CHAPTER 1
Reg listened to the voices. They started as whispers in her head. Like the other voices that were always there. There was always a background murmur; sometimes she could pick out the individual voices or feelings, and other times she could not. When she was doing a seance, the group consciousness and intention would help her to zero in on one voice, hopefully the voice that her client wanted to hear, but there was no guarantee of that.
She gathered her red box braids in both hands and swept them back over her shoulders so they all fell behind her. She smoothed her colorful gypsy skirt and tried to sort out the voices.
Some of the voices were harder to ignore or suppress than others. Her mother’s voice was one that had always been foremost in her mind, the hardest to silence. Her mother, Norma Jean, had died when Reg was a child, but the voice had never left.
Then… things had happened and, even though Weston had changed the timeline so that Norma Jean had not died, Reg could still hear the living woman’s voice in her head. And not only Norma Jean’s but, lately, all of the other siren voices as well.
They were loud and discordant. It seemed like it was never just one of them speaking to her at a time; there had to be a whole Greek chorus wailing and calling to her.
One might think that sleep, at least, would be a blessed release from the voices. But one would be wrong. The voices were just as loud at night. Sometimes even louder and more intrusive than during the day. As Reg tried to relax and release all of the day’s worries and put them aside for a peaceful night’s sleep, the voices got louder and clearer. The shrieks, chants, and songs were overwhelming sometimes.
In her dream, it had started out as the shrieking, discordant voices that she had become accustomed to, irritating and difficult to block, but the same-old, same-old that she didn’t feel like she had to listen to. If she could focus on other things, maybe play some YouTube videos on her phone to distract herself, they would become less intrusive.
But this time, it was different. The voices gathered and grew stronger and clearer. Rather than individuals trying to wail over each other, or the chorus chanting a warning together in different notes or melodies, the voices joined, the melodies synced up and harmonized instead of being discordant.
In the old Greek stories, the siren song was always alluring, enchanting, hauntingly beautiful. Reg had just assumed that those accounts were romanticized, since in her experience, the siren voices were loud, dissonant, and irritating. The reason that the sailors went crazy and jumped into the water was clearly not because they were attracted to the unbelievably beautiful voices, but because they were driven mad by it and had to find some way to make it stop. Without wax in their ears or being bound to a mast, the only solution available was to drown themselves.
But in her dream, the voices changed from their horrible, screeching, nails-on-the-blackboard collective shriek into something beautiful. They morphed into a song unlike anything she’d ever heard. So beautiful that it hurt her chest and brought tears to her eyes. She stopped and stood there, listening to the angelic voices, marveling that she’d never heard them sing together like that before.
But the meaning of the song was beyond her grasp. She usually heard English when they spoke to her mind, even though she knew they were scattered all over the world and probably each spoke a different language or some form of ancient Greek they could all understand.
Reg listened to the song. Harmonious, rhythmic, achingly beautiful. She felt a vibration in her own vocal cords—a humming, coupled with a desire to raise her voice with them. Reg had never enjoyed singing or been good at it. When music was a required subject in school, she had mostly mouthed the words, lip-syncing her way through the songs. Her teachers got after her for it, until they actually heard her sing, and then they decided she’d better go back to faking it. There were no solos for Reg Rawlins.
Reg awoke with a start, torn out of her sleep. Her body was rigid. Something was clearly wrong, but she didn’t know what. She opened her eyes and squinted around the room. It was getting light outside, but she wasn’t an early-morning riser. Dawn was still the middle of the night for her. She couldn’t exactly get up at six in the morning when she’d been dealing with seances and other client consultations at midnight and the wee hours of the morning. She needed her beauty rest.
She looked at the windowsill, expecting to see Starlight, her tuxedo cat, sitting there looking outside like usual. But he wasn’t. The windowsill was empty. He must be looking out the living room window, stalking around the cottage, or having a snack of dry kibble from his bowl.
Though lately, she wondered if he were somehow getting into the food in the fridge during the night. It seemed like she threw out just as much dry food as she added to the bowl in the first place. She didn’t let it sit for too long, knowing it would get stale and Starlight wouldn’t eat it then.
But did he eat it at all?
“Starlight?” Reg called and made kissy sounds to call him. “Star? Where are you? Come see me.”
She listened for kitty footsteps coming toward her or the snort that meant, “Are you kidding? I’m a cat; I have better things to do than to cater to a human being.” But she didn’t hear anything. The cottage was as quiet as a tomb.
“Starlight?” Reg tried again.
He still didn’t respond. She closed her eyes, intending to go back to sleep. He was a cat. Cats didn’t come when called unless you had a can of tuna in your hand.
But the silence of the cottage and Starlight’s absence concerned her. Starlight usually did come to her when she called him at night. He was as concerned with keeping watch over her and making sure she didn’t get into any more trouble than necessary as she was with seeing that he was warm and fed, safe and sound in the cottage, and that his kitty litter box was cleaned reasonably regularly.
When Starlight still didn’t return to his usual perch at the window, she sat up and looked around. He had been poisoned once, cursed by Norma Jean out of jealousy for her daughter’s affections.
