Well, except for the ghosts.
I swore under my breath and tugged my blouse back in place as hot tears lined my lashes. This day ranked right up there with the worst of them. To top it off, there was a milky figure looming in the parlor. It reclined against the rolltop desk, grinning smugly at me. Papa Nando, I assumed.
Failure, rejection, and a taunting ghost. What a trifecta.
“I didn’t do this to you,” I snapped. “I couldn’t curse a fly, let alone a whole family. Every bit of magic I’ve done in this house has been to help you—to help your great-great-grandson. And now you’re mocking me for getting—or rather, for not getting—the shaft. Can you say rude?”
Papa Nando frowned thoughtfully and then shrugged. He bent over and tapped his fist against a panel of the desk. The piece popped open, revealing a hidden stash of old rum bottles. He waved his hand with bravado, inviting me to partake before he faded from sight.
“Well, that’s more like it,” I said, crossing the room to help myself.
The bottles were old. Super old. If Papa Nando was the only one who knew about them, then they had to have been hiding in the desk, undisturbed, for nearly a hundred years. I questioned whether I should risk sampling one, but then decided screw it.
After the day I’d had, a stiff drink was just what the doctor ordered. And besides, it would have been rude to dismiss the first olive branch offered by the witch-hating ghost who was sabotaging my career.
I squatted in front of the desk and selected a bottle of rum, blinking the dust off it before cracking the seal. I didn’t see a glass, but rather than fetch a coffee mug from the kitchen, I drank straight from the bottle. Pirate style.
The booze burned a trail from my tongue all the way to my navel. It was a poor substitute for the fire Dylan had stoked in me earlier, but it would do for now. I stood and then flopped down onto the armchair beside the desk before taking another long drink from the bottle.
What the hell was I going to do? I was at a loss with this house. With Dylan. With the Hernández family curse.
My thoughts wandered lazily, muddled and muted from the rum. Though, I still startled easily enough when the stairs creaked behind me.
I jumped up out of the chair and spun around, wielding the liquor bottle like a sword. Had Papa Nando decided our truce had lasted long enough? Was he preparing to vault over the railing and rush me like a raging phantom?
But instead of Papa Nando, an older woman looked down at me from the second landing. Her head was wrapped in a white bandana that matched her dress. She frowned at the bottle in my outstretched hand, and I quickly dropped it to my side, resisting the urge to hide it behind my back.
“The open house was this morning,” I said, doing my best not to slur my words. “But I’m happy to show you around, give you a private tour.”
She didn’t reply, just turned and headed upstairs without me.
Oookay.
This was nice and awkward.
I set the bottle of rum back inside the hidden cupboard and snagged a brochure off the dining room table before following the old lady.
Maybe I wouldn’t be getting laid tonight. But a signed contract on the Hernández house would definitely help soothe my disappointment. Even more so than the rum.
I topped the stairs on the second floor and glanced down the long hallway toward the bedrooms. It was empty. Another creak from above drew my attention up to the next landing. I caught a glimpse of white through the spindles and spotted a weathered hand on the banister.
The old gal could move.
“Ma’am?” My voice echoed up the stairwell as I took the steps two at a time in my high heels. “The third floor hasn’t been renovated, but I’m sure we could discuss that further with the seller if you need the extra space. Ma’am?”
The third floor didn’t have a long hallway like the second. Only a small sitting room next to a single, closed door. And the old lady was nowhere in sight.
I hadn’t ventured this far during overhaul day. I’d been too worried about walking in on a den of disgruntled bats and getting attacked a la Bruce Wayne before falling to my death—either out a window or down two flights of stairs. The belfry was a level up, but one could never be too careful.
Still, not to be deterred, I reached for the door and slowly cracked it open.
“Ma’am?” I whispered into the dark room as I felt around for a light switch. My finger snagged on a thin chain, and I held my breath as I gave it a tug.
A bulb blinked to life overhead. It spilled thin light over three twin beds and an assortment of old toys, including G.I. Joes, Tonka trucks, and one creepy, yarn-haired rocking horse with green eyes.
