“I thought we’d already been over this, Thorn. I thought you were okay with me being me and all that,” I said.
“This is different,” Thorn said.
“How is it different?” I asked. “I mean, there’s no body this time. So, I’m not investigating a murder. I thought you’d support that.”
He just glanced over at me without saying a word. I saw his jaw tighten and then Thorn swallowed hard. But he didn’t say anything else.
“My magic has been reduced, but I’m not powerless,” I said. “And I really do think that I’m getting stronger again.”
“You’re going to try to use white magic to solve whatever this is?” Thorn asked and squeezed my hand.
“Of course,” I said. “I’ve used darker magic when I had to help people I loved, but it’s not like I’m embracing it. I don’t want to be a dark witch.”
“Because I’ve heard the stories,” Thorn said, and I knew what he was talking about.
“About my dad,” I said. “He let too much of it in…”
“And that’s what I’m worried about happening to you,” Thorn said. “You’re Brighton’s daughter, but you’re Remy’s too. Some of that susceptibility is in you.”
My father had gotten a little too snuggly with dark magic before he and my mother became a couple. He’d done it to protect those he loved, but he’d still let too much in. His eyes turned black, and he actually stalked my mom for a while.
Fortunately, she understood what happened to him and forgave him. If she hadn’t, I wouldn’t even exist.
“Are you worried about me being susceptible or inclined?” I asked.
“I’m not trying to make this some sort of moral failing on your part,” Thorn said, but he took his hand back and put it on the steering wheel. He was clearly distancing himself from me because we didn’t need to do anything to drive the car.
It was quiet the rest of the way to my parents’ house. When we got there, I started to get out but Thorn stopped me.
“I’ll take Laney up to your mother,” he said and got out of the car before I could respond.
I watched as Thorn went up to Mom’s door, rang the bell and waited. She answered, and they had a short conversation followed by my mother taking Laney into her arms. My baby was laughing and smiling, so something in my chest unclenched.
Thorn walked down the porch and back to the car. “I’m sorry,” he said as he slid into the driver’s side. “I trust you to handle this, and I shouldn’t question why you need to do it.”
“And I understand why you’re scared,” I said as he took my hand. “But I can handle this. Please understand that it’s more than just helping Nora too. I mean, I want to help her, but there’s also something wrong with magic. Something wrong with witches. I have to follow every lead and turn over every stone until I find it. I just don’t have a lot to go on.”
“And you think the magic issues might have something to do with Nora’s ghost?” Thorn asked as the car drove us toward her address.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “And I won’t until I check it out. If not, then at least we helped a distressed woman along the way.”
“Well, let’s do that then,” Thorn said.
We arrived at Nora’s house to find her and my father standing in the driveway. It was wide and led up to a three-car garage. The house itself was a ranch, and I guessed from its shape, and what was popular at the time, it was split-level.
I wondered what Nora did for a living because the house was at least 3,000 square feet, if not approaching four. The front façade was mostly stone with some brick accents. The color scheme was rich chocolate brown with earthy beiges and the occasional pop of red.
“This house is beautiful,” I said as we made our way up the sidewalk to the front porch area.
“Thank you,” Nora said. “I bought it as new construction, and I got to pick out a lot of the finishes. I’m glad you think it’s nice. So many people around here were going with black, white, and gray. I wasn’t sure how well the earth tones would go over.”
“I think it’s lovely,” Dad said. “Nothing wrong with being a little different.”
“I guess that’s especially true around here,” Nora said.
By that point, the four of us were gathered on her front porch in front of a large window. We couldn’t see inside the house because the shades were closed.
“I don’t know if I want to go in,” Nora said.
“That’s understandable, but we need you to show us around,” I said. “It will be okay, and if it gets scary again, we’ll get you out.”
Nora didn’t say anything more to that, but she nodded her head in affirmation. I watched as she turned around and unlocked the deadbolt with her key.
For a moment, I wondered if it would even open. Would the spirit inside let us in? My magic wasn’t what it once was, but I could still get the door open if it came to that. I’d been working for the last few months to strengthen my powers. It turned out that our abilities were like muscles, and I could get better with practice.
“You brought your cat,” Nora said as she opened the door and Meri darted inside.
It seemed like the first time she’d noticed him, but he’d been standing next to my leg. “I did,” I responded. “He’s sensitive to spirits. Most cats are. If there’s anything around, he’ll pick up on it before we will.”
That wasn’t necessarily true, but I didn’t want to explain to her Meri’s true nature. I’d decided earlier that I wasn’t going to discuss or reveal anything about witchcraft to Nora unless I absolutely had to tell her. If we could leave it at whatever she’d picked up in my shop, that would be better.
