by Delia James
I stuck my hand in my purse to assure myself I had remembered to put my wand in there. Yes, I’m not only a witch with a witch’s cat; I have a magic wand. It’s not quite as magic as those souped-up models the Hogwarts kids carry. Mostly it’s a tool for focus, and I was going to need that focus right now.
I took a deep breath and, with an effort, raised my mental shields.
In need I call, in hope I ask, to stand in the protection of the Light. Three times I silently repeated the invocation Julia had taught me. I also pictured myself surrounded by a shimmering curtain of positive energy. In my case, it was all blue and green and gold like the aurora borealis, because I am an artist and everything must have color.
I was safe in here. I was the woman behind the curtain. Any unwanted vibrations this building was putting out would be redirected around me.
So mote it be, I added to close the invocation. I also crossed my mental fingers. Holding tight to my images, my spell, my wand and, most important, my beautiful latte in its to-go cup, I stepped into the new home of Northeast Java.
“What do you think, Anna?” said Miranda to me. “Isn’t it marvelous?
What I thought was that it felt like I’d ducked into the current of a summer creek. Vibrations thrummed through the place, buzzing around my head and ears. They were blurry and indistinct because of my mental curtain, but they were most definitely there. Before my training, they would have gone straight through me. Now I gripped my wand and focused on the shields. They shimmered and wavered, but they held and I could focus on what was really happening in the here and now.
“It’s going to be perfect,” Miranda was saying. “I mean, look at this!” She ran her hands lovingly over the massive antique oak bar, complete with the brass foot railing. “This will be the service counter, of course, and this will all be open seating.” She spread her hands to gesture around the whole room. “Upstairs is going to be the meeting and collaboration space, we’re going to have a free library and . . .”
I had to admit, now that I had the mental space to take it in, it was a beautiful place. The remaining tables and chairs had been clustered in the middle of the room while the old plaster was being restored. The pressed-tin ceiling looked original. I turned around in a complete circle, imagining trompe l’oeil–style murals wrapping around the walls. It could be a blend of scenes from Portsmouth’s history, all suitably detailed with a coffee theme. There could be crates of coffee on the docks being unloaded for men in tricorn hats here; a cluster of chic young things from the 1920s sitting at a café table here; a man in World War II uniform sharing a table with a Rosie the Riveter from the shipyard there . . .
But while I was looking at those blank walls and imagining possibilities, Jake was looking around the space like he expected something or someone to jump out from behind the bar.
A heartbeat later, I understood why.
Footsteps thudded overhead, as if someone was hurrying across the room above. Jake’s head snapped up. Without a word, he sprinted up the narrow side stairs.
“Oh . . . nuts,” muttered Miranda, and she took off after him.
I set my half-finished latte down on the bar and followed, fast.
The upstairs was a single lovely, sunny room. There was a half wall down the middle, complete with built-in shelves, which divided it into a front and a back. This was probably destined to be that free library Miranda had talked about. A few ancient folding chairs leaned against the wall along with a stepladder, white buckets and a jug of bleach.
It was also completely empty of, well, people. Except for us, and we were all crowded together at the top of the stairs.
“You heard it, right?” said Jake to me. “We all heard it. Footsteps.”
A shiver ran down my spine. The currents swirled hard around my shields, which shivered, but held. Mostly.
“I don’t know what I heard,” announced Miranda. “We’re on the main street now, Jake. There’s going to be all kinds of noises.”
But Jake was picking something up off the half wall. It was a thick, plain white china coffee mug, the kind that Northeast Java used for its stay-in customers.
“It’s your cup,” said Jake. “The one that went missing when we were here on Monday.”
“It’s a cup,” said Miranda. “One of the contractors could have left it.”
Then, we heard it again—a quick, steady thudding—only this time it came up from beneath us. It sure sounded like someone in hard-soled shoes walking across the floor downstairs.
My shields shuddered.
“One of the workmen,” said Miranda. “Or maybe Chuck, you know, came by. “
“I don’t wanna doubt you, Starbabe, but when we get down there, it’s gonna be empty and the door’s gonna be locked.”
Miranda glanced uneasily toward the stairs. A shadow flickered in the corner of my eye, but I couldn’t tell if it was real or just my Vibe-primed imagination. Jake shook his head and started down. Miranda followed him reluctantly, and so did I.
When we got there, the main floor certainly looked empty. Jake went over to the front door and rattled it. It did not open. Not that that meant anything, of course. It was probably the kind of door that locked automatically behind you. But there was that bell hanging on the ornamental arm overhead. We definitely had not heard that ring.
I rubbed my arms. Was it just me, or had it suddenly gotten a lot colder in here?
Then I saw my latte cup on the bar. I walked slowly over and picked it up. There were two immediate problems here. One was that I was pretty sure I had left my cup at the other end of the bar. The other was that somebody had drunk the last of my perfectly brewed, perfectly sweetened, perfectly foamed latte.
I set the cup down and folded my arms. “All right. Jake, Miranda, what’s going on?”
“Nothing,” said Miranda immediately. “Well, nothing much. Jake and I are just having a little disagreement about the building. I think it’s perfect.”
