Jack
Tess followed me out. "Do you want me to come with you?"
I stopped long enough to pull her in for a hug. "No, but thanks. I don't know what I'm walking into. Jed said nobody was there, and from what he'd seen it was only vandalism, but he doesn't know Jeremiah's—my—our—place enough to know if anything is missing. Can you get a ride home?"
"Of course. Call me as soon as you know. Do you want me to reach out to Andy for you?"
"No. He has enough on his plate without dealing with simple vandalism."
I kissed her, jumped in the truck, and sped home. By the time I reached my place, I'd calmed down from fiery rage to mere fury. Whoever was behind this crime ring, they'd dared to come intomytown. They'd hurtmyfriends.
And now they'd invaded my territory.
I didn't have time for this, with a murderer on the loose. These jerks were goingdown.
When I reached the house, I realized I'd clamped my fingers so tightly on the steering wheel that they'd left dents.
Okay. Maybe I wasn't all that calm, after all.
Jed walked out onto the porch, and I recognized the angry amber sparks floating in his green eyes, since I'd seen the same in my own.
"Nobody came into the house," he called out. "The cowards just threw a brick through the window."
I studied the front of the house. They'd shattered the large parlor window, which was an odd size and would be a pain to replace. Even as I thought it, part of my mind wondered at how easily I'd settled into thinking like a homeowner, after fourteen years of living out of a duffel bag wherever life threw me.
Jed walked out to meet me, wearing jeans and one of the flannel shirts we'd bought him since he couldn't go around dressed in the outfit he'd been wearing in the 1700s. He looked like me—or like I'd look in forty years. Same reddish-brown hair, though his was streaked with white. Three hundred years trapped in a statue would probably do that to a guy. A few inches shorter than me, but same build, same shapeshifter lean muscle and fast metabolism.
Now there were two tigers in Dead End—and somebody had been stupid enough to invade our den.
That somebody was going to be very, very sorry.
"Any tracks out here?"
Jed nodded at the ground beneath the window. "I found shoe prints there. Maybe they looked in the window to see if anybody was home before they threw the brick through it?"
"A brick? What kind of brick?"
He raised an eyebrow. "How do I know? A brick. Not much different from the ones we used in my day, after half the town burned down a couple of times, and we got smart enough to realize that wooden buildings weren't the best way to go when we had fireplaces and woodstoves."
I examined the prints, which were large and deep in the soil around the plants. "Big man. Heavy, too, to leave prints this deep."
"That's what I thought. Or else a really short guy with enormous feet who held another guy up on his shoulders."
Jed was grinning when I turned to glance at him. "Hey. I thought I'd add a little humor to the situation. You look like you could chew nails right now."
He wasn't wrong.
"How'd you get here, anyway? I thought you weren't coming back until tomorrow."
"I got homesick," he said, shrugging. "Those folks at the university are nice enough, but they mostly treated me like a fascinating insect they were studying instead of like a person. Got old. They sent me home in a car—called it a Yoober—and I had a better conversation with the driver than I'd had in all the days at UCF."
The thought of an Uber driver chatting with my great-great-however-many-greats grandfather lightened my mood. "Yeah, we need to teach you how to drive and figure out how to get you a driver's license. The DMV is difficult enough to deal with under normal circumstances. Trying to explain how a guy presumed dead for three hundred years needs a license is going to be tough."
"Maybe Tess could take me. That girl could charm the fur off a bear," Jed said admiringly. "Or what about Ruby? She's the mayor. Doesn't that mean she could fix it?"
"With anything else, maybe. But the Florida DMV doesn't recognize Black Cypress County when it comes to rules of the road. We all have to qualify just like anybody else." I said, crossing to the porch. "But we can figure that out after the holidays. Right now, we need to discover who is behind these random crimes. I just can't wrap my mind around the logic behind any of it."
Jed followed me into the house. "What random crimes? There have been more?"
