Muscles quaking, I pocketed the crystal in my tunic dress and stumbled up the hill, slick from the sudden rain. By the time I reached the hospital parking lot, my hands were muddy, my white dress stained and sodden. I raced the last five-hundred yards to the hospital. Steeling myself against the hospital’s melancholy aura, I barreled through the sliding doors and into Connor’s broad chest.
“Lenore!” He grasped my bare shoulders, steadying me.
“Connor.” I panted. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you.” His voice was heavy.
My blood ran cold. “Has something happened? Is Karin—”
“She’s resting. Where have you been? Your family’s out of their minds worrying.”
“I was just...” I trailed off. The Emergency Room had grown crowded since I’d left. “I went for a walk to clear my head.” And the crystal hadn’t been anywhere on that walk. It was as if I’d pulled it from the passage between worlds, but that was impossible. That passage didn’t exist in ordinary reality. It was on the astral plane. I couldn’t bring real objects from it.
“For five hours?”
“Five? No. I’ve only been gone...” I glanced at the wall clock and stammered to a halt. It was nearly six o’clock. I grasped the sleeve of his uniform jacket. “Where’s Karin?”
“Upstairs. Room four-seventy-two.”
If they’d moved her, then she must be stable.
“Lenore,” he said gently. “You can’t run off on your own every time things get rough. It only makes it worse.”
I grimaced. “I had no choice.” There was no sense hiding it from him. Better he knew now who I was. Better we end things before they began. “I was on a shamanic journey. I thought I might be able to find whatever was hurting Karin. I can’t help her any other way.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone where you were going?”
“There was no time,” I said.
“And those times you explored Mike’s alone, knowing there was a killer on the loose? I talked to Mr. Pivens. He told me you’d promised not to go into that house by yourself.”
My gaze darted to the sliding glass doors. “That wasn’t…” I floundered before his obvious disappointment. Had I messed up that badly?
“Look, I can’t imagine what it must have been like growing up a triplet, the need to be alone. But this was bad timing. Your family loves and needs you.”
But he didn’t love me, and a stone weighted my heart. “I was trying to save her,” I said in a low voice. “That’s why I journeyed, and that’s why I had to be alone.”
“I get it. Shamans are healers, and a shamanic journey goes inward,” he said. “You needed privacy and quiet. But Jayce was so out of her mind with worry she called me for help finding you.”
I gaped, stunned. Jayce had called Connor? And he hadn’t just read up on shamanism. He’d studied it. “I’m sorry,” I muttered.
“Tell that to Jayce and Nick. They had enough on their plates without having to worry about you.”
I flinched. “There wasn’t anything else I could do.”
“You could ask for help,” he said.
“No one could have helped.”
“You should have asked.” He stood for a moment, silent, as if waiting for me to respond. When I didn’t, he strode through the sliding doors.
I stood for a moment, wanting to follow him, wanting to argue, to convince him. But wretchedness immobilized me, unable to go after him and unable to bear the sight of his departing back.
I’d always been a lone wolf. It wasn’t such a bad thing, was it? And how was I to know Toeller would interfere with my journey and keep me away so long?
My mouth set in annoyance. Besides, Connor shouldn’t try to change me.
Turning on my heel, I strode toward the doors that led from the emergency waiting room and to the main part of the hospital.
Five hours. Jayce would be worried and furious. And Karin...
I pushed through the swinging doors and hurried along a corridor. Through its windows, the leaves of semi-tropical plants danced beneath the rain. A ghost who’d lost her baby, her gown stained red, turned and stared bitterly at me.
I wasn’t avoiding people. I was doing what I had to. I speed-walked down the tiled hallway to the elevators, pressed the up button. So I spent a lot of time alone. I worked in a bookstore, my job was to read and know the books. That wasn’t a team activity. Something had to be done alone, like helping Mike cross over.
My heartbeat slowed.
Mike.
When was the last time I’d even tried to call his spirit? Had I been avoiding him too?
