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“Hey, you okay?” I asked.
She stretched. “Yeah, why?”
“You just . . . look kinda tired.”
“Ah, such a flatterer.” She shook her head. “It was a long day, Pax. I was in a crazy, tight, walled-off room with doll parts of doom and spiders that likely wanted to eat my face, and the EMF in that place made me twitchy the entire time.”
“Wait, you felt it all over the estate?” Interesting. I’d felt that classic uneasy feeling in a couple of places, but not all over the mansion.
“For the most part, yeah. As beautiful as this place is, it kinda gives me the willies. Dev would say bad juju. I just say bad wiring or some weird energy vortex.”
“It’s funny you should say that. Dev said that he set up a meeting with the local alternative archaeological society to discuss possible ley lines or vortices under the property.”
She nodded. “Huh. Good call. You never know.” Slamming the trunk, she turned to me more fully. “Well, I suppose I’d better get home. I’m starving. See you tomorrow?”
I reached out without thought and repositioned the pen in her bun, my thumb grazing her cheek as I did. “Drive safely, Sky.”
I turned and headed to my truck, wondering how she could get me so twisted up so easily.
Temptation and sin, indeed.
CHAPTER3
~Schuyler~
Iwoke, the sun blazing through the window and nailing me in the face like a spotlight. Even with my eyes still closed, I winced. My head had been killing me lately, and I couldn’t seem to get the headaches to let up. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. A whole hell of a lot had been going on these last weeks since Pax and I had paid our first visit to the Lamour Mansion, and things wrapped up at Arborwood, and we had been going nearly nonstop before that, bouncing from one location to the next.
I’d held someone at gunpoint at the plantation—someone I knew and actually liked!—after they’d taken someone else I knew hostage, prepared to sacrifice them to their quote-unquotedarkness, thus revealing that they were the sadistic serial murderer terrorizing the city. The same asshole who’d left no trace for me years ago as I tried to help the police find a woman’s killer. Istillcouldn’t completely wrap my head around it. I couldn’t wrap my head arounda lotlately.
I’d seen things I couldn’t compartmentalize, too; stuff that shook the very fabric of what I believed—or thought Ididn’tbelieve. And I hadn’t had time to process things and put them into their neat little boxes like I usually did, so everything was just sort of floating around out there with a lot of question marks.
We’d also lost anotherHaunted New Orleansmember, and the whole dynamic of the team had changed with that, the realization that we had been working with a killer, and the introduction of Hanlen. While I was happy to have her—her private investigative skills alone would be super useful for us—and I really enjoyed her as a person, it’d been a crazy ride.
We’d had to put off any additional investigation on the Lamour Mansion for a while because of everything that’d happened at Arborwood. Thankfully, the network was being really understanding. Again.
Pax and I had been out a couple of times over the weeks with Aaron and James, our new tech grip, Turner, and Birdie to do some one-off things that we needed to do anyway—things wecoulddo because the construction crew had halted all their work—but nothing official had happened since Pax and I first went to take a peek around and dig through the weird hidey hole or loft/balcony/catchall space.
That would change later.
Today was our first pre-official-shoot investigation with nearly the entire team. The day we got all our glamour shots and did our walk-throughs and initial readings on camera and started poking around for real. That way, we could take anything we found and try to debunk the findings as much as possible before discovering what things actually had a legitimate paranormal angle to explore—i.e., anything we couldn’t immediately explain away. We would bookmark those for the official seventy-two-hour investigation and additional research into the history of the house.
Now that my eyes had been metaphorically opened a bit more to the whole unexplained part of what we did—though I still remained very skeptical—I was kind of excited to see what this investigation turned up, and what I could experiment on to debunk. It was almost like joining the team all over again. The excitement was back. I firmly believed in science, but my need for . . .morehad initially led me to quitting my CSI job and accepting the position that Dev offered me in the first place. I still did some forensics work as a consultant to buy new shoes and support my collectibles habit, but I was happy to be working in a job where I could flex my muscles and still expand my mind.
Realizing I’d been lazy for too long, I finally got up and did a full-body stretch, noticing that I still felt like crap—achy and stiff and just generally shitty. It’d been too many weeks of this. I should probably get into the doctor. Maybe my iron was low or something. I’d just been feeling super drained and lethargic and not myself. Even my moods had been wonky, but I chalked that up to stress and the fact that I couldn’t get a good night’s sleep if my life depended on it these days—the dreams I’d been having lately were not letting me get any shut-eye.
After the world’s fastest shower and some quick makeup so I didn’t look like the walking dead, I twisted my hair into a bun and threw on my T-shirt that declared the year asNo good, very bad, would not recommendwith a one-star rating, tucked my jeans into my favorite white lug-soled boots that laced like a corset with black ribbons, and grabbed my butter-soft leather jacket on the way out the door—it always looked good on camera.
Just as I was about to unlock the car, my cell buzzed. I pulled it out of my back pocket and checked the display.
Paxton.
“Yo. What’s up?” I unlocked the car and threw my kit and bag into the back.
“Good morning to you, too,” Pax drawled. “I was just picking up some java. Wondered if you wanted anything.”
“Where?” I asked, digging my favorite pen out of my bag’s pocket to shove into my bun since I knew I’d need it.
“Café Du Monde.”
