My mood was toxic, and all I wanted to do was get the hell out of the garage so I could go home, maybe have a drink or five and crash. Okay, no, what I really wanted was to go find Suria, demand to know why she hadn’t returned my calls, then fuck her silly.

But I’d gone by there earlier today and knocked to no avail.

Hard to find her when I didn’t know where to look for her.

“Hey, boss,” Donut shouted from the door separating the office and the bay. He had the cordless in his hand and came striding toward me without waiting for me to answer. With his hand on the mouthpiece, he shoved the phone in my direction, not even giving me a chance to wipe my hands off. “It’s your mom. She sounds really upset, dude.”

Great. As soon as the thought entered my mind, I immediately felt like an asshole. It wasn’t like she called me to bug me or anything, and I knew that.

“What’s wrong, Mom?” I nodded at Donut and turned away from the guys in the bay as I headed for my office.

“I am such a fool,” she said, her voice tight and high with strain. “Baby, please don’t get upset with me, but…well, I think that psychic I went to see took me for a ride.”

A sick feeling settled in my gut. Closing the door behind me, I leaned up against it and rubbed at my temple.

“What do you mean, Mom?”

“It’s…” She huffed out a breath. “Damn it, give me a second. I’m so upset I can hardly think. I paid her so much money! Do you know how much I paid her? Let me tell you.”

And she did.

Red started to blur before my eyes.

It wasn’t going to hurt Mom financially, not in the long run. When my uncle died, he’d left us his estate, and we’d been careful. Mom had made some investments that were paying off in spades, and other than her penchant for visiting psychics and mystics and all that shit, she was a level-headed person. But that was still a fuck-load of money.

“Why don’t you start from the beginning?” I said, struggling to keep my voice level.

So, she did.

“I didn’t really start getting suspicious until this morning. I…well, I wanted to call the officer who I’ve kept contact with…remember how I’ve talked about Detective Jenkins?” she asked. She’d rambled a bit, straying back to the money, and something that might have been a séance, but she wasn’t sure. Now, though, she finally seemed a bit more focused. “I wanted to call him and thank him for how he’s always been there for us. I know he kept looking long after everybody else had given up and it meant the world to me. Now that I finally had some closure…well, I just felt I needed to tell him thank you, one last time.”

She paused, and I could picture her shoving her hand through her neat hair, although it was probably a mess by now, as agitated as she was. She’d be pacing too. If this had happened five years ago, she’d be smoking as she paced. But she’d given up the nicotine, thankfully.

“He told me how it was so odd that I’d called because he’d just talked to a young woman about the case. I asked who’d called and he gave me her name. She said she was a writer doing research, but I looked her up, and she doesn’t exist. I asked him what he told her, and he told me almost exactly what Sirene had told me happened. It was like she took his story and just…narrated it. He’d always suspected that Phillip just woke up, and when he couldn’t find me, wandered off…” Her voice cracked, and I knew she was reliving that guilt all over again.

I wanted to punch something.

And maybe wring a fake psychic’s neck.

“Mom,” I said gently, keeping the anger out of my voice. “It’s going to be okay. Is there anything else?”

She sniffed and said, “Yes. Well…I tried to call her. I wanted to know what was going on, if she’d called the detective, but her number has been disconnected. I tried to go by the place where she works – it’s just this little old house, but the sign was off, and I knocked anyway. This man told me that Sirene wasn’t around, and he didn’t know when she’d be back. That was when I knew something was right. She swindled me, Kian! And she used my brother to do it!”

After a few more moments, I finally got her to calm down.

“Okay, listen…I’m going to come over and pick you up, then we’ll go to the police station and file a report.”

“No, honey,” she said, reluctance thick in her voice. “I can’t do that. Everybody will know what a fool I am.”

“You weren’t a fool,” I told her. Naïve, maybe, but not foolish. My mom was a good woman, one who maybe trusted a little too easily when it came to certain things, but she wasn’t the one in the wrong here. “You just trusted the wrong person. She’s to blame for this, not you.”

“But…Kian, I still feel so stupid.”

“Mom, what about the next person she swindles? You’ll be okay without the money, but what about the person after you? And the one after you? Sooner or later, she’ll hurt somebody who can’t afford to lose the money. And that’s assuming she hasn’t already.”

Her soft sigh drifted across the phone, and I knew she got it.

“I’ll be there soon.”

Once I disconnected, I stood there gripping the phone so hard, the plastic casing cracked a little under my grip. I put it down before I gave into the urge to throw it.

That wouldn’t help anything at all.

Well, it would help me feel better, but not for long.

One thing would make me feel better – getting a hold of this psychic and dragging the money out of her, one dollar at a time.