Starlight Web

by Yasmine Galenorn

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” I muttered, wondering if anybody had seen me. I slowly pushed my way to my hands and knees, wincing as I glanced around. Maybe I had lucked out. There was nobody in sight, so maybe I’d make it through without any prying eyes. As I stood, I noticed that my jeans had a rip in the knee, and my knee beneath the fabric was scraped and bleeding. My nose hurt, and the heel of my boot had ripped off. So much for getting a good start to the day.

  I gathered up everything, yanked the boot heel out of the snow, and limped my way back up the frozen steps. Unlocking the door, I tossed my purse on the sofa and slumped on the cushion next to it. After a moment, I pulled my boots off, then fished my phone out of my purse and called Tad.

  “I’m going to be late. I faceplanted on my sidewalk just now.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I just broke my boot heel, scraped my knee, and I think I may have sprained my nose.” I must have sounded just exasperated enough for him to take pity on me. At least, he tried not to laugh, though I could hear the suppressed snicker behind his words.

  “Take your time. We’ll see you when you get here. Don’t rush it—we don’t want you showing up with a broken leg.”

  “Thanks,” I murmured. I felt out of sorts in every which way. Wincing, I stood. Not only did my hip still ache from the day before, but now my knee hurt, along with my elbow and nose. I was on my way upstairs to my bathroom when I heard someone behind whispering behind me.

  Are you all right, pumpkin?

  Pumpkin? That’s what my mother had called me. But I decided to wait till I was at the top to react. The last thing I needed was to tumble down a flight of stairs. As I headed toward my bedroom, I paused.

  “If that’s you, Mom, thanks. I’m all right. I just started off the day wrong. I’ll be okay. And if it is you, stick around, okay? If you can.”

  There was no answer, but I thought I felt the brush of a hand on my head, like she had always patted me on the head when I was little. I smiled, then headed into my bedroom. The ghost—whoever it was—didn’t follow.

  I stripped off my jeans and shirt and checked myself for injuries. I had a nasty bruise on my knee, along with a pretty vigorous scrape. I spread some antibiotic ointment on it, then covered it with a gauze bandage and taped it down. I also doctored a gash on my right palm, and a nasty scrape on my nose. It wasn’t deep enough to bleed, but it sure gave me the Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer effect. I could lead Santa’s sleigh through the storm without a problem for a while.

  After making sure I was still in one piece, I rubbed some Ice-O-Therm on my hip, then dressed again, choosing another pair of jeans and a turtleneck sweater. I threaded my belt through the loops, found a pair of boots that had stacked, platform heels that were also rubber, nonskid, and then I headed back downstairs. Once again, I put on my jacket and grabbed my purse and pack. I’d stop at a coffee stand for my latte.

  I made certain—again—that the stove was off, that all embers from the fire were dust, and then I headed out again. Yep, rock salt was on the list, all right.

  By the time I got to work, I was half an hour late, but when I walked in, everybody just glanced up and waved. I headed over to Tad’s desk and sat down.

  “I’m here. Thanks for cutting me some slack,” I said.

  “Hey, this job has a learning curve to it, and we take into account life’s vagaries. Meeting!” Tad called out. “Table, now.”

  We all moved to the main table and I shrugged off my coat, draping it over my chair and leaving my purse on my desk. I grabbed my tablet and digital recorder, along with a notepad and pen, and took a chair next to Hank.

  “Did you hurt yourself this morning?” Caitlin asked. “Tad told us you fell off your porch or something.”

  “Or something is more like it. I’m all right. I have a scraped knee and palm, and you can see my shiny nose adornment. But otherwise I’m okay. My hip aches, but that’s mostly due to yesterday’s monster mosh pit out at the asylum.”

  I told everyone that Ari and Killian were going to join us before Tad called the meeting to order.

