Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  RUNNING IN THE CITY IS NOT MY FAVORITE THING. STILL, the sun was shining, making it unlikely that I’d run into a vampire for a while. I ran for about a half hour, then made a beeline for Amber’s house.

  Her car was gone from the driveway. She had things to do, she’d told me—a hair appointment, errands to run, and some shopping. I’d told her Chad and I would amuse ourselves on our own. Still, I’d expected her to wait for me to return. I wasn’t sure I’d have left my ten-year-old son alone in a haunted house. However, he seemed unfazed when he met me at the bathroom door just as my watch read 8:00 A.M.

  We explored the whole of the old house, starting with the bottom and working our way up. Not that it was necessary or important to explore, but I like old houses and I didn’t have any better plan than waiting for the ghost to manifest. Come to think of it, I didn’t have any better plan after it manifested. Banishing ghosts was not something I’d ever tried, and everything I’d read about it over the years (not much) seemed to indicate that doing it wrong was worse than not doing it at all.

  The cellar had been redone at some point, but behind a smallish old-fashioned door, there was a room with a dirt floor filled with old wooden milk crates and junk stored down there by some long-ago person. Whatever its original purpose, it was now the perfect habitat for black widows.

  “Wow.” I pointed at the far corner of the ceiling with my borrowed flashlight. “Look at the size of that spider. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen one that big.”

  Chad tapped me and I looked at his circle of light, centered on a broken ladder-back chair.

  “Yep,” I agreed. “That one’s bigger. I think we’ll just back out of here and look elsewhere—at least until we have a nice can of spider spray.” I shut the door a little more firmly than I might have. I don’t mind spiders, and a black widow is one of the beauties of its kind ... but they bite if you get in their way. Just like vampires. I rubbed my neck to make sure the collar of my shirt and my hair were still covering my own bite. This afternoon I’d go shopping. I needed to pick up a scarf or high-necked shirt for better concealment before Amber or Corban saw it. Maybe I could find another lamb necklace.

  The rest of the basement was surprisingly clean of junk, dust, and spiders. Maybe Amber hadn’t been as intimidated by the widows as I’d been.

  “We’re not trying to find out who the ghost is,” I told him. “Though we could do that if you wanted to, I suppose. I’m just looking around to see what I can see. If this turns out to be a trick someone is playing, I don’t want to be taken in.”

  He slashed his hands down in a way that needed no translation, his eyes bright with anger.

  “No. I don’t think you’re doing it.” I told him firmly. “If that was faked last night, it was beyond any amateur fiddling. Maybe someone has a bone to pick with your dad and is using you to do it.” I hesitated. “But I don’t think it was faked.” Why would someone plant the smell of fresh blood too faint for a human nose, for instance. Still, I felt obligated to be as certain as I could that no one was playing tricks.

  He thought about that for a while, then gave me a solemn nod and pointed out things of interest. A small, empty room behind a very thick door that might have been a cold room. The old coal chute with a box of old blankets placed near the end. I stuck my head in the metal tunnel and sniffed, but only to confirm my suspicions : Chad had been sliding down the coal chute for fun.

  His eyes peered worriedly out from under his too-long hair. It didn’t look dangerous to me—it looked fun. More fun if no one else knew, I’d had a few places like that when I was his age. So I didn’t say anything.

  I showed him the old bare copper electrical wires, no longer in use but still present, and the quarry marks on the granite stone blocks used to wall in the basement. We checked out the basement ceiling below the kitchen and dining room. Since I didn’t know exactly what had been happening in the kitchen and dining room, I didn’t know what to look for. But it stood to reason that it would have been put in shortly before the haunting started—which was just a few months ago. Everything in that part of the basement looked as though it was older than I was.

  The next two floors weren’t nearly as interesting as the basement—no black widows. Someone had thoroughly modernized them and left not so much as a trace of an old servants’ stairway or dumb-waiter. The woodwork was nice, but pine rather than hardwood—the craftsmanship good but not extraordinary. The house had been built by someone of the upper middle class, I judged, and not by one of the truly wealthy. My trailer had been built for the truly poor, so I was a good judge of such things.

