words. Tell me what’s wrong.”
But Cody was not listening. He pushed away from Nola and hurried over to the window, still screaming.
Zay was on his feet and moving toward him now. Even though Cody acted like a kid, he was still a man, and none of us knew enough about him to know what he might do.
Cody pressed his palms flat against the window, then switched so only his fingers were touching the glass. He wiggled his fingers as the pale yellow light of the rising sun filtered through the branches of the willows beyond the road and spilled like ghostly honey across his hands.
He stopped screaming, transfixed by the sight of sunlight on his hands. Then he looked up and through the window. “Sunshine,” he said softly. He looked over his shoulder at Nola. “Sunshine.”
Wow. The guy really liked sunshine.
Back on the table, the kitten stuck her paw in the milk, slipped, and dunked her face in it. She mewled and Cody reluctantly turned away from the sunshine to retrieve her. “Sunshine, Kitten,” he said. “Sunshine.” He picked her up, but became confused as to what to do with the milk-soaked cat.
Nola handed him a towel and he dried her feet and face.
“Zayvion,” Nola said. “Stay here with Cody, please. Allie, let me get your clean clothes for you. Do you want to shower?”
“All right,” I said.
Zayvion cleaned the table, taking dishes to the sink, and I followed Nola to the laundry room.
“What?” I asked her when we got there. Her not-so-subtle attempt to get me away on my own meant she wanted to talk to me without Zay around.
“I’ve been thinking about everything you told me last night, and I have a couple questions.” She opened the