There was an eerie quiet to the room, as if no one had been up here for a very long time. Not even the old lady who had vanished without a trace. My skin tingled with equal parts excitement and dread.
Then the floor creaked behind me.
My heart leapt into my throat, and I loosed a blood-curdling scream.
Chapter 9
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING up here?” Dylan asked while I learned how to breathe again.
“There was...an old lady,” I panted and pressed a hand to my chest to keep my heart from ripping free. “I thought she was interested in the house, but then she just...disappeared.”
“An old lady?” Dylan looked confused. Then he sniffed me. “Have you been drinking?”
I ignored the question and glared at him. “I know what I saw.”
“And this lady, she came up here?”
I nodded and turned back to look inside the room again, sure I must have somehow overlooked her. “Was this your bedroom?”
“I shared it with my brother and cousin when we were children,” Dylan said, nodding at the row of beds.
“All the way up here?” I grimaced, wondering if he was about to reveal an icky Flowers in the Attic explanation.
“No one wanted to move into Papa Nando and Mama Ellie’s room off the parlor, so Mama Gretta and Mama Lois kept their rooms on the second floor,” Dylan said. “My mother and father shared a room, and my aunt and uncle shared the one across the hall from them. Which left this one for the batlings.”
“It must have been freezing in winter,” I said, noticing a tiny radiator between the two windows along the far wall. It couldn’t have possibly provided enough warmth.
Dylan shrugged. “It wasn’t so bad. If it got really cold, we’d Shift and huddle in with the bats in the belfry,” he added, dismissing my sympathetic frown. “We loved being so close to the belfry—which, to young fruit bats, was like a giant playroom with easy access to the backyard and the pawpaws.”
“And the other bats, the ones that weren’t Shifters, didn’t mind?”
“Not at all,” he said fondly. “They were our friends. Of course, they’re all dead now.” His brow creased, and his voice grew softer. “Even with my family’s curse, the microbats have shorter life expectancies. And I’ve been gone for twenty years.”
“I’m so sorry.” I reached out to touch his arm, but then stopped, remembering the way he’d recoiled from me before tearing off. Dylan snagged my hand before I could retract it.
“No, I’m sorry.” He sighed. “I shouldn’t have left earlier. I’m just...a mess right now. I suspect it will only get worse as the clock counts down.”
“It’s okay.” I smiled at him despite hearing my aunt Evillene’s reprimanding voice in my mind again.
Worthless, pathetic excuse for a witch.
I ignored it and circled back to something Dylan had said earlier. “You thought Papa Nando and Mama Ellie were desperately in love, right?” He nodded. “And Mama Gretta said that the curse was an accident?”
“Yeah, why?” he asked, brows knitting together curiously.
“What’s the average lifespan of a fruit bat?”
“About thirty y—” His eyes lit in understanding. “You think Mama Ellie meant to cast a longevity spell...and it backfired?”
“It’s p
ossible.” I nodded slowly. “She did botch a love spell. And a longevity spell is way more complex.” The comment sounded like I knew what I was talking about, which was too close to a lie for my comfort. “Or so I’ve heard,” I added under my breath.
Something fluttered and screeched behind one of the walls, and I curled in closer to Dylan, gawking around the room for any openings a wild colony of bats might fit through. The only thing that looked suspect was a rusty metal panel.
“What’s that thing?” I crinkled my nose at it.
“Just the dumbwaiter,” Dylan said. “It was one of the upgrades Papa Nando installed when the church was converted into a house. It runs from the belfry all the way down to the main floor. I accidentally shifted from bat to human in there once as a kid. Scarred me for life,” he confessed. “I’ve had claustrophobia ever since.”
“I didn’t see one of those in the front room.” Making homes visually pleasing was my forte, so I would have remembered something that gawdy.
“I’m pretty sure my brother drywalled over it when he was working on the house last year.” Dylan scratched his head and gave me another curious look. “That was just before he insisted he had heard a woman’s voice behind the wall and took a hammer to it.”