  The ghost hadn’t been to Chad’s room since last night—everything was neatly in place. As Corban had said, there were no signs of wires or strings or anything that could have made the car shoot across the room. I supposed it could have been done with magic—I didn’t know a lot about magic. But I hadn’t felt any, and I usually can tell if someone’s using magic near me.

  I looked at Chad. “Unless we find something really odd in the floor above your room, I’m pretty convinced this is the real deal.”

  In my room, my brush was on the floor, but I couldn’t swear I hadn’t left it there. Under Chad’s gimlet eye, I made my bed and stuffed the clothes I’d scattered all over the floor into my suitcase.

  “The real problem is,” I told him as I tidied my mess and he sat on the bed, “that I don’t know how to get the ghost to leave you alone. I can see it better than you, I think—you didn’t see anything yesterday except the things moving around?”

  He shook his head.

  “I did. Nothing clear, but I could see it. But I don’t know how to make it go away. It’s not a repeater—a ghost that just repeats certain actions over and over. There’s intelligence behind what it does—” I had to say it twice for him to get it all.

  When he did, Chad’s face twisted in a snarl, and he hissed.

  I nodded. “It’s angry. Maybe if we can figure out what it’s angry about, we can—”

  Something made a huge crashing noise. My reaction must have given it away because Chad stood up and touched my shoulder.

  “Something downstairs,” I told him.

  We found it in the kitchen. The fridge hung open and the wall opposite it was dented and smeared with a wet and sticky substance that was probably orange juice. A container of it lay open on the floor along with half a dozen bottles of various condiments. The faucet was on full force. The sink was stoppered and rapidly filling with hot water.

  While Chad turned the water off, I looked around the room. When Chad touched my arm, I shook my head. “I don’t see it.”

  Heaving a sigh, I started cleanup. I seemed to be doing that a lot here. I scrubbed the wall, and Chad mopped the floor. There was nothing I could do about the dents in the wall—and looking at them, I thought maybe some of them were old.

  Once everything was as good as it would get, I fixed sandwiches and chips for lunch. Thus fortified, we continued our explorations by going up to the attic.

  There were actually two attics. The one above Chad’s room was accessible by a narrow stairway hidden in a hall closet (maybe the last remnant of a servants’ stair). I half expected dust and storage boxes, but the attic held only a modern office with a professional-looking computer set up on a cherry desk. There were skylights for an open, airy feeling to offset the walls of cherry barrister’s book-cases weighed down by leather-bound legal tomes. The only whimsical feature was a lacy pillow on the narrow window seat in front of the only window.

  “You said there was another one?” I asked, standing on the stairs because entering the room seemed intrusive.

  Chad led the way to the other side of the second floor and into his parent’s bedroom. I wondered why the office had been personalized and charming while the bedroom suite, professionally decorated until it would have been as equally comfortable in a department store as it was in the old house, was impersonal and cold.

  Inside the walk-in closet, ther
e was a large rectangular door in the ceiling. We had to get a chair and pull it under the door before I could reach the latched hand pull, but the door turned out to be a folding staircase. Once we pulled the chair away, the stairs dropped all the way to the floor.

  Flashlights in hand, we intrepid explorers climbed into the attic more suited to a house like this than the previous one had been. Structurally, it was the mirror image of the office minus the skylights and gorgeous view. Light battled through the coating of white paint that covered the only window, flickering on the motes of dust we had disturbed with our presence.

  Four old steamer trunks were lined up against the wall next to a pedal sewing machine with SINGER scrawled in elaborate gold lettering over the scratched wooden side of the cabinet. There were more empty milk crates here, but in the attic, at least, someone had found a way to keep the spiders out. I didn’t see any creepy-crawlies at all. Or even very much dust. Trust Amber to dust her attic.

