“No, Grandma.” Paige sighed, not knowing what to say. She was getting older. They couldn’t rely on her the way they used to. They had to start doing for themselves more and relying on her less. “We have to carry our own. You’ve carried us long enough. Don’t you think?”
Nodding, her wrinkled lips flat and pushed out, Alma thunked the doorframe with one hand. “Well, I can get back to my quilting, then.”
Paige had never known Alma quilted.
Leslie herded the kids out of the workroom, listening to Tyler and Mandy squabble loudly. “Go clean your rooms,” she barked over the two of them.
Leah was pushed ahead of the pack. She tripped, caught herself and hurried to stand behind Paige.
“No!” Paige yelled in a commanding, stop the entire team to listen voice. “We have an entire house that’s been wrecked. We have a kitchen to clean, a living room to straight, a work room to tidy.”
“I’ve got the work room,” Alma called. “It’s still mine,” she grumbled.
“I heard that,” Paige said.
“Good.”
Paige pulled from her diaphragm again and continued barking orders. “Bedrooms can wait. First, we straight what fell. Anything that’s broken we pile on a table and see if we can glue back together. Mandy, you get the living room. Pay attention. Don’t be a slob.”
“On it,” Mandy said with a curt nod, straightening to a sloppy attention.
“Once you’re done straightening and picking up, might as well dust. We had a lot of shit falling from the ceiling.”
“Paige,” Leslie admonished. “Language.”
Seriously? That woman. “Once that’s done, sweep and vacuum.” As a kid, she’d always hated working on the living room floor because it wasn’t just vacuuming. The rugs didn’t cover the entire floor and in places, hardwood peeked out. It was annoying.
“Tyler, you’ve got the kitchen.”
“Aye, aye, Captain!” Tyler clicked his socked heels together and saluted with a lazy elbow. He straightened, dropped his hand, and waited.
“Pick everything up first. Put the shards that are easy to pick up on the dining room table.”
“Just throw them away,” Alma called, poking her head out of the workroom. “There ain’t nothin’ in that kitchen worth gluin’ back together.”
Paige tipped her head to the side. “You heard the woman. Throw them away. Get shoes on, both of you. No working with your shoes off.”
“Okay,” Mandy said, her leg twitching as if to run up the stairs.
“Aye, aye!” Tyler yelled.
Paige’s eardrums rang. That boy and his voice. “Okay? Go!”
The two thundered up the stairs, shoving each other out of the way.
“And, Tyler, you sweep when you’re done. And this will take as long as you make it! So, hurry and be done quickly, or be lazy frelling sloths and take all week. No X-box until you’re done!”
“We have a Wii,” Mandy called, disappearing down the hall.
“Fine,” Paige yelled louder. “No Wii!”
Leslie stared at her sister in wonder. “How did you do that?”
Paige smiled smugly. “I babysit adults all day.”
Snorting, Leslie ducked her head. “Okay. Where do you want me?”
“Bedrooms?” Paige shrugged. “You could keep an eye on Kamden and Bobby better that way.”
Leslie nodded. “I can do that. But you’re bringing Bobby up.”
“You got it.”
Dexx ducked back into the house from the front door. “Cops dealt with. Thanked them for her time. She’s awesome.”
“When did you leave?” Paige asked, scrambling to get out of his way.
“Back door, dude.”
“Oh.” She totally missed that.
Tru entered the entryway through the hall. “What do you need us to do?”
“Well, I know you’re itching to clean guns.”
Dexx grinned. He loved cleaning guns.
“But I need one of you with Mandy in the living room and one with Tyler in the kitchen. I’ll let you two boys duke that out.”
“You got it, boss,” Tru said with a smile. “Did you see me? I shot one of those hounds.”
Paige widened her eyes, her lips flat. “Great.” She loved shooting. She just didn’t necessarily love shooting at things, especially if they were alive and wiggling. If she was hunting for food, that might be one thing. She could probably work around that. But shooting someone else to protect her and her own? Yeah. She wasn’t about to fucking hesitate. Fuck that fucking shit. No. However, she didn’t enjoy it.
