Phantom of the Library
Lidiya Foxglove
Copyright © 2020 by Lidiya Foxglove
Cover art © 2020 by Covers by Juan
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
More Romantic Fantasy from Lidiya!
About the Author
Chapter One
Helena
“So, this is my new house.” Graham stepped out of the car looking stunned. “It feels strange to be given the house of a man I barely remember.”
“A midcentury modern. Wow! East coast wizards never have homes like this.”
We were in the most California place I could imagine, in a tiny town unmarked on maps called Avalon Wood. It was definitely a wizard town, the name hinting at magic while the town’s unincorporated, very low-key vibe definitely suggested they didn’t want any strangers poking around. We had passed through a 1920s-era downtown with several shops and cafes but none of them had signs. Any tourist who stumbled on this town would keep on going.
On a hillside rising just over the town was this neighborhood of large midcentury homes, clustered into a wizard community. It was getting into the holiday season, but flowers were still blooming in yards, citrus trees fruiting, spiny desert-y plants eternally green. Very different from Thanksgiving in the Hudson Valley where I’d grown up. The houses were all angles and glass, rock gardens, and ancient cars parked in driveways.
“Is that a ’57 Chevy next door? And whatever that is…” Graham held a hand to his eyes to shield the sun as he looked toward the next driveway down, which had a European sports car in the driveway with 1960s style. “Is this a car collectors’ community?”
“These are probably all the original owners,” I said. “Wizards live so long. They hate moving. They hate change. And they hate modern cars. So I bet almost everyone here is ninety to a hundred or else their kids inherited these houses and the cars too.”
“The original cars from when the neighborhood was built?” Graham said.
“Yes.”
“There’s something eerie about it,” he said. “I don’t think I want to live in a wizard retirement community.”
“Well, no one said you had to live here,” I said. “We’ll just search it and sell it. Byron’s body has to be here. I wonder where the graveyard is… Maybe you can find it since you’re so keen on digging up bodies.”
“I’m not keen, I’m just not scared of a pile of bones. He died forty years ago.”
Billie and Gaston pulled up behind us just then. The Sullivan brothers were farther back somewhere because Jasper was a slow-ass driver and they also seemed to get hungry more than Graham and I did. Billie, as a newly made vampire, and Gaston, as a very old vampire, naturally brought their food with them.
Billie jumped out of her truck, flip flops hitting the pavement, huge coffee in hand, and did a few stretches. Despite that I had always heard becoming a vampire was a traumatic experience, she seemed to be handling it pretty well. “Hel, did you see that there’s another house for sale on this street? And it’s real rundown. Boy, does it need help.”
“No! Where?”
“A few houses down!”
Graham dropped a hand on my head and stopped me from running. “You two are not buying another house. We’re not really here for houses, are we? We’re here to find the last piece of the map. You don’t even have money for another flip since Greenwood Manor hasn’t sold.”
“That’s not fair to say until we know what price the house is,” I said, but he wasn’t buying it. I glanced at Billie. At the least, we would go poke around the property later.
The Sullivan brothers arrived, completing our group.
Jasper and Jake got out and both kissed me on the cheek just to mess with me in front of Graham.
“Hey!”
“Well? You are our girlfriend, right?” Jake said. “You didn’t miss us on the road?”
“I wouldn’t miss you if you drove faster,” I muttered.
“That’s all Jasper.”
“I was doing eighty the whole way, I don’t know what you want,” Jasper said.
“When Helena took a turn behind the wheel of the BMW she went for it,” Graham said. “I’m surprised we didn’t get a ticket.”
“I just hit a hundred for a second on a very empty stretch of highway because I wanted to see how it felt,” I said defensively. “My truck doesn’t have that sort of mojo. But I got it out of my system.”
“It was a pretty sexy thing for my girlfriend to do,” Graham said, slipping an arm around my waist.
“What is this girlfriend business!? Now you’re all just trying to embarrass me!”
“I can’t let them have a monopoly on you,” Graham said. “We’ll probably get more competitive and aggressive as the days go on, I imagine, until you won’t have any peace at all.” He was speaking right into my ear, his nose pressed to my hair, and this mild threat made me wet.
Oh god, what had I gotten myself into?
“Let’s…get to business,” I said, shoving Graham off, not without effort.
Graham’s BMW, Billie’s work truck and the Wolves at the Door company van definitely stood out in the quiet neighborhood. I didn’t love how close these houses were, considering how our plan was to use the maps to tear down the barriers between the magical worlds. How popular would this plan be with the locals? Probably not very.
