But the close-looking eye could see there was scrollwork in the wood that spoke of a careful, skilled craftsman’s hand. Some of the windows that remained intact sported stained glass figures in beautiful clothing and graceful poses. And the mansion’s foundation gave the artistic impression of Germanic wooden bridges spanning babbling brooks. The wooden shingles might be molded or missing, but once upon a time, a lot of love had gone into the creation of this home.
As Siobhan stood there and took it all in, the realtor straightened on the front porch and shot a worried look over the padded shoulder of her dark blue blazer. The realtor’s name was Jane, which struck Siobhan as secretly funny. It seemed every realtor she’d ever met had been named Jane.
No doubt, at that moment, Jane was thinking that Siobhan had changed her mind. In fact, Jane had probably lost hope before she’d even allowed it to take hold; the house had been on the market for two long years since its last owner. No realtor in her right mind would begin to feel hope now.
But Siobhan hadn’t changed her mind. She wasn’t going to turn tail and run. She wasn’t that kind of girl.
With a smile meant to reassure, Siobhan left the side of her car and made her way up the walk that led to the front porch. The cement, which obviously wasn’t a part of the original home but had been added years later, was cracked and overgrown with yellow weeds that someone had half-heartedly sprayed with poison. Siobhan counted the cracks; she couldn’t help it. It was something she’d always done. There were thirty-two before she reached the bottom step.
Countless changing seasons had seen the paint job on the stairs peeled into curly-q ringlets and guitar-pick sized chips of white that looked like a dragon’s lost scales. Warped wood yawned open underneath, charcoal-gray and dry as a bone.
Five steps to the top.
The house seemed to lean toward her as she reached the last step and stood before the door. Jane gave her a wan smile and turned to unlock it. Siobhan noticed the key she used: A skeleton key.
“Now, as I mentioned before, this one has been empty for a while. As you can see, it needs a bit of upkeep,” Jane told her as she fumbled with the lock. The key had slipped in, but didn’t seem to want to turn. Siobhan watched the woman struggle with it a bit as she went on, “The last owner has agreed to provide a repair allowance and to pay closing costs, and the price has been reduced twice.” After a few seconds of frustrating failure, the realtor pulled the key back out, gave it a hard look, and slipped it back in to try to turn it once more. “I don’t know why they never replaced these locks,” she mumbled as she worked. “It isn’t safe to keep locks from owner to owner.” Her purse slipped off of her shoulder and into the crook of her arm. Tendrils of her light blonde hair had slipped from the bun at the nape of her neck to frizz about her face in the early May humidity.
“How many owners has it had?” Siobhan asked, not really caring how many it had had, but feeling the need to fill the silence with small talk. Jane’s nerves were so frayed, Siobhan could almost see their ends swaying in the breeze.
“Well…” Jane replied, a little out of breath. “I’d have to double check my notes, but I think it’s had somewhere in the family of a dozen.” She stopped messing with the key a moment, shot Siobhan a half-smile over her shoulder, and added, “It’s an old house.”
“Would you like some help with that?” Siobhan asked, looking from Jane to the key she clutched tightly in her white fingertips. The realtor glanced down at the key and back up again. Siobhan knew what she was thinking. What made her think that she could make it work when Jane couldn’t?
“I’m good with old things,” Siobhan said by way of explanation. She shrugged and smiled sheepishly, hoping that would do the trick.
“Oh,” Jane said. She straightened, pulling the key out of the door. “By all means, give it a shot. Two heads are often better than one.”
Siobhan held out her hand and the realtor deposited the key in her palm. Her fingers closed over the old metal, at once detecting the slight buzz that came from its surface. It was something Jane wouldn’t pick up. Most humans wouldn’t, in fact. But Siobhan would.
She gave the realtor a reassuring smile, bent, and slipped the key once more into the troublesome lock. At once, the key turned, almost of its own accord, and the door swung open, pulling away from her grasp.