“He nicked it.” Dexx chuckled and turned into the living room. “It’ll live. Who do I have, again?”
Paige shook her head. “Whoever you pick.”
“Mandy,” he threw back his head and yelled.
“Coming!” Mandy’s muffled voice was quickly followed by thundering footsteps. “Are these okay, Aunt Paige?” Mandy showed off her pink snow boots from the third from the top step, her expression worried. “It’s the thickest sole I have.”
“Snow boots?” Paige frowned at Leslie. “Where’d you get those?”
“We were going to visit you in Denver and everyone got excited to see snow.” Leslie raised her hand. “It was a thing. They’re fine, Mand.” Leslie headed up the stairs. “Go on. Dexx is helping you in the living room.”
“Sweet!” Mandy hopped and ran down the stairs, easily dodging her mother and baby brother. “Dexx!” She ran into the living room and leapt at him.
He laughed. “What is with all the energy?”
“We totally kicked booty out there today.”
“You did. Now, do me a favor and don’t make me do all the work.”
“What?” Mandy plucked at her purple shirt and shimmied. “Don’t make me do all the work.”
“Hey, Grandma.” Paige ducked into the workroom now that everyone had their jobs assigned. Well, except Leah, but Paige knew exactly what Leah was going to do. Cleaning up her ghost mess.
“Yeah?” Alma was working on righting books on the back bookshelf. “What’s up, Peanut?”
“I met the local shapeshifters’ pack leader today.”
“You what?” Alma swung around, then stopped herself. She set her palms down on the table, her wide shoulders squared. “Well. You’ve certainly had a busy day. What happened?”
“Well, I got the history of why we came to Texas.”
Alma bit her top lip.
“Did you know?”
Shaking her head and looking up at the ceiling, Alma sighed. “They were fairy tale stories. I had to deal with Momma, you understand. She wasn’t handlin’ her gift near as well as you do. She wasn’t right in the head. It was a fight to keep her from killin’ herself. I was worried for her. So the stories my grandmamma told me about the shifter battles were neat deterrents. Honestly, child, I didn’t even really think about them until you ran across the shifters there in Denver.”
“Hmm.” Paige ducked her head. “Well, we have a new treaty. I told Chuck you had to review it, and then we’d probably sit down and review it as a family before we could sign it.”
Alma stared at the wooden table with her white eyes. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s a good treaty. It cuts the limitations from the Whiskeys and Chuck’s pack.”
“And that’s a good thing?”
“Yeah, Grandma. It really is. We could use their help. They could use ours. They’re not bad people, Grandma, and neither are we.”
“Well, at least we’re not the Eastwoods.”
“But Mark was,” Paige said quietly. “Why didn’t you tell me about our connection to them?”
Alma shook her head and lifted one shoulder. “They were stories. By the time you showed up with him and I figured out who and what he was, it was too late. ‘Sides, he was a good man.”
He had been, too. Paige had been so in love with him. She shook herself. Reminiscing wasn’t what she was standing in the do
orway for.
“Grandma…” Paige licked her bottom lip, afraid of saying what she was planning to and not knowing how to do it. “We’re thinking of moving back to Portland.”
“What?” Alma’s expression went silent and still, her body not moving.
“We’re thinking of moving to Oregon. Maybe not Portland, but I would have a better chance of landing a job there. And Leslie and Tru are thinking of joining me.”
“When were you going to tell me this? Officially?”
“We were trying to find the best time.”
“And this was it?”
“Nope. But is there really a best time for this kind of conversation?”
Alma raised her hands to either side of her and let them fall with a shake of her head. “I guess not.”
“Yeah. I guess not.”
“So, you’re sidin’ with the pack and then takin’ the fight to Merry’s door.”
Paige nodded.
“Doesn’t make much sense.”
Oh, right. Alma didn’t know the rest. “Unless the pack is moving with us.”
Alma studied the table top. “Could be disastrous.”
Yeah. “Would be worse if we took the battle to Merry without backup.”
