Page 54 of Eye on the Ball

“He’s not dead?” Mutt sidled up next to me and looked at my shirt. “Tess, what happened to you?”

“She delivered a baby right here at the softball field,” Jack said, and there was so much pride in his voice I had to grin.

“I did!”

Mutt’s eyes widened. “Wow! Where’s the baby?”

“Mom and Dad and babies got choppered to the hospital,” I said, still smiling. “I can’t wait to go see them.”

Then I realized I was being insensitive. I put a hand on Mutt’s arm (we’d been friendly in high school before my curse, and I knew he’d done goofy jock guy things like put an arm around me, tug on my hair, and punch my shoulder; anybody who I’d touched before the curse kicked in seemed to be “grandfathered” into immunity from my visions).

“I’m sorry about Ace, Mutt. I know this must be scary. Sheriff Gonzalez and Deputy Reynolds will find out what happened and how to help him.”

Mutt surprised me by putting his head down on my shoulder and bursting into tears. “You’re the first person who’s said a single nice thing to me this week, Tess. You’re a sweet girl.”

I awkwardly patted his back and ignored Jack’s raised eyebrows. “It’s okay. I’m sure people meant to be nicer. It must have been a scary time.”

He snuffled, and I gently moved back. After he pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his face, he gave me a crooked smile. “You don’t want to get dinner sometime, do you?”

Jack took a step toward us, his eyes narrowing, and I pointed at him. He stopped advancing. Lucky for him.

“No but thank you. I’m in a relationship,” I said, wondering if anybody else had ever been asked out on a date in front of her boyfriend and next to the inviter’s cousin’s almost-dead body.

My life was so weird.

Deputy Reynolds stood looking at us with open disbelief. “If you don’t mind, maybe we can get on with deciding how to help your cousin?”

Mutt ducked his head. “Sure. I mean, yeah.”

“And maybe you can tell us where you were, Probie,” Susan added.

“Sure.” Probie shrugged. “I went to see the witch.”

29

Tess

I was delighted to finally get in the shower and then put on clean, soft yoga pants and a sweatshirt. Jack had put together a feast, because he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and it was almost five now.

When I walked into my homey kitchen and saw the food covering the table, I was glad again that Jack bought most of the groceries these days. I wasn’t sure my pawnshop income would be enough to support his eating habits. Shapeshifters needed a lot of calories. I’d read that tigers in the wild hunted once a week and ate up to seventy-five pounds of meat in one night.

This had not surprised me.

“Wine?”

I nodded. It was early in the day for me, but heroic baby deliverers deserved a glass of wine, right?

“I called Alejandro while you were in the shower,” Jack said, filling a glass and handing it to me. He bent to kiss me. “Rose and the babies are doing great. He was babbling a little, but that’s understandable. He’s now a father of three.”

“When can we go see them? Or are they heading home right away?”

“The doctors don’t want them to leave just yet. Rose’s mom is on the way now. Apparently, it was a fight to keep her grandmother from coming, too, but they convinced her to stay and look after everyone else.”

I laughed. “From what Rose has told me about her granny, that’s probably better. She’s a whirlwind of chaos.”

“We can go see them in the morning, he says.”

“Wonderful!”