Siobhan’s gaze narrowed in irritation on the open doorway. She felt her magic bristle as the cool air from the house’s interior curled out and over the wooden porch around their feet.
“Wow,” said the realtor, who was busily brushing her dress suit and hair back into place. She hoisted her purse back over her shoulder and gave Siobhan a stiff nod of approval. “You really do have a way with old things.”
You have no idea, Siobhan thought.
“Well, come on in,” said Jane, as she stepped past the house’s threshold and into the shadows beyond. Her patent leather pump lost its deep blue color, fading into black in the dim of the interior. “The electricity’s been off for a while now, as you can imagine, but I’ll open some windows and you can at least get an idea of what you’re dealing with.”
Siobhan followed her inside, her eyes turned up toward the rafters and fuzzy-looking corners filled with cobwebs and holes left by termites. She stifled the urge to laugh. No one in their right mind would buy this house. It wasn’t in need of upkeep. It was in need of a bulldozer.
But even as she thought so, her eyes strayed to the expertly carved banister that led to the second floor, and she frowned. Okay, she admitted begrudgingly. It doesn’t need a bulldozer.
It needed her.
A second later, Jane reappeared in the archway that led to the dining room and kitchen beyond. She was loudly brushing her hands to dust them off, and her hair had once more slipped from her bun. “I got the windows open –”
“I’ll take it,” Siobhan said before the realtor could say anything further.
Jane stopped in her tracks and stared at her with wide, blinking eyes.
Siobhan smiled and shrugged. “When can I move in?”
*****
She stopped just after she entered the living room and dropped the heavy padded glider chair she’d been carrying. It sent a cloud of dust flying as it clattered noisily to the wooden planks, which Siobhan ignored as she used the back of her forearm to wipe the sweat from her forehead.
“Not that I mind having you around, Steven, but I have to admit I wish you were solid right now. This crap is heavy.” Siobhan sighed and lowered herself into the glider before resting her head back on the head rest and closing her eyes. She’d sent the police detail away earlier that afternoon. It had been ten days since Steven’s death and she felt conspicuous and strange having cops watching her twenty-four-seven. She also felt guilty. Salem was right next door to Boston as the crow flies. Boston was a big city, often a dangerous city, and there were certainly more useful places for a pair of police officers to be than parked in a car across the street from her new worn-down, still empty home.
So she was stuck lugging the furniture in on her own, and after four hours of hauling heavy things straight, she was nearly done – and nearly done for.
She could feel Steven’s ghost hovering beside her to her left.
Steven’s ghost.
She’d come home on Monday night a week and a half ago to find her street blocked off by fire trucks and ambulances – and her house on fire. The entire block had smelled like evil.
Siobhan was a warlock. If anyone in the world understood the power and pull of evil, it was her. She fought it every day.
Twenty-eight years ago, she’d been born with a penchant for magic. Of course, the skills didn’t make themselves apparent until a number of years later, when at the age of eight, she unwittingly and telekinetically slammed her mother’s fingers in the kitchen drawer because she couldn’t get a word in edge-wise around her numerous brothers and sisters. That got her mother’s attention.
It also got Siobhan’s. And it felt
terrible.
That was the first time her magic had reared its head and caused harm. Since that moment, Siobhan made great effort to retain control over her emotions. Because when she didn’t, bad things happened.
Several years later, a friend was hosting an Oldies but Goodies movie night and Siobhan watched a very young Drew Barrymore kill people with massive fire balls. She stared at the child on the screen, and felt like an imposter amongst humans. There before her was someone with dangerous magic, magic she could barely control, and it was so fantastical, so unbelievable, it was the basis for a science fiction horror.
And Siobhan was reminded of herself – and of the secret she’d kept hidden for the duration of her childhood.
Every now and then, she considered going to a Wiccan coven or something similar and trying to get help. Talking to someone. Trying to figure things out.
But these witches were so vastly different from Siobhan, the gap between them felt un-breachable. They stressed a philosophy of “harming none,” and all the while, the magic inside of Siobhan begged her to do just the opposite. It was a nasty, volatile kind of magic.
