Page 10 of Wind Called

Telling him he was barking up the wrong tree?

He didn’t know. In a way, it was strange that he stood there in that moon-pale courtyard with her, water from the fountain glistening in the moonlight, because in every other prophetic dream he’d ever had, he hadn’t been present at all, was instead some sort of detached observer.

Maybe this wasn’t a vision, though.

Maybe it was just an ordinary garden-variety dream. He had those all the time, after all, far more frequently than the ones that tapped into his seer powers.

And he knew he’d be lying to himself if he didn’t admit that Bellamy McAllister had made quite an impact on him.

In his dream, she turned away and headed into the house, passing through a set of enormous bifold doors that created a wall of glass on that side of the home. He began to follow — only to walk into something small but very solid, sitting squat and square on the terra-cotta pavers.

The object was a safe approximately a foot square. A red light blinked on its face, telling him it had some kind of biometric lock engaged.

Why in the world would he be dreaming about a safe?

He didn’t know, and when he walked around the thing so he could go into the house in search of Bellamy, the dream fell away, and he found himself lying in bed and staring up at the ceiling. For a second or two, he couldn’t quite remember where he was.

Right — his hotel room in Cottonwood. He’d had dinner with his grandmother, then driven down here, watched some TV, and gone to bed much earlier than he normally would have. Maybe he could blame the early evening on being tired after his long drive, but he thought there was probably more going on here than simple weariness.

However, more than a decade of dealing with meaningful dreams had told him he should do his best to analyze what he’d seen, even if on the surface, it didn’t seem to make a whole hell of a lot of sense.

He’d seen the moon as he was driving down the hill to his hotel, so he knew what he’d glimpsed in his dream was a direct reflection of its current phase. And although he obviously had never visited the ranch Bellamy was caretaking, he had no reason to believe that the courtyard and the wall of glass were anything but a reflection of reality.

Why had she been standing out there, gazing up at the moon? Had she been restless after her shift at Sedona Vines, and had gone out to feel the warm desert wind and ground herself before going to bed?

Had she been thinking about him?

That, he thought, was flattering himself. She’d been friendly but brisk when they met, and hadn’t shown any sign that she’d been impressed by him at all. No, if anything, she’d been almost dismissive, as if she knew she needed to humor him but didn’t think there was anything about his dream of her that merited any particular concern.

Maybe there wasn’t. Maybe all this had been a wild goose chase and nothing more. He’d come up here on a weekend, but because he had his own landscape design business and could set his own hours — and because August was a slow time in Tucson, thanks to the unrelenting heat — it didn’t really matter if he lingered in the Verde Valley for a few days, trying to get to the bottom of all his odd dreams.

If there was even a bottom to get to.

But there had been that safe….

In his experience, if something so out of place appeared in one of his dreams, then it carried much more significance than the object intrinsically possessed. Also, it had blocked him from following Bellamy into the house, which seemed to signal it was something that might cause a problem between them.

If he even saw her again, which right now seemed kind of iffy.

Well, he’d talk to his grandmother tomorrow and see if she had any insights as to what the safe might have meant. Maybe it was nothing.

And maybe it was everything.

Groceries had been bought, and the second load of laundry was already chugging away in the washing machine. Bellamy would never say that doing laundry was one of her favorite household tasks, but it was a lot easier to manage when the room you were doing it in was bigger than your childhood bedroom at home. The flat she’d shared with her two dads her entire life only had the equivalent of a closet with a set of stackable machines, since it had been built long before modern washers and dryers were even a thing, and while they had been efficient enough, they couldn’t really compare to this large space with what felt like miles of counters and more storage than she even knew what to do with.

Well, she didn’t need to do anything with it, really. She used one cupboard for her laundry supplies, and had designated another to store some candles — pretty scented candles were her one real weakness, and she almost always had one burning when she was home — and then left everything else empty. Maybe it was going to take a while to get this place sold, but in the meantime, she didn’t see the point in cluttering up the house with a bunch of stuff she’d only have to move once Ike’s realtor finally found a buyer.

Even though she’d kept pretty busy today, she hadn’t been able to keep herself from thinking about Marc Trujillo. He hadn’t pressed her for more contact and had seemed just fine with letting her get back to work, and yet she wondered if she should simply leave things there.

What if there really had been something to his dream? She didn’t want to think that some kind of danger lurked out there, just waiting to pounce, but she knew the Arizona witch clans — and the Castillos in New Mexico, who’d suffered just as much if not more — had dealt with a whole bunch of crazy over the past couple of years.

Was it foolish to think the danger was now past?

On the surface, probably. Although she hadn’t been directly involved in any of it, she knew the Escobar clan in El Salvador was basically a non-threat now that it had new leadership. There was no reason to believe they would continue to reach out and try to get their hooks into any of the clans here in the U.S., not when they were attempting to rebuild after years of domination by a couple of evil leaders.

And Marc’s clan had worked hard to provide a safe home for all the magical books they’d collected over the years, so there didn’t seem to be much chance that anyone would be able to steal them again, not when they were now stored in the witchy equivalent of Fort Knox.

But he’d felt something all the same, something that involved Bellamy.

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