At least the house was surrounded by some lush gardens. Probably one and a half acre lots, I figured. The house was one story in front, two in back, overlooking a hillside view. The house itself was all boxy shapes stacked on each other and large glass windows, typical of midcentury design.
“I’ve never worked on a midcentury modern before,” Billie said.
“Me neither, but there is a warlock around here who does midcentury design and restores furniture and stuff. Tom Atomic. I watch his videos sometimes and he’s pretty cute and funny.”
“Well, we’re not taking any advice from him,” Jasper said. “Cute and funny? Sounds like a fucking nightmare.”
I snorted.
Graham was still just looking at me in a seductive way, like the world had stopped for him, except for me, as he pondered my apparently sexy handling of his BMW. Then he ran a hand through his dark hair and fished the house keys from his pocket, striding to the door before stopping at the lock.
“Will there be a demon in this doorknob?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “You just have to man up and try it. Don’t be scared.”
He gave me a scathing look that was still plenty sexy, his dark green eyes piercing, and turned the key in the lock.
No demons. But something
worse than a demon.
“Excuse me!” An old man with a withered voice tried his best to yell at us from the street. “Excuse me!”
We all turned.
The old man was bald but had an impressive mustache. He was hunched and pot-bellied, wearing all black—polo shirt, dress shoes and slacks. (You know he called them slacks.) He was wearing a big gold and crystal pendant around his neck like a rapper with bling. I guess this was wizard fashion around here.
“Who are you?” he demanded of all of us, Graham especially, since he had the keys. “Sam didn’t have any sons, did he? I never heard of it. You look like him, though, come to think of it.”
“I was a family friend,” Graham said. “He left the house to me. Graham Capello.”
“Capello! That sounds Italian! Capello… Hey, Hepzibah, where do we know the Capello name?”
A female voice shouted from somewhere in the distance behind the neighboring house, “That was Sam’s friend! Freddy or something!”
“Fiore,” Graham said.
“Fiore Capello!”
“So you got this house, eh? Well, you better take good care of it. We’re all watching you, eh, Graham? Keep it in the family, you know what I mean? My name’s Al.”
“Sure, Al, nice to meet you…,” Graham said.
“You know the history of this place?”
“Maybe not in the way you’re hoping to tell me.”
“Oh, you’re a funny one. An incubus, right? I can tell. I can always tell. Well, this neighborhood here, we’re all the kids and grandkids of the town founders who came out here because the elitist witches and warlocks out in New York and such didn’t want to make room for us. They’d all been here forever. And then we came over through Ellis Island, you know…and it was a whole little group of our grandparents who said, hey, you know what? What if we tried going out to Hollywood?”
He went on for a while. I resisted mentioning that we were a pretty long drive away from Hollywood. His entire story seemed like it held a grudge against my family, or at least any wizard who fit the exact description of my family. I was expecting him to actually namedrop one of my relatives at any moment.
“But who are the ladies?” the old man asked, turning his attention to me and Billie. “They look a little sweet to be Sinistrals.”
Is this a Sinistral wizard community? I immediately felt awkward. I didn’t know I’d be stepping into that. I assumed that the final house on our little tour would be as isolated as the first two. Nosy neighbors seemed like a bad mix with everything we were planning.
“We’re all Sinistral,” Billie said. “We just look sweet, but that ain’t our fault and we’re trying our best to overcome it.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“I’m glad to hear that. What are you doing with all these vehicles? You going to renovate? I hope you don’t gut the place. All these houses were built from 1957 to 1975 by Frank Pedrewsky. Graham, you ever heard of Frank Pedrewsky? Like Frank Lloyd Wright, but better.”
Maybe I was a bad girlfriend, because at this point I just straight up abandoned Graham and went inside the house. And so did everyone else.
“This is a real test of Graham’s demonic powers of charm,” Jake said. “Don’t feel bad. He has to work on it.”
“Hmm…” It was easy to forget about Graham once I was faced with the first interior room of Bel Tramonto.
The very first room was an entrance room that definitely did not have, and could not have, any other purpose. A patch of terrazzo floor faced a minimalist fountain set into a wall made from huge stones. The fountain fed into a little trickling stream that flowed out of the house and fed the garden outside. At least, it used to. Now it was dry.
“Doesn’t California have water issues?” Jasper asked. “Can we even get this thing going again?”
“Witches have their ways,” I said. “Maybe. Hopefully there isn’t some spirit of the spring we need to bargain with.”
Two bridges crossed the stream, leading to two more doors, so when you came in, you passed through a front door and then another door.
“I can only imagine how awkward this gets when you’re greeting guests,” I said. “I would definitely take these doors down, if not move this entire wall and…”
“I would ditch the fountain,” Jake said. “And this whole Meet the Flintstones rock wall.”
