by Heloise Hull
“Stop lollygagging and get in there.” Nonna floated ahead—and let out a bloodcurdling shriek.
I swooped into the room, baring my weapons. And found nothing, except for an ancient woman that looked perfectly asleep. Tiberius hopped up on the bed and peered into Nonna’s face.
“Where’s the blood?” I asked.
“It’s here somewhere,” Nonna said, doing circles around her body.
I took a deep, calming breath and cautiously approached. “Are you sure you didn’t pass peacefully in your sleep from old age?”
Nonna whipped around, ruffling the curtains and my nightdress in a chilling mist. Her eyes sparked black and she howled. “It was not peaceful!”
“Okay,” I said slowly, trying to back out of the room. “Maybe you suffocated?”
“You seem to know a lot about how I died,” Nonna said, blocking my way like an ephemeral quarterback. “Doesn’t she, Tiberius?”
The chipmunk bobbed his head noncommittally.
“What?” Nonna demanded.
“On second thought, you do look pretty peaceful,” Tiberius reasoned. “Maybe there’s some other explanation for why you can’t move on.”
And just like that, the chipmunk became my new best friend.
“Because I was brutally murdered! Now hurry up, we have to cleanse the villa of evil.”
“Not to be obvious or anything, but your dead body is still lying in your bed. Shouldn’t calling Luca be the first thing we do?”
“No!” Nonna flickered again erratically. “You have to pretend like nothing is wrong until you find my murderer.”
“You have got to be kidding. This is a joke, right? I’m the dead one. That must be it.” For the tenth time since arriving, I felt my forehead for a fever. “Did Aurick kill me? Is there even an Aurick here? Did you kill me?”
“If I had a body,” Nonna said, “I would have slapped you three sentences ago. If anyone did the killing, it was you.”
“Ladies, if we could pause the murder accusations and think rationally,” Tiberius tried.
Unfortunately for the chipmunk, we both ignored him. Nonna began describing an elaborate cleansing ritual that I needed to do immediately, but something had caught my eye. “Then, cut a lamb’s hindquarters from north to south, and—What are you doing with my dead body?”
By now, I was used to Nonna’s ghostly theatrics. Instead of taking notes like she wanted, I inched closer, the butcher knife dangling at my side. “If you’re dead, why is your chest moving?” I asked.
Nonna paused and cocked her head. “Oh. Oh no.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Oh no, what?”
Tiberius rolled his chipmunk eyes and bounded off for the kitchen, announcing he needed a snack.
“This is on me,” Nonna said.
“What’s on you?”
Without answering, Nonna glowed a brilliant, azure blue and sank into her body. Then, she sat up with a gasp, her hair still in hot pink rollers.
I put on my mom voice. The one right before Dark Night Batman level. “What did you do?”
For once, the indomitable woman looked meek. “Astral projection. I can move between planes, but the older I’ve gotten, the harder it is to control. Especially when I’m sleeping. Or approaching orgasm.”
“Oh good God, that’s—yep, I’m going to be sick.” I put a fist over my mouth.
“What?” Nonna eyed me, her sass firmly back in place. “Older women can’t have a sexual identity? Won’t you be sad in seventy years.”
I shuddered.
“First things first,” Nonna announced, sliding out of bed in her flowery nightgown. “You need to cleanse the kitchen after this disaster. Go grab my salt and sprinkle it in the four corners.” When I didn’t move, Nonna clapped her very alive, very mottled hands. “Go on, girlie. Up you go. Salt is in the bowl by the hearth. Then broom it towards the center, pick it up, and toss it out back.”
“I’m not cutting up a lamb leg.”
Nonna waved her hands. “We’ll discuss it later.”
“Nonna, there is no later. This has all been weird and almost to the point where I’m considering committing myself, but I can’t stay. I have to go home in two days.” Now that the chipmunk and the astral projection—or whatever that was—were gone, I could almost believe I’d dreamt everything. That felt safer, anyway. “And book an extended session with my therapist,” I muttered.
