Shadows of Old Ghosts

by Stephanie Zayatz

  “Of course,” Aviira whispered. Moira poured out two portions and brought one to Aviira.

  “Have a seat,” she said as she motioned to the long table behind her. She returned to the counter to get her drink and hoisted her thin frame up onto the counter, curling her legs around her body like she was ready for girl talk. The window behind her was open, letting the sound of evening crickets and distant traffic flow in.

  Aviira sat and took a drink. Seven and seven.

  “I know you’re more of a whiskey kind of woman, but I had a fancy,” Moira said with a bit of a smirk.

  “Achieves the same effect,” Aviira replied as she glanced up at the lamp hanging above her head. The orange blown glass lit the room with a warm, pale glow.

  “What brings you in this direction?” Moira asked as she sipped her drink. “I hadn’t exactly pegged you for the type to just drop in for a chat.”

  “Me neither,” Aviira said. She almost explained where she had come from, and reasoned maybe that was why she had absentmindedly driven to Moira’s house, but she pushed her sister out of her brain and tried to tell herself that it had nothing to do with it. “Just needed someone to tell me I’m not crazy maybe.”

  Moira smirked. “Depends on your definition of crazy.”

  Aviira took a small drink and looked at the other woman for a long moment, tried to figure out how to take that. Moira put her drink down and laid one arm across her knee.

  “Any luck with your case?”

  Aviira felt her eyes roll back unconsciously and she groaned.

  “I’m guessing no, then.”

  “We went away for the weekend and everything went to shit. This girl turns up dead and there’s no explanation for it at all.”

  “No physical explanation, you mean.”

  Aviira held her hands out. “Nothing we can take to the bank, anyway. Something murdered this girl and she died suffering…and we don’t have a clue how it happened.”

  Moira’s eyes narrowed slightly. “You think it was a shade.”

  She wasn’t sure if Moira meant it as a question. “It’s about the only explanation we have at the moment,” she said. She swallowed, feeling a tinge of nervousness in her gut. “But we went there thinking that she was the one responsible for conjuring the shade we encountered in that cellar, the one who was turning all those Creepers. Now the person we thought was our suspect turns up murdered and every lead we thought we had gets dumped on its head.”

  Somewhere down the street, someone took off on a loud motorcycle. The growling sound roared off into the night and faded.

  “I never dealt with supernatural shit over in special ops,” Aviira said as she ran a hand over her face wearily. “Never even realized I believed in it until now. I’m used to things being straightforward. We’ve just been walking in circles for a week. The more we look at something the less it makes sense.” She stared down at the floor for a second. “I think…I think whoever is responsible for those bodies we found is pissed that we’re prying.”

  “You thought that when you were here a few days ago,” Moira said quietly.

  “I know, but it’s just gotten worse since then.”

  “How so?”

  She shook her head slowly. “Both of us have been having these nightmares,” she said softly. “Terrible. I’ve never had nightmares in my life and these are…” She blinked, dragged in a breath through her nose. “Horrible.”

  “Both of you?”

  She nodded. “Jirel’s had them too…but I have this weird feeling that it’s me, that they’re targeting me specifically.”

  Moira sipped her drink and watched her. “Why?”

  “Because…because I had a nightmare this morning with ravens in it. Dead ones. All mangled and fucked up and…I thought that was weird enough to begin with, because I have a thing for ravens. And then I wake up and we find a dead fucking raven on the porch step. Like it was left there as a present. It just felt like whoever left it was doing it to fuck with me.”

  There was a distinct look of distress on Moira’s face. Aviira swallowed, glanced out the window for a moment. “There was a shade in my dream,” she said quietly. “I didn’t realize it until later when I thought about it. Jirel said he thought that someone was outside our cabin all night.” She shook her head in frustration. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to think anymore.”

  “Targeting just you doesn’t make much sense,” Moira said. “Jirel was there too when you found those bodies and saw that calling card.”

  “I know.” She took a drink and scoffed. “Maybe whoever it is thinks that they can go after whichever one of us is more likely to crack first.”

  An odd little laugh came from Moira. “That would definitely be Jirel in that case, then.”

  Aviira eyed her briefly. “I don’t know,” she murmured. “He certainly seems to have his shit together more than I do.”

  “That’s because he wants you to think that. That’s because he wants to think that. Jirel’s favorite hobby is living in denial. And he’s trying to put up a good front because he wants to impress you.”

  She snorted. “Why would he give a shit about impressing me?”

  “Because he thinks you’re a genius and he’s probably a little intimidated by you,” Moira said, her eyebrows going up a little. When Aviira’s eyes narrowed, she added, “He read your case notes on that little undercover ditty you did a few years back. Obsessed over them.”

  Aviira said, “Bullshit,” but she could hear the hesitation in her own voice. Jirel had told her he didn’t know anything about her the first day they’d met, which means he’d been bluffing her. Nobody bluffed her and got away with it—it was something she was so innately good at herself that it never worked on her.

  Moira crossed herself. “Hand to God, Aviira. That was why I was so shocked to see you on my doorstep last week with him. How…serendipitous.” She smiled and it held on her face. “For the record, coming from someone who’s known Jirel a long time…I’m glad he’s working with you. He’s had a rough go of things since Caesli left.”

