He shrugged. “Working? She had a shift today.”
“She disappeared in the middle of it.”
A dark look crossed Nash’s face. “That’s not a good sign. If she gets fired from this job, her mom’s going to kill her.”
I glanced over at my daughter, whose hazel eyes were wide open. Zoey asked, her voice croaky, “Did her mom really threaten to kill her?”
I put my arm around Zoey’s shoulders. “I’m sure it was just motherly love.”
“Jo is probably two floors down,” Nash said, stuffing both hands into the pockets of his tattered jeans. “At least that’s where the staff quarters are.”
“Thanks.” I turned away, leading my party toward the stairwell door again. “Let’s catch up later, Nash. I just have to go do a thing.”
“That’s our Zed,” Nash said. “Always on the run, going from one thing to another thing.” He lifted his chin at Zoey again. “Hey, how old are you, Mini Zed?”
I grabbed Zoey by the hand and yanked her to stay close to me. “Too young for you, so never mind.”
He was chuckling as we left the hallway through the fire door leading to the stairwell. We went down two flights. The door to the basement-floor hallway was locked and had a sign reading STAFF ONLY.
My mother brushed imaginary dust from her hands. “Oh well. At least we tried.”
“Seriously, Mom? I know you don’t practice witchcraft anymore, but have you forgotten everything?” I used my telekinetic magic on the other side of the door and pushed down the door handle. “Ta-da,” I said as the door swung open.
She held up her arms in the doorway to stop us. “What are we even doing down here? If someone’s been killed, we should call the police.”
“We can’t report a ghost,” I said.
“Then lie,” she said. “Make something up. You seem to be very good at that.”
I ducked under her arm and walked toward the area that was directly below my mother’s suite and Nash’s. The rooms had evidently been divided differently on this basement floor, and there were two doors to choose from.
Zoey held her finger to her lips as she pressed her ear against one of the doors. “Someone’s moving around inside this one,” she whispered.
I leaned in, cupping my hand around my ear.
“I can’t hear anything,” I whispered. “Your hearing must be much better than mine. Fox powers?”
She immediately shifted into fox form. My mother gasped in surprise before clamping her hand over her mouth. She must have seen my father shift plenty of times, but I could understand her reaction. Seeing a human turn into a fox is pretty amazing no matter how many times you’ve seen it. Like a glorious sunrise, or morning dew on spring’s first flowers, or finding designer jeans in your size on the eighty-percent-discount rack.
Zoey-Fox listened at the door. She held up one paw in a very human gesture.
After a minute, she shifted back to human form, kneeling on the floor. I noted that her shirt was now on backwards. Zoey had mastered the ability to keep her clothes on when she shifted back and forth, but sometimes there were hiccups, such as buttons being unfastened or shirts being on backwards. These wardrobe malfunctions drove her nuts, because Zoey was a perfectionist when it came to the skills she cared about. I had a theory that her perfectionism was exactly why her shirts kept getting turned around. As my aunt always says, magic has a mind of its own. And I’d noticed, thanks to some of the tricks my magical house had pulled lately, that magic also has a sense of humor. Twisted, absurd humor.
Zoey hadn’t noticed the backwards shirt yet. She got up and dusted off her knees.
“There’s someone in there,” she whispered. “A man, judging by the smell.” She rubbed her nose. “He wears the same aftershave as Mr. Moore.”
“Maybe it is Chet. He might be here investigating, following up. Or maybe he’s in trouble.” I lifted my fist to knock on the door.
My mother grabbed me by the wrist. Her cool fingers sent a chill through me.
“Don’t,” she said at a normal speaking level. “This whole wild goose chase of yours was fun for a while. Now that you’ve both had the chance to show off your special skills, I think it’s time we called the police.”
Her eyes were wide, and the whites were showing around her hazel pupils. She wasn’t trying to be bossy. She was genuinely frightened. I’d never seen her on edge like this before. Not even when she’d been supposedly dying. Did she know what awaited us on the other side of the door? Did she know more about Jo Pressman’s predicament than she was letting on?