“And I,” said Jake, “think it’s haunted.”
4
“Haunted?” I repeated. Not possible. Okay, I believed in magic, with and without cats, and I believed in my Vibe. I believed my grandmother was a witch, that upright, uptight Julia Parris had once run a nightclub, and that the Red Sox were going to win the World Series again this year.
But I did not believe in ghosts. No. Uh-uh. Not now, not ever. Not that I was scared or anything, but it was a bridge too far. A great big spooky covered bridge in autumn with the bare trees rattling and crows sitting on the roof too far. I’d just misremembered where I’d put that take-out cup. And of course I hadn’t actually left any latte sitting around. I’d finished it on my own; I just hadn’t been paying attention. And those hadn’t really been footsteps we heard upstairs. Or downstairs.
Right? Right.
Jake, however, was not getting with the program. “First day we came in here, there was a rumble in the floor—”
“Which just happened to be when a dump truck was going by outside,” Miranda said.
“And there have been sudden drops in temperature, and it’s got cold spots.”
“Because it’s fall in New Hampshire, and the insulation is older than we are.”
“Tools have been disappearing and reappearing—”
“Say the contractors, but I haven’t—”
“We even put in a security camera. It didn’t catch anything.”
“One camera,” said Miranda stubbornly. “For the entire building.”
“You agreed, Starbabe,” Jake reminded her. “We have been over every square inch and we’ve still got these . . . phenomena.”
Miranda closed her mouth, but she also folded her arms and looked up at him with her chin stuck out.
Jake faced me. “I need to apologize, Anna. I haven’t been, like, totally straight with you.” A slow sinking feeling formed in the
pit of my stomach. “We heard about how you helped find out who killed Dorothy.” He paused again. “And we heard you might have had some . . . spiritual help.”
“Or do you prefer the term ‘paranormal’?” asked Miranda anxiously. “We don’t want to speak disrespectfully about your practice.”
What I preferred was not to talk about any of this. At all. But I wasn’t going to get that option.
When I came to Portsmouth, I’d helped solve a genuine murder mystery involving a local witch named Dorothy Hawthorne, who used to own the house I was currently occupying. I’d used my wits and my new magic and had a healthy dose of help from Alistair and the guardian coven to do it, too. I hadn’t realized that word about that had somehow gotten out. I guess I shouldn’t have been that surprised. Most of the members of the coven were pretty open about their practice, but I had planned on staying in the broom closet for a while. At least until I was sure that the practice was really right for me.
Okay, the cat and the house and the wand were pretty strong signals, but it was all still new and it was a little scary. Before I got to Portsmouth, I’d spent a lot of time and effort keeping my Vibe a secret, because when people found out about it they had two reactions:
1) They wanted me to be their psychic friend and tell them all about what they should do with their lives.
2) They just thought Annabelle Britton, the crazy artist girl, was, well, crazy.
Jake cleared his throat. “Anyway, a place that’s haunted—I mean, that’s just far out, when it’s not yours. But we can’t bring our customers into a scene where we don’t know what’s going to happen to them. No way. So I told Miranda we were backing out of this move unless you could . . . clear it.”
See what I mean? Reaction Number One, right there.
“There is nothing to clear,” said Miranda.
“Then she won’t find anything.”
They were both looking at me anxiously. I took a deep breath and pushed down my irritation. I liked these people. Plus, I was going through one of those times all freelancers dread. My usual sources of income had kind of all gone dormant at once. I needed this mural project.
“Are you sure it couldn’t just be a squatter?” I asked. “I mean, the building was standing empty for a while.”
Jake glanced at Miranda and shook his head. “We really did have to clean out the whole place top to bottom when we got in. We found a lot of stuff, but no squatters, at least not recent ones.” He sighed. “I’m sorry about dropping you in the middle of this, Anna. But, do you think you could . . . you know, have a look with the third eye or whatever it is you got?”
I could say no. In fact, I should say no. I was only an apprentice witch. I’d been formally initiated into the coven with a lovely moonlight ceremony, but before I got my first lessons from Julia, I’d been required to take an oath (on my own wand, no less) that I would not actively practice or cast any magical working without my teacher or another senior witch present. I’d gotten a pass on my shield spell, since that was for personal protection, but other than that, I was not supposed to so much as try to conjure spare change out from under the sofa cushions.
And naturally, I didn’t want to pretend to be looking for something that couldn’t possibly be there. I knew it couldn’t be there, because there was no such thing as ghosts.
Uh-huh. I looked at my empty latte cup again. You keep telling yourself that, A.B.
On the other hand, one of the things I was supposed to do even as an apprentice witch was follow the threefold law. That is: Whatever you send out into the world comes back to you threefold. I didn’t want to be sending out more fear and uncertainty to create anger and strife between Jake and Miranda.
And I really needed this commission.
“I couldn’t promise anything,” I told them. “Not every impression I can pick up has a clear meaning or source.”
“Of course, we understand, Anna,” said Miranda soothingly. “You just do your best.”