I’m not sure what I was expecting, but when we stepped over the threshold, the house just felt like a house. It was clean and bright with a fresh lemon smell.
“Wow,” I said as I walked around the massive living room just past the entryway. “This is really gorgeous.”
“It really is,” my dad added.
Thorn was sort of making his way toward the kitchen area. I called it a kitchen area because the house’s floorplan was completely open and the kitchen flowed into the living room. At the back of the house was a large dining area with a massive twelve-person table.
“You live alone?” I asked as I studied the table.
“I do,” Nora said with a nervous chuckle. “I know the table is a lot, but it was my grandmother’s. It fits in so well here, in fact I chose the color palate around it, that I had to use it. Maybe someday I’ll have enough people over to fill the seats.”
That was something I hadn’t thought of before. While the house was brand new, there could be objects inside with entities attached.
Nora had lived in the house for months, though. Surely any spirits attached to her antique furniture would have begun manifesting previously. They might have even been restless wherever she lived before.
“Did you just bring the table into the house?” I asked. “Where did it come from?”
“It was in my parents’ storage,” Nora replied. “My old house wasn’t big enough for anything like it, but it’s been here since the day I moved in.”
Well, that probably wasn’t it, then. “What about new antiques? Have you purchased anything recently? Does the… activity coincide with any new objects you brought into the house?”
Nora thought about it for a moment. She bit her bottom lip as she mulled it over in her head. “Nothing I can think of recently. Almost everything I purchased for the house was either before I moved in or right after. I think the only things I’ve bought for the last couple of months are groceries. Come to think of it, I’ve been so busy with work that I haven’t been doing my usual Amazon ordering. I bet the UPS guy thinks I’m dead,” she said with a nervous laugh.
“What do you do for work?” I asked.
“I’m a data scientist,” Nora said.
“Well, that doesn’t sound like anything that would attract ghosts,” Dad said.
&nbs
p; “Dad,” I scolded.
“He’s right,” Nora said with a smile. “I won’t bore you with the details, but I work on machine-learning algorithms. It’s actually one of the reasons I bought this house. I was working in the city, but it was too hard for me to concentrate with a bunch of people around. When my team and I started to get into some seriously deep work, I asked for permission to work from home. The I realized that if I was going to work from home, I wanted something big, spacious, and full of light. I live here alone, but that just means I can use one of the bedrooms as a music room and another as a workout room.”
My eyes flitted over to a staircase that descended from the main floor. “You have a basement here?”
“I do, and I had them finish it. One of the rooms has an infinity pool so I can swim laps year-round. There’s also an entertaining space and a bar.”
“This house has everything,” I said.
“It has a little more than I bargained for,” Nora replied.
“Could you just walk me through the areas of the house where you heard the scratching?” I asked.
Nora walked us through the kitchen and then down a short hallway that led to the master bedroom. It was the room where she’d not only heard the scratching, but the bedroom was also where the main attack occurred.
I stood in the middle of the room next to Nora’s king-sized bed. She stayed in the doorway observing me, but I could tell she wasn’t coming in. It was too bad.
I couldn’t imagine what she’d paid for the place. She’d put all of her personal touches on it too, and at that point, Nora no longer wanted anything to do with the house.
“Anything happen in the bathroom?” I asked. Mostly because I wanted to check it out, and I felt weird about walking into her bathroom for no reason. It had to be gorgeous, though.
“No,” she said. “Wait, sometimes I did feel like I was being watched in there. When I was in the shower. I don’t know. Maybe the ghost was a perv.”
“It’s not unusual,” Dad said. “Not that ghosts are pervs, but that people feel like they are being watched in the shower. Most of the time, it’s just because we feel so vulnerable when we are bathing, and it’s not actually anything watching us.”
“Oh, well, that’s good to know,” Nora said.
“Do you mind if I have a look anyway?” I asked.
“Sure, go ahead. My housekeepers were just here a day or so ago. I don’t know. When I get deep into my work, it all runs together,” Nora said. “But either way, it’s not embarrassing in there yet.”
“You have housekeepers?” I asked. “Have they observed anything strange in the house?”
“I don’t think so,” Nora replied. “They don’t talk to me much, but neither of them have acted like anything was unusual. They haven’t run out of here in terror or anything,”
Thorn had come into the room with me, but he’d been looking out the bedroom’s largest window the entire time. He finally said something at the mention of the housekeepers and Nora’s work. “You told us that you’d barely been sleeping. How could you have been so deep in your work that you don’t know what day it is too?” Thorn asked. He’d picked up on a possible inconsistency that I hadn’t. “No offense, but you came to us because you’re a mess. How have you been working at all?”
