“Can I carry your bag to the car for you, Ms. Sutterfield?”
“Clara, please, and no.” She eyed his neatly pressed black suit and cleared her throat, wishing she would’ve dressed up a bit more. “I mean, no thank you.”
Mason was staring again.
Cocking her eyebrow, Clara glared. “I know karate.”
“Lie.”
“You a shifter?”
Mason nodded once and turned on his heel, then began walking toward a glowing red exit sign.
“Ewey, what kind?”
“It’s not polite to ask—”
“Snore, what kind or I’m going to guess.” Mason kept on walking, his fists now clenched and swinging at his sides. “Sea cucumber? They look like penises.”
Mason gave an amused grunt, but didn’t enlighten her. Instead, he said, “You’re a lot different than I imagined you.”
“Uh, do you often imagine the people you hire before you see them? Don’t be a creeper. And while we’re on the subject of my hiring, like I told you on the phone, I’m more of a tarot card and palm-reading kind of psychic. I don’t know how much help I can be for your ghost problem. I haven’t even done a séance. And between you and me, I’m not even that good at telling fortunes.”
With a troubled furrow in his brow, Mason popped the trunk of a black, polished Towncar. He settled his hands formally behind his back while she hefted the heavy duffle into the trunk, then he opened her door and waited until she was buckled to walk around the car and slip in behind the wheel.
“And I saw how much my plane ticket cost you. Six hundred bucks! That’s not chump change for someone who has mediocre psychic skills and zero background in ghosts.”
“Money isn’t an issue, so don’t worry at all about your travel costs.”
“So you’re just rolling in the dough.”
“I hired you for my boss.”
“Wait, I thought I was dealing with you.”
“Ms. Sutterfield—”
“Mason, I swear to God I’m going to scream if you keep talking to me like I’m a grandma. I’m thirty, not seventy. Please, call me Clara.”
“Thirty,” he murmured.
Clara narrowed her eyes at the back of his head and sank into the back seat. The car was spotless and smelled of new leather. Black on black. Nice. Mr. Sea Cucumber’s boss had taste.
“I could’ve hired other psychics, but I want to deal with you. You’re a registered shifter, and this is a sensitive…job. Even if you aren’t able to do anything for my boss, it will be worth the money”—he pitched his voice low—“just to see the look on his face.”
“I can hear you. Bear ears.”
“I didn’t expect you to be so dominant.”
“Why, because I’m a woman?”
“No.” He lifted his dark eyes to the rearview mirror and then back to the road in front of him. “Maybe.”
Clara rolled her eyes and crossed her arms over her bag. Figured. If she had a penny for every time someone underestimated her on the basis of gender, she could probably pay the late rent on her tarot card business. Clara’s Tarot was going under, and fast. She wouldn’t have even considered a job like this if Mason, or whoever Mason was working for, hadn’t offered her two thousand dollars plus travel expenses just to come out. Sounded too good to be true, but she’d already been paid half upfront, so the job seemed legit enough.
And now her curiosity was piqued about Mason’s boss. What kind of trouble were ghosts causing that could make a rich man hire a second-rate palm reader? Sounded like desperation to her. She pitied him already. Ghosts were no joke and could make life miserable. She should know. Her grandmother went mad with the sight. Clara had accepted long ago that her fate would be the same—madness if she couldn’t find a way to control the dreams and headaches.
She might not be a great psychic, but she saw things. Awful things that had nothing to do with this world. Teeth and wings and fire, and even though she didn’t have a ghost problem, she pitied anyone who was being haunted.
And as the scenery outside her window turned from the cityscape around the Cheyenne Regional Airport to the lush Wyoming evergreen wilderness, she promised herself she would do her best to help Mason and his boss.
Chapter Two
Clara stared up to the towering mansion built into the side of a stark cliff face. The walls were covered in windows, and sleek modern lines said someone had paid an architect a lot of money to design this place. She’d never seen anything like it. To the side of the structure was a waterfall tumbling straight down over the cliff’s edge and into a rushing river that snaked off into the forest.