by Leanne Leeds
“Oh my gosh, Aidan! There can be lots of really nice guys that you don’t fall for! He’s cute, and he’s nice, but do you ‘like him’ like him?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
Aidan’s problem came into perfect clarity. He felt like he should fall for the handsome detective. Kyle Roberts was good-looking, he was nice, he had a heroic job. Despite the fact that Kyle was a heckuva catch, Aidan simply didn’t have chemistry with him.
But he wanted to. So much. After so many years alone, though, he was trying to force it.
“Aidan, you don’t have to marry the first guy that’s interested in you—”
Aidan’s face turned white as he stared across the room toward the doorway. His hands began to shake and he pressed hard into the back of the sofa as if he wanted to disappear.
“What is that? What is that? What the heck is that!” he whispered.
I turned and looked at the doorway.
I saw the ghost of Tiffany Drake staring back.
“What are you seeing, Aidan?” I asked him as fear gripped my innards. I was almost sure I knew what he was going to say, and it was the last thing I wanted to hear.
“Can’t you see it? It’s the dead girl, isn’t it? That’s her! I saw her picture on the news! But it can’t be,” Aidan gasped out the words. “I can see right through her! What the heck is going on?”
“I have a name, jerk,” Tiffany responded.
Aidan’s eyes widened as his breath caught.
Then his head flopped over as he passed out.
“Great. Now two people are dead! I swear, this stupid place is cursed,” Tiffany told me.
I didn’t disagree with her.
7
“Well, I should’ve realized if he was descended from a witch that he would probably be able to see a ghost,” I told my family as we frantically discussed what to do.
“You think so, Charlotte?” my uncle asked sarcastically.
“Can’t we wipe his memory?” my mother asked.
“Not without taking him to the Magical Midway and having Charlotte do it,” my father said. “Once we take him there, his powers will fully awaken and who knows what those will be.”
“It’s a catch twenty-two,” I sighed. “We take him there, and he becomes a half-witch, we don’t take him there, and we have to come up with some explanation for what he saw.”
“Can we drug him?” Uncle Phil asked.
“I am not drugging Aidan. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“That boy is not going to stay passed out forever. I suggest that someone come up with something,” Uncle Phil said. “My vote is for drugs. Don’t humans take them for all sorts of reasons?”
“Aidan doesn’t do drugs,” I told him. “Besides, we would have to give him some type of hallucinogenic drug to make him think what he saw was all in his head. Not only doesn’t Aidan do drugs, but even if he did no one is gonna do it in the middle of an afternoon.”
“I’m sure some people do,” Uncle Phil said.
“Let’s drop the drug option, okay? Not gonna happen.”
“Can we just pretend he was imagining it and ignore it?” my mother asked.
“That’s an idea, Martha, but that also assumes that Tiffany Drake will stay out of sight for the rest of the time Aidan is visiting us. Do we really want to bank on the girl following directions? She didn’t do that very well when she was alive.”
“You know, I can hear you, Mr. Astley,” Tiffany called from behind my father.
“No offense meant, dear,” my mother called back.
“Bite me, old woman,” Tiffany responded. Mom rolled her eyes.
“I think counting on Tiffany to stay out of sight should be discarded as an option,” my father told us as he coughed. His hand went distractedly to the gray hair at his temple.
“You know, Charlotte, swinging by to visit your parents? Stellar idea. Truly. I have to commend you,” Uncle Phil murmured quietly.
“How the heck was I supposed to know that some spoiled brat was going to get a paver stone to the head two hours after we landed? Or that one of my closest human friends was secretly a paranormal? Or that a football player that sat behind me in some high school class was a detective? Cut me some slack, Uncle Phil. This one’s not on me.”
“One of your friends is a paranormal?” Fiona asked as she and Ningul made their way down the hallway. “Fancy that. We’re just finding new witches all over the place!”