There was a clatter on the other side of the door that even I could hear, no fox ears needed. Whoever was inside the room had been alerted to our presence. I felt a pressure in my gut compelling me to get into the room as soon as possible. Was Jo kicking me from the inside? Stepping on my guts like they were a gas pedal? There was no time to ponder. Without a word of warning to my zombie-fox-shifter girl squad, I twisted the room’s handle from the inside. There was no click. It hadn’t been locked.
The door opened with a loud, rusty creak—perfect for the basement of a castle. Inside the room, curtains on either side of a set of patio doors were fluttering. We were below ground, so the doors opened to a concrete-walled egress with stairs leading up—up and away for whomever had been inside the room a moment earlier.
“He’s gone now,” Zoey said. “We’re too late.” She sniffed the air. Her cheeks lost all their color. “I smell death,” she whispered.
My mother, who’d wanted us to back off a moment earlier, suddenly entered the staff apartment and walked quickly toward the adjoining room. “I’ll check in here,” she said. “You take the other side.”
“Be careful,” I said.
She shot me back a dirty look. “You think I could get any deader?”
That shut me up. My daughter, however, was more of a concern, because she could get deader.
“Zoey, you stay in the hallway,” I said. “Get your phone in your hand and have it ready to dial.”
She sighed loudly but stayed in the hall. She was a good kid.
I looked around the apartment. Unlike the guest quarters, the furnishings down here were old and worn-out to the point that most thrift shops would refuse to take them. “Hello? Anyone in here?” I slowly pushed open the door to the bathroom. It was unoccupied. The counter was covered in styling products, including three brands of antiperspirant, from which I deduced that the unit was shared by three women. There was no sign of a struggle or violence. I backed out and checked the small kitchen. It was littered with empty yogurt containers and cookie boxes.
My mother called out from the adjoining room. “Zarabella?” Her voice was uncharacteristically wavering. “Make sure Zoey stays in the hallway, and come over here at your earliest convenience.”
“No time like the present,” I muttered.
I found her in a small room that might have been a bedroom at some point. Or, judging by the stone walls, possibly a torture chamber from when the castle was in its original location. The current occupants used the room for socializing, judging by the TV on the wall, the beat-up futon sofa, and the table that sat four. My mother stood on the other side of the sofa, looking down. I walked toward her, rounding the sofa slowly.
I knew what I would see before I saw it, giving me a fleeting sense of déjà vu. Sprawled along the futon’s dark-blue cushions was the body of Josephine Pressman. Her blank eyes stared through me.
My mother looked at me helplessly. “Do you think she’s dead?” She wrung her hands.
I heard a thump, like someone fainting. It wasn’t a real sound, though, because it had happened inside my head. My resident spirit had done the ghostly equivalent of fainting at the sight of her own dead body. Jo would rouse herself eventually, and when she did, she would remember nothing of this. Denial of their own demise was standard operating procedure for ghosts. Nobody knew why, exactly, but my best guess was it served as a defense mechanism for the living host. A g
rieving ghost is a dangerous ghost. I’d learned that the hard way when I’d tried to level with a previous ghostly tenant.
Meanwhile, back in the physical world, my mother was leaning over the body, still wringing her hands. “Should we begin CPR?”
“No CPR,” I said. “I’m no doctor, but even I can see there wouldn’t be much point.” I drew her attention to the victim’s neck. Or, to be more precise, her lack of neck. Something had gotten to Jo’s neck, removing so much flesh that life for the body would be impossible.
“Do something,” my mother implored, her hands fluttering anxiously. “At least do a healing blast. I can talk you through it if you don’t know how.”
“I know how to heal,” I said with a snort. It was one of the first things I’d learned as a witch. “Zinnia’s a good teacher. I’m lucky to have her as my mentor.”
“Well?” More hand fluttering.
“Step aside,” I said. She wasn’t in my way at all, but it seemed like the appropriate thing to say.