  The trunks were locked. But the look of disappointment on Chad’s face had me digging out my pocketknife. A little wiggling, a little jiggling with the otherwise-useless toothpick, and the slimmest of the blades had the first trunk open before you could sing three verses of “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer.” I know because I hum when I pick locks—it’s a bad habit. Since I have no desire to become a professional thief, though, I haven’t bothered to try to break myself of it.

  Yellowed linens with tatting around the edges and embroidered spring baskets, or flowers, or some other appropriately feminine imagery filled the first trunk, but the second was more interesting. House plans (which we took out), deeds, old diplomas for people whose names were unfamiliar to Chad, and a handful of newspaper articles dating back to the 1920s about people with the same last name as the people in the diplomas and deeds. Mostly death, birth, and marriage notices. None of the death notices were about people who had died violently or too young, I noticed.

  While Chad was poring over the house plans he’d spread over the closed lid of the first trunk, I stopped to read about the life of Ermalinda Gaye Holfenster McGinnis Curtis Albright, intrigued by the excessive last name. She’d died at age seventy-four in 1939. Her father had been a captain on the wrong side of the Civil War, had taken his family west, finding his fortune in timber and railroads. Ermalinda had eight children, four of whom had survived her and had a huge number of children themselves. Twice a widow, she’d married a third man fifteen years before her death. He’d been—reading between the lines—far younger than she.

  “You go, girl,” I told her admiringly—and the stairway closed up and slammed shut so hard that the resultant vibration from the floor had Chad looking up from his plans. He wouldn’t have heard the snick of the lock, though.

  I dove for the door—too late, of course. When I put my nose to it, I didn’t smell anyone. I couldn’t think of any reason anyone would lock us in the attic, anyway. It wasn’t as if we were going to perish up here ... unless someone set the whole house on fire or something.

  I pushed that helpful thought out of my head and decided it was probably our ghost. I’d read about ghosts who set houses on fire. Wasn’t Hans Holzer’s Borley Rectory supposedly burned down by its ghosts? But then I was pretty sure that Hans Holzer had been proved a fraud at some point ...

  “Well,” I told Chad, “that tells us that our ghost is vindictive and intelligent, anyway.” He looked pretty shook-up, clutching the plans in a way that would make any historian cringe at the way the fragile paper was wrinkling. “We might as well keep exploring, don’t you think?”

  When he still looked scared, I told him, “Your mother will be home sooner or later. When she comes upstairs, we can have her let us out.” Then I had an idea. I slipped my phone out of my front pocket, but when I called the number I’d saved for Amber, I could hear the phone in her bedroom ring.

  “Does your mom have a cell phone?” She did. He punched the number in, and I listened to her cell phone tell me she wasn’t available. So I told her where we were and what had happened.

  “When she gets the message, she’ll come let us out,” I told Chad when I was finished. “If she doesn’t, we’ll call your dad. Want to see what’s in the last trunk?”

  He wasn’t happy about it, but he leaned on my shoulder while I finagled the last lock.

  We both stared at the treasure revealed when the last trunk opened.

  “Wow,” I said. “I wonder if your parents know this is up here.” I paused. “I wonder if this is worth anything?”

  The last trunk was completely full of old records, mostly the thick black vinyl kind labeled 78 rpm. There was a method to the storage, I discovered. One pile was all children’s entertainment—The Story of Hiawatha, various children’s songs. And a treasure, Snow White complete with a storybook in the album cover that looked as though it had been made about the same time as the movie. Chad turned up his nose at Snow White, so I put it back in the correct pile.

  My cell phone rang and I checked the number. “Not your mom,” I told Chad. I flipped open the phone. “Hey, Adam. Did you ever listen to the Mello-Kings?”

  There was a little pause, and Adam sang in a passable bass, “Chip, chip, chip went the little bird ... and something, something, something went my heart. I assume there’s a reason you asked?”

  “Chad and I are going though a box of old records,” I told him.

  “Chad?” His voice was carefully neutral.

  “Amber’s ten-year-old son. I have in my own two hands a 1957 record by the Mello-Kings. I think it might be the newest one in here—nope. Chad just found a Beatles album ... uhm, cover. It looks like the record is missing. So the Mello-Kings are probably the newest thing here.”