I admit, there was something in the way she said it that stung a little. When you’re carrying around something like my Vibe, you expect disbelief, but not from someone who’s on the magic bus herself.
I could, at this point, do one of two things. The smart thing would be to stall Jake and Miranda until I could get Julia and maybe one or two of the others here to provide magical backup and expertise.
I did the other.
“Okay,” I said. “Here goes.”
I put my back to the door and faced the room. I reminded myself that by soaking in the Vibe I knew was filling this room, I wasn’t actually casting a spell or even performing a ceremony. The vibrations were really going on outside me. I was just a receiver station. So, no harm, no foul. Right?
Right.
I let out a long breath and I pictured that shimmering, positive, northern-lights-ish ripple of energy I’d surrounded myself with lifting slowly, like the curtain at the start of a play.
The first thing I felt was warmth. It was relaxing, like settling into a hot bath. The air sparkled with a kind of suppressed excitement, or at least amusement. I felt it whisper against my skin, specifically, the back of my neck. I raised my hand and brushed it back.
I swear upon my life, I heard somebody chuckle behind me.
But I couldn’t have. Because Jake and Miranda were both in front of me, over by the bar. And they were waiting. I swallowed, and I tried to focus. I can’t say the real, present world went away exactly, but it did seem to retreat. The Vibe that surrounded me was more real, and more important, than anything else.
“This is a good place,” I said slowly. “This is the right place. Things are as they should be and will be.” My Vibe can mess with my ability to form comprehensible sentences. Maybe I should have warned them about that.
“There!” Miranda said. “I told you, Jake.”
“Okay, okay, I give.” Jake threw up his hands. “You were right and—”
The Vibe rippled; it swirled and it spread, like rings across the surface of a pond.
“Secrets,” I said.
“What?” they both exclaimed.
“Secrets,” I repeated. “Secrets locked away, hidden, vanished, gone . . .”
I could feel them. Deep in the swirling “water” I felt around me. The secrets were down beneath. They were up above. They were in the ceiling and behind the walls.
Everywhere.
My stomach lurched and I had to put a hand on the bar to keep from falling. I should have been scared—terrified, in fact—but I wasn’t. I wanted to know what was happening. I needed to know. To be known. Finally.
Someone was laughing at me. I needed to know about that, too. I needed to pick a direction, but how could I when the secrets were everywhere?
There was a doorway below the stairs. I walked over to it and pulled it open. Another set of stairs led down into the dark.
The Vibe was stronger here, bubbling up from the cellar.
Some vague and distant part of my brain was telling me I should stop this. I might have, too, once upon a time. Now, though, my curiosity had a hold of me as firmly as the Vibe did. I liked this sense of accomplishment. I liked the feeling of being able to finally follow my Vibe instead of just being tossed around by it. I wanted to find out if what I was picking up on was real.
In short, I wanted to know if I was right.
If I’d been thinking straight, I’d have realized this was not necessarily any kind of a good sign.
My fingers found the switch and snapped it on. Dim yellow light filled the stairwell. The steps were old and splintered and a little saggy in the middle. I couldn’t seem to muster enough worry to let that stop me.
I was heading straight down the basement stairs, with Jake and Miranda trailing behind.
The stairs creaked. My sneakers made hollow, thudding noises on the boards.
“Take it easy, Anna,” said Miranda from behind me. “That last one’s kind of steep.”
It was. I jarred my knee, and the Vibe shuddered.
“Hang on,” said Jake behind me. He must have flicked a switch, because a bare hanging bulb came on overhead.
The chilly basement was made up of a pair of rooms with brick walls and floors. The one we stood in was being used as construction storage. Two-by-fours, white rectangles of Sheetrock, five-gallon plastic buckets and sacks of plaster of Paris were stacked against the walls along with toolboxes and coils of braided cable. An old utility sink from the building’s previous lives had been left in place and had half a dozen jugs of industrial-strength soaps and solvents stashed underneath it.
“This is going to be the kitchen,” said Miranda. “One of the reasons we chose the building is there’s the room to install a walk-in fridge and decent-sized prep area.” She gestured toward the side room.
Her words washed over me without touching me. If I’d been wading through the Vibe upstairs, I was swimming down here. Secrets. Something hidden was waiting to be found. It wanted to be found.
I turned around slowly, angling for a direction, like when you’re trying to tell where that strange sound is coming from. Something thumped overhead. Jake’s nose shot into the air. I ignored it. Because every instinct in me was pointing straight down. I should be going down.
Except there was no more down.
Okay, down, I said to my Vibe and the universe at large. Down where? Down how?
Someone whistled, high, sharp and insistent. My head jerked around. Miranda had gone white. Jake took hold of her hand.
The open doorway to the second room was on my right. I bit my lip and walked across the threshold. My Vibe swirled, and it shifted and sank, straight through the floor. I felt it running through the bricks at my feet, like water down a drain.
I stared at the floor. The bricks were old, scarred and chipped. Time, grime and a whole lot of foot traffic had turned the mortar black.
It took a lot of effort, but I got my mouth to move. “Is there a subbasement?” It was like trying to talk underwater. My voice sounded wrong and echoey in my ears.