Wild Country (The World of the Others #2)- Anne Bishop Page 0,10

in the doorway. “Phil Mailer almost hit her. Jesse should talk to her about the proper way to cross the street.”

If she’d taken one of the candles, Phil wouldn’t have stopped in time.

Shelley closed the door and walked over to the display table.

Abigail found it hard to breathe. A dissonance in someone else’s life wouldn’t have produced this effect. This only happened when a dissonance threatened to bring something dark into her life.

“You still have some of those bison candles?” Shelley said the words with the same forced enthusiasm as someone being fed marginally edible leftovers for the third night in a row.

“Don’t!” Abigail shouted when Shelley picked up one of the jars. She grabbed the jar and threw it on the floor with enough force to break the thick glass. “You can’t have that one. It’s not right for you! It’s not right!” She grabbed another candle and smashed it on the floor. “They’re not right!”

The third jar didn’t break, so she went into her workroom, rummaged through her box of tools, and returned to the display table with a hammer. Air burned her lungs as she picked up each jar and set it on the floor. Then she swung the hammer hard enough to break the jars. Swung the hammer over and over and over.

Had to stop the dissonance, had to protect herself. Had to …

The hammer mashed through the candle, revealing something inside besides the wick. Using the hem of her dress, Abigail dug it out. A tumbled stone no bigger than her thumbnail. Quartz.

Heedless of the glass, she mashed the other broken candles and found more tumbled stones. Agate. Jet. Carnelian. Hematite. Turquoise. They could have been good stones for someone else, but they were bad stones to be around her.

“Gods above and below, Abby.” Kelley stood in the doorway that connected his shop with hers, staring at her. “What are you doing?”

She twisted to face him, felt a shard of glass slice her knee. But she didn’t feel pain. Not from the glass. She felt rage at this boring fool who had torn a hole in her defenses.

“How could you do this? How could you?”

“I thought … Just something extra. A little surprise when someone burned the candle. You didn’t have to touch the stones. You dislike my work so much, I’m surprised you even realized there were a few tumbled stones missing from the bowl in my shop.”

I knew they were in the candles. I could feel them.

Kelley hesitated, then walked over to her. He took the hammer and helped her to her feet.

“You’re bleeding.” He sounded sad—and there was something else in his voice she didn’t recognize. Something she didn’t like.

“I’ll help Abigail clean those cuts,” Jesse said as she stepped into the shop. “You clean up the glass.”

Kelley nodded.

Remembering who she was supposed to be, Abigail didn’t protest when Jesse took her arm and led her to the washroom at the back of her shop. It didn’t surprise her that Jesse would show up, but she asked the question anyway. “Why are you here?”

“Because Rachel came running back to my store, too scared to make much sense, followed by Shelley, who said you were having some kind of fit,” Jesse replied sharply.

When had Shelley left? When she’d gone into the workroom to find the hammer? Or had Shelley fled after she started smashing the candles? She hadn’t noticed, couldn’t remember.

“Sit.” Jesse pointed to the closed toilet. Opening the daypack that was now so much a standard part of Jesse’s attire that people barely noticed it, she pulled out the first-aid kit and a bottle of whiskey. Pouring two fingers into the water glass Abigail kept on a ledge above the sink, Jesse held it out. “Down in one.”

“I’m not supposed to drink,” Abigail whispered. “I promised Kelley I wouldn’t drink.” Of course, Kelley had believed she’d been drinking hard for two years before he found her and doing some bad things to pay for the drink, so her giving him that promise had meant a lot to him.

“We’ll call this medicine. If he has a problem with that, he can talk to me.”

She downed the whiskey. Funny how it didn’t taste as good as the sips she took on the sly when Kelley was gone for an afternoon and wouldn’t notice.

Jesse said nothing while she washed the cuts and applied antiseptic ointment and bandages. She put everything back in her daypack before she leaned against the doorframe. “You scared Rachel so much