I knelt before the body and charged my hands. I knew it was pointless. My magic could heal wounds, but it didn’t bring back the dead. Technically, that was my mother’s department, not mine. But I would put on a show, for my mother’s benefit if nothing else.
Against my better judgment, I gave Jo Pressman’s body a blast of my healing powers.
Immediately, I locked onto my task. There was only me, the blue light, and the wound on the young woman’s throat. I opened my heart and gave the task everything I had. My heart opened, but it was heavy, like a stone in my chest—and I did know exactly what a granite heart felt like.
The body was still warm. She might have only been dead a few seconds before she’d come up through the floor. Could I have closed up the horrific wound if I’d gotten here minutes sooner? If I’d been faster, not pausing to chat with my old friend Nash on the second floor, could I have saved her from whoever or whatever had torn out her throat?
I felt a darkness seeping in. My blue light poured out and something else flooded in like backwash.
My body shook as I wrung every muscle, squeezing all my powers into healing. It wasn’t enough, but it was so close. Her light seemed just out of reach, tantalizingly close.
My mother and my daughter were arguing. Dimly, I was aware of their voices. And then they were silent.
Everything of the mortal world disappeared, and I was nothing more than a pitcher of light, pouring myself into the darkness.
Becoming the darkness.
Chapter 5
There was darkness, and then a flicker of light, like stars. I moved toward the twinkling lights, which turned out to be windows, stretching down a long hallway. I paused and peered through one of the nearest windows. There was a pair of hands, slightly pudgy and female, with black-lacquered nails, opening a bottle of wine. Jo Pressman’s hands. She finished opening the wine and walked into the cluttered washroom of the staff apartment, where she began applying more makeup.
After a full minute of watching her apply mascara and eyeliner, I stepped back from the window. I turned and looked down the hallway. It was so long. And the hallway was growing brighter, with more and more windows appearing by the second, turning the walls into bright, moving images. It was as overwhelming as it was beautiful. The view was a kaleidoscope of Jo’s memories, an entire life laid out from end to end. If I were to run as fast as I could down the hallway, after a few hours of travel, I guessed I would see Jo as a baby, maybe even watch her being born.
Curious, I jogged down the hall for a few minutes before stopping to peer through a window. This view was of a man’s bare chest and his muscular arms, and then more. Oh my! It was a very personal memory of an intimate nature. I was so surprised that I jumped backward out of modesty. The hallway was narrow, though, and I accidentally fell toward another window. Only it wasn’t a window at all. It was a doorway, an opening, and I tumbled through it into the light.
A new view unfolded around me in three dimensions, as though I’d been physically dropped into a movie scene. This memory had to be at least a few months old, because Jo’s father, Perry Pressman, was still alive. He was pacing in his living room, pausing only to glance up at the ceiling periodically. I took a good look at the back of his head when he turned and was relieved that his skull was still intact, unlike the last time I’d seen him.
The appearance of the room kept shifting, so that the walls seemed far away and then claustrophobically near. The furniture and artwork in the living room seemed gray and bland one moment, then vividly bright the next. I wanted to rewind, to start from the beginning, but I didn’t know how to do that. The memory was already in progress. Only two people were present. There was the father, pacing and looking stressed, and the daughter, slouched on the sofa looking apathetic. She barely looked at her father, focusing instead on her cell phone or her nails or looking out the window.
“Josephine, you don’t know what you’re asking me to do,” Perry Pressman said.
She tossed her phone aside on the sofa and crossed her arms. “But, Dad, you’ve been working on that secret invention thing of yours forever,” Jo whined. “You said it was the answer to all our problems, but how’s it supposed to help if you never finish it?”
“These things take time. Sourcing the parts has been a challenge.”
“Come on, Dad. You can do anything! I’ve seen how you beg, barter, and borrow. You’re the best. I bet you have everything you need, and you’re just afraid to plug it in.”
He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Getting power into the machine is problematic.”
