“You said he had that on when he died?” Teag pressed.
“So the story goes,” Patti replied.
“Are there any other items he might have had with him when he was thrown from the horse?” I asked, making a slow circuit of the room. The energy I sensed off the trophies felt positive, but the vibes from the wardrobe creeped me out. I suspected we hadn’t found everything.
“His watch,” Patti said, pointing to a pocket watch under a glass dome. When I looked closer, I saw that the engraved cover was open, and the glass over the watch face had shattered.
“What about that long staff in the closet?”
Patti pointed to the old wooden walking stick that was probably only a few inches shorter than my own five-foot-six height. “This?” she asked. “It’s a family heirloom. The Nicholsons are very proud of their Scottish and Scandinavian ancestors, and this piece supposedly belonged to an ancestor.”
“Were the jacket and watch pieces brought up from storage because of the hunting exhibit?” I asked. Patti nodded. I made the rounds of the room twice more, but nothing else stood out to me as having any particular resonance. I had no desire to touch either the jacket or the watch, and since Nicholson’s death wasn’t a mystery to be solved, fortunately, I didn’t need to.
“Thank you,” I said, as Patti led us downstairs. “I think we’ve learned what we needed to make a recommendation.”
She looked nervous. “You won’t tell the board members that I mentioned the ghosts, will you? They only want us to talk about them at Halloween.”
I smiled. “Don’t worry. Your secret is safe with us.”
“Do you think that if they put the watch and jacket back in storage, the ghosts wouldn’t be as scary?” she asked.
I didn’t want to lie to her. “That won’t make the ghosts go away completely. But if those are items that his spirit is particularly attached to, taking them off display might make the haunting less…rambunctious,” I said. “At least, that’s the recommendation we’re going to make.”
“What would it take to make the ghosts leave for good?” Patti was more interested than I would have expected, and then I thought about docents needing to go out to their cars at dusk with few people around and decided I couldn’t blame her for being frightened.
“If those pieces are really the anchor, then destroying them would probably be the only way to set the ghosts free,” Teag replied. “Which is probably not something the board or the family would be willing to do. But it might help to put them in a lead box, not just take them down to storage.”
“And even destroying them might not send the ghosts packing,” I cautioned, in case Patti decided to take matters into her own hands. “There could be something else that bound the spirits here, and it could take a priest—or someone else with special skills—to get the ghosts to leave.” We often worked with a local priest to dispel troublesome spirits—but we also had a Voudon mambo, a medium, and a necromancer on speed dial, just in case. I didn’t think Patti needed to know that.
“Thank you,” she said, as she walked us to the door.
I looked around. “Will you be all right? You aren’t alone here, are you?”
Patti smiled and shook her head. “There are some people in the offices. We all try to go to our cars together. No one wants to be the last one here.”
Teag and I walked out to his car, giving a last look in the direction of where we had sensed the ghostly hunt.
“Okay, spill,” I said as we got in and buckled up. “You froze back there when we heard the horses. What happened?”
He stayed quiet as we pulled out of the parking lot and drove down the long lane. Century-old live oak trees lined each side of the driveway, and their twisted branches formed a tunnel that dripped with Spanish moss.
“I had a dream,” he said finally, as we pulled out onto the main road. “It was about a fox hunt, and at first it all looked like what you see in those paintings. But then the moon came out, and they were all zombies. With red eyes.”
Teag chanced a look in my direction. “I don’t usually have dreams like that, Cassidy. But I’ve dreamed it three times this month. I don’t know what it means, but it’s got to be important, and frankly, it scares the hell out of me.”
Chapter Two
“So you brought an audience this time, Teag? I didn’t know our lessons were so entertaining.” Mrs. Teller gave me a big smile and hugged me tight. I got a hug from Niella, her daughter, as well. Mrs. Teller led us into a room she had repurposed as her studio and motioned for Teag and me to have a seat. Niella came in a few minutes later with a tray that held a pitcher of sweet tea and four glasses, and she put it on a side table.