“You can’t leave,” Nonna exclaimed. “I need you to help me run Villa Venus while we figure this out.”
“You weren’t murdered. There’s nothing to figure out.”
“Strange things are afoot. They’ve been for decades now, but I haven’t been able to find the thread connecting it all.” She moved around me, taking me in from every angle. “But maybe you can. You heeded the island’s call after all.”
“I didn’t heed anything. I indulged in a midlife crisis.”
“Nonsense. The island called and you came. You should feel honored.”
“Here’s where you’re going to tell me this wasn’t a coincidence? That my slutty assistant did this on purpose?” Although, in the back of my mind I pictured the earthquake only I had felt, and I couldn’t help but wonder. Was there something legitimately supernatural occurring?
Nonna put her hands on her hips and pierced me with a severe glare. “You talked to a chipmunk and you can’t believe a simple conjuring spell is possible?”
I leaned out the door and saw Tiberius struggling to refill another glass of wine in the kitchen. “I think she’s going to need this first,” he huffed.
And once again, the only sane one in the room was a chipmunk.
Make that a lifetime of extended therapy sessions.
Nonna directed me the entire time I performed the cleansing ritual. She claimed she was weak after projecting for so long and could barely lift her arms to fix her hair. Now she had me banging around on the ground, looking for a two-quart pot while she unrolled her curlers and used an ozone-depleting amount of hairspray. “Fill it three-quarters of the way with water. Okay, now add three cinnamon sticks, three whole cloves, one teaspoon of the swept salt, and half of a lemon. Level that salt! Magic needs to be precise, girlie.”
“I’m not a girlie!” I exploded as she made me re-measure for the third time. “I’m a grown woman who sees ghosts and astral projections apparently.”
“Level it,” she repeated firmly. “Buone. Bring that to a boil, then reduce to a simmer for two hours. Then leave it to cool, fish out the lemon, and funnel it into a spray bottle. You’ll mist the whole house.”
“Is that all?”
“No, but I’ll turn you into a proper femmine di casa yet.”
“What’s that?” I asked, afraid of the answer.
“A proper domestic Italian housewife.”
Domestic implied there were also feral housewives. Now I had a life goal. “Sorry, but that ship has sailed. I will never go back to being a proper anything.” Just thinking about all the time I’d spent cleaning toilets or sifting through dirty jockstraps made me shudder.
“I admire that, girlie. I really do. But you need to learn to be a proper witch, despite absolutely no training.”
“What if I’m not a witch?”
“What if you are?” she countered.
“Would I be able to do all that?” I motioned with my hands like flying. I was starting to get genuinely interested. Or perhaps just chilled out by the second glass of wine.
Tiberius and Nonna exchanged another glance that spoke a thousand words. None in any language I understood, of course.
“Most witches do not astral project. It’s a special talent of a special breed. Later, I’ll have you dig up my grimoire and start teaching you the basics. Eventually, you can meet the girls, but I must say they’ve been slacking lately. No wonder this town is getting overrun with vengeful Renaissance faire ghosts. Oh, and I put a little spell on you to open your eyes when you arrived, but it won’t last. If you want to stay Open, I’ll
have to convince the girls to do the real thing. You’ve got magic in your veins. That’s what’s important.”
Suddenly, I felt faint again. How much wine had I really had? It felt like Tiberius had a heavy pouring paw. “Maybe I should lay down. This is all a little… much. In fact, I have to head back to the mainland tomorrow and arrange my flight home.”
“But you haven’t solved anything yet.”
“Like what?”
“Anything! I could have been killed viciously in my sleep. Avenge me, girlie.”
“I am not a girl!” I exploded, pain lashing behind my eyes. “I’m an overwhelmed forty-year old woman who has never had a proper vacation. I came here to recuperate after a shock. Not to become private investigator for a witch. Oh my God. I literally just said witch like it was normal. This isn’t normal. Nothing is normal. I’m going crazy. I’m—”
The chipmunk slapped me across the face. “Snap out of it, Ava!”
