by Layla Lawlor
"Uh huh," she said, as if suspecting me of teasing her. Her phone jingled. "My ride's here; see you later."
"Don't do anything I wouldn't do."
She left in a cloud of perfume, and I caught a brief glimpse of a little Miata with the top down and two giggling girls in the front. The one with spiked hair leaned out and waved to her, then pulled her in for a kiss. I had to turn away, not sure if I was hurting for her or for myself.
"Living-person problems," Drew remarked, walking through the wall into the kitchen. "Try being dead for a while."
It had gotten to the point where I didn't even jump when he did that. "I did, remember? You were there."
"Pfeh, don't make me laugh. You were only slumming."
"What happened to this haunting thing being temporary, Drew? I thought you were going to work out your issues, to the extent that it's possible for you, and move on to the afterlife."
"I'm working on it," Drew said, looking evasive. "Not that I'm receiving any support from certain quarters."
"You are not working on it. You're spending all night playing the guitar, which I know because you're keeping me up. The worst part is, you still aren't good at it."
"Music critic," Drew snapped, and vanished.
I felt guilty about taking out my emotional upset on the ghost. Still, I wasn't having my conversation with Mom in the kitchen where he could listen in on that, too, so I escaped upstairs to the Garret. As I climbed to the attic, I noticed that the door to the bathroom was closed and the shower was running behind it. Leanne, presumably.
It was actually unusual that Mom was trying so hard to get in touch with me. She had micromanaged my life the entire time I lived at home, coordinating everything from my wardrobe to my birthday parties with the same cool efficiency that she ran her division at the ad agency. But after I'd spent my freshman year dodging her attempts to helicopter parent long-distance, she had finally learned to back off, and the switch had flipped in the other direction. I got the feeling that she had written me off to an extent. The control was never about concern for me so much as Mom disliking the messiness and chaos that went along with having a child. And once I made it clear that I was an adult and no longer her problem, she had washed her hands of me. Last year at Christmas, she'd made plans to go off for the holiday with some of her coworkers from the ad agency without actually telling me until the last minute. I'd spent Christmas here in Ithaca with Fresca and enjoyed it, but I also felt like the last thread tying me to home had snapped that December. She would always be my mom and I would always be her daughter, but we didn't particularly like each other. The weekly phone calls were out of form and duty more than fondness.
I could never explain any of this to Fresca. She had never understood my relationship with my mother. Her family was incredibly close-knit. Fresca would never have let a voicemail from her mother age for days without immediately calling her back.
It occurred to me as I flopped on my bed that not being able to talk to her sisters or her mom about all of this was probably contributing to her problems.
Maybe she could though, I thought. I rolled over and gazed up at the Garret's low ceiling. There was no rule against talking about the supernatural; it was just that most people didn't believe you. Maybe if she had her siblings to talk to, as an outlet—
My phone, resting on my chest, began to vibrate. I checked it: Mom. Speak of the devil. Time to stop avoiding her and get this over with.
"Hi, Mom," I said.
"Kay Darrow, don't you ever check your phone?"
"I was going to call you back. I'm sorry."
"Sorry never mended anything," my mother said in the crisp tone that she undoubtedly used with her ad-agency clients right before explaining that everything they wanted in their advertisement was wrong, wrong, wrong. "Did your grandmother call you?"
Sounded like it was time for a round of my mother's second-favorite topic, Your Grandmother Has Gone Insane and is Taking Me With Her (her favorite, of course, was 101 Ways Kay is Failing to Live Up to Expectation). "Was she supposed to?" I asked.
My mother sighed deeply. "Well, that's just like her. Letting me handle everything as usual. Just a minute, let me dig up the flight information."
"The what now?"
Unexpectedly, Mom's voice turned cheerful. "She's very excited about seeing you. It's all she's talked about."
"Seeing me?" I said blankly. "When?"
"Well, Saturday. Don't you remember?"
"Saturday? This Saturday?"