“I didn’t bring him across the barrier, but we came close,” I told her. “Too close. I think the barrier is getting… I don’t know, like, it’s reaching out further. We were a couple of feet away so it shouldn’t have awakened anything in him. But Aidan saw Tiffany’s ghost.”
“That’s Aidan?” Fiona asked, pointing to my friend passed out on the couch.
“Yep.”
“Why is he sleeping?”
“He passed out. I guess in shock from seeing a ghost for the first time.”
“Humans don’t pass out for very long, do they? Not as long as you people usually argue over what to do, in any case.”
Aidan stirred and lifted his head, blinking. His eyes scanned us talking in the hallway, and then drifted back to Tiffany standing at the front window.
“I must be dreaming,” he whispered, his hands shaking again.
“Well, if you are maybe I’ll get lucky and be dreaming, too,” Tiffany snapped at him. “Because I don’t particularly want to be a ghost any more than you want to see one, handsome.”
“Okay, we need a plan,” I said as I turned back to the group.
“Tell him,” Gunther said as he appeared behind Fiona and Ningul.
“Are you crazy? We’d be breaking the rule if he stays human.”
“A rule you don’t even agree with, Charlotte,” Gunther pointed out.
“Young man, she cannot tell him the truth,” my mother told him sternly. “It would put us all in danger.”
“We are already in danger. Everyone here has been since the moment Charlotte became ringmaster. With all due respect, ma’am, Charlotte knows her friend. It’s Charlotte’s choice to make. And forgive me for saying so but it is a choice she would not have had to make if you both had not rejected the paranormal world.”
My mother stared at Gunther in shock at as the rest of the group turned and faced me expectantly.
“No,” I told them after considering all the options. “It’s not my choice to make. It’s Aidan’s.”
My mother, father, and uncle all protested at once.
“Charlotte, you can’t—”
“The rule is the most important—”
“Are you daft, girl—”
“Aidan is who he is,” I told them as I cut them all off. “He deserves to know who he is. He deserves to make the choice.”
“What if he chooses wrong? What if you give him all this knowledge and then he betrays us?” my father asked.
“Then I will take him across the border and allow the magic to awaken his powers,” I responded slowly. “And after that, I will turn him into a human. If I can turn a half-witch into a full witch, Roland and I have to be able to turn a half-witch into a full human. But at least it will be his choice to accept or reject who he is. With everyone hiding from the police, no one will even know.”
The faces of my friends and family mirrored the shock and horror of one another’s reactions. None had realized Roland and I would have this power, and the idea that we might be able to strip a paranormal of who and what they were horrified them.
It never occurred to them we could take as easily as we could give. Now they did, and it frightened each and every one.
But they nodded.
“Daddy! My Daddy’s here!” Tiffany shouted. “Daddy! Daddy, I’m here!”
“You have to be kidding me,” I told everyone assembled in the hall. “I swear, we can’t seem to catch a break.”
We all moved back into the living room as Aidan woke up and footsteps echoed from the front stai
rs. My human friend, maybe not entirely as human as I thought, continued to stare at the glowing ghost with a shocked expression of horror.
“I know this is freaking you out,” I told him. “But I need you to just hold your questions until we get Anthony Drake out of the house. Aidan, that’s Fiona and Ningul. They’re friends of mine from the circus. Go with them.”
Aidan stared at me and then moved his gaze to them. His eyes drifted slowly back, but he didn’t move from the couch.
“Aidan, come on, please?”
He was in shock. He didn’t move.
“We’ll sit with him, Charlotte,” Fiona said.
“Let me sit on one side,” Gunther said as he scrambled over to the couch. “I can’t do anything permanently, but I can settle him down if he starts freaking out.”
“I can handle his emotions, Gunther, if you can be ready to silence his voice,” my mother told him as she moved toward the chair next to the couch. Gunther nodded as he sunk into the cushions next to Aidan.
Poor Aidan. I’d never seen him look as overwhelmed as he did at that moment. The good thing was that his reaction of fight or flight or freeze? He fell on the side of freeze. As long as he stayed that way, we should be able to focus on Anthony Drake.
