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“ARE you sure it wasn’t just a bad dream? You know how you get those bad dreams when you eat ice cream before you go to bed.”
I’m sure if I polled every female in just the United States alone, I’d find that 99 percent of them have wanted to strangle their mothers at one point or another.
Probably even more than once.
Which was how I was feeling at that moment. But if I did that, where would I go to mooch a meal, a cup of herbal tea, and the occasional bit of otherworldly gossip?
Of course Mom’s comments didn’t help the fact I’d found several strands of white hairs all clumped together over my left temple. I had blinked sleep out of my eyes several times and squinted at it. Wasn’t a dream—there they were—starting at my part. I’d pulled all of them out.
That’s when I caught sight of the mark on my arm again—when I pulled at the long, white strands of hair. Very visible and very real.
It looked more like a big henna tattoo. I’d almost hoped my little adventure the night before had been a nightmare. Nada.
The arm hurt in a weird sort of not-really-painful way. Kind of like one of those bruises that remind you it’s there with a little pain now and then. I was especially aware of it when I sat at my computer and composed the report e-mail for last night’s client and the dot-com company. I explained briefly that the two men in question were more into each other than business. I hit send, and my arm twinged.
Not wanting to draw attention to it till I knew more about what’d happened last night, I wrapped it in one of those ACE bandages and told everyone I’d fallen.
And, of course, Mom was a bit put out when I wouldn’t show her my boo-boo.
My mom, Nona Martinique, owned a good-sized business nestled on Euclid off of Moreland in a small community lovingly dubbed Little Five Points, named after an intersection where the five main roads of Atlanta once met.
The house was just past The Junkman’s Daughter (a warehouse of vintage clothing and jewelry) and the older location of Sevenanda (formerly an herbal and health food store). They’d long since moved to a bigger location down the street, and the building sort of disguised itself at times as a soon-to-be short-lived business.
Kinda like a dot-com company.
Long known as Atlanta’s art community (and gathering place for the unexplainable), Nona had chosen the area after years of working at Delta. I don’t know how she did it, but she’d managed to raise me and still save for her dream.
A botanica and tea shop. I never knew she had it in her.
Mom’s botanica didn’t fit the true definition of the word. Oh, she sold the usual plants, seeds, horticultural information, but that side of the shop also retailed in seven-day candles as well as sachet love potions. The tea side sold preboxed, franchised teas, along with Mom’s own special blends. She imported a lot of the dried leaves, then brewed them in the back.
The whole deal made up the lower floor of a Victorian two-story she found six years ago when I took her shopping in the community. I admit we both fell in love with it. I wanted to live in it. Mom saw dollar signs.
Even through the years of neglect we found unique advantages. The house had sturdy, concrete steps leading up from the sidewalk, a nice backyard, and a wraparound porch in surprisingly good shape. The only thing that had marred the view was a honking condemned signpost on the front door.
A bit of investigation on my part (yes, I snooped) revealed the condemned notice wasn’t an official one, but something the owner slapped on there in hopes he could raze the building and sell the land to a developer.
But the house was declared a historical landmark, and that prevented him from doing anything destructive to it. He’d been too lazy and pissed off to remove the condemned sign.
So he’d tried selling or leasing it, but all the business owners interested broke their contracts within six months or always dropped the offer.
They all claimed it was haunted.
Which at the time seemed preposterous to me. Even though I was a Traveler, I’d not seen any ghosts during my wanderings. I thought they were figments of too many bad movies and the Sci Fi Channel.
Mom made the owner a purchase offer he couldn’t refuse and a promise not to renege on the deal.
She renovated the bathrooms, updated the appliances, painted, refinished the hardwood floors, and then furnished it with antiques she’d been buying and storing through the years.
Needless to say I was impressed with Mom. Most of the time.
It wasn’t long before we met Tim and Steve, the former owners of the house on Euclid Avenue, and the reason for the former purchasers’ problems.
