Dead and Dusted Read online

  Dead and Dusted

  Visions & Victims Book Four

  Lily Webb

  Contents

  Newsletter

  Previously in Starfall Valley…

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Dead on Target

  The Visions & Victims Series

  The Magic & Mystery Series

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2021 by Lily Webb

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Newsletter

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  www.lilywebbmysteries.com/newsletter

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  Or if you’d just like to say hi, you can reach me at:

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  www.lilywebbmysteries.com

  Previously in Starfall Valley…

  Dead on Arrival Re-Cap

  While psychic sleuth Selena Smith was excited to give the grounds of the Kindred Spirits Inn a revamp, she didn’t expect her new gardener to become a vamp too!

  * * *

  Selena started digging and eventually unearthed the truth behind the chemical confusion…

  * * *

  … But now several prominent guests are arriving at Kindred Spirits, and someone’s about to kick up some major dust.

  Though each mystery in the Visions & Victims series stands alone, the series reads stronger together.

  Chapter 1

  I tore down the treacherous side of Mount Starcrest with nothing but the sounds of my feet pounding against the snow-packed surface and my hammering heart in my ears — until a thunderous crack from somewhere behind tore through the air and shook the ground beneath me, hurling me to my knees.

  A sharp pain tore through my hands as they broke my fall, but I didn’t have the luxury of allowing myself to feel the injury. Instead, I wiped the fresh blood on my robes and forced myself back to my feet. No matter what else happened, I had to keep moving, keep running from the roiling, living wave of snow and debris that threatened to swallow me if I slowed down long enough to let it.

  Behind me, trees snapped and buckled under the crushing weight of the avalanche as it swept over everything in its path and smothered my screams in my throat before they could leave it — not that anyone would’ve heard them over the deafening destruction nipping at my heels.

  Every time my heels struck the ground, the throbbing stitch in my side seemed to grow, radiating out across my entire body and threatening to bring me to my knees for good. If it weren’t for the faces of my family and friends flashing through my mind, I might’ve given up, simply let the white wave take me — but I couldn’t doom my loved ones to the same fate.

  After what seemed like a lifetime, the gothic peaks of Kindred Spirits Inn, the castle masquerading as a bed-and-breakfast I called home, finally popped into view. With my arms flailing, I shouted as loudly as my raw throat would allow, hoping against hope that someone, anyone at all, inside the inn might hear and start evacuating the guests and staff — but I never got an answer.

  “Aunt Blair! Jadis! Thorn!” I cried, stumbling. “Someone, please, I need your he—”

  The words caught in my throat as I tripped and collided with the rock-hard snow beneath me. Dazed, I rolled onto my back, awed by the incompatibly beautiful blue and clear skies until the rumbling that shook everything around jarred me back to reality. Terrified, I sat up like something had electrocuted me — just as a wall of snow, ice, and debris washed over me.

  “NO!”

  “Selena! Selena, wake up! It’s okay, you’re just having another bad dream!” someone shouted over my terrified screams, and I jolted back into my body, unable to believe I could still breathe. I held my hands up to my face and sobbed when I found them clean and uninjured.

  “Jadis? Y-you’re alive…?”

  “What do you mean? Of course, I am. Oh, you poor thing!” Jadis, my best friend, groaned as she threw her arms around me and held me close to her chest. Despite the very real feeling of her heart beating against me and the tickle of her violet curls in my nose, I couldn’t stop crying.

  “It seemed so real…” I muttered, and Jadis pat my back a few times before she released me. Embarrassed, I hurriedly wiped my eyes with my hand.

  “Judging from the way you were screaming, I believe you,” Jadis said with a worried frown. “What did you see?”

  I opened my mouth to tell her, but immediately thought better of it when I remembered where I was and why. Despite the distance between the several tables set up in the reception room where the staff of Kindred Spirits had gathered for a meeting, the cavernous ceilings had no doubt carried my screams to everyone’s ears, and a fresh round of embarrassment flashed on my face at the realization.

  “Is everything okay?” Thorn, my kinda-sorta boyfriend, called from where he stood at the front of the room.

  “Yes, everything’s fine! I drifted off and had a bad dream; nothing to worry about,” I insisted, even as the image of the avalanche devouring me reappeared in my mind’s eye.

  Unconvinced, Thorn tossed the clipboard he’d been holding on the nearest table and dashed to my side in a blur of robes and honey-brown hair. He rested a hand on my shoulder and kneeled to eye level, but all I saw in his powder blue irises was ice, and I shivered. “Are you sure? You seem pretty shaken up. We can take a break from all this if you need to.”