I reached into my sodden pocket and gripped the crystal. No. It didn’t matter. Once Mike’s murder was solved, he’d be at peace and could cross over. I wasn’t being a reckless loner. I wasn’t avoiding people I loved. I was taking action.
The elevator doors slid open, and I stepped inside, pressed four. The doors began to shut. A feminine hand inserted itself between them, and they slid open. The FBI agent stepped into the elevator.
“We meet again, Ms. Bonheim.” Her ebony hair was in a neat bun. She unbuttoned the jacket of her navy business suit and glanced at the button panel. “I see you got my floor.”
I swallowed and said nothing.
“You look like a drowned rat who’s just seen a ghost,” Agent Maraj said, one corner of her mouth curling upward. “Though as a poet I don’t suppose you approve of mixing metaphors.”
“Mix away.”
“So have you?” She turned to face the closed doors.
“Have I what?”
“Seen any ghosts lately?”
I tried to sneer, but shivering in my sopping, muddy dress, I didn’t quite pull it off. “Why would I?”
“Because you and your sisters are witches.”
My heart thumped, fast and uneven. “I didn’t think the FBI believed in the supernatural.”
“The FBI is filled with all kinds of people. What do you believe in?”
“My family.”
The elevator shuddered to a halt. The agent stepped aside, and I hurried past her into the carpeted hallway.
She fell in beside me, taking one long stride to every two of mine.
I pushed through a swinging door into a tiled corridor. The walls were painted a soft sand.
“I get the feeling you don’t want to talk to me,” she said wryly.
“If I had anything to share that might help, I would.”
“Are you sure of that?”
I didn’t know how to respond, so I walked on. But I hesitated at an intersection to scan the small signs on the walls.
“Four-seventy-two is that way.” Manaj pointed down a corridor.
Why did she know where my sister was? “Thanks. I’m not sure Karin is up for questioning.”
Her brown eyes glinted. “I’m not here for your sister.”
My mouth went dry. Was she here for me? “Then what are you here for?”
“FBI business.”
“Good luck then.” I turned and walked away.
“What are you so afraid of, Ms. Bonheim?” she called after me.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Maybe you should be.”
I kept walking.
Are you willing? A masculine voice echoed in my head, and my footsteps slowed.
I scanned the empty corridor.
Willing to do what?
A heavy, gray curtain had been pulled across Karin’s door. Soft voices drifted from the other side.
I rapped on the door frame and drew aside the curtain.
Jayce and Nick stood beside a hospital bed. Karin lay pale beneath the covers, her eyes shut. Tubes fed into her arm.
“Lenore!” Jayce hurried around the bed and hugged me fiercely. “Where the hell have you been? You’re soaking wet!” She pulled away from me, a new, damp stain across the front of her blue Henley thanks to me.
“Sorry,” I muttered. “How is she?”
“She’s sleeping,” Jayce said.
“Thank God.”
She dragged me from the room. “Where were you?” Fear, anger and relief mingled in her eyes. “Why didn’t you call?”
“I went on a journey.”
“For five hours?!”
A nurse walked past and shot us a quelling look.
“I tried to find the unseelie’s world,” I said in a low voice. “Toeller caught me.”
My sister swore softly. “Why didn’t you tell me? I could have watched over you! Protected you!”
“Shamanic journeys aren’t your thing.”
“And traveling to fairyland isn’t yours.” She scrubbed a hand across her forehead. “What the hell, Lenore! You just took off. We didn’t know where you’d gone or why you’d left, and anything could have happened to Karin. It’s the sort of stupid, reckless stunt I would pull. What’s gotten into you?”
“I had to do something.”
“And so you took off and left us without telling anyone where you were going?”
“I didn’t think it was going to take five hours.”
“You ran.”
“What does that mean?” I folded my arms. My wet tunic dress had grown cold and sticky against my skin.
“Instead of staying with Nick and I, or even telling us what you were thinking, you ran to Lower World. This is so typical!”
