by Pat Esden
“I’ll be right there.”
As Chloe hung up the last of the train cars rattled past, dragging their noise and vibrations with them as they moved on. The air stilled. Darkness settled around her, except for the glow from her phone. She realized then that she could have used its light to help her find the kittens in the garbage. But she couldn’t change that now. The important thing was that the ghost kittens had vanished, a sign that she’d found all the living ones—living for now, at least. Truthfully, she might have been a skilled medium, but she was no kind of adept witch or healer. She’d never even had a pet. All she could do was keep them warm and hurry.
Em gathered up the coat, snugging it against her chest as she started back through the weeds. When she reached the street, half of her wanted to keep walking toward the complex. A wiser part pulled her under the safety of a streetlight to wait for her ride.
Minutes passed. She paced to the edge of the streetlight’s brightness, then paced back. She adjusted the coat to give the kittens more air. But she didn’t want to risk looking at them. Not here in the cold. Not until they were safe.
Finally, a familiar orange BMW coupe pulled up to the curb. Em climbed in with her bundle. The car belonged to the coven’s high priest, Devlin Marsh, but Chloe was driving. Em was glad about that. She really liked Chloe. She was not only pretty, in a long-legged and fashionable-blonde sort of way, but she was also kind and headed-for-med-school smart. Best of all, it wasn’t just people Chloe cared about. She loved animals, especially cats and Devlin’s excitable golden retriever. She’d know what to do for the kittens.
“How many are there?” Chloe asked, pulling the car away from the curb.
“Three. But one is barely moving.” Em dared to open the bundle and take a closer look under the brightness of the car’s interior light. Two sets of shiny eyes stared up at her. The third set were closed. The kittens didn’t look quite as tiny as she’d thought. Still, they were really young.
“I messaged my friend Juliet. She used to volunteer at a cat rescue. I’m sure she’ll have all kinds of advice.”
Em cradled the kittens closer. “I just hope they all make it.”
“I do too.” Chloe fell silent, then stepped heavily on the gas.
Em glanced Chloe’s way. She’d expected her to ask how she’d found the kittens or to give her advice about what they should do. But Chloe’s attention was trained on the road ahead, her jaw working as if she were lost in thought.
“Is something wrong?” Em asked.
Chloe skimmed her hand along the steering wheel, leaving behind a slight sheen of sweat. “Yeah. Something happened at the complex while you were gone.”
Em swallowed hard. There was only one thing that could have upset Chloe this much—and the coven had been worried about it. Despite the upturn Em’s life had taken since she’d joined the Circle, the coven itself had gone through a terrifying upheaval that had culminated on the night of the club fire. Actually, “upheaval” was far too mild a word for what had happened, and for the depth of the threat it represented to the coven.
Rhianna Davies—a witch with a longstanding grudge against the Northern Circle—had murdered Athena Marsh, the coven’s high priestess and Devlin’s sister. She’d then used necromancy and strips of Athena’s skin to create a necklace that allowed her to transform into a likeness of Athena. In that disguise, Rhianna had manipulated the coven members into awakening the wizard Merlin’s demonic Shade. The coven had later managed to banish it. But Rhianna had escaped, leaving the Circle holding the bag for bringing the Shade into this world, an incident the Eastern Coast High Council of Witches and their legal system would never overlook.
Worry sent a chill up Em’s arms, and she shivered. To make matters worse, awakening the Shade wasn’t the only violation the High Council could accuse the coven of committing. Their battle to banish Merlin’s Shade had caused citywide chaos and briefly exposed the existence of true witches and magic to the mundane world. No matter how good a cover story the coven created, it was still impossible for an entire city to overlook flying monkeys made from scrap iron rampaging through the streets, not to mention glowing swords, energy balls, and the strange lightning that had caused the club fire.
Em steadied her voice. “I’m guessing you heard from the High Council?”
“Worse. They’ve sent a special investigator.”
