Flight From Death

by Yasmine Galenorn

  It appeared that they had owned the house before Nathan. In fact, Terrance Buckland had been a business associate of Nathan’s until, according to the website, Nathan had screwed him out of a major deal and Terrance’s family had lost everything, including the house. Nathan had foreclosed on it—somehow he had become the lien holder—and moved his own family in.

  The Bucklands had ended up in a ramshackle house on the outskirts of town, and they had, as far as I could tell, died out except for their son, who had erected the website. He worked for a local garage as a mechanic, but I had the feeling his life was a far cry from how well-to-do his family had been before Nathan got hold of them.

  I sat back, contemplating what I’d found out. Was Terrance Buckland haunting the house? Had he come back to haunt Nathan and stuck around? Or was Nathan haunting his own house in a Jacob Marley sort of fashion?

  Jotting down my thoughts, I returned to the search engine and typed in “Terrance Buckland” and “Port Townsend.” That brought up a whole different realm of results.

  The Buckland family had been of Gypsy descent, over from England not long before the turn of the twentieth century. They had journeyed west and ended up in Port Townsend during the early days when it was still a thriving town, hoping to be the port city of Washington. As the town took a nosedive, though, the Bucklands thrived. They managed to make it through the decades during which Port Townsend turned into almost a ghost town.

  During the seventies, as the hippies discovered the jewel of a city, citywide renovations began to take place, pushing the town into a prime tourism destination. The Bucklands rode the top of the wave. But then Nathan Striker entered the picture, and in one fell swoop, during the late eighties, he had managed to destroy everything the family had built, foreclosed on their house, and the friendship between Nathan and Terrance vanished into the dust in a war over money.

  So the Buckland family had every reason to hate Nathan Striker. I added Toby Buckland—Terrance’s only living relative—to the list of people we should talk to, though I figured we might want to leave out the part about Patrick being Nathan’s friend.

  I glanced at the clock. Eight thirty. Feeling charitable, I rinsed off our breakfast dishes and stuck them in the dishwasher. As I was bending over, somebody pinched my butt. Hard.

  Startled, I stood up so fast I clipped the top of my head on the counter. With a groan, I leaned against the granite, wincing. “Enough, already. Stop it.”

  A low laugh echoed through the kitchen and as I glanced into the sink, I saw a bubble of blood rising from the drain. “Holy fuck—stop it. Just stop it!”

  The laughter continued and I slammed the dishwasher door shut and backed away. As I turned around, a plate flew off one of the shelves and whirled past me, just missing me. I ducked as a teacup followed suit.

  “Get out . . .” The voice rumbled low as the lights in the kitchen flickered off and on. Easing back, I stepped out of the room and waited. A moment later, the heavy atmosphere vanished and I eased my way back in. The energy had lightened and when I glanced into the sink, it was clear—no sign of blood.

  I turned on the dishwasher and went in to wake Ralph. If we didn’t do something soon, Patrick’s vision of a bed-and-breakfast would remain just that.

  • • •

  The minute Ralph and I left the house, I felt a sense of relief. The looming presence that lingered in Patrick’s place was already starting to wear on me and we hadn’t even been there a full twenty-four hours. I told Ralph about the blood and the poltergeist activity and the voice.

  “Are you sure we aren’t dealing with some demonic force?” I knew that some ghosts could be real PITAs, but this seemed like overkill.

  He shook his head. “There’s a tendency to blame everything on demons, but honestly? Astral entities can be just as mean and violent. I think we’re dealing with a ghost . . . well, mostly. But there is something bigger behind it, though I really don’t believe it’s demonic. I hope that Patrick’s witch friend might be able to shed some light on the subject.” He yawned. “The nap helped, but I’ll be looking forward to a good rest.”

  “I’m still not used to working the night shift.” I slid into the passenger seat. “And on another subject, I really need to get my license.”

  “You’re coming along . . . it won’t take much longer.” Ralph fastened his seat belt and started the Range Rover. He was the one who got me signed up for driving lessons at the Supe Community Action Council, and he was taking me out for practice a couple times a week. Ralph had more patience for that sort of thing than Alex did, and it was safer for him to teach me than Bette, who was a speed demon and accumulated tickets like she did notches on her headboard.