Stricken, I stared at my sister. “What are you talking about?”
She blew out her breath. “Never mind. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“I think you did.”
“Look, I get that books and Lower World are your coping mechanisms. Just... Next time give us a heads up, okay?” She turned and walked into the hospital room.
I stood in the hallway and stared after her.
A nurse walked past, pushing a food cart. She stopped in front of Karin’s open door and glanced at her clipboard, then continued on.
Lower World was my coping mechanism? Well, of course it was. That was the whole point of the shamanic journey – coping, healing, figuring things out. And books weren’t a coping mechanism, they were fun, relaxing. But...
Don’t do this, Lenore.
You could ask for help.
Books and lower world are your coping mechanisms...
Are you willing? Clear and strong, the masculine voice cut across my internal chatter.
I swayed, bracing my hand on the sand-colored wall. Was it true? Was I using the otherworld of books and shamanism to avoid this one? To avoid… what? Not the people I loved…?
…to avoid thinking about losing them. If I didn’t get close, I had nothing to lose.
Are you willing?
“Willing to do what?” I whispered. “To lose?”
No one answered.
I closed my eyes. Was I willing to risk? Willing or not, my sisters were in danger. Our coming loss was real. And if I avoided this fear...
My eyes opened. If I avoided that fear of loss, I would avoid risks that might be worth taking. This wasn’t about me not asking for help. It was about my choice to be alone. Was avoiding the risk of getting hurt worth it?
Risks like Connor. Connor, who’d always been there when I needed him. Connor, who understood what I was and didn’t laugh or judge. Connor, who was strong and smart and brave and quick to smile. And I knew I shouldn’t be thinking of him now, not with my sister in the hospital. There were other things I needed to face, like breaking the curse so Karin could live.
Are you willing? the voice demanded.
I straightened off the wall. To save my sister, I was willing to do anything.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Karin woke up enough to tell us all to go home. Predictably, Nick refused.
But I was shivering in my damp clothing. Giving her a quick kiss on the cheek, I left the hospital and drove home. The rainclouds had broken apart, beams from the setting sun setting the snow-capped mountain peaks on fire.
At my house, I changed into white jeans and a loose, cream-colored knit top. I’d just had my butt kicked on my own territory – the path between worlds. But I was still standing, and what had Doctor Toeller done to me after all? She’d pulled me out of the passage, but aside from a few bruises on my ankle she hadn’t hurt me.
I laid the crystal on the work island in our aunt’s kitchen and unhooked a bundle of dried sage from the pot rack.
Rules. This crystal’s existence in our plane was a violation of those rules. Had the fairy changed the passage somehow, or had I changed? I laid the sage atop the crystal and made a list.
A) She needs sacrifices to stay here – they’re taken somewhere and kept alive, b/c some escaped. Fairyland?
B) Hurts through curses – family curse, bad luck curse, eating disease?
C) Helps her favorites – known to gift some people with good luck.
D) Traditional fairy powers – knock down old buildings, change paths in the woods...
E) Crystal removed from passage btwn worlds - how?
I tapped my pencil on the yellow-lined paper. Curses and reverse curses seemed the same sort of power. But the ability to change paths in the woods was something else. So was kidnapping people from this world and taking them into the next. Changing paths could be an illusion, or a spell that confuses people in the woods. Or it could be real, a way of warping the reality in this world. And knocking down walls...
I made a frustrated noise. There had to be some logic to her powers, something that tied them all together. Didn’t there? And why did the people of Doyle age differently? Why did our skin look so weirdly perfect? Was that a simple fairy glamour? Or...
I drew in my breath. What if her world was somehow bleeding into ours? A sort of dimensional layer? That would explain the changing paths in the woods that Karin and Nick had experienced. It might even explain the wall collapses – a sudden dimensional shift that weakened walls and foundations.
Could it explain us?