“An old woman’s voice?” I asked.
We turned for the door at the same time, but Dylan played the gentleman and let me pass through first. As we began our descent down the stairs, he sniffed again.
“Is that...rum I detect?”
I glanced over my shoulder and smirked at him. “Papa Nando showed me where he keeps his secret stash.”
“What?” Dylan huffed. “That’s absurd. He didn’t drink—Mama Ellie would have...well, she would hexed him on purpose. Papa Diego said she thought alcohol made a person susceptible to demonic possession.”
I shrugged. “Whatever you say.”
“Besides, why would he show you? You’re a witch.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said dryly. “Maybe because I’d just been felt up and then ditched by his great-great-grandbat.”
Dylan’s bottom lip rolled outward in a delicious pout. “I said I was sorry.”
“If we manage to break this curse today, maybe I’ll let you make it up to me.”
“Deal.”
When we reached the front room, I scanned it for any sign of the old woman who I was fairly certain now was Mama Ellie. Dylan hadn’t mentioned ever seeing her ghost, but with a house full of bitter men she’d unintentionally cursed, I couldn’t blame her for being MIA.
I crossed the room to the far wall and ran a hand over the toasted almond paint job, rapping the knuckles of my other hand lightly on the drywall.
“It should be about here, wouldn’t you say?” I asked Dylan.
“I have a tape measure and box knife in the kitchen,” he offered, giving the recently repaired wall an anxious frown.
“No need.” I picked up a candle holder from the coffee table and slammed it into the wall. Once, twice, and then a third time for good measure. Sweet catharsis.
“Awww, man. I worked my ass off on that wall.” Dylan groaned and pressed the heel of one hand to his forehead. “I really hope we find whatever it is you’re looking for.”
“What you’re looking for,” I said, picking away a chunk of drywall. Rusty metal peeked through, and I grinned, pleased by my excellent aim. “Time to get naked, batboy.”
“Really?” Dylan perked, clearly assuming I had something sexier in mind.
“Yeah, you’re going exploring. In there.” I found the handle of the dumbwaiter and yanked. The door creaked and then fell off its rusted hinges before dropping loudly to the hardwood floor.
“Oh joy.” Dylan loosed a heavy sigh, but he didn’t refuse, and I took great pleasure in watching him peel off his shirt and shimmy out of his jeans.
After the brief flashing he’d given me earlier, I was surprised when he turned his back to me, bashfully covering his manly parts, but I did enjoy the view of his ass until he shifted into a bat.
I took a good look at his creature condition this time, now that he wasn’t trying to ghost me—so to speak. He was larger than I expected, and when his little toes clung to the top of the opening that led into the kitchen, I noticed he had some impressive bat parts, too. He caught me staring and folded his leathery wings around his body, snout scrunching with offense.
My eyebrows hitched, and I cleared my throat as I looked away from him and back to the gaping mouth of the dumbwaiter.
It was super creepy. Definitely the stuff of claustrophobic nightmares. But I certainly wasn’t going to fit my happy ass in there, and I was pretty sure Dylan wouldn’t be too keen on the suggestion that I go all Wreck-It-Ralph on the rest of the wall. We were short on options.
“So, I’m thinking an enchanted amulet, maybe a rolled of piece of parchment in a bottle... you know. Witchy stuff,” I said, easing forward to gaze into the abyss of the old shaft.
Dylan squeaked out a miserable, annoyed sound before dropping from the kitchen opening and flapping across the distance. I stood clear as he crawled inside the mouth of the dumbwaiter. His bony wing tips clicked and echoed against the metal walls, but it was the helpless, chittering coo that unnerved me the most.
I hadn’t forced him, but I felt guilty just the same. He was obviously doing this to impress me—well, that and the slim hope that Mama Ellie might have a stash of her own that held the key to breaking the Hernández family curse.
Dylan was only gone for a few minutes, but it felt like an eternity. When he reemerged, I released a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.