A loud and insistent knock echoed from the door.
“Just a minute!” I called from the living room. I took one last glance around for no other reason than to make myself feel better.
With a gangster standing on the welcome mat, a ghost standing at the window, and my friend Aidan frozen in a panic on the couch as my mother and boyfriend shoved elements of psychic control around him like he was a wild calf to be lassoed… frankly, I wasn’t sure the situation could get any more complicated.
Never think that things can’t get more complicated, Charlotte, Gunther thought. They always can, and it seems lately that they surely do.
I didn’t bother responding.
Upon opening the door, I came face-to-face with a furious Anthony Drake. The man looked like a gangster right off a Hollywood mafia movie set. The thick scent of a woodsy cologne cascaded over me as if the man had the power of offensive magic.
I sneezed.
“Are you one of the idiots that runs this place?” he growled at me as he leaned forward aggressively. “The police told me that my little girl was murdered this morning. I want to see where it happened. I want to know what you know about what happened to my daughter.”
“Mr. Drake, I think we should perhaps deal with the situation a bit more delicately than usual,” a tall, pale looking gentleman stated from behind him. “My apologies, Miss, I’m sure you can understand that Mr. Drake has had a tough day and is in quite a state.”
“Of course,” I responded. “This is been a pretty traumatic day for everyone.”
“No one more so than my daughter, you twit,” the hulking man growled at me again.
“Mr. Drake, I totally understand that the loss of your daughter in such tragic circumstances is a difficult issue to deal with emotionally. Please know that we’re here to help you in any way that we can. It will be easier to help you, though, if you understand that we are not responsible for what happened to your daughter.”
“Oh yeah? How do I know that!”
“Mr. Drake, Sir, Detective Roberts did let you know that none of the owners of the animal shelter are under suspicion,” the mousy man said in a quiet voice. The man following Anthony Drake like a puppy rested a gentle hand on the big man’s shoulder. He spoke quietly, even soothingly, to the solidly muscled gangster. I had seen enough movies to assume this was likely his body man, but I thought body men were bigger and more robust than this guy seemed to be.
Anthony Drake stomped across the living room and stared outside the window. The same window that his daughter’s ghost stared out of.
The two merged into one with a shimmer at the shoulder.
As much as Tiffany Drake had been obnoxious, demanding, and had subjected us to a near constant stream of complaints and demands, my heart broke for her. With her father sharing the same space as her specter, I could sense the first tendrils of grief wrapping around her as her father’s eyes cast through the space she occupied without seeing her.
“Daddy, can you see me?” Tiffany whispered as she looked up into the face of the scariest man in Mickwac. “Daddy, I’m right here. I’m right here, Daddy.”
Aidan’s panicked face softened with sympathy for the girl. For the first time since any of us had met her, Tiffany Drake was a vulnerable, sad, grief-stricken young woman. Despite what she had done and despite how she had acted no one in the room could be unmoved by her heartrending words to the father that would never hear them again.
“My name is Michael Hayden,” the quiet man said as he stepped forward and extended his hand. “I am Mr. Drake’s assistant, and I again apologize for his rudeness. As I said, it’s been a trying day. Mr. Drake would appreciate if you would allow him to see the location where his daughter lost her life. He would also like to ask you all some questions. In case anyone has any information that they were perhaps uncomfortable sharing with the police.”
“I’m not sure what you mean, Mr. Hayden. We told the police everything that we know,” my father told the man.
“No one tells those idiots everything that they know,” Anthony Drake snorted.
“We’d be happy to show you where it happened, if that’s what you’d like,” I responded.
“What I’d like is to snap the neck of the idiot that was dumb enough to think he could get away with murdering my daughter,” Anthony Drake proclaimed as he turned around and stared angrily at me. “And make no mistake, I’ll find out who did this long before the police. If I’m feeling generous maybe I’ll text them and let them know where the body is.”