Longtime companions, the couple had bought the house in the late eighties and been in the process of restoring it to its original splendor when tragedy stuck them down in the middle of an argument over olive green or chartreuse.
Apparently Steve had been on his way down the stairs of the basement to get the chartreuse when one of the wood steps collapsed, and he pitched forward.
The impact on the concrete floor below snapped his neck. Dead.
Tim followed him not long after, calling down to him in the dark. During his fall, Steve had lashed out to grab something and taken the single lightbulb cord with him, yanking it out of its housing in the house frame.
Not so lucky, Tim hit the missing step and fell as well; only he managed to break his back. He didn’t die as quickly, but languished in the house beside his decomposing lover for nearly a week before passing away.
Believe me, as gruesome as this story sounds, you hear it over a hundred times, and it just gets to be boring.
They’d been watching what Nona had done to the place and were both pleased. Add to the fact my mom was an avid human-rights activist as well as a dead ringer for Debbie Reynolds, and it was just love at first sight all around.
Mom insisted she’d known they were there the whole time. She says she can see ghosts. Apparently I could too, but the two didn’t make their presence known to me till after they discovered I could move out of body.
They became Mom’s constant companions in the house—that is, after she set up a few ground rules.
No ghosts in the bathrooms, not corporeal or incorporeal. No ghosts in the bedroom, the same.
And no ghosts in the shop during business hours.
She threatened that either they mind her or there would be an exorcism of the worst kind.
Because of this, so Mom didn’t break her own rules about no ghosts in the shop during working hours, she pushed the shop hours back on Wednesdays to noon. That way we could all sit down on those mornings and have tea and biscuits and homemade butter and discuss our weeks.
We were at the larger, rectangular Tudor-style oak table. Mom had put out biscuits with country ham (that means extra saltymmmmmm), six different homemade jams (grape, apricot, pear, apple, blackberry, and jalapeño!), three different teas in an assortment of teapots (jasmine, English Breakfast, and Earl Grey—Ick! Stuff tastes like boiled hay), and two cakes, carrot and fennel. Those she’d picked up at the local bakery two blocks away.
After last night, I didn’t think I could eat. But once I’d stepped into the shop, my stomach betrayed me. Remember that ravenous thing I mentioned?
Mental note: mmmmmm…biscuits.
Rhonda joined us late. But that had something to do with staying up till 4 A.M. to work her Magical MacGyver mojo on some mystical whatnot for some wacko customer of Mom’s. Her flat black hair was cut short into a Betty Page coif. Her black nails matched the half-moons hanging beneath her eyes.
I’m not sure how old Rhonda is. Sometimes she seems eighteen, and other times she feels forty. I just know she’s damned good at her magical mechanics.
And last night, I’d truly appreciated it.
Her greeting this morning included the relinquishing of my astral watch to her. She mumbled something about having a few upgrades ready and proceeded to work her mojo on it while downing three cups of bla
ck coffee. I hoped she didn’t notice the melted band, or if she did, she’d wait till Mom wasn’t about.
“There.” She handed it back to me. Evidently she hadn’t seen the physical damage. Whew—I think.
I strapped it on my right wrist. “So what does it do now?”
“I installed a gather upgrade, so it’ll not only record your time on the astral per little excursion,” the side of her mouth twitched. “It’ll also give me an accurate reading on total hours.”
“You think me going astral has some sort of cumulative effect?”
She shrugged. “Dunno. We still haven’t exactly figured out what exactly it is you do, Zoë.” Rhonda tore a biscuit in half and dipped one end in some honey. “But I added a little alarm to it too—just to let you know when you’re exceeding your daily allotted astral time.”
I looked down at the watch. Alarm? Greeeat.
So I caught Rhonda up on my night’s adventure, of course leaving out the whole he-grabbed-my-arm part. I’d left that out of my telling it to Mom, Steve, and Tim too.
