by Ani Gonzalez
Would she? Could she?
Her jewelry was selling like hotcakes. She might have to make some design concession to the local market and add some ankhs and pentagrams to her stock, but she could make a living here. Not to mention that she finally had her own store. It wasn't the sleek minimalist space in Soho she'd envisioned, and Yolanda, a savvy businesswoman, would charge her a sky-high rent, but, still, it would be her own.
Then there was her ersatz husband. She was falling in love, no doubt about it.
She could have all this—Liam and the store and a new life. She could have it all. There was just one tiny little thing standing in her way.
Hagen House or more, accurately, whatever still lived or unlived—was that even a verb?—inside it.
She drove to the house with a truckload of magic supplies and a fiercely determined heart. She was going to fix this. Whatever was in the house would be shown the door and sent back to the beyond.
Tonight, the night the gates of hell opened up.
The house looked bright and cheerful when she drove up. The sun was setting and a dying glow of sunshine lit up the property. She'd been impressed when she'd first seen the stately white colonial. It looked elegant and dignified, the grandest house on the street.
She grabbed a box and walked up to the front entrance. That was part of the spell. There would be no side doors, no servants' entrance, today.
She looked down at the ring on her left hand. The stone glittered, its shine giving her strength. She was the lady of the house and she was coming home.
Was this what Liam had envisioned when he'd taken over the remodel of the house? She'd seen the pictures of the dilapidated Hagen House in the Banshee Creek archives. It had been a hollowed-out mess with disheveled roof tiles and overgrown ivy. Liam had poured his heart and soul into rebuilding this house.
And the Santelli Curse had ruined it for him.
Until today.
She brought in her materials and set them down in the foyer. Then she closed the door, programmed her phone alarm to ring right before moonrise, and got to work.
She had a lot to do and time was running out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
"HOW MANY lanterns are you planning to light up?" Liam asked, looking round the pile of red contraptions in dismay.
"Just a couple of thousands," Caine replied. "Don't worry. You don't have to help out with the lighting part. We have interns to do that. Just help us finish the platform."
Liam sighed, wondering how he'd allowed himself to be talked into building a platform with Chinese decorations next to the creek.
If he recalled correctly, he'd been drunk at the time.
"Our guys will be on the bridge lighting the lanterns," Caine explained, "and the spectators will be on the shores. That way we won't have any problems with Fire and Rescue."
Oh, yeah. He'd been smashed. It had been after the party at the botánica. Zach Franco had brought that crazy super-alcoholic cider his brother was working on, and Liam had drunk like five bottles of it. That stuff was good, but strong.
The "store warming" party had been his idea. He'd wanted to distract Kat after her horrible experience, and the party had done the job. Banshee Creek, bless its generous, party-loving heart, came together to welcome her in style. It had been a big surprise and she'd blushed and stammered her way through it in a happy daze.
It had given him hope, which in turn had made him reckless. The end result was that now he was stuck building a lantern-lighting platform for PRoVE.
Like they say, no good deed goes unpunished.
"Okay," Liam said. "The footings are down and the top is nailed up. Now we have to put those two things together. Have your guys lift it up and set it over the footings." The PRoVE acolytes lifted the wood rectangle. "No, not that way. The other way. Hurry up, guys. We need to be done before nightfall."
The sun was almost setting, but they'd get it done on time. The PRoVE guys weren't bad. They just needed a little direction. Their hearts were in the right place. They'd ended up organizing most of Kat's store-warming party. It had been, he suspected, a kind of apology to Kat for the ill-fated PRoVE taping that had led to her collapse.
And it had worked. Kat had been pleased and flattered. She'd drank cider and ate pizza and showed off the newly decorated store. She wasn't bothered when the PRoVE video crew took out their phones and showed her the footage of her fall on the staircase, and she didn't blink when they pointed out the dark shadow behind her. She'd loved the presents and had looked happy and content, and not at all like the obsessed, pale girl who'd spent the last couple of days researching musty files in the Banshee Creek library.
That girl scared him.
Sure, he understood the obsession. He'd gone through the same thing when he'd renovated the house. Every detail had to be right, everything had to be perfect to restore the house to its original glory. He'd wanted to make up for the years of neglect.
But he was a businessman and he knew that sometimes you just had to cut your losses, and that was exactly what he meant to do. The house or whatever was in it didn't want to be fixed. He could feel the malice in it now, and it did not want to go away. That was okay. He wouldn't be able to sell the house or even rent it to the paranormies—not now that he knew it was dangerous. But he could board it up and abandon it, or he could look into tearing it down, or even burning it to the ground. Caine would have a fit because he wouldn't be able to do paranormal investigations anymore, but Liam could deal with that.
He could deal with anything as long as Kat was safe.
"That doesn't look right," he shouted, frowning at the lopsided platform. "Are you sure you measured the footings correctly? Give them another look. We're burning daylight here."
The sun was coming down fast. He could almost make out the outline of the full moon against the darkening sky.
"Liam!"
The shout came from the grassy parking area next to the creek. He peered out, trying to figure out who it was.