  “Good, because I’m tired of relying on taxis for things like grocery shopping.” I settled back and played navigator as we headed toward Kearney Street.

  During the day, Port Townsend felt like a different city. At night, it was eerie and felt full of ghosts. During the daylight hours, it seemed to have almost a costume party atmosphere. The sense of Victoriana was strong here, and the buildings were bright and cheerful, looking newly built in a number of areas even though a good share of them were over one hundred years old. The town had a vibrant feel to it, even beneath the cover of the clouds, and yet, it seemed to me that they were trying to impress the tourists too hard.

  Ralph glanced out the window. “I like it up here, I love the beach, but honestly? The veneer of this town feels like a bandage over a deep wound. This whole area—not just Port Townsend, but the peninsula—is haunted. A lot of nasty things happened up this way, and so many spirits live in the forest. And I’m not just talking ghosts.”

  I shivered, thinking of the siren. “Yeah, I know.”

  “Tomorrow morning if we get the chance, let’s drive out around the outskirts a little. I’d rather not go at night. And anyway, during the evenings we’ll be working with Alex and Patrick so I doubt if we’ll have time.” Ralph grinned at me. “Bet you we can meet Bigfoot!”

  “I don’t want to meet Bigfoot.” I wrinkled my nose. “I can’t change into dragon shape to take him on if he gets nasty, not unless he decides to go swimming with me and I kind of doubt that he’d take me up on that.”

  Ralph snorted. “Yeah, probably not.”

  We had been driving south on San Juan Avenue and now we turned left onto Nineteenth Street. The windswept trees and foliage on either side of the street left no doubt to the fact that we were in a shoreline community. Nineteenth merged into Blaine Street, and shortly after that we turned right onto Kearney. Another couple blocks and we eased into the parking lot at the Town’s End Mini-Mall, a small strip mall boasting a bookstore, a fish-and-chips joint, a souvenirs boutique, a coffee shop, and Tonya’s magic shop. Of the five, only the coffee shop and Tonya’s place were open this early.

  Ralph and I headed inside. A bell signaled our entrance, and I looked around, surprised to see how open and airy the place was, and yet—the shop felt enchanted. Plants draped from almost every shelf, and a striped ginger tabby cat curled up in a rocking chair over by a shelf filled with bottled herbs. A scale stood on a counter next to the shelf, along with bags and a scoop. Obviously it was help yourself. Bookshelves lined two walls, filled with titles, and a display case offered crystals, wands, daggers, and various other human pagan paraphernalia. Near the back, a curtain partitioned off a doorway.

  Along the window in front, a sign pointed people to a window seat, a waiting area for people who were here to consult with Tonya herself. The counter, directly to the right as we entered, was staffed by a young man. He smiled at us, his hair neatly combed back into a ponytail.

  “May I help you find something?”

  “We’re here to see Tonya. I’m Shimmer. I called earlier.”

  He nodded. “She mentioned you’d be coming in. See those curtains back there, just go on through. She’s in the back.”

  I led Ralph toward the back and pushed through the curtains. They were a ch
eerful montage of blues against an ivory background, and they partitioned off the back section to the store. There were three other doors in the room. One door was labeled OFFICE and another RESTROOM. The third was labeled EXIT.

  A table stood in one corner of the room, round and wooden, with a crystal ball in the center, a deck of cards on one side, and four chairs.

  I looked around, uncertain what to do, when the office door opened and a woman entered the room. She was wearing jeans and a green V-neck sweater, belted by a thin brown leather belt. Her hair was tucked into a neat French braid, and she was carrying a packet of papers. She stopped when she saw us, obviously startled, but then immediately walked over, her hand out.

  “Hello, I’m Tonya Harris. Are you Shimmer?”

  I nodded. “This is my friend Ralph. We work for the Fly by Night Magical Investigations Agency.”