“So are you here to see what this boy’s been up to, or are you thinking to learn some weaving yourself, huh?” Mrs. Teller fixed me with a gaze that seemed to see right down to my bones. She was in her late sixties, with short hair sprinkled with gray, mahogany skin that showed no signs of aging, and piercing black eyes. Niella took after her, in her looks, her lilting accent, and her talents.
“I think I’ve got enough with my touch magic,” I replied. “I’m leaving the Weaving to you.”
Mrs. Teller and Niella are some of the best sweetgrass basket makers in Charleston. They have a regular spot down at the Charleston City Market, and their baskets fetch high prices—for good reason. Not only are they true artists with a difficult craft, but Mrs. Teller’s Weaver magic gives a “little something extra” to all of her creations. Oh, and she’s also a damn fine Hoodoo worker, a Root woman of high regard.
Mrs. Teller laughed, a rich, throaty sound. “Let me know if you change your mind.”
I glanced up at Niella and thought she looked more tired than usual. “Have things been busier than usual?” I left it up to interpretation whether “things” meant the market or the Hoodoo.
“Well now, that’s a tale in itself,” Mrs. Teller said. Out of habit, she picked up an unfinished sweetgrass braid, and her fingers flew while she talked. Teag took down a half-woven basket of his own from a shelf and returned to sit next to me. Where Mrs. Teller’s muscle memory was born from more than a half-century of practice, enabling her to bend and twist the sharp dried grass without slicing up her fingers, Teag moved with careful caution. He’d learned the hard way, and I’d seen him come into the shop with fingers covered in bandages more than once.
“Fill us in,” I begged. Sharing information was essential for those of us in the supernatural community in Charleston, and Mrs. Teller ran in some circles that Teag and I usually weren’t part of.
“Trouble’s brewing,” Mrs. Teller said, and Niella settled into a chair beside her, picking up her own half-done basket to work while we talked. “People can feel it coming, like a storm over the ocean.” The sweet, earthy smell of the seagrass filled the air.
“What kind of trouble?” I asked. Teag’s focus was on his basket, and I knew he juggled both the complexity of working the stubborn grass, as well as the magic he channeled through the weaving. He might be listening, but he had too much going on to talk.
“Don’t know yet, that’s the truth of it,” she replied. Her Lowcountry accent rounded her vowels and softened her consonants, and added a musical quality that I found mesmerizing. “But it’s big. I feel that in my bones, and my bones don’t lie.”
I tried to track how she wove the sweetgrass, but her fingers practically blurred with the speed of experience. Even without handling the baskets, I knew they projected a calm, protective resonance that probably attracted buyers as much as the beauty of her craftwork. The baskets of hers that I owned were some of my favorite decorations because they always made me feel better being around them.
“Just a feeling, or have you seen something?” I pressed.
“What I’ve seen is people making a beeline to my door, asking me for gris-gris bags and goofer dust,” she said. “Folks be saying that they can’t sleep, or that they hear noises but nothing’s there, or they catch a glimpse of sha
dows out of the corner of their eye.” She shook her head. “Uh, uh,” she tutted. “That’s not good. Not good at all. So I fix them up best I can, show them how to put down the dust or put a dime in their shoe or fix their mojo bag and send them on their way, and the next day, I got twice as many people waiting for me, because they all told their friends.”
While the boom was good for business, I knew that whatever had people unnerved sounded like the kind of problem that landed in my lap, sooner or later. Sorren is part of the Alliance, a secret organization of mortals and immortals that take care of supernatural threats. He founded Trifles and Folly with my ancestor nearly three-hundred-and-fifty years ago, and our store is one of dozens Sorren has all over the world. The stores serve as outposts to get dangerous magical or haunted items out of circulation and shut down things that go bump in the night.
“What kind of bad dreams?” I asked, although I couldn’t resist a glance in Teag’s direction, but he never looked up from his work. “Is there a common thread?”
Mrs. Teller shrugged. “There’re all nightmares, for sure. Most people won’t speak of their dreams because they think saying it out loud gives the dreams power. Maybe so, maybe not. But the ones who would say told me they were being chased, in the dark, but they couldn’t see what was behind them. Except for red eyes.”