Yolanda was running frantically toward the creek. She was dressed in a bright purple smock and her polka dot glasses looked like they would fall to the ground at any moment. The old santera could run. She reached his side before he could react.
"Have you seen Kat?" she asked, breathing hard.
A shiver of unease ran through him. "She's at the store cleaning up."
Even as he said the words he had the sinking feeling that Kat was nowhere near the store.
Shit.
"No," Yolanda replied firmly. "She's closed it for the day. I have a horrible feeling about this. I was doing a little brisca spread to see if I had to put up a help wanted listing for the botánica."
Briscas were a type of old-fashioned Spanish playing cards. Yolanda had been scrying to see if Kat would stay, or if she would have to get a new employee. Yolanda's management techniques were a bit unorthodox, but the botánica and the hair salon were both solid businesses. You couldn't argue with success.
"And it came out all wrong." The santera wrung her hands. "The Queen of Coins was felled by the nine of swords."
She paused dramatically, clearly expecting Liam to understand the import of her words.
"Er, that sounds bad."
Yolanda snorted.
"What does it mean?" he asked.
"The nine of swords is knowledge badly applied. The Queen of Coins applies to females born under the protection of Oshún." Her eyes bored into him. "Like Kat. Has she been doing research on her own?"
Liam cursed under his breath. Kat had been doing nothing but research. He'd assumed that she'd been working with Yolanda.
Apparently not.
"Stupid girl." The old santera looked both angry and scared. "During the full moon and on the start of the Ghost Festival? Has she lost her mind? She has the ability, but she lacks the experience."
He felt a chill run down his spine. He didn't know what the full moon meant, but he knew that ghosts supposedly came out during the festival, even the malicious ones.
And his house had a very nasty ghost in it.
He looked up at the white orb rising over the horizon. The sun was setting and the whole sky was drenched in red.
Red like blood.
"She's at the house," he said. "Let's go."
He waved goodbye to Caine, who looked thoroughly confused, and ran to the parking lot. The PRoVE crew would have to finish the platform on their own. Kat had his truck, and he was stuck with her tiny hatchback, but it would still get them there.
Yolanda panted as she ran. "This is why I don't take ahíjados."
Liam frowned, trying to figure out what she meant. An ahíjada was like a godchild, right?
Or an apprentice.
The santera sighed. "Their life expectancy is so short."
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
AMY HAD been right. She'd packed a lot of salt.
Kat stood in the foyer, looking out toward the front windows. The windowpanes were lined with streaks of kosher salt interposed here and there with a white or yellow rose petal and a tiny piece of gold resin.
Cleaning this up was going to be a pain.
But it would be so worth it.
She glanced at her phone. Only had a couple of minutes until moonrise and she still had not finished her preparations. The salt and the petals were only the first stage of the cleansing. The second stage had been walking around the perimeter with the burning bundle of sage.
That had been disturbing.
Mainly because she'd found nothing. No grief, no horror, none of the emotional or psychic detritus that she would have expected if Violetta had cursed the place after her lover's death. None of the anger and rage she'd experienced on the stair landing.
Nothing at all.
Maybe she was doing it wrong. Or maybe she wasn't a witch after all. Maybe this was all a very expensive New Age hobby she'd managed to pick up.
She sighed. Oh, well, might as well get it over with.
She took out her template and knelt on the cold marble floor. She'd already placed the rest of her supplies within easy reach. She was as prepared as she would ever be.
Slowly, she spread the semi-transparent paper out directly under the chandelier.
She fought back a sense of unease. She was placing the template directly over the spot where she'd seen the bloodstains.
The spot where Violetta Santelli had died.
She took a breath and kept going, ignoring her nerves. The template was a lotus shape with petals going off in several directions. It wasn't a traditional pentacle shape, but she'd deemed it a more appropriate shape for her spell. The lotus was a sacred flower that carried spirits back to the Land of the Dead, which was exactly what she was doing. Her drawing had, like the pentacle, five points. That, according to the Witchcraft 101 book, was all she needed to harness the requisite elements.
She placed white candles on each petal—the glass-encased, guaranteed-for-outdoor-work, velones from the botánica's pricey Sorceress' Best line—and reached for the salt.
This was the tricky part.
She carefully sprinkled the salt over the template. This time, the salt wasn't for protection. It was to create a vessel, a vehicle to take a lost spirit back to where it belonged. The salt would act like one of the festival's Chinese lanterns rising up—at least metaphorically speaking—and sending the ghost to Hell.
At least that was the theory.
She sprinkled the salt into curved shapes carefully, trying to replicate the shape exactly. The sun was already setting, its pinkish light washing in through the windows, so she worked as fast she could.
She needed to have the candles lit up by the time the full moon rose.
She worked slowly, placing the grains with care. She tried to focus on positive thoughts of freedom and release, but her mind wandered. The night of Violetta's death had also had a full moon. It had happened during the summer, so the room had probably looked a lot like it looked right now, with a wash of pinkish light pouring in through the windows, turning dark as it hit the marble.
She blinked. Why was everything turning dark? No, not dark.
Red. Crimson, like blood.