“I was gonna say Brady Bunch,” Billie said.
“Can we open it up into…oh…wow,” Jasper said. “This living room.”
Byron was standing in the center of the sunken living room holding out his hands. “Welcome to Bel Tramonto. I told you that you might want to make a few changes. You might have noticed that Fiore and Deveraux inherited grand old family homes, but Sam had to make his own way in the world, and this was his final home, the one he bought when everything was going well. The perfect house for entertaining glamorous movie stars who also happened to be demons…in the peak of the 1970s.”
My brain was collapsing into 1970s overload. The living room was sunken. There was this huge groovy fireplace in the middle of it that had sort of the shape of a lava lamp, with a couch wrapped around it to seat about twenty people. All the carpeting was orange, the sort of orange that was making my eyeballs bleed on contact. One of the walls were that same stone treatment as the entrance, one wall was just glass overlooking palm trees, and one wall had been done in a psychedelic green wall paper, and that was also the wall that had a huge stereo system and shelves of records. Ash trays were scattered around and the smell of cigarettes permeated the carpet in such a way that this house would still smell like cigarettes in the year 2400 if we didn’t ditch all of this.
Gaston, of course, took this as an invitation to light a cigarette.
“Go outside!” I said.
“As if it would matter at all if I smoked the ten thousandth cigarette this house has ever seen…” He shrugged and opened a door in the wall of glass, which led to a small deck that was shaped in a point, like the prow of a ship. It had sort of a tiki vibe in back, by the looks of it.
“At least we have an open floor plan,” Jasper said.
The kitchen connected to the living room, blocked off by a half wall. When you stepped up from the living room, you were in the kitchen and dining area. The kitchen cabinets were all that dank dark midcentury wood color, with light formica tops, green and chrome appliances and big globe lights hanging down over an island. More expansive windows looked out over the palms. I wondered if there was a pool down there in the backyard.
“This hardly even seems like a wizard house,” Jake said. “It seems to be loaded with electricity and I don’t know where you would make spells or anything.”
“I agree,” I said. “Definitely one of the least magical warlock houses I’ve been in. But he was a lawyer.”
“He was the grooviest lawyer!” Billie said. “I love this place! I mean, we definitely have to change most things…but I love it.”
Byron had stopped to look at some photos hanging on the wall in the hallway. I came up behind him and wished I could touch him. He could become touchable for brief moments, but only when he chose. My hand hung in the air just behind his back, the memory of my skin knowing all too well how solid he could feel.
“All these celebrities are demons?” I murmured.
“Yep.”
“Hm. Well, I guess that explains how Tom Selleck got that reverse mortgage gig. Sam must have been a really fun guy.” The photos were full of what looked like totally rocking parties, like old photos of Studio 54 and everyone having a good time. Probably better than Studio 54. Wizards never trusted cocaine.
“Byron…this must be hard for you, to say goodbye to the last of your friends.”
Some of the photos of Sam and the other Sons of Pandora on the wall included Byron in them. He looked just the same, younger than the other three. I saw Graham’s grandmother there too.
“I’m just glad you’re here,” Byron whispered. “This is all so long gon
e. Another life altogether. But when we’re together, Helena, this house feels reborn. And so do I. It’s so close now that I can taste you.”
“Don’t you mean taste it?”
“No, the first one.” He winked at me. A little mischief buried his sadness over losing his old—very old—friends. I couldn’t really imagine how hard it would be.
As we looked at the photos, I felt like I could hear some very faint, sad female singing. The neighbors? “Byron, do you hear that?”
“That’s Maya,” he said.
Female. Singing sadly. Broken fountain. Crap.
“Is Maya a water spirit?” I asked.
“Indeed.”
“Aw, crap.”
The front door flew open and Graham ran in looking more disheveled than when I last saw him, you know, about five minutes ago.
“Is your shirt scorched?” My eyes zeroed in on a brown mark on Graham’s arm, like you might get if you left an iron there too long.
“We have problems,” he said.
“It’s too soon for problems!” I cried.
“Well, we have them anyway.”
“Graham, you can’t handle a couple of old wizards?” Jake said. “I’ll talk to them.”
“I wouldn’t—”
Jake opened the door and was immediately zapped back into the door.
Yep. We had one of the worst problems. Termites were easy to get rid of. Roof leaks could be fixed. But a mob of angry neighbors? Shit.
Chapter Two
Helena
This was not what you wanted when you were trying to deal with ancient artifacts and raise dead demigods. You know. The stuff you might rather do in private. Nor was it what you wanted when you were just trying to renovate a house.
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