Teag didn’t say anything, but he swallowed hard, and his fingers paused for a few seconds.
I swallowed hard, too. “Yikes,” I managed. “Any idea what might cause that?”
“Lots of things could,” Mrs. Teller replied. “If it were one or two people coming in, I’d say they got someone real mad at them. But so many at my doorstep?” She shook her head. “Uh, uh, uh. There’s something bigger going on, and you and Sorren need to be getting to the bottom of it.”
For the rest of the evening, I sat back and watched Teag’s lesson. Mrs. Teller managed to combine teaching him about magic along with the techniques of weaving complicated patterns with the sweetgrass. I didn’t always follow how it worked, but then again, my magic is different from theirs.
After a particularly frustrating effort, Teag sighed and looked up, angry at himself for not being able to complete the exercise. “I can store magic in knots, and I can weave a general intention—like ‘tranquility’—into a piece of cloth, or protective spells. But I’m not doing very well at countering a spell someone else has woven into something. And to be honest, I’m not sure I want to learn how to weave a compulsion into a piece of cloth.”
I shivered. Teag was probably remembering a run-in we’d had with something evil that had gotten locked into a rug by a master Weaver. That gave me nightmares of my own.
“Just because you know how to do something doesn’t mean you do it all the time. Maybe you know something, and you never use it,” Mrs. Teller replied. “But the things you can do with your magic, they’re like tools. You never know when you’ll need it. You think ‘compulsion’ and imagine something bad, like hurting someone. What if you wove that into a rope and used it to tie up a creature and keep him from fighting or yelling?”
Mrs. Teller coiled the braid of sweetgrass she wove. “The magic itself, it’s not good or bad. Like I’ve told you before, it’s what we do with the magic that matters.” She looked up at him over the top of her reading glasses. “Now, try that binding spell again.”
By the time the lesson ended, I felt worn out, and I wasn’t the one expending magic. Watching the effort Teag put into trying to accomplish his lessons made me tired. Although being around so many of Mrs. Teller’s baskets gave me a Zen-like calm like I’d had a stiff drink.
“You’re getting better at control,” Mrs. Teller said to Teag as we got ready to leave. “And your gift is strong. I been doing this for a long, long time, and no one I ever taught has been as strong as you are.” Before Teag could thank her, she fixed him with a look. “That’s a warning, not a compliment. Power like that attracts attention—usually the wrong kind. Like a big, shiny beacon. You need to learn to defend yourself, boy. You don’t have a choice about it.”
Teag was quiet on the way back to my house. I’d known him long enough to recognize the way he bit his lip meant he was turning Mrs. Teller’s words over in his mind.
“She’s right,” he said after a while. We parked at the curb, but neither of us made a move to get out of the car. “I need to figure out how to do more defensive magic. How to shield, so I’m not easy to find.” The worry was clear on his face. “I know how to fight. But if Anthony got hurt because someone was coming for me…I couldn’t live with myself.”
Teag and Anthony had been a couple for several years now, and I kept wondering when I might find a wedding invitation in my mail. Anthony knows about what we really do at the store and about the Alliance, and he has some latent clairvoyance, but he has no magical defenses of his own, and that makes him vulnerable.
“I don’t think the fox hunters from the Nicholson mansion are going to come after you,” I said, with as much of a smile as I could muster. “And you’re doing everything you can to learn more about your magic. You’ve already come so far—”
“Not far enough,” Teag said with a grim set to his jaw. “Maybe I’ve been lucky that no one’s noticed me so far. That luck won’t hold. And until I know how to shield my magic, so it isn’t so visible, then I’m a threat to everyone around me—you, Anthony, even Sorren.”
“Pretty sure Sorren can take care of himself,” I joked, although I knew that even with his vampire abilities, Sorren wasn’t invincible.
“I know,” Teag said, and slumped. Where he had looked ready to charge into battle a moment earlier, now he looked tired and overwhelmed. “It’s scary to think about. And with the dreams, I haven’t slept well.”