Streaks of red appeared on the marble, as if blood were seeping through the stone. She ignored the manifestation, and fought the crippling wooziness creeping over her, the same feeling that caused her collapse on the landing. Instead, she focused on pouring the salt in a straight line.
The white crystals rained down from the box in her hand. She worked steadily, following her pattern while the wet, dark spots grew, soaking the paper. She could smell the copper bitterness of the blood. She could feel the warm sticky liquid flowing, almost bubbling up through the marble.
And still she kept on going. This wasn't real. It was just the ghost. One box of salt. Then another. Meanwhile, she could feel the warm wetness through the template paper, wetting her pants.
Okay, so maybe white wasn't a great outfit choice for spell work. This was probably why witches liked to wear black clothes.
She kept on working, though. This had happened to her on the landing and, in the end, it turned out to be an illusion. Her favorite pants were probably fine.
And this reaction meant that she was doing something right. The ghost felt threatened.
Finally, she finished salting the last petal. She put down the half-empty box of salt with a shaking hand. The pattern was complete.
She sat back to check her work. She had to make sure the lines were completely filled. But a bright flash suddenly blinded her, interrupting her examination. What the—?
She looked around. The chandelier was turned on. No, every single light in the house had suddenly turned on. The fancy music system that Liam had installed had also activated and a sickly, old-fashioned tune wafted through the house.
It's nothing, she told herself. It's just an illusion.
The insistent beeping that interrupted the music, however, was very real. It was her phone alarm alerting her that moonrise was almost here.
The Ghost Festival—the real one, not the Banshee Creek one with chocolate-chip fortune cookies and plum wine sangría—would begin in a couple of minutes.
She reached for the lighter torch. It was a high tech piece of camping equipment and the clerk at Banshee Creek hardware had told her it was guaranteed to work in the harshest situations. The torch, he'd claimed, could light a fire in the North Pole. She'd paid a pretty penny for it, but it was worth it. She couldn't risk something going wrong during the spell.
Her hand was shaking so hard, she could hardly turn the torch on, but finally a steady orange flame appeared. She lit the first candle, then the second, all the while trying to ignore the flickering glow of the chandelier and the music coming from the built-in speakers. The tune was odd. It resembled accordion music, but it sounded mechanical and old-fashioned, like the music that accompanied black-and-white movies.
She lit the third candle, but before she could light the next one, a revolting clamminess swept over her, accompanied by stab of grief and betrayal. She pushed away the horrid feeling and raised the torch to light the fourth candle.
The blood under her hands solidified, turning into a thin glassy substance. Her every movement caused spider-web cracks to form on the mirror-like surface. A gust of wind swept through the room as she lit the candle and the sudden chill made her shiver. Luckily, Sorceress' Best was true to its claims. The candles held on to their flames.
When this was over, she was heading straight to her computer to give the company a five-star rating. Their stuff was good.
She raised her head to light the fifth and final candle, and instantly tensed. There, reflected in the red glass, she could see a hideous image, a grimacing woman dressed in period clothing. Her face was contorted in a hateful expression and her eyes gleamed with malice.
Kat froze, rooted to the spot. A bitter cold ran through her, rendering her immobile. She noted, abstractly, as if this were all happening to someone else, the identity of the woman.
> It was Giulia Santelli. Violetta's older sister.
She'd been right. The realization, however, brought her no sense of triumph. She still couldn't move. The full moon was rising higher in the sky and she was kneeling on the floor, trapped by the spirit of a woman who had killed both her sister and her sister's lover.
Try as she might, she simply couldn't move. The flame on her torch flickered mockingly, dancing next to the candle's wick. All she needed to do was move an inch.
And yet she couldn't
So near and yet so far.
She focused on the yellow flame. Yellow like the tiger's eye necklace around her neck, a charm she'd assumed would protect her. Unfortunately, she'd forgotten one of the primary laws of magic, according to Witchcraft 101. She shared the Santelli blood with Giulia and that made her vulnerable to the ghost's attack. The Law of Sympathy was working against her.
But she was a witch, wasn't she?
She pushed away her doubts and focused on the flame. Yellow for Oshún, the goddess of beauty and love. Warm like the sun, her symbol.
Lady of the sun, shine your light on me.
The cold receded. She pushed the torch forward with all her remaining strength, and pictured a warm bonfire, a fireplace, the fiery lanterns that Caine and his staff would light up to lead the ghosts home.
Liam was there now, helping PRoVE build a platform for the lantern-lighting ceremony. The thought of Liam was even more warming that the bonfire imagery.
Until a dagger-like feeling of jealousy pierced through her. The glow from the chandelier flickered and Kat suddenly realized that the enormous light fixture was shaking.
Giulia did not like that at all.
She thought Liam was hers. Just like William Hagen before him. That's why the house never hurt Liam.
Ignoring the bitterness coalescing around her, Kat focused on Liam. Liam who built this house. Liam who searched for the Santelli heir. Liam who married her and gave her the silver ring on her finger.
The corrosive chill grew stronger. The chandelier kept shaking. She could hear the crystal pieces crashing against each other.