"Kay, you really should start keeping a day planner rather than relying on your phone to keep all your appointments. Didn't I give you one for Christmas? It's hardly an excuse for—"
"Mother," I said. "Are you telling me that Grandma Geraldine is coming here? To Ithaca?"
"She's flying into JFK on Saturday afternoon. You said that it was fine. In fact, it was your idea. I need to give you the flight information; do you have a pen?"
"It was not my idea! When did that happen?"
"Well, I don't remember the exact words that you used," my mother said. "It's American Airlines Flight—"
"Mother! No, I don't have a pen." I flailed around for an art marker and my sketchpad. "Give me a minute. I can't—I'm not—what am I supposed to do with Grandma Geraldine in Ithaca?"
"Whatever you want, of course. It'll be a good opportunity for the two of you to get to know each other better. Do you still have that sweet roommate?"
Yes, except now I have a crush on her and she's suffering from monster-induced PTSD. "Mother, I wish you'd asked me."
"Kay Darrow, you were the one who suggested your grandmother could fly out this weekend, so please don't take that tone with me. Do you have a pen?"
"Yes," I said gloomily, because I'd just realized the conversation she had to be referring to: the one in the woods two days ago. At any rate, I remembered that the word "weekend" had been involved.
Dammit. If a monster ate Grandma, I would never forgive myself. I was pretty sure my mother wouldn't forgive me, either.
Chapter 10
The bag of books from Gwyn contained one I knew I hadn't put there, an English translation of the Mabinogion. Since I'd been hanging around Muirin, I had done enough reading on the mythology of the British Isles (mostly on Wikipedia, but she didn't have to know that) to recognize it as the Welsh national epic, but I knew nothing about it other than that.
When I opened the book, a note fell out: a single sheet of folded paper. Muirin's name was written on it. Unless I missed my guess, it was in the same looping hand as the one she'd burned.
Clearly he'd put it in the book hoping I'd give it to her; I could think of no other reason why it would be here. It wasn't sealed, so I overcame my qualms about invading her privacy and unfold it. I was thwarted, however, because it was written in a language completely unfamiliar to me. It was not very long, and signed simply with a G.
I tucked it back into the book and called Muirin. Her phone gave me an out-of-service-area message, which seemed ominous, given circumstances. I left a message asking her to call me, and then decided to see if I could get in touch with anyone else. Irmingard and Millie had both given me their numbers before I left New York. And this would give me an opportunity to ask about possible help for Fresca, as well—did the Gatekeepers have some kind of in-house monster trauma counseling, and if so, how might I get in touch with them?
Irmingard answered on the first ring and sounded delighted to hear from me. "Kay! Hey! What's up, girlfriend? Get home okay?"
I could hear voices in the background, a loud TV or maybe the noise of a bar or club. The absolute surrealism hit me without warning, that here I was calling up a fantasy creature, a kobold, just to chat. "Yeah, but come to find out, I'm coming back to the city this weekend." And now I felt like a dork, but Irmingard giggled.
"Keen! Business or fun?"
"I'm—it's a family thing. So I won't be down there long. But could we get lunch or something?"
"Oh, I h
ave an even better idea! Come down early, and Millie and I can take you to Shadow New York."
"I'd love to—" I began, before being interrupted by a sudden loud clatter from the yard and a sharp pop. Light flashed briefly against the window, like the blue flash of a police car's lights, but only once. "Uh, Irmingard, call you back later, I gotta go."
I retrieved the sword from the bookshelf where I kept it and buckled it on before hurrying downstairs. Maybe it was raccoons in the trash cans, I told myself. (Exploding raccoons?)
Footsteps pounded on the stairs behind me, and new roomie Leanne skidded into the kitchen on my heels. Leanne had reminded me when I first met her of a tall, blonde rabbit. She was mostly legs and elbows, and she never held still, looked you in the eye, or talked above a mumble. She even had the buck teeth. She was decent roommate material—reliable with the rent, quiet, kept to herself a lot—but there was something about her that ran a cheese grater down my nerves. I'd had maybe two conversations with her in the month she'd lived with us.
"Did you hear that?"
"Raccoons," I said quickly.