“Of course, this is all hyperbole,” Michael Hayden jumped in as he grabbed Anthony Drake’s arm. “Mr. Drake is in a highly emotional state, and nothing that he’s saying should be taken at face value. He is simply a grieving father and is expressing anger the way any grieving father would.”
“Oh, is that what that was?” Fiona murmured. Ningul grabbed her hand and squeezed it quickly. “I get it, I get it. No need to break my fingers, there, sweetheart.”
My family and friends seemed to sense the danger that radiated off of Anthony Drake. Even the ones that didn’t have inherent powers. My father and I caught each other’s eyes a few times as we all moved toward the back door. Everyone gave the hyperbolic grieving father a wide space.
There was absolutely no reason for the entire group to move out the back door and toward the dog kennels. One person could have led the two men to the isolated area where Tiffany Drake lost her life. With no discussion, though, it seemed we all decided no one should be alone with the two men.
Even Aidan got up to follow.
Anthony Drake was a dangerous man seemingly incapable of subterfuge at the moment. The gentle seeming Michael Hayden?
As he placed a guiding hand on Anthony Drake’s elbow, I gasped in pain. A flash of pure hatred cut through my brain. It was so intense, so sharp and focused that my eyes cast about wildly trying to determine where this dark fury had come from.
After a few moments of scanning each person ambling toward the kennel in silence, my eyes settled on the unassuming man that walked just to the right and slightly behind of Anthony Drake.
I was sure that it came from Michael Hayden.
“Are you all right?” Gunther asked quietly as we walked slowly in the middle of the group. We weren’t five feet down the path that led to the kennels before Anthony Drake stepped in front of us and led the way as if he had been here before. He hadn’t, not that I ever remembered.
“Yeah, I just felt something I wasn’t expecting to feel,” I told him quietly. “This whole situation is making me jumpy, I guess.”
“I would’ve thought you would be jumpy long before this,” he told me.
“When people die and turn into sparkle ash it doesn’t make yo
u as jumpy as when they die and bleed all over the floor,” I retorted. “Actually, it’s not even that. The… world that we live in? It’s more serious and less serious to me, I guess. Somehow all of this feels more real. Somehow. It shouldn’t, but it does.”
“Here we are, Mr. Drake,” my father told him as he stepped around the pair and held the door for them politely. “Tiffany was working in here this morning. If you just walk through the kennels behind the curtain at the end of the hall? That’s where…”
Anthony Drake stared daggers at my father before pushing past him.
“I can’t believe he can’t see or hear me,” Tiffany whined. “What am I even still a ghost for if I can’t talk to my father? He fixes everything. If you can’t hear me, Daddy, and you can’t fix anything, why am I stuck here? How am I supposed to move on? They don’t expect me to do it myself, do they?”
I didn’t know whether Tiffany was speaking to herself, her father, or us. Unfortunately, with two criminal human beings in our group, none of us would answer.
Not that we could answer. We were paranormals, not gods. I had no clue why she hadn’t moved on.
Our lack of reaction to her questions and complaints did not sit well with her, and Tiffany’s whining became more insistent. I wondered if I could send her somewhere the way I shoved the Witches' Council back from where they came from.
I probably could, but it was against the law.
I think, anyway.
The scraggly brown mutt in the first kennel growled at the two men, saliva dripping from its maw. His muscles were tense, haunches flexing. The accusatory stare from the gangster did nothing to dissuade the canine from his aggressive stance.
Anthony Drake jumped toward the front gate and kicked the metal cage with a fury. The dog yelped as he dropped his tail and slunk to the back of his enclosure.
“Daddy hates dogs,” Tiffany told no one in particular.
“Of course he does,” my mother sighed.
“I didn’t hurt the stupid animal!” Mr. Drake shouted at her. “I don’t need to hear these mangy mouths echoing in my ears as I visit the place that my daughter drew her last breath! They should have a little respect!”