“Did you tell Anthony?”
He shook his head. “Not everything. Nothing he can do about it. So I said I’d had nightmares, but didn’t get into the details. We don’t know there’s anything to them, yet. But…I wish I could sleep.”
I reached over and squeezed his arm. “We’ll figure it out,” I said. “And in the meantime, maybe Rowan or Lucinda could help with a charm to make your power a little less visible.” Rowan’s a powerful witch, and Lucinda is our friendly neighborhood Voudon mambo. They’re both strong in their abilities and lucky for us, they’re good friends.
“That’s a good idea,” Teag said, and I knew it bothered him to admit how much Mrs. Teller’s comments had troubled him. “I’ll call them tomorrow.”
I moved to get out of the car. My house is warded with strong magical protections by Lucinda, Rowan, and several of our other allies. Once I’m past the gate, the bad guys have to be pretty damn powerful to do any harm. The house Teag and Anthony share is also warded, though the protections there are newer, and being strengthened over time. Teag laid a hand on my shoulder.
“Thanks for going to the lesson with me,” he said. “I didn’t want to go by myself tonight, not after what happened at the mansion.”
I gave him a supportive smile. “I understand. You’d do the same for me. Now go home and get some sleep. We’ll call Rowan and Lucinda in the morning.” I knew Teag would watch to see that I got inside the wall that surrounded my little backyard garden, and I turned to wave before I pulled the door shut after me.
The next morning at the shop was a blur. We were swamped with customers, and while that’s a great problem to have, it made doing our real job—busting bad spooks—hard to do. But a nice day brings people out, and a stretch of beautiful weather meant plenty of tourists. I couldn’t complain about ringing up sales, but I itched to contact Rowan and Lucinda and get something to ease Teag’s worries.
By mid-afternoon, the shoppers had moved on down King Street, and we could finally take a break. “Go on,” Maggie said. “I’ll be fine here for the afternoon. I can tell the two of you have places to be. And besides, Mrs. Morrissey called.”
Maggie is a godsend. She’s a retired teacher who got bored with too much free time and works
for us part-time. She’s a bundle of energy, and since she has a penchant for changing the color and style of her hair on a whim, we never know what new look she’ll be rocking. Maggie knows the real scoop about us, and while she dresses like Woodstock, she has a mind for business straight out of Wall Street. When the chips are down, she’s exactly the person you want handling the details.
“Thanks,” I said, licking the last of the pizza sauce off my lips from the takeout we’d gotten for lunch. “When did Mrs. Morrissey call?”
“Right when that busload of Canadian tourists turned up and bought up all the tea sets,” she replied. “I heard it go to voicemail. I think it’s important; didn’t sound like she wanted to chat.”
I pulled out my phone and walked into the back room, a little kitchen behind the shop where we had a table and coffee maker. Usually I didn’t need the privacy of my office to talk to Mrs. Morrissey, but Maggie’s comment worried me.
“Cassidy? Thank you for calling back so quickly. I know how busy you are.” Mrs. Benjamin Morrissey remained the epitome of social grace, no matter how dire the situation. She’d been a friend of my Uncle Evann, the relative—and fellow psychometric—who willed me Trifles and Folly. I suspected she knew more about what we did than she let on, but she definitely knew about my ability to read objects.
“Never too busy for you.” I meant it. I considered Mrs. Morrissey a friend, although I guessed her age to be in her mid-seventies, a good half-century older than Teag and I. “What can I do for you?”
Trifles and Folly, as an antique store, has plenty of reasons to collaborate with the Historical Archive, run by Mrs. Morrissey. Sometimes we work together on charity fundraisers or special exhibits. But from the tone in my caller’s voice, I suspected she wasn’t going to hit me up for a donation.
“We’ve had a theft,” she said. “And it’s one of the pieces you told me was ‘special.’ Could you come by when you have a chance? Bring Teag—we have a new textile exhibit, ‘Under Wraps’ that he might appreciate.”
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