"No, that was like fireworks or something." Leanne reached for the door. I interposed myself.
"Maybe it's prowlers," I said.
"Should I call the police?"
"You two haven't told her anything, have you?" Drew demanded in a disgusted tone from the corner of the kitchen. "You'd think having one roommate violently murdered would teach you a lesson about keeping secrets, but no."
He kinda had a point. At least with Leanne and Drew in the room, I felt a little safer—a totally bogus psychological effect, I knew, since either of them would be about as useful in a crisis as a slice of buttered toast. But human beings are herd animals. We feel better with other members of the herd around us.
No more suspicious noises came to my attention, so I lifted the curtain and peeked out into the yard.
The usual evening mist had begun to rise from the creek, wrapping ghostly fingers around the trees. The halogen safety light, on a telephone pole at the top of the driveway, washed the yard in its blue-white glare.
Jill Frost's convertible, its bright silver darkened to the color of tarnish, was parked behind my car.
Jill stood halfway between the car and the house, facing toward us, spread-legged and tense. Her head was down, her face in shadow, but I recognized her by the brilliant cascade of spun-gold hair over her shoulders. She held her hands out to the sides, and though she had no visible weapons, there was something very deliberate about her stance: one hand high, the other low, both with the last two fingers folded down. That sharp bang and flash of light had come from somewhere.
I had no idea what she was doing until I saw the dogs. One of Gwyn's great white hounds crouched at the foot of the porch steps, head down and hackles raised. There was another off to the side, focused on Jill with equal intensity. When I listened carefully, I could hear the low, stereo rumble of their growling even from inside the house.
"Oh God, oh God," Leanne whispered loudly in my ear. "It's those stray dogs, the ones that killed a bunch of people on campus this spring. Oh God, whoever that is, she's gonna die."
I heard her fumbling with her phone. I hastily swatted it out of her hands. The last thing I wanted was to get human authorities in the middle of whatever was going on out there.
Leanne wailed and cowered.
"Nice going," Drew said. "You broke her."
"Shush!" I hissed back, at both of them. I didn't dare look away from the drama playing out in the driveway.
Moving slowly, never taking her eyes off the dogs, Jill raised her hand and pointed two fingers at the sky. At first I thought the ball of light gathering at the tips of her fingers was an optical illusion. It wasn't. She swung her hand and the ball lightning leaped from her fingertips. The wolfhound at the foot of the stairs uncoiled and streaked to the side, but there was a high-pitched yelp when the fireball detonated. Leanne flinched away, crying out, and I was temporarily blinded. My vision cleared in time to see Jill bound onto the porch, as preternaturally fast as I'd ever seen Muirin move, with the other dog behind her.
I threw the lock on the doorknob. It didn't help. Jill twisted the doorknob hard enough to snap it, and opened the door.
"I revoke my invitation!" I said, not caring how it sounded to Leanne.
"How adorable," Jill said, and plowed into the kitchen, not breaking stride. She flicked a finger at the door and it slammed behind her in the dogs' faces. The fight had left her mussed and panting.
I backed up and put my hand on the hilt of the sword. Leanne wailed, "You—there was—you threw—"
"Be still, child." Jill pointed at her. Leanne's face went slack and she slumped, staring at nothing with half-lidded eyes. She blinked once, slowly.
I drew the sword, and blue fire flashed up the blade. Drew had vanished as soon as Jill entered the kitchen, so at least that was one less person to worry about. "What did you do to her?"
"Put that thing away, child," Jill said shortly. But she kept her distance, to my surprise; she was, if not afraid of the sword, then at least wary of it. "Our deal is now concluded. I will take my token back."
A sharp pain stabbed my chest and I choked, then worked my tongue around something hard in my mouth. For one awful minute I thought one of my teeth had painlessly, inexplicably fallen out, but what I spat it into my palm was the PROMISE candy heart—dry and intact and perfect.
I held it out to her with a hand that trembled. I didn't even want to be that close, and I shivered harder when she plucked it neatly from my palm.
