Page 6 of Frazier

“I need to call it in. Find a place that I’m sure they’ll want a helicopter to be landed nearby.” Amelia pulled out what she thought was the bank bag and looked inside. “Money?”

“Yes. It’s old too. It’s sad to think that they went through all this only to end up being killed by crashing their car into a tree.” He showed her that Tommy had been shot in the back of his head. More than likely from a bullet coming up from the trunk when he was hiding in the back seat. Clara had been shot in her chest. Frazier thought it had come up the same way and caught her in mid-chest. Their bones showed that much to them, at least. “So these two died by the police, and poor old George died by the car crashing. I wonder what his last thought was when the tree popped up in front of him.”

“Probably ‘well fuck a duck and watch it waddle.’ George might not have known that the other two were dead before that. Or they might not have been yet.” They were enjoying making up stories about how they’d died and come to be on their mountain. It was morbid, sure, but they’d had nothing to do with them dying.

He made the call to the main office of the park first, then to the police. It was Mark, who was running the desk today, that suggested that he contact someone in their office. Just to make sure that everyone who might want to be involved was informed. Not that he thought it would go quietly in the night. This was going to be big news for everyone.

It turned out to be a shit show. Every time someone new came on the scene, he was questioned about how they’d found the car. It was getting to the point that he wished that the two of them hadn’t gone looking for the car. It wasn’t until David showed up with food for him and Amelia that he felt like he had someone there that he could lean on.

“I heard it on the news that the car had been found with bodies in it about two hours ago. Just as your grannie was making your lunch for you, they were able to contact some of the relatives of the deceased. To think that after all this time, there is someone out there related to them still. Apparently, Clara had a husband and child that she had left behind. He has kids of his own now and has barricaded himself in his house.” Amelia said that was what she’d more than likely do too. “Yes, he has about twenty news vans in his yard, all of them with cameras and phones pointed to his front door. It looks to me like he could have used the money for this. By the way, did you know there was a reward for finding this car and the money?”

“I’ve been told that there is several times by the public, the police, as well as the coroner that had to come all the way up here to pronounce that the three skeletons in the car were dead.” The three of them laughed. “But in all seriousness, no, I didn’t even think about that when we came out here to find the car. It was just a way for us to get out and about to talk to each other.”

It was well after dark when they were headed home. He had better eyesight than any of the people with them, so he led the way down. Amelia held onto David to keep him from tumbling down the hill, and he watched over his grandda, who had decided that it was too much going on for him not to be somehow involved. It was fun for them all, Frazier thought. Especially his grandda who remembered when the robbery had taken place.

“I’d only been a wee bit of a boy at the time, but I remember it. Everyone was speculating on where they might have gone off to and what they were spending their ill-gotten gains on. My daddy thought they’d gone all the way to Middlesboro, Kentucky. I remember thinking that it was a fer piece to be going in a car, but it would only take a person a couple of hours to get there nowadays.” Grandda laughed. “Of course, cars didn’t travel all that fast or well back then, I don’t think.”

Grannie had a few things to say about it as well, even going so far as to drag out old albums with the newspaper clippings stuck in them. She told them how her mom had saved them so that when the car was found, she could compare the notes of what people had been saying back then about where the people had ended up.

“I don’t think anyone ever wanted to believe they all died. It was, for lack of a better way to say it, romantic to all of us kids. They robbed a bank, and back then, we all thought they’d gotten away with it. Were out spending the money on things like movie pictures and the such.” She laughed a little. “Tommy was such a good-looking kid. My older sister, she would look at the pictures of him and just sigh like she’d been his one and only love. Silly girl. I wonder what she might have thought if she’d known he was only a hop up the hill dead in his car.”

That night when they were sitting around the living room, Amelia asked his grandparents if they had ever planned to leave the mountain when they’d been younger. All six of their grandsons just stared at them, waiting, like he was on their answer. They looked at each other before answering.

“No. Not once. I met your grannie when she was just a baby, it seems like now. She was all of fifteen, and I was a strapping sixteen-year-old. Both of us had us a good job. My daddy, he worked in the park then, and he worked hard. He’d bring me into town with him every day so that I could work for a couple of little places around that needed an extra hand or two when there were people traveling in.” Grandda looked at Grannie, and Frazier was shocked at the look of pure love they had for each other, even after all these years. “Your grannie, she worked in one of the ladies shops in town. They sold some of them fancy hats that women liked to wear back then. I was bringing home about a dollar or two a week. Your grannie, she was bringing home a bit more as she worked longer hours. But it did help me ask her out on a date.”

Grandda told stories of him courting grannie. How their wedding had been pulled off and the house that had been built for them when they had their daddy. By the time he was telling of dad meeting their mom, the story had been wonderfully whimsical. Like something you’d read or see in a black and white movie. Only it was his family they were talking about, and it was nice to have such memories told to them.

~*~

Amelia looked out the window of the room she’d been staying in. It was sometimes difficult to remember that she wasn’t in the times of when Frazier’s grandparents had been born. Nothing about the scene she was watching had her thinking of the city far beyond here, filled with people traveling up and down the road in their loud cars and avoiding running down pedestrians that thought they were above being hit by a car while in the town.

