by Jenn Burke
I was less appreciative of his ability to utterly focus on a task at hand. We needed to talk about the whole sunlight thing—and since he was a captive audience at the moment...
“Are we going to ignore it?” I asked, my voice pitched low. I didn’t really want Lexi and Iskander to overhear, though I was pretty sure they were far enough away they wouldn’t.
Not that I didn’t want them to know about it... I just didn’t want them to know about it yet.
“What?” He stepped on a loose floorboard and it emitted a cloud of dust. “Whoops. Sorry.”
I coughed and waved a hand in front of me to clear the air. “Don’t play dumb. That’s my shtick. About the sunlight.”
He grunted.
I grabbed the sleeve of his jacket and pulled him to a stop. “It was weird.”
“Weirder than you seeing ghosts while you’re in the living plane?” He arched a brow.
“We’re not talking about me right now. Vampires aren’t supposed to tolerate the sun like that until they’re over one hundred years old.”
“That’s what my contact said, but maybe she was fucking with me. I don’t know.”
“Why would she?”
“Because she could?”
She’d once been the fuck-buddy of Hudson’s sire, so yeah, I doubted she was the most upstanding citizen.
“Or maybe my tolerance has increased with age and I didn’t know it. I doubt it’s like a switch gets thrown one day after your one-hundredth year as a vampire, and suddenly the sun is your friend again.”
“Yeah,” I said, conceding the point.
He leaned forward and kissed my forehead. “I bet if I’d stayed in the sun much longer, I would have started feeling it.”
“Maybe we need to test that out.”
Hudson made a face and started walking again. “No, thank you.”
We picked our way around a pile of what was probably spare lumber covered with a blue tarp. I lifted a corner to glance underneath—yep, lumber. I had no idea what sort of magical evidence we were looking for, beyond Lexi’s cryptic, You’ll know it when you see it.
Great. Helpful.
I let the tarp drop. “It’s something we should know, though, right? Your limits?”
“I’m not volunteering to stand in the sun until I puke. Been there, done that.”
“Hud—”
“You feeling anything hinky down here?”
I gave in to the change in topic. “The entire place feels hinky.”
“That’s helpful.”
“It’s the truth.”
I hadn’t noticed at first, what with my trauma from yesterday and my anxiety over seeing any of the ghosts on this visit. But now that Charlie had given us some details about the strange circumstances here, and I could concentrate on something other than my own nerves...yeah. Hinky was a good word. There was something subtly off about Aurora House and its barn. Not on the level of a demon, but something that made the hair on the back of my neck dance the mamba at regular intervals. An atmosphere that murmured of fear and uncertainty, rather than the warmth and safety the home should have exuded. It was like everything was waiting for something to happen. No—for the other shoe to drop.
“Any chance if you talk to Charlie again out here, she’ll be able to give you better directions?”
I wrinkled my nose. “She was pretty adamant that she was not going to come back to the barn ever again, if she could help it. Which, you know, tells us something on its own.”
Hudson looked around, his eyes glimmering as his vampire night vision kicked in. “Any ideas what’s going on here? Theories, thoughts, suppositions?”
“I don’t know.” I went to drag a hand through my hair and encountered my toque instead. I tugged it lower over my ears. “There wasn’t anything odd about the place when we were renovating it. Though I didn’t spend much time out here.”
“Renovations can stir things up though, right?”
“There have been reports of that, sure. During the renos, not freaking seven months later. And my impression from Charlie is that she wasn’t even here then. She showed up when the rooms were all furnished and occupied.” I let out a soft sigh. “I don’t see anything. I don’t feel anything extra strange. I just... I don’t know.”
“Hey, Wes!” Lexi’s voice rang out from the loft.
Hudson and I moved to a section of the main floor where we could see Lexi standing at the edge of the loft. “What’s up?” I asked.
“We found something. C’mon.” She gestured for us to come up the ladder.