"Thank you," Jill said, and made it vanish into her clutch.
"What did you do?" I moved between her and Leanne, with the sword in guard position in front of my body. "What did I do?"
"My business with you is done. I require safe passage from your guardians in order to leave, child."
I swallowed. "They're ... not mine."
Her face remained serene but for a hint of irritation, like the first tinge of green in a tornado sky. "Do not be tiresome, mortal. I am in a hurry."
I swallowed, turned and flung the door wide. "Hey—dogs? Just let her go. We want her gone." I took a long step back, so the doorway was clear, and gripped the sword in both shaking hands. "You're not welcome in this house," I told her. "You're not a guest. You cannot come in again."
She didn't answer, just strode out the door, down the steps and across the gravel to her car. The dogs were nowhere in sight.
I couldn't help noticing, before I closed the door and locked it, that the fireball I'd seen detonate at the foot of the stairs had left neither scorch marks nor other damage behind.
"Leanne," I began, turning to my frozen roommate, and as if that had been some signal, her head snapped up. I could see the life come back into her. She looked at the door, at me, then burst into tears and fled upstairs.
"I'm sorry!" I called up the stairs. "Do you want to talk about it?"
No answer except sobbing and the slam of a door.
I meekly picked up her phone and put it on the table. We were really the world's worst roommates, and she didn't even know the house was haunted on top of everything.
"Drew?" I said to the room at large. No answer.
I could feel myself on the verge of tears. I went up to the Garret to calm down.
Unsurprisingly, it was Jill Frost who poured out of my pencils onto the cheap sketch paper. The first drawings were hardly more than a scribbled oval and a suggestion of hair in a few quick strokes. While my cup of coffee went cold beside the bed, I began to slow down, finding focus and a growing sense of calmness, of centeredness, as I settled into capturing a faithful likeness.
Drawing people from memory is hellishly difficult under the best circumstances, and Jill was extra hard because of the smooth perfection of her features. As every good caricaturist knows, it's exaggeration of the unusual and unique that creates a good likeness. My first attempts at Jill's face were too generic; I could have been draw
ing any blonde celebrity. I began to focus in on the small details: the supercilious curve to her lips, the slant of her long neck, the way her hair parted at the temple. It was easier to draw her looking off to the side than directly at me. Not only did the distant stare help to capture her ethereal quality, but it felt less like the eyes on the paper might suddenly blink and look into my own.
Someone was saying my name. The sound penetrated my right-brain haze, and I raised my head and blinked. Outside the small pool of light around my drawing lamp, every item in my room—the books on makeshift bookshelves, the unframed prints and posters on the walls, the half-painted canvases, the superhero action figures—was outlined in a faint tracery of light. My second sight used to kick in when I painted, but this was the first time it had been triggered by art since Muirin started trying to teach me to "open my third eye." My drawing hand ached and there was a knot of pain between my shoulder blades. From the feel of things I'd been drawing nonstop for hours.
"Kay?" Drew said again from below.
I stretched my fingers and shook the feeling back into them, then leaned over and pulled up the trapdoor. The Garret didn't have a normal staircase to the second floor, just a hatch and a ladder.
"Yeah?" I said.
Drew frowned up at me from the second-floor hallway. Interestingly enough, while my ex-roommate's ghost looked perfectly solid to me under normal circumstances, in my second sight he was transparent and glimmered with a soft firefly radiance. Most living beings would be outlined in cool fire, usually somewhere in the green-to-blue spectrum, but Drew was awash in a gently shifting rainbow palette.
"I was hoping you'd come down," he said. "I wanted to ask you about that woman."
"Jill?"
"Yeah." Drew shuddered, literally; a wave passed through him like a reception failure on TV. "You know how I told you that your friend Muirin looked different to me? Different from the rest of you, I mean. Brighter."
I nodded.
"Well, if Muirin is like a campfire, this Jill person is a forest fire. I can barely look at her, and I'm afraid to get near her. I'm afraid I'd pop out of existence like a soap bubble. Either her flame would blow me out, or she'd suck me into herself."
