“Holy crap,” I breathed. “Spud, Dragon pig, come on. Now.” I shot off toward the house, my gaze on the horizon.
The westward sky wobbled like someone had stuck a soapy finger into oil, forcing the blue out to form a ring around a glossy golden disk in the sky. The disk flashed with blue fire and then…
“What the...?”
…a car tumbled out the sky and hit the beach a couple miles north.
A seagull called out, the wind picked up,tickfollowedtock,and the day once again seemed like any other day in Ordinary, Oregon.
Chapter Two
Ryder tookone look at my face and dumped the espresso into travel mugs. He grabbed the toast, hooked both mugs with one hand, and shrugged into his Carhartt Jacket. I got Spud off his leash and told the dragon pig to stay and look after him.
“What happened?” Ryder asked as we jogged to the driveway.
“Magic, I think. Big magic.”
He slid into the passenger side of my Jeep. I took the wheel and got us moving north.
“What kind of magic?” He settled the cups into the holders, balanced the toast on his knee, and reached for the police radio.
“Hole in the sky.”
“Got it,” he said, taking the supernatural weirdness of our town like a champ. There were days when it was hard to remember he’d only found out about the monsters and gods and magic of this place a couple years ago.
There were days when it was hard to remember he used to be part of the Department of Paranormal Protection, a governmental agency that hired people to hunt monsters. People who could do a lot of damage to our town.
But there wasn’t a day when I wasn’t thankful for Ryder finding out just how un-ordinary Ordinary was, and then immediately quitting the DoPP. He’d taken our side and had become an important part of keeping our secrets safe.
“Jean and Myra?” He switched from the police radio, which was monitored by a handful of mortals who didn’t know about magic, to his phone.
“Yes.”
“North?”
“I think 50thStreet. Tell Myra to sweep the beach from 40thup, and Jean to...”
“Delaney’s here with me. You’re on speaker,” Ryder said responding to the call he’d answered before the phone even rang. “Jean,” he told me.
“Something fell out of the sky,” I said.
“I know.” My youngest sister, Jean’s voice buzzed with excitement.
“You saw it?” Ryder asked, handing me toast.
I wasn’t hungry, but knew better than to turn down food before rolling into something like this. I took a bite and grinned. He’d put butter and honey on it. Even scrambling to check a possible disaster, he had his eye on the details, and had made a quick breakfast of toast and coffee something special.
“I was at the beach when it happened,” Jean went on. “I had a feeling...”
Jean’s family gift was knowing when something bad was going to happen. She called it her Doom Twinges, and she had been trying to get better at sensing the incoming “wrong” before it happened. It meant paying attention to the slightest niggle of wrongness she felt, instead of only paying attention to the big, possibly life-ending stuff she usually noticed.
I didn’t envy her gift, nor her quest to improve it. If I had to second-guess everything my intuition told me, or worse, believe every change in my mood, every random thought I had might be something more than just a mood or thought, I’d go out of my mind.
“I was parked right above the beach access. A hole opened in the sky, then time stopped—boom,fire—a car plops out of the sky.”
“Where did it land?” Ryder asked.
“On the beach. No one was around. No injuries.”