The hayloft was huge...and less than steady. The floor vibrated and creaked with every step we took, and my fingers desperately wanted to grab Hudson’s arm. I shoved my hands in the pockets of my jacket instead as we joined Iskander at the tight junction of the roof and the loft. It was a triangular space, deep and low, with some small crates pushed off to one side, and it seemed to hold...
I frowned. “That’s a lamp.”
“That’s what I told her,” Iskander said.
“It’s not a lamp,” Lexi insisted, crouching down to get a better look. “Why would someone hide a lamp up here behind some boxes?”
“It looks like a lamp to me,” Hudson said.
“Does a lamp usually do this?” Lexi slipped a finger near what I thought was a bulb, and blue sparks trailed in the wake of her touch.
“It’s a lava lamp?” I suggested.
“Oh my gods, you guys.”
“So if it’s not a lamp, what is it?” Iskander said.
“I don’t know,” Lexi admitted. “I can feel magic in it, but it’s not...not natural magic. It’s hard to explain. It’s like—” She broke off and waved a hand absently as she sought the right word. “Battery-powered magic?”
“Battery-powered magic,” I repeated flatly. “That’s a thing?”
“I don’t know!” Lexi shifted back on her heels. “It could be an anchor for a spell to keep it running when the witch isn’t here. It could be an artifact of some kind—but honestly, it doesn’t look like an artifact.”
“It looks like someone took a shade off a lamp and added some reflectors and other doohickeys to the base,” Hudson said.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “It looks like someone’s basement craft project. But what’s it doing here?”
“Million-dollar question.” Lexi pushed to her feet. “Okay—Isk and Hud? Can you see if Kee has anything we can put this in? A cardboard box, maybe? And some gardening gloves. I don’t want to touch it if I can help it.”
“On it.” Hudson handed me his flashlight and headed in the direction of the stairs. Isk gave a thumbs-up and followed him.
“Wes, can you see anything?”
“Other than the lamp?” I grinned at her unimpressed look and focused the flashlight on the quasi-cubbyhole the object was in. “No.”
“What about from the otherplane?”
Reluctantly, I faded half into the other realm. Lexi’s form grew fuzzy around the edges, but everything else remained the same—damp, dingy, unwelcoming—
Wait.
The lamp—well, in the otherplane, it was clear it wasn’t a lamp. There was a resonance to it similar to what I’d felt from the Crown of Osiris, the magical artifact the demon had forced me to use all those months ago. The lamp’s energy wasn’t as strong, or as threatening, but it was definitely there. And unlike the crown, the lamp was emanating something. I slipped further into the otherplane to get a better look—
And a shadow figure burst out of the gloomy corner of the loft and slammed into Lexi.
She skidded across the floor toward the open edge of the hayloft opposite the ladder. I leaped out of the otherplane to grab her, but the person hip-checked me as he reached for the not-lamp, and I ended up grappling with him—and it was definitely a him. The figure that had
been dark and shadowy in the otherplane was more distinguishable now—a young kid, maybe in his late teens or early twenties, wearing a dark hoodie. The flashlight I’d dropped on the floor illuminated the inside of his hood for a second, and I spotted a tattoo on his neck—black ink against white skin.
He tried to lift the lamp away, but I grabbed it and yanked back. The resistance must have caught him off guard because he let go and scurried away, down the ladder. Breathing hard, I put the lamp down and rolled over to see how Lexi was doing.
She—she wasn’t there.
I couldn’t breathe as I got to my hands and knees, grabbed the flashlight, and scrambled forward.
Please let her be hanging on the edge please let her be hanging on the edge please let.
She wasn’t hanging on the edge.
She was crumpled a story below, on a tarp-covered pile of something. Unmoving.
“Lexi!”
Chapter Seven
I hated hospitals.
No. Hate wasn’t strong enough of a word.