Below her were four big bears. All of them were shifters and Cross bears. They were wrestling around, like children after a rainstorm in the mud and grass. The other two, she thought it to be Mark and the youngest Ewing—it was difficult to tell in the darkness—sitting as their other selves on the sidelines watching. Ewing would be leaving in the morning to go to a zoo on the other side of the country to take two bear cubs as well as a couple of mountain lion cubs that had been orphaned when the hill slide had happened a month ago.

“You’d think he was going to be gone for a year the way they’re acting out there.” Sunny sat beside her on the window seat. Jamie joined them a few minutes later with a bottle of wine that grandda had made last fall. She poured them all a glass. “I love this stuff. It’s so sweet you forget that it could be dangerous for you after a couple of glasses of it.”

They didn’t talk much but sipped their drink and watched the antics below them. It wasn’t until they either got bored or just tired that they sat back in their seats that Amelia told them what she’d been holding from them for the past few days.

“I have some things that I’d like to give the two of you. It’s a gift from my mom. There are similar ones for the other brides that come to be here as well. It’s magic, so I don’t know what it will give you or do to you, but you’ll be able to figure that out when the time comes. It comes with instructions on how to use it as well as what it does. Like the magic that Frazier and I got, it sort of downloads with the magic.” Sunny asked if it was something that she’d need to share with her mate. “No. She said that it was just for the women. I’m not sure, but I think it has something to do with labor and delivery when you have your babies. But don’t hold me to that. It’s just the first thing that popped into my head when I found the box.” She put out her hand, and the magic simply went to them. Amelia turned to the window again before continuing. “I’d been searching for my mother’s spell book for the last several days. I don’t know why I didn’t ask someone at her house where it was. I guess I thought it would be a well-kept secret by a witch of grandeur. Turns out it was on the bookshelf with the rest of her books in the kitchen. No spell books there but cookbooks that, for some reason, she collected over the years. I never once saw her cooking even popcorn while I was living at home.”

She knew they were confused, so she laughed a little before telling them why she’d even mentioned it. Amelia told them about the spell she’d been looking for that would make it so that her magic would take care of the family even if they left the mountain.

“I don’t think any of the family has it in their head that they’re going to leave. But you might know something that we don’t. Do you?” She didn’t answer Sunny but sat staring out the window. “Now I’ll have to think about that for a long time until all of Cross’s have mates like we do. Come on, tell us what you’re thinking.”

“I can’t. I won’t either. It’s just bits and pieces of the future that I can see. In much more detail than when my mom could do it, I think. Anyway, it’s not that I don’t want to tell you, but it’s just that I can’t. I don’t know enough at this point to even tell you who it might well be. It could be the grandparents leaving the mountain by death. I just don’t know.” They both thought that was a good enough answer and let it go. “Tomorrow, I have to have a meeting with a group of witches that have been going beyond the boundaries that they should be. They’ve been doing things that are against our bylaws, and I’m going to have to either kill the lot of them or figure out another way to have them punished. Death is the only thing that I think will stop them.”

“You don’t sound all the happy about it either way. Is it dark magic?” She told Sunny that it was. “I’ve dealt with that sort of magic before. Not often, but enough to know that it’s dangerous to those that use it and those that are targets of it. I’ve also had to deal with other creatures while working for the government. It’s a little scary to know that for whatever people think about things that go bump in the night, they’re much more frightening than they think.”

“I agree with you there.” Amelia finally turned from the window before speaking again. “These witches that I have to go and see are, for the most part, young witches that have been caught up in things that they should have left alone. But now, with the ones in charge, four older, like as old as the grandparents older, have taken the dark magic to a level that is beyond anything that I’ve had to deal with before. But then, I’ve never been the grand witch until recently.”

“Are you afraid?” Amelia said that she was more afraid of the unknown than the women. “I guess I can see that. I can go with you if you’d like. I have this knack for being able to find people before they find me. Would that help you? Also, since all this magic is coming to us, I’ve also figured out that I’m a good deal stronger than I used to be at a lot of things. Like reading people’s minds.”

“I think that I’ll be all right.” She glanced out the window before speaking. “We’ve, Frazier and I have been in this house together for an entire month, and he sleeps in the bedroom down the hall. How do I get him into my bed? I mean, I’ve done everything but come right out and tell him I want a piece of him.”

“You have to do that.” Amelia asked Jamie what she meant. “You have to tell him that you want a piece of him. It’s the only way that it works for these guys. I’m sure he told you when you were first together that he’d only touch you if you came to him or told him. Something like that?” She nodded. “They mean it. You have to—even then, he’s going to ask you several times if you’re sure before he’ll take you to bed. They’re great in bed too. I don’t know if it’s them being bears or what, but they can make you scream and then think they’ve killed you every time they touch you.”

“Seriously?” Jamie nodded then so did Sunny. “But in order to get this wonderful lovemaking, I have to near rape him, and even then, I have to tell him several times that I want him. That’s sort of—”

“Yeah, fun.” Sunny laughed. “It’s also kind of sexy too. To them, you’re already his wife. I mean, it’s their whole culture with being shifters and finding their mates. I love it. If it hasn’t been done already, the paperwork for you two to legally be married is already in the courthouse. I guess they have people in places there that can get things done up like that so that people won’t question whether or not you’re married when the kids come along. Do you want any?”

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