  “All right, listen up. When we arrive on the premises, no going solo. If you go anywhere, take someone with you. The bathrooms are still working, although there’s no hot water, but the toilets and sinks work. Take tissue and soap.” He paused. “Except for the fact that January was attacked, and the dead bodies that seem to be piling up around this particular haunting, I wouldn’t be as worried as I am. But those are enough to spook me.”

  Caitlin cleared her throat. “If Charles Crichton is right, then we’re dealing with a compound manifestation. I really question spending the night there.”

  A look of exasperation crossed Tad’s face. “Yes, but what the hell are we supposed to do? Our client paid us good money to ascertain whether it’s safe for them to buy the property. We don’t do slipshod work.”

  “We could just take out our equipment and hunt around for a while, then leave our cameras set up and—” Caitlin started to say but Hank cleared his throat, interrupting her.

  “We can’t leave that equipment out there on its own. It’s expensive, and we’d be out fifty thousand dollars’ worth of equipment. We either have to stay with it, or bring it back with us.”

  Tad let them discuss the point for a moment, then he rapped his knuckles on the table. “Enough. You both make valid points. All right, since I’m the one who has to make the final decision, we’re staying the night. Shawn and Dell are busy, and they can’t make it, but with January’s friends, we’ll have extra brawn and magic.” He paused, turning to me. “They have to sign an NDA, as well as a waiver releasing us from liability if something happens.”

  “I’m sure they’ll understand. Let’s take the documents with us,” I said.

  Caitlin sighed. “All right, we spend the night. Have we looked over the equipment to make certain it’s all working?”

  Hank shook his head. “I thought we’d do that right after this meeting.”

  “Can I watch?” I asked. “I’ve never used any ghost hunting equipment and I’d like to be conversant with it before we head out.”

  Caitlin linked her arm with mine and drew me toward the storeroom. “Be my guest. I love talking about gadgets.”

  As she opened the storage room door, I glanced back to find Tad staring at me, the look on his face unreadable. I wasn’t sure what he was thinking, but I hoped I could put up a good front and convince him he’d hired the right person for the job.

  Thirty minutes later, I was more or less versed about paranormal gadgets and how they worked.

  Witches relied on our trancework and senses, rather than on gadgets and whatsits. Then again, we also had our own props and gadgets—our wands and daggers, cauldrons and brooms and everything that made up a witch’s altar.

  By the time Caitlin was done with me, I knew how to use several of the easier cameras, the FLIR, and the EMF reader. Some of the equipment was too complicated to teach me to use in what time we had before leaving, but at least by the time Caitlin was done with me, I knew enough so that I wouldn’t mess up the readings by turning the wrong knob or pressing the wrong button.

  During that time, Hank seemed to warm up to me. He showed me how to hold some of the cameras, and he sorted through a pile of clean thermal underwear and found a pair that would fit me, along with an undershirt.

  “We have extra sleeping bags, and we’ll be taking a battery-operated space heater to huddle around, but you might want to wear these. It’s going to be cold and we won’t be doing a lot of moving around.”

  “Exactly what will we be doing?” I asked, accepting the warm leggings and shirt.

  “We’ll go into that room where you got clobbered and set up there first. Tad and Caitlin will stay there while you and I head upstairs to do a brief observation run. The fact that you heard movement up there means either we have ourselves a squatter, or an animal made a nest up there, or…and this is the most likely, we have more ghostly activit
y. We need to know which one it is.”

  “Have you ever found squatters or animals? I mean, something other than a ghost?” I asked, holding the thermal underwear up to me. It looked like it would fit. “These are clean, right?”

  He snorted. “Of course they’re clean. We wash everything when we come back from a run. Though you might want to get your own. Spending a night in the cold isn’t out of the ordinary for what we do. We keep spares on hand, but most of us have full camping gear, a top-notch sleeping bag—everything we need to bivouac in any situation, whether it’s midsummer or midwinter.”

  I paused to make a note on my phone to buy camping gear and long johns.

  “As to whether we’ve ever found a natural cause for what someone thought was a haunting, or other UL—”

  “UL?” I asked.