Siobhan’s power was not a modern day witch’s power. It had nothing to do with cauldrons or herbs or crystals. It was about anger and hatred and revenge…. And…. It was real.
Day after day, night after night, year after year, Siobhan struggled to get a firm grip on what she was and how to deal with it, and she did so alone. Being the youngest child in a family of four daughters and three sons made her task both more difficult and more simple. Hiding was a constant necessity, but it was like hiding in New York; there was always someone else around to take the attention off of her.
In high school, she was the attractive but unpopular kid that young adult romance writers loved to pen about now, only at the time, there had been no gorgeous vampire to save her and no strapping werewolf to protect her. It was just her, in a non-stop battle with her own flaring temper and the magic that thrummed through her veins, begging for release.
The effort was taxing, to say the least. As time went by, the tiring effects of her constant war with herself took different forms, lending her OCD tendencies, a touch of insomnia, and a firm, undying need for at least five cups of strong Irish tea a day.
Other things happened as well. Little by little, she was made aware of the fourth dimension of reality around her. Life did not consist of humans and animals and then her – different from the others and alone in this difference. Instead, it consisted of humans and animals and magic.
This magic ran through the veins of supernatural races that she’d once only dreamed of but that now followed her, tracked her down, and noticed her even when no other human did. The first run-in she’d had with one of these races was with an Akyri child.
A hungry Akyri child.
Siobhan had been thirteen at the time and the little girl, who must not have been any older than four or five, had looked at Siobhan as if she were a Big Mac at the end of a marathon run. She was starving for magic, and Siobhan’s looked like a feast.
Over the next fifteen years, Siobhan learned more about these Akyri and their symbiotic relationships with warlocks, and she came to accept that a warlock was what she was. A black magic user.
Whether she liked it or not.
Witches and warlocks were not made, not trained, not formed. They were not bred by their environments or nurtured this way or that. They were born. And it was as simple as that. Siobhan had no idea why she possessed the abilities she did while her brothers and sisters seemed devoid of them. She had no idea why they were dark abilities, tainted by wrath the way that old houses were tainted with mold. But that was the hand that life had dealt her, and she came to accept that she would always be struggling with it.
She didn’t have to struggle of course. She knew this. Her magic reminded her of it over and over again, coaxing her and massaging her and whispering in her ears: Give up. Give in. Let me handle this.
But if she did, she would become something that deep down in her heart, she didn’t want to be. It just wasn’t her.
So in the end, she grew more tired every day and relied more and more upon tea and coffee and sleeping in late and tried to distract herself with work. Because she didn’t like to chance losing her temper around someone else, she tried to keep to herself as much as possible, and her “work” consisted of finding antiques, using magic to restore them to pristine and mint condition, and selling them online. She was good at it. It was something about the magic that ran through her veins that lent itself to dealing with things that were past their prime. Old things. Worn out things. Even dead things.
She’d witnessed a coyote hit by a bus once while she’d been traveling through the Southwest. It had one black leg. A few nights later, she’d found that same black-legged coyote skulking around her car in the motel parking lot. She had no idea how or why. But there it was. Dead things found their way to her. And sometimes, as was the case with the antiques she bought and sold, she brought them back to life.
She earned an okay living, but the money wasn’t the biggest advantage to doing what she did. It was being able to drive the car she drove – a jet black 1965 Ford Mustang built the first year that Ford began putting bigger, 225 horse power engines in its ponies – as if it were fresh off of the lot. It was being able to wear the same pair of perfect fitting jeans for thirteen years. And it was this house, forgotten, left behind, and crumbling, and what it would look like when her magic was finished with it.
Siobhan opened her eyes and looked up at the cracked rafters above her. When night fell and lent her a blanket of privacy, a single, powerful spell would fix the house’s interior so quickly and so completely, it would be like turning back time. The exterior, however, would take longer. It wouldn’t do for Siobhan to cast a spell that corrected everything outside all at once. Someone was sure to notice something so drastic.