Her usually gloomy façade perked up at the mention of something on the astral plane besides Tim and Steve. “So he wore a trench coat and boots. Kinda like in The Matrix?”
I nodded. I was still burned about Nona’s ice cream and nightmares comment. “Yea, but he didn’t look like Keanu. He looked more like a really scary Vin Diesel.” And depending on what movie you watched, that wasn’t a hard stretch to imagine.
I vote for Pitch Black myself. Same kinda monochromatic look as well.
“Did he have that dreamy voice too?” That was Tim. Apparently he had the hots for the Vin-man.
“No.” I took up a biscuit, my third, and slathered rich butter over it. I’ve always considered Mom’s cooking a good remedy for having the shit scared out of me. “He never said a word. Just gave me that evil boogeyman grin.”
Rhonda snapped her fingers. “That’s it!”
We all paused as she jumped up from the table and ran into the botanica store. A beaded curtain covered the archway that separated the two halves. From a distance the pattern on the beads resembled a sunny meadow.
Up close, it looked like an unpleasant Monet.
“Did that poor man get away?” Nona sipped loudly at her tea.
I shrugged. “I didn’t pay much attention to what happened to him. Once I noticed Trench-Coat eyeballing me, I worried about my own bacon.”
“So you don’t know whether that man’s soul ascended or was trapped by this entity? I mean you did say it looked like he stopped sucking it up into his hand when you blew your wad.”
The urge to strangle returned. Kill, kill!
But it was a good question. Mom was making me think, and I didn’t want to. I was still put off and still frightened. I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to be alone.
But I didn’t want to be grilled either.
See, Mom is an avid reader. No, scratch that. Voracious. Goes through words like a vampire goes through blood.
Okay. Ew. Where did I pull that analogy from?
Before I got to her shop she’d seen the front page of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, the AJC. I hadn’t.
Mom had the paper open to the full article, and everyone had taken turns reading it. The guy I’d apparently abandoned, in my mother’s opinion, was William Tanaka, vice president of Visitar Incorporated, a gaming and video company based in Atlanta. He was thirty-two years old.
Thirty-two. Shot dead by some creature the poor man had no concept of—
Wait…
Tanaka’s words came back to me at that moment, the ones he said just before Trench-Coat blew his face out of the back of his head (see? I told you I had no control over the recall).
“Temae mai kihaku temae yuigon iiya.” I felt a chill pass over my shoulders and race down over my arms and my spine. And I didn’t think it was from the chilly weather outside.
“What?” Steve looked up from the newspaper article. “What did you say?”
“I have no idea.” I looked at him. “I think it was something Tanaka said last night, before Trench-Coat killed him.”
“Temae mai kihaku?” My mom’s housemate frowned. To the natural eye—meaning for anyone that walked in off the street—if Steve wished to be visible to the regular, living populace, he would look normal. I mean as in you’d never know he was a ghost.
Unless you tried to touch him.
He was solidly built, standing maybe six-foot even, with broad shoulders, thinning red hair, and pale blue eyes.
“Don’t change the subject, Steve,” Tim said, and pointed to the array of color swatch books that littered their side of the table. “We have to decide on a trim color.”
To me, Tim looked more washed-out in comparison to Steve. He was dark-haired, with dark eyes and very pale skin. I think he looked that way because he was depressed all the time. Ghosts apparently reacted to strong emotions, especially their own.
And from what I could gather from the couple’s cryptic conversations for most of the morning, they’d been fighting again on whether Mom should paint the house’s trim in white or something equally as boring.
“Look.” I’d had enough and shoved the rest of the butter-slathered biscuit into my mouth. “Just paint the trim black and be different,” I said through the mouthful.
I thought Tim was gonna have a coronary he blanched so white. Steve was looking wide-eyed and horrified.
“Black?” Steve hissed. “Black? A Victorian house of this grandeur would never have had black trim. This is a Painted Lady, Zoë. The trim should be white.”
