“What. The. Fuck. Was. That?” Nico breathed each word softly behind her, and sounded like he was good to run at the first available opportunity.
Nahia reached back to grab his hand, just to settle him down, or so she told herself. “What we came for. It’s gonna be okay.” She dropped his hand and stepped into the center of the landing, with every intention of going down the hallway. “We can hear you. Would you like to come talk to us? We’re not here to hurt you.”
She cast a quick glance back at Nico and saw his palm resting on his holstered gun. Okay, well one of them wasn’t there to hurt anyone, and the other was confused as to how that would happen exactly. He followed behind her closely as she approached the hallway. Each step seemed to heighten her awareness of the location and the entity.
“Can we talk about the officer you threw out of the house today?” she called down the hallway, her recorder out in front of her and her camera snapping pictures as she stood there. For some reason, she hesitated to go any farther than the mouth of the corridor.
“No.” It was loud and clear, and male, maybe in his late 40s.
The voice was close enough to her that all the hair on her body stood up at once, and she found herself pulling up taller. “Did you—?”
“Uh huh,” Nico answered immediately in a tone that told her he not only heard, but he quite probably had stopped blinking.
Undaunted, she tried again to establish contact with the entity. “Can you tell us your name, sir? Your home really is quite beautiful.”
“Go. Away.” The voice came from less than six feet away, and was clear enough that it could have been another person in there with them. A door slammed at the end of the hallway, and both Nico and Nahia jumped. The atmosphere changed in the room then, from tense but curious to openly hostile.
She didn’t need to be told twice. After taking one more picture, she turned on her heel and set her hand on Nico’s arm. She could feel the tension in his muscles as clearly as her own. “You heard the man.”
Nahia did not run. She would be damned if she let an entity run her out of a house. At the same time, she respected that if they didn’t leave on their own, this entity was clearly strong enough to enact his will on both of them, and that wasn’t something she was terribly keen to experience. Stopping only long enough to grab the camera she’d left recording in front of the staircase, they walked out of the building and into the fresh air of the night.
Nico leaned against the hood of his Nissan, dropping her backpack heavily to the ground. His eyes were the size of saucers and he was breathing like he’d just outrun a cheetah. “Jesus H. Christ. What the hell happened in there?”
She couldn’t have been more elated if she had wings. Nahia knelt down next to her escort and put all her accoutrements back in their respective spots before rising with the bag. “That is what we came for! That was so great!” She was practically dancing as she put her belongings in the back of the Fiat. It was one thing to have experiences; it was another to do so with a skeptic in tow who had no idea what to make of the incident. When she made her way back over to Nico, he hadn’t moved from his spot against the hood of the car, and he still held the stunned expression.
Leaning against the hood next to him, she crossed her arms as she regarded him. He was so tall, with night black hair and these shoulders…man, she wanted to know what they felt like beneath her fingertips. His hands were braced on the hood on either side of him, and he just looked like his entire understanding of everything in the universe had been rocked. “You okay?”
“As okay as I’m gonna be, I think,” he replied, a hint of humor in his voice. His eyes never left the house. “So, what now?”
Nahia watched the house and noticed, not for the first time, that the house seemed to watch them in return. “I’m kinda hungry. How do you feel about a cheeseburger?”
Nico found humor in the little ritual Nahia did before they got in their cars. Her admonition to the entities of ‘no riders, no fares, no stowaways’ just struck him as amusing and eccentric, much like the speaker herself.
As he sat across from her at a shiny black vinyl booth at a nearby Steak N Shake, he found that the bright lights only improved the view. Her hair was back in a braid of turquoise streaked black and rested on her shoulder, almost as thick as his wrist. He found himself wondering what it looked like down, and how it would feel wrapped around his fingers.
The quick smile and dark eyes that sparkled when she laughed were also distinct bonuses. She was cute, in the girl-next-door way right down to her sparkly KISS t-shirt, and he found himself completely blindsided by her, both in her person and what they’d done tonight.
As soon as the waitress stepped away with their orders, he looked at her curiously. “Okay, explain. What the hell happened back there?” He had never experienced anything so simultaneously scary yet exhilarating in his entire life. And he jumped out of airplanes.
Nahia toyed with her complementary glass of water and the straw therein. “That was…intelligent responses to my questions. That was an intelligent haunting.” Her grin grew as she said the words until the size of it cut dimples into her cheeks. She looked like she’d gotten the biggest rush from the whole encounter, and while he’d been unsure at the beginning, her fearlessness had been amazing to watch.
“It spoke to us.” That was still so incredible to him. He’d heard ghost stories as a kid, but he’d never seen anything like tonight. It was a wonder his hands weren’t still shaking, though she didn’t need to know that.
She nodded, balling up the straw wrapper and flicking it across the table into the sugar holder. “And we got it on tape. It was brilliant. Easily the best I’ve had in a long, long time.”
“So, do you do that full-time?” He wasn’t sure how these things worked, and considering the building was abandoned, he doubted she was making any money on it.
She shook her head, causing tendrils of her braid to come free and curl around her face. “Oh no, strictly a side job. It’s not something I would charge money for, anyway.” Her cheeks flushed pink and she broke eye contact to look at the table and then to the floor next to them.