“What? The investigator is here already? That was quick.” Em rubbed a hand over the bundle in her lap, feeling the stir of the kittens’ tiny bodies. An investigator. At the complex. That wasn’t good. They could recommend the coven be disbanded for their violations. If they saw fit, they could even abolish individual coven members’ ability to work magic and seize their assets, including sacred objects and the complex itself.
Though Em hated how selfish it made her feel, an investigation like this could also put an end to her personal plans. She’d joined the coven mainly so she could live in the sanctuary of their complex while she got her act together. Once she reached a year of sobriety, she intended to leave and never be dependent on anyone or anything again. But right now, she wasn’t prepared to leave. She had no money, no job, no other place to live—other than the hellish halfway house or the streets.
“The investigator is interrogating Devlin right now.” Chloe’s voice strained upward, her anguish for her boyfriend undisguised.
“Shit.” Em’s chest tightened. Devlin was usually cool and collected, a poster boy for Ivy League success. But right now, he was suffering deeply, full of remorse and guilt, shaken by the loss of Athena, a sister he loved with all his heart.
The car tires skidded as Chloe winged into the complex’s driveway a little too fast. Anger tinged her voice. “I knew the Council would send someone soon. But this soon? It’s ridiculous. It’s barely been a week. Devlin—all of us—are grieving. It’s not fair.”
“It’ll be okay. Devlin can handle himself,” Em said. A lump knotted in her throat. She looked down at the bundle of kittens. This certainly wasn’t the best night for bringing home orphans.
Ahead, the outline of the complex’s main building came into view, an old three-story brick factory that the Circle had transformed into an artsy group living quarters. Devlin and Athena technically owned it and the adjoining smaller buildings, all surrounded by a chain-link fence broken only by an elaborate and funky arched gateway—but Devlin owned the entire complex now that Athena was gone.
Em’s gaze went back to Chloe. “So what’s the investigator like? A man or a woman? Suit-and-tie, by-the-book asshole?”
“You got the asshole part right. He walked in the front door, then just hauled Devlin into the office and started firing questions at him. He barely took time to introduce himself.” As Chloe drove under the gateway, she glanced through the windshield toward the peak of the gate where the remaining flying monkey sculptures stood sentinel, their non-animated wings glistening in the darkness. “I bet the inspector will have a field day quizzing Devlin about them.”
Em cringed. “I feel so bad for Devlin. What’s wrong with the investigator? Is he just old and crotchety?”
“No, not at all. He’s only a little older than Devlin, maybe thirty. He’s more of a backwoods enforcer, all alpha and bad attitude. Not at all like the elderly examiner that investigated my dad’s business. His name is Gar Remillard…”
Chloe kept talking, but her voice faded into the background as Em’s entire focus went to a vehicle parked by the front door of the complex’s main building. Most likely the special investigator’s ride. A vehicle that should have been unfamiliar to her. But she knew the big, lifted truck instantly, its oversize tires made for mudding. The truck she’d seen right after she’d left the A.A. meeting. The guy with the camo cap, the black curly hair, and intense stare.
The haunted man.
Chapter 2
Invisible friends. Vivid imagination, other paren
ts would have said.
My aunt knew the truth. She sold my mother
on the possibilities, as shiny as a new car or a diamond ring,
their ticket away from sugar daddies and welfare fraud.
—Journal of Emily Adams, age 22
Memory from second grade. Amherst, Massachusetts.
It was almost eleven. Em sat on her bed with a nurser bottle, feeding the littlest kitten an emergency formula she’d made from a recipe on the Internet. The other kittens slept curled up in a box, kept warm with a heating pad and towel.
The kitten stopped sucking and closed its eyes, a purr vibrating from its scrawny body. The other two were brown tigers with the incandescent blue eyes of super young kittens. This one was white, and its eyes were changing to golden-amber. Em had originally thought it the weakest kitten, but it had drunk greedily and kneaded its claws into her as it sucked.