  “I see. No luck hunting ghosts?”

  “Some.” I looked ruefully at the closed door that was keeping us prisoner. “What about you? How’re negotiations with the Mistress?”

  “Warren and Darryl are to meet with a pair of her vampires tonight.”

  “Which ones?”

  “Bernard and Wulfe.”

  “Tell them to be careful,” I told him. “Wulfe is something more than just a vampire.” I’d only met Bernard once, and he hadn’t impressed me—or maybe I was just remembering Stefan’s reaction to him.

  “Go teach your granny to suck eggs,” said Adam calmly. “Don’t worry. Have you seen Stefan?”

  I touched my fingers to my neck. How to answer that. “I don’t know, he might have bitten me last night,” somehow didn’t seem the right thing to say. “He has been making himself scarce so far. Maybe tonight he’ll stop in to talk.”

  I heard the door open downstairs. “I need to go now, Amber’s back.”

  “All right. I’ll call you tonight.” And he hung up.

  Someone ran up the stairs and into the bedroom. “Your mother’s home,” I told Chad, and began replacing the records. They were heavy. I couldn’t imagine what the whole trunk might weigh. Maybe they packed the trunk when it was already in the attic—or had eight strapping werewolves to carry it.

  “It’s locked,” I told Amber, as she rattled the door. “I think there’s some kind of a catch on your side.”

  She was breathing hard as she pulled the stairs down.

  Her attention was all for Chad, and she didn’t bother with speech as her hands danced.

  “We’re fine,” I interrupted her. “You have some neat records here. Have you had them valued?”

  She turned to stare at me, as if she’d forgotten I was there. Her pupils were ... odd. Too large, I decided, even for the dim attic.

  “The records? I think Corban found them when we bought this house. Yes, he checked them out. They’re nothing special. Just old.”

  “Did you have a good time shopping?”

  She looked at me blankly. “Shopping?”

  “Amber, are you all right?”

  She blinked, then smiled. It was so full of sweetness and light that it gave me cold chills. Amber was many things, but she wasn’t sweet. T
here was something wrong with her.

  “Yes. I bought a sweater and a couple of early Christmas presents.” She waved it away. “How did you get stuck here?”

  I shrugged, replacing the last records and pulling the trunk shut. “Unless you have someone breaking into your house to play nasty practical jokes, I’d say it was the ghost.”

  I stood up and started past her to the opened door. And I smelled vampire. Could Stefan be staying here? I paused to look around while Chad thundered down the attic stairs leaving his mother and me alone with the smell of vampire and fresh blood.

  “What’s wrong?” Amber said, taking a step forward.

  She smelled of sweat, sex, and a vampire who was not Stefan.

  “Was shopping all you were doing?” I asked.

  “What? I had my hair done, paid a few bills—that’s it. Are you all right?”

  She wasn’t lying. She didn’t know she’d been a snack for a vampire. Today.

  I looked at the daylight streaming through the windows and knew I desperately needed to talk to Stefan.

  7

  I WAITED UNTIL DARK, THEN QUIETLY SNUCK OUT THE back door and into the yard.

  “Stefan?” I called, keeping it quiet so no one in the house would hear me.

  It wasn’t as stupid as all that to call for him. He’d come here to keep an eye on me. It made sense that he’d be nearby, somewhere. Watching.

  I waited for a half an hour, though, and no Stefan. Finally, I went inside and found Amber watching TV.

  “I’m going to bed,” I told her.

  Her neck, I noticed, was bared to the world without blemish—but there are other places a vampire can feed. My own neck sported a scarf, one of several I’d picked up that afternoon on a Goodwill shopping spree that Chad and I had taken. The only thing I’d found resembling a lamb had been a barrette with a cartoon sheep on it. Not something to invoke the protection of the Son of God.

  “You look tired,” she said with a yawn. “I know I’m exhausted.” She muted the TV and faced me. “Corban told me about last night. Even if you can’t do anything else, it means a lot to me that you’ve convinced him that Chad isn’t just making things up and acting out.”