  “Urban legend. Anyway, the answer is yes. Last year we were sent out to investigate a potential Jersey devil–like case, but it was just a wolf shifter who…well, this was worse than a UL in this case. The wolf shifter had been hexed and when he transformed, he couldn’t finish the shift. He couldn’t return to his human form, either. He died after a few days, and the witch who cast the spell was brought up on charges by the tribunal of Court Magika. He was stripped of his powers and sent to prison out on Gull Island.”

  “Why would he want to hex the shifter?”

  “Love triangle…the wolf shifter was the husband of the witch’s mistress.”

  Court Magika was a tribunal who pronounced sentence on cases that just couldn’t fit in the normal court systems. Made up of a council of witches who were also lawyers and judges, Court Magika had the power of life and death at their fingers.

  “That’s horrible,” I said, thinking of the poor shifter. Caught in mid-transformation, he would have been in incredible pain, unable to fully shift either way. The strain on his body had to have eventually killed him.

  “Trust me, the witch who cast that hex paid for it. Life on Gull Island, especially when you’ve had your powers stripped, is no walk in the park.” Caitlin gave me a smile from where she was polishing a couple of the camera lenses.

  “She’s right,” Hank said. “Anyway, so the ‘devil’ we were looking for was the shifter who lived for five days in the woods before he died. They only caught the witch because the shifter’s wife finally turned herself in. The guilt on her conscience was more than she could bear.

  “We’ve had other cases like that, where it turned out to be something totally normal. I’d say the ratio is about 70 percent actual hauntings or whatever, and 30 percent false alarms. But even the false alarms can be daunting, like with the wolf shifter,” Hank said. “We’re good to go. Let’s get the van loaded.”

  “I stopped and bought sandwiches, chips, candy bars, and water. We’ll stop on the way for coffee,” Caitlin said. “I think we’re ready to go.”

  “I need to put these on,” I said, holding up the long underwear. I hurried to the bathroom, did my business, and slid on the long-sleeved undershirt and the leggings. While I wasn’t looking forward to returning to the asylum, I decided to look at it as an adventure. Might as well go full immersion on the job, and at least I wouldn’t be alone. As I returned to the main room, Hank and Caitlin were carrying bags of equipment out the door.

  “We’re ready. Let’s head out to the van,” Tad said.

  “Whose van?” I asked.

  “Conjure Ink owns a van—we can transport all our equipment as well as up to seven people.” He locked the office door behind us as we trudged out into the overcast morning. It wasn’t snowing at the moment, but the temperatures were still hovering around the upper twenties, and everything had a frozen sheen to it. It was beautiful, in an Elsa sort of way.

  I crunched over the snow, following the others. We were headed toward a large van, and when we got there, Tad opened the door to reveal what looked like a bank of high-tech surveillance equipment mounted on a fold-down table on the opposite wall of the van. There were two seats up front, three near the computer equipment, and two more in the back, where I saw the stack of sleeping bags.

  Caitlin, Hank, and I sorted the equipment as Tad slid into the driver’s seat. Then, Caitlin and Hank took their places near the table. I stood there, unsure of where to sit.

  “January, ride shotgun,” Tad said.

  “I wasn’t sure where you wanted me,” I said as I belted myself into the front passenger seat. “What’s all that back there?”

  “Computers. We can download our results and know what we’re dealing with, without having to return to the office during sessions.” He glanced back to make sure that Caitlin and Hank were fully situated and buckled in, then eased the van out of the parking space and we were on the road.

  “How long have you been interested in work like this?” I asked.

  Tad shrugged. “All my life, I guess. I started studying about UFOs when I was eight. Of course, as a kid I devoured the tabloids. I didn’t care about who was dating who, I wanted to read the stories about the dogman or whatnot. I knew most of it was garbage, but I thought if I could just find one thing that was real…”

  “Did you know about the Otherkin community at the time?” It seemed unbelievable to me, but there were a handful of humans who still denied the existence of magic, of shifters, of the various preternatural entities who walked the face of the planet. How they still insisted that their beliefs had any veracity confounded me—evidence was everywhere, including in a lot of their next-door neighbors’ houses.