I paced. It might. People who’d been taken to fairy world were said to age differently. If that world was bleeding into this one, it could affect the people who stayed within the boundaries of the bleed. But tourists seemed to come and go with no ill effect. Even Nick seemed normal, and he was spending more and more time in Doyle. Maybe people needed to spend a certain amount of time in Doyle for it to change them.
I sighed. I’d talk it over with Jayce and Karin first. But for now, I had another painful duty to fulfill.
Mike.
Slipping the crystal into my purse, I drove to his Victorian. I hadn’t stopped trying to locate his spirit because I’d been busy. I’d been avoiding it because seeing him was too painful.
The porch light automatically flicked on as I walked up the steps. I unlocked the heavy, dark-wood door and walked inside, fumbled for the switch. The chandelier illuminated the high ceilings, the grand staircase winding to the second floor.
The air was thick, expectant. Shaking myself, I flipped the light switch at the top of the steps. I walked down the hallway’s worn, burgundy carpet, examining the antique photos of Doyle. Doc Toeller didn’t appear in any of them.
I reached for a brass doorknob, cool against my fingertips, and dropped my hand to my side. I’d no right to be upstairs. My inheritance was downstairs, in the secret room. By sneaking up here, was I any better than Peter and Gretel? But they’d come here out of greed. I was here for love.
The purse slid from my shoulder, and I let it thunk to the floor.
“Mike? I’m worried about you. Are you here?”
At the far end of the hall, a brocade curtain stirred. A cool breeze whispered along the back of my neck.
“Mike? It’s me, Lenore… You’re probably wondering why I’m in your house.”
No answer.
I blundered on. “The police are still trying to figure out what happened to you, how you died. But I think you were killed over a book. That man, Heath Van Oss, was looking for it, and he was murdered. I hid some valuable books of yours
in a safe deposit box, but I’m not sure if they’re the books the killer is looking for.”
A door clicked open opposite me, and my breath caught. “Mike?”
Lightly, I pressed my hand against the door, opening it wider. A queen-sized bed covered in a simple, beige blanket with hospital corners. A brass clothing rack with a neatly pressed pair of khaki trousers folded over it and a leather belt. An antique bureau with elaborate scrollwork. A tarnished mirror hung on the wall.
Mike’s bedroom.
This was the room Gretel had emerged from the other night, when I’d surprised her and Peter. Its closet door stood open, and a shoebox lay on the oriental carpet. I walked to the cardboard box, knelt, and opened the lid.
Men’s leather shoes, polished to a high gloss. My chest constricted.
I stood. A movement caught the corner of my eye, and I turned.
The brown bed skirt rustled, a gentle wave rippling toward the head of the bed.
I walked toward it. “Mike?”
Beside the bed was an end table, stacked with books, and a desk lamp.
Smiling, I picked up the top book, The Hardy Boys – The Tower Treasure, still in its full-color, paper cover. It looked like mint condition, and I guessed the book was from the 1930s. My brow furrowed. No, not the thirties – the cover’s colors were too soft. Was this a first edition from 1927? I opened the book and inhaled sharply.
This wasn’t The Hardy Boys.
Gently, I removed the paper cover, exposing a leather-bound book.
The Folk and Fairy Tales of America, by Ichabod Langley.
“Holy shit.” This was the book Van Oss had said he’d been tracking. I glanced up. “Sorry, Mike.” He’d sworn like a sailor when in the mood, but it felt wrong to curse in his presence. I thumbed to the title page. First printing, eighteen fifty-five. The publisher was Ticknor and Fields.
I gnawed the inside of my cheek. I knew that publisher. They’d gone out of business around 1890, and they’d typically printed books at the author’s expense. But they were well respected – they’d published Twain and Emerson and Hawthorne.
Maybe I had picked up a few things about old books from Mike.
He’d been hiding the book in plain sight, by his bedside. I sank onto the bed and skimmed the chapters. The book had been organized by region. I flipped to the section on the west, and my heart beat double time. The Legend of the Doyle Fairy.
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