I stared wide-eyed at the little creature. “I’m officially certifiable. Before I only considered the possibility, but now I know. Lock me up and throw away the key.”
Nonna put her hands in a prayer position. “Please. You have to stay. I don’t understand why the island let you in, but she did. There’s a reason, we just have to uncover it, and my gut tells me it has to do with the ghosts.”
“That does not sound healthy for me. In fact,” I said, heading for my room to pack my bags, “that sounds like a one-way ticket to a horror film. No thanks. Great hospitality, I’ll leave you a decent Yelp review.”
Nonna’s body went limp in her chair, her head lolling backwards. A cold chill spun across my skin. Candles sputtered out and a bookcase wobbled. “Nonna?” I inched closer. Her eyes were milky and unseeing.
Crap.
What if she was having a heart attack or a stroke? She was over a hundred, so the odds weren’t in her favor. “I’m going to call 911. Wait, what’s the Italian equivalent?” I asked the chipmunk.
Before he could respond, Nonna’s lifeless body popped up, her face twisted and skeletal. Her mouth was a large vortex of blackness as she screamed Mummy-style at me in another astral projection.
I shrieked and stumbled back. “You can’t scare me into staying,” I said, rubbing my chest where my heart beat erratically from being completely, blindingly terrified. “Even if I wanted to, which I’m not saying I do, I can’t. My horrible ex-husband apparently gambled our life savings away, and I have to go home to find a job. My money is gone. I have nothing.”
Tiberius and Nonna glanced at each other. The chipmunk nodded.
“How do you like Italian winters?” Nonna asked cheerfully, back in her body. Like it wasn’t the world’s most leading question. Or like she hadn’t accused me of murder an hour ago.
“Um.”
“Great! We can forge the signatures on my will, and you can take over the B&B. There’s plenty of money, even without tourism, so you’ll be set.”
“Why would we have to forge them? It’s your will.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. We couldn’t get a lawyer out here to make it official. They’d never get through the veil.”
“What?”
“Oh, it’s fine. There’s nothing to forgery. My skill set used to be a hot commodity back in the war. Falsified passports, papers, money, you name it, I did it.”
“Oh good, more lawbreaking,” I muttered.
Tiberius hopped onto Nonna’s shoulder and whispered in her ear. They both looked at me, and I heard Nonna whisper back, “Eh. Seems a little much.”
Tiberius gave her a stern talking that I didn’t understand. It didn’t sound Italian or English.
“Fine!” Nonna exploded.
“Will somebody tell me what’s going on?”
Nonna didn’t meet my eyes. “If you’re going to take over Villa Venus, there’s one more housekeeping note. Aurick is definitely not human.”
Chapter Seven
Rudely, they didn’t give me have a minute to let that sink in. When I got home, I was doing it. I was going to be petty and give this place a one-star rating. Would not recommend. Not even if you were a witch in the making.
“And?” Tiberius prodded.
“It’s not just Aurick,” Nonna continued. “The whole town is supernatural.”
“The whole town?” I sputtered, wine sloshing out of my glass and onto the antique table. I tried to nonchalantly wipe it away.
“Except for Luca,” Nonna said hastily. “He came as a heart-broken tourist and never left. We didn’t want to break his heart again and so we sort of…”
“Lied?” I offered dryly.
“Withheld information,” Nonna corrected. “Magic mostly cloaks itself anyway. As long as the shifters don’t get too shifty in front of him, he’ll never know.”
“And Aurick really is a…” I gulped, forcing the word out, but it deflated into a whisper. “Vampire?”
Nonna wheezed laughter. “No, no.” She paused. “Actually, we’re not quite sure what he is. Like you, he showed up one day through the veil. This island has its mysteries. He might not even be here anymore.”
“Didn’t you check on him yesterday?”
“To be honest, I forgot. And he’s never been in town. I doubt anyone but us even knows he’s here.”
My stomach roiled at all of the news.
“One final thing, girlie.”
