Chapter 14
Of Strange Moon Rising
Previously: The Logan brothers goad Riley into taking ‘that-one-house’ call. Kellen is friendly for half a second until Riley mentions the officer whose place she took—Eli Rasmussen.
The moving boxes in the living room mocked her. Riley turned her chair to better ignore them as she ate dinner. After she’d washed her dishes, she cut open the first box. Riley’s phone rang halfway through her unwrapping.
Her mother’s cheery, “Am I calling too late?” had her pushing the pile of brown packing paper aside.
“Not at all. Where are you?” Riley’s voice echoed enough to let her know she was on speaker. “Is Da there?”
“Here, ma wee shite,” he called from further away. “We’re still in Ireland working on the new bottle designs.”
“We’re leaving for Scotland soon. Stayin’ with your Da’s parents for a bit. You get settled in?” Ma liked to work in the library whenever she returned to her family home. Riley pictured her there in her favorite ottoman with a well-loved quilt tucked around her, red hair tied up in a messy knot.
“Sure. Still unpacking. The house is great. Work’s been interesting.” The loaded silence that followed made her cringe. It wasn’t a lie, it wasn’t even a half truth—it wouldn’t have tripped her own abilities, but her mother’s?
“What’s happened?” she demanded.
Riley flopped down onto the living room couch, wishing for a truth-telling off-switch for the thousandth time. “I’m working a homicide.” She plucked at the stitching on the cream colored cushions as Irish Gaelic curses flooded the line.
Muffled, like someone had a hand over the speaker, Riley heard her complain, “Lennox, she’s already knee-deep in murder. This was a horrible idea.”
Riley pinched the bridge of her nose. “I’m not going to leave in the middle of this case. I’ll reevaluate after, unless it goes cold, then I guess I’ll be stuck here.”
Her wry tone earned a, “Not funny.” And then, “It’s never too late to change your mind, you can always move back here—”
“Maeve,” Da broke in.
“She can change her mind,” she growled at him. “You know city life is no place for the likes of us. My Little Red, the move was suppose to reduce your exposure to death and danger, and already, a murder. Please consider—”
“I’m getting maybe ten percent of the hits on my radar per day compared to Cincinnati.” Riley held her breath, hoping she wouldn’t hear the omission of the death-dreamings in between her words. If she learned of it, there would be no reasoning with her. Riley would be packed up and out of the country as fast as Maeve Maegellín O’Mooney MacIntyre could make it happen.
“Truth,” was her grudging reply.
Riley blew out a breath. “Truth-seeking’s a bitch when you want to argue, huh?”
She sniffed. “Don’t be smug about it.”
It was Da who broached, “Ye’ don’t need those meds, right?”
“Right.” She ran a fingertip over the scar on her calf. Riley’s abilities never went to waste where people were packed like sardines, but it’d taken too long for her to see the toll the city had taken, or rather, she’d ignored and excused the warning signs. “I like it here, for the most part.”
“Fir wye?” Da’s voice grew louder. She heard the creak of leather as he sat close.
“The clean air, the short commute, the non-existent traffic. My new boss and coworkers are great—well, most of them. I’ve already made a friend. She’s the M.E.”
“You’ll make a friend or two outside of the police subculture, assuming you stay past this case.” Ma made it more of a demand than a request. “First responders don’t count.”
“How about a Forest Service Officer?” The huff she received made her chuckle. “I’ll expand my social circle. I’ve met the one neighbor I have—he’s not a LEO or a first responder.”
“Well, good, but you know you could reconnect with plenty of friends if you forgot this nonsense and moved—”
“Ma.”
She sighed. “Alright, I’ll let you go. I love you, mo chuisle. Be careful.”
Riley chucked her phone on the coffee table after a few more parting words and rubbed at her eyes. Unpacking would have to wait. With the clock ticking down on Tristian’s return home, Riley was bound to endure the immersive hell of a third death-dreaming. She’d stocked up on caffeine pills to avoid a fourth, which would require safety measures to ensure she woke up—and worse—a call telling Ma and Aunt Brenna she’d hidden it from them. She turned off the living room lights. It wouldn’t get to that point, and if it did, Riley had her contingencies. A flash of movement through the wall of windows brought her to a halt. Even with the moon bright enough to place the yard in gray-scale relief, Riley couldn’t see much beyond the deck. She flipped the switch for the backyard floodlights. Two dots of fiery white flared just beyond the eastern tree line. Riley squinted as the eyeshine vanished and the wolf melted into the woods. “Wolfrun, indeed,” she muttered.
Riley enjoyed the feeling of waking slowly, without an alarm or emergency klaxon. After a week in a motel, sleeping in her own bed felt better than aloe on a sunburn. She rolled onto her back, kicking the sheets that tangled around her pajama pants. The remnants of a dream had her heart going. She’d been dreaming of work, or maybe of Greg. Probably both. The taste of burning insulation sat heavy on the back of her tongue and her lungs itched from phantom smoke inhalation. Riley could almost hear the sound of popping drywall in the Marele family’s kitchen, where a wood beam had dislodged her mask. She cracked her eyes open and tried to blink past the haze of sleep lingering over her vision. Riley raised a hand to rub at her face when her brain caught up with the increasing discomfort in her lungs. Oh. Oh shit. Not a dream.