The combination of the siren song and Starlight’s absence was too worrying. Reg couldn’t go back to sleep until she saw Starlight and confirmed to herself that he was okay. With a groan, Reg rolled over and slid her feet off the bed. She sat on the edge of the mattress for a minute, orienting herself, hoping that Starlight would come strolling in and she could just lie back down and continue with her sleep.
But he didn’t.
Sighing, Reg rose to her feet. She took a quick look around the bedroom, but she knew he would not be there. If he wasn’t snoozing on the bed or looking out the window, he didn’t have any reason to stay there.
Reg yawned and padded out of the bedroom. Her first stop was the bathroom to take care of other concerns, since she knew she wouldn’t find him in there. His litter box was in the bathroom, but that was the only reason he would be in there. Or to drink out of the faucet. But that was generally only when she was there to turn it on for him.
Reg washed her hands and walked out to the kitchen and living room area. There wasn’t any need to check her office, since the door was shut and she rarely used it. It had become more of a dumping ground for things she needed to store and didn’t have any other place for. Starlight liked to sneak in there when she opened the door to inspect the boxes and hide behind the various stacks. Which was exactly the reason she didn’t want him in there and kept the door closed.
“Starlight?” Reg looked around the kitchen and living room and couldn’t find him.
He wasn’t sitting on the back of the couch looking out the window. He wasn’t eating from his bowl or sitting on the counter where he wasn’t supposed to be.
Reg walked around with increasing concern, looking under pieces of furniture, in dark corners, anywhere Starlight might have decided to hide. Cats hid when they were sick or injured. They pulled away from even the ones they loved and pushed their faces into dark corners, isolating themselves.
Where was he? There weren’t that many places in the cottage to hide. She couldn’t think of anywhere else to check. She returned to the bedroom, turned on the light, and looked around for him. Under the bed? In the closet? Under the blankets of the bed? Curled up on the dirty clothes that had not quite made it into the hamper? In the hamper itself?
There was no sign of him. Reg returned to the bathroom and bent down to look into the cave of his litter box. Not there.
She walked back out into the front of the cottage and saw Starlight sitting in the middle of the floor. He sat tall and regal, like a statue of Bastet.
CHAPTER 2
Where were you?” Reg demanded.
Starlight blinked, first with his green eye and then with the blue, looking at Reg as if she were the one behaving strangely. What was she doing getting out of bed in the middle of her usual sleep schedule calling for him?
“I looked everywhere for you and you weren’t here,” Reg told him crossly.
He just stared at her.
“Were you hiding? Why couldn’t I find you?”
There was no answer. Reg reached out to him with her other senses, trying to get a read on his emotions and thoughts. It wasn’t quite the same as reading someone’s facial expression or body language, but it was similar.
He wasn’t open to her as usual, and Reg got the distinct impression he wanted her to go back to sleep and forget about the whole thing. It wasn’t any of her business where he had been or what he had been doing. She was supposed to be in bed asleep.
“I woke up and you were gone,” Reg told him crossly. “How am I supposed to go back to sleep when you disappear like that?”
His gaze was unblinking.
Just go to sleep and you’ll feel better when you wake up later.
“I don’t want to go back to sleep,” Reg argued stubbornly,
But she did. She was exhausted and she didn’t feel like she had been sleeping very well when she had been dreaming the siren song. It hadn’t been that restful stage of sleep she craved. Instead, it had sapped more energy from her. She needed to crawl back into bed, slip under the covers, close her eyes, and go to sleep again.
Starlight finally moved, walking over to her and rubbing against her legs. He led her toward the bedroom door, purring.
Reg looked around the kitchen and living room, getting the distinct impression he was trying to distract her from the question of where he had been and what he had been doing.
But everything was not in its place as she had first thought. In the early morning light creeping through the windows, she could see that things had been knocked down and disarranged on the counter. And in the living room, the throws and pillows were in the wrong places. Not on the floor, like they would be if Starlight had been zipping wildly through the house, chasing imaginary mice and knocked them down. But they were in the wrong places, as if a human had been there, looking through her things, coming up with a new decorating scheme.
“What the…?”
Starlight wound around her legs, meowing and purring, trying to entice her back to her bedroom and the prospect of a few more hours of sleep. She looked down at him.
“Did you do this? Who has been here? Was it you? Harrison?”
Harrison was one of the few entities who could get into her cottage uninvited. He had no problem passing even the strongest wards. Which was fine, because he wasn’t there to do her harm, but it was still disconcerting. The immortal had no sense of privacy or propriety, and she sometimes awoke to find him sitting on her bed looking at her or playing in the living room with Starlight while she was sleeping.
Starlight just looked up at her, purring at top volume. Didn’t Reg want to go to sleep? Didn’t she want to crawl under her soft, comfy covers, close her eyes, and drift off into oblivion?
“No, I don’t want to go to sleep,” she lied. “I want to know what’s been going on here.”
But of course, the cat had no answers for her. Even when he had appeared to her in other forms, he had never spoken to her in human words. It was all body language and the connection of their minds.
And this time, he didn’t have anything to tell her about the state of the cottage or what he had been doing while she was sleeping.
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