“So then what do you do full-time?” With her distinctive look, he couldn’t imagine her surviving in an office environment.
Nahia laced her fingers together on the table in front of her, an action he recognized as self-soothing. For all her flamboyant look, she wasn’t comfortable in the spotlight. Straightening when the waitress came with their drinks, she smiled. “I’m the owner and proprietor of Wellington’s Magickal Apothecary downtown on Mass Ave.”
That was a tony neighborhood, an eclectic mix of high end boutiques and little restaurants with great martinis. “What, pray tell, is a magickal apothecary?”
Nahia sat back in the booth with a grin that bespoke of confidence and comfort with the subject matter. She was obviously more at ease talking about the business than she was herself. “I sell tea.” She held a straight face for all of moment before laughing outright. “Sorry, that’s the usual joke. It’s easier to explain it that way than to say what I really do.”
“Which is?” His instincts, both as an investigator and as a trained psychologist, had him paying closer attention to her. At least, that’s what he told himself as he sat across from the unusual, beautiful woman. Her attempts at diversion were amusing as they were at odds with her overall open demeanor.
“I do sell tea, herbal and medicinal, both.” She nodded to impress upon him the truthfulness of the statement. “And amulets, incense, sage, crystals, candles, pendula, tarot cards...you get the picture.”
As her list grew, so did his eyes. Her reticence was an act of protection, and not deflection. Her owning a wiccan store was definitely not what he expected from her, though the longer he thought about it, the more sense it made. “Fortune teller and ghost hunter, huh? What do you do in your free time?”
The waitress dropped off their burgers, hers with extra pickles and a side of steak sauce,
his with the Frisco sauce that he never failed to get on his shirt. She took a bite and sipped her water before she answered him. “I’m not a fortune teller.” The way she ducked her head told him she had more to say, but kept it to herself. “I just have a store that dovetails nicely with my hobby.”
He raised a ketchup-covered fry in tribute. “That it does.” They ate in companionable silence until the last fry had been devoured and the last pickle slice spoken for. Throughout the meal, he caught her staring at him more than once, something that pleased him more than he thought it should. “How’d you get involved with ghost hunting?”
She shrugged, absently gathering her debris and stacking it neatly on the table in front of her, presumably to make it easier for the waitress or busboy. “Same way most people do, I guess.”
Having absolutely no experience prior to tonight, he prodded, “Which is?”
She looked around the restaurant like she was checking the seclusion of their location, then leaned across the table with a seriously intense look. “I grew up in the Holmes House in Irvington.”
Obviously this was very important, if he knew what the hell she was talking about. “The Holmes House?”
The look she gave him could have been an x-ray, and he could see the exact moment she remembered he wasn’t a local because her dark eyes got big and her cute little mouth formed an ‘o’ involuntarily. “Of course you wouldn’t know that. The Devil in the White City?” He shook his head again, now terribly confused. “Okay, one of the first American serial killers. 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. He killed a bunch of folks there, then fled prosecution, left a bunch of bodies in his wake. At least a couple of them were here in Irvington, kids.”
Jesus. Talk about a gruesome place to grow up. “And you saw them?”
She shook her head. “I don’t see them, but I can feel them and I can hear them. We’d play games when I was little. They’d turn on the TVs in the house and I’d run through and turn them off. They’d move things in plain sight of the grownups and wait for them to notice. I could hear them laughing, talking to each other, sometimes to me. Just little things. I didn’t know I was different until later, but my parents were exceptionally cool about it.”
He didn’t think his eyes could get any wider as he listened to her story until she mentioned her family. “You told your parents?”
“Well, yeah. Figured they could hear them, too, since they noticed when they moved stuff. My grandmother had the sight according to my dad, but she passed away when I was a baby. They assumed it was just a quirk, and I would grow out of it, but I never did.” She looked small for some reason, and vulnerable. He had this inexplicable urge to go over to the other side of the booth and hug her, but he refrained, only just.
“So now you seek it out? The contact with the other side.”
The vulnerability he sensed vanished as she nodded and sat up a bit straighter. “Yeah, I do. I want proof, simple as that. I want empirical evidence, irrefutable stuff like pictures and recordings, and then I’ll go from there.”
He wasn’t quite sure what she meant by ‘go from there’, but it sounded just as dangerous, if not more so, than the stuff they did today. “So what are you going to do now? I mean, as far as the house is concerned.”
She signaled the waitress. “How do you feel about a milkshake?” she asked him when she arrived. He could see the comfort she derived from food, even though her form was svelte and curvy, but she wasn’t getting out of his line of questioning.
Once they’d agreed to share one, he asked her again. “So the house?”
Her hands were moving again, pulling on her braid, futzing with her napkin, a sign he began to recognize as agitation with her. Finally, she laced her fingers together and looked at him across the table with a cautious expression. “I’m going to review the evidence, the audio, the pictures, the video. Then I’m going to research the house and see if I can help the spirit.”
She might as well have been speaking Greek. “What does researching the house have to do with helping the spirit? And what can you do for someone who’s already dead? And why?”
