Wicked Tempest: A Kate Waters Mystery (Kate Waters Mysteries Book 2) Read Online Free Page B

take charge and fix her world. She had told him that before. “But how could I not be involved in this?”
    “She needs her dad, not a detective,” Shelia said.
    Her comment dug up a familiar pain, one he had heard from Julie before. His phone rang and he checked the display. Kate Waters? He remembered Kate well, having just closed the case on her sister’s homicide. He turned to Shelia. “I’m sorry. I have to take this one.”
    She nodded and he headed out of the waiting room and into the hall. “This is Wells.”
    “Detective Wells, this is Kate. Kate Waters.”
    “Hello Kate. I’m sorry to say you’ve kind of caught me at a bad time.”
    “This is very important.”
    He could only imagine what she was about to tell him, and feared more witchcraft-related trouble.
    “What is it?”
    “I found a girl, dead in her home.”
    Shit. He hadn’t expected that. “Okay, give me a minute. I’ll call you right back.” He hung up and went back into the waiting room.
    “I have to go.” He knew what was coming next, Shelia’s look of disappointment and shame, and it punched into him harder than ever before.
    “But it’s your daughter this time.”
    “At least she is still alive, unlike someone else’s daughter at the moment.” Wells thought she should at least think about that. Her world wasn’t always the worst or even the most important, but Shelia never understood.
    “Can you at least say good-bye to her?”
    Wells tucked his phone back into his jacket. He walked to the waiting room doorway and turned to Shelia. “I can be her dad too.”
    ***
    The rainstorm softened to a steady drizzle, but it was still a cold curtain wrapping itself around Kate. The patterned rug on Brooke’s porch became a dark labyrinth for her wandering thoughts, trapping them into confusion, anxiety, and horrors of the past. A slew of questions kept knocking at her mind. How did Brooke die? Was she murdered? Like her sister Jev? Did Thea have anything to do with it? Was she in danger herself?
    She waited outside with Thea, who leaned against the side of the house, maybe questioning all she had seen too. Death had bled a thick stillness between the two of them. There was something beneath Thea’s usual quiet exterior, and it shouted of warning, as if she not only believed in the curse she spoke of, but feared it as well.  
    Looking into the window next to her, Kate could see the corner of the island in Brooke’s kitchen. Just two feet from there, Brooke lay in the twisted angle of death. She was so young. Like Jev.
    A shiver seized Kate’s shoulders as she thought about the girl’s death, a somber reminder of Jev’s, how she used to imagine her car crash, the man who had left her to die, and all the secrets of Jev’s she had uncovered afterwards. She assumed Brooke had her share of secrets too, especially if she was in the Blue Moon Coven.
    Kate shook back the chill of those memories and checked her phone display to see if her boyfriend, David, had called her. He wasn’t answering their home phone or his cell. Though often unavailable—David was a paramedic for Providence Medical Center—his timing sometimes couldn’t be worse.
    “What’s taking him so long?” Thea said, referring to Detective Wells. She paced in small circles next to the front door.
    “I called him at a bad time, so he said. I imagine he’s dealing with his own problems.”
    Thea stopped and turned to Kate. “I know you think I’m crazy, but something harrowing is coming.” Her fingers kneaded the tops of her knuckles.
    “I think it has already arrived,” Kate said, gesturing to the kitchen where Brooke was.
    “No, there’ll be more.” Thea went back to pacing. “The storms are intensifying, the ground has been shaking, the—”
    “The ground is always shaking,” Kate said. “You’re reading in too many things. I think you’re just being overly paranoid.”
    Thea swung around with a sharpness in her eyes that Kate had come to expect.