“You’re right,” Nora said. “It’s been a struggle, but my project has to keep moving forward. I’ve been doing what I can, and my team checks my work. It’s not like it’s the first time I’ve had to work on little sleep.”
Thorn nodded. He knew what that was like too, and apparently, her answer had satisfied him.
I wasn’t sure what to do at that point. “Are you picking up on anything, Dad?” I asked. I wanted to ask Meri the same thing, but not only was he not in the room with us, he wouldn’t be able to answer me anyway. Why I had a talking cat, or even why I was talking to my not-talking cat, wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have with Nora.
“Nothing,” he said. “Oddly so given everything that’s gone on here. You’d think there’d be some residue.”
“Residue?” Nora asked.
“Yeah. When that much paranormal activity goes on in a place, it leaves behind a residue. Given what you’ve told us happened here, this place had to have been swimming in spectral energy,” I said.
“And yet, it’s like nothing,” Dad said. “Not even an off vibration. There’s nowhere in Coventry that’s this clean.”
Nora shivered. “Give me a second. I’m going to go turn down the air conditioning. I guess I got a little overzealous with it. We’re supposed to get that big warm-up, though.”
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. The room had turned suddenly chilly, and I didn’t believe for a second that it was the air conditioning.
“A calm before the storm,” I said and swallowed hard.
“What?” Dad asked, but I could see in his eyes that the same conclusion was dawning on him too.
“The lack of energy, it was a calm before the storm,” I said. “I didn’t think whatever it was could come back, but it’s drawing every little bit of available energy.”
“What?” Nora asked.
“Scraping the bottom of the barrel,” Dad said. “Something is about to happen.”
“We should get out of here,” Nora whispered.
“We’ll be okay,” I said. “If it’s working this hard just to appear, then it’s not going to hurt us.”
“It can’t,” Dad said.
“Are you sure?” Nora’s voice cracked. She sounded as if she were on the edge of hysterics, and I noticed she was slowly backing down the hallway half a step at a time.
“Nora, stay with us,” I said, and then I saw it. “Stop backing up right now.”
She could see me looking over her shoulder. Nora turned and screamed.
“Oh, now that’s creepy,” Thorn said.
In the hallway was the ghost of a woman, but she barely looked human. Her eyes were completely black, and her skin looked mottled and gray. It was the eyes, though, that had me questioning whether we were looking at a ghost or a demon doing a bad impression of a person.
“Get back,” I said and stepped around Nora.
My first instinct was to put myself between the specter and everyone else. Meri did the same, except he stood protectively before me.
It would have been great if we still had the magic we once held. Meri could have dispatched the ghost, or demon, in seconds. I thought he still could sometimes, so I wondered why he was sitting there staring at the thing.
Are you going to do something about her? I wanted to ask Meri, but I couldn’t. Part of me started to wish I’d listened to Thorn and stayed home.
Obviously, if there was something Meri could do about the ghost, he would have done it. But instead, he looked back at me and then at the ghost. He did that a couple more times, and then approached her.
“Meri,” I said almost breathlessly. It wasn’t that I expected him to respond, but I hoped he’d listen and not follow the specter.
When he approached her, the ghost turned and began to move down the hall. Meri looked back at me again, and I knew what he wanted.
So, I started to follow too. It felt insane. The woman, or demon disguised as a woman, was absolutely terrifying. And yet, Meri didn’t seem to be afraid.
She led us to a door just past the kitchen before you got to the two smaller bedrooms. “What’s this door?” I asked Nora.
The ghost had stopped and seemed to be patiently waiting. She turned to look at us, and her skin was whiter than gray. The black had cleared from her eyes and the irises were a soft shade of hazel.
“It’s the basement door,” Nora said.
The ghost moved through it, and I reached out and opened the door. “I guess we’re going to the basement.”
“You’re really going to follow it down there?” Nora asked. Judging by the tone of her voice, she was horrified.
“We came here to figure out what was going on with your house
,” I said. “I think this is the best way to do it.”
“She attacked me,” Nora said. “That thing could have killed me.”
“And she seems to have something to tell us,” I said. “Maybe if we find out what that is, she’ll move on. I’m starting to think that she’s not a demon but an angry spirit. That can happen to anyone if they are left to linger on this plane in confusion.”
“Or she could be a demon deceiving us,” Dad said.
“I’m aware, but we’ll be careful,” I said.
“How is going down there being careful?” Nora’s question was shrill and full of terror.
Black Arts & Bones (Familiar Kitten Mysteries Book 11) Page 3