Her sigh and resumption of fidgeting told him that was not the right answer. “I find out who it is and why they haven’t moved on yet. Nobody deserves to be trapped here.”
Unable to stand her discomfort any longer, he reached across the table and covered both her hands in one of his. She looked up at him, dark eyes wide and almost fearful. “Hey, it’s okay.” When she blinked at him and nodded slightly, he knew he had to ask the obvious, “You don’t like to talk about this with people, do you?”
Nahia’s cheeks flooded bright pink, but she never took her eyes off him. “No. Not with people I’ve just met, I don’t. Most people look at me like I’ve grown three heads. It’s easier to divert attention and keep moving.” She leaned forward with a wry grin. “You’re not very good at going with the diversion.”
“Let’s just say I’m very focused.” Nico released one of her hands which promptly moved to her hair, smoothing tendrils that weren’t even out of place before moving to rub the back of her neck and then return to the seat next to her. Her other hand, though, was completely still in his, save for a slight trembling, his thumb absently rubbing back and forth over her wrist.
The waitress came with their chocolate milkshake and two glasses, a knowing smile on her lips when she saw their joined hands. The only broke apart when Nahia divided up the drink and hummed happily with her first sip.
He nodded in agreement. The chocolate milkshake had been the second best idea of the night. The first had been agreeing to Nigel’s then-ridiculous request to look after his friend. Little did he think he’d be sharing a meal with a beautiful, decidedly different woman, one that he might want to get to know better, if she’d allow it.
His shake now halfway gone, he tried to retrieve the previous conversation. “I’ve never experienced a disembodied voice before tonight.”
Nahia didn’t look up from where she was attacking the bottom of the glass with a long spoon. “First time’s always strange. I was ten.”
The unexpected factoid brought him up short. “You’ve been ghost hunting since you were ten?” He couldn’t imagine the type of parents that would allow a preteen girl to go into abandoned and purportedly haunted locations. He also couldn’t imagine how weird it would be to hear voices that no one else could. His training whispered schizophrenia, but he definitely could not deny what had happened tonight in the old house, so he was willing to go with it.
She shook her head and smiled shyly as she looked at him. “I’ve been able to hear them since I was ten. I didn’t actively start hunting until much, much later.”
“So explain the research aspect of your hunting to me.” He would have been lying if his scientific mind wasn’t curious about her potential findings.
A lightning quick smile danced over her lips, so fast he’d have missed it if he hadn’t been watching her intently. Nahia’s words were soft and just as quick as her smile as her eyes fell to her lap. “I research the house. Tax records, police runs, news stories, you know. Try to get a name, see who I’m dealing with. Then I go back and try to talk to them, to show them a way to the light, to give them comfort of knowing that someone cares about them, even though they’re no longer here in body.”
The sensitivity of her statement surprised him not at all, though the protective feelings it sparked inside him were unexpected. “You’d have gone in by yourself tonight, wouldn’t you?”
She looked at him from beneath her lashes and nodded slightly, before raising her chin and meeting his gaze head on. “Definitely. I’m afraid of very little in this world.”
Nico believed her when she said she’d ghost hunt on her own, that had been obvious in the way she led them through the house like she was ten feet tall and bulletproof. But her assertion of fearlessness rang a bit hollower when he could see she was clearly terrified of the strange connection between them. Bringing it up, however, would serve no p
urpose but to push her away, and that was the last thing he wanted.
The diminutive brunette with the soulful eyes and the honest smile intrigued him, and as new as the whole situation was to him, he hoped she’d let him stick around awhile to get to know her better. Only one way to do that, really, and after very little thought, he was all in. “So, how do I help you?”
Nahia didn’t do tarot reading for other people, generally speaking. Maybe for her friends at parties sometimes, but certainly not for money and not regularly. She just didn’t like giving people bad news, and for her, the cards were accurate and not terribly shy about their doom-and-gloomy sides.
That said, she didn’t mind turning to the cards herself when she had a question, just to provide perspective and a bigger picture view. A deck of Renaissance tarot wrapped in velvet was kept in a teak box on the shelf above and to the right of the register, her personal stash for when she was bored. She was shuffling to do a simple three card spread on her checkout counter in the empty store just after she opened, when the bell above the front door pealed.
She looked up to see her best friend Nigel’s smiling face. He had the kind of face that made women swoon, all angular cheekbones and strong jaw. Add those to a muscular six-foot frame, dark hair and light green eyes, and he was the kind of pretty that truncated women’s vocabularies. Today he was in her favorite suit, slate gray and black shirt, making him look like a cinematic mobster, and not a missing persons detective.
“Morning, sweets! Your parents’ plane get off okay?”
His attempt to play coy only incensed her further, so she nodded once curtly instead of speaking. They both knew her parents’ anniversary vacation was not what he came to talk about.
“Something wrong?”
“I’m mad at you,” she said, but couldn’t quite keep the grin out of her voice. She didn’t look up at him as she continued to shuffle the oversized cards.
Dead and Disorderly (Behind the Blue Line Series Book 2) Page 2