“Come on, spill it,” Tad needled me.
I sighed. It wasn’t that Rowan and I had agreed to keep the connection secret, but neither were we shouting it to the rooftops. It was what it was.
“All right, but I don’t want this spread around town. At least not until I’m prepared for an onslaught of questions. Get it?”
A sideways glance told me Tad was frowning.
“All right, though now you’re making me nervous.”
“Rowan Firesong is my grandmother.” I swung a left on Fern Street as we neared my house.
I could feel Tad’s eyes boring into my side. As I pulled into my driveway, he sputtered.
“Rowan’s your grandmother? But she’s…”
“Over two hundred? Yes, I know. But women who are witchblood stay fertile a lot longer, given our lifespan. She gave birth to my father and then adopted him out to the Jaxsons. She was worried for his safety, though I still don’t know why.”
“So you have Rowan’s blood running through your veins, as well as your great-grandmother Colleen’s blood? You must be a powerhouse of a witch,” he said, his eyes widening as he unfastened his seat belt.
“Powerhouse? I don’t know about that. Then again, I haven’t had much of a chance to train with my magic. But I’m learning, now that I’m away from that batshit ex of mine.” I turned to Tad before we got out of the car. “Listen, please don’t tell anybody yet. I just don’t feel like being the topic of the day in the town gossip mill.”
“I won’t,” he promised. “Thank you for trusting me.” He glanced at the house. “All right, let’s go see if we can figure out what we’re dealing with here.”
As we set up the cameras in each room, I had the feeling we were being watched. The energy was thick, like brain fog, and it made me feel slow and tired.
“The remodel looks great,” Caitlin said.
“I know, but damn it, I want to love my home again, not be afraid of it. I grew up in this house and I came back here, wanting to make it my home. This better be fixable or I’m going to have a meltdown.”
When we came to the library, I ushered them in and pointed to the door to the storage room. As I cautiously opened the door, I saw that the trunks and everything that had been in them were gone. The police had taken them to look for what evidence they could find. But the chairs and end tables that had been in the room were still there, only now, they were stacked in the center, one atop another, in a precarious and gravity-defying tower that wavered as we entered the room. I paused, waiting for them to tumble down, but the tower stood. Finally, I tried to ignore them as we installed the cameras and microphones. The feedback would go to a chain of laptops we used to record all the filming.
Caitlin was setting up the laptops on the dining room table, spreading out everything so it wasn’t crowded. Tad and Hank and I followed our standard protocol: Tad stayed with Caitlin while Hank and I installed the cameras and microphones. We’d learned the hard way about splitting up, and now, we always tried to work in pairs. It was safer that way.
When we finished installing the gear, we returned to the dining room where Caitlin was logging on to the system and fine-tuning the different levels.
“Okay, we’re going live in five…four…three…two…one. All cameras are working, all monitors recording.” She motioned to Hank. “Can you walk into the kitchen there and say something so I can see if we’re picking up sound?”
He obliged, stepping into the kitchen. When he spoke, we could hear him from the close proximity, but we also heard his voice coming through the microphone, so we were all good.
“Now what?” I asked.
“We do what we usually do. Wait and watch,” Tad said.
I headed to the kitchen to find some potato chips and returned just in time to hear a loud crash. The sound echoed through both the air and the monitor.
“Which room?” Tad said, jumping up.
“The storage room,” Caitlin said. “Would you look at this?”
We crowded around the monitor, only to see that the furniture was spinning in midair now. The chairs and tables had fallen, but two of the chairs were in spinning lazily in midair, while one of the end tables zipped around the room, crashing into the walls.
“Holy fuck,” I said. “What can do that?”
“Poltergeist. Some ghosts. Possibly a shadow person,” Tad mumbled, gaze glued to the monitor. “Stay with Caitlin. Hank, let’s check the room.”
I tried to protest but Tad insisted.
As they trekked off for the storage room, Caitlin glanced at me. “You must be going out of your wits dealing with this.”
“Now I know how our clients feel,” I said. “Oh, I’ve had spirits in my house before—look at what happened with Rameer, though that turned out to be a relatively benign happenstance. I miss him, actually. I got a postcard from him, believe it or not.”
“I thought he was leaving to go back to his own plane,” Caitlin said.
Rameer was a djinn. In a fit of drunken birthday games, I had accidentally asked him for three wishes, leading to plenty of mayhem and a few long-term consequences. One of those had to do with my ex. I had wished for Ellison to suffer as much as he had made me suffer. Through his own stupidity, he had. For a while, I had felt twinges of guilt, but I had also learned how sometimes, life meant dealing with what happened. Life wasn’t always fair, and sometimes, we needed payback because the universe wasn’t set up to right wrongs.
In fact, the word “karma” didn’t mean anything remotely what most people in western culture thought it did. Karma didn’t work like the golden rule or the rule of three that some people espoused. And sometimes, a little schadenfreude was a balm to the soul.
Anyway, long story short, I had freed Rameer so he could go back to his own plane and not be enslaved again. We had found his bottle so he could leave, and that had been that. He had turned out to be a pleasant fellow, and he had given us the interview of a lifetime.
“Apparently, he came back for a vacation—leaving his bottle hidden at home, thank gods. He went to Iceland, of all places, and he sent me a postcard from there last week. He said he also has a present for me and he’ll drop it off at the end of his vay-cay.” Secretly, I was grateful. Rameer seemed to be someone I could enjoy knowing as a friend.
“I’m glad—what the hell?” Caitlin froze, pointing to the screen.
Hank and Tad were in the room, and the chairs were lining up on the opposite wall, still midair with their legs pointed toward the men.
I hit the speaker attached to the microphone. “Get out of there—get out now!”
Sure enough, the next moment the chairs went zooming across the room at them, so fast that if the legs hit them anywhere, they’d impale them.
Hank and Tad dropped to the ground and the chairs froze in midair just beyond them. The men began to crawl out of the room, scrambling as fast as they could go. They barely managed to vanish when the chairs dropped, full throttle, missing them by inches. The next moment, the door slammed and they returned, breathless.
“Are you all right?” I jumped up, scanning them for injuries.
“A few bruises, but no worse for the wear. Though that wouldn’t have been the case if you hadn’t noticed what was happening and warned us.” Tad’s voice was shaking. “I don’t think your ghost went away with the skeleton, by the way.”