“What’s that?” I asked, taking a small, leather-bound book he clutched with his long bat toes. He chittered at me in reply. Unlike Zelda, the Shifter Whisperer, I couldn’t communicate with animals—but I’d spent enough time with Broomzilla to recognize sarcasm when I heard it.
“Watch it,” I replied with a stern look. “Or no papaya and mangoes for you.”
Dylan shifted back into his human form and quickly dressed. When he turned around, his face was ashen, and he avoided looking at the opening of the dumbwaiter. Facing one’s fears did not always make them go away. But it was still admirable.
I pointed him toward the rolltop desk. “The rum is in a hidden compartment behind one of the lower panels.”
“Thanks,” he said, making a beeline for the desk while I thumbed through Mama Ellie’s brittle grimoire.
Her curly handwriting was faded in places, and the faint odor of mildew wafted from the pages, along with bits of dried herbs and flower petals, an occasional smear of blood or flattened butterfly.
It felt almost sacrilegious, digging through another witch’s most sacred notes. Grimoires were more personal than journals. They held the secret of their owner’s power. Their magical fingerprint.
I really didn’t know what I was looking for. Some of the spells were in Spanish, and some were in French. I found the one for the pawpaw trees ever-fruiting lifespan, but even a lousy witch like me realized that the same verses wouldn’t work on a human or an animal. Mama Ellie had known that, too.
Near the end of the book, I found the spell she’d cast on Papa Nando.
Dylan was right. They’d been hopelessly in love. So in love that Mama Ellie had not only tried to magic up a long life for her husband, but for all of their descendants. Unfortunately, she hadn’t specified if she meant a long life for a fruit bat or for a human.
She’d also worked a verse into the spell that ensured that their family would always have a place to call home. Which—backfire number two—had ended up trapping their spirits in the house. Forever. Home sweet home.
Poor Mama Ellie. She maybe had more power than me, but she clearly didn’t know how to use it any better than I did. Maybe there were worse things than having a magical deficiency.
“So?” Dylan asked, returning with the bottle of rum I’d tested earlier. “Is it in there?”
I chewed my bottom lip as I read
through the rest of the spell. “Oh, it’s in here all right.”
“Well? How do we undo it?”
“Were you familiar with your Mama Ellie’s witch family?”
“No,” Dylan said, licking rum from his lips. I took the bottle from him and had a few deep swallows before breaking the news.
“They were into sex rituals.” I handed over the grimoire so he could see for himself.
Getting busy with Dylan on the chaise sofa for funsies was one thing, but orchestrating every last detail in order to break a curse? As a craptastic witch with hardly enough magic to power a shop vac for more than an hour?
Sure, no pressure. Nope. None at all.
“Oh hell.” Dylan closed the book and blinked up at the ceiling. “She drew pictures.”
“And they’re very detailed,” I added, taking another long drink of rum.
Dylan cleared his throat and opened the book again, cautiously. His brow furrowed as he read and reread the details of the spell turned curse. “This doesn’t seem all that bad.”
“It has to be under a clear night sky,” I balked. “As in, outside.”
He shrugged. “The backyard has a privacy fence.”
“True.” I sighed and cocked my head. “All you need now is a willing witch.”
“You mean...you don’t...” His face crumpled, and he closed the book, gripping it tightly under his chin. “But earlier... I really am sorry about that—”
“Dylan.” I touched his arm and gave him a sad smile. “Your Mama Ellie wasn’t very good with magic.”
“Obviously.” He snorted.
“But at least she had enough magic to work those spells. I don’t, and I never will,” I confessed. “Maybe you should ask Zelda—”
“That werewolf of hers would swallow me whole before I even finished asking the question.”
“But she might know another witch who could help you.”
Dylan shook his head and pulled me in close to his chest. Before I could protest any further, his mouth found mine. Lust raged war with the rum in my stomach, and the room spun. I wasn’t sure what was more to blame, and I was too overwhelmed to care.
How to Sell a Haunted House Page 7