  Aviira finished her drink and said, “Tell me about that. He’s been pretty tight-lipped.”

  “No surprise there,” she said, rolling her eyes a little. “Any excuse not to talk about Caesli is a good excuse for him.”

  “They were together long?”

  “Five years,” Moira replied. A little smile twisted her lips. “He met her in college and followed her out here. It was a total coincidence that Xander was running the branch.”

  Aviira’s eyes narrowed a little. “He told me that he’d come out here to work with Xander,” she said. Their conversation at the bar that first night they’d met seemed so long ago even though it had only been a week.

  A week. It felt like everything had changed in a week; everything she knew to be true had turned on its head in little more than a week.

  “It’s a good story, but it’s not really the truth.”

  “So what happened?”

  The other woman shrugged casually. “She just…left. Out of the blue. I have a feeling she just couldn’t cope with the fact that he was going to outlive her.”

  “What do you mean, outlive her?”

  “Well, I mean, nobody’s sure about that, but he’s almost pureblood elf, yes? He’s probably going to outlive us all by several lifetimes. I could understand how that might make a woman nervous when you get down to thinking about the reality of it. Difficult to grow old and happy with someone when they aren’t going to age. Children would be almost out of the question. How his parents ever managed to get around that mind fuck is beyond me, and I know how that feels just as much as Jirel does.”

  Aviira said, “Right,” but there was a question lying below the surface as she considered what Moira had alluded to.

  She didn’t seem interested in explaining the vague comment. “In any event. That was the end of that, unfortunately.”

  “Did she know all this when she got into a relations
hip with him?”

  Moira nodded.

  “And she let it go on?”

  “Obviously.”

  Aviira shifted her weight in her seat and shook her head. “See, this is why I don’t do relationships. What a fucking shitty thing to do. She could have just broken up with him early on when she realized that, but she kept stringing him along till she had no choice but to completely break his heart. I’m assuming, anyway.”

  Moira made a strange sound. “Oh, no. It was not good. And then a few months after that Jayne transfers partners on him, and you know by now he’s already got a complex about women abandoning him. It’s a surprise the whole situation with that girl and the stalker didn’t turn out worse.”

  She didn’t know what to say, so she just made a quiet “Mm” sound. Moira slipped off the countertop and approached Aviira to refill her drink. She almost said something in protest, since the motion was a clear indication that the conversation was not over.

  “Did you call her?” Moira asked gently.

  Aviira looked up at her. She knew exactly who she was talking about, but for some reason she wasn’t sure why Moira should have known. For a brief moment she had to wonder what else Moira knew about her without saying it. Jirel had warned her that Moira knew things that she shouldn’t have.

  “Call who?”

  Moira smiled like Aviira should have known better. “Your sister.”

  “No,” she said, pulling in a deep breath. “Just been too busy.”

  “Come now,” Moira said as she walked back to the counter and leaned on it. “You only came here tonight because it gave you an excuse not to pick up the phone.”

  Aviira lifted her eyes to Moira in a glare. Moira shrugged. The motion was followed by a long silence.

  “I saw her tonight,” Aviira said softly. “She didn’t see me, but…I saw her. I don’t even know what I was doing, sitting outside her house like a fucking stalker or something. I just…I don’t know.” She rubbed a thumb over the back of her other hand, tracing the scars there. “I have this…thing about not walking away from something I’ve started,” she said finally. “So some part of me figures it would just be easier to not start something if I can’t…if I never call her, I don’t have to feel like I wasn’t able to fix it if she rejects me.”

  “Why would she reject you?”

  She swallowed. She didn’t have anything good to say.

  Moira crossed her arms over her chest. “That’s a family trait, isn’t it? The inability to walk away when someone needs protecting.”

  “I never knew my family,” Aviira said.

  “You’re stubborn, but that’s not what I was referring to. Your bloodline is made up of king’s guards and knights…fiercely loyal and dedicated to their craft. Unable to give up on anything.” Moira paused. “Isn’t it?”

  It was. After joining the Society Aviira had traced her bloodline—at least her mother’s bloodline anyway, she’d never been able to locate her father’s line for some reason—through almost a millennia until the records became too unreliable, and found that her family had all been knights and protectors of kings and queens for generation after generation. It was practically the family business.

  Moira continued. “It’s the reason you do anything you can to stay working for the Society. So that you don’t have to walk away and give up. You stay in the Society because it’s the only way you have of protecting your sister.”

  Aviira crossed her arms and placed her thumb over the scar on her lip. “I was never able to protect her when we were younger,” she said quietly. “This is the only thing I have to give to her.”

  “That’s not true and you know it.”

  Neither of them said anything. Aviira wasn’t sure how the conversation had taken such a direct turn onto her.

  “All of a sudden all these old ghosts start popping up again,” she said absently, shaking her head. The drink and her exhaustion were beginning to make the edges of her vision waver. “All these things that I thought were long buried are all coming back to me again. I put them away for a reason.”