I gave him the middle finger of my right hand and swallowed my mouthful, or part of it. “And this is a pissed-off lady, Steve. Drop the trim and tell me about what Tanaka said. Why did you react like that?”
“Zoë, temper.” Mom patted the table beside Steve in an attempt to soothe him. She comforted a ghost rather than her own daughter. But that was because she had a crush on him.
Leave it to my mom to have the hots for a dead gay man.
Steve took a deep breath (oh please, ghosts don’t actually breathe) and smiled at my mother before raising a fuzzy eyebrow at me. “Well, the man basically declared that the intruder, Trench-Coat, would not take his soul.”
I looked at him with surprise. “You can speak Japanese?” Steve nodded. “International banker, remember? I can speak four languages. Japanese, German, and French.”
“You said four. That was only three.”
“The fourth is English.”
I knew that.
Rhonda came back into the café at that moment holding a massive book. I checked to make sure it wasn’t made of human flesh. Hey, with Mom, you never know.
My mom had stranger things in her house than ghosts.
I was more interested in what Steve had said as I took up another biscuit and my knife. Tanaka had sort of called Trench-Coat a soul thief, which led me to believe he had known what was about to kill him.
But did Tanaka know who he was? Or did spirit thieves have names?
I had a flashback to the brief seconds I’d been trapped in the monster’s laser beam (well? Got a better name?). Remembering the contentment I’d begun to feel, the lulling voice in my head, coaxing me to release myself to it. To just let go, and feeling all good and tingly in the right places.
I shuddered when I realized how much I’d wanted to do just that. How bad could it be, really? To just shuck this mortal coil and all the day-to-day problems and embrace oblivion?
But that sort of thing scared me—so much so I tried never to leave my body when I was angry. It was too much like running away. And what if someday my body didn’t let me back in?
“Zoë?” Nona reached across the table and touched my bandaged wrist. I winced—not that her touch hurt—but it abruptly reminded me of the thing’s mark on me. I hadn’t realized I’d zoned out while caught in the memory.
I blinked at her. “Yeah Mom?”
“You okay? You wer
e looking into space—and your expression went completely blank. Like there was no one home.”
I set my knife and biscuit back on my plate. My stomach twisted again, and I wanted to throw up. I hadn’t told anyone that I’d gotten caught in Trench-Coat’s snatching-beam.
And I really didn’t want to talk about it now. I was almost embarrassed that I’d let that thing get the better of me. And that I was mortally terrified of it.
“Zoë—what’s wrong? Is your arm hurting you? Maybe I should call the doctor. I can take you there myself.”
Ack. No.
“So what’s in the big book, Rhonda?” Tim rested both his elbows on the table as Rhonda started moving things around on the table to make room for the book.
I glanced at Tim, who gave me an almost imperceptible wink. As always, he’d known I wasn’t in the mood to talk with Mom and had shifted the subject. Gotta love the wee guy.
I looked over at Rhonda, happy the attention moved away from me. She’d set the bulky thing on the table, shoving her plate and delicate teacup to the table’s center. She thumbed to the right, then back to the left in an active search pattern. “I can’t find it. But it was a great thing about the bogeyman and the Abysmal plane.”
Bogey who and the abysmal what?
“I’m not sure it was the boogeyman, Rhonda,” Steve said. “That thing carries away disobedient children.”
She didn’t glance up but her ruby red painted mouth worked into a smile. Creepy. “Bo-gee-man. Not boo-gee. And you’re right, but in that reference I remember seeing something about Symbionts and souls. And—bogeymen and Symbionts seem to appear in most cultures. The bogeyman is synonymous with soul stealing.”
“Synonymous,” Tim said. “That’s a big word. You’re doing great with your big words, Rhonda.”
“Can it, squirt.”
This was a great description of Tim. Squirt. Small. Delicate. Boney. Rhonda, who was not much more than skin and bones at odd angles herself, looked huge compared to his daintiness.
The interchange was also a nice example of their relationship. Tolerant—on good days.
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