  “I’m fine, I swear. I’m just a bit disoriented,” I maintained, though that was putting it lightly. I hadn’t told anyone, not even Jadis, that I’d been having the same nightmare every night for more than a week. I’d always woken up before the avalanche got me, though, so even though I’d bolted upright in bed gasping for breath more times than I could count, I’d never screamed — until now. But it was still just a dream, and apparently a pretty common one according to the research I’d done online, so it probably wasn’t anything to worry about.

  “I’d argue more than a little,” Thorn said, and I shot him a frown.

  “It doesn’t matter. We’ve got bigger things to deal with right now than a silly dream of mine, remember?” I asked, pointing a betraying shaky finger at the whiteboard he’d abandoned at the front of the room.

  As the list of names Thorn had scrawled on its surface reminded, by this time tomorrow, Kindred Spirits would be full of prominent guests who were coming for a weekend of business — including the mayor of Starfall Valley and the CEO of Starforce Technologies, the biggest and most powerful company in town — a lucrative business retreat that Thorn had arranged as Kindred Spirits’ new PR manager. The last thing I wanted was to sabotage it for him and the inn.

  “Call me crazy, Selena, but you’re much more important to me than all of them combined,” Thorn said, deepening my embarrassment. “If you’re falling asleep in the middle of the day like this, it just proves you’re working yourself too hard.”

  “No, I’m not!” I shot back, though it was as far from true as possible. In the two days since Thorn had told us he’d convinced some of the biggest names in town to spend a weekend with us, I’d
barely stopped working long enough to catch my breath.

  In fact, one of the most common meanings of avalanche dreams I’d found online was that the dreamer might subconsciously feel buried under responsibility and stress, so maybe Thorn had a point.

  I didn’t blame any of them for being worried, but they didn’t need to babysit me, either — a fact none of them seemed able to accept thanks to me passing out from pushing my magical powers a bit too far a few weeks prior. Since then, no one around me seemed unable to believe that I was really, truly fine when I said I was.

  “I think he might be on to something, Selena,” Jadis argued. “You’re so wound up that you haven’t slept through the night all week.”

  “Way to sell me out,” I grumbled, feeling increasingly defensive. “I just want everything to go well this weekend! Is that such a crime?”

  “We all do, so no, it’s not a crime at all,” Thorn said, “but not getting enough sleep definitely is. If you can’t stay awake when all the guests get here, then what’s the point of all that work?”

  “We’re just worried about you, Selena, that’s all,” Jadis said, attempting to comfort me, so I let her.

  “I think a break sounds like a wonderful idea,” my aunt Blair chimed in as she spun around from the table in front of us where she sat next to her wife, my aunt Kiki. Blair flashed me a warm smile. “Lilith knows we’re all more than a little stressed out about this weekend, right, Kiki?”

  Aunt Kiki blew a raspberry as she faced me, making her electric-blue curls flutter around her face. “That doesn’t even begin to describe the feeling. It’s still hard to believe we’re about to host two of the most powerful people in all of Starfall Valley.”

  “I still can’t believe you’ve never met either of them,” I said. For over twenty years, Blair and Kiki had run Kindred Spirits all on their own and turned the inn into a bit of a landmark. Then again, I didn’t know how often high-powered CEOs and government officials needed to spend a few nights at a bed-and-breakfast.

  “Oh, we’ve seen them around here and there, and we’ve talked to Mayor Nash before. He actually wanted to host a campaign event here back when he was running for office, but the campaign ran out of money,” Blair said.

  “I forgot about that,” Kiki laughed. “Seems like a lifetime ago — almost as long as when I went to the Starcrest Institute with Leland Marth.”

  “Whoa, what? You never told us that!” Thorn said, his eyes wide.

  Kiki shrugged. “Why would I? I didn’t know him. Leland was a couple of classes under me, so we never crossed paths.”

  “Okay, but still. Do you think he remembers you? Does he have a good opinion of you?”

  “I’m not sure it matters after all this time,” Blair answered for Kiki. “Anyway, I think we’ve spent more than enough time talking about Mr. Marth today. Come on, Selena, I’d like to talk to you alone for a moment,” Blair said as she stood and hovered over me expectantly until I did the same. Without another choice, I scrambled out of my chair and followed her out of the reception room into the east wing of the inn.

  “Meet back here in ten minutes or so? We still have some details to go over!” Thorn called after us.

  “Sounds good,” Blair answered and wrapped an arm around my shoulder to usher me away. We walked in silence to the foyer where a cozy fire burned in a grate at the center, spilling light and shadow around the room. Blair led me to the office door behind the front desk and waited until we were safely alone inside to speak. “So, tell me about this dream,” she said as she sat down on the corner of a small desk at the back of the room, her black robes swishing around her feet as she kicked them absently through the air.

  “It’s nothing, really,” I said and joined her on the desk. Blair’s eyes raked over me, and I stared at the floor.

  “When is anything that happens to you ‘nothing,’ love?” she asked and nudged my shoulder with hers. She smiled, her eyes twinkling, and I couldn’t resist.