What else could this old broad have to tell me? Spaceships would soon arrive to take us on an all-expense paid trip to Mars? Jim would magically give me all his money if I cursed him? On second thought, that didn’t sound like the worst thing in the world.
“Make sure you plug your ears when coming and going. Thessaly likes to sunbathe on the rocks below.”
“Who?”
“Thessaly, the siren.”
“I’m sorry,” I snorted. “I thought you said siren, like from a mythology book.”
“She almost got you yesterday, but she’s mostly harmless. All of the residents are.”
Tiberius snorted. “That’s an understatement. When’s the last time a witch hexed anyone?”
“Accidentally or on purpose?” Nonna asked.
“If you have to ask, that’s the problem,” he replied tartly.
I opened my mouth to protest, but quickly closed it. Honestly, what did I have to go back to? The endless job search, where I would have to demean myself to a bunch of twenty-year-olds for minimum wage? Or finding an apartment on Craig’s List without a serial killer roommate? Oh God, a roommate. While Jim had felt more like a roommate than a husband the past few years, I had a feeling it would be different with an actual stranger.
Even if this was a big con job, I didn’t have anything to lose, and at least Aradia had beautiful views, an interesting history, ghosts, and wine. Lots of delicious Italian wine. And delicious Italian men. Luca’s face wavered in front of my mind’s eye. His salt and pepper hair—and saltier personality. I liked them dry. And tall. And delicious.
Nonna snapped me out of my musings. “Come on, girlie. Time to meet your destiny.”
And you know what? I agreed to go with the midlife crisis flow.
“Let’s go into town. Even though it’s past noon, I’m sure the two lazabouts are at Rosemary’s Bakery, probably on their third espresso and biscotti. We’ll have to convince them to do the ritual, but it shouldn’t be hard. Just offer them something from the mainland. You brought presents, sì?”
“Um…”
“Any old thing will do. We used to have a few brave souls cross the waters to bring us supplies, but that dried up over an… incident.”
“Why does that sound like a vampire sucked all of your supplier’s blood?”
“I haven’t the faintest. A tube of lipstick will do. Rosemary has been bemoaning her dwindling supply.”
By now, I was getting used to Nonna’s ramblings. I nodded politely, going back to my room to fix my hair, put on some make-up, and stuff an extra tube of lipstick in my purse. For being a tiny t
own on an isolated island, the women and men always had their hair coiffed and faces done. Before, I thought it was an Italian thing. Now I wondered if it was a magic thing.
As we left, I dutifully plugged my ears with cotton balls, half-wondering if there truly was a siren living on the rocks below and half-wondering why Nonna didn’t have to plug hers. Perhaps the siren didn’t affect her on principle. Maybe they were friends or maybe Nonna threatened to hex her if she ever tried.
Or maybe, she didn’t exist.
Tiberius claimed he had better things to do and scampered up a walnut tree. “Suit yourself,” Nonna said, putting on her lime green helmet and motoring down the steep drive. I kicked my own Vespa into gear and followed, the whine of the motor reduced to a dull buzz.
The windy dirt road turned into cobblestones and the town came into view. All of the houses were made of beautiful wheaten-colored stones usually found in Rome. The towering buildings curved gently inwards, as if time pulled them together. It was truly a medieval city, and I couldn’t help but love it—despite it apparently housing all sorts of supernatural creatures.
When I wasn’t feeling crazy, I felt alive here for the first time in a long time. Confident. Like my old self was coming back. I didn’t want all of it back, just the parts that mattered. My old courage and determination. I missed them, buried as they were under a suburban soccer mom shine. It had felt good at the time, but that life was gone, and I wanted to find the old me and merge it into the midlife me. The one who didn’t go along with something because it was easy.
Nonna said there were only about a hundred inhabitants, and I felt a few heads swiveling to watch me as we entered the town. I had the feeling their curiosity was strong and their gossip game stronger. What would a human do that was out of the ordinary? Breathe through their nose? Did we have a particular scent? What if there really were vampires? I was the only mortal around besides Luca. What did they eat to survive?