  She shook her head. “Normally, I wouldn’t ask you to come in before I investigate a haunting. I like to go in without being prejudiced by information. But when you called this morning, something told me that I needed to meet you in advance.”

  It made sense from a magical point of view. She was a witch; she’d have hunches and intuition about the situation. She motioned to the table.

  “Have a seat. If this is as bad as you say, I want to know more about what I’m getting into.”

  Ralph held out the chair for her, and then one for me. “Ms. Harris—”

  “Tonya, please.” She pushed the cards and the crystal ball out of the way. When we were settled, she leaned back, looking at us. “You’re Supes, aren’t you? You aren’t human.”

  I grinned. “You nailed us there. And neither is Alex, our boss. Or Patrick, the owner of the bed-and-breakfast. Is that going to be an issue?”

  She shook her head. “Not at all. Doesn’t bother me. Hell, I’ve been seeing spirits since I was a little girl. I knew there were Fae before they ever came out of the closet. In fact, when I was a little girl, one of my best friends was a wood nymph who lived in the back acreage behind our house. My folks thought she was an imaginary playmate, but they were wrong on that one.” She laughed then, and I wondered why Patrick thought her abrupt. She seemed genuinely friendly to me.

  “I’m a werewolf,” Ralph said. He cleared his throat. “Our boss, and Patrick, his friend, are vampires. That change anything?”

  She raised an eyebrow but shook her head again. “Not as long as they keep their fangs off me. Actually, I already knew about Patrick. He dated my mother for a while. It did not end well, but neither did it end in bloodshed so I guess that’s as good as it gets. For the record, she’s the one who ended the relationship. He was the one who got dumped. I felt kind of sorry for him—she wasn’t relationship material.” She leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table.

  I debated whether to tell her what I was, but figured I’d cross that bridge if she asked. “Here’s the thing . . . we’re not convinced the ghost is just a ghost. Ralph doesn’t believe it’s demonic, and I don’t have enough experience to tell. But whatever it is, the consensus is that more is involved than a single spirit or group of spirits. Patrick suggested talking to you.”

  “What do you know about the house?” She picked up her deck of cards and began to shuffle them as she listened.

  “Just that it belonged to someone named Terrance Buckland years ago. He was a business partner of a man named Nathan Striker. Striker was a ruthless businessman, and he pushed Buckland into bankruptcy, foreclosed on his home as a lien holder, and ousted the family. Then Striker moved in.”

  “How does Patrick figure into this?” Tonya began to lay out the cards in a straight line as I spoke.

  “Only in that he and Nathan were friends for a while. Anyway, Nathan Striker died, and his family sold off the place to Patrick a couple years ago. Patrick just recently began renovations and all of a sudden, the place has been haunted—something wants him out.”

  Tonya picked up the first card. “The Emperor. This is about control. A pissing match. Who controls who—and authority figures. But it’s influenced by the Moon—hidden factors and forces. There are sides to this situation that have not yet come to light. Until those are discovered, we won’t be able to solve the problem. Here we have the Wild Man, a force of nature who is undeniable and feral—in some decks he’s known as the Devil. He’s the wild card, so to speak, in this. He’s upset the order of things and thrown everything out of balance.”

  She turned over another card. “We have the Queen of Wands . . . a woman of fire, a woman of power. She is influential in the situation. And the five of Swords and ten of Wands? This tells me that betrayal and oppression weigh heavily in this haunting.”

  The Queen of Wands? So far we had heard nothing about a woman. I turned to Ralph. “Terrance was married. We’re going to meet with his son today. Was Nathan married?”

  He consulted his notes. “Not that I can see. His sister was the one who sold the house to Patrick.”

  Tonya frowned. “The woman . . . she isn’t Terrance’s wife—that much I’m picking up on. But . . . do you know if Terrance was a Supe?”

  I shook my head and took a closer look at her cards, keeping my hands to myself. I knew better than to touch other people’s magical supplies. “No, he’s not part of the Supernatural Community—at least not that it showed in any of my research. He is of Gypsy descent, though.”

  Tonya coughed. “Oh hell. You’re sure?”