Sighing, Alma looked up, her lips screwed to the side for a long moment before she spoke. “You’re going to keep on with Dexx, then?”
Yeah. She was. “I have an animal spirit inside me, Grandma. Why give him up when I break the treaty ten ways to Sunday?”
“Well, we could probably hide.”
Why? “I don’t want to.”
Alma raised her chin and dropped her gaze.
“When did you start hiding instead of fighting, Grandma?”
The corners of Alma’s eyes drooped. “When I found myself raisin’ my daughter’s daughters, I guess. Funny thing happens to ya when you realize how badly you failed the first time.”
Paige understood that. Kind of. Well, the failing part, anyway. “Well, I’m not hiding.”
“I can see that.”
“We’d like you to join us.”
“Of course, I’m joining you, you dumb nut!” Alma frowned down at her hands. “I ain’t leaving you to the Eastwoods on your own, no matter how strong you might be right now. I’m goin’ with you.”
That was a relief. “We haven’t fully decided if we are or not. Nothing’s finalized. I have to stay here for at least two months, anyway. A lot could happen between now and then.”
“But once you get your mind settled on a thing, there’s nothin’ else what gets in your way.”
“Yeah.” Paige couldn’t hide that. “It must be hereditary.”
Alma quirked her lips, but her shoulders relaxed.
“We have a lot to do before we can move, though.”
“Yeah, well…” Alma glanced significantly through the door to the rest of the house. “If you can command those kids to do somethin’ like clean this house?” Alma nodded and met Paige’s gaze. “Well, I think we might just make it after all.”
Paige wasn’t so sure. Surviving a magickal war was a lot different than cleaning a house.
But then again, maybe it wasn’t.
“Um, Pea?” Dexx called, his tone a little urgent. “We still got ghosts!”
“They’re not ghosts,” Leslie yelled from the top of the stairs.
“Right.” Paige threw back her head and yelled, “Tell them to go to the attic. Leah and I will meet them there.”
“Yeah, because spirits’ll listen to us?” Leslie yelled.
Paige turned to Leah and sighed, Bobby completely just zonked in her arms. “You ready to clean up your mess?”
“Um.” Leah wrung her hands. “I don’t—I don’t know.”
“Meh.” Paige wrapped her free arm around her daughter’s shoulders and herded the girl upstairs. “I’ll show you. Or, at least, I’ll try and you’ll muddle through it and, hopefully, you won’t destroy the house.”
“You think I could?” Leah’s tone rose a half octave.
“Worst case scenario,” Paige offered. “Besides, you really think you can do worse than the frelling bard? He breaks glass. With his voice.”
Leah opened her mouth, her face folded with worry.
“Or the fire starter? Can you imagine the damage Mandy does when she’s pissed?”
Leah loosened her shoulders a little. “Well, yeah, I guess.”
“And, anyway, it would give Grandma the perfect excuse to clean out that frelling attic.”
“I heard you,” Alma called.
Paige smiled.
“Grandma is scared of me.”
It took Paige a second to remember that the person she called Grandma wasn’t the same person Leah called Grandma. Right. Rachel. “She would be if she knew what you could do, you mean.”
Leah ducked her head.
“How long have you had your ability?”
“A few months. Almost a year, I guess.”
Paige turned to the left to drop Bobby off in his crib. Leslie was nowhere to be found, but Kamden was contentedly sleeping in the crib already. Paige stepped back into the hallway and called semi-loudly, “Bobby’s down.”
“Okay,” Leslie’s voice came from Tyler’s room.
Paige nodded once and headed to the far end of the hallway.
“What are we going to do?” Leah asked.
“Well, we’ll make sure nothing died in the attic while all your spirits join us. And if they don’t all come, then you get to wrangle them up.”
“Huh?”
“You get to call them to you. Same way you brought them through the Gate, only without having to open the door.”
“I don’t think I can.”
“Oh, chica,” Paige said, opening the door to the attic stairs, “I have confidence you can do it. If you can make the mess, you can figure out how to clean it up. Oi. Did these stairs shrink since the last time I used them?”