Instead, she would repair it little by little, a spell here and a spell there, and a few weeks into it, the neighbors would pass by, glance at her house, and nod their approval at all of the work she’d done to fix up the old Victorian-style manor.
In the meantime, she needed to give off the appearance of normalcy. And so she lugged her furniture from the van outside into the manor’s dim, cool interior, and marveled at the way no one ever offered to help. She was the stranger in town. She was the one buying the “haunted house,” the “cursed house,” and she was red-headed to boot.
Siobhan smiled now, sat up straight, and sighed heavily. Beside her, a thin wisp of white energy brushed past her hand, drawing her attention.
Steven.
She’d met him six months ago at a coffee shop where he and a few other cops sometimes stopped in for a warm drink and a break. They’d gotten to talking. She’d been impressed with a lot of things about him – his appearance, of course, and the confident way he carried himself. But there was also an untapped power about him; the magic in her recognized it, even if it was altogether human and not magical in and of itself. Most of all, it was the keenness of his eyes.
And he’d been carrying a dog-eared copy of Macbeth. It seemed like fate.
He’d watched her with a strange kind of interest, as if he could tell she had a secret and he was dying to know what it was. But there was also a gentleness about him, a smoothing out of his rough edges. He was hard but kind. And she was intrigued.
They dated for two months before he caught her using magic. She’d been finishing up the final touches on an 18k pocket watch she’d picked up at an auction, and while she thought she’d locked the door, apparently she hadn’t. He walked in while the watch hovered in the air, spinning like a top, becoming increasingly shiny and functional.
Instead of the insanity she expected to ensue, Steven seemed… almost pleased. As if he’d subconsciously known all along what she was and had simply been waiting for proof.
He accepted it, he accepted her, and since he was a detective and used to keeping evidence under wraps
and an orphan with a somewhat blotchy past of his own, he kept her secret, and she trusted him.
Two months later, they’d become comfortable enough to start staying at each other’s houses. They exchanged keys and left a few belongings behind for “sleepovers.”
Two months after that, she’d come home to a house on fire and a dead boyfriend.
And now, a week and a half later, he was a ghost living on the outskirts of her reality, always somewhere nearby but just out of reach. She didn’t know what to make of any of it. She had no idea what to think. What had happened that night? The forensics people, CSI investigators and insurance arson experts had all come up with vague, strange stories and none of them seemed to be able to pinpoint how the fire had started, what had set it off, or how Steven had been trapped within it.
Because Siobhan had been Steven’s girlfriend and because the house had been hers, she’d been offered a larger amount of police protection than usual. After all, when they’d found Steven’s body and the gun in his hand, they’d discovered that all fifteen bullets had been discharged. There was no point to holding an empty gun, and Steven would have known that better than anyone.
Someone probably killed him. That was the general consensus.
It was just that no one could figure out how. Much less, why.
In the privacy and silence of a hotel room in the dead of night, Siobhan had tried casting a spell that would allow her to see the events that had taken place just prior to the fire, but each time she attempted to use the magic in this way, she failed. She never saw anything. Steven’s death remained a mystery.
Siobhan frowned and looked up at the faint vapor that moved away from her side, away from her chair, and through the living room. It passed beneath the archway that led out of the joined rooms and disappeared down the hall. Steven’s ghost… most likely checking out the house now that it was getting dark. Always protecting her, even in death.
Siobhan leaned forward and put her face in her hands, allowing the coolness of her fingers to pull a bit of the heat off of her forehead. She closed her eyes again. There, behind her lids, she saw the flames rising toward the moon and smelled the deep black of soot and felt the heaviness of doom on her chest. There had been very little left of Steven’s body when all was done and said. So even though her warlock’s brain had tiptoed toward the idea of bringing him back from the dead, she’d known it would be impossible. Unthinkable, even.
The Phantom King (The Kings) Page 2