“Jo Jo Corman,”Sunny Trimmel called out when I walked into Sunny’s Outlook, a vegan restaurant owned by Sunny and her best friend Chavvah Smith.
It was close to eight, closing time, and the place was empty. Not a surprise. I’d worked in the diner off and on for a few years, and the dinner crowd tended to peter out early on Wednesday nights.
“It’s been a month of Sundays since I’ve seen you.” The perky blonde beamed a wide smile in my direction. “I’m glad you’re here. I could use your help.”
“Of course, you can,” I muttered, then quickly flashed her a smile back. I’d had a long day of drywalling, but I owed Sunny a debt that I could never repay. My mom had disappeared when I was nine years old, and there were a lot of people in town who had speculated that she’d run off with another man. My father had been the mayor of Peculiar when it happened. The event changed him. He’d quit his job, dived into a bottle of booze, and didn’t come up for air for another nine years. His descent into self-pity and alcoholism had left me to raise myself.
It had been Sunny, an outsider, who’d discovered the truth of what really happened to my mother. She hadn’t left us at all. She’d been kidnapped and murdered. Sunny’s psychic ability to commune with ghosts had given me the opportunity to say goodbye. It also allowed my father to finally grieve her loss and move on. He’d cleaned up his act and found someone to love in the process. I was happy for him, but still, sometimes, it was hard to think about the past without getting angry.
I’d only been eighteen when we learned of the horrific circumstances of my mother’s death. It was hard to believe ten years had passed. Since then, Sunny and Chav had taken on the role of surrogate aunties, giving me a shoulder to lean on, a job to pay the bills, and a place to stay when I needed it. When I needed them.
I settled into the nearest booth and put my sore feet up on the empty bench on the other side of the table. “It’s been a rough day,” I teased Sunny as she headed behind the counter. “I hope it’s nothing too hard.” I hadn’t planned to stop at the restaurant before going home, but I had nothing but an empty house waiting for me.
“How’s the new wing at the courthouse coming along?” Sunny asked as she brought me a cup of coffee and a slice of pie. She set them down on the table. “It’s a big job, but Babe says you all are moving fast.”
Babel “Babe” Trimmel, Sunny’s husband and a coyote shifter like me, was the Mayor of Peculiar, a job he’d held for a decade since the well-deserved demise of our prior mayor. Babe had grown up an integrator, a shifter who lives among humans, but he’d adapted to our therianthropic community like a natural born, and his experiences with the outside world had given him a fresh perspective as a leader in our town.
“Good.” I nodded. I’d started working with my father a couple of years back, and he’d renamed his business Corman and Son General Contracting. It had made him happy, and I liked the work a lot more than I thought I would. On top of that, I liked my dad, something I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to do. “Dad and I are almost done roughing it all in. We’ll probably get to painting next week.”
Sunny knocked my feet off the bench. “No shoes on the seats.”
I quirked my head to the side. “I can always take them off.”
“Don’t you dare,” she exclaimed, then gestured to the pie. “Ruth made some extra Dutch Apple today, so I saved you a slice.”
I narrowed my gaze at her. Had Sunny asked me to come by, and I forgot? I sat up straight. “Was there something I was supposed to help you with tonight?”
She shook her head and tucked a strand of blonde hair behind her ear. “I had an, uhm, intuition. Eat up. You’re going to need the energy.”
When Sunny said “intuition,” I knew she meant her psychic gift of foretelling. She had told me once that most of the things she saw were random and useless. Me eating pie, no matter how delicious, fit the “random and useless” bill.
“You had a psychic vision of me coming in for pie?” I took a bite and savored the sweet apple and cinnamon flavors as they danced on my tongue. Ruth Thompson was hands-down the best pie maker in town, so the deliciousness was not a surprise. “I mean, I’m not mad about it because this pie is outstanding.” I glanced up at her. “But you having a vision about me coming in for it tonight is weird.”
“It’s not the only thing I saw.” Sunny’s expression was pinched, and her hazel eyes had narrowed as she peered at me. “Are you all right?” She reached out and touched my left forearm, where I’d had a double spiral recently tattooed. It was mostly healed, but I moved out of her reach. I didn’t want her “intuition” reading anything into the simple design.
During my teens, I’d been on a self-destruction tour of tattoos and piercings. There wasn’t a single one I regretted. Each modification I’d made had helped ease the deep emptiness that had always seemed on the verge of swallowing me up. For a while, I’d stopped getting anything new, but lately, I could feel that emptiness creeping up on me again. Work helped, but it only covered the pit, it didn’t fill it in.
For the past few months, I’d been having vivid dreams about transforming into my coyote and running. I hadn’t felt scared during these dreams, but I’d felt as if I were chasing something that I’d never be able to find. I think I would’ve rather been afraid. The double spiral symbol kept showing up on doors, in the swirl of moving streams, across fields of flowers, and even in the clouds. The dreams stopped after I got the new tattoo, so I called it a win and moved on.
“I’m okay.” I forced a smile. “Just saw the symbol somewhere, and it stuck with me.”
She arched a brow. “So, you had it permanently inked into your skin.”
I grinned sheepishly. “Pretty much.”
Sunny shook her head. “Jo Jo, I believe this is more important than you might think. I’ve seen the symbol as well.”
“In your visions?”
She nodded. “I’m not sure what it means, but I think it has to do with love.”
I gave her a sharp look. “You guys know that I’m one hundred percent over Michele, right?” Michele Thompson, Ruth Thompson’s second oldest daughter, had been the focus of my attention during my youthful years. She’d been wild, carefree, and rarely regretful. I’d seen something in her that I wanted for myself. These days, though, I rarely thought about her. “I mean, we split up almost five years ago. She moved away, and I’ve moved on.”
Sunny took my hand and gripped it tightly. “I’m not talking about Michele.” Her eyes widened, and she began to shake. I’d seen her have visions before, so I knew what was happening. I wanted to yank away, but I didn’t want to accidentally injure her, so I gutted it out.
The blonde psychic lightly bit her lower lip as the trembling in her body ceased. She stared at me and said one word, “Etta.”
You could’ve knocked me for a loop. “What about her?” Etta was a werewolf, and she was Chavvah’s stepdaughter. We’d hung out some when the lycanthropes first came to town.