  “Oh, I always knew. Our neighbor was a shifter. He was an eccentric old coot who, every full moon, would go out and shift into his alt-form and run around the neighborhood, looking for treats.” He grinned. “That old dude was tough as nails. He was an ex-marine who had some form of PTSD. You know, one of those Get-off-my-lawn-you-kids types. But when he shifted into his collie form, he was the sweetest dog ever. Everybody loved him when he was in his alt-form, and everybody watched out for him. Poor guy was hit one night by a car. The driver couldn’t see him because it was hailing like crazy. He was in his alt-form, trying to get home, when he darted across the street at the wrong time. The driver skidded, but he clipped him a good one. It was hard on the whole neighborhood when he died.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. Finally, I opted for, “Then you’ve been aware of shifters all your life.”

  “I wanted to be a witch. But my mother told me we didn’t have the blood for it. I begged her to send me to one of the magic academies, but I couldn’t even get admitted. We just have no magical blood in our veins.”

  “How did you come to start Conjure Ink?”

  “I came across the Urban Legends organization about five years ago. I decided since they didn’t have a member site here in Western Washington, I’d create one. That’s when I began to pull together Conjure Ink.” He pulled into a drive-thru Starbucks and we all placed orders for far too much caffeine and sugar.

  While waiting for our orders to be filled, I thought about Tad.

  So many people envied those who were born to magical families, but there were other ways to work with magic, even if you didn’t have the aptitude. For instance, there were garden witches who worked on the practical level—they grew the herbs and harvested them under the right signs of the moon, and while they couldn’t cast the spells, they could commune with the plants and produce ethically sourced ingredients for those who could work the magic. But I knew that sort of side business wouldn’t have suited Tad at all. He had a thirst for knowledge, and running Conjure Ink seemed perfect for him.

  As Tad handed around our order and I passed out the cups and pastries, we got underway again.

  “So, my friend Ari—she’s been my best friend since I was little, is going into my side business with me,” I said. “Since we both work day jobs, we don’t have to rely on it for income, which means we can be selective about time and the cases we take on.”

  He nodded. “That’s a good idea,” he said. “Once you start relying on some
thing for your daily bread, it becomes a much heavier responsibility.”

  Caitlin, who had been listening from the back of the van, said, “So what does Ari do for a living? Moonshadow Bay is small, but I don’t remember ever running into someone with that name.”

  “Ari owns a hair salon. She runs it out of her own house—she’s tiny, petite…flame-red hair?” When Caitlin shook her head, I added, “How long have you been here? I don’t remember you from high school.”

  Caitlin grinned. “I went to high school fifty years ago. I’m a bobcat shifter, remember? Shifters live a lot older than most humans, or even than most witches. I was born in 1952.”

  Longevity rates could really be confusing for those who weren’t part of the Otherkin community. Shifters were long-lived, well into two or three hundred years or more. Witches—magical families like my own—were one step away from human. We lived a lot longer than most humans, a few up to two hundred, though mostly we topped out around one-fifty, and we aged slower so we stayed aware and able most of our lives. Vampires, whom I knew existed but had never met one, of course could live on much longer than either the shifters or witches. And there were other members of the Otherkin community.

  Hank sort of straddled the edge. He was a psychic—a human with intense psychic abilities. Which meant he and Tad would age faster than Caitlin and me.

  That made everything clearer. “That’s why you weren’t in my class. I thought you might be younger than me, but I guess that’s not the case.”

  “Can I ask something?” Hank said. “How did you get the name ‘January’?”

  I laughed. “My mother and father were convinced they were having a boy. I was conceived a few years before they could use ultrasound to determine gender. I’m not sure why they thought that I was going to be a boy, but they were so sure that they only picked out boy names. When I arrived without a penis, they were so thrown they couldn’t figure out what to name me. So—”