  “Okay, fine, it’s probably not nothing,” I sighed. “I don’t know what it means, exactly, but I keep having this awful dream of an avalanche heading toward Kindred Spirits. For some reason, in the dream I’m up near the peak of Mount Starcrest when it starts, and I’m running frantically to get back to the inn to alert everyone, but I never make it in time.”

  The smile fell off Blair’s face like I’d slapped her. She cleared her throat and sat up straight. “That’s concerning, to say the least. When did this start?”

  I shrugged. “About a week ago, I guess. I’ve looked up some interpretations, and I don’t think it’s anything to worry about. It’s probably just stress. Lots of people have weird recurring dreams like this when they’ve got a lot going on.”

  “Maybe, but I’d bet most of them don’t also have the ability to see glimpses of the past — and, more recently for you, slivers of the future.”

  My eyes shot to hers, and my brows stitched together. “Wait, what? You don’t think this is some sort of prophetic vision or something, do you? No way, it can’t be. That’s crazy.”

  Blair tossed her hands up. “I’m no local history buff, but as far as I know, we’ve never had an avalanche in Starfall. Besides, it’s the middle of spring, so I doubt it. Your dreams make me wonder, though. Have you had any others along these lines lately?”

  After taking a few moments to think about it, I shook my head. “No, not since a few weeks ago with Azalea in the town square,” I said, but I still didn’t really believe that meant anything. In a snap, I’d predicted that a dangerous witch was going to jump for her broom to flee from the cops, so I snatched it away from her with magic. Predicting a move like that didn’t exactly make me a psychic.

  “Hm, strange,” Blair said as she massaged her chin.

  “What is?”

  “Foresight isn’t typically spotty like that, and it’s rare for it to manifest physically before it does in dreams.”

  “I’m… Not following. My head’s still foggy from the dream.”

  Blair patted my shoulder. “Oh, just some magical theorizing on my part. Don’t worry about it. I’m sure you’re right; this is probably just a stress-related dream that will resolve itself in time.”

  I sighed and slouched. “Honestly, I don’t even know why I’m so worked up over this weekend. It’s not like I know any of these guys.”

  Blair chuckled. “I think anyone would be nervous to meet powerful people, but it’s much worse when you’re going to take care of their every want and need. For what it’s worth, I feel the pressure too. In all the time Kiki and I have been running Kindred Spirits, I don’t think we’ve ever hosted such a prestigious — and mysterious — event.”

  “Seriously! What could the mayor of Starfall and Leland Marth have to talk about? Are they working on some super-secret government partnership or something?”

  “I don’t have the faintest idea, but whatever it is, it must be big. Which reminds me, have you signed your non-disclosure agreement yet?”

  I sighed and shook my head. “No, sorry. I keep forgetting about it with all the other preparations going on.”

  “I understand, but please make sure you get it done and back to me sometime today. Mr. Marth made it very clear when I spoke to him yesterday that he and his staff won’t set foot on the property until we’ve all signed the documents.”

  “Wait, what? His staff? What’s with that and all the secrecy?”

  Blair laughed. “Mr. Marth is infamous for the lengths he’ll go to protect Starforce Technology’s information. Really, I can’t say I blame him. With so many staff members and other guests running around here over the weekend, who knows what one of them might overhear? If that information leaked, it could be very damaging to Mr. Marth and whatever deal he’s trying to strike,” she said, as if she already knew I’d do everything in my power to eavesdrop. She knew me too well.

  “So, is he going to make all the other guests sign an NDA too?”

  “You can bet your wand he will,” B
lair said with a wink. “I’ve already sent them out to everyone scheduled to attend. If they don’t sign them and hand them to me when they arrive, they don’t enter the inn. Plain and simple.”

  “Is this really worth all the trouble?”

  Blair raised her eyebrows. “Are you kidding? When word gets out about Mr. Marth and Mayor Nash doing business here — and rest assured, it will — our bookings are going to go through the roof. If Mr. Marth gives us his seal of security approval, I know other business and government leaders will want to follow. It doesn’t hurt that Starforce and the government have partnered to rent out the entire inn for their staff and security.”

  I gulped. “The whole inn? And security?”

  “You heard me correctly, and that’s a good thing. We couldn’t possibly meet their security standards alone.”

  “Don’t hate me for asking, but that makes me wonder… What if this weekend goes wrong?”

  Blair winked at me. “Then we’ll probably never see another booking, and we’ll have to close up shop for good. No pressure, right?”

  “No, none,” I muttered as visions of stone-faced security guards armed to the teeth creeping around Kindred Spirits flashed in my mind. With so many moving pieces and so many people to attend to, how could we possibly expect the weekend to go off without a hitch? No wonder I’d been having nightmares — who wouldn’t if they were in my robes?