Whispers of Fate: The Mistresses of Fate, Book Two Read Online Free Page A

drag him out of his cabin and beat the shit out of him. Luckily Tavey’s grandfather and Old Ninny, one of Summer’s relatives, had called the police, who arrived in time to stop them from killing him. His uncle, who’d never been all that stable, had never seemed to recover from the incident, which had left him with a broken collarbone and a skull fracture.
    After that things had calmed down somewhat, but there were new incidents every fall, around the months that Summer disappeared. Tyler didn’t think Tavey was involved in the fires and the bricks thrown through his uncle’s windows, but she sure didn’t hesitate to tell anyone what she suspected, including his uncle.
    “Tyler, do you think you could get me an introduction to Tavey Collins?”
    Tyler whipped his head around so quickly he felt his neck pop. They were driving down the 140 toward Canton. Christie’s dog, Grumbles, who was sitting on the seat between them in the truck, made the weird rumbling noise that had earned him his name, and started licking Tyler’s face.
    Tyler gently pushed him away so he could make eye contact with his stepdaughter, before turning his eyes back to the road.
    “You know why that’s unlikely.”
    “Uh-huh. She hates your guts.”
    “No, I hate her guts.”
    “You really shouldn’t practice hate.” She had lowered her voice and drawn her eyebrows together, impersonating Tyler—he’d given a speech about Internet bullying in her high school the week before. It wasn’t his normal assignment, but all the officers tried to give back to the communities they served.
    He snorted—she was a funny little shit, for a girl. “All right. I don’t hate her. She and I just don’t get along. It’s better that we avoid each other whenever possible.”
    “Kind of like you and Mom?” she suggested, her toffee-brown eyes curious.
    Tyler thought about that one for a moment. Strangely, it wasn’t like that with Christie’s mom. He felt no serious animosity toward Angie; they’d just figured out too late that they wanted different things.
    “Your mom and I don’t avoid each other.”
    “She avoids you.”
    This was news to Tyler. “Why, for God’s sake?”
    “She says she feels bad for not telling you she was in love with someone else.”
    “She says this crap to you?”
    “We have a very open relationship.”
    Tyler chuckled. Yeah, if he missed anything about his marriage, it was getting to hang out with this kid, who was a pistol for sure.
    He changed the subject. “Why do you want to meet her?”
    “Are you kidding?” She turned in her seat so she was facing him more directly. “She’s awesome. She runs her own businesses, she gives to charity, and her dogs are the best trackers. They literally run circles around the other dogs.”
    “Literally, huh?”
    “Sometimes. My friend Becca says her house is killer and she has a gazillion dogs.”
    Tyler could testify to the house being killer. The Collins residence sat grandly on one of the rolling foothills just west of Pine Mountain. Built in the mid-1800s by Tavey’s many times great-grandfather, it looked similar to plantation houses from an earlier era, with a huge porch surrounded by columns and elaborate gardens. The property ranged for several miles, basically from the edge of the city limits of Fate to the county line to the north. Farther to the northwest but also in the hills lived the family of the girl who had been Tavey’s best friend—Summer Haven. Before Summer had gone missing, the two girls had run back and forth across his uncle’s land to see each other, driving the old man nuts.
    He glanced at the teenager next to him, who’d put her feet up on his dashboard and was now glued to her iPhone. He couldn’t imagine letting her run back and forth through the woods alone now, even with her stupid dog leading the way.
    “I’ll think about it,” he conceded finally, as they pulled into her driveway. The small one-story patio home with a screened-in