Suddenly aware that I was blocking the door, I quickly moved aside. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean…oh, never mind. You woke me up and I’m pre-caffeine, pre-food, pre-brushing my teeth.”
Ari giggled—she could always find the humor in just about everything—and walked me back to the living room. “You need a shower. You smell like a campfire. What happened? Did you stop to make s’mores on the way up here?”
I snorted. “No. I decided to torch Ellison’s wedding tux, my wedding dress, and the key to his convertible. Which, I might add, may have a bad case of—” My cell phone rang at that moment and I glanced at it. Sure enough, it was Ellison. “Oh joy. He must have found the convertible,” I said, letting the call go to voice mail.
“January, what did you do to his car?” Ari’s eyes twinkled. “I know you. You didn’t just leave quietly.”
I grinned. “I may have opened the window. And a hose may have found its way into said open window, and the water may have gotten turned on.” I grinned. “I had to leave the bastard some parting gift. After all, he stole my magazine, blacklisted me, and had the nerve to get engaged to his bimbo before we were even divorced.”
Ari let out a snort. “You didn’t disappoint me, lady. All right, go get your ass in the shower. I’ll poke around in the kitchen and see if there’s any coffee.”
“Instead of that, can we just go out for breakfast? After I shower, of course.” Even I couldn’t stand my own stench at that point.
“Sure.” She plunked herself down in the rocking chair. “Go wash up and change.”
I hurried to the bathroom, carrying my suitcase with me. I had plenty of other clothes but I had packed a suitcase specifically for the first few days until I had unpacked and gotten myself situated.
I showered, basking in the warmth of the water, then dried off and changed into a pair of jeans and a V-neck hunter green cashmere sweater. Sitting at my mother’s vanity, I brushed my hair—it was naturally wavy and down to my lower back. I kept it a deep mahogany—sometimes veering into burgundy—thanks to a dye bottle. I applied my makeup. I always went for the old glamour girl pinup look with cat-wings and burgundy lipstick. Finally, I gathered the mass of waves back into a ponytail and tied my hair back using a green scarf.
Standing back, I took a long look at myself. I washed up pretty good, even though Ellison had been bitching about my weight for years. I was curvy, an hourglass shape. At five-nine, I was a firm size 14. He had wanted me to get down to a size 2 maximum, preferably a size zero. That was never going to happen.
I slid on a pair of black boots and zipped them up. They were platform, but with a nonskid sole. Ellison had hated them because he said they looked goth, and that I was “too old for that shit.” Ellison had said a lot of nasty things to me, come to think of it.
I hurried downstairs. “Ready?” I asked, entering the living room.
Ari was standing in the center of the room, frowning. “You have a ghost?”
“What?”
“I asked, do you have a ghost? I heard somebody talking a moment ago.”
I frowned. “I’m not sure. I thought I heard a woman talking when I was standing out in the front yard last night, so maybe? What did they say?”
Ari scrunched up her face. “I’m not actually sure, to be honest. I couldn’t make it out. It was just like…murmuring, you know?”
“Well, I’m not going to sweat it right now. Let’s go get breakfast, then will you help me unpack? Aunt Teran’s coming over this afternoon to help.”
Ari loved my aunt. Teran had kept us stocked in weed, and me in birth control, when we were teenagers, because as liberal and magical as my mother had been, those weren’t easy things to ask for. Now, of course, pot was legal, and I could get my own birth control. But it was still a good memory to have.
“She is? Good, I haven’t seen her since the funeral. Well, we’ve run into each other in the grocery store but…” Ari paused, then said, “Are you going to be all right living here? Now that your parents are…”
“I believe the word you’re searching for is ‘dead,’ ” I said.
She grimaced. “Yeah, but I wasn’t sure how blunt to be.”
“It’s all right. You don’t have to tiptoe around the subject. I miss them, but I’ll be okay. And yes, I’ll be fine. I’ve always loved this house, and while it’s going to be tough going through their things, I have to do it sometime. I might as well start when I’m unpacking my own things.”
We headed out to Ari’s car. She had a big old SUV that had seen better days, but the vehicle was as sturdy as a tank, and it would probably run until she drove it into the ground. As we headed toward the town center, I thought again about the voice. If I had a ghost, maybe it was my mother, come back to watch over me.
We decided to eat at Lucky’s. The joint looked a lot like it had when I last visited, though it was a far cry from the basic diner it had been when I was little and my father brought me here for milkshakes. The décor now sported a shamrock theme, which almost tipped on the side of kitschy, and the basic blue walls had been changed out for yellow and green.
I ordered a waffle, two sides of bacon, and a triple peppermint mocha with plenty of whipped cream. Ari ordered the blueberry pancakes and a gingerbread latte.
“So, what’s changed around here that I should know of?” I glanced around. There wasn’t anybody in the diner I recognized, but given Moonshadow Bay had a population of about two thousand people, that wasn’t odd.
Ari leaned back in her seat, staring out of the window. The snow was beginning to fall again. “Not much, to be honest. Oh, some new shops have gone in. There’s a new magic shop in town called the Broom & Besom, and the owners are pretty hard-core aquanistas.”
Aquanistas focused their magic on the element of water, and just like the force they worked with, they could be pretty harsh at times. People liked to think of water as gentle, but really—water was one of the strongest forces. It could burrow through earth, quench fire, and crowd out air to drown people.
“Okay, I’ll have to drop in there after I see what my mother kept in stock. It’s time I get back to my magic, now that Mr. Asshole isn’t here to bitch about it.” I hadn’t exactly stopped practicing my magic, but I had needed to be discreet about it, hiding most of what I did from him. “What else is new?”
“Well, a few people moved away but new ones came to take their place. Mostly, you know, people tend to stay put once they arrive in Moonshadow Bay. The Gull Catcher broke his leg last month and he’s in the hospital.”
“I bet he’s freaking unhappy as hell,” I said. The Gull Catcher was a coyote shifter who spent a lot of his time on the beach trying to catch gulls while he was in his coyote form. He was a veteran who had PTSD, and he was mostly harmless, though he was definitely on the eccentric side. He made a living doing odd jobs around the town.
Ari paused, then after the waitress brought our mochas, asked, “What are you going to do now?”
I thought for a moment, then shrugged. “Find a job. Ellison made it impossible for me to work in Seattle. You know how firmly he entrenched himself in the art and publishing community in Seattle. When we split, he spread a bunch of rumors about me and basically turned all his friends against me. They sided with him because he managed to keep control of the magazine and could make or break them with bad reviews. And he just fits the literati artēēst vibe that runs through the upper crust there.”