“Let’s see where we can get in the next few hours. Gunner and Scout, you can take the east-side contacts. Stormy and I will take the west. We’ll meet when we’re done and see where we stand.”
STORMY WAS NEW TO THE MAGIC GAME, SOshe had a lot of questions. Apparently, she wanted to ask all of them as we worked through our portion of the list.
“What else is real?”
The question baffled me. “What do you mean?”
“I know vampires and shifters are real. I know demons are real … and evil witches … and spider people.” She shuddered.“Naiads are the stuff of legend, though. I never even considered the fact that they were real. I want to know what else is real.”
I took a moment to consider it. “Well, you know gnome shifters are real.”
Her expression grew dark. “Yes, I’m well aware.” She was being hunted by gnome shifters.
“Pretty much everything you can fathom is real,” I admitted.
“Aliens?”
I shrugged. “Aunt Tillie claims she’s been probed multiple times.”
Genuine horror washed over Stormy’s face. “Seriously?”
“I don’t actually believe that. That would be an example of her lying.”
“Ah.” Stormy relaxed a bit. “What about Bigfoot?”
That was a trickier question. “I guess I believe it’s possible Bigfoot is real. Don’t tell Clove I said that, though.”
Stormy giggled.
“It’s also possible that all the Bigfoot sightings—the legit ones—were actually shifters,” I continued.
“I hadn’t thought about that.” She nodded. “Lamia are real. We know that thanks to Scout. They seem to have a lot of crazy paranormals in Hawthorne Hollow that we don’t have in Shadow Hills and Hemlock Cove.”
“It’s not that they don’t come to our areas, it’s that they see a higher concentration in Hawthorne Hollow because they have a nexus. On top of that, they actively hunt them. I don’t get as worked up over spriggans and jackalopes as Scout does.”
“She does hate the jackalopes,” Stormy agreed. “What about gods? Are they real?”
“Like Zeus and Aphrodite?”
She nodded.
“Those were demons pretending to be gods to control the masses.”
She bobbed her head. “I get it.”
“Some gods are real. Like Pan and Cernunnos. The loas are real, which means the voodoo gods are real. The big gods were fake.”
She was quiet a beat, absorbing it all. “It’s a lot to take in.”
“It is, but you should never have to deal with gods.”
“That’s good. I have my hands full with gnome shifters.”
I grinned. She might have been new, but she was adjusting well. “You’re doing great,” I assured her as I pulled into a driveway near Long Lake. “Okay, this house belongs to Dustin Carrington. He was at the resort site twice this week. He’s going to be working on the irrigation system.”
“Do you really think a bunch of construction workers banded together to kill a naiad?” Stormy asked as she unfastened her seatbelt. “It seems so … dark.”
“They may have believed they killed a human,” I replied. “Or they may have thought they killed a monster and assumed no one would believe their story if they went to the authorities.”