For the past eighty-five-plus years, hospitals had been a constant reminder that I would outlive everyone I loved. I’d already outlived April, Michael’s sister and the witch who had resurrected me out of misplaced guilt, and her daughter, Vera. I’d sat with April until the end, until her rheumy blue eyes closed for the last time, as her breaths faded into nothing. I’d held her hand until it went cold, wishing that I could do for her what she’d done for me—bring her back, give her life—even though she’d told me more than once that she wanted to see what came next. She wanted to continue on her journey.
That made her so much braver than I would ever be.
Lexi was everything I’d expect April’s great-granddaughter to be. Epically unafraid, loyal to a fault, not perfect, but not pretending to be, either. I wished that April had been able to meet her.
The pungent smell of antiseptic burned my nostrils. The ER waiting room was packed, and the low-level murmur of voices, so many voices, never stopped. A baby cried somewhere on the other side of the room. A nurse’s shoes squeaked on the immaculate corridor floor past the reception desk.
Everything after I’d discovered Lexi had fallen was a blur. There’d been blood. Too much blood leaking out from under her hair. I’d screamed and somehow made it down to her to discover she had a pulse. Hudson had been there a moment later. He’d called 9-1-1 immediately and convinced me not to move her. The ambulance had taken her to the closest ER—not the hospital where Lexi worked, which I knew would bug her to no end when she woke up.
Because she would wake up.
Hudson placed his hand on my knee, and only then did I realize I’d been bouncing my foot and shaking the entire row of seats. His touch was comforting—and it wasn’t. I wanted to lean into him and let him hold me up, but if I did, I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t crumple to the floor, anyway.
“How long does it fucking take?” I muttered.
“Be patient.”
“Fuck that.”
His grip on my knee tightened. “You’re not going to help things by having a tantrum.”
I glared at him. “A tantrum?”
He huffed out a breath. “You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t. Enlighten me.”
“Wes...”
I flung his hand away and got up, ignoring his repeated hisses of my name. Iskander watched me from his perch beside Hudson, but he didn’t say anything or try to stop me as I marched past. Good. I didn’t want to fight with him or Hudson, and I knew Hudson didn’t want to provoke me. He just sucked at communicating.
I got the gist of it, though, and he wasn’t wrong. Demanding answers from the nurse at reception about Lexi’s condition wasn’t going to get me anywhere.
I didn’t know anything, and it made me want to kick a hole in the wall.
“Wes?”
Evan’s soft voice drew my attention to him. He was dressed in a nice button-down, with jeans and Converse sneakers—which was stupid. It was January, for fuck’s sake, and Converse were a shitty choice for snow-and-ice-laden sidewalks. His jacket wasn’t heavy enough, either.
My eyes narrowed. “You want everyone to know you’re a—”
“Hi to you too.”
“Where have you been?”
“I came as soon as I could.”
“We’ve been here for hours.”
“It’s been forty-five minutes since I got the text from Iskander. I had to get a Lyft.” He squinted. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“My goddamned best friend is unconscious and won’t wake up, that’s what’s wrong with me!” I lunged forward—to do what, I had no idea—but something dragged me back.
“Easy,” Hudson rumbled in my ear. “Don’t make a scene.”
I’d told myself that only moments ago, but hearing that same advice made my blood boil...and my magic strain against its container. I jerked my arm out of his hold and stalked off down the hall, refusing to look back at Hudson and Evan. A few doors down, I found a men’s room and ducked inside. It was empty.
Thank god.
I hunched over one of the sinks and released my magic. Immediately, my temper cooled, soothed by the sensation of letting go. My skin was glowing—I didn’t have to look directly at it to know, but it didn’t stand out as obviously as when the room was dark. If someone came in, they’d likely think I was simply having a moment.
Which was the truth.
God, I wanted to fight something. Preferably the asshole who’d shoved Lexi down.