  Her reaction startled me. She looked almost frightened. “Um, yeah. Why?”

  “I don’t want to say yet—not till I come over tonight, but that makes sense with the Queen of Wands here. I’ll see you tonight. I want to do some research of my own, and I also need to prepare so that I’m not at the mercy of whatever it is. But trust me, be cautious what you say when you go speak to Terrance’s son. Very cautious.” She escorted us out politely but firmly.

  As we got back in the car, I turned to Ralph. “What do you think all that was about?”

  He had a pensive look on his face. “The Gypsies are a powerful people. They have a long history of magic, and they have a bad reputation, most of it unearned. But as a rule, they tend to hold grudges and they do believe in retribution. I wonder if . . . well, let’s wait and see what Tonya has to say tonight.”

  Next stop was the Port Townsend Historical League. The building was located in an old converted Victorian. An ornate but not ostentatious sign indicated we were at the right place, and we followed the winding path through the neatly tended yard to a ramp that sloped up to the door. It was their one concession toward accessibility, it seemed, because when we entered, I realized I sure wouldn’t want to be disabled and trying to maneuver through the choppy rooms.

  After signing in at the desk and asking for information on historical houses, we were pointed in the direction of the second floor, where two entire rooms had been turned into a library focused on the history of the buildings of Port Townsend. As we stared at the overwhelming number of old books on the shelves, Ralph jabbed me in the arm.

  “We’re saved.” He pointed over to a long wooden table that had four computers on it. “The Net saves the day again.”

  He settled in to one of the computers and typed in the address of the High Tide Bed-and-Breakfast. A moment later, he pulled up the information and I realized that the books in the rooms were for show only—the organization had scanned in all the info.

  “Here we go. The house was originally known as the Buckland House. I guess the Buckland family built it in 1902 to 1903. But . . . let’s see . . . oh lovely.”

  “It wasn’t built over a cemetery, was it?” I grimaced. That would be par for the course, from the movies I’d been watching with Bette.

  “No, it wasn’t, but it was built over what was originally a training area for the soldiers before Fort Worden was officially established. The land was sold to the Bucklands in 1901, and the house was completed by 1903. Let’s see . . . the soldiers stopped using it when . . . it says a miscalculatio
n by soldiers led to one of their practice mortars misfiring. The bomb landed in the yard and exploded, killing five of the soldiers there. That was the last time they conducted practice on that piece of ground, and a year later, the battery gun was moved into what would become Fort Worden proper.”

  “So . . . five solders dead there. Anything else? What about before the government commandeered the area?” So far we had one very unhappy ousted family, a man who had died in the house he took away from them, and five soldiers dead from a miscalculation.

  Ralph frowned, flipping through screens. “Back in 1840, there was a family named Jenson trying to homestead in that spot. They vanished . . . nothing was ever found of any of them. No bodies, nothing.”

  “Robbery?”

  He scanned the article. “No, apparently everything they owned was still in place, and the fire in the fireplace had burned out by the time that friends discovered the family was missing, but a pot of stew was still on the woodstove. A blanket that the mother had been knitting was in the rocking chair . . . outside, they found a doll the daughter owned at the head of a path leading into the forest. They found a shoe that they think belonged to the son. The guns were all in place, nothing missing but the family.”

  That was weird. “Any speculations as to what happened to them?”

  “No . . . though some people thought Indians. But that doesn’t hold water either, not with any local reports of native activity during that time period. Also, it says here that there were reports of strange creatures in the woods and odd lights dancing in the air. The locals had warned the family that there were local legends of dangerous spirits around the area, but they didn’t believe the stories, of course. Before them . . . there aren’t really many notations here. And the information doesn’t go into what the legends were.”

  I sat back, thinking. That made people gone missing, accidental deaths, and a really bad end to a business relationship, all taking place in the same area. Maybe the area really was cursed. Or, sometimes a location just attracted bad energy—evil, if you wanted to call it—or dangerous. Some places in the world were magnets for crimes and accidents. And that was a truth that ran through all the realms. There were areas in the Dragon Realms that nobody—even the most powerful of dragons—would venture into.