Paige and Leah straightened the attic a little, though it really didn’t need a whole lot. Miracle of miracles, though, in honesty, it was hard to figure out what had been destroyed or thrown to the floor. It wasn’t as though the attic was organized to begin with. Paige put organizing the attic on her list of things to do when and if they decided to move to Oregon. Though, how in the hell they were supposed to move half this crap out of the attic was beyond her. The couch? The chair? The desk? The old hutch? Yeah. They’d have to remove walls, or the roof. Gee whiz.
“So, something happened today that I should probably tell you about.” A tendril of guilt wormed its way into her heart. “I, uh, took your grandmother to court today.”
Leah’s lips were tight and her eyebrows rose as she shuffled a big box that must have had nearly nothing in it.
“I don’t know if she told you.”
“I guessed something happened. I’m not stupid, you know.”
“I do sometimes forget you’re not seven, you know,” Paige said, using Leah’s tone.
“Okay. So, you took her to court. She’s never going to lose. You know that, right? She won’t lose. Not to you, anyway.”
“What makes you say that?”
“She always gets what she wants.”
“How does she do that?”
Leah set down a box and sighed. “I don’t even know. Another one just came up.”
Spirit. Paige was going to have to teach that girl how to give some non-verbal indicators when she shifted the conversation to the invisible people. “That’s what, five of them now?” They’d been seeping up through the floor for the past ten minutes.
“Six.”
“Mmm.” Paige must have missed one. Leah had said eight had come through, so they only needed two more. “Well, I did win today.”
Leah jerked, a frown furrowing her forehead. “What?”
“Temporary orders.”
“You didn’t even ask me. What about what I want?”
Paige stopped and perched against the arm of the red chair. “Yeah. What do yo
u want? I mean, I had to act quickly. I realize I should have asked you, but I don’t even know if you know what you want. And I’m not entirely certain that being with that wo—with your grandmother—” Shit. That was hard. Paige might despise Rachel to the bottom of her soul, but Leah still loved her. “—is necessarily safe.”
“I am safe with her.”
“Right. And that’s why you hid your gift from her. Because she’ll just open her arms to you and be right as rain.”
“Pa—Mom.”
She wasn’t the only one remembering how to be a decent human being. That was comforting in a weird, this-shouldn’t-be-comforting-because-she’s-a-kid-and-you’re-an-adult kind of way. “Lee.”
“She’s my grandmother. She loves me.”
“Yeah, well, my grandma told me that Ra—my mother—” Fuck. “—loved me once, too.”
“But you raise demons.”
“And you bring back the souls that have crossed to Heaven and Hell already.”
“At least that isn’t evil.”
“According to you.”
Leah frowned and pulled away. “Are you trying to say you’re not evil? According to you?”
This conversation was turning out to be a lot more grown up than Paige had been prepared for. “How old are you?”
“If you’d been around, you’d know.”
“Oh, I know. I’m just not believing that this conversation is being held with a twelve-year-old.”
“Because I’m supposed to be stupid?”
“In some things? Yes!” Paige flopped her hands in her lap, her shoulders scrunched. “Look, I’m just as stupid in certain things. I’m not going to lie. I’m still learning here. Learning who you are. What you like. How you think. You’re just more mature than I would have guessed, and I didn’t even really know how to have this conversation with you if you’d been, you know, a normal kid.”
“And what would that have been?”
“Like me!” Paige let her head fall back and breathed, closing her eyes briefly. She raised her head and met Leah’s gaze. “Look. I don’t know what I’m doing on a good day in a normal situation. I want you in my life so bad I ache. My heart hurts when you’re not around, when I can’t hear your voice, when I can’t hear your footsteps, when I can’t see your face, or hear about your day. And I have the stupid questions in my head. Like, ‘Does she still like Blue’s Clues or My Little Pony or is she into Barbie?’”
A Barrel of Whiskey - (An Urban Fantasy Whiskey Witches Novel) Page 21