Smoke slipped under her door, curling into the room in deadly waves. Hunched over, she made her way to the handle, which was cool enough on the back of her hand to open. Once the door swung wide, Riley balled up her shirt to cover her mouth and nose and folded over, fighting panic. She was a volunteer firefighter, had been for years—she knew what smoke did to the lungs, knew what fire did to the body, and knew just how dangerous a situation she was in, but Riley’d never been on this side of it. It was her house she could hear fire tearing into. The house she’d grown up in. The house her mother had lived her last years in. God, where did she leave her phone? Tony was at the firehouse. Her neighbors would call it in, if they hadn’t already. Riley kept low, hand held out, as she moved down the hall to the stairs. She doubled over in a coughing fit, hacking up the taste of ash, burning plastic, and rancid chili peppers. At the bottom of the stairs, a wall of heat pressed against her. The fire must have originated in the kitchen. Had the toaster been left plugged in? Had the GFIs failed? Riley stumbled toward the back door. If the garden hose reached the kitchen window—
Riley pitched forward with the momentum of an unseen blow. Pain followed, raging across the back of her skull, crumpling her to the floor. Had the upstairs floor fallen through? The kitchen window, she thought, face smashed into the carpet. Could start on the fire with the hose before the engine arrived. Heavy footfalls indented the carpet next to her. Riley’s relief curdled into cold terror when they stepped around her. It wasn’t Tony or Greg, Vic or Dan, come to drag her to safety. Someone had set her house on fire and remained to make sure Riley never made it out.
The urge to move battled with the tugging pain behind her eyes. The sliding glass door to the backyard parted, offering sweet, clean air. Fighting nausea, Riley turned her head. Sirens warbled in the distance, making her next breath break in a sob. They were coming, but would they make it in time? The door slid shut, and her eyes followed, surrendering to the trauma and shock that might kill her before the fire had the chance.
Riley flailed in a panic, rolling off the bed. She gagged when she hit the hardwood floor, hip first. The pain sparking through her system helped reorganize her thoughts. She wasn’t in the fire, she was home—she was Riley, not Tristian. She hacked and gagged until she could draw a deep enough breath to convince her mind she wasn’t inhaling smoke. Riley. She was Riley Rowan MacIntyre. Boneless on the cold floor, covered in a sheen of sweat, she repeated her name in her throbbing head until she had the absurd urge to giggle. The oversized t-shirt she’d worn to bed twisted around her waist; goosebumps crawled up her bare legs. Riley twitched at the phantom feeling of wearing pajama pants—she despised sleeping in pants—it helped further separate her mind from the all-consuming dream, helped her realize the pain wasn’t entirely from the crash to the floor.
Tristian wasn’t going to die tomorrow. He was dying now.
Riley dragged herself upright just long enough to grab her cell phone, fighting through the sensation of needles pushing through her skin to the muscle. The screen appeared blurred with the aura of the lingering dream-induced migraine, but she managed to type out a 9 and 1 before a vice tightened around her head and blackened her vision. Okay, no 9-1-1. Light seeped back in, allowing Riley to find the newest contact in her list. She peeled her cheek off the floor and pressed the phone to her ear, listening to every ring with an increasing impatience.
“Hel—” a sleep-rough voice began.
“Greg? Get up, you need to get—”
“Who is… what—”
“Get up!”
“’Kay, up.” The swishing of sheets filled the line, drowning out more croaked attempts at getting him out the door. Sounding fractionally more alert, he asked, “Red?”
“Tristian’s house is on fire, and he’s inside.” Riley had no time to try to come up with a reasonable excuse for how she knew. Her nausea lessened, proving she’d made the right choice.
“He said he’d be at the mot—”
“I know, but he’s home!”
Sounds of hurried dressing reached her ears. “Did you get a call? I didn’t get anything.”
“No, I—please, just hurry.”
The sound of his heavy footsteps filled the line. “I’m going to—”
Greg?” The needling had lessened to prickles, so she waited.
An agonizing minute later, he was back. “I’m on my way,” he yelled over a loud engine. “Dispatch just alerted the firehouse.”
“He’s close to the sliding-glass back doors.”
A pause, and then, “Got it.” The call disconnected.
Riley shuddered on the floor as her headache broke and her pain fled. Tristian would live. She’d have to face the questions she knew were in the hesitation before Greg’s parting words, but Riley couldn’t find it in her to regret risking her privacy to save Tristian’s life. “I thought we had more time,” she whispered into her empty bedroom.
Obligatory Legal Stuff:
This chapter is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places, and incidences are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, locals, and events are coincidental.
No generative AI used. No AI training or scraping allowed.
All rights reserved.
Chapter Title Image created in Canva. Background image from Canva Pro.