I wanted to hold him up in front of me. I wanted to look into his eyes and see them widen with fear. I wanted to—
Something grabbed the back of my head and slammed my forehead into the sink. Pain cascaded through me, making me see stars. I whirled to face my attacker, stumbling when the room continued to spin—but there was no one there.
“What the—”
An invisible fist slammed into my right cheek, then my left. I leaned on the sinks, trying to get my bearings and make sense of what was happening. The stall doors crashed open. At the same time, water spurted out of the faucets and the urinals.
What the fuck—a poltergeist? In the hospital?
Poltergeists weren’t intelligent—they were closer to echoes, but not quite the same. Whereas an echo was a ghostly version of a repetitive or habitual action that had occurred when the person was alive, a poltergeist was otherplane energy reacting to something in the living plane—usually the volatile and uncontrolled emotions of a sensitive teenager—that resulted in spontaneous and violent bursts of activity. Not really a ghost.
To have one in a hospital, and not even a children’s hospital, made no sense.
Then hands wrapped around my throat, and I couldn’t think about the impossibility of the situation any longer.
I tried to grab the hands, but there was nothing to grab. My fingers clawed at my own skin. If I stepped into the otherplane, I might be able to disrupt the energy, but I couldn’t do it, not when every breath was getting harder to suck in than the last. Black dots danced at the edges of my vision and I sagged against the sinks.
A door slammed open and I thought for a minute that the poltergeist was playing with the stalls again. But then I heard Hudson’s panicked “Wes!”
He growled. It was a distant sound, far away. Another growl reverberated in the room and I realized Evan was there too. The dots were growing, getting larger, and I slumped. My head grazed the bottom of the ceramic sink and I thudded to the floor—
And suddenly I could breathe again.
I gasped, drawing in as much air as I could, great big heaving lungfuls of it. It took me a few to banish the dark spots and see that Hudson was crouched over me, his expression beyond concerned.
“You okay?”
I tried to talk, and winced. “Yeah,” I whispered. “Ho
w’d you know?”
Hudson hesitated, the barest of pauses, before saying, “I heard you.”
Had I been that loud? I knew his senses were enhanced, predator-keen, but I wasn’t convinced he’d be able to hear a fight in a busy hospital, rooms away from where he’d been.
“What the hell was that?” Evan was standing and I couldn’t see his face from my perspective on the floor under the sinks, but I could hear the fear and frustration in his voice.
“Poltergeist.” I grasped Hudson’s hand when he held it out, and let him guide me back to my feet. Once upright, I leaned on him, and he opened his arms without hesitation.
“I thought poltergeists were a teenage psychic thing?”
I nodded. “I have no idea how it was here.”
“Why did it attack you?” Evan asked.
Eh, I had an idea about that. I was thinking pretty negative thoughts, with my magic spewing everywhere. I had never considered that there would be anything for me to attract, let alone violent energy looking for an outlet.
The door opened and Iskander joined us. His gaze swept over Evan and Hudson, seeing their fangs still extended and their eyes glowing, and finally landed on me. “How come I wasn’t invited to the bathroom party?” he rasped.
“A poltergeist tried to play with Wes,” Evan said. He gave his head a shake. His fangs disappeared and his eyes reverted to their usual gray-blue.
“Never a dull moment.” Iskander’s slight smile drifted away. “The doctor was looking for you, Wes.”
I pushed away from Hudson. “Let’s go.”
* * *
Twelve hours later, Lexi’s mom and dad were there.
I hadn’t seen Rosanna in years—about three, I think, since the last time Lexi had dragged me back to Alberta to share Christmas with the family. Neither Rosanna nor her husband, Darrell, had changed much. She still wore her golden-blond hair in a professional bob, though it was frizzier than usual and she wore no makeup. I was used to seeing her as a businesswoman who happened to be a mom, but right now, she was the mom first. Darrell towered over his wife, his hand cupping her shoulder in a show of support. His rich brown skin had a dullness to it that spoke of his worry and stress.