  “Old ghosts cast large shadows,” Moira said. “And you can’t just bury them. Trust me. I’ve tried. Somehow or another, they’ll always come back to you.”

  Aviira gave her a long stare. She had a feeling she wasn’t just using a figure of speech.

  “Your sister won’t reject you,” Moira said eventually. “She can’t. It’s in her blood too, remember that.”

  There was a drawn out silence. A cricket near the window hummed, but instead of being comforting, it was like a needle in Aviira’s ear. “I guess I should just get used to the fact that everyone seems to know more about me than I do,” she said quietly, and finished her drink.

  July 21st – Tuesday

  ***

  Jirel could tell by the way Aviira was squinting even behind her sunglasses as she approached his car that she was hungover. She was late meeting him at his car downstairs and her hair was loose and uncombed, two uncharacteristic indicators that she’d probably had a rough night.

  “Sorry,” she said quietly as she opened the passenger door and got in.

  “You okay?”

  “Fine.”

  He started the car with a long look over at her. “No offense, but you look like shit.”

  “You know when you start off a sentence with ‘no offense, but,’ you’re about to say something offensive?”

  “Fine. You look like shit.”

  “Long night.” She started combing her fingers through her hair in an attempt to tame it into something mildly professional.

  “You should have called if you were looking for a drinking buddy,” he said as he pulled into traffic and drove toward headquarters. “I had dinner with Jayne and Corin last night, it would have been nice to not be a third wheel.”

  She was quiet, pretending to concentrate on wrestling her hair into a thick braid. Without looking at him, she said, “Is it that obvious?”

  “I know the morning after a bender when I see one.”

  She didn’t know what to say. She knew she had no reason to feel guilty, but she did anyway even if she couldn’t touch on the reason why.

  “Hey,” Jirel said gently. “Everything okay?”

  “I saw Liisha last night.”

  His eyebrows went up. “You did?”

  “I didn’t…we didn’t talk or anything. I saw her and she didn’t see me. I told myself I wouldn’t do this until after this assignment was over, because I knew this was going to happen.” She took in a deep breath. “By the time I got home I decided, fuck it, might as well finish out the night on a high note.”

  He didn’t buy her thinly veiled sarcasm; the night’s events had obviously sent her into a tailspin and she was far from happy about it.

  “Where did you see her?”

  She pulled the tie off her braid in agitation and ran her fingers through the braid to loosen it, then immediately started to re-plait it. “Outside her house. I sat in my car outside her house like a goddamn stalker and I saw her come home from wherever she was and watched her go inside to her perfect fucking family and go on living her perfect fucking life without me in it.”

  Jirel looked over at her but didn’t say anything, not sure if he might set her off. She undid the braid again and sighed. She couldn’t say anything; her throat was too tight. Instead she focused on redoing the braid a third time, making the plaits tighter than necessary.

  “We don’t have to talk about it,” Jirel said.

  “I resented her for a long time,” Aviira said abruptly. “The whole first year I spent in the psych home I had a lot of misdirected anger at her. I was pissed that she got picked and I didn’t. Pissed that someone wanted to love her and not me. Someone wanted her. The only thing anybody had ever wanted to do was put up with me and when I finally did something about it they locked me up like a criminal.”

  She stared at her lap, feeling a bitter taste in her mouth from all the words she’d stuffed down for
so long finally coming up like bile, or maybe it was just the hangover. She took in a slow breath. Jirel was very still while he drove.

  “And it wasn’t fair…but it wasn’t fair to be mad at her, either. She didn’t mean for any of that to happen and she wasn’t the reason I went to the home. But it still hurt, because someone wanted to take care of her. Nobody had ever taken care of me. I know I can take care of myself just fine but sometimes it gets to be a little tiring. I guess it would just be nice to know that someone gave a shit, you know what I mean?”

  She finished the braid again and tied it at the end, but couldn’t stop staring at her lap.

  After a long silence, Jirel said quietly, “I give a shit.”

  Aviira raised her eyes and looked at him. He cleared his throat quietly and took his eyes off the road for a moment to look at her. She couldn’t think of anything to say. They stared at each other for as long as he could manage to keep his eyes off the road. When he finally looked away, she did too, and stared out the window while a swarm of competing thoughts rampaged through her pounding head.

  “You get any sleep?” she asked after a moment of looking out the window.

  He made a noncommittal sound. “Couple hours.”

  She nodded to indicate she’d experienced something similar. By the time they finally pulled up at headquarters she had remade her braid at least a dozen times but finally wrapped it up and pinned it to the side of her head. When she got out of the car, she smoothed her hair and pushed her emotions down into her gut. Jirel cast an uncertain look in her direction as they started across the street together, but she said nothing, so neither did he.

  His phone chimed as they walked and he pulled it from his pocket, shaded the screen from the sun.

  Xander

  10:22 My office. Now.

  Jirel read the text and frowned. “That doesn’t sound good.”

  Aviira looked over. “What?” He showed her. Her eyebrows went up. “Wow. Periods and everything.”

  Jirel put the phone back in his pocket. “Like we need more for Xander to be pissed at us about,” he said quietly.