“You can figure it out,” she urged. “And you’d better do it soon, because you’re not getting any younger. If something were to happen to you, who would finish your legacy?”
He stopped in his tracks and stared at his daughter, his face ashen. “If something were to happen to me, you need to destroy everything. Burn the house down. Promise me, Josephine.”
“Sure, Dad,” she said lightly. “I’ll make sure your money-printing machine is all cleaned away.”
“That’s not what the machine does. When I said it would be able to print money, I was just using a figure of speech.” He gave an exasperated sigh.
“Well, I need some money, so plug it in or whatever.”
He rubbed the back of his head. “If you only knew.”
Perry started pacing again. And he was talking about the illegal nature of his invention, the thing that didn’t literally print money but would still be able to provide them with endless cash. Jo wasn’t listening, so his voice in the memory sounded like mwah-mwah-mwah. That was how I heard it, too, since I was inside her memory and head.
Jo picked at her chipped nail polish. It was a shade of pale pink she didn’t like but that she hoped would communicate to her father that she was finally ready to change her ways and stop being a financial drain on the family. Never mind that a thrifty person who took after her penny-pinching father wouldn’t be paying for manicures in the first place! At least she was trying. She’d canceled some magazine subscriptions and had started going to—of all places—the public library. The horror.
He waved his hands in her field of view. “Jo, you’re not listening,” he said. “This is important. You need to pay attention.”
“Fine,” she groaned, and then she tried and failed to pay attention. Her father’s speech continued to sound like mwah-mwah-mwah. After a while, he slammed his fist on the room’s cheap coffee table. The thrift-store find cracked down the middle. “They could have us killed,” he said. He was on his knees now, looking more dramatic than she’d ever seen him.
Jo scoffed. Her father’s business associates would have them killed? Wow. Her father was really having a paranoid spell tonight.
“But you’ll share the money with your partners,” she said. “And if you’re the only one who can run the machine, that makes you extra valuable.”
“To a point,” he said. “We are dealing with powers beyond most people’s imag
ination.”
“Uh-huh.” Jo had heard this sort of crazy talk from her father over the years often enough that she wasn’t surprised. His medication kept his delusions mostly under control, but there were breakthrough events. When he got like this, it was best to go along with him and not disagree.
“You’ll just have to be extra careful,” Jo said, blinking and smiling sweetly. “Or, if you can’t get the money, I could try asking Mom.”
He stopped breathing. After a stiff pause, he said, “Leave your mother out of this. She’s a good woman.”
She giggled. “You never want her to know what you’re up to because you’re afraid she might try to get more alimony.”
Perry banged his fist on the coffee table again. “Have you even heard a word I’ve said? The machine in the attic is extremely dangerous. Project Erasure could very well erase both of us.”
She looked up at his grimaced face. Did he seriously just call his invention Project Erasure? He had to mean erasing debt. He had to. What else could it be?
“Dad, did you take any weird, experimental vitamins today?” She’d seen something labeled Black Scarabyce Blood in a dark bottle in the kitchen. It had looked like a prop from a movie about witches! And yet it hadn’t been the strangest thing she’d seen in her father’s house. Perhaps he was mad, after all. Not just eccentric-mad-genius mad, but genuinely mad.
“Dad? Is there anything you want to tell me?”
He gripped the sides of the cracked coffee table with both hands and hung his head. He mumbled something unintelligible. He often got this way when he was tired and hungry or both.
“Let’s get something to eat,” she said. “I’ll call for delivery. Do you want Thai or pizza?”
“There’s plenty of food in the freezer,” he said. “Takeout is a waste of money.”
“So what?” She’d been trying to be patient with him, but the prospect of eating another one of his bulk-bargain frozen dinners with the petrified green beans was more than she could handle. “Come on, Dad. Money is just a resource, like time or muscle power. It’s not inherently evil. Fire up your machine, print up some money, and stop being such a tightwad for once in your life. Live a little while you’re still alive!”
Wisteria Wyverns Page 4