She glanced away from the kitten to where her phone and a six-month A.A. medallion sat on the nightstand. It was late, and she didn’t feel like calling, but she needed to touch base with her therapist or she’d catch hell tomorrow. Her therapist wasn’t just the person at the halfway house in Albany who had hooked her up with the coven, she’d also agreed to be her temporary A.A. sponsor: someone she was supposed to check in with daily.
She put the kitten in the box with the others and retrieved her phone. She could leave a message if no one answered—better to do that than nothing.
The phone rang once. Twice.
Her therapist picked up. “Hey, Emily. I was just thinking about you.”
“Sorry it’s so late. I found some abandoned kittens in a trash bag on my way home from a meeting.”
“That’s horrible. Are they going to be okay?”
“I think so. We’re going to take them to the vet tomorrow. They’re really little.”
Her therapist’s voice went from concerned to firm. “While you were at the meeting, did you talk to anyone about being your sponsor? You’re welcome to call me anytime, day or night. But it’s important for you to have a local support system.”
“Ah—I was planning on asking someone at the women’s meeting later this week.” She glanced at her six-month medallion. One of the tenets of A.A. was rigorous honesty. But what she’d said wasn’t a total lie, any more than not mentioning the trouble the coven was in was a lie. She intended to go to that meeting, eventually.
“That sounds like a good plan.” Her therapist’s tone lightened. “You’re still writing in your journal?”
“Yeah, every day.” That was the full truth. Along with everything else, she owed her therapist for turning her on to working through her feelings and past by freewriting—especially poetry. She really enjoyed that. “One of the coven members gave me a cool book. Return of the Great Goddess. It’s really inspiring.”
“I’ll have to look it up.” The therapist’s tone became more casual. “I read a wonderful poem about the Goddess this morning. Maiden. Mother. Crone…”
Em’s attention shifted away from the phone as a rumble of raised voices came from somewhere beyond her closed bedroom door. Half-listening to her therapist, Em tiptoed to the door and stepped out into the hallway so she could hear the argument. It was coming from somewhere on the floor below, reverberating up the stairwell.
“It’s the truth,” Devlin’s voice growled.
“So you say,” a man’s voice answered, dangerously low and cool. Gar Remillard. She was sure of it. His voice didn’t have anything distinctive about it, just the rock-hard tone of a man not about to give an inch.
Devlin huffed. “Wherever you got your information, it’s wrong.”
“I’ll see you in the morning, Devlin.” Gar’s voice paused for a second, then he went on. “I recommend between now and then, you find yourself some proof.”
The tap of footsteps sprinted up the stairwell toward her floor. Em started to retreat, but she wasn’t fast enough; Gar reached the top before she could get out of sight.
Devlin was well-built, the kind of put-together handsome that was hard to overlook. Gar in his faded jeans and taut T-shirt was even harder not to notice, but for entirely different reasons. He stood broader and taller than Devlin, a good few inches over six feet. Slashes of dark ink marked his biceps and forearms. A five o’clock shadow stippled his rugged chin. Unruly black hair. Steel-blue eyes darkened by the hallway’s dim light. Behind him the ghost whirled, an all but invisible tempest tagging his every move.
He nodded a brusque greeting to her, his surly expression unwavering.
She feigned a smile and retreated into her room. He went into the one next to hers and thumped the door shut. The guest room. She should have guessed that’s where he was staying.
“Em? Did you hear me?” her therapist said.
“Oh, yeah—sorry.” Em eased the door to her room closed and bolted the lock. “I lost the connection for a second. It’s this cheap phone.”
“That’s okay. I should get to bed. Don’t forget about the sponsor.”
“I won’t.”
Relieved to have the call over with, Em stashed her phone on the nightstand, her thoughts already returning to the room next door and its surly occupant. When she’d arrived at the complex a couple of weeks ago, Devlin had let her pick out her own room. She’d chosen this tiny one up on the top floor with the empty guest rooms. He’d encouraged her to change her mind and suggested she take a larger room with a private bath down on the second floor, the one that Brooklyn had ended up moving into recently. But this little room set all by itself had felt right to her, tucked out of the way like a bird’s nest in the canopy of a tall pine. She’d never dreamed that she’d end up sharing her retreat so soon, and with someone as troubled and dangerous to the coven as Gar—and his ghost. She felt so bad for both of them.
Em crawled into bed and shut off the light on her bedside stand. She curled up and murmured her usual prayer of gratitude for a safe place to sleep and a refrigerator full of food. For not throwing up every morning like she used to and for the money she made doing cleaning chores around the complex. “Dear Goddess, protect the coven, protect the kittens too.”
The whoosh of a shower whispered out from the other side of her bedroom wall. The guest bath. It was interesting how she and Gar had noticed each other even before he arrived at the complex. She’d been mistaken to assume it was nothing more than a fleeting connection, brought on by his haunting and her psychic ability. In truth, Gar and the ghost were smack-dab in the middle of her business. If she could figure out who was haunting him, and why, then she might be able to free the ghost from whatever was keeping it earthbound. Without question, breaking that attachment would make Gar less volatile and easier to reason with. She should have mentioned the haunting to Chloe, but she’d been so worried about the kittens that it had slipped her mind. First thing in the morning, she’d tell everyone. Some of them might have sensed something was off about him, but more likely they hadn’t. She was the coven’s only psychic medium, after all.
As she curled up tighter, a memory slipped into her mind. Another haunting. Years ago. She was fifteen, sitting on the loading dock at a conference center in Atlanta. The hot sun. The stench of garbage. The clank of pans in the kitchen behind her. Next to her, Alice. Sixteen years old. Haunted blue eyes, so much like Gar’s. Full, beautiful lips. The two of them holding hands as they plotted Em’s escape from her aunt and mother.
Em squeezed her eyes shut, trying to hold back the inevitable flood of harder memories: Alice, her kisses. Her trembling hands. Her craziness brought on from being haunted by the baby she’d lost, a spirit too young and fiercely attached to listen to Em’s pleas for it to move on and let its mother live in peace. Another memory. The Royal Palm Playhouse in Tampa. Alice lying dead on the bathroom floor. A syringe on the tiles beside her.
Em’s throat tightened until she couldn’t swallow. She w
riggled across the bed and grabbed the bottle of water from beside her phone. But the bottle’s thin plastic felt wrong in her grip, not at all like the hard surface of the travel mug her fingers had reflexively expected to feel. The mug she’d kept filled with vodka and Coke. The burn and forgetting.
She shoved the bottle back on the stand. She’d gotten over the cravings. She’d gotten through detox months and months ago. When was the reptilian part of her brain going to forget and let go? Water was good. Liquor wasn’t an option. Not today. Not tomorrow.
Taking a deep breath, she picked the bottle back up and took a long sip, the tepid water moistening her mouth, soothing her throat. She took another breath and sent the thoughts out into the darkness. Alice, I miss you. Watch over us all, especially the haunted man.
She didn’t expect to physically hear an answer. She never had, at least when it came to Alice. But she often sensed Alice watching over her like a guardian angel.
A muffled squeak reverberated through the wall as the guest room shower shut off.
Em held motionless, hands clamped around the bottle as she listened. She couldn’t hear Gar’s movements or anything else. But she could imagine him and what he was doing, unfolding the towels she’d set out when she’d cleaned the guest room a few days ago. Wiping moisture from his legs… Gar Remillard. A haunted man. Curly black hair. Camo cap pulled low. Looking at her.
Careful to not make a sound, she put the bottle back on the nightstand and scrunched down under her blankets.
A thump came from directly behind her headboard—his headboard, bumping into the wall as he got into his bed. When she’d left the clean towels in his bathroom, she also put fresh sheets on the bed and scented them with a spray made from lavender and sage. Hopefully the herbs would ease the ghost’s anguish and bring Gar gentle dreams.
An ache tugged in her chest as thoughts of Gar and his burden twisted with memories of Alice, her half-crazed eyes and the soul-deep connection they’d shared. Haunted.